Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn will be visible with the naked eye from many areas.

Doctors are exasperated by the persistence of false and misleading claims about the virus.

France, Germany and other states say situation does not warrant change in coronavirus policies

Kathleen Ferris stared across a desert valley dotted with creosote bushes, wondering where the water will come from to supply tens of thousands of new homes. In the distance, a construction truck rumbled along a dirt road, spewing dust.

An article that critiqued a study on what happened after women did not get abortions that they sought has been retracted after observers raised concerns that the peer review process had not been objective.

The article, "The Turnaway Study: A Case of Self-Correction in Science Upended by Political Motivation and Unvetted Findings," was originally published in Frontiers in Psychology in June of 2022.

The Turnaway Study itself was an effort of researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, which followed women who had received abortions and women who sought abortions but did not get them because they were too far along in their pregnancies "to describe the mental health, physical health, and socioeconomic consequences of receiving an abortion compared to carrying an unwanted pregnancy to term," according to its website.

As we reported in November, the journal placed an expression of concern on the paper after critics pointed out that the editor and all four reviewers (whose names Frontiers published on the first page of the paper) were associated with pro-life organizations. The researchers behind the Turnaway Study responded to the article's critiques in a commentary published in December.

The paper's author, Priscilla K. Coleman, a professor of human development and family studies at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, told us at the time that she would "actively pursue all options available including legal avenues to rectify the situation." (She also said she would "pursue all avenues available to me should your article, which is premature at this time cause me any additional reputational harm.")

On December 26, Frontiers in Psychology retracted Coleman's article with the following notice:

Following publication, undisclosed competing interests were brought to our attention, which undermined the objective editorial assessment of the article during the peer review process.

Frontiers conducted a post-publication assessment of the article, including consulting with independent expertise, which concluded that the article does not meet the standards of publication of Frontiers in Psychology.

This retraction was approved by the Field Chief Editor of Frontiers in Psychology and the Chief Executive Editor of Frontiers. The authors did not agree with this retraction.

In response to our request for comment on the retraction, Coleman told us:

The only information ever provided to me by Frontiers (just prior to posting) was the public retraction notice. Relying solely on this statement, I was asked if I agreed or disagreed with the retraction. Via my attorneys, I requested clarity to make the determination. No further information was provided regarding the rationale or internal findings. Frontiers responded that they would get back to us on substance in the New Year; yet that same day (December 26th) they proceeded with the retraction, posted the original ambiguous statement, and inappropriate presumed my response. Given Frontiers' membership in COPE, it is difficult to reconcile my experience in this matter with their obligations as a member.

Hat tip: Chelsea Polis

Like Retraction Watch? You can make a tax-deductible contribution to support our work, follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, add us to your RSS reader, or subscribe to our daily digest. If you find a retraction that's not in our database, you can let us know here. For comments or feedback, email us at team@retractionwatch.com.

Sandwiched here between the Pacific Ocean and Kona Airport—atop a dusty volcanic desert—dozens of 50-gallon water tanks gurgle and bubble away; each home to a solitary, wild-caught octopus and a couple of floating, plastic bath toys.

Sandwiched here between the Pacific Ocean and Kona Airport—atop a dusty volcanic desert—dozens of 50-gallon water tanks gurgle and bubble away; each home to a solitary, wild-caught octopus and a couple of floating, plastic bath toys.

With the move of its last two chimps, a former Los Angeles County animal sanctuary that was abruptly closed in 2019 is now empty of its animal charges, state officials said Wednesday.

submitted by /u/lughnasadh [link] [comments]

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With the move of its last two chimps, a former Los Angeles County animal sanctuary that was abruptly closed in 2019 is now empty of its animal charges, state officials said Wednesday.

The honeybees looked perfectly healthy, buzzing about their boxy wooden hive on a warm autumn day in central Pennsylvania.

The honeybees looked perfectly healthy, buzzing about their boxy wooden hive on a warm autumn day in central Pennsylvania.

A forensic anthropology novel technique, facial morphology points to the Near East as an important region for human-neanderthal interbreeding.

Waves have a higher energy thickness contrasted with other sustainable power sources, so it requires less space to create a similar measure of energy. The upside of these waves is that they convey measures of dynamic energy and keep them all through the excursion from the focal point of the ocean to the ocean side. The dynamic energy of the ocean waves is tackled to mechanical works like power age …

Few scholars of the work of William Faulkner know that the winner of the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature toyed with the above passage in early drafts of his 1936 novel, Absalom, Absalom!

He went instead with the more memorable:

'Why do you hate the South?' 'I dont hate it,' Quentin said quickly, at once, immediately; 'I dont hate it,' he said. I dont hate it he thought, panting in the cold air, the iron New England dark; I don't I don't! I don't hate it! I don't hate it!"

Meanwhile, the genius of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass – "I celebrate myself, and sing myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you" – echoes in his lesser known work, "Role of Human Resources, Pay Disparity and Sustainable Power Utilization on Co2 Alleviation," whose soaring lines include:

The Maintainable Improvement Objectives (SDGs)

are a bunch of five earnest issues

that should be tended to by the worldwide local area continuously

2030 individuals, planet, flourishing, harmony, and organization.

Okay, clearly not. But the editors of the British Journal of Research would have readers believe that Faulkner and Whitman, along with other long-dead luminaries including Charlotte Brontë, of the Department of Basic Sciences at the University of Aberdeen, in the UK, and Herman Hesse, of the Department of Basic Sciences, University of Cologne, in Germany, wrote papers for a recent issue of the periodical.

Published by Prime Scholars, the BJR claims to be "an international quarterly open access journal which aims to publish articles related to different research fields and specialities." One of the journal's purported editors in chief did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

We learned about the bogus papers thanks to Dorothy Bishop, who tweeted about them Thursday.

As Bishop noted, the motive for the scheme isn't clear:

Of course, readers of Retraction Watch will not find it surprising that it's possible to get just about anything published in something that looks like a journal.

Ultimately, as Bronte wrote in Jane Eyre, motive is less important than results:

I could bend you with my finger and my thumb…But whatever I do with this cage, I cannot get at you, and it is your soul that I want.

Or:

In any case, sewage and modern pro-fluent that is unloaded into the climate corrupt crisp drinking water, making it difficult to give clean water to occupants and environments in the encompassing region …

Like Retraction Watch? You can make a tax-deductible contribution to support our work, follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, add us to your RSS reader, or subscribe to our daily digest. If you find a retraction that's not in our database, you can let us know here. For comments or feedback, email us at team@retractionwatch.com.

Move comes as US, Japan and India introduce tests and EU debates issue with Italy

This documentary follows a couple's efforts to reintroduce an ocelot, headed to a zoo or worse, into its home in the Peruvian Amazon.

A bunch of weird animals washed up dead across the globe in 2022. Here are our favorites.

A wild theory suggests that consciousness may explain quantum mechanics, by forcing the subatomic particles to choose one concrete outcome.

Inside All About History 125: Learn how Xerxes I overcame rebels and plots to claim his throne and dominate West Asia.

The decision to stop reporting the Covid growth rate is the latest in a series of attempts to limit the available information about the current spread, writes Dr Brian Ramsden, while Susan Treagus has been keeping a Covid diary

With a predictable adherence to the principle of burying bad news, the government's UK Health Security Agency announced on the Friday before Christmas that it is now ceasing to publish the reproduction number – the R value – and the growth rate for Covid-19 in the UK (UK to stop publishing Covid modelling data, 25 December).

This decision was taken at a time when the R value and the growth rate both show that the prevalence of Covid is increasing in the UK. This is just the latest in a series of attempts to minimise the availability of information about Covid. Data about tests is virtually nonexistent, because tests are no longer freely available; contact tracing has ceased; and daily reporting of infections stopped when people were told there was no longer a need to use masks or to self-isolate.

Continue reading…

The dynamic change mechanism of the seasonal peak rate of photosynthesis, also known as GPPmax (Maximum Gross Primary Productivity), has become a hot topic in carbon cycle research. In the Northern Hemisphere, the GPPmax of vegetation is closely related to the year-on-year variation of the ecosystem carbon sink function.

The dynamic change mechanism of the seasonal peak rate of photosynthesis, also known as GPPmax (Maximum Gross Primary Productivity), has become a hot topic in carbon cycle research. In the Northern Hemisphere, the GPPmax of vegetation is closely related to the year-on-year variation of the ecosystem carbon sink function.

A new paper, published in the ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering journal, found that pine needles could be used to produce renewable fuels and value-added chemicals, such as preservatives used in agriculture, using only water as a solvent.

It is an exciting question why the internal clock runs almost unchanged at the same rate despite fluctuating temperatures. A team has now found an piece of the puzzle to answer this question.

Comparing models of working memory with real-world data, researchers found that information resides not in persistent neural activity, but in the pattern of their connections.

To find out how many scientists a region needs to become a leader in a discipline, researchers tracked millions of scientists moving across the globe. Their result: there is no critical mass, but you have to be a pioneer. Regions can catch up later, but this costs a lot.

Language function and the psychosocial wellbeing of patients and their families can be promoted with singing-based rehabilitation. Group intervention provides opportunities for peer support while being simultaneously cost effective.

A team of engineers and neuroscientists has demonstrated for the first time that human brain organoids implanted in mice have established functional connectivity to the animals' cortex and responded to external sensory stimuli. The implanted organoids reacted to visual stimuli in the same way as surrounding tissues, an observation that researchers were able to make in real time over several months thanks to an innovative experimental setup that combines transparent graphene microelectrode arrays and two-photon imaging.

Researchers investigate the neurological signals behind itchy eyes in rodents and their corresponding scratching behavior.

The higher the temperatures, the faster physiological processes are. But there is an exception: the so-called circadian clock, which regulates the sleep-wake cycle in organisms. A fascinating question for scientists is why the inner clock runs in an almost unchanging way despite fluctuations in temperatures. This is a phenomenon known as temperature compensation. Studies indicate that different molecular mechanisms contribute to this.

The higher the temperatures, the faster physiological processes are. But there is an exception: the so-called circadian clock, which regulates the sleep-wake cycle in organisms. A fascinating question for scientists is why the inner clock runs in an almost unchanging way despite fluctuations in temperatures. This is a phenomenon known as temperature compensation. Studies indicate that different molecular mechanisms contribute to this.

Solar Foods will grow bacteria using carbon dioxide from the air and hydrogen produced by renewable energy, a process more efficient than growing plants

A team of engineers and neuroscientists has demonstrated for the first time that human brain organoids implanted in mice have established functional connectivity to the animals' cortex and responded to external sensory stimuli. The implanted organoids reacted to visual stimuli in the same way as surrounding tissues, an observation that researchers were able to make in real time over several months thanks to an innovative experimental setup that combines transparent graphene microelectrode arrays and two-photon imaging.

There are echoes of early 2020 in Xi's policy of obfuscation

Professor Park Chi-Young's team successfully developed an atypical porous polymer material that can completely remove phenolic organic contaminants in water at ultra-high speeds. The porous material developed can efficiently remove not only microplastics in the water but also very small-sized volatile organic compounds (VOCs) based on photothermal effect. At the same time, it is expected to be utilized as a high-efficiency adsorption material that can be commercialized in the future as it has cost competitiveness based on raw materials and enables a solar-based water purification process.

Max Hamilton found out that his roommate had been exposed to the coronavirus shortly after Thanksgiving. The dread set in, and then, so did her symptoms. Wanting to be cautious, she tested continuously, remaining masked in all common areas at home. But after three negative rapid tests in a row, she and Hamilton felt like the worst had passed. At the very least, they could chat safely across the kitchen table, right?

Wrong. More than a week later, another test finally sprouted a second line: bright, pink, positive. Five days after that, Hamilton was testing positive as well. This was his second bout of COVID since the start of the pandemic, and he wasn't feeling so great. Congestion and fatigue aside, he was "just very frustrated," he told me. He felt like they had done everything right. "If we have no idea if someone has COVID, how are we supposed to avoid it?" Now he has a different take on rapid tests: They aren't guarantees. When he and his roommate return from their Christmas and New Year's holidays, he said, they'll steer clear of friends who show any symptoms whatsoever.

Hamilton and his roommate are just two of many who have been wronged by the rapid. Since the onset of Omicron, for one reason or another, false negatives seem to be popping up with greater frequency. That leaves people stuck trying to figure out when, and if, to bank on the simplest, easiest way to check one's COVID status. At this point, even people who work in health care are throwing up their hands. Alex Meshkin, the CEO of the medical laboratory Flow Health, told me that he spent the first two years of the pandemic carefully masking in social situations and asking others to get tested before meeting with him. Then he came down with COVID shortly after visiting a friend who didn't think that she was sick. Turns out, she'd only taken a rapid test. "That's my wonderful personal experience," Meshkin told me. His takeaway? "I don't trust the antigen test at all."

[Read: Should everyone be masking again?]

That might be a bit extreme. Rapid antigen tests still work, and we've known about the problem of delayed positivity for ages. In fact, the tests are about as good at picking up the SARS-CoV-2 virus now as they've ever been, Susan Butler-Wu, a clinical microbiologist at the University of Southern California's Keck School of Medicine, told me. Their limit of detection––the lowest quantity of viral antigen that will register reliably as a positive result––didn't really change as new variants emerged. At the same time, the Omicron variant and its offshoots seem to take longer, after the onset of infection, to accumulate that amount of virus in the nose, says Wilbur Lam, a professor of pediatrics and biomedical engineering at Emory University who is also one of the lead investigators assessing COVID diagnostic tests for the federal government. Lam told me that this delay, between getting sick and reaching the minimum detectable concentration of the viral antigen, could be contributing to the spate of false-negative results.

That problem isn't likely to be solved anytime soon. The same basic technology behind COVID rapid tests, called "lateral flow," has been around for years; it's even used for standard pregnancy tests, Emily Landon, an infectious-disease physician at the University of Chicago, told me. Oliver Keppler, a virology researcher at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich who was involved in a study comparing the performance of rapid tests between variants, says there isn't really a way to tweak the tests so that they'll be any more sensitive to newer variants. "Conceptually, there's little we can do." In the meantime, he told me, we have to accept that "in the first one or two days of infection with Omicron, on average, antigen tests are very poor."

Of course, Hamilton (and his roommate) would point out that the tests can fail even several days after symptoms start. That's why he and others are feeling hesitant to trust them again. "It's not just about the utility or accuracy of the test. It's also about the willingness to even do the test," Ng Qin Xiang, a resident in preventative medicine at Singapore General Hospital who was involved in a study examining the performance of rapid antigen tests, told me. "Even within my circle of friends, a lot of people, when they have respiratory symptoms, just stay home and rest," he said. They just don't see the point of testing.

[Read: COVID science is moving backwards]

Landon recently got COVID for the first time since the start of the pandemic. When her son came home with the virus, she decided to perform her own experiment. She kept track of her rapids, testing every 12 hours and even taking pictures for proof. Her symptoms started on a Friday night and her initial test was negative. So was Saturday morning's. By Saturday evening, though, a faint line had begun to emerge, and the next morning—36 hours after symptom onset—the second line was dark. Her advice for those who want the most accurate result and don't have as many tests to spare is to wait until you've had symptoms for two days before testing. And if you've been exposed, have symptoms, and only have one test? "You don't even need to bother. You probably have COVID."

PLUS. Hvert år udpeger Ingeniøren årets bedste danske forskningsresultater. Dette er et af dem.

Researchers have developed a transparent temperature sensor capable of precisely and quickly measuring temperature changes caused by light. This technology is expected to contribute to the advancement of various applied bio devices that rely on sensitive temperature changes.

All children argue. And while this can be tedious for parents and caregivers, it's not necessarily a problem.

Kids on TV and in movies always seem to be keeping hamsters and gerbils as pets. They're small, look cute, and don't need to be taken for a walk. So why don't we all have hamsters and gerbils as pets in Australia?

Have you played the puzzle game Tangram?

Kids on TV and in movies always seem to be keeping hamsters and gerbils as pets. They're small, look cute, and don't need to be taken for a walk. So why don't we all have hamsters and gerbils as pets in Australia?

Nature Communications, Published online: 29 December 2022; doi:10.1038/s41467-022-35648-w

Latin America is the world's most urbanized region and its heterogeneous urban development may impact chronic diseases. In this study, the authors evaluate the association of built environment characteristics with body mass index, , and type 2 diabetes.

Nature Communications, Published online: 29 December 2022; doi:10.1038/s41467-022-35735-y

Human gut archaeal viruses remain largely unknown. Here the authors present a bioinformatic pipeline to identify viruses of human gut archaea, revealing diversity of archaeal viruses, their hosts and their functional gene repertoire in the human gut.

Seema and her husband did quite well when they first opened a samosa stall in the local market of a town in Bihar state, northeastern India.

What bird is that?

Using NASA's (TESS), an international team of astronomers has detected a new "hot Jupiter" exoplanet. The newfound alien world, estimated to be nearly three times as massive as Jupiter, orbits a rapidly rotating star known as TOI-778. The finding is reported in a paper published December 16 on the arXiv pre-print server.

Ammonia (NH3) is an important fertilizer and chemical for human society; however, its production by the traditional Haber-Bosch process consumes substantial fossil fuel energy and produces massive carbon dioxide emissions. Powered by renewable energy, electrocatalytic reduction of nitrogen (N2) to NH3 under eco-friendly and mild conditions provides a highly attractive solution for carbon neutrality.

Here is a list of people you should not currently want to be: a Russian sausage tycoon, a Russian gas-industry executive, the editor in chief of a Russian tabloid, a Russian shipyard director, the head of a Russian ski resort, a Russian aviation official, or a Russian rail magnate. Anyone answering to such a description probably ought not stand near open windows, in almost any country, on almost every continent.

Over the weekend, Pavel Antov, the aforementioned sausage executive, a man who had reportedly expressed a dangerous lack of enthusiasm for Vladimir Putin's war against Ukraine, was found dead at a hotel in India, just two days after one of his Russian travel companions died at the same hotel. Antov was reported to have fallen to his death from a hotel window. The meat millionaire and his also-deceased friend are the most recent additions to a macabre list of people who have succumbed to Sudden Russian Death Syndrome, a phenomenon that has claimed the lives of a flabbergastingly large number of businessmen, bureaucrats, oligarchs, and journalists. The catalog of these deaths—which includes alleged defenestrations, suspected poisonings, suspicious heart attacks, and supposed suicides—is remarkable for the variety of unnatural deaths contained within as well as its Russian-novel length.

Some two dozen notable Russians have died in 2022 in mysterious ways, some gruesomely. The bodies of the gas-industry leaders Leonid Shulman and Alexander Tyulakov were found with suicide notes at the beginning of the year. Then, in the span of one month, three more Russian executives—Vasily Melnikov, Vladislav Avayev, and Sergey Protosenya—were found dead, in apparent murder-suicides, with their wives and children. In May, Russian authorities found the body of the Sochi resort owner Andrei Krukovsky at the bottom of a cliff; a week later, Aleksandr Subbotin, a manager of a Russian gas company, died in a home belonging to a Moscow shaman, after he was allegedly poisoned with toad venom.

[Anne Applebaum: The Kremlin must be in crisis]

The list goes on. In July, the energy executive Yuri Voronov was found floating in his suburban St. Petersburg swimming pool with a bullet wound in his head. Think Gatsby by the Neva. In August, the Latvia-born Putin critic Dan Rapoport apparently fell from the window of his Washington, D.C., apartment, a mile from the White House—right before Ravil Maganov, the chairman of a Russian oil company, fell six stories from a window in Moscow. Earlier this month, the IT-company director Grigory Kochenov toppled off a balcony. Ten days ago, in the French Riviera, a Russian real-estate tycoon took a fatal tumble down a flight of stairs.

To reiterate: All of these deaths occurred this year.

One could argue that, given Russia's exceptionally low life expectancy and unchecked rate of alcoholism, at least some of these fatalities were natural or accidental. Just because you're Russian doesn't mean you can't accidentally fall out of an upper-story window. Sometimes, people kill themselves—and the suicide rate among Russian men is one of the highest recorded in the world. For Edward Luttwak, a historian and military-strategy expert, that's at least part of what's happening: an outbreak of mass despair among Russia's connected and privileged elite. "Imagine what happens to a globalized country when sanctions kick in," he told me. "Some of them will commit suicide." But the sheer proliferation of these untimely deaths warrants a closer look.

After all, this is what the Kremlin does. There is precedent for this phenomenon. In 2020, Russian agents poisoned—but failed to kill—the Putin critic Alexei Navalny with a nerve agent; a decade earlier, they succeeded in a similar attempt on the Russian-security-services defector Alexander Litvinenko. In 2004, when Viktor Yushchenko ran against a Kremlin-backed opponent for Ukraine's presidency, he was poisoned with dioxin and left disfigured. Thirty years earlier, the Bulgarian secret service, reportedly with the help of the Soviet KGB, killed the dissident Georgi Markov by stabbing him on the Waterloo Bridge in London with a ricin-laced umbrella tip. Russian agents often "turn to the most exotic," Luttwak told me. "People who do assassinations for commercial purposes look at [their methods] and laugh."

[Read: The spies who love Putin]

Suicides are more difficult to decipher. For oligarchs who have failed to show sufficient loyalty to Putin, coaxed suicide is not an implausible scenario. "It is not uncommon to be told, 'We can come to you or you can do the manly thing and commit suicide, take yourself off the chess board. At least you'll have the agency of your own undoing,'" Michael Weiss, a journalist and the author of a forthcoming book on the GRU, the Russian military-intelligence agency, told me. Did Antov really fall out his window in India? Was he pushed by a Kremlin agent? Or did he get a call that threatened his family and made him feel he had no option but to leap? "All of these things are possible," Weiss told me.

In the Kremlin's Gothic murderverse, imagination is key.

Defenestration has been a favorite method of removing political opponents since the early days of multistory buildings, but in the modern era, Russia has monopolized the practice. Like Tosca's climactic exit from the battlements of Castel Sant'Angelo, death by falling from a great height has a performative, even moral aspect.

In Russian, this business of assassination is known as mokroye delo, or "wet work." Sometimes, the main purpose is to send a message to others: We'll kill you and your family if you're disloyal. Sometimes, the goal is to simply remove a troublesome individual.

A few years after the Russian whistleblower Alexander Perepilichny died while jogging outside London in 2012, at least one autopsy detected chemical residue in his stomach linked to the rare—and highly toxic—flowering plant gelsemium. "These are the clues of evidence that the Russians are fond of using," Weiss told me. A calling card, if you will. "They want us to know that it was murder, but they don't want us to be able to definitely conclude it was murder."

[Robert Service: Back in the U.S.S.R.]

Poisoning has that ambiguity. It is literally covert, concealed, sometimes hard to detect. Defenestration is a bit less ambiguous. Yes, it could be an accident. But it's a lot easier to conclude it was murder—an overt assassination.

"Things that mimic natural causes of death like a heart attack or a stroke, the Russians can be quite good at doing that," Weiss said. The deaths range in their showiness, but they're all part of the same overarching scheme: to perpetuate the idea that the Russian state is a deadly, all-powerful octopus, whose slimy tentacles can search out and seize any dissident, anywhere. As the Bond franchise had it, the world is not enough.

The war in Ukraine is not universally popular among Russia's ruling elite. Since the conflict began, sanctions on oligarchs and businessmen have constrained their profligate and peripatetic lifestyles. Some are, understandably, said to be unhappy about this. High-level Russian elites feel as if Putin "has essentially wound the clock backwards," Weiss said, to the bad old days of Cold War isolation.

This year's spate of deaths—so brazen in their number and method as to suggest a lack of concern about plausible, or even implausible, deniability—is quite possibly Putin's way of warning Russia's elites that he is that deadly octopus. The point of eliminating critics, after all, isn't necessarily to eliminate criticism. It is to remind the critics—with as much flair as possible—what the price of voicing that criticism can be.

In December of 1972, astronaut Eugene Cernan left his footprints and daughter's initials in the lunar dust. In doing so, he became the last man to set foot on the moon. Now, after 50 years, humanity is going back. But in the half-century since Apollo 17, a lot has changed in how we explore space—and how we see our place in it.

While those early missions were all run by governments, much of modern spaceflight is the domain of billionaires and their private companies. Commercial space travel has brought a new way of thinking about trips outside Earth's gravity, with tourism turning space into a vacation and something of a status symbol. It's also widened the range of people who go to space from the clean-cut white male astronauts of the Apollo era.

New visitors bring new perspectives to space, and that diversity could well change our relationship to it. A year ago, at 90 years old, actor William Shatner rode one of Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin spacecraft. But as he told staff writer Marina Koren, his time in space didn't line up with the optimism of Star Trek's Captain Kirk.

Koren and fellow staff writer Adam Harris discuss our changing relationship with space on an episode of the podcast Radio Atlantic. They also listen to some of Koren's interview with Shatner. You can hear their conversation here:

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Google Podcasts | Pocket Casts

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The following is a transcript of the episode:

Adam Harris: This is Radio Atlantic. I'm Adam Harris.

Marina Koren: And I'm Marina Koren.

Harris: This week on the show, we're talking about space. We just heard some of our colleagues' kids talking about space. As a parent myself, it feels like the images of space are inescapable. One of the first T-shirts I remember buying for my daughter was a NASA T-shirt. We have blankets in our house that have moons and rocket ships on them. Is that your recollection of childhood?

Koren: Definitely. I had those glow-in-the-dark stars on my ceiling. Occasionally one would fall off and spook me, but I recently got a set for my 3-year old nephew. This is a go-to source of wonder and excitement for kids, for sure.

Harris: And I should say that we are both staff writers, but you are the one on the space beat.

Koren: Yes, I am The Atlantic's outer space bureau chief.

Harris: (Laughs.) And it's been a big year to be a space reporter, right?

Koren: It has, yeah! We are definitely in this strange new era of exploration. It's been 50 years since the last time human beings have set foot on the moon. 1972 was Apollo 17, the final moon landing.

I think the universe is a lot more familiar to us now, because we've come such a long way. But something that's really different now is that you have commercial companies that are doing the work that was traditionally done by governments. There's SpaceX, Elon Musk's company, and Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos's venture.

And even 10 years ago, if you told someone that SpaceX will be launching people to the International Space Station, they might have laughed at you. It seemed ridiculous, but this is the reality now.

It feels like we're in this strange sci-fi future where space travel is something you can buy. It's a type of vacation. And it's become a status symbol in a way.

But now people can go to space and come back and tell everyone: "Well, I've been to space. I've done something that only about 600 or so people have done in the history of humankind."

Harris: Before private space travel, [when you think of people going to space,] you think of folks like John Glenn or Buzz Aldrin. It's someone with military training who has studied to be an astronaut like their entire life. What does it mean that that's no longer the only type of person that's going into space?

Koren: I think that spaceflight is about to get really, really interesting because the stories that we've heard from spacefarers have come from a specific group of people. These were, more often than not, white men with military backgrounds, trained in a certain workplace culture that values "the Right Stuff." It values being stoic and unafraid in the face of something dangerous.

But in this new era of commercial spaceflight, you're gonna be seeing a wide range of participants. There will hopefully be more women, more people of color, people from underrepresented groups, from different educational and socioeconomic backgrounds, and people with just a wide range of experiences.

Harris: And what are the stories that we've already heard about the experiences in space, right? These professional astronauts, when they come back, what do they say space was like?

Koren: Yeah, there are a few common themes. So people, when these astronauts have gone to space and they've seen Earth from that perspective, they have been overcome with emotion at the beauty of Earth. And it suddenly becomes very clear just how thin our atmosphere is. And that is the only thing that really protects our planet from everything else. They're struck by the fragility of the planet.

And then something else also happens to a lot of astronauts when they go to space—they suddenly feel a sense of connectedness with their fellow human beings down below. Because from space, you can't see any national borders. It's just continents and seas and clouds. And so, many astronauts have come home and described these feelings. And the stories are indicative of a cognitive shift, almost, that is known as "the overview effect."

And I've talked to astronauts who say that they were taken aback by the borderless world and how beautiful it is, how it made them feel like: Why are we at war? Why is there conflict? We're one planet. It made them feel whole.

I've also talked to one academic who did an extensive study of astronauts—and she couldn't reveal this astronaut's name to me—but she said that this person, when he went into space, he took one look out the window and was convinced that humanity was going to destroy itself in some hundred-number of years. And so that experience could be profound and inspiring to one person, but it could also actually make another feel despair.

And what's happening now with space tourism and private spaceflight is that the people going into space now have heard these stories of the overview effect. It's a thing. And so they're expecting to feel a certain way when they go to space. They're expecting to have a profound change on their perspective of the world, and even maybe on their personalities. And so I wonder if we're kind of over-hyping that. And I have talked to a few professional NASA astronauts who agree. They worry that these spaceflight companies and their sales pitches to customers are overselling the effects of the overview effect. It's not a guarantee. It's not a gift from the universe. It's something that a person experiences and feels individually. And your mileage will vary.

Harris: Yeah. And you said these flights are like a couple of minutes. Is that enough time to change you?

Koren: That is a great question. So I talked to Frank White, the author who coined the term "the overview effect." He came up with it when he was flying on a plane—so, not in space, but he had a pretty good view—and he got to thinking: Future generations of humans who might be living and working in space would have this distant view of Earth all the time. And they would have these insights that regular earthbound people lack.

And he was surprised that people who were flying on Blue Origin and having a few minutes of weightlessness were coming home and talking as if they had had this profound experience. They were saying it changed them. And he was surprised because he thought that in order to really get the full hit of the overview effect, you had to spend some time in space. Weeks to months in orbit around Earth, or even all the way out on the moon.

So, that's kind of the literature that we're working with here. And I think that's what's going to change in this era of commercial spaceflight, because you are going to have people who are not like the Apollo astronauts. And they're going to be coming home with different stories and really widening the overview effect that we've become familiar with as a public.

And the future participants won't be restricted by some of the constraints that the professional astronauts were. If you were a professional astronaut and you went to space and you didn't have a great time, I don't think you could say that once you came back from space, because that could potentially affect your future flight assignments. You had to have a certain response on your way home. And so I think we're about to hear some of the most honest stories of spaceflight that we've ever heard before.

Harris: Is the overview effect real? If we only have this limited pool of stories to pull from, is that theory a real thing? Have all of the folks who have gone up to space shared that view?

Koren: That's a great question. And I think the way we talk about the overview effect, it becomes like this mystical, magical thing. Astronauts are revered people. Even when I've interviewed astronauts, when they walk into the room in their full flight suits with all their mission patches on the fabric, you can't help but feel intimidated. Because you think: Wow, this person has seen something that I've never seen.

And so we think of the overview effect and the experience that people should have in space as something that the universe gives us. But it's actually a cultural phenomenon. It has been shaped by a certain group of people working under a certain set of pressures who wanted to make sure that they could fly again.

So they couldn't say anything outrageous. And the overview effect also came out of a certain time and place. Many of these stories come from the midst of the space race, in the middle of the Cold War. That definitely shapes a person's perspective. So I would say that seeing Earth from space is not a one-size-fits-all reaction.

Harris: What are some of the interviews that stuck out because they may have differed from this idea of an overview effect?

Koren: So I spoke with William Shatner about his space flight. He was 90 years old when he took that trip. I recorded some of my conversation with Shatner. And he said it was a really transformational experience, but not for the reasons that we're used to hearing.

Harris: So you got to talk to Captain Kirk?

Koren: I did, yes! I will admit: I have never seen Star Trek before.

Harris: So we have a space reporter who's never seen Star Trek?

Koren: (Laughs.) I haven't. But you've seen it, right?

Harris: I have seen Star Trek. It was playing pretty frequently on our TVs when I was a kid. My dad rarely missed episodes or reruns. [But] for people like Marina who don't know who Captain Kirk is: He's the captain of the starship Enterprise on Star Trek in the 1960s. The original captain. And he was this really optimistic figure—this really sort of classical hero. [But] what did Shatner have to say about going to space? Actually being there?

Koren: When I talked to him, it was about a year after his experience, and the flight was still really fresh in his mind. I asked him how he was feeling a year out, and he dove right into a Shatner-esque monologue about going to space.

William Shatner: We had emerged from the film of air that surrounds the Earth, and we're weightless. I got out of my five-point harness and made my way to the window. I saw a wake of air. Like a submarine might leave in the water.

And then I looked to my right, which was facing space. When I looked up there, I saw nothing but blank, palpable space. The blackness was so overwhelming. My immediate thought was: My God, that's death.

And then I looked back, and I could see with great clarity the beginning of the circumference line of the earth. The color of the desert that I had just left, which was beige. The whiteness of the clouds. The blueness of the air. And those three colors in deference to the blackness—I was overwhelmed by the sense of death and overwhelmed by the sense-nurturing by the Earth.

Koren: When Shatner came back from his quick trip to space, he's standing outside the capsule; there's other people around him. Jeff Bezos is there. Bezos is popping champagne like a frat boy. And Shatner is just standing there, super still.

Shatner: I didn't know what I was feeling, but I was weeping, and I didn't know why. Everybody else was celebrating. It took me a couple of hours sitting by myself to understand that what I was feeling was grief. And the grief for the Earth.

Koren: He is overcome with emotion. He is weeping, and then he starts saying how he was just taken aback by the blackness of space, the ugliness of space, how it looked like death.

So Shatner was super, super honest about his experience. And when I talked to him, he said that that grief was still with him. Earth was beautiful and gleaming and delicate from that perspective, but it just reminded him of everything that's wrong on the ground and particularly made him think about how unstoppable climate change feels.

And so for him, this was in many ways a negative experience. And Shatner was starting to cry when we were talking about it, because the experience is so fresh in his mind and nothing about climate change and the prognosis there has really changed in the last year since he went to space. So that grief was still with him.

Harris: How was his experience different from what he may have imagined that he would feel after going up to space?

Koren: He told me that he expected to see Earth and just be reminded of how beautiful and wonderful this planet is. I think he expected it to be reaffirming in a positive way. And it's interesting to think of this man who played a character who was this really big space optimist in real life going to space, and his initial emotional reaction to that is grief and sadness and all kinds of negative emotion.

I think what Shatner shares with other astronauts is: When people have gone to space, they have felt an overwhelming desire to take care of the planet. You really see that this is all there is. This is all we know, at least. And if this is our one home on this floating ball of rock in the void, then we should take care of it.

And so, you know, there's a case to be made that the more people go up into space, that feeling will trickle down and lead to some type of meaningful improvement on Earth.

Harris: If somebody gives you a ticket on a $20 million flight, you're not gonna be able to say, "Well, that wasn't exactly what I expected it to be." But Shatner was able to do something different. Why was his experience different from others who have been up to space and came back down and just said, "Oh, it was great. Thanks, Jeff Bezos, for putting me on this flight"?

Koren: I mean, William Shatner is William Shatner, right? He was 90 years old during his space flight. He's Captain Kirk. I think he doesn't owe Jeff Bezos anything. Yes, Bezos comped his ticket, and that's lovely. But someone like William Shatner going into space can come back and say what they want, because the public looks at them in a different way. If a very wealthy person decides to comp the tickets for an electrician [or] for a nurse, and they go up and come down, can they speak their minds very freely? I don't know.

Harris: Say a billionaire called you up and was like: "Hey, Marina, love your stories. You wanna go to space?" Would you go if you got the opportunity?

Koren: Oh man, well, there would be some conversation about journalistic ethics. But would I ever go to space? I'm gonna say no.

Harris: Really?

Koren: Because spaceflight is risky. You never know what might happen, what could happen. I don't wanna die on the job not having filed my story. Like, if something happens—if I'm somehow incapacitated, I come back and I can't write the story—that will haunt me. (Laughs.)

Planes freak me out. I still can't believe that we can get planes off the ground and land them back in one piece. And, you know, space is not at that level yet, but maybe someday it will be. And that's pretty wild to think about.

Harris: Actually, to that point, thousands of people fly at high altitudes every day. Do you think that there's a future where spaceflight is going to feel as sort of commonplace as taking a flight to LaGuardia?

Koren: I think that future is possible. I think what we have to be careful about is making too many promises. If you listen to Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos talk about spaceflight right now, they're suggesting that this future is happening, like, next week. And I don't think that future will happen that quickly. It's true that more people than before are going to have the opportunity to go to space now. I'm not sure if in my lifetime there are going to be spaceships full of people going to the moon.

I mean, there might be. SpaceX and Elon Musk are working really, really hard to make that future reality. SpaceX's next-generation moon rocket could reach orbit as early as next year. SpaceX has already sold tickets to people to go on a trip around the moon. These things are happening. How quickly they become reality, I don't know. Maybe 50 years from now when we're a hundred years out from the Apollo-program anniversary, maybe it will feel a bit more mundane, just like a plane ride.

Harris: Is some of the mystique fading from space, or space travel? Are we sort of becoming desensitized to space travel? Those first couple of commercial flights, it was all 24-hour news cycle. They broadcast all of them. But that sort of slowed down. Are we sort of becoming desensitized to the awe and wonder of space travel?

Koren: I think that's possible. I think of the Earthrise picture taken by the Apollo 8 crew in 1968. That picture was mind-blowing to people. They'd never seen Earth like this before. Fifty years later, I think our brains are so spoiled by special effects that I do wonder if the sight of Earth from space is going to be that shocking. Especially when you have so many people going into orbit and coming back and posting on Instagram like: "Here's what it looks like." I do wonder if we've seen so much incredible CGI, if our modern brains might be less impressed by the view than maybe people were in the 1960s. But I also don't know if that's just some dumb millennial take.

Harris: It's like if somebody goes up, and they're like: "This isn't what Interstellar looked like."

Koren: (Laughs.) "Where's the wormhole?"

Harris: "I was expecting a wormhole." And all they see is, as Shatner said, this great blackness of space.

A team of researchers at Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, working with a colleague at the University of Texas at Austin and another from Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia, has found evidence of ripe conditions for planet formation in the vicinity of two closely orbiting protostars.

From "rogue" black holes cruising the cosmos to one of the oldest black hole ancestors in this universe, this year's findings truly sucked us in.

We know a lot about the T. rex that lived millions of years ago, but it's still a wonder to scientists how it became the legendary predator. With a recent discovery, scientists may have found a missing link.

Though too much alcohol may damage your short-term memory, new research says the aromatic hops in your favorite beer may stave off some of the negative effects of Alzheimer's disease.

To find out how many scientists a region needs to become a leader in a discipline, researchers at Complexity Science Hub tracked millions of scientists moving across the globe. Their result: there is no critical mass of scientists, but you have to be a pioneer. Regions can catch up later, but this costs a lot.

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After long pursuing a strict zero-Covid regime, restrictions have been lifted in China as new variants emerge

After long pursing a zero-Covid policy, China has relaxed many restrictions including quarantine rules for travellers. But some experts have raised concerns the U-turn may cause problems. We take a look at why.

What has happened in China?

Continue reading…

Scientific Reports, Published online: 29 December 2022; doi:10.1038/s41598-022-27082-1

Implementation of a three-dimensional (3D) robotic digital microscope (AEOS) in spinal procedures

Scientists from the Large High Altitude Air Shower Observatory (LHAASO) have presented roughly 1.5 years of observational data, calculating new limits on the lifetime of heavy dark matter particles that have masses between 105 and 109 giga-electron volts.

A study conducted by researchers from the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin revealed the evolution of ossification patterns in the backbones of four-legged vertebrates. Antoine Verrière and his colleagues were able to reconstruct the patterns of how the bones in the vertebral column formed in the ancestor to all land vertebrates based on a large dataset of modern and fossil vertebrates with the inclusion of rare new data from the 300-million-year-old reptile Mesosaurus tenuidens. The results are published this week in Scientific Reports.

A study conducted by researchers from the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin revealed the evolution of ossification patterns in the backbones of four-legged vertebrates. Antoine Verrière and his colleagues were able to reconstruct the patterns of how the bones in the vertebral column formed in the ancestor to all land vertebrates based on a large dataset of modern and fossil vertebrates with the inclusion of rare new data from the 300-million-year-old reptile Mesosaurus tenuidens. The results are published this week in Scientific Reports.

What if there were a gadget that could within short order check whether you have COVID or the flu—or maybe it would even pick up that you have diabetes without knowing it? The device could figure all this out without you having to go to a doctor or a laboratory.

A team of researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Heart and Lung Research, working with a colleague from Temple University, has found that transcriptional adaptation appears to play a role in inherited epigenetic changes.

Nuclear fusion, lab-simulated wormholes, and ramming distant asteroids, here are the biggest and best physics stories of the year.

A team of researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Heart and Lung Research, working with a colleague from Temple University, has found that transcriptional adaptation appears to play a role in inherited epigenetic changes.

Scientific Reports, Published online: 29 December 2022; doi:10.1038/s41598-022-27042-9

Effect of hydration on the anatomical form of human dry skulls

Nature Communications, Published online: 29 December 2022; doi:10.1038/s41467-022-35690-8

Binary nanoparticle superlattices exhibit different collective optical, magnetic, and electronic properties. Here, the authors develop an efficient global optimization algorithm for the discovery of periodic 2D architectures forming at fluid interfaces.

An ongoing immune assault on olfactory nerve cells and an associated decline in the number of those cells may explain why some people fail to recover their sense of smell after COVID-19.

The finding, published in the journal Science Translational Medicine, provides an important insight into a vexing problem that has plagued millions who have not fully recovered their sense of smell after COVID-19.

While focusing on the loss smell, the finding also sheds light on the possible underlying causes of other long COVID-19 symptoms—including generalized fatigue, shortness of breath, and brain fog—that similar biological mechanism might trigger.

"One of the first symptoms that has typically been associated with COVID-19 infection is

," says senior author Bradley Goldstein, associate professor in the head and neck surgery and communication sciences department and the neurobiology department at Duke University.

"Fortunately, many people who have an altered sense of smell during the acute phase of viral infection will recover smell within the next one to two weeks, but some do not," Goldstein says. "We need to better understand why this subset of people will go on to have persistent smell loss for months to years after being infected with SARS-CoV2."

In the study, Goldstein and colleagues analyzed olfactory epithelial samples collected from 24 biopsies, including nine patients suffering from long-term smell loss following COVID-19.

This biopsy-based approach—using sophisticated single-cell analyses in collaboration with Sandeep Datta of Harvard University—revealed widespread infiltration of T-cells engaged in an inflammatory response in the olfactory epithelium, the tissue in the nose where smell nerve cells are located. This unique inflammation process persisted despite the absence of detectable SARS-CoV-2 levels.

Additionally, the number of olfactory sensory neurons were diminished, possibly due to damage of the delicate tissue from the ongoing inflammation.

"The findings are striking," Goldstein says. "It's almost resembling a sort of autoimmune-like process in the nose."

Goldstein says learning what sites are damaged and what cell types are involved is a key step toward beginning to design treatments. He says the researchers were encouraged that neurons appeared to maintain some ability to repair even after the long-term immune onslaught.

"We are hopeful that modulating the abnormal immune response or repair processes within the nose of these patients could help to at least partially restore a sense of smell," Goldstein says, noting this work is currently underway in his lab.

He says the findings from the study could also inform additional research into other long-COVID-19 symptoms that might be undergoing similar inflammatory processes.

Additional coauthors are from the University of California, San Diego; Harvard University; and Duke. The National Institutes of Health and the Duke Department of Head and Neck Surgery & Communication Sciences funded the work.

Source: Duke University

The post Immune assault may explain loss of smell in long COVID appeared first on Futurity.

To see what the future might look like it is often helpful to study our history. This is what I will do in this article. I retrace the brief history of computers and artificial intelligence to see what we can expect for the future.

How Did We Get Here?

How rapidly the world has changed becomes clear by how even quite recent computer technology feels ancient to us today. Mobile phones in the '90s were big bricks with tiny green displays. Two decades before that the main storage for computers was punch cards.

In a short period computers evolved so quickly and became such an integral part of our daily lives that it is easy to forget how recent this technology is. The first digital computers were only invented about eight decades ago, as the timeline shows.

Since the early days of this history, some computer scientists have strived to make machines as intelligent as humans. The next timeline shows some of the notable artificial intelligence systems and describes what they were capable of.

The first system I mention is the Theseus. It was built by Claude Shannon in 1950 and was a remote-controlled mouse that was able to find its way out of a labyrinth and could remember its course.¹ In seven decades the abilities of artificial intelligence have come a long way.

Language and Image Recognition Capabilities of AI Systems Are Now Comparable to Those of Humans

The language and image recognition capabilities of AI systems have developed very rapidly.

The chart shows how we got here by zooming into the last two decades of AI development. The plotted data stems from a number of tests in which human and AI performance were evaluated in five different domains, from handwriting recognition to language understanding.

Within each of the five domains the initial performance of the AI system is set to -100, and human performance in these tests is used as a baseline that is set to zero. This means that when the model's performance crosses the zero line is when the AI system scored more points in the relevant test than the humans who did in the same test.²

Just 10 years ago, no machine could reliably provide language or image recognition at a human level. But, as the chart shows, AI systems have become steadily more capable and are now beating humans in tests in all these domains.

Outside of these standardized tests the performance of these AIs is mixed. In some real-world cases these systems are still performing much worse than humans. On the other hand, some implementations of such AI systems are already so cheap that they are available on the phone in your pocket: image recognition categorizes your photos and speech recognition transcribes what you dictate.

From Image Recognition to Image Generation

The previous chart showed the rapid advances in the perceptive abilities of artificial intelligence. AI systems have also become much more capable of generating images.

This series of nine images shows the development over the last nine years. None of the people in these images exist; all of them were generated by an AI system.

The series begins with an image from 2014 in the top left, a primitive image of a pixelated face in black and white. As the first image in the second row shows, just three years later AI systems were already able to generate images that were hard to differentiate from a photograph.

In recent years, the capability of AI systems has become much more impressive still. While the early systems focused on generating images of faces, these newer models broadened their capabilities to text-to-image generation based on almost any prompt. The image in the bottom right shows that even the most challenging prompts—such as "A Pomeranian is sitting on the King's throne wearing a crown. Two tiger soldiers are standing next to the throne"—are turned into photorealistic images within seconds.⁴

Language Recognition and Production Is Developing Fast

Just as striking as the advances of image-generating AIs is the rapid development of systems that parse and respond to human language.

Shown in the image are examples from an AI system developed by Google called PaLM. In these six examples, the system was asked to explain six different jokes. I find the explanation in the bottom right particularly remarkable: the AI explains an anti-joke that is specifically meant to confuse the listener.

AIs that produce language have entered our world in many ways over the last few years. Emails get auto-completed, massive amounts of online texts get translated, videos get automatically transcribed, school children use language models to do their homework, reports get auto-generated, and media outlets publish AI-generated journalism.

AI systems are not yet able to produce long, coherent texts. In the future, we will see whether the recent developments will slow down—or even end—or whether we will one day read a bestselling novel written by an AI.

Where We Are Now: AI Is Here

These rapid advances in AI capabilities have made it possible to use machines in a wide range of new domains:

When you book a flight, it is often an artificial intelligence, and no longer a human, that decides what you pay. When you get to the airport, it is an AI system that monitors what you do at the airport. And once you are on the plane, an AI system assists the pilot in flying you to your destination.

AI systems also increasingly determine whether you get a loan, are eligible for welfare, or get hired for a particular job. Increasingly they help determine who gets released from jail.

Several governments are purchasing autonomous weapons systems for warfare, and some are using AI systems for surveillance and oppression.

AI systems help to program the software you use and translate the texts you read. Virtual assistants, operated by speech recognition, have entered many households over the last decade. Now self-driving cars are becoming a reality.

In the last few years, AI systems helped to make progress on some of the hardest problems in science.

Large AIs called recommender systems determine what you see on social media, which products are shown to you in online shops, and what gets recommended to you on YouTube. Increasingly they are not just recommending the media we consume, but based on their capacity to generate images and texts, they are also creating the media we consume.

Artificial intelligence is no longer a technology of the future; AI is here, and much of what is reality now would have looked like sci-fi just recently. It is a technology that already impacts all of us, and the list above includes just a few of its many applications.

The wide range of listed applications makes clear that this is a very general technology that can be used by people for some extremely good goals—and some extraordinarily bad ones, too. For such 'dual use technologies', it is important that all of us develop an understanding of what is happening and how we want the technology to be used.

Just two decades ago the world was very different. What might AI technology be capable of in the future?

What Is Next?

The AI systems that we just considered are the result of decades of steady advances in AI technology.

The big chart below brings this history over the last eight decades into perspective. It is based on the dataset produced by Jaime Sevilla and colleagues.⁷

Each small circle in this chart represents one AI system. The circle's position on the horizontal axis indicates when the AI system was built, and its position on the vertical axis shows the amount of computation that was used to train the particular AI system.

Training computation is measured in floating point operations, or FLOP for short. One FLOP is equivalent to one addition, subtraction, multiplication, or division of two decimal numbers.

All AI systems that rely on machine learning need to be trained, and in these systems training computation is one of the three fundamental factors that are driving the capabilities of the system. The other two factors are the algorithms and the input data used for the training. The visualization shows that as training computation has increased, AI systems have become more and more powerful.

The timeline goes back to the 1940s, the very beginning of electronic computers. The first shown AI system is 'Theseus', Claude Shannon's robotic mouse from 1950 that I mentioned at the beginning. Towards the other end of the timeline you find AI systems like DALL-E and PaLM, whose abilities to produce photorealistic images and interpret and generate language we have just seen. They are among the AI systems that used the largest amount of training computation to date.

The training computation is plotted on a logarithmic scale, so that from each grid-line to the next it shows a 100-fold increase. This long-run perspective shows a continuous increase. For the first six decades, training computation increased in line with Moore's Law, doubling roughly every 20 months. Since about 2010 this exponential growth has sped up further, to a doubling time of just about 6 months. That is an astonishingly fast rate of growth.⁸

The fast doubling times have accrued to large increases. PaLM's training computation was 2.5 billion petaFLOP, more than 5 million times larger than that of AlexNet, the AI with the largest training computation just 10 years earlier.⁹

Scale-up was already exponential and has sped up substantially over the past decade. What can we learn from this historical development for the future of AI?

Studying the Long-Run Trends to Predict the Future of AI

AI researchers study these long-term trends to see what is possible in the future.¹¹

Perhaps the most widely discussed study of this kind was published by AI researcher Ajeya Cotra. She studied the increase in training computation to ask at what point in time the computation to train an AI system could match that of the human brain. The idea is that at this point the AI system would match the capabilities of a human brain. In her latest update, Cotra estimated a 50% probability that such "transformative AI" will be developed by the year 2040, less than two decades from now.¹²

In a related article, I discuss what transformative AI would mean for the world. In short, the idea is that such an AI system would be powerful enough to bring the world into a 'qualitatively different future'. It could lead to a change at the scale of the two earlier major transformations in human history, the agricultural and industrial revolutions. It would certainly represent the most important global change in our lifetimes.

Cotra's work is particularly relevant in this context as she based her forecast on the kind of historical long-run trend of training computation that we just studied. But it is worth noting that other forecasters who rely on different considerations arrive at broadly similar conclusions. As I show in my article on AI timelines, many AI experts believe that there is a real chance that human-level artificial intelligence will be developed within the next decades, and some believe that it will exist much sooner.

Building a Public Resource to Enable the Necessary Public Conversation

Computers and artificial intelligence have changed our world immensely, but we are still at the early stages of this history. Because this technology feels so familiar, it is easy to forget that all of these technologies that we interact with are very recent innovations, and that most profound changes are yet to come.

Artificial intelligence has already changed what we see, what we know, and what we do. And this is despite the fact that this technology has had only a brief history.

There are no signs that these trends are hitting any limits anytime soon. To the contrary, particularly over the course of the last decade, the fundamental trends have accelerated: investments in AI technology have rapidly increased, and the doubling time of training computation has shortened to just six months.

All major technological innovations lead to a range of positive and negative consequences. This is already true of artificial intelligence. As this technology becomes more and more powerful, we should expect its impact to become greater still.

Because of the importance of AI, we should all be able to form an opinion on where this technology is heading and to understand how this development is changing our world. For this purpose, we are building a repository of AI-related metrics, which you can find on OurWorldinData.org/artificial-intelligence.

We are still in the early stages of this history and much of what will become possible is yet to come. A technological development as powerful as this should be at the center of our attention. Little might be as important for how the future of our world—and the future of our lives—will play out.

Acknowledgements: I would like to thank my colleagues Natasha Ahuja, Daniel Bachler, Julia Broden, Charlie Giattino, Bastian Herre, Edouard Mathieu, and Ike Saunders for their helpful comments to drafts of this essay and their contributions in preparing the visualizations.

This article was originally published on Our World in Data and has been republished here under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Image Credit: DeepMind / Unsplash

As Mauna Loa erupted in late November 2022 for the first time since 1984, the emissions produced vog or volcanic smog. Vog—a mixture of ash, sulfur dioxide and other gases—may cause breathing difficulties, headaches, a sore throat, watery eyes and more to those living near and/or downwind of the vog plume.

Felines recognize their owners' cat-directed baby talk

From "crawling" rashes to exploding bladders, here's 10 unusual medical cases that recently caught our eyes.

Though humans, along with other vertebrate and invertebrate organisms, don't photosynthesize, we're definitely the downstream beneficiaries of the life forms that do. Phototrophic organisms at the bottom of the food chain convert abundant sunlight into the energy that ultimately powers all other life.

Though humans, along with other vertebrate and invertebrate organisms, don't photosynthesize, we're definitely the downstream beneficiaries of the life forms that do. Phototrophic organisms at the bottom of the food chain convert abundant sunlight into the energy that ultimately powers all other life.

Felines recognize their owners' cat-directed baby talk

Scientists setting up 'post-detection hub' in Scotland are concerned humans would react 'like headless chickens'

The moment has been imagined a thousand times. As astronomers comb the cosmos with their powerful telescopes, they spot something that makes them gasp. Amid the feeble rays from distant galaxies lies a weak but persistent signal: a message from an advanced civilisation.

It would be a transformative event for humankind, one the world's nations are surely prepared for. Or are they? "Look at the mess we made when Covid hit. We'd be like headless chickens," says Dr John Elliott, a computational linguist at the University of St Andrews. "We cannot afford to be ill-prepared, scientifically, socially, and politically rudderless, for an event that could happen at any time and which we cannot afford to mismanage."

Continue reading…

The tracking of cold-water creatures offers insights into the worrisome effects of global warming.

The tracking of cold-water creatures offers insights into the worrisome effects of global warming.

New findings link lack of access to abortion and suicide risk among women of reproductive age.

When the Dobbs v. Jackson Supreme Court decision came down in June, overturning the right to abortion in the United States that Roe v. Wade had bestowed in 1973, conversations about access to reproductive care took on a renewed urgency.

Now, findings published in JAMA Psychiatry show that restricting abortion access is linked to increased suicide risk for women of reproductive age. They did not find the same association for older women or death due to motor vehicle accidents.

"Stress is a key contributor to mental health burden and a major driver of increased suicide risk," says child-adolescent psychiatrist and neuroscientist Ran Barzilay of the University of Pennsylvania's Perelman School of Medicine and the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.

"We found that this particular stressor—restriction to abortion—affects women of a specific age in a specific cause of death, which is suicide. That's the 10,000-foot view."

The study emerged after Barzilay, Jonathan Zandberg of the Wharton School, and Rebecca Waller of the psychology department discovered an overlap in their research interests. Zandberg studies how restrictions to reproductive care affect gender inequality, Barzilay, the factors that affect a person's mental health trajectory and suicide risk. Waller focuses on environmental stressors that influence parents and, in turn, child development. Data scientist Elina Visoki from Barzilay's lab also contributed to this research.

Zandberg's prior work had shown that more restricted access to reproductive care creates a costly trade-off for women's career aspirations and their family formation choices. The researchers decided to examine other aspects of this dynamic, looking at the mental health implications of enforcing strict reproductive rights and more specifically, risk of suicide, the third leading cause of death for 25- to 44-year-olds in the United States.

They conducted what's called a difference-in-differences analysis, using state-level data from 1974 through 2016 and covering the entire population of adult women during that time. "We constructed three indices that measure access to reproductive care by looking at the enforcement of state-level legislation," Zandberg says. "Every time a state enforced a law that was related to reproductive care, we incorporated it into the index." Then, among women of reproductive age, they analyzed suicide rates before and after the laws took effect, comparing those numbers to broad suicide trends and to rates in places without such restrictions.

"Comparatively, women who experienced the shock of this type of restrictive legislation had a significant increase in suicide rate," Zandberg says.

Next, the researchers examined whether the finding was specific to women of reproductive age or could be observed in other populations. As a comparison, they ran the same analysis for all 45- to 64-year-old women between 1974 and 2016. They did not find any effect. Finally, they examined another common cause of death, motor vehicle death rates, and saw no effect. Controlling for potential confounders like the economy and political climate did not change the results.

Though the findings do not prove that restricting abortion access caused suicide rates to increase, the researchers say the analytic approach is one of the most rigorous methods to enable causal inference. "This association is robust—and it has nothing to do with politics," Barzilay says. "It's all backed by the data."

There are limitations to these conclusions, including the fact that the researchers did not have access to data about the experiences or mental health of individual women. In other words, "we're looking at the connection between summary data about causes of death at the state level and policy and politics over many decades. Yet, every death represents an individual moment of tragedy," Waller says. "So, there's clearly an awful lot more that we need to understand about what these findings mean for individual suicide risk."

Yet even with the limitations, the researchers say the findings have clinical, policy, and ethical implications. For one, recognizing this link can change how physicians and other health care providers approach suicide risk classification in women of reproductive age. Beyond that, it points to a need for better suicide-prevention policies and adds hard data to the ethical debate about abortion access.

Big picture, the research team says it's important to have insight into current trends to plan for future scenarios in which partial restrictions morph into full-fledged restrictions or even abortion criminalization. "Whatever your view is on all of this, it's all over the news. It's everywhere," Waller says. "The women internalizing the stories they hear are the ones who these restrictions will affect the most."

Funding for this research came from the National Institute of Mental Health and the Lifespan Brain Institute of Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) and the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.

Source: Penn

The post Lack of abortion access linked to suicide risk appeared first on Futurity.

Updated on December 29, 2022, at 12:10 p.m.

The dramatic, multidimensional implosion of Meta; the nuclear train wreck of Elon Musk's Twitter; the momentous labor uprising against Amazon—it wasn't just an unusually disastrous year for America's biggest tech companies. It was a reckoning.

The tech giants that have shaped our lives, online and off, over the course of the 21st century have at last hit a wall. Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta, and Apple all saw their valuations fall, sometimes precipitously. Many slashed their workforces; at least 120,000 tech workers lost their jobs this year. The myth of the genius founder, which insulated so many of these giants from so much criticism for so long, was debunked before our eyes.

These companies, launched with promises to connect the world, to think different, to make information free to all, to democratize technology, have spent much of the past decade making the sorts of moves that large corporations trying to grow ever larger have historically made—embracing profit over safety, market expansion over product integrity, and rent seeking over innovation—but at much greater scale, speed, and impact. Now, ruled by monopolies, marred by toxicity, and over-reliant on precarious labor, Silicon Valley looks like it's finally run hard up into its limits.

Call it the improbable paradox of the modern tech giant. Some of the most powerful, profitable, and expansive companies in human history—associated at least nominally with wide-ranging innovation—are stuck. They're failing utterly to create the futures they've long advertised, or even to maintain the versions they were able to muster. Having scaled to immense size, they're unable or unwilling to manage the digital communities they've built. They're paralyzed when it comes to product development and reduced to monopolistic practices such as charging rents and copying or buying up smaller competitors. Antitrust investigations beckon. Their policies tend to please no one; it's a common refrain that antipathy toward Big Tech companies is one of the few truly bipartisan issues.

You can just feel it, the cumulative weight of this stagnation, in the tech that most of us encounter every day. The act of scrolling past the same dumb ad to peer at the same bad news on the same glass screen on the same social network: This is the stuck future. There is a sense that we have reached the end of the internet, and no one wants to be left holding the bag.

How these companies respond to this troubled new era will have major repercussions. This is why throughout 2022, we've been pitched a mishmash of virtual- and augmented-reality projects and "metaverse" concepts. It's why the tech giants that preside over today's toxic online communities are now promising to force them onto our faces. It's why there's brewing resentment among certain tech-industry heavyweights who believe they've seen their visions stymied. It's why others are jumping ship, leaving massive planks of online infrastructure open to acquisition and further disarray.

There's a palpable exhaustion with the whole enterprise, with the men who set out to build the future or at least get rich, and who accomplished only one and a half of those things.

---

The most obvious example of tech's quagmire, of course, is Twitter. From his overinflated bid to buy the company for a price that doubled as a weed joke to his catastrophic tenure as CEO, Elon Musk and his tortured dalliance with the social network was the most-watched tech saga of the year. By November, Musk had slashed half the staff and reinstated some of the site's most controversial banned users, including the neo-Nazi Andrew Anglin and former President Donald Trump. He used his new perch to promote right-wing conspiracies, to mock nonbinary people and Anthony Fauci, and to suspend journalists. Advertisers balked and paused spending on the platform. Prominent users sent farewell tweets. Now, at the end of the year, amid lawsuits, potential Federal Trade Commission and European Union law violations, a shriveled staff, and a mounting pile of unpaid bills, Twitter's future is very much in question.

But the relentless Musk/Twitter drama shouldn't overshadow the conditions that allowed it to erupt in the first place: The platform has been in a state of arrested development for a long time. It has struggled to add users and to keep toxic content, abusive accounts, and disinformation off its platform. It's popular among a subset of people—especially comedians, journalists, and politicians—but it hasn't turned a profit since 2019, and even then, profit-turning was a rarity. It's posted a loss in eight of the past 10 years.

Twitter has always presented itself as a crucial online public square. If that were the case, why was Twitter's board so quick to hand over the keys to a notoriously thin-skinned and often malicious troll? The answer is as simple as it is cynical: "The proposed transaction will deliver a substantial cash premium, and we believe it is the best path forward for Twitter's stockholders," Bret Taylor, Twitter's independent board chair, said in a press release. The money saw the writing on the wall and got out while the getting was good. They knew what a mess Twitter was and perhaps even had the sense, like many of us do, that the era of social media may be ending altogether.

The company, we were reminded this year, has long been dysfunctional. In August, when Twitter's former head of security, Peiter "Mudge" Zatko, submitted a whistleblower complaint alleging major vulnerabilities at the company, he described a security culture so lax that at any given time, an employee could access a U.S. senator's account with no oversight. Foreign-intelligence agents, he claimed, could and had infiltrated Twitter's inner ranks with ease. Zatko blamed Twitter's executives for placing profit over safety and for running, as he said, "a company that was managed by risk and by crises, instead of one that manages risk and crises."

The revelations echoed those that wracked Facebook the year before, when Frances Haugen alleged that the world's largest social-media network had, among other things, allowed regimes to use the platform to fan ethnic violence.

The big social networks are stuck. And there is little profit incentive to get them unstuck. That, after all, would require investing heavily in content moderators, empowering trust and safety teams, and penalizing malicious viral content that brings in huge traffic. Instead, Musk's Twitter opted to no longer enforce a policy against COVID misinformation, or Facebook's "cross-check" system that shielded valuable high-profile users from moderation. Rather than drafting and implementing robust policies to address toxicity, harassment, and user security, the networks' leadership has opted, essentially, to ignore the problems. Twitter's founder Jack Dorsey up and bailed, first as CEO in the fall of 2021, then from the company's board altogether this spring.

Meta's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, has apparently become so disillusioned with reality that he decided to try to invent a new one, and to shovel us all into it. For example: When Meta held its Connect conference in October to showcase its progress on the metaverse, the stars of the show were, well, legs. That lone syllable quickly became a comic shorthand for the entire event: Meta's big breakthrough, after a year and $15 billion spent trying to build its metaverse, was that its pixelated cartoon avatars had pixelated appendages now. (The mockery that followed was especially acute after it turned out that Meta had even faked the legs.) The bluster did accomplish what the company's metaverse was built to do in the first place, though: distract us from the fact that Facebook's user growth has slowed to a crawl, that the platform is losing ground to TikTok, and that it's mired in controversy and moderation woes. With each passing day, Facebook's metaverse aspirations look more like a Hail Mary fantasy, a beleaguered CEO's escape attempt to a 3-D virtual world where he might leave behind the misery of his dull 2-D version.

The company has lost hundreds of billions of dollars in value this year. It laid off more than 11,000 people, or 13 percent of its staff, in November.

---

It's not just social media that's in decline, already over, or worse.

In September, when Apple held its annual iPhone-launch event, few were surprised when its newest models were nearly identical to the past dozen or so. And just weeks before, news broke that the Department of Justice was considering a sweeping antitrust lawsuit against the tech giant for anticompetitive practices. As its mighty iPhone sales figures have plateaued and its business has grown more conservative—it hasn't released a culturally significant new product line since 2016's AirPods—Apple has begun to embrace advertising.

Over the summer, Apple began allowing companies to buy ads on the front page of the App Store. In October, reports surfaced that Apple was exploring ads for its TV+ service too. "Apple Is an Ad Company Now," Wired declared. Meanwhile, the company is squeezing more out of the developers who rely on the App Store to distribute their work, reaping profits at a margin that in 2019 were alleged to be an eye-watering 78 percent.

But Apple isn't alone in its monopoly-growth pangs. Google continues to be the world's largest ad company and rakes in nearly 60 percent of its business from search listings. It makes money from its YouTube ads and cloud business too, but its fundamentals remain largely the same as a decade ago. Yet as Google has consolidated its monopoly, the quality of its flagship search product has gotten worse. Result pages are cluttered with ads that must be scrolled through in order to find the "'organic"' items, and there's reason to think the quality of the results has gotten worse over time as well. (Internet users delighted in sharing reports that young people are turning to TikTok and Instagram instead of Google to search the web.) YouTube, meanwhile, is facing many of the same policy quagmires as Facebook and Twitter, especially when it comes to content moderation—and similarly failing to meaningfully address them.

[Read: The open secret of Google Search]

Like Apple, as its core product—search—has been seeing revenues level off for a while now, Google has behaved less like the tech innovator of its mythology and more like a monopoly of world-swallowing corporations past. It has thrown its weight around to ensure that it dominates the digital-ad marketplace and turned further toward Goliath-scale rent seeking, both in its own app store, Google Play, and in the expansion of its Cloud business. As a result, Google, too, is facing antitrust action from the Department of Justice—little surprise, given that it controls the world's dominant search engine, web browser, and mobile-device operating system all at once. Google's quest for new revenue streams has led it to a place where so many of the once-idealistic tech giants seem to have wound up—at the Department of Defense. In December, the Pentagon announced that it had extended a $9 billion DOD contract to Google—along with Oracle, Amazon, and Microsoft—to help build a "tactical cloud."

Keep in mind that Amazon makes the bulk of its profits—when it turns them—from its Amazon Web Services cloud-internet business. Despite Amazon's behemoth size and e-commerce imprint, its margins on its retail business are thin—last quarter, it logged a loss. Amazon has expanded relentlessly on the back of AWS profits, low consumer prices, and what amounts to systematic worker exploitation. Now that growing numbers of its workers across the nation are standing up and organizing, its equation is in jeopardy. It's little surprise that the company has opposed the Amazon Labor Union and continues to contest the result of warehouse workers' historic vote last April to unionize at a Staten Island fulfillment center. In November, in response to a National Labor Relations Board complaint, a federal court ordered Amazon to cease and desist its practice of "firing employees for protected activities."

Some of Amazon's most famous projects and products also hit spectacular walls this year. Back in March, we learned that Amazon's prototype delivery drones kept crashing in test flights; one even started a forest fire in Oregon. Alexa, Amazon's ubiquitous virtual assistant, is apparently losing billions of dollars a quarter—enough to be deemed a "colossal failure" by a former employee—and was the division hit hardest when the company began slashing thousands of jobs this past fall. (Amazon's CEO announced that more job cuts were coming in 2023 too.)

Aside from renting out more access to its web infrastructure, Amazon's road to perpetually expanding profits lies in opening more fulfillment centers and working more employees to the bone using sophisticated and punitive surveillance and productivity systems—a proposition that is running up against a rising labor movement, a tight employment market, and a public that supports union drives at Amazon by overwhelming margins.

---

What a grim outcome for the internet, where the possibilities were once believed to be endless and where users were promised an infinite spectrum of possibility to indulge their creativity, build robust communities, and find their best expression, even when they could not do so in the real world. Big Tech, of course, never predicated its business models on enabling any of that, though its advertising and sloganeering may have suggested otherwise. Rather, companies' ambitions were always focused on being the biggest: having the most users, selling the most devices, locking the most people into their walled gardens and ecosystems. The stuckness we're seeing is the result of some of the most ambitious companies of our generation succeeding wildly yet having no vision beyond scale—no serious interest in engaging the civic and social dimensions of their projects.

So it's fitting that Elon Musk has come to dominate the conversation about the tech sector at the moment it's most sharply fallen short of its lofty promises. Silicon Valley has always been built on the mythology of the heroic founder, and few come more thoroughly shrouded in myth than Musk—and this was a year in which that mythology unraveled.

Musk was once the actual inspiration for the cinematic Iron Man: He was believed by many to be a superhero capable of creating electric cars, sending rockets to Mars, and delivering the future to all of us. Now he's the thrashing, bullheaded avatar of Big Tech in the 2020s: unfathomably rich and powerful but also lodged in the mud, amplifying toxicity and discord, and at distinct risk of entering a sustained decline.

Or take Elizabeth Holmes, whose unicorn start-up Theranos was once a darling of Silicon Valley, and who was sentenced in November to more than 11 years in prison for defrauding investors about her company's technology, which never worked. Or Sam Bankman-Fried, the erstwhile crypto wunderkind and champion of effective altruists who was embraced by the Democratic Party, and who promised to help usher in the age of cryptocurrency with his exchange, FTX, and to work to improve the lives of future humans everywhere. He ends the year bankrupt, out on bond, and accused of multiple counts of fraud. Customers may never get back the money they entrusted to Bankman-Fried's collapsed exchange. So perhaps it's not just Big Tech but the very model that engendered it—in which a visionary is entrusted with millions to invent the future, with scant oversight—that has hit a wall.

[Read: Sam Bankman-Fried got what he wanted]

There's an air of irony that, as we close out the year, the latest buzzing industry trend is automated image and text generation. Tools such as OpenAI's DALL-E and ChatGPT use huge neural networks to try to assemble new-looking products from massive expanses of old data that has been vacuumed up from the internet as Big Tech has made and managed it—images, articles, and posts created in service of feeding the platform incentives of the Web 2.0 monopolies.

It's telling to see who is most excited about these tools: founders and investors. Some of the images have gone viral, but there's already an accompanying weariness and plenty of pushback from working artists and illustrators. And no matter how wondrous, it's seemingly only a matter of time before these platforms get bought or cloned by the giants, or turned into some onerous subscription-fee service that will steamroll the human creators of the source material. This is Silicon Valley again making a show of preparing to devour its own tail.

Somewhere in here, Big Tech's AI generators seem to be insisting, amid the last internet we spoiled, that there has to be something new. Something we can use. They shouldn't be so certain.

This article has been updated to reflect that Sam Bankman-Fried has been released from federal custody on bond.

Back in the 1960s, China and Russia squandered their chance to defeat the West when they became bitter rivals during the Cold War. Today, their presidents—who are expected to confer again this week—are trying to correct that fateful error. The world's most powerful autocracies have joined forces for an assault on the liberal order led by the United States and its allies—a threat made all too real when Russia invaded democratic Ukraine in February with Chinese support. Authoritarianism was again on the march, and the world's major democracies faced a grave challenge to their unity and resolve.

As 2022 has unfolded and the true nature of the Russia-China relationship has become more apparent, the danger it poses seems less acute. What has emerged is nothing like an axis of autocrats, but a lopsided partnership in which the terms are defined by its alpha member, Xi Jinping, primarily to serve China's interests. This tells us a lot about the foreign-policy principles of China's leaders and how those ideas may hamper Beijing's quest to reshape the world order.

Historically, relations between China and Russia have been fraught with distrust and confrontation. The two came frighteningly close to nuclear war in the late 1960s, at the height of their Cold War schism. More recently, though, Beijing and Moscow have found common cause. Economically, they are mutually beneficial trading partners, with China's industrial machine importing Russian oil, gas, coal, and other raw materials in exchange for high-tech Chinese goods.

[Read: China is watching Ukraine with a lot of interest]

Xi and Russian President Vladimir Putin have also forged a close personal connection. In 2019, Xi described Putin as a "best friend." The glue of their friendship is a shared frustration with American global primacy. Each sees Washington as the main impediment to the achievement of their international ambitions. That's why alarms rang more loudly in democratic capitals when Putin visited Xi in Beijing in early February and they issued a joint statement saying that "friendship between the two States has no limits, there are no 'forbidden' areas of cooperation."

Fears rose in the U.S. and Europe that the two authoritarian states were embarking on a coordinated attack in Asia and Europe against the dominance of the West. Those fears seemed justified when, later that month, Putin launched his war against Ukraine.

The Sino-Russian partnership seemed to pay instant dividends. From Xi's perspective, Putin's invasion rolled back Western influence (or so it appeared) at little cost to China. Moscow, for its part, gained important political support from Beijing at a moment when the U.S. was aiming to isolate Russia on the world stage. Beijing has consistently blamed NATO for causing the war and supported Putin's security concerns in Europe, which China's top diplomat described earlier this year as "legitimate."

Xi has also rebuffed calls to use his influence with Putin to help end the war or mediate between the Russian leader and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Although Xi told President Joe Biden in their November meeting that he was "highly concerned" about the Ukraine crisis, he also appeared to wash his hands of any responsibility to play a more active role in reaching a settlement. The official Chinese readout of the conversation stated that Beijing will encourage peace talks but looked forward to a dialogue between the U.S., NATO, and Russia.

Beijing's diplomatic backing of Moscow's position on Ukraine, as well as of Russia's role in the world as a major power, has been of significant value to Putin. So has China's more tangible assistance. As Russia's financial and business ties to the West crumble under the weight of sanctions, trade with China has replaced some of the lost income. Total trade between China and Russia surged by nearly a third, to $172 billion so far this year. (By contrast, Russia's trade with the U.S. plunged by about half, according to the latest available data.)

"For Russia, the key task for now is to generate enough revenue stream to pump money into the war machine, the budget, to feed all of the people who carry guns and support domestic security," Alexander Gabuev, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Moscow Center, told me. "As the relationship between Russia and the West is being destroyed by both sides … the key revenue flows … are turning to the East, and China is the major player."

[Alexander Gabuev: Putin's Doomsday scenario]

Aside from the Ukraine war, and whatever its outcome, the China-Russia relationship is likely to deepen. Xi and Putin share a strong interest in reducing their economic reliance on the U.S. and its European and Asian partners, and both have a clear incentive to expand trade and investment between their economies. In a recent paper in the Naval War College Review, the scholars Andrew Erickson and Gabriel Collins foresee the potential for greater military cooperation between Russia and China as well. Moscow could enhance China's naval capabilities by giving its fleet access to Russian ports in the Far East and by sharing technology, especially for undersea warfare. "Russian military pinnacle technologies," they wrote, "could be coupled with China's financial resources and industry to tip the Indo-Pacific security balance in favor of a Sino-Russian axis of autocracy at the expense of the United States and its allies and partners."

Still, the events of the past year have shown that the "no limits" relationship does, in fact, have its limits. Beijing has not provided material support for Putin's war effort, nor helped his government and banks evade the tough sanctions imposed by the West after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Self-interest is certainly at work here. In a March conversation, Biden warned Xi that China would face "consequences" if the Chinese leader directly aided Russia. That would likely entail sanctions on China—which the country, still heavily dependent on American and European trade, technology, and investment, can ill afford. And although Xi has backed Putin's security concerns in Europe, he has shown some discomfort with Putin's war. In their November meeting, Biden and Xi jointly criticized the Russian leader's threat to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine, according to Washington's summary of the conversation.

Some analysts have interpreted a degree of waffling by Xi in that encounter as a signal that he is having second thoughts about his bet on Russia. Revealingly, perhaps, the bit about nukes was omitted from the account of the meeting released by China's foreign ministry. But Chinese-Russian ties continue to develop. The same day that Zelensky was in Washington addressing Congress, Xi hosted former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev in Beijing.

Most likely, Xi's diplomatic two-step is an indication of Beijing's continuing attempts to play all sides. In that sense, it's typical Chinese foreign policy. Beijing eschews the sort of commitments Washington has made to its close allies. China's leaders prefer to maintain their own freedom of action, both at home and abroad, unfettered by promises made to other countries. Xi has enshrined this practice into his chief diplomatic program, the Global Security Initiative, a framework for reshaping the global order. Outlining its tenets, Xi declared that countries should "say no to group politics and bloc confrontation." Attempts to form "small circles," he said, are "doomed to fail."

That means China will resist the formation of a new, authoritarian bloc with Russia (or any other countries) like the old Communist bloc that the Soviet Union once formed. Beijing's commitment to such ideas suggests that it will never forge a true alliance with Russia that would require China's leaders to coordinate policy more closely or that would bind them to mutual defense. Despite its current troubles, the Russian leadership may prefer it that way. Moscow may be wary of becoming too tied to—and too dependent on—China as well. The relationship between Xi and Putin is not equal. The Ukraine war has exposed Russia as a declining power, and its isolation from the West has left Putin little choice but to turn to Beijing. Xi is taking advantage.

[Damir Marusic: Taiwan faces its Ukraine moment]

For instance, China has been purchasing Russian oil at steep discounts. With access to dollar transactions curtailed by U.S. sanctions, Russian businesses are turning instead to the Chinese yuan, advancing Beijing's longtime goal of promoting its currency as a rival to the greenback. The relationship is "more beneficial to China than for Russia," Gabuev told me. "The asymmetry that was built into this relationship even before the war has been galvanized by the war."

The stronger China becomes, the greater that imbalance grows, and the more Beijing may prod Moscow to align its interests with China's—and the more nervous Russian leaders may become. "A Russia whose motives for aggressive military action in Europe likely include regaining the fear-based 'respect' accorded the Soviet Union in the past may tire of being viewed—and perhaps treated—as a vassal of China," Erickson and Collins wrote. "Popular resentment at national subservience may prompt Putin or his ultimate successor to reset relations symbolically, and even substantively, away from Beijing's preferences."

The dynamics of Xi's relations with Russia tell us that China isn't a very good friend, and this will surely have consequences for Beijing's quest for greater global influence. The U.S. has extended and entrenched its power through a network of close alliances and defense arrangements with nations that share values and foreign-policy objectives. China will do nothing of the sort. Beijing will more likely operate through bilateral ties, loose international groups (such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization), and initiatives it can control (such as its Belt and Road development program). It will engage with other countries only so far as such arrangements directly benefit it, as the partnership with Russia shows.

The question is whether such a strategy is sufficient for Beijing to achieve its foreign-policy ambitions. The U.S. certainly pursues its national priorities in its foreign affairs, sometimes ruthlessly, but it has also been willing to make sacrifices to promote its agenda—by, for instance, absorbing the costs of other countries' defense. China has not always shunned such a practice. In historical periods when China was the unrivaled power in East Asia, the emperors of imperial dynasties often spent heavily on gifts and assistance for foreign states and dignitaries from the region. The display of generosity was designed to uphold the dynasties' diplomatic system. Today's Chinese leaders, however, seem much less willing to sacrifice wealth or make concessions in order to realize greater goals. Other countries, including Russia, may choose to respond in kind, limiting Beijing's ability to exert its influence in a global struggle with the U.S. and its allies.

All the same, the China-Russia relationship could remain dangerous to the U.S. and democracy more broadly. Whatever differences or points of distrust they may have, Beijing and Moscow still share an objective of altering the world order, and they will continue to pursue that, within the constraints of their relations. "This is not an alliance," Yun Sun, a director of the China program at the Stimson Center, told me. "Partners is a much-qualified word in terms of what each side will do for the other." But Chinese leaders, she went on, "do see Russia as a useful partner—or useful instrument—in confronting the United States. That has not changed, and that is not going to change."

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We know for certain cooking isn't unique to our species and that it was going on 750,000 years ago. The evidence of hominins deliberately exposing their food to heat is being pushed back further all the time, finds Michael Marshall

Nature Communications, Published online: 29 December 2022; doi:10.1038/s41467-022-35743-y

Methods to predict genome-wide off-target activities of prime editors (PEs) are currently lacking. Here the authors report a cell-based assay, TAgmentation of Prime Editor sequencing (TAPE-seq), that provides genome-wide off-target candidates for PEs.

Nature Communications, Published online: 29 December 2022; doi:10.1038/s41467-022-35730-3

Pretomanid has been approved for use in cases of multi-drug resistant pulmonary tuberculosis, yet the penetration of this antibiotic into other target tissues is not well established. Authors provide insight on pretomanid pharmacokinetics in the central nervous system, using positron emission tomography in animal models, and human studies.

Schools adapted to remote learning, but students also got used to seeking easy answers instead of real understanding.

The next generation of video game characters could be powered by AI, making them more engaging and challenging.

Multiple researchers at the Jackson Laboratory (JAX) are taking part in an ambitious research program spanning several top research institutions to study senescent cells. Senescent cells stop dividing in response to stressors and seemingly have a role to play in human health and the aging process. Recent research with mice suggests that clearing senescent cells delays the onset of age-related dysfunction and disease as well as all-cause mortality.

Multiple researchers at the Jackson Laboratory (JAX) are taking part in an ambitious research program spanning several top research institutions to study senescent cells. Senescent cells stop dividing in response to stressors and seemingly have a role to play in human health and the aging process. Recent research with mice suggests that clearing senescent cells delays the onset of age-related dysfunction and disease as well as all-cause mortality.

Earth has been thoroughly explored, yet is still teeming with secrets. In 2022, scientists unearthed several of them.

Black carbon aerosol is the product of incomplete combustion of fossil fuels and biomass, and has strong light absorption. Black carbon deposition in snow ice reduces the albedo of the snow ice surface, accelerating the melting of glaciers and snow cover, and thus changing the hydrological process and water resources in the region.

A paper published on Dec. 21 in Energy Material Advances reviews improvement strategies for the electrocatalytic activities of transition metal nitrides (TMNs) on hydrogen evolution reaction.

The Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) satellite launched into Earth orbit on Friday, Dec. 16, from Vandenberg Space Force Base in central California, and engineers are working to prepare the mission to begin measuring the height of water on over 90% of Earth's surface, providing a high-definition survey of our planet's water for the first time.

Certainly I'm not the first person to suggest, as New Year's approaches, that a little reflection might be in order. Plenty of us take the opportunity to think about the year that has passed—what we're proud of, what we could have done differently, how we changed—and set resolutions for the year ahead. As helpful as this contemplation can be, though, it tends to be somewhat self-involved: We focus on our own accomplishments, but not always on the people in our lives who made them possible. In recent years, I've tried something different.

Near the end of December, I open my email or pick up a pen, and I begin composing thank-you notes. The messages are usually just a few sentences long: I recap my interactions with the recipient that year, put my finger on what I appreciated, and say I'm grateful. But when I consider whom to thank, I realize the list could go on and on. I try to think of everyone who made my year better: the established journalist who referred me to a radio program, the HR staff who processed my paperwork, the friend who dropped off groceries when I was recovering from COVID. Almost always, I get a note back expressing similar gratitude.

Typically, we're told to write thank-you notes at specific junctures—after finishing a job interview, receiving a gift, hosting a wedding or another significant function. These notes can be lovely, but they also run the risk of being rote and transactional. We send them because we're expected to. End-of-year thank-you notes, though, aren't written out of obligation. Those who get them are reminded unexpectedly that someone is thinking of them—and that their actions haven't gone unnoticed.

That knowledge can mean a lot, however brief or clumsily worded a thank-you might be. In one study, conducted by researchers at the University of Chicago, subjects instructed to send "gratitude letters" worried that their recipients would feel awkward or that their writing would be scrutinized. But actually, the people receiving the notes—which took most subjects less than five minutes to write—were genuinely touched. Many reported feeling "ecstatic." And they found the notes to be warmer and more competently written than the senders had predicted they would.

[Read: Resolutions are not the vibe for 2022]

I'd argue that end-of-year thank-you notes are good for the sender too. Looking back on the year, I don't stop reflecting after thinking about what I've accomplished. When I make a mental list of everyone who supported me, I remember that no achievement is the result of my efforts alone. That realization is humbling; it grounds me in gratitude for all I was able to do rather than resentment for what I didn't or couldn't do.

It also makes me feel less alone. In 2022, after a big move—not to mention nearly three years of a pandemic—I've felt particularly isolated. And plenty of sociologists and public-health researchers worry that too many Americans are experiencing the same—that we don't rely on our communities like we used to. But sending thank-you notes reminds me of the rich tapestry of connections that make up my life. It draws me just a bit closer to the people around me, even those I don't know well: my mail carrier, my neighbors, a co-worker who helped me even when it wasn't required.

I'll still write resolutions for the coming year, but I won't just be mulling career milestones or side projects I want to complete. I'll also be thinking of the people who were there for me—and how I plan to show up for them too.

Senator Kyrsten Sinema says she's had enough of partisan squabbling. Who hasn't? But the former Democrat's switch to independent earlier this month won't solve anything. Sinema is still bound by the parties, no matter which letter—D, R, or I—appears next to her name.

True independence in our partisan system is a fantasy. Like the two other independent senators, Sinema will continue to vote almost entirely like a Democrat. She is what the political scientists Samara Klar of the University of Arizona and Yanna Krupnikov of SUNY–Stony Brook would call an "undercover partisan"—someone who behaves mostly like a partisan but publicly rejects partisanship to show their disdain.

Sinema's own words show the fallacy in her reasoning. "While Arizonans don't all agree on the issues, we are united in our values of hard work, common sense, and independence," she wrote in The Arizona Republic, announcing her newfound political identity. What is "united in … independence"? How do we agree on anything if we are all independent?

Imagine a Senate of 100 true independents. How would they organize? How would they decide what to vote on, when, and under what procedure? Political parties always emerge in legislatures; the same Framers who fretted over political parties when writing the Constitution formed parties in the very first U.S. Congress, when they had to govern. Parties are necessary to organize sustainable coalitions and build governing majorities. In politics, power belongs to groups, not individuals. Politics involves organizing, choices, and affiliations. Parties are the institutions that turn chaos into politics, as bad as politics may still be.

[Read: 'She made an idiot out of me']

Despite the necessity of parties, the idea of political independence is alluring to many people. "Independent" has been by far the most popular self-identification in U.S. politics for a good three decades now, hovering at about 40 percent of the electorate in recent years—which is not to say that the members of this group are united in their independence. Contrary to common conception, independents are not the same as moderates. Rather, they tend to be simply more dissatisfied with politics than people who identify as partisans are. In the 2016 primaries, independent voters preferred Bernie Sanders (who, like Sinema, is also an independent) to the party's more traditional candidates. Other leading independents, such as Senator Angus King of Maine and former Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, are similarly, well, dissimilar, at least when it comes to their policy preferences.

What does bind independents is a public rejection of partisan politics, at least as currently practiced in the U.S. by the two major parties. But the problem is that rejection can backfire, making partisan politics worse. American voters are already cynical and distrustful. What they need isn't more political independents claiming to be above it all. They need more real choices in the form of more parties—parties that represent a greater array of ideas and that can give more people in the American public a voice and connection to their government.

This would require changes in electoral rules. Our current winner-takes-all system of elections is hostile to third parties. Few voters want to "waste" their ballot on a candidate who is unlikely to win, and candidates who do manage to win over a significant percentage of the electorate are viewed as spoilers for the Democratic or Republican nominee.

A number of existing proposals would help give third parties more relevance. Fusion voting, under which multiple parties can endorse the same candidate, could allow more parties to meaningfully participate in Senate elections—while keeping with the Constitution's requirement that only a single candidate can win. New parties would then have a reason to form: They would have power without having to recruit a candidate who can't win.

For the U.S. House, where multimember districts would be allowed by the Constitution (but are banned by statute), switching to proportional representation would most directly break the two-party hegemony. Rather than splitting, for example, Arizona into nine separate congressional districts, all Arizonans could vote in the same statewide, multiparty election. Parties would win seats in direct proportion to their statewide vote share, so a party that gets a third of the votes in Arizona would get three of nine seats in Congress. Each party would select its candidates, instead of hosting primaries. Just as in our current system, general-election voters would choose their preferred candidate. The difference is that those ballots would also count toward the total vote share for that candidate's party. A party that gets three seats would send its three most popular candidates to Congress. Giving political parties the ability to vet and choose their own nominees strengthens the parties' ability to give voters clear choices.

Collectively, this means that Arizonans would seat a delegation that would better represent the state's political diversity. More voters would find a party or candidate that represents them. Every voter would matter equally, not just those who live in competitive districts. Fights over districting and redistricting would vanish. Gerrymandering would cease to be relevant.

[David A. Graham: Kyrsten Sinema's decision is all about 2024]

Sinema is correct in part. There is "a disconnect between what everyday Americans want and deserve from our politics, and what political parties are offering." But the solution is more parties, not a rejection of them. With more selection for representation, Americans could form inclusive governing coalitions that lead to actual change. Building a personal brand around one's independence is easy, particularly as a short-term electoral ploy. But building something that lasts, and that gives voters meaningful options, is far harder—and far more important.

Nature Communications, Published online: 29 December 2022; doi:10.1038/s41467-022-35553-2

Elevated body mass index is heritable and associated with many health conditions that impact morbidity and mortality. Here, the authors identify greater than 900 genetic loci for body mass index (BMI) and find over 300 diagnoses associated with increasing BMI.

This week, we look back at 2022's biggest consumer tech stories. Then, we offer our predictions for what the next 12 months will bring.

Scientific Reports, Published online: 29 December 2022; doi:10.1038/s41598-022-27001-4

Author Correction: Imaging-based representation and stratification of intra-tumor heterogeneity via tree-edit distance

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The year was marked by sinister new twists on cybersecurity classics, including phishing, breaches, and ransomware attacks.

Forget return-to-office mandates. The most sought-after talent want ultimate flexibility. Their bosses need to get on board.

AI is better at fooling humans than ever—and the consequences will be serious.

The Inflation Reduction Act and Europe's energy crisis have focused attention on a stealthy tool to reduce emissions: the humble home.

There are many tensions in our relationship to hope. The key is not to let corporations exploit them.

Start-ups are raising funds to speed up process that uses microbes

Scientific Reports, Published online: 29 December 2022; doi:10.1038/s41598-022-26436-z

Author Correction: Assessment of natural groundwater reserve of a morphodynamic system using an information-based model in a part of Ganga basin, Northern India

Scientific Reports, Published online: 29 December 2022; doi:10.1038/s41598-022-26982-6

Author Correction: Degradation and fragmentation behavior of polypropylene and polystyrene in water

Scientific Reports, Published online: 29 December 2022; doi:10.1038/s41598-022-26992-4

The uptake pattern of 18F-sodium fluoride radioligand in brain tissue after

PLUS. Styringen af produktionen på nordjyske Svanehøj er lagt fra ERP-systemet i hænderne på tre montører.

Do sleeping spores dream of electric sheep?

Do sleeping spores dream of electric sheep?

Friendships won't save the world. But they can sure save your sanity, shore up your health and make your life a lot better

Here is a much-needed resolution for many of us in the new year: make new friendships and shore up old ones.

Americans are an increasingly lonely bunch, spending more time solo and on our devices than with others. A decade ago, the average American spent about six and a half hours a week with friends. In 2014, time with friends declined, while time alone shot up. By 2019 – before the pandemic – Americans were spending just four hours a week with friends, a number that tanked in 2021 to two hours and 45 minutes. And it's not that those hours were going to other people – to kids, spouses or family. As time with friends decreased, time spent alone soared.

Continue reading…

Any new vaccine must be better than the ones we already have, setting a high bar for approval that is not expected to be met in 2023

Girls. Get Out. Now M3GAN. In just a handful of performances, the actress has redefined authenticity—and achieved a new kind of artificial reality.

Scientific Reports, Published online: 29 December 2022; doi:10.1038/s41598-022-26900-w

Author Correction: Impact of γ-irradiation and SBR content in the compatibility of aminated (PVC/LLDPE)/ZnO for improving their AC conductivity and oil removal

Scientific Reports, Published online: 29 December 2022; doi:10.1038/s41598-022-26885-6

Author Correction: MHD mixed convective stagnation point flow of nanofluid past a permeable stretching sheet with nanoparticles aggregation and thermal stratification

Scientific Reports, Published online: 29 December 2022; doi:10.1038/s41598-022-27073-2

Adverse birth outcome and associated factors among mothers with HIV who gave birth in northwest Amhara region referral hospitals, northwest Ethiopia, 2020

Scientific Reports, Published online: 29 December 2022; doi:10.1038/s41598-022-26797-5

Thermometry of stored molecular ion beams

Scientific Reports, Published online: 29 December 2022; doi:10.1038/s41598-022-27005-0

The care cascade following a supportive management intervention for patients presenting to a radiation oncology clinic

Scientific Reports, Published online: 29 December 2022; doi:10.1038/s41598-022-27191-x

The occurrence and molecular identification of Thelazia spp. in European bison (Bison bonasus) in the Bieszczady Mountains

Scientific Reports, Published online: 29 December 2022; doi:10.1038/s41598-022-25986-6

Biometric recognition of newborns and young children for vaccinations and health care: a non-randomized prospective clinical trial

Scientific Reports, Published online: 29 December 2022; doi:10.1038/s41598-022-26048-7

Genome-wide association study of the response of patients with diabetic to intravitreal Anti- injection

A microbiology research group at the University of Hong Kong lost five papers for image duplication in late October, weeks after other scientists published a critique in

of one of the group's COVID-19 articles.

The paper on COVID-19 was published in Cell in 2021 and was led by Patrick Chiu Yat Woo and Kwok-Yung Yuen, chair of infectious diseases in the university's Department of Microbiology.

Writing in Retraction Watch in early October, Robert Speth of Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., and Georgetown University in Washington, DC, and Michael Bader of the Max-Delbrück-Center for Molecular Medicine in Berlin, described their experience notifying Cell of numerous errors in the paper, and the journal's editor refusing to publish a correction.

Weeks later, five of Yuen and Woo's papers were retracted from two journals published by the American Society for Microbiology:

• "False-Positive Results in a Recombinant Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome-Associated Coronavirus (SARS-CoV) Nucleocapsid Enzyme-Linked Immunosorbent Assay Due to HCoV-OC43 and HCoV-229E Rectified by Western Blotting with Recombinant SARS-CoV Spike Polypeptide," Journal of Clinical Microbiology, 2004.
• "Association of Presence of Aspergillus Antibodies with Hemoptysis in Patients with Old Tuberculosis or Bronchiectasis but No Radiologically Visible Mycetoma," Journal of Clinical Microbiology, 2004.
• "Coexistence of Different Genotypes in the Same Bat and Serological Characterization of Rousettus Bat Coronavirus HKU9 Belonging to a Novel Betacoronavirus Subgroup," Journal of Virology, 2010.
• "Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 4a Protein Is a Double-Stranded RNA-Binding Protein That Suppresses PACT-Induced Activation of RIG-I and MDA5 in the Innate Antiviral Response," Journal of Virology, 2014.
• "Discovery of a Novel Bottlenose Dolphin Coronavirus Reveals a Distinct Species of Marine Mammal Coronavirus in Gammacoronavirus," Journal of Virology, 2014.

The five papers have been cited nearly 400 times in total, according to Clarivate's Web of Science.

The retractions were spurred by PubPeer comments from sleuth Elisabeth Bik, a familiar name for Retraction Watch readers, pointing out similarities in the papers' images. The text of the notices was similar. One representative notice stated:

We were alerted that lanes 2 and 6 of Western blot strips in Fig. 2A are more similar than expected on retrospective inspection under magnification. The lapse of 18 years since the publication of this paper made investigation using original research material impossible. We therefore voluntarily take the step of retracting this paper to set the scientific record straight.

In response to our request for comment, Yuen and Woo told us:

We first received notifications on this issue from Pubpeer on 1st August 2022. We immediately proactively reached out to journal editors for their advice on how to set the scientific record straight. Since we no longer had the serum samples to repeat the experiments, we retracted the articles although three of them have been independently confirmed by other research groups. [They later provided these references: Detection and Characterization of New Coronavirus in Bottlenose Dolphin, United States, 2019; A Bat-Derived Putative Cross-Family Recombinant Coronavirus with a Reovirus Gene; and Antagonism of dsRNA-Induced Innate Immune Pathways by NS4a and NS4b Accessory Proteins during MERS Coronavirus Infection.]

We thanks for the comments of our work published in Cell. Their concerns have been addressed and published.

The corresponding author of the MERS paper, Dong-Yan Jin, responded to Bik on PubPeer in November that the authors "admitted that an error was introduced and I take full responsibility for it as corresponding author." At the end of his comment, he wrote:

The LKS Faculty of Medicine of the University of Hong Kong has set up a panel to investigate this and other papers. The panel found no evidence of fabrication or misconduct from any author. The panel also noted that the main conclusions of the paper were not based on the Western blot data concerned, and thus members were convinced that the conclusions drawn in the paper were valid and credible.

Bik posted a longer response from Jin, which stated that Yuen and Woo "were not involved in preparation of the figure concerned," and ended:

I apologize to Dr. Yuen, Dr. Woo and other coauthors. It was my supervisory oversight and not theirs in this paper. I feel bad that another co-author's honest error and my own oversight have resulted in criticism and attack of Dr. Yuen in the media. This is completely unfortunate and unhealthy. It does not help to keep a high standard of responsible science. It is completely unfair, groundless and counterproductive. It will only bring more harms than benefits to science. This has already wasted tremendous amount of energy and resources from different parties. Dr. Yuen's response to the papers concerned was quick and highly responsible. He has my full respect.

Like Retraction Watch? You can make a tax-deductible contribution to support our work, follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, add us to your RSS reader, or subscribe to our daily digest. If you find a retraction that's not in our database, you can let us know here. For comments or feedback, email us at team@retractionwatch.com.

Over 2,000 years ago, Baiae was the most magnificent resort town on the Italian peninsula. Wealthy statesmen including Mark Antony, Cicero, and Caesar were drawn to its natural springs, building luxurious villas with heated spas and mosaic-tiled thermal pools. But over the centuries, volcanic activity submerged this playground for the Roman nobility—leaving half of it beneath the Mediterranean.

Today, Baiae is one of the world's few underwater archaeological parks, and its 435 acres are open to visitors wanting to explore the remains of the ancient Roman city. A protected marine area, the site needs to be monitored for damage caused by divers and environmental factors. However, explains Barbara Davidde, Italy's national superintendent for underwater cultural heritage, "communication underwater is challenging."

Cabled systems are the most reliable, but they are difficult to maintain and cover a limited operational area. And wireless internet doesn't work well in water, because of the way water interacts with electromagnetic waves. Scientists have tried optic and acoustic waves, but light and sound aren't efficient forms of wireless underwater communication—water temperature, salinity, waves, and noise can alter signals as they travel between devices.

So Davidde teamed up with a group of engineers led by Chiara Petrioli, a professor at Sapienza University and director of Sapienza's spinoff WSense, a startup specializing in underwater monitoring and communication systems. Petrioli's team has developed a network of acoustic modems and underwater wireless sensors capable of gathering environmental data and transmitting it to land in real time. "We can now monitor the site remotely and at any time," says Davidde.

Their system relies on AI algorithms to constantly change the network protocol. As the sea conditions change, the algorithms modify the information path from one node to the other, allowing the signal to travel up to two kilometers. The system can send data between transmitters one kilometer apart at a kilobit per second and reaches tens of megabits per second over shorter distances, explains Petrioli. This bandwidth is enough to transmit environmental data collected by sensors anchored to the seafloor, such as images and information on water quality, pressure, and temperature; metal, chemical, and biological elements; and noise, currents, waves, and tides.

At Baiae, underwater internet allows remote, continuous monitoring of environmental conditions such as pH and carbon dioxide levels, which can influence the growth of microorganisms that could disfigure the artifacts. In addition, it allows divers to communicate with one another and with colleagues above the surface, who can also use the technology to locate them with a high degree of accuracy.

Davidde anticipates that the network will be available to tourists visiting the archaeological site in the coming months. As they swim over the ruins, visitors will use waterproof smart tablets to communicate—and to view 3D reconstructions of the ruins via augmented reality.

"Underwater internet has made monitoring of the archaeological site simpler and more efficient," says Davidde. "At the same time, we can offer the public a new, interactive way to explore the underwater park of Baiae."

Even at low bandwidth, this underwater wireless communication technology is extremely useful, particularly for dynamic systems, such as divers in motion during a site exploration.

Systems like these are now used at several archaeological sites in Italy and have many other applications, including studying the effects of climate change on marine environments and monitoring underwater volcanoes. Italy's National Agency for New Technologies, Energy, and Sustainable Economic Development uses WSense networks to study how algae, aquatic invertebrate animals, and corals adapt to climate change in the bay of Santa Teresa, for example. WSense systems have also spread outside Italy; in Norway, for instance, they are used to monitor water quality and fish health in salmon farms.

"It's nothing like what a cabled system can do," Petrioli says, "but the flexibility of a cable-free network is extremely valuable."

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It took generations of work by engineers and scientists to reach this month's nuclear fusion milestone, but there are big challenges ahead, says Matthew Sparkes

A reporter got an inside look at SpaceX's attempt to launch and land three rockets in less than two days in October, part of the company's bid to make spaceflight appear almost routine.

Geologists rely on tiny crystals of the mineral zircon to understand the timing of key events in Earth's early days, like the rising of continents and the emergence of oceans.

(Image credit: Michael Ackerson/Smithsonian)

Scientists believe they can change ecosystems by creating mechanical versions of the real thing

Once hunted to the brink of extinction, the thousands of king penguins that densely congregate on the remote Possession Island each year now face a new threat: climate change.

Once hunted to the brink of extinction, the thousands of king penguins that densely congregate on the remote Possession Island each year now face a new threat: climate change.

Open access notables

Author Guy Dagan appropriately doesn't make the connection but armchair enthusiasts can: if the climate becomes more twitchy when the atmosphere is loaded with aerosols, what happens if we try solar geoengineering via aerosols at scale? Maybe we should make sure we've modeled that thoroughly before leaping. Equilibrium climate sensitivity increases with aerosol concentration due to changes in precipitation efficiency is the springboard for this possible ripple of unintended consequences, for those of us with active imaginations.

The US Congressional Research Service delivers a nice little precis in Australia: Climate Change Issues, part of this week's government/NGO collection. If one wants the "official" US view of how another CO2-slinger is doing delivered short and sweet, look no farther.

Via Environmental Politics comes a review of an intriguing book: Fugitive Politics: The Struggle For Ecological Sanity. Noel Castree's remarks are rather jaded, perhaps from overexposure to Carl Boggs' earlier work. Castree marks the book as a dry well for hope and objects to its unapologetically confrontational stance and unashamed political identifications. Bearing that in mind, hope's shape is highly personal and hope can be found in strange places. This is a book perhaps best reviewed by a reader consuming it in the natural course of learning— with full self-awareness of biases.

Buhaug et al. build models for conflict arising from climate stresses in their work Climate-driven risks to peace over the 21st century. The authors' result is methodically complete, attentive to quantification and well anchored to prior literature. Hence the three scenarios of potential conflict explored in the paper ring plausibly and concerningly. Attention must be paid, or with even a rough resemblance to outcomes captured here we're in even more trouble.

"Global change" of course implies change everywhere, but the nitty-gritty details of ramifications of our unfortunate messing with our climate continue to amaze. Our situation is a thirsty sponge for situational awareness. Michael Clare & crew call attention to a problem that will be slow to unfold and patchy in its emergence, in Climate change hotspots and implications for the global subsea telecommunications network. The authors find that geography and geophysics mean there will be no easy rulebook for adapting our suboceanic telecomms assets to climate change.

It's not right to call broad uplift of living standards for hundreds of millions of people a "fringe benefit." Whatever the term, Paola Casati et al. measure the ripples extending from energy modernization in places hungry for improvement and find truly powerful positive effects. Clean energy access as an enabler for social development: A multidimensional analysis for Sub-Saharan Africa assesses the potential benefits to be enjoyed by ~770,000,000 people as we deal with our climate problem and finds a huge win. Why in the world would we want to be dragged kicking and screaming toward this?

136 articles in 48 journals by 1,025 contributing authors

Observations of climate change, effects

Attribution of the Unprecedented 2021 October Heatwave in South Korea
Kim et al., Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, Open Access pdf 10.1175/bams-d-22-0124.1

Borealization of nearshore fishes on an interior Arctic shelf over multiple decades
von Biela et al., Global Change Biology, 10.1111/gcb.16576

Climatology of Clear-Air Turbulence in Upper Troposphere and Lower Stratosphere in the Northern Hemisphere using ERA5 reanalysis data
Lee et al., Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, Open Access 10.1029/2022jd037679

Comparison between warm-sector and frontal heavy rainfall events in South China and the objective classification of warm-sector heavy rainfall events
Fu et al., Meteorology and Atmospheric Physics, 10.1007/s00703-022-00949-8

Evaluation of change points and persistence of extreme climatic indices across India
Soorya Gayathri et al., Natural Hazards, 10.1007/s11069-022-05787-w

Improved elasticity estimation model for typhoon storm surge losses in China
Sui et al., Natural Hazards, 10.1007/s11069-022-05768-z

Long-term changes in the frequency of exceptionally cold and warm months in Europe (1831-2020)
Skrzy?ska & Twardosz, International Journal of Climatology, 10.1002/joc.7978

Persistent and non-persistent regional extreme total, daytime, and nighttime precipitation events over Southwest China (1961–2019)
Cheng et al., International Journal of Climatology, 10.1002/joc.7968

Record High Warm 2021 February Temperature over East Asia
Xie, Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, Open Access pdf 10.1175/bams-d-22-0139.1

Regime shift increase in East Asia's summer extreme hot day frequency across the late-1990s
Lee et al., International Journal of Climatology, 10.1002/joc.7976

Regional changes of surface air temperature annual cycle in the Northern Hemisphere land areas
Deng & Fu, International Journal of Climatology, 10.1002/joc.7972

Seasonally freeze–thaw changes on the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau and their possible causes
Yan et al., International Journal of Climatology, 10.1002/joc.7966

Spatio-temporal changes in the mean and extreme temperature indices for Serbia
Toši? et al., International Journal of Climatology, 10.1002/joc.7981

The Extremely Wet May of 2021 in the United Kingdom
Christidis & Stott, Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, Open Access pdf 10.1175/bams-d-22-0108.1

Water Year 2021 Compound Precipitation and Temperature Extremes in California and Nevada
Hoell et al., Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, Open Access pdf 10.1175/bams-d-22-0112.1

Instrumentation & observational methods of climate change, effects

Global seamless and high-resolution temperature dataset (GSHTD), 2001–2020
Yao et al., Remote Sensing of Environment, 10.1016/j.rse.2022.113422

Plant phenological dataset collated by the Finnish Society of Sciences and Letters
Holopainen et al., Ecology, 10.1002/ecy.3962

Quantifying the role of variability in future intensification of heat extremes
Simolo & Corti, Nature Communications, Open Access pdf 10.1038/s41467-022-35571-0

Representation and evaluation of southern Africa's seasonal mean and extreme temperatures in the ERA5-based reanalysis products
Roffe & van der Walt, Atmospheric Research, 10.1016/j.atmosres.2022.106591

Sensitivity of Observationally Based Estimates of Ocean Heat Content and Thermal Expansion to Vertical Interpolation Schemes
Li et al., [journal not provided], Open Access 10.1002/essoar.10512366.1

Modeling, simulation & projection of climate change, effects

Changes in ENSO Characteristics in Model Simulations with Considerably Altered Background Climate States
Siuts et al., Journal of Climate, 10.1175/jcli-d-21-1004.1

Climatological changes in East Asian winter monsoon circulation in a warmer future
Wu et al., Atmospheric Research, 10.1016/j.atmosres.2022.106593

Evolution of the Internal Climate Modes under Future Warming
Coburn & Pryor, Journal of Climate, 10.1175/jcli-d-22-0200.1

Extreme indices of temperature and precipitation in South America: trends and intercomparison of regional climate models
Lagos-Zúñiga et al., Climate Dynamics, Open Access 10.1007/s00382-022-06598-2

Global warming overshoots increase risks of climate tipping cascades in a network model
Wunderling et al., Nature Climate Change, 10.1038/s41558-022-01545-9

High-latitude precipitation as a driver of multicentennial variability of the AMOC in a climate model of intermediate complexity
Mehling et al., Climate Dynamics, Open Access pdf 10.1007/s00382-022-06640-3

Human Contribution to 2020/21-like Persistent Iran Meteorological Droughts
Kam et al., Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, Open Access pdf 10.1175/bams-d-22-0149.1

Modeling the effects of realistic land cover changes on land surface temperatures over China
Li et al., Climate Dynamics, 10.1007/s00382-022-06635-0

Multiple Equilibria in a Coupled Climate–Carbon Model
Zhu & Rose, Journal of Climate, 10.1175/jcli-d-21-0984.1

North Atlantic Tropical Cyclone Outer Size and Structure Remain Unchanged by the Late Twenty-First Century
Schenkel et al., Journal of Climate, 10.1175/jcli-d-22-0066.1

Projection of hourly extreme precipitation using the WRF model over eastern China
Tang et al., Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, 10.1029/2022jd036448

Regional non-stationary future extreme rainfall under changing climate over Asian Monsoon Region
Sojan et al., Atmospheric Research, 10.1016/j.atmosres.2022.106592

Southern Ocean control of 2°C global warming in climate models
Shin et al., Earth's Future, 10.1029/2022ef003212

Warming of Baltic Sea water masses since 1850
Dutheil et al., Climate Dynamics, Open Access pdf 10.1007/s00382-022-06628-z

Advancement of climate & climate effects modeling, simulation & projection

Comparing two weather generator-based downscaling tools for simulating storm intensification and its impacts on soil erosion under climate change
Zhang et al., International Journal of Climatology, 10.1002/joc.7971

Consistency of seasonal mean and extreme precipitation projections over Europe across a range of climate model ensembles
Ritzhaupt & Maraun, Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, 10.1029/2022jd037845

Critical analysis of CMIPs Past Climate Model Projections in a regional context: the Iberian climate
Soares et al., International Journal of Climatology, 10.1002/joc.7973

Intraseasonal to seasonal evolution of soil moisture-based droughts and floods in observation-based datasets and CMIP6 models
Wei et al., International Journal of Climatology, 10.1002/joc.7965

Learning by Doing: Seasonal and Diurnal Features of Tropical Precipitation in a Global-Coupled Storm-Resolving Model
Segura et al., Geophysical Research Letters, 10.1029/2022gl101796

Selection of CMIP6 GCM with projection of climate over the Amu Darya River Basin
Salehie et al., Theoretical and Applied Climatology, Open Access 10.1007/s00704-022-04332-w

Spiral polyethylene tube solar collectors performance analyzed by a new partially linear regression model
Vasconcelos et al., Environment, Development and Sustainability, 10.1007/s10668-022-02847-w

The added value of km-scale simulations to describe temperature over complex orography: the CORDEX FPS-Convection multi-model ensemble runs over the Alps
Soares et al., Climate Dynamics, Open Access pdf 10.1007/s00382-022-06593-7

The double-ITCZ problem in CMIP6 and the influences of deep convection and model resolution
Ma et al., International Journal of Climatology, 10.1002/joc.7980

Uncertainty in Preindustrial Global Ocean Initialization Can Yield Irreducible Uncertainty in Southern Ocean Surface Climate
Singh et al., Journal of Climate, 10.1175/jcli-d-21-0176.1

Understanding CMIP6 biases in the representation of the Greater Horn of Africa long and short rains
Schwarzwald et al., Climate Dynamics, Open Access pdf 10.1007/s00382-022-06622-5

Cryosphere & climate change

Anthropogenic and internal drivers of wind changes over the Amundsen Sea, West Antarctica, during the 20th and 21st centuries
Holland et al., The Cryosphere, Open Access pdf 10.5194/tc-16-5085-2022

Estimation of stream water components and residence time in a permafrost catchment in the central Tibetan Plateau using long-term water stable isotopic data
Wang et al., The Cryosphere, Open Access pdf 10.5194/tc-16-5023-2022

Extensive and anomalous grounding line retreat at Vanderford Glacier, Vincennes Bay, Wilkes Land, East Antarctica
Picton et al., [journal not provided], Open Access pdf 10.5194/tc-2022-217

Sea level & climate change

Anthropogenic and internal drivers of wind changes over the Amundsen Sea, West Antarctica, during the 20th and 21st centuries
Holland et al., The Cryosphere, Open Access pdf 10.5194/tc-16-5085-2022

Reconstruction of Mediterranean coastal sea level at different timescales based on tide gauge records
Ramos Alcántara et al., [journal not provided], Open Access pdf 10.5194/egusphere-2022-169

Paleoclimate

Consolidating historical instrumental observations in southern Australia for assessing pre-industrial weather and climate variability
Gergis et al., Climate Dynamics, Open Access pdf 10.1007/s00382-022-06573-x

Permafrost in the Cretaceous supergreenhouse
Rodríguez-López et al., Nature Communications, Open Access pdf 10.1038/s41467-022-35676-6

Biology & climate change, related geochemistry

Assessing the upper elevational limits of vegetation growth in global high-mountains
Zou et al., Remote Sensing of Environment, 10.1016/j.rse.2022.113423

Borealization of nearshore fishes on an interior Arctic shelf over multiple decades
von Biela et al., Global Change Biology, 10.1111/gcb.16576

Earlier leaf senescence dates are constrained by soil moisture
Wang et al., Global Change Biology, 10.1111/gcb.16569

Effects of high temperature and marine heat waves on seagrasses: Is warming affecting the nutritional value of Posidonia oceanica?
Stipcich et al., Marine Environmental Research, Open Access 10.1016/j.marenvres.2022.105854

Food resource uncertainty shapes the fitness consequences of early spring onset in capital and income breeding migratory birds
Ejsmond & Ejsmond, Ecology and Evolution, Open Access 10.1002/ece3.9637

Frequent storm surges affect the groundwater of coastal ecosystems
Nordio et al., Geophysical Research Letters, 10.1029/2022gl100191

Incorporating dead material in ecosystem assessments and projections
Barnhill et al., Nature Climate Change, 10.1038/s41558-022-01565-5

Larch response to warming in northern Siberia
Kharuk et al., Regional Environmental Change, 10.1007/s10113-022-02016-9

Ocean acidification causes fundamental changes in the cellular metabolism of the Arctic copepod Calanus glacialis as detected by metabolomic analysis
Thor et al., Scientific Reports, Open Access pdf 10.1038/s41598-022-26480-9

Optimal energy allocation trade-off driven by size-dependent physiological and demographic responses to warming
Thunell et al., Ecology, 10.1002/ecy.3967

Response of xylem formation of Larix sibirica to climate change along the southern Altai Mountains, Central Asia
Wang et al., Dendrochronologia, 10.1016/j.dendro.2022.126049

Shifts in predator behaviour following climate induced disturbance on coral reefs
Rotjan et al., Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, Open Access 10.1098/rspb.2022.1431

Variation in breeding phenology in response to climate change in two passerine species
Andreasson et al., Oecologia, Open Access pdf 10.1007/s00442-022-05306-5

Vulnerability of the Cerrado–Atlantic Forest ecotone in the Espinhaço Range Biosphere Reserve to climate change
Costa et al., Theoretical and Applied Climatology, 10.1007/s00704-022-04321-z

GHG sources & sinks, flux, related geochemistry

2021 February Texas Ice Storm Induced Spring GPP Reduction Compensated by the Higher Precipitation
Yang & Liu, Earth's Future, 10.1029/2022ef003030

Contemporary controls on terrestrial carbon characteristics in temperate and sub-tropical Australian wetlands
Francke et al., Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences, 10.1029/2022jg007092

Effects of afforestation on soil carbon and nitrogen accumulation depend on initial soil nitrogen status
Hong et al., Global Biogeochemical Cycles, 10.1029/2022gb007490

Factors influencing the temporal variability of atmospheric methane emissions from Upper Silesia coal mines: a case study from the CoMet mission
Swolkie? et al., [journal not provided], Open Access pdf 10.5194/acp-2022-243

Hydrologic and landscape controls on dissolved organic matter composition across western North American Arctic lakes
Kurek et al., Global Biogeochemical Cycles, 10.1029/2022gb007495

Methane Production Linked to Organic Matter Molecule and Methanogenic Community in Estuarine Benthic Sediments
Li et al., Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences, 10.1029/2022jg007236

Precision of mangrove sediment blue carbon estimates and the role of coring and data analysis methods
Sternberg?Rodríguez et al., Ecology and Evolution, 10.1002/ece3.9655

Prediction of plant carbon sink potential in Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region of China
Huang et al., Environment, Development and Sustainability, 10.1007/s10668-022-02846-x

Ranking the risk of CO2 emissions from seagrass soil carbon stocks under global change threats
Dahl et al., Global Environmental Change, Open Access 10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2022.102632

Reduced CO2 uptake and growing nutrient sequestration from slowing overturning circulation
Liu et al., Nature Climate Change, 10.1038/s41558-022-01555-7

Soil CH4 and N2O response diminishes during decadal soil warming in a temperate mountain forest
Heinzle et al., Agricultural and Forest Meteorology, Open Access 10.1016/j.agrformet.2022.109287

Decarbonization

A powerful checklist for the selection of optimal scenarios between local renewable resources and grid extension using exergy, financial, and social analyses
Kaviani et al., Environment, Development and Sustainability, 10.1007/s10668-022-02856-9

Achieving carbon neutrality through green technological progress: evidence from China
Cai et al., Energy Policy, 10.1016/j.enpol.2022.113397

Clean energy access as an enabler for social development: A multidimensional analysis for Sub-Saharan Africa
Casati et al., Energy for Sustainable Development, Open Access 10.1016/j.esd.2022.12.003

Electroactive CTAB/PVDF composite film based photo-rechargeable hybrid power cell for clean energy generation and storage
Molla et al., Scientific Reports, Open Access pdf 10.1038/s41598-022-26865-w

Embodied carbon emissions induced by the construction of hydropower infrastructure in China
Ge et al., Energy Policy, 10.1016/j.enpol.2022.113404

Green batteries for clean skies: Sustainability assessment of lithium-sulfur all-solid-state batteries for electric aircraft
Barke et al., Journal of Industrial Ecology, 10.1111/jiec.13345

Life cycle greenhouse gas emissions of residential battery storage systems: A German case study
Fett et al., Journal of Industrial Ecology, 10.1111/jiec.13344

Mapping of solar insolation using air temperature in tropical and mountainous environments
Hoyos & Ruiz, Meteorology and Atmospheric Physics, 10.1007/s00703-022-00945-y

RSM-based comparative experimental study of sustainable biodiesel synthesis from different 2G feedstocks using magnetic nanocatalyst CaFe2O4
Saravanan et al., Environment, Development and Sustainability, 10.1007/s10668-022-02761-1

Spiral polyethylene tube solar collectors performance analyzed by a new partially linear regression model
Vasconcelos et al., Environment, Development and Sustainability, 10.1007/s10668-022-02847-w

Terpene solvents for the fabrication of greener organic solar cells and electronics
, Nature Energy, 10.1038/s41560-022-01172-w

The characteristics and parameterizations of the surface albedo of a utility-scale photovoltaic plant in the Gobi Desert
Ying et al., Theoretical and Applied Climatology, 10.1007/s00704-022-04337-5

Transparent planar solar absorber for winter thermal management
Asad & Alam, Scientific Reports, Open Access pdf 10.1038/s41598-022-19448-2

Aerosols

Cloud adjustments from large-scale smoke–circulation interactions strongly modulate the southeastern Atlantic stratocumulus-to-cumulus transition
Diamond et al., Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, Open Access pdf 10.5194/acp-22-12113-2022

Equilibrium climate sensitivity increases with aerosol concentration due to changes in precipitation efficiency
Dagan, Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, Open Access pdf 10.5194/acp-22-15767-2022

Climate change communications & cognition

Changing how you look at climate change: attention bias modification increases attention to climate change
Carlson et al., Climatic Change, 10.1007/s10584-022-03471-3

Guiding Environmental Messaging by Quantifying the Effect of Extreme Weather Events on Public Discourse Surrounding Anthropogenic Climate Change
Noviello et al., Weather, Climate, and Society, 10.1175/wcas-d-22-0053.1

Investigating how economic and national identity loss messages impact climate change policy support
Klas et al., Climatic Change, 10.1007/s10584-022-03472-2

The Impact of Message Valence on Climate Change Attitudes: A Longitudinal Experiment
Diamond & Urbanski, Environmental Communication, 10.1080/17524032.2022.2151486

Agronomy, animal husbundry, food production & climate change

Climate change and cattle production in Nigeria: any role for ecological and carbon footprints?
Onyeneke et al., International Journal of Environmental Science and Technology, 10.1007/s13762-022-04721-8

Quantifying crop vulnerability to weather-related extreme events and climate change through vulnerability curves
Monteleone et al., Natural Hazards, Open Access pdf 10.1007/s11069-022-05791-0

Rural Development Index (RDI) and GHG emissions of agricultural and livestock production: a spatial analysis of the Brazilian states
Batistella et al., Environment, Development and Sustainability, 10.1007/s10668-022-02777-7

Sustainability implications of Rwanda's Vision 2050 long-term development strategy
Perez-Guzman et al., Sustainability Science, Open Access pdf 10.1007/s11625-022-01266-0

Hydrology, hydrometeorology & climate change

Anthropogenic Impacts on the Water Cycle over Drylands in the Northern Hemisphere
Luo et al., Journal of Climate, 10.1175/jcli-d-22-0037.1

Changes in reliability–resilience–vulnerability-based watershed health under climate change scenarios in the Efin Watershed, Iran
Chamani et al., Natural Hazards, 10.1007/s11069-022-05774-1

Projection of hourly extreme precipitation using the WRF model over eastern China
Tang et al., Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, 10.1029/2022jd036448

Regional non-stationary future extreme rainfall under changing climate over Asian Monsoon Region
Sojan et al., Atmospheric Research, 10.1016/j.atmosres.2022.106592

Spatiotemporal variation of daily precipitation concentration and its potential relationship with climatic factors and land use types in the Haihe River Basin, China
Ma et al., International Journal of Climatology, 10.1002/joc.7982

Climate change economics

Heat projections and mortgage characteristics: evidence from the USA
Baranyai & Banai, Climatic Change, Open Access pdf 10.1007/s10584-022-03465-1

Masters of the machinery: The politics of economic modelling within European Union energy policy
Royston et al., Energy Policy, Open Access 10.1016/j.enpol.2022.113386

Climate change and the circular economy

Combining industrial ecology tools to assess potential greenhouse gas reductions of a circular economy: Method development and application to Switzerland
Wiprächtiger et al., Journal of Industrial Ecology, 10.1111/jiec.13364

Lessons, narratives, and research directions for a sustainable circular economy
Leipold et al., Journal of Industrial Ecology, Open Access 10.1111/jiec.13346

Climate change mitigation public policy research

Carbon sinks and carbon emissions balance of land use transition in Xinjiang, China: differences and compensation
Luo et al., Scientific Reports, Open Access pdf 10.1038/s41598-022-27095-w

Environmentally related technologies and environmental regulations in promoting renewable energy: evidence from OECD countries
Chu, Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences, 10.1007/s13412-022-00810-9

Estimating carbon footprints from large scale financial transaction data
Trendl et al., Journal of Industrial Ecology, 10.1111/jiec.13351

From sectoral to integrative action situations: an institutional perspective on the energy transition implementation in the Netherlands
Warbroek et al., Sustainability Science, Open Access pdf 10.1007/s11625-022-01272-2

Investigating how economic and national identity loss messages impact climate change policy support
Klas et al., Climatic Change, 10.1007/s10584-022-03472-2

New energy demonstration city, spatial spillover and carbon emission efficiency: Evidence from China's quasi-natural experiment
Chai et al., Energy Policy, 10.1016/j.enpol.2022.113389

Prediction and scenario simulation of the carbon emissions of public buildings in the operation stage based on an energy audit in Xi'an, China
Zhang et al., Energy Policy, 10.1016/j.enpol.2022.113396

Climate change adaptation & adaptation public policy research

A subjective Bayesian framework for synthesizing deep uncertainties in climate risk management
Doss-Gollin & Keller Keller Keller Keller Keller, [journal not provided], Open Access 10.1002/essoar.10511798.1

Can we do more than "bounce back"? Transilience in the face of climate change risks
Lozano Nasi et al., Journal of Environmental Psychology, Open Access 10.1016/j.jenvp.2022.101947

Climate change hotspots and implications for the global subsea telecommunications network
Clare et al., Earth, Open Access 10.1016/j.earscirev.2022.104296

Impacts of trees-grass area ratio on thermal environment, energy saving, and carbon benefits
Xi et al., Urban Climate, Open Access 10.1016/j.uclim.2022.101393

Unprecedented droughts are expected to exacerbate urban inequalities in Southern Africa
Rusca et al., Nature Climate Change, 10.1038/s41558-022-01546-8

Climate change impacts on human health

Urban extreme heat, climate change, and saving lives: Lessons from Washington state
Kearl & Vogel, Urban Climate, Open Access 10.1016/j.uclim.2022.101392

Climate change & geopolitics

Climate-driven risks to peace over the 21st century
Buhaug et al., Climate Risk Management, Open Access 10.1016/j.crm.2022.100471

Other

Challenging the values of the polluter elite: A global consequentialist response to Evensen and Graham's (2022) 'The irreplaceable virtues of in-person conferences'
Whitmarsh & Kreil, Journal of Environmental Psychology, 10.1016/j.jenvp.2022.101881

Climatological Diagnostics and S2S Predictions of MJO Events
Wu et al., International Journal of Climatology, 10.1002/joc.7984

On the Middle East's severe dust storms in spring 2022: Triggers and impacts
Francis et al., Atmospheric Environment, Open Access 10.1016/j.atmosenv.2022.119539

Informed opinion, nudges & major initiatives

Consider the risks of bottom-up approaches for climate change adaptation
Qamar & Archfield, Nature Climate Change, 10.1038/s41558-022-01572-6

Fairness considerations in global mitigation investments
Pachauri et al., Science, Open Access pdf 10.1126/science.adf0067

Feasible climate mitigation
Stern et al., Nature Climate Change, Open Access 10.1038/s41558-022-01563-7

Only halving emissions by 2030 can minimize risks of crossing cryosphere thresholds
Kloenne et al., Nature Climate Change, 10.1038/s41558-022-01566-4

Book reviews

Change in global environmental politics: temporal focal points and the reform of international institutions
Beaudoin, Environmental Politics, 10.1080/09644016.2022.2160113

Fugitive Politics: The Struggle For Ecological Sanity
Castree, Environmental Politics, 10.1080/09644016.2022.2161217

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Articles/Reports from Agencies and Non-Governmental Organizations Addressing Aspects of Climate Change

Climate change made record breaking early season heat in Argentina and Paraguay about 60 times more likely, Rivera et al., World Weather Attribution

A large area centered around the central-northern part of Argentina, and also southern Bolivia, central Chile, and most of Paraguay and Uruguay, experienced record-breaking temperatures during two consecutive heatwaves in late November and early December 2022. The authors found that human-caused climate change made the heatwave about 60 times more likely. Alternatively, a heatwave with a similar probability would be about 1.4°C less hot in a world that had not been warmed by human activities.

The U.N. Climate Conference 2022 (COP27): Outcomes, Richard Lattanzio and Jane Leggett, Congressional Research Service

Outcomes of the meetin?including (1) greenhouse gas emission pledges and implementation are not on track to achieve Paris Agreement aims, (2) demand for climate finance, including adaptation finance exceeds delivery, and (3) the process continues regarding financing arrangements to address loss and damage.

Australia: Climate Change Issues, Bruce Vaughn, Congressional Research Service

While Australia has long experienced drought, bushfires, and flooding, projections indicate Australia will likely experience increasing temperatures, as well as more severe floods, coral bleaching, ocean acidification, droughts, and bushfires, as a consequence of climate change.

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Obtaining articles without journal subscriptions

We know it's frustrating that many articles we cite here are not free to read. One-off paid access fees are generally astronomically priced, suitable for such as "On a Heuristic Point of View Concerning the Production and Transformation of Light" but not as a gamble on unknowns. With a median world income of US$ 9,373, for most of us US$ 42 is significant money to wager on an article's relevance and importance.

• Here's an excellent collection of tips and techniques for obtaining articles, legally.

• Unpaywall offers a browser extension for Chrome and Firefox that automatically indicates when an article is freely accessible and provides immediate access without further trouble. Unpaywall is also unscammy, works well, is itself offered free to use. The organizers (a legitimate nonprofit) report about a 50% success rate

• The weekly New Research catch is checked against the Unpaywall database with accessible items being flagged. Especially for just-published articles this mechansim may fail. If you're interested in an article title and it is not listed here as "open access," be sure to check the link anyway.

How is New Research assembled?

Most articles appearing here are found via RSS feeds from journal publishers, filtered by search terms to produce raw output for assessment of relevance.

Relevant articles are then queried against the Unpaywall database, to identify open access articles and expose useful metadata for articles appearing in the database.

The objective of New Research isn't to cast a tinge on scientific results, to color readers' impressions. Hence candidate articles are assessed via two metrics only:

• Was an article deemed of sufficient merit by a team of journal editors and peer reviewers? The fact of journal RSS output assigns a "yes" to this automatically.
• Is an article relevant to the topic of anthropogenic climate change? Due to filter overlap with other publication topics of inquiry, of a typical week's 550 or so input articles about 1/4 of RSS output makes the cut.

The section "Informed opinion, nudges & major initiatives" includes some items that are not scientific research per se but fall instead into the category of "perspectives," observations of implications of research findings, areas needing attention, etc.

Suggestions

Please let us know if you're aware of an article you think may be of interest for Skeptical Science research news, or if we've missed something that may be important. Send your input to Skeptical Science via our contact form.

Journals covered

A list of journals we cover may be found here. We welcome pointers to omissions, new journals etc.

Previous edition

The previous edition of Skeptical Science New Research may be found here.

A group of emergency physicians and consumer advocates in multiple states are pushing for stiffer enforcement of decades-old statutes that prohibit the ownership of medical practices by corporations not owned by licensed doctors. Thirty-three states plus the District of Columbia have such rules.

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Nature Communications, Published online: 29 December 2022; doi:10.1038/s41467-022-35659-7

In animals, sensory systems appear optimized for the statistics of the external world. Here the authors take an artificial psychophysics approach, analysing sensory responses in artificial neural networks, and show why these demonstrate the same phenomenon as natural sensory systems.

The world is getting warmer, winters included. The United States, however, has experienced severe winter storms in recent years, and experts are taking a closer look at the link between these extreme cold events and climate change.

It was a rescue worthy of Batman.

It was a rescue worthy of Batman.

US space agency's test altered asteroid's orbit by about 1%

Back in November, researchers hailed the dawn of a new era of Alzheimer's therapies. After decades of failure, a clinical trial finally confirmed that a drug, lecanemab, was able to slow cognitive decline in patients with early stages of the disease. The result may have been modest – a reduction in the decline in patients' overall mental skills by 27% over 18 months – but it could not be more significant in the journey towards better understanding and treating the disease.

Ian Sample speaks to Prof Nick Fox about the clinical trial results, if this could be the first of many new Alzheimer's therapies, and whether we could one day see a cure.

Continue reading…

Back in November, researchers hailed the dawn of a new era of Alzheimer's therapies. After decades of failure, a clinical trial finally confirmed that a drug, lecanemab, was able to slow cognitive decline in patients with early stages of the disease. The result may have been modest – a reduction in the decline in patients' overall mental skills by 27% over 18 months – but it could not be more significant in the journey towards better understanding and treating the disease. Ian Sample speaks to Prof Nick Fox about the clinical trial results, if this could be the first of many new Alzheimer's therapies, and whether we could one day see a cure.. Help support our independent journalism at theguardian.com/sciencepod

PLUS. Ingeniørerne bag Aalborgs nye autonome færge drømmer om, at den baner vej for sejlende taxaer til øsamfund. Men Kong Vinter og teknologien har drillerier i ærmet.

Ingeniøren har været ombord på færgen Greenhopper, der er på vej til at blive Danmarks første autonome passagerfærge. Udstyret med LIDAR, W-bånds radar, masser af kameraer og en bunke software prøver færgen hele tiden at udregne den sikreste rute over Limfjorden.

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Never tickle the dragon's tail.