DW.COM - Sci-Tech: Recent Episodes
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It's not the first time that scientists have made a discovery about a slippery marine species by accident. You may have heard about the "immortal jellyfish" which was discovered by chance in the 1980s by two young scientists, Christian Sommer and Giorgio Bavestrello .
They found that when adult Turritopsis dohrnii jellyfish were stressed, they reverted to an earlier stage in their life-cycle — rather than die.
Normally, the adults (medusae) release a free-swimming larval stage of the organism known as planulae. The planulae form polyp colonies, and those colonies eventually release new medusae.
But, as their then-lab leader Ferdinando Boero once wrote in The Biologist magazine, Sommer and Bavestrello saw a process that was "like a butterfly transforming back into a caterpillar."
Jellyfish reverse their development to survive when stressed
The process is called reverse development. And it seems now that Turritopsis dohrnii is not the only jellyfish-like creature — known collectively as "jellies" — able to do it.
Two scientists in Norway have discovered that comb jellies from the species Mnemiopsis leidyi reverse from a mature "lobate", or adult with lobes, to an early larval-state — also when stressed — just like the "immortal" Turritopsis dohrnii.
"'Immortal' is a bit of a misleading term. 'Reverse development' is more correct," said Pawel Burkhardt, one of the researchers, an evolutionary neuroscientist and group leader at the Michael Sars Centre, University of Bergen.
Burkhardt's colleague and lead author of the study, Joan Soto-Angel, used two methods to stress the comb jellies: prolonged starvation and physical injury or "lobectomy" (cutting the adult lobes). Both stressors were followed by a low feeding regime.
They found that animals subjected to lobectomy treatment had lower mortality rates and higher reversion success, with six out of fifteen (40%) fully reversed. In contrast, prolonged starvation only yielded seven out of 50 (14%) fully reversed animals.
"The unique thing about Mnemiopsis is that you have a single individual, which can reverse to a single larva," said Burkhardt. "It's an individual, so you can trace it. And with Turritopsis, it's not so clear."
This is because Turritopsis reverses into a colony of individuals, rather than a single larva. So you can't be sure that you're witnessing the life-cycle and survival strategy of a single specimen, which is important for scientists wanting to map out the process precisely.
The findings are significant, wrote Ferdinando Boero, who was not part of the latest research, in an email to DW: "They show that reverse development can occur also in non-cnidarians, so expanding the range of body plans that are able to do it."
To explain Boero's terminology: Both Turritopsis dohrnii and Mnemiopsis leidyi are "jellies", but they belong to different groups, cnidarians and ctenophores, and each have different "body plans". So different structures, or what scientists call "morphological" features. Turritopsis dohrnii are cnidarians, Mnemiopsis leidyi are ctenophores.
How reverse development allows comb jellies to survive harsh conditionsIf we stick now with the ctenophore Mnemiopsis leidyi, the scientists showed that the species can regrow again into adults after their reversal into larva.
"It's very dynamic. Once they are back at the larval, or cydippid stage, if they are provided with enough food, they can grow back to an adult," said Burkhardt.
And this cycle could theoretically repeat again and again. Though it doesn't necessarily mean that they live forever. They could get eaten by a predator, for example.
But since they are a "highly invasive species," these findings may also have an ecological impact.
"There is a theory that the collapse of fisheries in the Black Sea [in the 1990s] was caused by Mnemiopsis," said Burkhardt. "Since the larva has tentacles, it feeds completely differently from an adult — an adult needs way more food and the larva needs much less — so it may be a strategy to survive harsh conditions."
Could humans do reverse development?Aging is sometimes cited as the main cause of death. It is through aging that our cells degenerate and our brain plasticity — the capacity of the nervous system to adapt over time — slows.
Increasingly, some researchers are looking into ways of slowing the human aging process, even if only to make life more comfortable as we approach a natural death.
But while research into Turritopsis dohrnii has shown some of what we know about jellyfish is transferrable to humans, that work has yet to be done with Mnemiopsis leidyi.
"I can only speculate," said Burkhardt. "[But there appears to be] a major rearrangement in the nervous system [between the two stages] and that's what we want to look at in the next couple of years."
What's clear so far is that when Mnemiopsis leidyi regress, they grow a new "structure" — tentacles, which the adult doesn't have — and the tentacles need a specific nervous system to function. And genes need to be turned on to create that nervous system. But how? That is the question.
"The observation of the pattern of reverse development is the first step," said Boero. "Then we need to ascertain the genetic processes that regulate the normal developmental patterns, so as to restart development. If a genetic switch exists, we might try to see if it works also in human cells. The rejuvenation of humans, though, is highly unfeasible due to our low plasticity."
And, as Boero added: Things might just be even more complex than that.
Edited by: Derrick Williams
Primary source:Reverse development in the ctenophore Mnemiopsis leidyi, a "brief report”, published Joan Soto-Angel and Pawel Burkhardt in PNAS (October 2024)
India and China's relationship has repeatedly been tested by one central question: Where does our land begin and yours end? The border disagreement between the two nuclear powers has led to weaponized standoffs for decades.
Now, a video has stirred up passions in India again: In a report for NDTV, the Indian news broadcaster's Science Editor Pallava Bagla explains in his words how India is losing land to China . The reporter blames the laws of nature, plate tectonics to be precise.
What are plate tectonics?The Earth's crust is like a puzzle, constructed out of many pieces: There are a few gigantic oceanic plates and many smaller continental or "crustal" plates. However, scientists disagree over the exact number of the smaller plates.
These plates "swim" on the Earth's inner, molten mantle. When magma from the planet's core bubbles up where there are cracks, the plates shift — often a few centimeters in a year.
This natural phenomenon has happened for billions of years, and in fact, it is totally normal. The plates either move apart, rub against each other, or shove themselves under one another. As a result, the continents above also move in what is known as plate tectonics.
What is unique about the Indian plate?Fifty million years ago, the Indian plate rammed the Eurasian plate, upon which China lies, with such a speed that it created a movement of about 30 centimeters (about 12 inches) per year.
Research into this historical event led scientists at the German Research Center for Geosciences (GFZ), working with colleagues from India's National Geophysical Research Institute and Freie Universität Berlin in 2007, to dub the Indian continent "the world's fastest."
Was it a cause for celebration? No. The problem is that speed has its price.
While the pushing and shoving by the Indian plate against the Eurasian plate created the Himalayas, the world's highest mountain range, it also has caused regular hefty earthquakes in the region.
Perhaps even worse, it's causing constant land loss for India. The world's most populous nation has moved about 2,000 kilometers (1,243 miles) towards northern Asia in the millions of years since that historic collision.
The Indian plate moves about five centimeters per year towards the Eurasian plate and, with that, 'under' China.
Will India eventually disappear?"If India continues to shove itself under the Eurasian plate, the country will eventually disappear," said Sabrina Metzger, a geophysicist at GFZ.
But Metzger also said the speed at which the Indian plate is bashing the Eurasian plate will continue to reduce.
"That's how such collisions work," said Metzger, "at some point, they stop." Indeed, the Indian plate was a lot faster millions of years ago.
So, no need to panic, said Metzger, adding that India could lose land for an entirely different reason, namely, because of rising sea levels. And that would be cause for concern.
Sources: The rapid drift of the Indian tectonic plate, published by Kumar, P., Yuan, X., Kumar, M. et al. in the journal Nature (October 2007)
It's boiling in the Himalayas by Felix Lorenz, published by the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung
This article was originally published in German.
The world's first wooden satellite was launched into space on Tuesday in an attempt to prove that wood is a space-grade material.
Designed by researchers at Kyoto University in Japan, LignoSat is made of honoki, a kind of magnolia tree that was traditionally used to make sword sheaths.
The team aims to plant trees on the moon and Mars in 50 years.
"With timber, a material we can produce by ourselves, we will be able to build houses, live and work in space forever," said Takao Doi, an astronaut who studies human space activities at Kyoto University.
Testing wood in spaceThe Japanese researchers conducted a 10-month experiment aboard the International Space Station (ISS) and found that honoki was the timber most suited for space applications.
They then constructed LignoSat using a traditional Japanese crafts technique without screws or glue to hold the satellite together.
"If we can prove our first wooden satellite works, we want to pitch it to Elon Musk's SpaceX," Doi said.
LignoSat is scheduled to orbit the Earth for six months.
It will measure how wood endures the extreme environment of space, where temperatures fluctuate from -100 to 100 degrees Celsius (-148 to 212 degrees Fahrenheit) every 45 minutes as objects orbit through darkness and sunlight.
The satellite will also gauge timber's ability to reduce the impact of space radiation on semiconductors.
Timber vs. metalThe researchers said wood has a number of benefits over metal.
Conventional satellites create oxide particles when they are decommissioned and re-enter the Earth's atmosphere, but wood is expected to burn up with less pollution.
Wood is also expected to be more durable in space than Earth because there is no moisture to rot it and no oxygen to burn it.
"It may seem outdated, but wood is actually cutting-edge technology as civilization heads to the moon and Mars," said Kenji Kariya, a manager at Sumitomo Forestry Tsukuba Research Institute. "Expansion to space could invigorate the timber industry."
zc/sms (Reuters, AFP)
How big is the Pacific Ring of Fire?The Ring of Fire dominates the Pacific Ocean. It's a string of at least 450 active and dormant volcanoes that form a semi-circle, or horse shoe, around the Philippine Sea plate, the Pacific Plate, Juan de Fuca and Cocos plates, and the Nazca Plate. There is a lot of seismic activity in the area.
About 90 percent of all earthquakes strike within the Ring of Fire. This means people's lives are under almost constant threat in Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, Japan, Australia and New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, and other island nations like the Solomon Islands, Fiji, and many more in Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia, all the way east to the western seaboard of the North and South Americas. Although levels of threat differ depending on local factors like your proximity to the quake's epicenter, whether it's out to sea or on land - and standards of housing.
Why so many volcanoes in the Ring of Fire?The tectonic plates move non-stop over a layer of partly solid and partly molten rock. This is called the Earth's mantle. When the plates collide or move apart, for instance, the Earth moves, literally. Mountains, like the Andes in South America and the Rockies in North America, as well as volcanoes have formed through the collision of tectonic plates.
Many volcanoes in the Ring of Fire were created through a process of subduction. And most of the planet's subduction zones happen to be located in the Ring of Fire.
What is subduction?Subduction happens when tectonic plates shift, and one plate is shoved under another. This movement of the ocean floor produces a "mineral transmutation," which leads to the melting and solidification of magma - that is, the formation of volcanoes. Basically, when a "downgoing" oceanic plate is shoved into a hotter mantle plate, it heats up, volatile elements mix, and this produces the magma. The magma then rises up through the overlying plate and spurts out at the surface.
If, however, the overlying plate is ocean, it can produce a chain of volcanic islands like the Marianas. This is also where we see the Earth's deepest trenches and deepest Earthquakes.
When and where were the worst earthquakes in the Ring of Fire?The worst earthquake in the Ring of Fire - and, with it, the world - struck Chile on May 22, 1960. It was a 9.5-magnitude quake. That's according to the US Geological Survey's list of the "Largest Earthquakes in the World Since 1900."
It's closely followed by the Great Alaska Earthquake of 1964 (magnitude 9.2), the Northern Sumatra earthquake - also known as the Indian Ocean Tsunami - on December 26, 2004 (magnitude 9.1), and one off the East Coast of Honshu, Japan, on March 11, 2011 (magnitude 9.0), which led to a tsunami and ultimately the nuclear disaster at Fukushima.
Most of the earthquakes on the list are strictly within the Ring of Fire, and they range from magnitude 9.5 to 8.5.
Given all this activity, can't we predict earthquakes in the Ring of Fire?No. Most experts will tell you it's (so far) been impossible to predict earthquakes. Even if two happen within the ring in close succession, it is hard to say the one had anything to do with the other. One earthquake will not necessarily cause another.
Some seismologists are cautiously open to the idea that whatever we do as humans - whether it's testing nuclear explosives or deep-sea drilling - all has a potential impact. But there's little or no hard, scientific proof.
As for the Ring of Fire specifically, the region is under constant tension. When a quake strikes, that tension is temporarily relieved, but it soon starts to build again. So all that is left for the people who live around the Ring of Fire is to be aware of the danger, perhaps to live further inland, build safer, earthquake resistant housing, and for nations everywhere to improve oceanic and land-based early-warning systems to help minimize the risk to life.
This article was originally published December 7, 2016, and was updated November 4, 2024.
As exam season approaches in many parts of the world, students face a familiar challenge — cementing all they've learned throughout the term in their minds, ready for exam day.
But what if the secret to effective revision is not just more hours spent studying but understanding how your brain learns and recalls information?
Recent neuroscience research offers new insights into how the teenage brain absorbs and recalls facts.
But there are no quick tricks or "easy" hacks for success at school, said Bogdan Draganski, a cognitive neuroscientist at Insel University Hospital Bern, Switzerland.
Learning is an individual affair, where everyone's "individual motivational, attentional and cognitive differences" mean there is no one-size-fits-all way of learning, Draganski told DW.
Instead, let's take a look at what science has to say about optimizing learning for exams.
How the brain learns complex informationThe brain physically stores memories as connections between neurons, particularly in the hippocampus or amygdala brain regions.
New memories are formed when neurons create new synapses with other neurons, building a mesh of neuronal connections. And we need to actively maintain those memories to recall them later.
However, scientists aren't certain what happens in the brain when we learn information that's more complex than a single memory.
"The mechanisms governing successful episodic memory formation, consolidation and retrieval remain elusive," said Draganski.
The neuroscientist added that this is because learning is a tremendously complex process in the brain, involving the integration of sensory inputs, emotional states, stress levels, cognitive process centers, and, of course, memory networks.
"And all this is different across individuals, based on sex, gender, socio-economic and environmental factors," said Draganski.
That's why he said you need to find your individual learning process. And it may be different from what's been drilled into you at your school.
We learn best from stories Learning new information and making it stick involves two main processes: encoding, where new information is initially learned, and consolidation, where that information is strengthened in the brain's memory stores.
Studies suggest that 'active recall' — where you actively test yourself on the information — improves memory retention compared to passive studying, which includes things like rereading notes.
Neuroscientists also show that our brains are hard-wired to seek novelty. This means you're more likely to remember things that are new and interesting. And conversely, to switch off when your learning environment is predictable — like in some classrooms.
High levels of attention are key. That's why it's important to find many different ways of learning the same subject — whether through educational videos, reading, or other media like podcasts and radio shows. Even drawing or singing what you've learned can help reinforce knowledge.
Finding stories about what you're learning can help too. Studies show that you retain about 50% more information from narrative texts than you do from descriptive texts.
How bad is stress for learning? Research has also shown that stress has a major impact on learning and memory processes.
On the one hand, some stress around the time of learning can actually enhance memory formation.
But too much of it impairs memory retrieval. Recent evidence suggests that stress may also make updating memories with new information more difficult.
And when stress grows overwhelming, it inhibits the brain's ability to encode information, making learning more difficult and less effective. Extreme-stress situations can generate anxiety, which makes learning even more challenging.
It's hard to balance having enough stress to put a bit of fire into your learning, while not letting it tip over into anxiety or fear of failure. Too much of it and on exam day, you'll have trouble recalling what you learned.
Science-based tips for more effective learningDraganski had one piece of advice for teenagers eager to improve their learning performance: "Live a healthy life." By that he means maintaining healthy routines around sleep, diet, and exercise.
Sleep in particular is vital for learning and memory consolidation. During sleep, the brain processes and organizes information, strengthening the connections that help with recall.
Lack of sleep, by contrast, can lead to impaired concentration, difficulty remembering information, and increased stress levels.
Teenagers need about 8–10 hours of sleep a night to support optimal cognitive function, so make sure you're getting it, even if it means "challenging your school authorities if school begins very early in the morning," said Draganski.
Exercise and stress reductionAnother tip is to exercise frequently. Physical activity has profound benefits for brain function, especially in teenagers.
Exercise helps manage stress by reducing cortisol levels and promoting the release of endorphins, which help create a sense of well-being. Even a short walk or light workout can improve focus, reduce anxiety, and make revision more effective.
Finally, Draganski said a teenager's success at school depends to some extent on meaningful parental help.
If you can, work with them to create a low-stress environment.
Practicing mindfulness or deep breathing techniques can also help keep stress levels manageable — for dealing with exams as well as parents.
Edited by: Derrick Williams
Sources: Graesser AC, et al., Constructing inferences during narrative text comprehension. Psychol Rev. (1994) Jul;101(3):371-95.
Whiting SB, et al., Stress and Learning in Pupils: Neuroscience Evidence and its Relevance for Teachers. Mind Brain Educ. (2021);15(2):177-188.
Quantum computing, artificial intelligence, biotechnology, the climate crisis, space exploration and semiconductor manufacturing.
These are just some of the critical science and technology priorities that the next US president, be it Donald Trump or Kamala Harris, will need to address during his or her time in office.
Emerging tech will have significant implications for economic growth, national security and global leadership over the next five years. Some, like AI regulation or semiconductor manufacturing, could shape global economics and relationships for a generation.
"The next president will address the relationship of the US research community with the world. And global challenges in health, environment and security will be high on the next president's agenda," said Caroline Wagner, an expert in science-related public policy at Ohio State University, in the US.
During his first term, Trump pulled the US out of the Paris climate agreement and World Health Organization, and criticized current President Joe Biden for "listen[ing] to the scientists" about COVID-19 as something only a fool would do.
Trump couldn't seem more different from Harris, for whom promoting science and innovation forms a core part of her economic policy agenda.
However, both US presidential candidates share common ground in their protectionism of US-based science and technology sectors.
Kenneth Evans, an expert in science and technology public policy at Rice University, in Houston, Texas, sees protectionism as one of the defining issues for the next US administration.
"There's a continued slide toward US protectionism and a decoupling strategy with China on science. Both candidates are concerned with protecting US intellectual property and research security — espionage and wholesale stealing of ideas," Evans told DW.
So, how would a Trump or Harris administration affect US stances on science and tech-related issues?
Trump 2017-2021: Was he really anti-science?The Trump administration's efforts to undermine science are well documented in the Silencing Science Tracker — an online database hosted by Colombia University which tracks anti-science actions taken by the US government.
"The Trump administration regularly suppressed, downplayed or simply ignored scientific research demonstrating the need for regulation to protect public health and the environment," wrote Romany Webb and Lauren Kurtz in a paper on Trump's war on science published in 2022.
Trump also proposed sweeping reductions of the US federal research and development budgets, which total around $200 billion per year (€185 billion). Climate-related programs were a major focus of funding cuts.
However, Trump failed to get these proposals passed in the US Congress.
"Congress actually maintained or increased funding levels for most science agencies," said Wagner.
In fact, the US Congress passed some of the largest increases in federal research and development programs in US history during Trump's time in office.
Evans said Trump was more anti-consensus than anti-science. "Trump is an opportunist, so if science suits his interests at the time, he'll take it. He promoted the mRNA COVID-19 vaccine, created during his time in office, as a big win," he said.
Trump's opportunism, said Evans, makes it difficult to know what he or his administration plans for 2025 and beyond.
"Public statements and campaign materials from Donald Trump have focused primarily on manufacturing competitiveness, though specific science policies remain undefined," said Wagner.
What are Harris' plans for science and tech?During the Biden-Harris administration, Vice President Harris helped shepherd through three landmark tech-boosting bills into law: the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, the Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPS and Science Act.
While Harris "towed Biden's line on promoting innovation," Evans said we don't know much about Harris' track record on science.
Harris' current platform emphasizes "generational investment" in America's research infrastructure, and her broadly pro-science approach has earned public endorsements from pro-science institutions like Scientific American magazine, as well as 82 Nobel laureates.
"[Harris'] campaign has highlighted domestic high-tech manufacturing, climate change initiatives and environmental resilience. On emerging technologies like AI, Harris has discussed the need for balanced regulation that promotes innovation while addressing safety and ethical concerns," said Wagner.
But Harris' specific funding commitments and policies for R&D remain to be fully articulated, she added.
'Small yard, big fence': US protectionism is bipartisanHowever Harris aims to promote innovation and climate science initiatives, the fact remains that both candidates are highly focused on protecting US economic and security interests.
During her presidential campaign, Harris has consistently emphasized strengthening US interests in science and tech sectors like semiconductor manufacturing and biotech to counter China.
"This is part of a broader shift toward protectionism to keep US ideas in the US, and to develop technologies like semiconductors in the US. It's a Biden and Trump policy: Small yard, high fence," said Evans.
Where Trump led with US protectionism, Biden and Harris have followed. Biden and Harris expanded tariffs on Chinese goods and severely limited China's access to American-made computer chips and semiconductor manufacturing equipment.
Scientific research collaborations between the United States and China have also declined since 2019.
Wagner said there were multiple reasons for this, but added that "the Trump administration's China Initiative and broader concerns about research security played a role, as did China's push for technological self-reliance."
For Evans, the biggest issue in the next five years will be how the next US president approaches competition with China, and other partners in Europe and elsewhere around the world.
"The worry is that the next president is purely transactional with our partners rather than looking at a global landscape of diplomacy and internationalism," said Evans.
Edited by: Zulfikar Abbany
Sources:Changes in co-publication patterns among China, the European Union (28) and the United States of America, 2016-2021, published by Caroline S. Wagner and Xiaojing Cai (2022). http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4035897
Politics v. science: How President Trump's war on science impacted public health and environmental regulation, published by Romany M. Webb and Lauren Kurtz. (2022) https://doi.org/10.1016/bs.pmbts.2021.11.006
The increasing popularity of generative AI is projected to result in the rapid growth of e-waste, electronic waste, according to a study published in Nature Computational Science .
Researchers behind the study calculated that e-waste could reach a total of 1.2-5.0 million metric tons between by 2030, which is around 1,000 times more e-waste than was produced in 2023.
"We found that the e-waste generated by generative AI, particularly large language models, could increase dramatically — potentially reaching up to 2.5 million tons per year by 2030 if no waste reduction measures are implemented," said Asaf Tzachor, an expert in sustainable development at Reichman University in Israel, and a co-author of the study.
The study also offers solutions to reducing e-waste — strategies to prolong, reuse, and recycle generative AI hardware could reduce e-waste creation by 16% to 86%, they estimate.
"This presents a tremendous opportunity for reducing the waste stream if these practices are widely adopted. It's clear from this study that the nature of the e-waste crisis is global, which is why it's important to focus on cross-border e-waste management," said Saurabh Gupta, founder of Earth5R, an India-based sustainability organization. Gupta was not involved in the study.
What is e-waste?Every time we throw away an 'outdated' or broken electronic device, it's considered e-waste. This can include computers, smartphones, chargers and wires, electronic toys, cars, and larger server systems.
E-waste makes up 70% of the total toxic waste produced around the world each year, yet only 12.5% of e-waste is recycled. This live counter at The World Counts shows just how fast e-waste is growing.
"Reducing e-waste is important because improper disposal leads to the release of hazardous materials, like lead and mercury, which harm ecosystems and human health," Gupta told DW via email.
The researchers in the study published October 28, 2024, focused on e-waste produced from generative AI algorithms — types of AI that generate texts, images, videos or music from massive datasets.
It's clear from previous research that AI has high energy requirements — calculations by research firm SemiAnalysis suggest AI could result in data centers using 4.5% of global energy production by 2030.
But Tzachor said it's less clear how much e-waste is produced from generative AI programs, such as ChatGPT. This includes all the computer resources required for training and using AI in data centers.
And because generative AI is dependent on rapid improvements in hardware infrastructure and chip technologies, there are indications it's leading to more e-waste as the hardware gets updated or replaced.
"It's far easier and more cost-effective to address the e-waste challenges posed by AI now, before they escalate beyond control," said Tzachor.
How did researchers calculate the growth in AI e-waste?The researchers created a model to quantify the scale of e-waste from data centers that support the use of generative AI models, such as large language models.
They found that e-waste could reach 5 million tons per year in a scenario where growth AI was estimated to be high.
But their estimates of AI e-waste were potentially on the low side, said Tzachor, because of the rapidly changing AI business landscape.
"Factors such as geopolitical restrictions on semiconductor imports and rapid server turnover may intensify the generation of e-waste associated with generative AI," Tzachor told DW via email.
Moreover, the study only included e-waste created by generative AI systems, specifically large language models, and not other forms of AI.
"E-waste from the broader AI ecosystem is significant. The study forecasts that this figure will rise with increasing AI adoption, creating a combined environmental challenge from multiple forms of AI," said Gupta.
Reducing e-waste needs global strategiesThe study estimates that implementing circular-economy strategies could reduce e-waste generation by 16%, or up to 86%.
Circular economy strategies aim to minimize waste and increase the efficiency of computer hardware.
Tzachor said there were three main goals of the strategy:
Prolong the use of existing hardware to delay the need for new equipmentReuse and remanufacture componentsExtract valuable materials during recycling of hardwareGupta said he strongly agreed with the study's findings.
"The range of 16-86% reduction reflects the immense potential of these strategies, especially if supported by policies, and when widely implemented across industries and regions," said Gupta.
Gupta's organization, Earth5R, has demonstrated how effective circular economy strategies approaches can be, he said.
"Through our grassroots programs and partnerships with businesses, we are already fostering local e-waste collection and recycling efforts that help businesses and consumers manage their electronics sustainably," said Gupta.
He emphasized that e-waste was a global crisis that needed equitable, cross-border e-waste management strategies to mitigate the "environmental and health damage" caused when high-income countries export their e-waste to low-income regions.
Edited by: Zulfikar Abbany
Primary source:E-waste challenges of generative artificial Intelligence, published by Wang, P et al. in the journal Nature Computational science (October 2024) DOI: 10.1038/s43588-024-00712-6
Three NASA astronauts and one Russian cosmonaut returned to Earth from the International Space Station (ISS) Friday after seven months in orbit.
The four, Matthew Dominick, Michael Barratt, and Jeanette Epps, and Russian cosmonaut Alexander Grebenkin had been scheduled to return two weeks ago but those plans had to be delayed due to weather disturbances caused by Hurricane Milton.
NASA said the crew had received medical exams upon exiting the SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft that flew them home, but added that the four, "were taken to a local medical facility for additional evaluation" after splashing down in the Gulf of Mexico near Pensacola, Florida.
NASA said the step had been taken "out of an abundance of caution," and that "all crew members were flown to the facility together."
No mention was made of why exactly the extra exams were necessary.
The crew had spent the previous seven months conducting hundreds of scientific experiments aboard the ISS, including some conducted with stem cells and plants as well as others concerned with the health of astronauts in space.
Two other stuck-in-space astronauts, Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, whose own mission went from eight days to eight months, will remain on the ISS until February next year.
js/lo (dpa, Reuters)
In a mountain-top marketplace in Uzbekistan, a trader sells Chinese silks, pots of gunpowder and jade dragon amulets, teeth-bared and grinning. Imams and Buddhist monks saunter past. The air is filled with the fine fragrance of teas, peppers and nutmeg, while breezes waft away acrid black smoke from smithies smelting steel.
A thousand years ago, inhabitants of two mountain-top cities in modern-day Uzbekistan experienced these and other impressions in their daily lives
A new study published October 23 in the journal Nature has revealed that the two cities — Tugunbulak and Tashbulak — were major urban centers that lay on medieval Silk Road trading routes.
Drone-borne scanning equipment captured images of unexpectedly large settlements ringed with watchtowers, fortresses, plazas, and homes for tens of thousands of people.
The researchers suggest that cities located high up in the mountains may have been more important in the exchange of goods and knowledge along the medieval trade routes between East and West than previously thought.
Two medieval cities: Tugunbulak and TashbulakUS and Uzbekistan-based researchers used drone-based LiDAR — Light Detection and Ranging — to map the archeological sites of the two recently discovered sites in Uzbekistan, which dated back to the era between 1000-1400 CE.
The two cities, Tugunbulak and Tashbulak, are located in the Malguzar mountain range, about 2,100 meters (7,500 feet) above sea level. Urban centers are rarely located over 2,000m above sea level, with only 3% of the planet's population living at or above that altitude.
The smaller city, Tashbulak, which covered about 12 hectares, is located five kilometers (3.1 miles) away from the larger city of Tugunbulak, which covered 120 hectares. The authors say Tugunbulak was one of the largest cities in central Asia during the early-medieval period.
"These would have been important urban hubs in central Asia, especially as you moved out of lowland oases and into more challenging high-altitude settings," said Michael Frachetti, an archeologist at Washington University in St. Louis, US, who led the research.
The two cities were likely important trading centers and fortresses protecting merchants traveling along the Silk Road, the authors say.
"While typically seen as barriers to Silk Road trade and movement, the mountains actually were host to major centers for interaction. Animals, ores, and other precious resources likely drove their prosperity," Frachetti said in a press statement.
LiDAR allowed creation of archeological mapsThis was the first-ever use of cutting-edge drone-based LiDAR in Central Asia. LiDAR is a detection method that uses light pulses to measure distances to the earth, in this case from a drone.
The pulses generate 3D maps of the landscape beneath, including buildings and evidence of settlement, with very high accuracy at the centimeter-level scale.
"These are some of the highest resolution LiDAR images of archeological sites ever published," Frachetti said.
The scans created detailed views of plazas, fortifications, roads and houses that shaped the lives and economies of highland communities, traders and travelers.
The maps have been cross analyzed with archeological findings from the two cities, providing clues about their importance as industrial and economic hubs in central Asia.
Preliminary digging at one of the fortified structures at Tugunbulak suggests that the fortress might have been a factory where local metalsmiths turned rich deposits of iron ore into steel.
The researchers also suggest the city's proximity to large forests indicates it could have been an important center for trading fuel.
Frachetti hopes to use the same combination of on-the-ground detective work and drone-based LiDAR to gather evidence of other high-altitude settlements along the Silk Road and beyond.
"We could really change the map of urban development in medieval Asia," he said.
What are the Silk Roads?The cities were thought to have been constructed around 1000 CE during the time of the Qarakhanid Empire. The cities went into decline and disappeared sometime before Genghis Khan's Mongol forces conquered the region around 1220 CE.
"Major political forces were at play in Central Asia. The complex heart of the network was also a driver of innovation," Frachetti said.
Tashbulak and Tugunbulak were up in the mountains, away from the main overland routes of the Silk Roads, which passed by the lowlands near Samarkand. But the researchers argue the highland cities were not remote backwaters, but important trading centers in their own right.
The Silk Road is credited with bringing advanced technologies like gunpowder, paper, and silk from China to the Middle East and Europe. The trade routes also acted as conduits for religions like Islam, Christianity and Buddhism, as well as for artistic influences in sculpture, handicrafts and painting.
But some scholars say the impact of overland Silk Road routes has been overestimated — in part because ships along maritime routes from India could carry more goods than Silk Road carts and could also travel faster.
In his new book The Golden Road, historian William Dalrymple argues that ancient India has been overlooked as a center of ideas and technologies that transformed cultures around the world.
Dalrymple credits ancient India with spreading the first universities, the mathematical sign for zero and the other numbers generally called 'Arabic numerals', as well as games like chess and ideas of theoretical science.
Edited by: Derrick Williams
Primary Source: Frachetti, M. D., et al., (2024). Large-scale medieval urbanism traced by UAV–lidar in highland Central Asia. Nature. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-08086-5
Storytelling is about changing minds, and film is no different. Since the first moving pictures in the 1890s, filmmakers have used the tricks of cinema to shift people's perceptions and moral compasses.
Now, scientists in the United States have measured how watching a film changes people's ability to understand emotions and their moral positions on the criminal justice system.
The new study, published October 21 in the journal PNAS, found that watching a docudrama about efforts to free a wrongly convicted man on death row increased empathy towards incarcerated people and support for reforms to the US criminal justice system.
"[Our study] suggests the film made participants either more willing or more capable of understanding another human being despite societal stigmas against them. This is more than a fleeting feeling, but a skill," said Marianne Reddan, a cognitive scientist at Stanford University, US, who co-led the study.
"It tells us that exposing people to the personal experiences of people who live very different lives from their own is essential for the development of healthy communities and healthy political structures."
'Just Mercy' docudrama increases empathyIn 1986, Walter McMillian, a Black 45-year-old logger living in Alabama, was arrested for murder. McMillian was innocent — he was at a family gathering when the crime occurred — but was convicted based on false eyewitness testimony. He spent six years on death row before a court overturned his conviction.
This true story was made into a biopic called "Just Mercy," released in 2019 and starring Oscar winner Jamie Foxx as McMillan.
After watching "Just Mercy," participants of the study had increased empathy test scores toward men who had been in jail. These effects were found in politically left- and right-leaning participants alike.
"This study measured more than the feeling of empathy, but also participants' capacity to understand the emotions of a formerly incarcerated person they have never met before," said Reddan.
Watching the film also increased support for criminal justice reform, such as the idea of using tax money to fund educational programs in prisons or raising opposition to the death penalty.
The researchers also found that people who watched "Just Mercy" were 7.7% more likely than participants in the control group to sign a petition supporting criminal justice reform.
"This study underscores the influence of audiovisual content in shaping public opinion and potentially motivating collective action. 'Just Mercy' shifted people's perceptions, but also their behaviors," said Jose Cañas Bajo, a researcher in cognitive science and film studies at the University of Jyvaskyla in Finland, who was not involved in the study.
Film, emotion, and polarizationCañas Bajo said the novelty of this study lies in the method of quantifying how films can change viewers' perceptions and behaviors, especially how "a film like 'Just Mercy' can function as a call to action."
But the idea that a film can change minds is not new. "Filmmakers are like magicians. They have been researching how to influence viewers' perceptions and emotions with editing tricks since the earliest days of film," he said.
Alfred Hitchcock demonstrated this effect by filming a scene of a woman with a child, which then cuts to a man smiling, seemingly sympathetically. But if the scene of a woman and her child is replaced by a woman in her bikini, Hitchcock says, the man's smile appears lecherous.
Cañas Bajo explained that filmmakers often play with the knowledge that film is a safe space where viewers can experience emotions they don't typically feel. Have you ever felt empathy towards real killers in a TV show, like the Menendez brothers in Netflix's crime drama Monster?
It's for this reason that filmmakers have responsibilities towards their viewers when telling stories, Cañas Bajo said.
In this study, the "Just Mercy" filmmakers used their skills to influence viewers' empathy towards a man imprisoned for a murder he never committed. The film was used as a tool for progressive social change in the criminal justice system.
But filmmakers can use the same tricks to create antipathy, the opposite of empathy, toward people they frame in a bad light. Propaganda films have long been used to dehumanize people and justify violence or war or to push false narratives and pseudoscience.
"Some crime docufilms provoke antipathy towards the perpetrators, which can fuel demands for more punitive measures, including capital punishment," said Cañas Bajo.
How long does empathy last?An open question from this study is how long feelings of empathy last for after watching a film. Is watching one film enough to create lasting changes to your political or moral views?
Reddan said her team is currently conducting a new study about the durability of these effects over a three-month time period.
"Preliminary evidence indicates some of these effects persist for at least three months. We are also currently collecting neuroimaging data of this paradigm to understand how the film influences empathetic processing at the level of the brain," Reddan said.
But the difficulty is disentangling the effect of one movie on its own, Cañas Bajo said.
When we watch a film, we are always comparing it to our own memories and other films we may have seen. Films don't have to be made by the same person to be emotionally linked with one another. That happens in the viewers' heads.
Reddan said this is why we should be mindful of the type of media we consume.
"The media that we largely consume for entertainment has a significant impact on how we relate to one another," she said.
Edited by: Derrick Williams
SourceReddan, MC., et al. Film intervention increases empathic understanding of formerly incarcerated people and support for criminal justice reform. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2024; 121 (44) DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2322819121
Rwanda is on alert after new cases of sickness caused by Marburg virus – one of the deadliest pathogens known – were reported in late September.
While outbreaks of the viral disease it causes are rare and usually confined to sub-Saharan Africa, four concerning incidences have occurred since 2021.
The most recent Rwandan outbreak has seen at least 36 cases of Marburg virus disease (MRV), with more than 400 people currently being monitored for symptoms.
Like many diseases, MRV’s name derives from when the disease was first reported in western countries, tracing back to lab outbreaks in Germany and the former Yugoslavia in 1967.
Back then, a delivery of vervet monkeys (Chlorocebus pygerythrus) to labs in Marburg and Frankfurt in Germany, and Belgrade in what is present-day Serbia, was pinpointed as the source of the outbreak.
Patients admitted to hospitals displayed a range of symptoms common to many viral diseases, but those who died showed signs of hemorrhagic fever.
Marburg is one of the world’s 10 deadliest viral infectionsCurrent statistics indicate an 88% mortality rate among those infected with MRV. While outbreaks and infections are infrequent compared to some other viruses in the region, it’s often lethal.
After its first reported outbreaks in Germany and Serbia in the 1960s, most subsequent outbreaks have been reported in sub-Saharan Africa. These include Angola (Uige, 2005), Guinea (Gueckedou, 2021), Ghana (Ashanti Region, 2022), Equatorial Guinea (Kie-Ntem, 2023) and repeat outbreaks across the Democratic Republic of the Congo (1998-2000), Uganda (2007, 2008, 2012, 2014, 2017), Tanzania (2023) and Kenya (1980, 1987).
Johannesburg in South Africa also reported an outbreak of the disease in 1975.
The symptoms of Marburg virusMarburg virus can spread very quickly in the body, infecting and destroying cells in the blood, liver and skin.
Once someone is infected, the virus incubates for five to ten days. It then presents with sudden onset of fever, headache and muscle pain, as well as bleeding in the skin and mucous membranes. The mouth, eyes, gastrointestinal tract and internal organs are often affected, too.
In severe cases, people can experience neurological paralysis. Coagulation disorders associated with the virus can cause what is known as hemorrhagic shock. That can lead to organ and circulatory failure and death. Without intensive medical care, most infected people die.
How is Marburg virus transmitted?Like many viruses, Marburg virus is ‘zoonotic’, which means it is able to jump from an animal host reservoir to humans through prolonged exposure. In the case of Marburg, cave and mine-dwelling rousette bats are the most common source of transmission.
Once in humans, the virus is transmitted through bodily fluids such as blood, urine or saliva.
Outside the body, however, the viruses do not last long and droplet infections through the air are extremely rare.
How is Marburg virus treated?Patients usually need intensive medical care and must be isolated because of the high risk of infection. So far, however, it's only possible to treat the symptoms of the virus.
The most common treatments include infusions to prevent fluid loss, with electrolytes to replace blood salts and glucose to regulate sugar balance.
Drugs are also used to stabilize blood pressure, reduce fever or stop diarrhea and vomiting. Patients may also receive a blood transfusion and clotting agents to slow and stop any extreme loss of blood.
These measures increase the infected person's chances of survival, but the disease is still fatal in about half of all cases. Death usually occurs eight to nine days after the onset of the disease and is often the result of severe blood loss.
Antiviral drugs such as remdesivir have been used in clinical trials to treat Ebola and could also be tested against Marburg fever.
Is a vaccine against Marburg virus in development?There is currently no specific treatment or vaccine to address Marburg virus disease. The Rwandan health ministry reported trials for a vaccine were due to start shortly after the first reports in the country, though with few details.
There are at least two similarly named research consortiums racing to develop an effective vaccine.
The first is the primarily US-based ‘MARVAC’, a WHO-coordinated group. Its members have several vaccines in the pipeline. One candidate in development by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in the US uses a chimpanzee adenovirus. Called cAd3, this deactivated adenovirus has a surface protein that has been shown to trigger an immune response to Marburg. During a first-phase trial, 40 adult volunteers were given the vaccine. A majority showed a “robust antibody response” that was maintained for nearly a year.
At the end of 2023, the European Commission granted another consortium (calling itself ‘MARVAX’), €7.4m to develop their own vaccine product. This group includes research contributions from France’s Institut Pasteur, Spain’s National Centre for Biotechnology and CZ Vaccines, and Germany’s Bernhard Nocht Institute for Tropical Medicine.
This story was substantially updated from the original published on 16 February 2023.
Sources: WHO Africa Region https://www.afro.who.int/health-topics/marburg-haemorrhagic-fever
Robert W. Cross et al (2022). “An introduction to the Marburg virus vaccine consortium, MARVAC”. PLoS Pathogens. https://doi.org/10.1371%2Fjournal.ppat.1010805
Picture the scene: An asteroid is hurtling towards Earth. It's the size of the Eiffel Tower, shaped like a peanut and potentially hazardous — sounds scary, right?
And it's not even made up. But the asteroid in question — named 2024 ON — has already zipped past Earth. No, it didn't miss us — it was never going to hit.
Since its discovery in July 2024, media and other content creators made headlines of the asteroid's particulars: It was 370 meters (1,240 feet) in diameter, traveling at around 40,000 kilometers per hour (24,000 miles per hour), considered "potentially hazardous" by space authorities and heading in Earth's direction.
But as soon as 2024 ON was discovered, astronomers calculated it would pass by our planet at a distance of one million kilometers. That's more than twice the distance to the moon.
"Publications need to have these 'cliffhangers' to have visits," said Juan Luis Cano of the European Space Agency's Planetary Defense Office. "But on a daily basis we are visited by many objects."
In fact, around 100 tons of space material hits Earth every day. Fortunately, the mass is spread across many tiny rocks, rather than one, large destructor.
Large destructors: near-Earth objects in a nutshell The United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs defines near-Earth objects (NEOs) simply as anyasteroid or comet which passes close to Earth's orbit.
In more technical terms, NEOs are objects with a perihelion — their closest orbital distance to the sun — of under 195 million kilometers.
Given that Earth orbits the sun at a distance of about 150 million kilometers (km), NEOs are well within our solar neighborhood.
Scientists like Cano know of about 34,000 NEOs, but none of the larger ones are currently on course to hit Earth.
How likely is an asteroid impact on Earth?While tiny NEOs smack Earth every day, the larger ones hit far less often. Asteroids the size of 2024 ON might strike Earth once every 10,000 years.
Those bigger than a kilometer in diameter, such as the Chicxulub asteroid that sent the dinosaursinto extinction 66 million years ago, might hit in 260 million years.
"We estimate there are around one thousand objects larger than a kilometer and we have discovered 95% of them," said Cano. "These are the ones that could cause a global disaster."
But smaller ones also have destructive potential. Depending on the speed and angle of entry into Earth's atmosphere, a 40m-wide rock could level an entire city. Hundreds of thousands of such smaller NEOs are yet to be catalogued.
"We discover around 3,000 near-Earth asteroids [NEAs] every year," said Cano. "[But] we need [...] to find them quicker."
Finding near-Earth objects is a 'tricky' businessIn the past decade or so, two space-based telescopes have been tasked with finding NEOs.
First, there was NEOWISE, which documented more than 158,000 NEOs. NEOWISE was retired in 2024 after a more than 10-year mission.
Second, there's a successor mission called the Near-Earth Object Surveyor.
The NEO Surveyor is due to start operation in 2027. It will aim to find the rest of the potentially hazardous asteroids (PHAs) within 50 million kilometers of Earth's orbit. But finding hazardous objects in space is tricky.
"One of the trickiest things to do in astronomy is to tell how far away something is," said Amy Mainzer, a planetary scientist at UCLA who headed the NEOWISE mission and will lead the NEO Surveyor.
"You would think, 'Well, we see objects at the edge of space, why don't we know what's right next to us here by Earth? Don't we just know everything?' and the answer is, 'No, it's actually really hard.'"
It's important to keep track of the objects we have seen and communicate those findings, said Mainzer.
To do that, astronomers also use ground and telescopes to monitor NEOs and PHAs. One of the newest is the Vera Rubin Observatory, currently under construction in Chile, which will spend a decade creating a time-lapse map of the universe.
"This is going to revolutionize the number of asteroids we discover," said Cano.
ESA is also crafting four small "Flyeye" multi-lens telescopes to make wide-field observations of the night sky.
How NEO tracking helps our planetary defenseNo known asteroids are set to strike Earth for at least the next century. We know that thanks to our planetary defense systems. Tracking NEOs is a part of that.
Once an object is identified, researchers like Mainzer and Cano make repeat observations to quickly but accurately plot a NEO's trajectory. This can help deescalate concerns about a NEO and forms part of what scientists call planetary defense.
Take Apophis, for instance. When it was first identified in 2004, the 340m-wide Apophis was considered one of the most potentially hazardous objects ever discovered. It was thought it could hit Earth in 2029, 2036 or 2068.
Subsequent calculations ruled that out. It will come within 30,000km of the planet, which is closer than the moon and in the range of geostationary satellites, at the end of this decade. But it won't hit Earth on current projections.
But what would happen if a new, rogue NEO was spotted on a collision course with Earth? Given enough warning, engineers might try to nudge it off target.
In 2022, NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission successfully crashed a spacecraft into an asteroid called Dimorphos. It demonstrated that a collision-based mission could change the direction of a celestial body and defend our planet.
ESA is scheduled to launch a reconnaissance mission called Hera in October 2024 to inspect the aftermath left by DART. It's hoped this will help scientists better evaluate DART's success.
Edited by: Zulfikar Abbany
Sources:NEOWISE (NASA) https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-mission-concludes-after-years-of-successful-asteroid-detections/
Near-Earth Object Surveyor (NASA) https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/near-earth-object-surveyor/
Hera (ESA) https://www.esa.int/Space_Safety/Hera
It was sometime during the COVID pandemic when Wegovy and Ozempic hit mainstream awareness. Since then, they have taken the weight loss industry by storm.
It's worth noting from the start that while both are based on the same drug or active ingredient — semaglutide — as products, Wegovy and Ozempic were originally intended for different uses.
Ozempic was first approved in 2017 by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as an injectable drug to help "lower blood sugar levels in adults with type 2 diabetes mellitus, in addition to diet and exercise."
Wegovy was approved the same year to help adults and children aged 12 years and older, who were overweight or living with obesity.
Semaglutide can also be taken as a tablet, marketed with the name Rybelsus.
From tech to television: Celebrities lose weight Celebrities, tech moguls and online influencers have championed the drug — known users include screen stars, musicians and comedians like Oprah Winfrey, Kelly Clarkson and Amy Schumer.
Elon Musk, the public face of X, SpaceX and Tesla, tweetedin October 2022 that he was taking Wegovy when someone asked "What's your secret? You look fit, ripped and healthy."
All this celebrity endorsement for Wegovy and its sibling-products has had a social impact, but also a financial one. What was a drug for a specific medical market has become a phenomenon, visible even on fashion catwalks.
Novo Nordisk, a Danish pharmaceutical company, manufactures and markets all three versions of the drug. It was valued at $570 (€510) billion in May — bigger than the entire Danish economy, or GDP.
How does the active ingredient semaglutide work?Semaglutide reduces appetite by imitating a natural hormone called GLP-1.
GLP-1 is released after we eat. It travels to the brain to signal that we are sated. It also goes to the digestive system, where it slows down the process.
Semaglutide decreases blood sugar levels by helping the pancreas make more insulin — this is the mechanism in Ozempic, which treats people with type 2 diabetes, because they cannot produce insulin as their bodies need it.
"Ozempic can also reduce the risk of cardiovascular complications for people with diabetes," said Penny Ward, a physician-doctor at Kings College London, UK.
When used as a weight loss medication, Wegovy is only recommended "as an adjunct to diet and exercise to reduce weight in patients who are very obese," Ward told DW via email.
In clinical trials, most people taking Wegovy lost 5-15% of their body weight after 68 weeks of weight loss treatment.
But the drug is only recommended for people with a body mass index, or BMI, higher than 30kg/m2, where obesity is deemed a health risk to the individual.
Wegovy is not recommended for people classed as "overweight" with BMIs between 25.0 and 29.9 kg/m2, or those of a "healthy weight."
Wegovy is not a drug for 'cosmetic reasons'Ward and other health experts are concerned the drug is being misused as a quick fix for people trying to get slimmer. Ward said Wegovy "is not a drug which should be taken for cosmetic reasons."
Wegovy and Ozempic drug can cause a range of side effects, including nausea, vomiting, stomach pain, tiredness, or damage kidney function.
Most symptoms are mild and short-lasting, said Simon Cork, a physiologist at Anglia Ruskin University, UK, but "some serious side effects can occur, such as gallstones and pancreatitis."
There have been anecdotal reports of rarer, more severe side effects, such as bowel obstructions, pregnancy complications, and vision loss.
Cork said that might be due to individuals taking doses "outside clinical boundaries for prescription, either off-license, or through non-legitimate means."
But the side effects mean that semaglutide drugs should "only be taken by very obese patients at risk of major cardiovascular complications and only then under close medical supervision," said Ward.
Copycat weight loss drugs on the riseWeight loss hacks promising quick fixes for slimming have a long history. But they have risen to a whole new level since Ozempic and Wegovy became popular.
The rise in the products' popularity has resulted in fake versions of Ozempic and Wegovy flooding the online market, as the World Health Organization has warned.
New supplement cocktails promise "natural" and "side-effect free" alternatives Wegovy and Ozempic as weight loss medications.
The latest to jump on the trend is celebrity business person Kourtney Kardashian. Kardashian launched "GLP-1 Daily" via her supplement brand, Lemme.
Despite the name, however, the supplement does not contain any GLP-1 in natural or synthetic form, and it does not behave like the hormone. The capsule contains food extracts from lemon, saffron, and orange.
It's marketed as a "a breakthrough innovation in metabolic health, formulated to naturally boost your body's GLP-1 production, reduce appetite, and promote healthy weight loss."
But the health experts DW contacted doubted the supplement would work. Cork said he had "not found any convincing evidence." And Ward said claims about the product were based on "hype rather than fact."
"It is helpful to bear in mind that 'brand ambassadors' are often paid for their services in promoting a product," said Ward.
"Many claims are made but none of these have been reviewed or approved by a regulatory authority and the cited studies are of limited quality. There is no discussion of the safety profile, so it isn't possible to know if any side effects were reported," said Ward, and concluded that she would not recommend it to a patient wanting or needing to reduce blood sugar and reduce cardiovascular risk.
Edited by: Zulfikar Abbany
Sources:
European Medicines Agency and US Food and Drug Administration product information pages for Wegovy, Ozempic and Rybelsus.
If you were to recreate the moon on Earth, you would need three essential ingredients:
a sandy material with a chemical composition like regolith (lunar soil)special lighting to mimic the angle of the suna moon gravity simulator (the moon's gravity is one-sixth of the Earth's gravity)And a huge container to house it all, like a massive metal hangar.
When the German Space Agency (DLR) and European Space Agency (ESA) unveiled their version of the moon — the LUNA Analog Facility — in late September 2024, they got two-thirds of the way to representing the moon's strange landscape. One crucial element was missing.
Pitch darkness was broken by a spotlight trained on two fully-suited astronauts — Germany's Matthias Maurer and France's Thomas Pesquet.
Maurer and Pesquet marched across the hangar, with its 700 square meters (7,500 square foot) of artificial regolith, made from the volcanic soils of Italy's Mount Etna, Germany's Eifel region and rocks from Norway.
Equipped with long-handled scoops, a sample trolley and robotic dog, the pair pretended to explore the fake lunar surface in front of about 100 dignitaries.
As they walked, the light shone from a precise angle to simulate how the sun will obstruct an astronaut's vision when humans return to the moon, possibly this decade.
But they walked — they didn't bounce as in footage from the 1969 Apollo 11 mission — because LUNA has no lunar gravity.
Gravity simulator: Missing piece of the LUNA puzzleAgainst a cinematic soundtrack, Maurer and Pesquet demonstrated how they would collect samples and explore a crater on the real moon. It was a spectacle for the politicians and agency officials, who fist-bumped the astronauts for the TV cameras and their crews.
But it felt so earthly without a moon-like gravity. It's a problem the engineers have yet to solve.
In the past, astronauts have used parabolic flights and swimming pools to simulate and experience the effects of zero or microgravity.
Parabolic flights use refitted jet aircraft to recreate the loss of gravity by ascending to and descending from high altitudes at 45 degree angles.
Astronaut training swimming pools are also specially equipped, and the astronauts perform mock exercises in spacesuits.
But neither of these options would work in the LUNA Analog Facility because it's on dry land.
Instead, engineers hope to develop a "gravity offload system," said Andrea Emanuele Maria Casini, an aerospace engineer, who manages the LUNA project.
"You have to imagine it like hanging the astronauts as puppets," Casini said.
Cables will be attached to the exterior of the astronauts' spacesuits, likely pulling back on them as they walk and suspending them as they jump.
The project is still in the prototyping phase. And until its arrival, Casini agreed: LUNA is a very expensive sandpit. But eventually they will want to test new technologies and train astronauts in a closed environment.
"The magic happens inside," said Casini. "The terrain will help the next generation of astronauts go back to the moon."
And there is room for expansion. There are two additional modules next to the LUNA Analog Facility — a habitat simulator and a repurposed greenhouse from an experiment called EDEN ISS, which simulated food cultivation in cold space environments.
Adjacent to the main hall, there's a vacant lot, which may be used for a future "LUNA 2" or Mars training environment.
The moon brought down to Earth The LUNA Analog Facility has been in development for 12 years. Maurer, who has spent 177 days in space, has driven idea from day one. He told DW the facility captured the realities of the moon, even without the gravity offload system.
"When I step down into the crater [in the facility] and have the sunlight fully in my face, I'm blinded," said Maurer. And because he's in a crater, everything in front of him is cast in darkness by the shadow of the crater ridge.
It's a stress test for astronauts, exposing them to the difficult and sometimes contrasting conditions they will encounter on the moon.
Another factor is the moon's regolith. "It's a major technical obstacle," said Maurer. "It destroys all electrical equipment, it gets into moving parts and blocks them, and it gets into the space suit. We can test [all that] here."
Links around the globeLUNA can hook into mission control centers across the planet: From DLR in Cologne and the German Space Operations Center (GSOC) in Munich to NASA in Houston, US, and the International Space Station.
That means simulations could be run remotely: NASA astronauts could be guided through a mission simulation in Germany by their teams in the US.
When fully functional, the LUNA Analog Facility will stand as a totem of Europe's commitment to space, said ESA's special advisor for political affairs, Kai-Uwe Schrogl.
"[LUNA] provides credibility," Schrogl said. "You can talk a lot about going to the moon and beyond, but if you only have a few rockets or a lander on the drawing board, then you are not really credible. You need such a facility to show that you are serious."
Aside from aiding NASA's Artemis program, Europe has its own ambition of getting to the moon by the 2030s. The LUNA Analog Facility is one of many small steps to achieve that goal.
Edited by: Zulfikar Abbany
Every October, a handful of scientists get woken up by a phone call to find out they've won a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, Physics or Chemistry.
Startled and bleary-eyed, they throw a shirt on over their pajamas, join a video call to Stockholm and try to explain a life-time's worth of research to the world's media in a few short minutes.
Journalists then desperately try to understand what "quantum dots," or "entangled photons" are, file their reports, then breathe a sigh of relief that it's all over until next year. By the following week everyone's forgotten — what was another a flash in an endless news cycle.
Be honest, who really cares about Nobel Prizes? Are these prizes, first awarded in 1901, with all their high-class pomp and ceremony, still relevant today?
The Nobel Prizes do help to popularize scientific discoveries. But do they also give a false impression of how discoveries are made? Are they too biased in favoring science from the US, Europe, and men?
The noble idea behind the Nobel PrizeThe Nobel Prizes originated from one guilt-ridden scientist's final will and testament — Alfred Nobel, inventor of dynamite.
Nobel's goal was to reward outstanding science to "those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind."
Nobel Prizes are meaningful milestones for scientific advances. They credit how millions of people were protected from severe COVID-19 infections from rapid vaccine development , the invention of energy-saving LED lights, and gene editing technologies which have cured previously untreatable diseases.
"Doubtless they're the Mount Everest of science. The Nobel Prizes show the pinnacle of scientific discoveries, and there's an emotive attachment to them," said Rajib Dasgupta, a physician and professor of public health based in New Delhi, India.
If anything, the prizes help remind us that we're fortunate to live in an age of new scientific advances: After DNA, after vaccinations, after theories of the big bang and sub-atomic particles.
Do Nobel Prizes really inspire people about science?The Nobel Prizes are certainly a useful way to capture people's imagination about science when they are elevated to the platform of mass media.
The extent to which media outlets cover the Nobel Prizes varies by country, but Dasgupta said the Prizes were closely followed by the Indian media — and that in detail, rather than just for the news.
"The interest comes from an educational tilt towards STEM subjects in India, particularly among the middle class," Dasgupta told DW.
Teaching children about the Nobel Prizes is embedded in the Indian school curriculum to get people interested in science, as it is around the world.
Lily Green, a biology teacher at a high school for 11-to-18-year-olds in Newbury, UK, said she taught a historical perspective of the Nobel Prizes in her science classes, but didn't follow the prize announcements every October.
"We use them to teach the more fundamental concepts of science. The best discoveries are those that capture kids' imagination with scandals or great stories — like [Barry Marshall] who infected himself with bacteria to show how they cause ulcers," said Green.
But Green doubted whether the Nobel Prizes played much of a role in inspiring students to study science at university.
"They're generally captivated and interested in science, not because they want to win a Nobel Prize," she told DW.
The myth of the genius scientistIn the first years of the Nobel Prizes, they were mostly awarded to individual gentlemen scientists, such as Albert Einstein or Rutherford.
Marie Curie's gender — in terms of the ratio between male and female scientists — was, and still is, an exception. But Curie was also awarded two Nobel Prizes, so she was a double exception.
The prizes helped build the idea of the genius scientist — one who single-handedly drove science forward with their sheer brilliance.
But in reality, scientific progress operates very differently, especially in contemporary research.
Scientific discoveries are born from collaborations between hundreds of researchers around the world from different research fields. Science is a community — it is multi-disciplinary and diverse.
Now, Nobel Prizes are commonly split between groups of scientists. But for every Nobel Laureate, there are thousands of other scientists, PhD students, and technicians who were part of the research — and did the experiments — but remain uncredited, at least among the general public.
Green agreed there was a tendency to overplay the work of individual scientist at the Nobel Prizes, but also felt that the idea of the solo genius scientist is waning.
"We're teaching more and more that science is a collaborative effort. It helps the kids to see the amount of work that goes into scientific discoveries," she said.
Dasgupta also said that there's a popular idea that Indian scientists collaborate and emigrate to contribute to Nobel Prize-winning science, creating what he called "organic links to the Nobel Prizes; [it's] not just an idle interest."
Lack of diversity in Nobel PrizesThe biggest criticisms of the Nobel Prizes relate to their lack of diversity and bias towards western scientific institutions.
In the sciences, less than 15% of Nobel Laureates are women.
And very few people from countries outside Europe and the US have won a Nobel Prize. The US, UK and Germany dominate the rankings for the number of Nobel Laureates, totaling 663 among them. China has 8 and India has 12 Nobel Laureates.
"Most prizes are very deserving, but they're not without politics. Institutions in many countries are being overlooked, including India. And certainly, Nobel Prize committees are not as inclusive as they need to be," said Dasgupta.
Nobel Prizes can also exacerbate this inequality by diverting more funding to institutions which have already won prizes and the recognition that follows.
But Dasgupta said the reality was that institutions in India and elsewhere had to get stronger to compete with the US or Europe — only then would those countries be able to hold onto the talent they have created.
Edited by: Zulfikar Abbany
CERN's 70th anniversary celebrations in 2024 may be its biggest achievement since scientists there detected the "elusive" Higgs boson particle in 2012.
Over a decade later, CERN scientists are still smashing subatomic particles at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) but have not reported any comparable discoveries since the Higgs boson.
But they do hope to make new, major discoveries with a much larger particle collider, which, if built, will be three-times the size of the LHC.
The proposed Future Circular Collider (FCC) would be more than 90 km long.
It would aim to serve as a so-called Higgs factory, producing Higgs boson particles for research. The Higgs boson is thought to be a building block of the universe.
But at an estimated cost of CHF 15 billion (~€15.7 bn; ~$17.5 bn), and in a world of limited resources, is the FCC worth it?
Criticism of CERN's expansion plansCERN does "fundamental" research. It is so fundamental — exploratory — that the scientists can never be sure whether their research will produce any results. Certainly not results will immediately be of benefit to people's everyday lives.
Some people argue that the proposed cost of FCC ($17 billion) would be better spent on more practical and urgent scientific questions of our time.
The world spent about $4.1 billion on malaria research in 2022. That same year, the World Health Organization says there were an estimated 249 million malaria cases and 608,000 malaria deaths in 85 countries.
Would the $17 bn be better spent on researching malaria or other real-time threats, such as climate change and emerging viruses?
Theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder thinks so: Hossenfelder has been an outspoken critic of CERN's plans to expand.
"It's a high-risk, low-payoff project," said Hossenfelder in a video post. Hossenfelder noted that the FCC project would realistically cost much more once operations began.
CERN also came under public scrutiny regarding its energy expenditure during the shortage around the Russia-Ukraine war.
Despite this, dissenting voices against CERN, especially among other scientists, have been few. Many scientists believe that building a bigger particle collider can answer many fundamental questions, same as the Higgs boson.
Why is the Higgs Boson such a big deal?To put it unscientifically, the Higgs boson has been described as a "God particle" — it "glues" fundamental elements of the universe.
It may seem like the universe came from nothing, but the Higgs boson explains how the Big Bang happened 13.7 billion years ago — it reveals why particles have mass.
When particles have no mass, they race about the universe at the speed of light like photons.
But having mass gives particles gravitational properties, ultimately slowing them down. And with gravitation, they are able to come together and form other elements.
In 1964, Peter Higgs, François Englert, and others proposed that particles gain mass by interacting with — what they called — a Higgs field. CERN's Large Hadron Collider experimentally proved this theory in 2012. And Higgs and Englert won the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics for their work.
What questions can Higgs Boson still answer?CERN is (at time of writing) the only lab equipped to study the Higgs boson.
"It uses the biggest machines to study the smallest particles," said Judith Pirscher, the German State Secretary at the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), at an event in Berlin.
But it's been 12 years since the breakthrough discovery. Why are scientists still smashing particles? And why should CERN continue, sinking billions in the process?
"With the Higgs Boson, we've found a key, but we still don't know everything it can unlock," said Klaus Desch, Germany's CERN delegate, who is based at the University of Bonn.
Desch said that studying the Higgs further could reveal more about the universe's origins and dark matter — about which we know very little.
Beate Heinemann, director of particle physics at the German Electron Synchrotron, added that CERN's future research may explain why we observe more matter than anti-matter, suggesting "something is missing."
There is also global interest in this fundamental research, and international competition.
In 2018, China proposed building a 100 km collider to produce a million Higgs bosons over seven years.
Meanwhile, the American Particle Physics Project Prioritization Panel (P5) chose to support upgrades at CERN over building a separate Higgs factory. Japan also paused plans for its own collider, the International Linear Collider (ILC), in 2019.
After LHC: the Future Circular ColliderThe LHC will complete and shut its operations in 2041. If the FCC goes ahead, the new tunnel will be at an average depth of 200 meters underground and include eight surface sites that will serve four experiments.
About a third of that $17 billion cost will be buried with this tunnel alone. The construction would result in about 16.4 million tons of excavated materials over a period of five years.
CERN is expected to file a feasibility report by 2025. It will investigate the technical, financial, geological, and the environmental impact of the project.
"We are constantly looking for ways of reusing the waste energy from our scientific installation, for example, to power nearby villages," Director General Fabiola Gianotti told DW. "We are already doing so in some cases. Sustainability is a major priority at CERN."
At a 70th anniversary event for CERN in Berlin, speakers reminded the audience that the World Wide Web was born at CERN — you could say the WWW was another fundamental idea, which, like the Higgs boson, glues are lives together.
CERN has also nurtured growth in research areas like big data analytics, quantum computing, super conducting magnets and carbon dioxide cooling of computers.
Pirsche said simply: "Basic research needs support."
Edited by: Zulfikar Abbany
A new mock-up of the moon's surface has opened near the western German city of Cologne.
A decade in the making, the LUNA Analog Facility is jointly built by the European Space Agency (ESA) and the German Aerospace Center (DLR).
"The LUNA facility symbolizes the conditions on the lunar surface and prepares astronauts for the moon," Josef Aschbacher, ESA director general, said at a press briefing event.
That includes non-European astronauts, including those from the American space agency NASA.
The LUNA facility is a "regolith testbed" made from synthetic materials designed to simulate the moon's surface.
LUNA was first conceptualized in 2013, but the original proposal for a 1,000-square-meter (10,764-square-foot) facility was trimmed to a 700-square-meter final design.
LUNA facility mimics moon's surface"We have about 900 tonnes of regolith simulating material in the facility to simulate the dusty environment and mobility on the surface," said Juergen Schlutz, LUNA Facility Engineer & Moon Strategy Lead at European Space Agency, at the same press briefing.
The simulated moon dust, called EAC-1, was sourced from 45-million-year-old volcanic powder cast across the Eifel region covering the Belgian, German and Luxembourg borderlands.
The main hall also includes a specialized illumination simulator to recreate day-and-night cycles on the moon's surface.
The ESA is also working with European partners to introduce gravity offloading systems. "They will allow testing of the ability to move in one-sixth gravity conditions, like astronauts would have to on the moon," said Schlutz.
As well as providing a realistic surface for astronauts to prepare for moon visits, it will also provide a testbed for operating robotic systems, scientific activities and energy systems.
For example, researchers at the facility will test the regolith to understand the effects of moon dust on equipment space agencies plan to bring to the moon.
Research at the facility aims to generate solutions that "make life on earth much more productive and cleaner," said Aschbacher.
Preparing for Artemis missions to moonThe LUNA facility won't be the only moon-like facility available for astronauts and scientists to use.
Under construction next door is the Future Lunar Exploration Habitat (FLEXHab), simulating a potential moon habitation module and connecting into the main hall.
The EDEN-ISS greenhouse, a five-year experiment simulating food cultivation in cold space environments, will be repurposed as the "EDEN LUNA" project.
It will be used for astronauts-in-training to practice growing their own food — a vital skill should NASA's goal of establishing a permanent moon research presence be realized in the coming years.
NASA's Artemis program is poised to return to the moon by the end of the decade with a new generation of explorers.
Artemis I launched in 2022 as an uncrewed test flight. The second and third missions will launch crewed missions first to lunar orbit and then the moon's surface.
Edited by: Fred Schwaller
The European Organization for Nuclear Research — better known as CERN — is a place of scientific breakthroughs.
Since 1954, thousands of the world's best scientists and emerging minds have converged on Switzerland to explore how the universe works. On September 29, CERN will celebrate its 70th anniversary.
CERN has been the seat of some of the most important discoveries in science — from the confirmation of the elusive Higgs boson in 2012, to more practical innovations like the invention of the World Wide Web.
The Large Hadron ColliderCERN is perhaps best known for its extensive underground particle accelerator known as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) — a 27-kilometer-long (16-miles-long) tube built beneath the Swiss and French borderlands near Geneva.
Scientists have been accelerating particles around the LHC since September 2008.
The LHC works by sending separate, highly energized particle beams in opposite directions through the 27-kilometer-long tubular vacuum.
The particle beams consist of a type of particle called protons, which are guided by superconducting electromagnets, making them collide at almost the speed of light.
The particles are so tiny that the task of making them collide is like firing two needles 10 kilometers at each other with the precision to make them collide.
When the particles collide, they produce energy that is used to create new particles.
The LHC is one of 11 other particle accelerators based at CERN. Researchers use them to help advance a range of technologies, including some that impact our daily lives.
Their research has helped construct more powerful computers and microchips, improve the quality of technology used in healthcare, energy and space exploration.
Higgs boson breakthrough in 2012At the top of CERN's agenda using the LHC was the ambition to find the Higgs boson particle.
The Higgs boson is a type of particle named after Nobel Prize physicist Peter Higgs. Higgs believed the particle created a field which fills the entire universe and gives other particles their mass.
In 2012, after decades of research, scientists at CERN finally found proof of Higgs' theory — they had found a Higgs boson.
It was a colossal scientific breakthrough that opened a whole new field of particle physics research and helped explain why particles bunched together at the formation of the universe.
CERN aren't trying to create black holesPrior to the LHC being switched on, there were concerns that smashing protons together at sub-light speed would lead to the formation of tiny black holes.
We think of black holes forming only when massive stars implode, but some theories suggest that tiny, quantum black holes can form when particles collide.
These tiny black holes are nothing like the black holes that suck matter inside them in space. They would only last for fractions of a second and be completely safe.
In fact, CERN researchers might like the formation of such a theoretical black hole inside a particle accelerator. It would give them an opportunity to see how gravity behaves on a quantum scale.
What's next for CERN?Scientists aren't finished with CERN's LHC. Beyond the discovery of the Higgs bosons, there are many other fundamental, unanswered questions about the universe.
They are developing a second-generation High Luminosity LHC. The upgrade will enable them to increase the number of proton collisions in the LHC to be at least five times.
This "LH-LHC" will likely be operational around 2041. Scientists aim to perform detailed studies of Higgs bosons by generating at least 15 million of the particles each year.
With the use of upgraded technology to generate more particles (and collisions), CERN hopes it will learn more about the once elusive Higgs boson, and discover new particles as yet unknown to science.
Edited by: Fred Schwaller
I was 11 years old when the 9/11 attacks occurred. I have vividly remember walking home from school in the UK with my grandmother that day. We passed a shop with a bank of TVs facing into the street through a big window. We stood there for a while with a large group of strangers, watching the attacks unfold live on the news. Where others were shocked or crying, I felt calm.
But I know this memory to be false. There were no TV shops in our village, and my grandmother never walked me home from school — she lived too far away.
Having false memories is normal. We are all built from real and false memories, said Gerald Echterhoff, a social psychologist specializing in memory at the University of Münster, Germany.
"Memories are dynamically constructed. They are susceptible to social influences or from inadvertently altering [y]our own memories," Echterhoff said.
I likely picked up this memory of standing in front of a TV shop from disaster films or other people's stories of watching the news unfold.
We tell ourselves that we are our memories. We hold onto memories to understand our past selves and build a narrative of our lives, cross-comparing them with other people's memories and asking, "What I was I like back then?"
And if I could recall more vivid memories, I could create a fuller narrative of my life, and so I could know myself more. The reverse seems true as well: If you lose memories, you become less of the person you feel you were. Dementia or age muddles memories: You forget yourself.
But if so many of our memories are false or forgotten, how do we know who we really are — our true identity? The answer starts with how our memories are stored in the brain.
How is a memory stored in the brain?Scientific research shows us that a memory is hard-wired into the structure of the brain.
The brain physically stores memories as connections between neurons, particularly in the hippocampus or amygdala brain regions.
New memories are formed when neurons create new synapses with other neurons, building a mesh of neuronal connections.
Memories need to be actively maintained to last. Recalling a memory strengthens the connections between the neurons, forming it through remembrance.
Then there's the act of forgetting. Forgetting is an act of "pruning" the connections between neurons. Neglect or befuddlement withers a memory away. We tend to fill in the blanks with what other people have told us.
The problem is that those false memories — memories of things we didn't experience the way we remember them — are stored in the brain in exactly the same way as our real memories are stored. The same is true of biased information.
Researchers and psychologists have tried to differentiate reality from falsehoods, but have yet to design a perfectly reliable "recipe" for distinguishing accurate from inaccurate memories, Echterhoff said.
The Paul Ingram case: When false memories get scaryIn 1988, Paul Ingram was arrested by Washington State police in the US. His two daughters had accused him of sexual abuse and sacrificial acts.
Ingram said he had no memory of any of the alleged events, so initially denied the charges. Police also found no physical evidence of the alleged abuse or any ritual sacrifices. But he started to doubt his pristine memory, saying, "My girls know me. They wouldn't lie about something like this."
Ingram, a deeply religious man, prayed for guidance and began imagining what it would be like to abuse his daughters. During Ingram's interrogation, a psychologist told Ingram it was common for sexual offenders to repress their memory of crimes. The psychologist effectively helped guide Ingram's imagination and "memory" of abusing his children. God, Ingram believed, was revealing the truth to him.
Eventually, Ingram pleaded guilty to the charges, even elaborating on them during the trial, leading to Ingram having "memories" of performing satanic, ritualistic sacrifices of animals and babies. Ingram received a 20-year prison sentence.
But a second psychologist doubted Ingram's memories were real. After extensive interviews with Ingram, the second psychologist concluded that Ingram's memories had been planted in his brain through established methods of suggestion during the interrogation process. This report was not available for use in the trial.
Ingram's case (State of Washington v. Ingram) is a textbook example of how strong, false memories can be implanted by social interactions, said Echterhoff.
Horror scenes from fictional films are also known to serve as inspiration for false memories in witnesses' descriptions of horrendous events.
In a review of memory in judicial processes published in 2015, Mark Howe and Lauren Knott write that therapists can sometimes transform fictional scenes into powerful false memories, especially when the therapist suspects repressed abuse.
But, then again, memories of horrendous abuse that emerge years after an event may well be real memories, repressed or otherwise. The #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements showed this.
How #MeToo made memory politicalThe assumption that memories can be easily falsified came under heavy criticism during sociopolitical movements like #MeToo and Black Lives Matter (BLM).
MeToo showed how victims of sexual and physical abuse are often discredited through rhetoric that their memories were false or distorted. Lawyers used the "false memory" defence to smear abuse victims during the Harvey Weinstein rape trial. But it didn't work — Weinstein's victims came together to present a common memory of their abuse. Weinstein's defence failed and he was found guilty of rape and sexual misconduct.
Campaigns like #MeToo and BLM helped change our ideas of how memory shapes our identity, said Echterhoff. Memory can be in the service of shared, cultural experience, not just an individual recollection. This notion echoes older ideas from research, he said.
The boundaries of the "self" based on personal memories are now seen as porous: Our memories and other people's memories bleed into each other based on shared experiences.
"Now there is a stronger idea of communities based on a shared memory of the past, often based on suffering. This is very powerful in bringing people together and building cultural identities," said Echterhoff. But unearthing a nation's cultural memories can also sow division, as Germany is finding while it debates its history of colonialism.
I'm sure my false memory of seeing the 9/11 attacks on TV have helped build my sense of cultural identity, sharing a defining moment of the 21st century with a group of strangers.
I still hang on to the false memory, almost preferring it the more accurate memory of my hearing about the attacks the next day at school, after I'd missed the event in real time. In the false memory, I'd witnessed a shared history.
Edited by: Zulfikar Abbany
Primary source:Howe ML, Knott LM. The fallibility of memory in judicial processes: lessons from the past and their modern consequences. Memory. 2015;23(5):633-56. doi: 10.1080/09658211.2015.1010709
Efforts to study the universe are being hindered by radio waves emitted from the Starlink's extensive satellite network, according to a new study.
The Starlink "constellation" consists of more than 6,300 working satellites orbiting the planet at 550km, accounting for more than half of all satellites surrounding Earth.
All those satellites create radio "noise" — known as unintended electromagnetic radiation, or UEMR.
While the Starlink network allows the delivery of high-speed internet services across the planet — a service benefiting communities without reliable internet infrastructure — satellite noise risks undermining the work of astronomers.
A study led by the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy (ASTRON) found second-generation "V2" Starlink satellites — which account for around a third of the company's network — emit UEMR at levels 32 times brighter than the brand's V1 infrastructure.
Starlink's first-edition satellites, which currently comprise most of the network, have already been in the crosshairs of the astronomy community when their UEMR were first detected polluting research as recently as 2022.
Benjamin Winkel, a scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy who contributed to analysis, said the interference is "blinding" the work of the research community.
"While the generation 1 satellites indeed got dimmer in the last year — so Starlink actually did something to them [to reduce radio leaks] — the new generation unfortunately seem to be brighter again," said Winkel.
"When we say ‘blinded' it means your eye collects too much light for you to see anything, you are getting saturated. This is exactly what happens with our radio telescopes," he added.
Interference from low-earth satellites is blocking our view of spaceThe number of orbiting satellites from all operators could increase to 100,000 by 2030.
With satellites already visible in the night sky with the naked eye, this huge increase in the number of near-Earth orbiters from all operators has the potential to further blind astronomers using both optical and radio telescopes.
"My colleagues told me that they are really frightened of the future," Winkel said.
"There should be some improvements if they really want to observe in a good manner."
These latest findings are particularly devastating for radio telescope observations.
The consequence could mean light "smears" appearing on the images obtained by these powerful instruments. These light leaks cannot always be removed, tarnishing valuable observation data.
New satellite regulations may be needed Cellphone networks and radio pollution from other ground level electronic sources can also interfere with space observations, but these emissions are tightly controlled by regulators like the International Telecommunications Union.
Once space side, it's a different story. With few regulations over satellite operators, the research community is reliant on forging good faith interactions with companies putting technology into space.
For the most part, things have been positive, with Starlink having previously made acceptable modifications to its V1 fleet to reduce radio noise.
In August, Elon Musk's SpaceX (the owner of Starlink) elaborated on its efforts to steer radio emissions away from telescope line-of-sight, a technique known as the telescope boresight avoidance method.
In a statement it said "SpaceX maintains an open invitation to other radio astronomy organizations from around the world to implement the approach to protect their important scientific research."
Starlink isn't the only culprit when it comes to future astronomical interference, however.
An emerging player in the space internet game is OneWeb, which has about 630 satellites in orbit. Amazon's Kuiper project only has two satellites in orbit, but growth is expected as it stakes its claim for the consumer broadband dollar.
It's big business, but together these companies are taking essential real estate from space researchers. Regulation is vital, but that takes time, and so a good faith undertaking by satellite operators to continually plug their radio leaks looks to be the best short-term solution.
"There is no way to make any electrical or electronic apparatus without this kind of leakage," Winkel said. "The question always asked is: how much is leaked?"
"Consumer devices… fall under some kind of regulation for this leakage, also for health and safety issues [and] not to interfere with other devices. But for satellites that is not the case, so this is really a grey zone," he said.
Edited by: Fred Schwaller
Primary sourceBright unintended electromagnetic radiation from second-generation Starlink satellites. Published by C. G. Bassa, F. Di Vruno, B. Winkel, G. I. G. Józsa, M. A. Brentjens and X. Zhang in Astronomy & Astrophysics (2024) https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/202451856
Over the European summer, the number of COVID-19 infections rose again, with test positivity for SARS-CoV-2 above 20%. Globally, test positivity was about 10%.
The US also saw a rise in hospitalizations, apparently after a wave of COVID-19 infections in Singapore.
Now, as we in the northern hemisphere move into autumn and winter, there is concern about two new variants.
The first one is known as KP.3 and its sub-variant KP.3.1.1. The second is XEC, a "recombinant" variant which is related to KP.3.
KP.3 is considered a global Variant of Concern (VOC) in the US by The US Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) because KP.3 was "predominant" there in August. VOCs may spread more easily or cause more severe illness.
It's important to note that KP.3 is not a global VOC, only in the US.
The CDC recommended people get an updated 2024–2025 COVID-19 vaccine.
What are the KP.3 and XEC variants?KP.3 is one of a group of SARS-CoV-2 variants known as FLiRT variants. SARS-CoV-2 is the base virus that causes COVID, the illness.
As the name KP.3 suggests, there are also KP.1 and KP.2 sub-variants. KP.3 became predominant because it is more infectious than other circulating sub-variants.
KP.3 and other FLiRT variants descend from the omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2.
Now, think of a family tree: The KP variants are children of the JN.1 variant. And JN.1 is, in turn, a child of omicron variant BA.2.86.
This is important to know because of all the major COVID variants, omicron remains dominant, globally. You'll recall, other major variants are alpha, beta, delta, and gamma.
But omicron keeps evolving or mutating into new variants and sub-variants.
XEC the sub-variant is believed to have formed when KP.3 joined with KS.1.1. But we don't know for sure.
As Francois Balloux, Professor of Computational Systems Biology and Director at the UCL Genetics Institute, UK, told the Science Media Centre, "XEC is a likely recombinant between the subvariants KP.3.3 and KS.1.1."
XEC COVID variant in GermanyXEC has been reported as being first detected in Germany in June. But it is yet to appear on the Robert Koch Institute's COVID Dashboard.
As a spokesperson from the Robert Koch Institute implied via email, XEC may never appear on the dashboard because it is "impossible to predict how individual variants will spread."
Since June, the number of XEC cases in Germany has been in double-digits, but the spokesperson did not specify further. The RKI's doesn't even mention XEC on its weekly assessment, published September 18, 2024.
The focus in Germany remains on KP.3.1.1, which is dominant and considered more infectious than previous variants.
In an interview with the DPA news agency, virologist Sandra Ciesek said it was no surprise that KP.3.1.1 was more infectious.
"The virus keeps mutating in search of new ways to infect people […] but that doesn't mean that the variant causes a more severe illness," said Ciesek, who's based at the German Center for Infection Research.
How prevalent are KP.3.1.1, KS.1.1 and XEC?Up to September 3, KP.3.1.1 remains the most dominent variant, according to data provided by GISAID, the Global Initiative on Sharing All Influenza Data, and presented by outbreak.info.
- KP.3.1.1 was detected worldwide 14,396 times
- KP.3.3 was detected worldwide 9,157 times
- KS.1.1 was detected worldwide 2,650 times
- XEC was detected worldwide 95 times
How dangerous are the FLiRT variants?Paul Hunter, professor of medicine at the University of East Anglia, UK, told DW in August, "FLiRT" was a "silly" acronym "but it's stuck," he said, and it's one with a serious meaning.
FLiRT denominates mutations at key sites in that all-important spike protein — the one that allows the virus to spike and attach to a living cell, infect it, and then replicate itself and spread.
FLiRT variants appear to have a potential to be more dangerous than previous versions of SARS-CoV-2.
A paper published in July 2024 suggested that KP.2 had "a greater ability to evade vaccine-induced immunity," and that it reproduced more effectively than its "parent" variant JN.1.
As for KP.3, the CDC said its sub-variant KP.3.1.1 was probably responsible for 30-40% of COVID-19 clinical specimens in mid-August 2024 in the US. That suggested a rapid increase from a rate of 20-26% two weeks earlier, at the start of the same month.
The risks associated with KP.3.1.1 are particularly acute for people older than 65 years of age and children younger than 2 years, said the CDC.
Edited by: Fred Schwaller
Select sources:Tools to explore COVID-19 and SARS-CoV-2 data with variant surveillance reports, data on cases and deaths, and a standardized, searchable research library https://outbreak.info/
COVID-19 Variant Update via the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Infectious Diseases Society of America https://www.idsociety.org/covid-19-real-time-learning-network/diagnostics/covid-19-variant-update/
Hezbollah, an Iran-backed Shiite political party and militant group in Lebanon, has alleged Israel coordinated an attack that resulted in a near simultaneous explosion of about 5,000 pagers — small one-way communication devices — on September 17, 2024.
Independent analysts have said an attack of this scale would have to have been planned months in advance.
It's the use of pagers — a technological throwback to last century — that has caught the attention of many readers, and how these simple messaging units could be adapted to explode by remote detonation.
What is a pager?While an entire generation has grown up surrounded by cellphones, specifically smartphones, there was a time where simple pagers were a commonplace device used by doctors and other professionals "on call" for emergencies.
The small devices use specific radio frequencies, and, in most cases, only send one-way messages to specific recipients. The recipient then has to use another device to either message or call back.
And they haven't disappeared entirely. They are considered more reliable for communication in emergency situations, for instance, such as during blackouts or natural catastrophes.
Hezbollah officials reportedly switched to pagers from cellphone and satellite networks to evade tracking by Israel. Pagers allowed Hezbollah to send short messages.
Phone networks, on the other hand, can be monitored to geolocate devices.
The AR-924 pagers identified in the Lebanon attacks were reportedly manufactured under license by Hungarian company BAC Consulting KFT, according to the product's Taiwanese licensor Gold Apollo.
BAC's chief executive has since denied being responsible for the production of the items used in the attack.
According to the specifications listed by Gold Apollo on a since-removed product website, the AR-924 has up to nearly three months of battery life on a single charge.
Could it have been a lithium-ion battery explosion?It is possible that the explosions resulted from thermal runaway of small lithium-ion batteries used to operate the pagers.
While generally safe to use, incorrect storage, charging or damage to lithium-ion batteries can result in overheating.
At full charge, this can lead to battery combustion — as has been shown in numerous internet videos and news footage of cellphones, or personal mobility vehicles, such e-scooters, lighting up.
A manipulated signal or malfunction of a device equipped with a lithium-ion battery could cause the battery to explode, but footage of the attacks makes this seem unlikely.
"I don’t think there’s much mileage in it being the lithium-ion battery as some people are suggesting," head of COTEC (the Cranfield Ordnance Test and Evaluation Center), Trevor Lawrence, told DW.
"From what I’ve seen, the effect is much more violent than that."
More likely: Hezbollah's pagers were sabotagedWhile it is unclear what caused the explosions, at time of publication, the most probable explanation is sabotage at some point in the supply chain.
Lebanon's security services have told news agencies that about 5,000 of the AR-924 pagers were likely rigged with explosives before delivery. Lawrence, himself a former Ammunition Technical Officer in the British Army, agrees.
"I’m fairly confident that what we’re talking about is pagers that have been specifically modified and had explosives put in them," Lawrence said.
A forensic assessment of the explosion sites would allow authorities to determine the chemistry behind the explosives.
Reports suggest Hezbollah are investigating whether small quantities of PETN (pentaerythritol tetranitrate) or RDX were used as explosive.
Bomb disposal experts have suggested that the simple build of a pager means it has most of the components needed for a makeshift bomb already — and that all that may have been needed was to have explosive material and a detonator added to them.
"There’s certainly been explosive inserted in them, and some sort of initiation device which has then been linked into the pager activation itself," Lawrence said.
"It would almost certainly be a military grade plastic explosive, so something like RDX or PETN," he said.
"If you can get very, very close to the target you only need a very small amount of explosive to cause life-threatening injuries. You can’t get closer than a pager."
Edited by: Zulfikar Abbany
Update: This article was updated at 17:00 UTC on 18 September 2024.
We know that pregnancy completely changes a mother's body, but new research shows changes in the brain are just as dramatic.
Based on brain scans of one healthy 38-year-old woman's brain over two years, scientists have created the first comprehensive map of how the brain changes during pregnancy.
The data, published in the journal Nature Neuroscience, found a dynamic reorganization in the mother's brain — the changes unfolded like clockwork over the course of the pregnancy.
Almost all parts of the brain showed changes in function and anatomy, including in regions involved in social and emotional processing — some of which lasted for two years after the baby was born.
While the research focused on one woman's pregnancy, the work joins a small body of research showing that the process of being a mother, called matrescence, is another stage of development.
Scientists are beginning to discover how hormonal changes during pregnancy and motherhood overhaul the brain's anatomy and function, as they also do during adolescence and menopause.
"It seems like the human brain goes through this choreographed change across gestation, and we were finally able to observe the change in real time," said lead author Emily Jacobs of the University of California, Santa Barbara, US.
Widespread brain changes during pregnancyThe brain studied is that of Elizabeth Chrastil, who is also a neuroscientist at the University of California, Irvine. The researchers imaged Chrastil's brain using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) every few weeks, starting before the pregnancy and continuing for two years after the birth.
"This was an intense undertaking. We did 26 scans before," said Chrastil in a media statement with Jacobs.
The researchers found sweeping changes in overall brain neuroanatomy which unfolded week by week during the pregnancy.
Inside Chrastil's brain, grey matter volume, cortical thickness, white matter microstructure, and ventricle volume all changed.
"The findings are remarkable. It shows that in a relatively short time, pregnancy can alter the brain as much as other life stages, like adolescence," said neuroscientist Clare McCormack of New York University Langone Health, US, who was not involved in the study.
Some of Chrastil's brain's white matter tracts also grew stronger in the second trimester. White matter are the information-sending tracts between brain regions. Stronger white matter tracts means information is being carried more efficiently.
The changes were all over the brain too — "over 80% of my brain regions showed reductions in grey matter volume," Chrastil said.
Grey matter is brain tissue with high concentrations of neuron cell bodies, where information is processed. Reductions in grey matter volume are sometimes associated with reduced memory and cognitive function.
However, the study authors say a reduction in grey matter during pregnancy isn't necessarily a bad thing. It's more like a wave of brain refinement as the brain prepares for motherhood — like the process of chiseling a block of marble into a sculpture.
"This change probably reflects the fine tuning of neural circuits. This adaptive process enables the brain to become more specialized," said Jacobs.
What do brain changes mean for pregnancy health?The changes in Chrastil's brain were linked with shifts in hormone levels of estrogen and progesterone during the pregnancy.
But the study doesn't yet tell us how, or whether, these anatomical changes alter a mother's psychology or health: Which types of brain restructuring cause mood changes or sleep disturbances during pregnancy? Which changes create the powerful bonds of motherly love? Scientists don't yet know.
Future research in many more women is now underway to determine how these brain changes impact a mother's psychology and health.
The insights could improve understanding of conditions such as postnatal depression and preeclampsia, a form of high blood pressure during pregnancy.
"This study is an important step towards improving understanding and treatment of perinatal mood and anxiety disorders, which affect as many as 1 in 5 women who give birth," McCormack told DW.
But ultimately this study opens up more questions than it answers, said Chrastil: "We're only just starting to scratch the surface of understanding the brain during pregnancy."
'Shocking' lack of research about pregnancyThere are so many unanswered questions because of the "shocking" fact that this is the first study to consistently map brain changes during pregnancy, write the study authors in their paper.
"It's 2024 and this is the first glimpse we have of this fascinating neurological transition. There is so much about the neurobiology of pregnancy we don't understand yet. It's a biproduct of the fact that biosciences have historically ignored women's health," said Jacobs.
Of the 50,000 brain imaging articles published in the last thirty years, less than one in a hundred focused on health factors unique to women, like pregnancy, Jacobs highlighted in a press statement.
"Male/female differences in brain function have not traditionally been appreciated by most neuroscientists or clinicians," said Diana Krause, a hormone expert at the University of California, Irvine, US, who was not involved in the study.
"Why? As a woman scientist it makes no sense to me, but clearly, sex and hormones have a tremendous impact, and it is great to see more work focusing on these issues," Krause told DW.
The new study kicks off the Maternal Brain Project, an international effort to understand the impact of pregnancy on maternal brain function. Larger cohorts of women and their partners are being enrolled for studies in the US and Spain.
Edited by: Zulfikar Abbany
Primary source:Neuroanatomical changes observed over the course of a human pregnancy. Published by Pritschet, L., Taylor, C.M., Cossio, D. et al. in Nature Neuroscience (September 2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41593-024-01741-0
The first half of September 2024 saw devastating floods in Nigeria, Myanmar, the Czech Republic, Budapest and other parts Central Europe after heavy rainfall.
In August, floods hit Bangladesh and left more than 500,000 people without clean water, sanitation, dry clothes and other basics like medication.
With experts tending to attribute these extreme weather events to climate change, governments and communities are looking towards mitigation and adaptation strategies.
For instance, investment in grey infrastructure projects, using concrete and steel, and natural green initiatives could help to prevent the very worst impacts of more frequent and severe flood events.
Mobile flood barriers in VeniceVenice, one of the world's most iconic European cities, faces a double-whammy existential crisis: a combination of climate-driven sea level rise and the city's slowly sinking into the muddy foundations upon which it was built.
It's calculated to be sinking at about 2.5mm per year on average, and that for the past 150 years. Some studies suggest much of the city could be under water by the middle of the next century — a modern-day Atlantis.
But the more immediate challenge is flooding.
Planning for flood-prevention systems in Venice stretches back to the 1980s. In 2003, construction of the MOSE system began.
MOSE features four mobile inlet barriers at points along the lagoon that separate the city from the sea.
Each barrier consists of a series of gates that can be raised to separate the lagoon from the surrounding ocean during high flood tides.
Flow-through, flood control and 'dry' dams in Japan, USTypically, dams are used to block a river as a means of water storage.
But flow-through dams are designed to allow water to move during normal conditions. Rather than storing water in dry periods, they come into action during severe weather: They close up and store the floodwaters on an upper floodplain, and protect land on the other side of the structure.
Water is then released back into the lower part of the river system once the floods have subsided.
Such dams have been constructed in Ohio, in the US, and in Japan, along the Masudagawa and Hata rivers. Another is being built along the Asuwa river.
House stilts, breakaway walls and self-elevating homesStilts have long been used to support freestanding homes and protect them against flooding. But the idea is becoming popular in areas that are only now having to adjust to extreme weather and flooding.
While stilted houses have been commonly used in small island nations, where sea levels are rapidly rising, as well as floodplains in Asia and Africa, other nations are increasingly looking towards such techniques as a means of improving housing.
In the US, regulations stipulate that stilt supports need to be strong enough to withstand flooding and wind forces, while elevating buildings high enough to withstand a "once in a century" flood.
In the United Kingdom, a mechanical jack system has been developed by a company called FloodJack. It detect rising waters and activates a foundational elevation system to protect homes from water damage.
But for some nations, not even raised houses are enough anymore. In the wake of disastrous flooding events on the US Gulf Coast and in Australia, for instance, some governments have imposed restrictions on where homes can be rebuilt.
While these aren't technological innovations, policy initiatives such as these are increasingly being looked upon as effective ways of reducing loss and damage.
Barrier technology from Netherlands to AfricaBuilding temporary barricades against rising floodwaters — an idea developed by a Dutch company called SLAMDAM — has proved just as effective in African countries as it has in the Netherlands.
The SLAMDAM is made of tubes that fill with water to create a temporary wall or barricade that pushes flood waters back.
It has been utilized by communities in Burundi, Nigeria and Kenya. Communities have also used the stored water during dry periods for irrigation.
'Nature based' flood mitigation — an opportunity for Asia?It's not just technological innovation that could help communities solve the problem of hazardous flooding. Some regions are turning towards environmental interventions. These are sometimes called "nature based solutions".
For flood mitigation, they could include the management of the flow of water between rivers and floodplains, or the restoration of agricultural regions with native vegetation to encourage more effective stormwater storage.
Other ideas include reestablishing sand dunes and mangrove forests to provide natural barricades to flooding.
Such initiatives are considered "green infrastructure" and are being deployed across the globe.
Edited by: Zulfikar Abbany
Select sources:MOSE System, Venice https://www.mosevenezia.eu/project/?lang=en
Portable dams in Africa / SLAMDAM https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/can-portable-dam-help-africa-counter-rising-waters
Nature-based solutions for flood management in Asia and the Pacific, OECD (March 2024) https://doi.org/10.1787/18151949
There are hundreds of huge stone statues on Rapa Nui — the so-called Moai. No one has ever conclusively found out why they exist. But researchers have long assumed that many thousands of people must have lived on the Pacific island, also known as Easter Island, to erect the colossal figures.
Ancestors of contemporary Polynesians first settled on the then-uninhabited volcanic island around the year 1210.
No other inhabited place is so isolated in the world. Rapa Nui is 1,900 kilometers (1,180 miles) from the nearest inhabited island and almost 3,800 kilometers from the Chilean mainland.
Early theories assumed that the population grew rapidly. The inhabitants, it's been said, cut down all the trees to build the Moai, and for firewood; they killed seabirds and depleted the soil with agriculture.
Eventually, the environment was fully destroyed, and the population was said to have collapsed — that's the theory, anyway. And the island became a symbol of ecocide, a destruction of a natural habitat and environment by deliberate human action.
Books such as Jared Diamond's Collapse (2005) and Kevin Costner's feature film Rapa Nui — Rebellion in Paradise (1994) present the thesis of the islanders' demise with powerful words and images.
New studies: Rapa Nui's population remained stableA number of studies suggest, however, the population on Easter Island or Rapa Nui never reached an unsustainable size. Instead, new arrivals found ways to get along on the island. And a small, stable population was maintained over the centuries.
But it must have been difficult to feed the people — 63 square kilometers of the island consists entirely of volcanic rock.
In contrast to lush tropical islands, such as Hawaii and Tahiti, the volcanic eruptions on Rapa Nui ceased hundreds of thousands of years ago. The minerals stirred up by the lava had long since been washed out of the soil.
Rapa Nui is also much drier than other tropical islands. And as the seabed around the island slopes very steeply, hunting for marine life would have been more difficult than in the easily accessible lagoons or reefs of other islands in Polynesia.
Rapa Nui rock gardens secured food suppliesAccording to researchers, the early inhabitants on Rapa Nui were successful because of their "ingenious construction of rock gardens," in which the islanders grew nutritious sweet potatoes as a staple food.
Rock gardening, or lithic mulching, involves scattering stones over low-lying areas that are at least partially protected from salt spray and wind. The stones and rocks interrupt the dry winds and create an air flow that keeps the surface temperatures reasonably constant, protecting the plants from excessive heat or cold.
Similar rock gardens are also known from the indigenous peoples of New Zealand, on the Canary Islands, and southwestern parts of the US. However, the amount of work involved is very high and the yield very low.
Disproved population collapse theoryThese days, Easter Island has about 8,000 inhabitants. There are also around 100,000 tourists per year.
Most of the food is imported, but some inhabitants have gone back to growing sweet potatoes in the old rock gardens. It started as a trend during the COVID-19 pandemic, when transport routes were locked down.
According to researchers, the gardens once only provided enough land to feed a few thousand people.
"The population could never have been as large as some of the earlier estimates,” said Dylan Davis, an archaeologist at Columbia Climate School in the US, who was lead author of the latest study.
And that disproves the collapse theory, said Davis: "By changing the environment to their benefit, humans were very resilient despite limited resources."
Calculating population based potential crop yieldResearchers have tried to estimate the size of early Easter Island populations by using the size of the rock gardens and the amount of crop that people could have cultivated on that land as a guide.
For example, a 2017 study suggested that inhabitants would have required about 7,700 hectares (~19,000 acres) for sweet potato cultivation — or about 19 percent of the island. On that assumption, they calculated a population of between 17,500 and 25,000 islanders.
New study re-calculated population with artificial intelligenceThe researchers in the latest study used artificial intelligence to configure satellite images in such a way that not only rocks but also places with higher soil moisture and nitrogen — both of which are characteristic of rock gardens — were highlighted.
Based on those calculations, the rock gardens are thought to have covered less than hectares (188 ha). That is less than 0.5% of the island. And if the diet was largely based on sweet potatoes, as thought, then these gardens would only have fed about 2,000 people.
Adaptation to difficult living conditionsBased on isotope (chemical) studies of bones and teeth, researchers believe the early inhabitants got 35-45% of their food from the sea and a small proportion from other, less nutritious plants, such as bananas, taro and sugar cane.
The researchers think that around 3,000 inhabitants could be fed if they succeeded in adapting to the difficult conditions on the island.
That's about the same number of people who were living on Easter Island when Europeans first arrived there in 1722.
Carl Lipo, an archaeologist at Binghamton University and co-author of the study, concluded that the idea of an ecocide on Rapa Nui cannot be proven in view of the latest findings.
Primary source:Island-wide characterization of agricultural production challenges the demographic collapse hypothesis for Rapa Nui (Easter Island). Published by Dylan S. Davis et al. in Science Advances (June 2024) https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.ado1459
This article was originally published in German.
The Nipah virus caused the death of a 24-year-old in the Indian state of Kerala, authorities reported September 16, 2024 — it was the second fatality after a teenager died from a Nipah infection in July.
Nipah is most common in fruit bats, which live in wooded areas close to the highly populated state of Kerala. It's also found in pigs.
Humans can pick up an infection from animals either directly, through droplets, or indirectly via contaminated surfaces. Human-to-human transmission is also possible. An infection can trigger encephalitis and lead to mild to severe illness, but also death.
The World Health Organization classifies Nipah as a priority pathogen, which means it has the potential to trigger an epidemic.
How is the virus transmitted?Nipah virus is commonly found in fruit bats (Pteropodidae), which feed on nectar and pollen, as opposed to vampire bats which eat insects and drink the blood of animals. Fruit bats are much bigger and use their eyes, and not ultrasound, to orient themselves.
Scientists still don't conclusively know how the virus is transmitted from fruit bats to pigs, cattle or even humans. However, there are indications that both humans and animals can get infected by coming in contact with the contaminated saliva and urine of fruit bats.
The 2018 outbreak in Kerala was probably due to the contamination of a drinking water source. Dead fruit bats were later found in a well belonging to the house of an infected family in Changaroth. First, many of the family members fell ill. Later, their acquaintances also got sick.
Why is the virus so dangerous?The Nipah virus aggressively inflames the brain. The US Centers for Disease Control cites an incubation period of five days to two weeks.
Initial symptoms resemble those of the flu: fever, nausea and severe headache. Some patients experience respiratory problems. Later, disorientation, dizziness and confusion follow.
Within one to two days, patients can slip into a coma and die. The mortality rate for Nipah disease is 70%.
How can the disease be treated?There is no vaccination or medication against the Nipah virus — neither for animals, nor for humans. Medications have so far only been able to alleviate the symptoms.
In principle, patients have to be immediately isolated and taken to an intensive care unit, where vital body functions can be supported.
Contact persons or suspected cases have to be quarantined to stop the spread of the infectious disease.
Where does the Nipah virus come from?Nipah virus was first discovered in 1998 in the Malaysian village of Sungai Nipah. Febrile encephalitis — an illness caused by the virus entering the brain — and, in some cases, severe respiratory infections were observed in 229 individuals.
Men who worked in slaughterhouses were the first to catch the infection. It became apparent that one could contract the disease from animals.
Around the same time, a comparatively mild outbreak of a respiratory infection caused by an unknown pathogen was observed in pigs in Malaysia.
Only later did scientists find that the workers and the pigs had been infected by the same virus. As a precaution, more than 1 million pigs — half the country's total pig population — were culled in Malaysia.
Since then, cases of the virus have been reported in Bangladesh in 2001 and 2003, and in Kerala in 2018, 2021 and 2023.
Update: This article, original written in German, was substantially revised in September 2021 and updated with developments since. The latest update was published on September 16, 2024.
The infected blood scandal has been described as the worst treatment disaster in the history of the UK's National Health Service (NHS).
In total, almost 30,000 people in the UK contracted HIV or hepatitis after receiving blood transfusions contaminated with the viruses back in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. More than 3,000 people died, and more continue to die every week.
A governmental inquiry published in May 2024 found evidence of large-scale cover-ups by health workers and ministers, which ignored, downplayed, or denied the risks and damages caused by contaminated blood donations.
"It's not just the impact of the infection itself, the fallout has lasted for decades. It's huge. It affected the lives of people's families and friends. Lots of people in the UK had no idea this was going on — because people were being silenced," said Beatrice Morgan, senior associate solicitor at Leigh Day, a UK-based law firm which represented over 300 individuals during the UK infected blood inquiry.
Infected blood scandals aren't just restricted to the UK — many countries bought blood contaminated with infectious diseases.
But it's still not known how many people were infected with HIV , hepatitis B or hepatitis C from contaminated blood around the world. The total impact is unknown. People whose cases have been confirmed are still seeking justice.
What is the UK infected blood scandal?In the 1970s, a new treatment for people with hemophilia became available which required donated human blood plasma. Many countries didn't have enough blood donations, so sourced much of their blood-related products from the US.
"They were collecting blood from prisons and active drug users, many of whom were known to have hepatitis. The blood wasn't screened properly. It takes only one contaminated donation with HIV or hepatitis to contaminate a whole batch, and a batch could contain up to 40,000 other donations," said Sally-Anne Wherry, a senior lecturer in Advanced Clinical Practice at the University of Gloucestershire, UK.
There's huge evidence, added Wherry, that governments and drug companies involved in buying and selling US-based blood knew this was taking place.
In the UK, around 27,000 people with hemophilia were infected with hepatitis C.
A further 1,250 people were infected with HIV, including 380 children, of whom about two-thirds later died of AIDS-related illnesses. Some unintentionally gave HIV to their partners.
Wherry has spent her adult life campaigning for justice — her father contracted hepatitis from blood transfusions aimed at treating his hemophilia. She said the trauma it caused was tremendous and multigenerational.
"Hemophiliacs and their families experienced unbelievable stigma around the time of the AIDS crisis. People's houses were vandalized, and hemophiliac kids were told to be taken out of school," Wherry said.
Which other countries were hit by infected blood scandals?Blood is a globalized commodity, bought by health systems that cannot source enough blood for their patients.
"Any country that bought contaminated blood from the US in the 1980s was affected," said Wherry.
In Canada, 2,000 people contracted HIV and 60,000 people developed hepatitis C.
Australia saw more than 20,000 people affected.
And in France, more than 4,000 people contracted HIV.
In Germany, a scandal erupted in 1993 after government officials tried to cover up reports of HIV/AIDS in people given infected blood. Over 400 people died, and a third of the country's hemophiliacs (2,000 people at the time) were infected with HIV.
China also saw HIV infections from contaminated blood bought and sold internally. An estimated 300,000 people were infected with HIV through blood selling-schemes in the 1990s.
People are still being infected with diseases by contaminated blood products. In 2016, more than 2,000 people in India contracted HIV from contaminated blood transfusions, and an outbreak of bacterial infections from infected blood transfusions occurred in Turkey in 2021.
Contaminated blood remains a concern in any country where blood is not properly screened before use.
Cover-up of infected blood transfusionsA public inquiry in the UK began in 2017 and published its findings in May 2024.
The report summary described the UK blood scandal as "horrifying" and accused doctors, the UK's National Health Service (NHS), and every government dating back to the 1970s of repeatedly failing patients.
"We've been waiting for justice for such a long time, and it's still not here yet. There's been constant pressure for decades to have this issue noticed," Wherry said.
Following the report's publication, then-UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak offered a public apology, highlighting the failures of successive governments and the NHS.
Sunak said that people affected by the infected blood scandal would start receiving compensation by the end of 2024. The total cost of compensation is expected to reach billions of pounds.
What have we learned?Rigorous testing of donated blood for infectious diseases is now routine around the world.
HIV screening became routine in 1985, while testing for hepatitis C began in 1991, 18 months after the virus was first identified. Testing is now routine for other blood-borne diseases, including bacterial infections.
Some countries also have rules about who can or cannot donate blood, aiming to reduce the chances of people transmitting infectious diseases. Until 2023, for example, gay men in the US were banned from donating blood due to discriminatory concerns about HIV. That has now changed.
In addition, there's been legal action: A German court convicted three company executives for distributing contaminated blood. And in France, three former health minister were charged with manslaughter; two were acquitted and one was found guilty of unintentional manslaughter but spared a prison sentence.
Morgan said it's unclear whether similar legal action would happen in the UK: "Because it's all so late, it's unclear whether it's in the public interest to prosecute individuals who may have criminal responsibility."
Instead, said Morgan, people first want financial compensation.
Edited by: Zulfikar Abbany
Sources:Infected Blood Inquiry Report 2024 https://www.infectedbloodinquiry.org.uk/reports/inquiry-report
Policy paper: Government Update on the Infected Blood Compensation Scheme: 16 August 2024 https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/government-update-on-the-infected-blood-compensation-scheme-16-august-2024/government-update-on-the-infected-blood-compensation-scheme-16-august-2024
Well over half the world's population — 4.4 billion people — cannot access safely managed drinking water, a new study has shown.
4.4 billion people is more than double estimates made in by The World Health Organization (WHO) in 2022.
But the report only examined access to clean water in low and middle-income countries, meaning the figure would likely be greater once poor access in higher income countries is accounted for.
"The information which we have points towards very high rates of contamination," said lead researcher Esther Greenwood from ETH Zurich, Switzerland.
The new figures come from more sophisticated methods to collect data about water contamination.
The risks of drinking contaminated water Unsafe drinking water has a risk of causing a variety of severewater-borne diseases like cholera, dysentery, typhoid, and less severe diseases like norovirus.
To be considered "safely managed", water must be available on demand, on premises and contaminant-free, and designed to deliver safe water.
The majority of those without access to such services are limited by likely fecal contamination,according to the research published in the journal Science.
Greenwood's study was conducted to plug existing data gaps. Satellite observations and household survey information were analyzed using artificial intelligence to define areas of safe and unsafe water access.
As well as representing more than half the global population, the 4.4 billion people who don't have access to safe drinking water accounts for two-thirds of those living in low and middle-income countries.
Greenwood says the findings are conservative as the data are samples taken on a single day rather than over extended timescales.
"It could actually be that the numbers are even higher," she said.
South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa most affectedThe analysis considered human and environmental impacts that limited safe water access across the UN's 22 geographic subregions.
It predicted 1.2bn people living across India, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Iran, the Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka — more than half of the region's population — were not using safe managed drinking water.
But South Asia fares better than others on a per capita basis.
More than 80% of people living in Sub-Saharan Africa — a region covering more than 1.1bn people — cannot access safe managed water.
So too, regions across Oceania (excluding Australia and New Zealand) and Southeast Asia, where around 75% are affected.
About half of these populations may be exposed to contaminated drinking water, according to the study.
E.coli used as a contaminant indicator, but it's not the only concernThe analysis used E.Coli bacteria as a proxy indicator for contamination.
E.coli are associated with diarrhea-related diseases and often result from exposure to contaminated food and water. While healthy adults usually experience mild symptoms and recover quickly, children and older people are at risk of developing kidney failure and death.
Water contaminated with E.Coli caused a norovirus outbreak in Italy this summer, and caused several athletes to get sick after swimming in the River Seine during this year's Olympic games.
"We're not directly interested in E.coli as we're not suspecting that all E.coli is pathogenic. It's rather an indicator that there could have been recent fecal contamination and that worries us because in feces there's a high risk of having other pathogens spread," said Greenwood.
Contaminants from groundwater and industryE.coli is not the only potential cause of water contamination. While not included in this study, arsenic and fluoride levels are also used to monitor chemical contamination in water.
Both are naturally occurring substances, and excessive consumption can be toxic.
A 2023 study estimated around 100 countries were affected by fluoride contamination(exceeding 1.5mg/L) in their groundwater.
The same researchers found 230m people — mostly in Asia — were at risk of arsenic-contaminated groundwater contamination.
While contaminants can be naturally occurring — more than 80% of both fluoride and arsenic groundwater contamination is attributed to geological processes — industrial use of chemicals and coal burning can also contribute to water contamination.
"It seems that more households are affected by E.coli contamination than by chemical contamination. But I think that chemical contamination has different implications for peoples' health. It's something which would also need to be further investigated," Greenwood said.
One in two people suspect their water is harmfulPeople's access to safe drinking water is dependent on their local geographic, sociocultural, and economic situation as much as it is which country they live in.
People in poorer rural areas often have the the greatest difficulties in accessing clean water. Almost 500 million people worldwide collect water from unprotected wells, rivers, ponds, and lakes, the WHO estimated in 2022.
Data also shows people living in towns and cities with low-incomes, or informal or illegal settlements, also have less access to improved sources of drinking-water compared to other residents.
Global trust in water safety is low, with another study showing 1 in 2 people believe their drinking water sources could cause serious harm if consumed.
"It's not enough to have water flowing through the taps. People need to trust their water," said study lead Sera Young, an anthropologist from Midwestern University, Illinois, US.
Improving water infrastructure is only part of the picture to improve water sanitation. Young said that frequent and open-access water testing is needed to help people trust their water supply.
That means "making the water quality tests public and making those test results easy to understand and even putting tests into people's hands so they themselves can test for contaminants of concern," she said.
Edited by: Fred Schwaller
Primary sourcesMapping safe drinking water use in low- and middle-income countries. Published by Esther E. Greenwood, Thomas Lauber, Johan Van Den Hoogen, Ayca Donmez, Robert E.S. Bain, Richard Johnston, Thomas W. Crowther, Timothy R. Julian in Science http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.adh9578
Arsenic contamination of groundwater: A global synopsis with focus on the Indian Peninsula. Published by E. Shaji, M. Santosh, K.V Sarath, Pranav Prakash, V. Deepchand, B.V. Divya in Geoscience Frontiers. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gsf.2020.08.015
Fluoride contamination in groundwater: A global review of the status, processes, challenges, and remedial measures. Published by E. Shaji, K.V. Sarath, M. Santosh, P.K. Krishanaprasad, B.K. Arya, Manisha S. Babu in Geoscience Frontiers. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gsf.2023.101734
Public trust in drinking water safety is low globally. Published by Joshua D. Miller, Chad Staddon, Aaron Salzberg, Julius B. Lucks, Wändi Bruine de Bruin & Sera L. Young in Nature Communications. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-51528-x
Condom use among sexually active teenagers has declined significantly over the past decade.
A new report from the World Health Organization (WHO) suggests that 30% of teenage boys and girls in Europe, Central Asia and Canada didn't use any form of contraception, including condoms, the last time they had sex.
Hans Henri Kluge, the WHO Regional Director for Europe, said the report's findings were "dismaying, [but] not surprising."
The data suggest rates of unprotected sex are at their highest levels since 2014. That's putting young people at significant risk of sexually transmitted infections (STIs) and unintended pregnancies.
"Age-appropriate comprehensive sexuality education remains neglected in many countries, and where it is available, it has increasingly come under attack on the false premise that sex education encourages sexual behavior," Kluge said in a media statement.
The study's authors call for new reproductive health services and sex education without any so-called "gatekeeping measures" so that teenagers get unhindered access to available support.
Up to 61% of teenagers not using contraceptionThe study surveyed over 242,000 15-year-old teenagers in 42 countries and regions in Europe, Central Asia and Canada.
Across Europe, an average of one in five boys and one in seven girls reported having had sex.
Almost a third (30%) of those teenagers said they used no contraception at all the last time they had had sex. That figure has been constant since 2018.
There were big differences between regions, though, with teenagers from some countries engaging in more unprotected sex than others.
In Denmark, including Greenland, 61% of teenage girls and 50% of boys said they used no form of contraception the last time they had sex.
Rates of unprotected sex were also high in some eastern European countries, including Slovakia, Bulgaria and Poland, as well as in the United Kingdom and Ireland.
Swiss, Austrian, German and French teenagers used contraceptives the most, but between 12-25% of teenagers in those countries didn't use contraception.
Concern over STIs and unwanted pregnancies"This trend is concerning as not using a condom exposes young people to the risk of sexually transmitted infections and, especially if no other forms of contraception are used, unintended pregnancy," the study authors write.
Rises in unprotected sex have been linked with increased syphilis rates.
STIs are on the rise in Europe, with the number of reported cases significantly increasing in 2022 compared to 2021.
In a separate report published by the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), cases of gonorrhea were shown to have risen by 48%, syphilis cases by 34% and chlamydia cases by 16%.
The report also found that 6% of girls and 18% of boys did not know whether their partner had used contraception during their last intercourse.
While alcohol-induced memory loss might be at play, according to the study authors, the figures indicate that many teenagers experience sexual assault, including from stealthing, when the condom is removed without consent, or unwanted or nonconsensual sex.
Call for more sex educationSome European countries, such as France and the UK, offer free and easy access to condoms for people under the age of 25.
But making condoms freely available isn't seen as the only solution. Even with free access to condoms in the UK, teenagers in Wales and Scotland continued to report high levels of unprotected sex (between 30-42% of the respondents).
Experts are therefore calling for more and better sex education. In France, President Emmanuel Macron said the country wasn't doing a good job at sex education.
"The reality is very, very far from the theory. We have to train our teachers better in this area, we have to sensitize them again," said Macron in 2022 when France's free condom scheme was launched.
The WHO report gives credence to Macron's words and extends their relevance across Europe and Central Asia. The United Nations body calls for comprehensive sex education in schools so that teenagers can openly discuss topics around sexuality and sex health.
The study findings show the "vital importance of age-appropriate, youth-friendly sexuality education that allows young people to learn about and explore sexual feelings, relationships and behaviors," the report says.
No services should have gatekeeping measures imposed on them, such as requiring parental permission or a referral from a clinician, the report says.
Edited by: Zulfikar Abbany
Sources: A focus on adolescent sexual health in Europe, Central Asia and Canada Health Behaviour in School-aged Children international report from the 2021/2022 survey (World Health Organization, August 2024) https://iris.who.int/handle/10665/378547
Annual Epidemiological Reports on the state of sexually transmitted infections (STIs) in the European Union/European Economic Area (EU/EEA) (European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, March 2024) https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/news-events/sti-cases-rise-across-europe
If you were feeling unhappy, afraid or threatened by the changing reality of your life and surroundings — your neighborhood, work, grocery store — would your first instinct be to join a political party reinforcing those negative feelings?
You might if that very same party told you they — and only they — could fix things for you.
Two researchers found this when they examined voters who had turned to support the German far-right populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party.
The AfD is classified as a "suspected" far-right extremist organization and is alleged to have used Nazi-era sloganeering. However, there has also been a significant bump in support over the past decade.
In Germany's 2017 election, the AfD became the third-strongest party with 12.6% of the vote. Though support dipped to 10.4% at the next election in 2021, the party received 15.9% of the vote in this year's European elections, a surge driven in part by enticing younger voters. The AfD is also expected to make major strides in upcoming state elections in Saxony, Brandenburg and Thuringia.
The rise of right-wing populism is not just a trend in Germany. Other European countries have seen similar developments.
At the 2024 UK general elections, when the Brexit Party of 2016 became Reform UK, it grew from zero to five parliamentary seats, with a 14.3% share of the total vote. Far-right populists in France and Italy can also boast successes.
Right-wing voter happiness on a 'downward spiral'The researchers, Maja Adena and Steffen Huck of the Berlin Social Science Center, were interested in AfD voters' sense of happiness, or what psychologists call subjective well-being (SWB). They wanted to discover the emotional impact of supporting a populist party.
And their findings were simple: AfD supporters started unhappy and became unhappier. It's like a "downward spiral," said Adena in an email to DW.
"There is a strong self-selection of unhappy or unsatisfied individuals [turning] to AfD. They're already unhappy. However, the novelty of our study is that we show [their] happiness deteriorate[s] once they're exposed to the AfD's negative rhetoric," said Adena.
The effect was apparently strongest among new AfD supporters, those whose identity as AfD supporters was "not yet fully formed."
In their paper, published in the journal Plos One, Adena and Huck infer that "the initial decision to support a right-wing party … has the most profound negative effect on well-being."
Adena and Huck wrote that they found "causal evidence" to suggest that while new supporters may experience a positive effect because of their "taking a stance," ultimately, the negative rhetoric of "blaming elites," a common theme among populist parties, wears people down.
But there is a silver lining: "While the well-being of long-term supporters stabilizes," Adena told DW. "Those who stop supporting the AfD partly recover" and get a bit happier again.
How political psychologists measure voter happinessAdena and Huck took data from four surveys between 2017 and 2021, sampling about 4,000 people.
Each time, the respondents were asked to measure their subjective perceptions of personal and financial well-being — how they felt about the past year and the year to come — on a scale.
This is what psychologists call internal referencing: there is no comparison with others; it's just your perception of yourself. The researchers said this would give them more precise data, but this may, in fact, be where the study comes unstuck.
"That part of the study is shaky, to be frank. I don't think you can make any kind of assessment of how you are without making social comparisons," said Fathali Moghaddam, a professor of psychology at Georgetown University's Berkely Center in Washington DC who was involved in the study.
Moghaddam said any sense of happiness or unhappiness must be discussed in relation to the threats people feel.
"And to understand populist movement[s], we have to take the larger, global context into account — the subjective [sense of] instability, the feeling that the world is unstable," said Moghaddam. "Particularly in Europe and in the United States … where white Christians are feeling the world is unstable, that they are being invaded and threatened."
That may indeed motivate one to join a populist movement. That feeling of "taking a stance" can lead to a positive sense of well-being — "I'm taking back control!"
Motivating and demotivating emotions in politicsIf you are truly unhappy, however, perhaps even depressed, you may be less likely to "take a stance." Those existing negative emotions combined with negative populist rhetoric is likely to be a complete turn-off for some.
"I was surprised at the angle these authors took because we know that happiness is not a driver for political action, and unhappiness is even less of a driver. Unhappy, depressed people are much more likely to turn away from politics," said Anna Kende, director of the Department of Social Psychology at ELTE University, Budapest, Hungary.
Other studies have suggested that voting for populist parties increases discontent, but, said Kende, discontent is not the same as unhappiness.
On the other hand, the issue of negative rhetoric rang true for Kende. Hungary's populist leader Viktor Orban , and his Fidesz party have been in power for 14 years. Their negative rhetoric never lets up, said Kende. "It's paradoxical because they should have solved all ‘our problems,' but that's not in their interest."
Kende said populists seldom campaign on their success, only on new threats. This can affect voters and their future voting behavior.
"The real seasoned supporters are okay with [this] not delivering, but the new ones, the less strong supporters who maybe at one point in their life feel like, 'OK, the AfD could offer me something,'" said Kende. "For them, this negative repertoire may have a stronger impact, and they may be more likely to turn away at the failure because they were not committed to the start."
The far left are no better offNone of this means that voters on the left of politics are necessarily happier than those on the right.
Research out of Columbia University New York in 2023 suggested that "American adults who identify as politically liberal have long reported lower levels of happiness and psychological well-being than conservatives."
Researchers are unsure why this is, but it may be that people of any political standpoint feel unhappy if their views aren't reflected by governing institutions.
"[From our study], we are far from pinning down the mechanism, unfortunately: whether the observed deterioration in well-being is due to the negative rhetoric of the AfD or rather due to feeling marginalized and non-mainstream. We actually point to both possibilities," said Adena.
Edited by: Fred Schwaller
Primary source:Support for a right-wing populist party and subjective well-being: Experimental and survey evidence from Germany, published by Maja Adena and Steffen Huck in PLOS ONE (June 2024) https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0303133
Low testing rates in theDemocratic Republic of the Congo (DR Congo) are concerning the region's health experts as it battles an Mpox outbreak.
"In the DRC, only less than 40% of cases are tested, laboratory-confirmed," said Dimie Ogoina, an infectious diseae specialist at Niger Delta University, Nigeria.
DR Congo is "working blindly" as it tries to combat the outbreak, Ogoina said in a press statement.
There are now more than 3,500 confirmed Mpox cases across 11 West and Central African nations, with DRC accounting for 90% of cases.
Refugee camps in DR Congo are facing particularly severe Mpox outbreaks, with children most at risk.
But the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC) estimates the true number of cases could be more than five times greater.
"I believe cases in Africa are largely underreported because [with] the number of cases are occurring, the public health system cannot detect those cases," Ogoina said.
Experts warn the virus could spread further without better surveillance, control and treatment measures.
Mpox Clade 1b is a growing concernAlthough DR Congo has the most reported cases, there are concerns Mpox will continue spreading beyond its borders.
Before now, the disease had never been reported in East African nations like Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi and Kenya.
That's changed since the recent outbreak. Each of these countries has reported cases of Clade 1b versions of the Mpox virus since April this year.
Clade 1 lineages are more virulent and deadlier than the clade 2 lineages of Mpox which caused the global outbreak in 2022.
Evidence emergedat the start of this year that both Mpox clades are capable of sexual transmission
"We didn't know that Clade 1 can be easily transmitted through sexual contact. But now with the clade 1b, we see more sex workers affected and reporting of more sexual activities being, I can say, the main source of transmission or mode of transmission for this outbreak," said Placide Mbala-Kingebeni, an epidemiologist at the Institute of Biomedical Research in DR Congo, who led the study.
Mbala-Kingebeni said the virus is also adapting to become more difficult to detect. Genetic deletions — small changes in the virus’s genetic code — have made identifying the virus in tests more difficult.
"The reason that we are afraid about Clade 1b is because it seems very, very well adapted to human-to-human transmission," he said.
Vigilance required in efforts to curb Mpox spreadThough cases remain overwhelmingly confined to Africa, single cases of Mpox Clade 1b have now been reported in Sweden and Thailand.
Pakistan and the Philippines have each identified cases of Clade 2.
In a message posted to Twitter/X, Anne Rimoin, Chair of Infectious Diseases & Public Heath at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), US, said "an infection anywhere is potentially an infection everywhere."
Authorities in the European Union, UK and US still view risk to their populations as low overall, but the risk of cases being ‘imported' by overseas travelers has some experts flagging the need for vigilance.
Edited by: Fred Schwaller
Sources:
Kibungu, Emile M et al. “Clade I-Associated Mpox Cases Associated with Sexual Contact, the Democratic Republic of the Congo.” Emerging infectious diseases vol. 30,1 (2024): 172-176. doi:10.3201/eid3001.231164
Diet is well known to impact the risk of developing type 2 diabetes, but a new study has found that eating lots of processed meats carries a particularly high risk of causing the disease.
Eating the equivalent of just two slices of ham a day was associated with a 15% greater chance of developing the disease, according to a study published in Lancet Diabetes and Endocrinology.
The studyof nearly 2 million people across 20 countries investigated diabetes risks associated with eating unprocessed red meat, processed meat and poultry.
When age, sex and body mass were accounted for, the research found 50g of processed meat a day was enough to increase the risk of type 2 diabetes by 15%.
The equivalent of eating a 100g steak daily raised risk by 10%, but associations with poultry consumption and the disease were less clear, according to the researchers from Cambridge University who conducted the study.
What causes type 2 diabetes?Type 2 diabetes is a condition in which the level of sugar (glucose) in the blood becomes too high. It's caused by the body developing a resistance to a hormone called insulin, which normally lowers blood sugar.
Type 2 diabetes often develops due to being overweight or inactive, but can also be related to genetics.
Health authorities around the world recommend healthy diet and exercise, avoiding smoking and controlling blood pressure and fat levels to reduce the chances of develop type 2 diabetes.
Nick Wareham, Cambridge of University, UK, a senior author on the study, said their study shows that meat consumption has a particularly large impact on diabetes risks which is independent from obesity or body mass index.
Reducing consumption of processed meats could reduce risk of developing type 2 diabetes, he said.
"Maybe the way to think about it is also to flip it around and say how much you need to reduce your meat intake to reduce your risk by 10%," he said.
That's to say: reducing one's consumption of processed meat by at least two slices of ham per day in turn reduces the chance of getting type 2 diabetes.
"If everybody ate a little bit less, risk would go down, and obviously there are planetary benefits to that as well," said Wareham.
Meaty data from some places, not others537 million people around the world have been diagnosed with diabetes, according to data from the International Diabetes Federation (IDF). Around 90% of diabetics have type 2 diabetes.
Estimates by the IDF and other health monitors show the prevalence of type 2 diabetes is on the rise globally. Three times more people now have diabetes compared to 25 years ago.
Fast developing regions like Africa are projected to have sizeable increases in type 2 diabetes, however the quality of data available to understand how this change is taking place is patchy.
"We already had strong evidence of this relationship, but this study adds another layer with additional studies and geographic coverage," says one of the study's co-authors and a leading metabolic disease researcher from Harvard University, US, Walter Willet.
"This is most important for the higher income countries that are consuming the most meat, but it is also important for most low-income countries because they are currently increasing their intakes of red meat," he said.
Sabrina Schlesinger at the German Diabetes Centre, who was not involved in the study, noted the use of 20 countries in the data improved the "generalizability" of the research.
"The findings of this study provide convincing evidence that supports the need for a shift in dietary patterns, especially in modern Western diets, which are characterized by high intake of processed and red meat," Schlesinger said.
"Remarkably, the study suggests that simply replacing processed meats with other types of meat (like unprocessed red meat or poultry) may not be sufficient. A broader shift towards plant-based diets could be more beneficial for health outcomes," she said.
Metabolic mechanisms linked to fatty dietProcessed and red meats are usually high in saturated fats. While consumption of these fats are known to cause a range of health issues, scientists haven't been entirely sure why.
A separate study has identified a new role of molecules called ceramides acting in the gut which could be contributing to type 2 diabetes risks.
Diets high in saturated fats provide the material needed to create a metabolically toxic variant known as C16.
These toxic C16 molecules were known to be made by the liver. But the new study shows the gastrointestinal tract (the gut) also makes them.
"We've identified a second organ that can make it, and actually makes it in response to what's coming in with the fat consumption," said the study's lead researcher Sarah Turpin-Nolan, from Monash University in Australia.
"If drug companies are trying to make something to treat metabolic disease and type 2 diabetes, if their drug can hit the liver and the gut, they will have a better effect overall," added Turpin-Nolan.
Scientists are yet to establish how C16 and metabolic processes lead to type 2 diabetes. Knowing more could help understand why diets rich in processed meats carry a particularly high risk of causing type 2 diabetes.
Edited by: Fred Schwaller
Primary sources:Meat consumption and incident type 2 diabetes: an individual-participant federated meta-analysis of 1·97 million adults with 100 000 incident cases from 31 cohorts in 20 countries. Published by Li Chunxiao et al. in The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology https://doi.org/10.1016/S2213-8587(24)00179-7
High-fat feeding drives the intestinal production and assembly of C16:0 ceramides in 40 chylomicrons. Published by Michael SM Mah et al. in Science Advances https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adp2254
"Our body tells us more or less what to eat and when to eat, and maybe we should listen," said Susanne Klaus, a chief researcher at the German Institution of Human Nutrition.
That makes sense. But the way our body demands energy of us isn't the same throughout our lifetimes.
From being spoon-fed by parents when we're infants to sneaking sugary sweets when we're children, to eating everything in sight as teenagers and then pecking on small, simple plates in later stages of life, our appetites change as the years roll on. Understanding why can help ensure good health in our later years.
The hunger hormones and how they workAt its core, eating food is functional: Without the energy we draw from it, we simply wouldn't survive.
Carbohydrates in our food are converted into energy while fats and amino acids help create the vital proteins and other structures that help the body function.
To ensure these processes run like clockwork, the body has special systems to ensure a regular energy supply.
"These [are self-regulating] mechanisms that drive hunger and satiety," said Klaus. "They're mainly signals from the stomach and intestine but also from hormones, such as leptin, which is secreted by adipose tissue [or body fat] and which signals to the main hypothalamus [a control center in the brain]. This is an autonomic system, like breathing."
These chemical drivers compelling us to seek (or stop seeking) food are sometimes called hunger hormones. Aside from leptin, ghrelin is perhaps the best-known hunger hormone.
Ghrelin is released into the bloodstream by the stomach and tells the brain to get us eating. When you're full, ghrelin release slows, giving a sensation of fullness.
Other hormones regulate feelings of fullness and emptiness, too. These include insulin and other pancreatic hormones that inhibit hunger, such as GLP-1, which the diabetes drug, Ozempic, mimics.
The mechanics of digestionWhen these hormones prompt you to stick food in your mouth, the body uses digestive processes to, quite literally, eat away at your meal.
Mechanical digestion begins in your mouth, where you grind your food into smaller, mushier forms you can swallow. This process continues as this swallowed slurry is forced down the esophagus into your stomach — a process known as peristalsis.
Alongside this process is chemical digestion. This begins in the mouth where amylase enzymes in saliva begin to break down starches in food. More of these digestive enzymes are in the stomach to finish the job so water and nutrients can then be absorbed from the intestines into the bloodstream.
How your appetite changes as you ageThis impulse for food hits overdrive when you reach adolescence. The body craves energy to fuel its most important growth stage — puberty — spurring it toward physical and sexual maturity.
But lifelong nutrition can be a challenge. For older people, there is a risk of the body becoming less effective at prompting the necessary intake of nutrients. Some studies have shown changes to hunger hormone secretion patterns in later life.
"When people age, on average, [they] lose muscle mass and muscle is the compartment which uses the most energy," said Klaus.
A major driver of muscle mass reduction is a failure to consume sufficient protein.
"Protein intake in later life is lower than what is recommended and even the recommendations, according to various scientific groups, should actually be higher for protein intake in later life, because it is very important to maintain muscle mass," said Daniel Crabtree, a late life-stage nutrition researcher at the University of Aberdeen.
Despite the advice, Crabtree said older people's protein intake does tend to be below what's recommended, and that can include physiological factors and other signs of an ageing body — from problems with your teeth to changes in taste or smell.
Edited by: Zulfikar Abbany
It’s been more than 125 years since the role of mosquitoes as the transmitters of malaria was discovered on 20 August 1897 by British physician Ronald Ross.
Ross was awarded a Nobel Prize in Medicine for his work, which has helped educate people across the planet about the risks posed by the mosquito-borne diseases injected into the human bloodstream when the flying insects ‘bite’.
The date of his discovery now serves as the annual World Mosquito Day.
Over the course of the 20th century, other diseases transmitted by mosquitoes have been discovered on every continent except Antarctica. Taken together, these illnesses have symptoms in common that include fever, headaches, fatigue, muscle or joint pain. Correct diagnosis usually requires on careful assessment of these and other specific symptoms
Suitable treatments for mosquito-borne diseases are rare and medical attention is usually advised, though some antivirals and vaccines have been developed. Prevention remains the best tactic in the battle against them, with the use of mosquito nets, body-covering clothing, insect repellents and actions to reduce mosquito reproduction (such as draining still or stagnant water sources) at the top of the list.
Anopheles mosquitoes and malaria – the ‘original’ infectionMalaria is caused by single-celled parasites from a group called Plasmodium. There were more than 249 million cases globally in 2022, up five million from the year before, and nearly 20 million more than a baseline set in 2015. Almost 95% of all cases occur in Africa. The disease remains one of the biggest causes of child deaths globally.
It is transmitted by 'night biting' female mosquitoes belonging to the genus Anopheles. Infection progresses in fever episodes, with symptoms including headaches and pains in the limbs, sweating and chills, but also diarrhea. Over the course of the illness, severe damage to the nervous system can occur.
Vaccines like Mosquirix are beginning to emerge onto market and anti-malarial drugs can lower the risk of contracting the disease.
Aedes and Culex mosquitoes – the viral carriersMosquitoes from the Aedes group (particularly Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus) are the common carriers of viruses that cause dengue, yellow fever, Zika and Chikungunya.
Culex mosquitoes transmit pathogens that cause West Nile fever and Japanese encephalitis, and can also carry Chikungunya.
These are 'day biting' mosquitoes, and prevention can be helped by wearing body-covering clothing, the use of mosquito nets when sleeping during the day, insect repellents, window screens, and control of standing-water environments that mosquitoes use for breeding.
Dengue feverDengue is the most common mosquito-borne disease, with more than 500 million people infected each year.
Symptoms range from muscle and joint pains to headaches, nausea and vomiting, and fever. Severe dengue is characterized by fatigue, dehydration, blood in the stool, vomiting, and severe pain in the nose, mouth and abdomen. Repeat infections leave a sufferer more prone to severe symptoms.
There is now a vaccine recommended by the WHO for children aged 6-16, but so far only in regions where the disease is common, as even the vaccine can trigger deadly reactions in the body.
Though not endemic to Europe, it can be 'imported' by travelers returning from dengue-prone regions.
Yellow feverThis is a vaccine-preventable illness now endemic in 34 African and 13 South and Central American countries.
Not everyone infected with the virus that causes yellow fever develops symptoms, but those that do may experience fever, muscle pains, backaches, headaches, nausea and vomiting. Recovery is usually within 3-4 days, but some people develop a more toxic second phase. It can cause liver and kidney problems, abnormal bleeding and – without treatment – can even lead to death.
Both the yellow fever vaccine and surviving a prior infection provide lifelong immunity. Survival rates for those infected with the disease can be improved through prompt medical care.
Zika virusZika is an often symptomless disease, but one that poses risks during pregnancy.
A Public Health Emergency of International Concern due to Zika outbreaks in South America was declared in 2016. Case numbers have been at low levels since 2018.
When present, symptoms include rash, fever, aches and pains that are usually mild and last about a week. The greatest danger posed by Zika is infection during pregnancy, where the infection can be passed onto the developing fetus and may lead to microcephaly (a reduction in the size of the skull) and problems with limb, eye and hearing development.
Pregnant women with symptoms are advised to seek medical attention if they live in regions known for the disease.
West Nile virusLike dengue, yellow fever and Zika, WNV is a potentially fatal flavivirus. Signs of infection in humans are like those caused by many other mosquito-transmitted diseases: Shaking, cold chills, fever, headaches and dizziness, followed by a skin rash. Not every infected person shows these symptoms. They only appear in about one in five cases.
There is no vaccine against the disease, nor are there antiviral drugs suitable for treating it. Medical attention is recommended if symptoms present.
Chikungunya virusLike many mosquito-borne viruses, Chikungunya may not cause symptoms in everyone. When present, they usually only last for about three days. They are generally followed by a period of severe joint pain lasting one to two weeks before subsiding. Some infected patients develop itchy rashes as well as lesions on the mucous membranes (such as inside the nose or mouth). Infections usually cause no permanent damage. Once the disease has been overcome, patients are immune for the rest of their lives. In February 2024, the US Food and Drug Administration approved the Valneva vaccine for people aged 18 years and older.
Japanese encephalitis (JE) virusJE is the most common cause of viral encephalitis across Asia, and though symptomatic cases are rare, people with severe cases experience rapid onset of disorientation, coma and seizures. One in three symptomatic cases are fatal. Fortunately, there are vaccines available to prevent JE.
Edited by: Derrick Williams.
This article about World Mosquito Day was originally published on 20 August 2018. It was updated to include up-to-date information on mosquito-borne diseases on 19 August 2024.
Have vaccines for mpox been developed? The short answer is yes, they have.
The European Union, United States, Canada and others approved the use of the MVA-BN vaccine back in 2022 during the first declared global health emergency for mpox.
The long answer is a bit more complicated.
What are mpox vaccines? Vaccines to protect against an mpoxinfection do exist, but currently no available vaccines specifically target the monkeypox virus. How is this possible?
The monkeypox virus belongs to a genus of viruses called Orthopoxvirus, which are all complex DNA viruses.
Among others, viruses in this genus include the variola virus, which causes smallpox, the cowpox virus and the vaccinia virus.
Viruses from this genus have a great share of genetic similarity, which makes it possible for vaccines developed against other viruses to also be used to protect from mpox infection.
How do mpox vaccines work? Vaccines which protect against mpox rely on a phenomenon called cross-reactivity.
Cross-reactivity happens when different antigens — different species of viruses, for example — appear similar to our immune system.
Imagine this: As viruses from the Orthopoxvirus are structurally similar, if a person is infected by the variola virus, for example, the antibodies that their cells will produce against the virus will also be able to protect them against a monkeypox virus infection.
Cross-reactivity between antibodies to Orthopoxvirus allows a vaccine developed to fight smallpox, for example, to also work with mpox infections.
So I can't get mpox if I'm already vaccinated against smallpox? The answer currently seems to be: there is no guarantee.
Smallpox was declared eradicated in 1980 after a decadeslong global mass vaccination effort.
After the 1980s, mass immunization against the disease stopped, which some researchers suggest could have increased the susceptibility of people to other forms of Orthopoxvirus, including the monkeypox virus.
In fact, people born after the end of the universal smallpox vaccination program have lower levels of antibodies against the monkeypox virus.
This could explain why men aged 18-44 accounted for the majority of cases in the previous 2022-2023 mpox global outbreak.
But previous smallpox vaccination doesn’t mean that a person is fully protected from contracting mpox.
Previous studies have suggested that the smallpox vaccine is about 85% effective in preventing monkeypox virus infection, but people who have received a smallpox vaccine seem to have milder cases of mpox.
What vaccines do we currently have? As of August 2024, there is only one vaccine approved for use against mpox across all of the EU/EEA, United Kingdom, United States, Switzerland and Canada.
This is the MVA-BN vaccine, also known as Modified Vaccinia Ankara-Bavarian Nordic.
The vaccine consists of a weakened strain of the vaccinia virus — one of the viruses from the Orthopoxvirus genus, which the monkeypox virus belongs to.
The Modified Vaccinia Ankara vaccine was developed in the 1950s and '60s in Germany and was originally used to protect against smallpox infection.
Its current form, MVA-BN, was developed by the Danish biotech company Bavarian Nordic and has been in production since 2010. It is given in two doses, usually 28 days apart.
The World Health Organization lists another two vaccines approved by different regulatory agencies for the prevention of mpox.
During the 2022 mpox outbreak, Japan approved the smallpox vaccine LC16, and Russia licensed OrthopoxVac for immunization against smallpox, mpox and other orthopoxviruses.
In the United States and Australia, ACAM2000, a vaccine which contains a live vaccinia virus, is recommended for people at risk for exposure to Orthopoxvirus infections.
Are vaccines in development? Yes. One example is a new mRNA vaccine — BNT166 — specifically targeting antigens on the monkeypox virus, which is now under clinical evaluation.
You might be familiar with mRNA vaccines from the COVID-19 pandemic and the ensuing global vaccination effort.
Currently, the WHO doesn't recommend a mass vaccination program. It recommends that only people who are at risk or who have been in contact with the virus should be considered for vaccination.
Edited by: Martin Kuebler
Sources and data:Li D, Wang H, Sun L, et al. Levels of antibodies against the monkeypox virus compared by HIV status and historical smallpox vaccinations: a serological study. Emerging Microbes & Infections. Published in 2024.
https://doi.org/10.1080/22221751.2024.2356153
Zuiani A, Dulberger CL, Silva, et al. A multivalent mRNA monkeypox virus vaccine (BNT166) protects mice and macaques from orthopoxvirus disease. Cell. Published in 2024.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2024.01.017
Jezek Z, Grab B, Szczeniowski M, Paluku K, Mutombo M. Human monkeypox: secondary attack rates. Bulletin of the World Health Organization. Published in 1988.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2844429/
Marzuki C, Zaid A, Azman FW, et al. Vaccines for Orthopoxviruses: A Review. Malaysian Journal of Medicine and Health Sciences. Published in 2023.
https://doi.org/10.47836/mjmhs.19.s9.41
CDC. Mpox in the US. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Published October 19, 2022.
https://www.cdc.gov/poxvirus/mpox/clinicians/vaccines/vaccine-considerations.html
Akter F, Tahira Binte Hasan, Alam F, et al. Effect of prior immunisation with smallpox vaccine for protection against human Mpox: A systematic review. Reviews in Medical Virology. Published in 2023.
https://doi.org/10.1002/rmv.2444
American astronauts Barry 'Butch' Wilmore and Sunita 'Suni' Williams are stuck in space — for now — as NASA and Boeingwork through issues with the Starliner spacecraftthat brought them up to theInternational Space Station (ISS).
Starliner is a space capsule built by Boeing as part of NASA's Commercial Crew Program, an initiative where private companies provide private spaceflight services to the ISS. Rival SpaceX also provides such services.
Wilmore (flight commander) and Williams (pilot) were at the helm of the Boeing-built capsule in its first crewed test flight to the ISS, which overcame pre-flight technical problems to dock with the space station on June 6.
But persistent issues involving helium lines into the thrusters and the propulsion system generally have kept the Starliner moored to the ISS ever since, with NASA and Boeing teams still working to safely return the astronauts to Earth.
Currently, NASA has outlined two options — either fix the issues so the astronauts can pilot Starliner back to Earth, or return Starliner to Earth ‘uncrewed'.
That second option would leave Wilmore and Williams to come home with SpaceX's Crew-9 mission in February 2025 — prolonging their stay from an initially planned eight days to around eight months.
What happens to humans in space?There are unquestionablyhealth risks associated with space travel, but astronauts like Wilmore and Williams are highly-trained and experienced at living aboard their ‘second home' — the ISS.
If they return home in February, they will have experienced eight months more radiation exposure than originally anticipated.
But that's still a comparatively light dose compared to exposure for other astronauts. Russian cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko, for instance, has spent more than 1,000 days in space. His current stint began in March.
One of the big challenges to human health in space is weightlessness. Because humans have evolved with Earth's gravitational pull, our bodies are simply not optimized to live without it. The absence of gravity can cause a loss in bone density, increase the risk of developing kidney stones, alter eyesight and have a negative impact on the cardiovascular system.
Studies have also shown that exposure to higher radiation levels in space increases the risk of cancer and causes muscles to atrophy.
An astronaut's perspectiveIn a press briefing on Wednesday, NASA's chief astronaut Joe Acaba — who has spent 306 days in space himself — highlighted the inherent risk of space travel that all astronauts face.
"We embark on missions fully aware of the various scenarios and outcomes that may become our realities. We undergo rigorous training to prepare both mentally and physically for the challenges that may arise during any given mission," Acaba said.
"Human spaceflight is inherently risky and as astronauts, we accept that as part of the job."
What are the Starliner astronauts doing to fill the time?
While Starliner remains docked, Wilmore and Williams are keeping busy. They have 'integrated' into the station's work rota with the other ISS crew members, which includes four members of the SpaceX Crew-8 and three of the Soyuz MS-25 mission.
"They are as busy as any other crew that is up there," said Acaba.
How will they know whether Starliner is safe to return?While project teams work through available data, a multi-layered review process is still underway that will ultimately decide whether Starliner returns to Earth with Wilmore and Williams on board. At this stage, NASA officials are still gathering data to inform these review processes.
Regular program meetings have been held — most recently last week — to assess progress among the specialist teams analyzing Starliner data.
NASA is also conducting an agency-level Flight Readiness Review, where three independent technical agencies are involved. The reviewers include members of its Safety and Mission Assurance, NASA's Chief Engineer, and the agency's Chief Health and Medical Officer.
Once complete, this review will hand recommendations to NASA's Associate Administrator for Space Operations Ken Bowersox, who will poll his teams on whether a return to Earth should go ahead, then make a flight decision.
"At the agency review, I go ahead and say what my call is," said Bowersox.
"At that point we could have a persistent dissenting opinion, it could come up after a PCB and then be raised at the Flight Readiness Review, it could be elevated beyond that."
Dissenting opinions on whether to proceed could be elevated to NASA's Associate Administrator Jim Free, or potentially to Administrator Bill Nelson for final input.
Has this happened before?NASA says mid-mission Flight Readiness Reviews are not unheard of. Officials confirmed a similar mid-mission review was held whenSpaceX's first crew test flight was launched back in 2020.
"Before each major milestone, especially on a test flight, we will execute a thorough readiness review," said NASA's chief flight director Emily Nelson, "We don't always call in agency leadership for this conversation specifically, but we certainly review our readiness before each dynamic milestone."
When will NASA decide?Although there's no hard cut-off, logistics will play a part in Ken Bowersox's decision. Right now, it's looking like NASA will make a call on how Wilmore and Williams will return by the end of August.
A curveball: Boeing spacesuits don't work on SpaceXEven though Boeing and SpaceX are both part of NASA's Commercial Crew Program, their spacecraft and mission equipment are unique, including the spacesuits the astronauts wear. Should Wilmore and Williams be forced by an emergency to return on the SpaceX Crew Dragon 2 spacecraft, they may therefore have to do so ‘unsuited'.
If the final decision is in favor of a planned return for the Starliner crew on the SpaceX capsule, Wilmore and Williams will be provided appropriate suits for return. Because of the Starliner repair job, the next SpaceX flight to the ISS won't launch until at least September 24.
Edited by: Derrick Williams
A new version of the mpox virus has emerged in Central Africa, spreading among children and adults in more than a dozen countries.
Infection with mpox causes a pus-filled skin rash lasting up to four weeks, which can be very painful.
But what symptoms should we look out for and what can we do to reduce the risk of infection?
What is mpox? You might have heard of mpox with its former name — monkeypox. Mpox is an infectious disease caused by the monkeypox virus.
The virus was first discovered in 1958 in Denmark, when an outbreak that resembled smallpox was described in monkey colonies kept for research.
Although it is called "monkeypox virus," the original source of the virus is still unknown. Researchers suggest that rodents or small mammals, like squirrels and primates, might harbor the virus.
Mpox cases outside regions like Central and West Africa, where the virus is endemic, have historically been rare and were usually linked to travel or imported animals.
In the span of two years, however, the WHO has twice declared the spread of mpox a global health emergency.
In 2022, mpox spread to more than 70 countries that hadn't reported cases previously.
This year, a new mpox variant caused a surge of cases and deaths in Congo and in neighboring countries, causing WHO to again declare the spread of the virus an emergency with international concern.
How is mpox spread? The virus can enter the body through broken skin, mucous membranes (such as the eyes, mouth and nose) and through the respiratory system.
You can get infected by coming into close contact with people with mpox, such as skin-to-skin contact during kissing, hugging, sex (oral, anal or vaginal) and massages.
Prolonged face-to-face interactions with someone with mpox (like talking or breathing) can cause infection from respiratory droplets carrying the virus.
You can also get mpox from an infected person's body fluids through shared sex toys, bedding or towels. Pregnant people can pass the virus to their baby.
If you are in direct contact with infected animals, you can also contract mpox. This includes skinning, cooking, eating and hunting infected animals or getting bitten or scratched.
An infected person can pass on the virus even before symptoms start, and transmission can continue until all skin lesions are healed and a new layer of skin has formed. This can take weeks.
What are the symptoms of mpox? The viral infection usually begins with a rash that can be located near the anus or genitals, or on the chest, face or mouth. The rash then can then extend to the palms of the hands and soles of the feet and other parts of the body.
The rash can be painful and itchy and resemble pimples or blisters at first, which go through several stages before the scabs fall off.
Flu-like symptoms can start before or after the rash. Those include fever, headache, swollen lymph nodes, muscle aches or chills. Some people report difficulty peeing and a painful swelling of their anus.
Symptoms usually start within 21 days of exposure to the virus.
Dangerous complications can occur when the lesions become infected, leading to abscesses.
Other complications can include severe dehydration caused by diarrhea or vomiting, pneumonia, inflammation of the brain (encephalitis) or the heart (myocarditis) and others.
Who is most at risk? People who are immunosuppressed because of medical conditions or medication are at higher risk of complications from mpox.
People who have multiple sexual partners, sex workers and health care workers are at a higher risk of contracting mpox.
According to the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, those at risk also include pregnant people, children younger than 1 and people with a history of eczema.
During the 2022 outbreak, many people who initially presented symptoms were mainly, but not exclusively, men who have sex with men.
However, the World Health Organization has pointed out that anyone who comes in contact with a person infected with mpox can get infected themselves, regardless of sexual orientation.
How can I prevent getting mpox? Most people recover from mpox in two to four weeks. If you or your partner has mpox, avoiding having sex, touching or kissing can reduce the risk of spread.
The Centres for Disease Control and Prevention recommends avoiding close contact with people who have a visible rash at parties, clubs and festivals, where little clothing is worn, and skin-to-skin contact happens often.
Having fewer sexual partners and using condoms also reduces the risk of infection. However, condoms don't prevent infection if you come into contact with lesions or body fluids from other parts of the body.
The CDC has also warned against touching objects handled by a person with mpox, including utensils, towels and bedding, and urged frequent hand-washing.
You can also get vaccinated, although this may not be a current option in your region and might depend on your risk of complications and exposure.
In the US for example, people at high risk of infection or complications can get the Jynneos smallpox vaccine to help prevent mpox.
Because the mpox and smallpox viruses are genetically similar, vaccines that are used to prevent smallpox can also be administered to protect from mpox infections.
Edited by: Martin Kuebler
Sources:
Amer F, Khalil HES, Elahmady M, et al. Mpox: Risks and approaches to prevention. Journal of Infection and Public Health. Published June 2023.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jiph.2023.04.001
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Mpox and Your Health. Published September 13, 2022.
https://www.cdc.gov/poxvirus/mpox/your-health/index.html
Robert Koch Institute, Federal Center for Health Education, Berlin, Cologne. Flyer, transmission and prevention of mpox. Published February 13, 2023.
https://www.rki.de/EN/Content/infections/epidemiology/outbreaks/Monkeypox/Mpox-Flyer_EN.pdf
van Ewijk CE, Miura F, van Rijckevorsel G, et al. Mpox outbreak in the Netherlands, 2022: public health response, characteristics of the first 1,000 cases and protection of the first-generation smallpox vaccine. Eurosurveillance. Published March 2023.
https://doi.org/10.2807/1560-7917.es.2023.28.12.2200772
World Health Organization (WHO). Mpox questions and answers. Published December 11, 2023.
https://www.who.int/news-room/questions-and-answers/item/monkeypox
The UN's health agency reports concerns about more severe variants of SARS-CoV-2 evolving globally.
The latest figures from the WHO show that between 24 June and 21 July 2024, new hospitalizations increased by 11% and ICU admissions by 3% compared to the previous month.
“Data from our sentinel-based surveillance system across 84 countries reports that the percent of positive tests for SARS-CoV-2 has been rising over several weeks,” said the WHO's Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove.
Deaths due to COVID were also up 26% in recent weeks. However, the WHO urges caution when interpreting reported data, as testing and sequencing for COVID has decreased, and many countries report results with a delay.
Overall test positivity for SARS-CoV-2 is above 10%. However, Dr. Van Kerkhove warned that in Europe, that percentage is above 20%.
Are we seeing a global surge in COVID cases?Ziyad Al-Aly, a COVID physician-scientist at Washington University in St. Louis, US, said we should take the rise in hospitalizations seriously, as it's "always wise to prepare for the worst and hope for the best."
"The uptick in the US was preceded by a COVID wave in Singapore. Unfortunately, a lot of countries are not tracking and reporting these metrics. So we are flying blind," Al-Aly told DW via email.
The good news is that COVID hospitalizations are still well below levels from last winter. The severity of infections also seems to be lower than it was earlier in the pandemic, according to Paul Hunter, a professor of medicine at University of East Anglia in the UK.
However, Hunter stressed that these patterns of COVID surges are now part of normal life given that "SARS-CoV-2 will likely be with us for generations. Rising and falling numbers will be part of our future for our lifetimes at least," he said.
FLiRT COVID variants driving new casesThe recent minor uptick in COVID cases appears to be due to several new subvariants called FLiRTs.
They are descendants of the now-dominant JN.1 variant, which is itself a descendant of omicron but with certain additional mutations. Members of the FLiRT group include KP.2, KP.3 and JN.1.7.1.
"The FLiRT variants are named after their specific mutations — Furin-like cleavage site, L452R, and T478K. Silly I know, but the name has stuck," said Hunter.
While data is limited, Hunter said "there is no evidence so far that these variants are any more harmful than previous variants and may even be less so."
Al-Aly was more cautious, saying it's too early to tell if the new FLiRT variants are more or less harmful than previous variants.
"We are still learning about the new variants KP.1, KP.2, KP.3, LB.1; there is some evidence that some of these are more transmissible and may be more immune evasive. This may explain the growth advantage and the uptick in hospitalizations in some regions. But more data is needed before we have more definitive answers," he said.
What's causing the summer COVID surge?
The evidence so far points to falling population immunity to COVID.
"Sterilizing immunity following an infection or vaccination only lasts four to six months on average, so immunity gained from infections during winter or the autumn vaccination campaign will have already been lost for the most part," said Hunter.
Most people's immunity to COVID comes from a mix of infections and vaccine. This so-called hybrid immunity has given better protection against infection and severe disease than either alone.
Hunter suspects most current reports of COVID hospitalizations in the UK are older or vulnerable people, because the only testing and reporting done is from people seeking medical care.
Hunter emphasized that elder people, and those at higher risk of severe COVID infections, should take extra precautions to prevent infections.
"So if you are a 75 year old and had your autumn booster last year, avoided infection over winter and then did not to take up the spring booster you would now have very little sterilizing immunity left," he said.
"People ask me all the time: Can one still get long COVID with the new variants and the answer is very likely yes," said Al-Aly.
Edited by: Martin Kuebler
This article was first published on 5th July 2024. It has been updated on 15th August 2024 to reflect new data on COVID deaths, positive tests, hospital and ICU admissions.
A new type of mpox called "clade 1b" appears to be deadlier and able to spread from person-to-person more easily than previous forms. Mortality rates are as high as 10% of infections.
Mpox, formally known as monkeypox, is an infectious disease caused by the monkeypox virus.
Clade 1b mpox was first detected in Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in central Africa, where it started spreading in September 2023.
Infections have since been reported in Cameroon, the Central African Republic (CAR), and Rwanda. New cases in Uganda and Kenya in early August 2024 were also linked to clade 1b.
The World Health Organization on Wednesday declared the spread of mpox to be a global public health emergency, the second time in two years it has categorized the virus as such.
In a post on social media platform X in early August, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said that because a "deadlier strain of mpox spread to multiple African countries," the WHO, Africa CDC and local governments were "scaling up the response to interrupt disease transmission."
Between the beginning of 2022 and July 28, 2024, a total of 37,583 cases and 1,451 deaths from mpox have been reported in 15 African countries, according to data from Africa CDC.
What are mpox clades?Mpox is separated into two different clades: clade I and clade II.
The more virulent and deadlier clade I is endemic in the Congo Basin in central Africa. Clade II is endemic in West Africa.
Clade II is the type that caused the global outbreak that began in 2022. Infections from clade II mpox are less severe, with more than 99.9% of people infected surviving the disease.
Clade I strains cause more severe illness and deaths, with mortality rates of around 3%. But health experts in the DRC say the mortality rate from strain clade 1b can be as high as 10% among children.
The clade 1b strain causes skin rashes across the whole body, unlike other strains where lesions and rashes are usually limited to the mouth, face and genitals.
Both mpox clades are spread by close contact with an infected person. That includes talking and breathing near an infected person — via so-called "droplets", as we learned during the COVID pandemic.
Mpox can also be transmitted sexually — in fact, sex is one of the main transmission routes — but health experts do not describe the disease as a sexually transmitted infection (STI).
Clade 1b mortality rates high in DRC childrenDRC has been hit particularly hard by cases of clade 1b mpox cases. More than 13,000 people have been infected.
The vast majority of deaths (85%) were in children under 15 years of age — they accounted for 68% of cases. The disease is more common among males, who accounted for 73% of all cases reported.
Most countries are yet to specify the strains causing suspected mpox infections.
Mpox situation in Africa 'high risk'While mpox is moderately transmissible and dangerous, the fatality rate has been much higher on the African continent compared to the rest of the world.
"Despite a safe and effective vaccine and antiviral treatment against mpox, these are not readily available to most [African Union member states]. Thus, we have listed the risk level as high," wrote Africa CDC in a report on July 30, 2024.
Between January and the end of July 2024, a total of 14,250 cases (2,745 confirmed; 11,505 suspected) and 456 deaths were reported from 10 African countries.
This represents a 160% and 19% increase in the number of cases and deaths respectively in 2024 compared to the same period in 2023.
According to the report, DRC is the hotspot of mpox cases, accounting for 96.3% of all cases and 97% of all deaths reported this year.
The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC),said on July 29, 2024, the risks to the European region are "very low."
This article, which was originally published on August 8, was updated on August 15, 2024 to reflect the WHO's declaration that the spread of mpox was a public emergency.
Edited by: Zulfikar Abbany
Primary source:Report: "Mpox Situation in Africa" (Africa CDC, July 30, 2024) https://africacdc.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/MPox-Situation-in-Africa.pdf
A detailed chemical study of Stonehenge's central monolith has upended understanding of the British monument's mysterious origins, suggesting one of its central stones was transported from northern Scotland.
The findings more than triple the distance that the five-square-meter, six-ton sandstone slab might have traveled, compared to previous assumptions.
The 5,000-year-old neolithic stone circle is a treasured part of Britain's archeological heritage, visited by more than a million people each year, a site for annual solstice celebrations and most recently the subject of a controversial climate protest.
But how the structure was built remains uncertain.
Until last year, the Altar Stone was described as a 'bluestone' despite being found to be sedimentary sandstone thought to have originated from a deposit near the Brecon Beacons in Wales.
Along with smaller dolerite and rhyolite bluestone boulders from the Mynydd Preseli deposits on the country’s west coast, it has long been thought that ancient Britons transported these rocks 140 miles to construct Stonehenge. The site also features large slabs of locally-sourced sandstone.
But a report from the University of Aberystwyth last year found the Altar Stone's composition was fundamentally different from the sandstone of Wales, with its authors predicting an origin in northern Britain.
On a recommendation from the Aberystwyth team, tiny fragments of the Altar Stone were sent to the other side of the world – Western Australia – where a PhD student at Curtin University put them under the microscope.
"Rock DNA" uncovers the origins of Stonehenge's Altar StoneStonehenge's large, central Altar Stone lies embedded in the earth beneath two larger sarsen sandstone blocks, which were sourced from the local Wiltshire region along with the other large upright stones that form the monument's outer circle.
But when the Aberystwyth researchers led by geologist Richard Bevins identified the possibility of a different origin for the Altar in 2023, it took a Welsh expat working on the other side of the world to fill in the gaps.
"I grew up kind of wandering those [Preseli] hills, much like, maybe, Neolithic Britons did thousands of years ago, and in some way that must have inspired me," said Anthony Clarke, a geologist originally from South Wales who currently works at Curtin University's Timescales of Mineral Systems group in Perth.
Clarke and his colleagues performed an isotopic analysis of tiny decaying uranium fragments within the Altar Stone's crystals.
This process fires a laser into the rock slivers, measuring the ratio of uranium and lead released by the stone.
Using these measurements, Clarke and colleague Chris Kirkland – a Scotsman also working at Curtin – used an extensive geological database of the UK’s rock deposits to match the Altar Stone with the Orcadian Basin, about 850 kilometers north of Stonehenge.
"By measuring the isotopic ratios of uranium and lead within these little crystals, we have miniature 'clocks'," said Kirkland.
"These clocks are very handy because they tell us about the original age of the material that was eroded to produce our sandstone (...) we can look at lots of different crystals within the Altar Stone and build up an 'age fingerprint', much like DNA. It's like DNA for our rock."
Stonehenge: a story of seafaring trade?Hauling a six-ton rock overland for more than 1000 kilometers would have been a remarkable feat six thousand years ago.
Instead, the researchers say the Altar Stone was probably transported over water.
"We initially thought it had to have been moved by ice – it's just such a long distance for humans to transport. But if we look at ice flow directions during previous ice ages in the UK, ice was actually moving even further away from southern Britain," Clarke said.
"If you look at overland transport of the Altar Stone, they would have to have passed some formidable barriers: rivers, the heavily forested nature of prehistoric Britain, the marshy boggy landscape and the mountains standing in the way, from northern Scotland (...) which then leaves us with a marine transport route."
Clarke points to evidence of sea-based trade, shipping and social connections throughout the British Isles at the time of Stonehenge's construction as supporting the ocean transport hypothesis.
It's similar to recent studies by archaeologists that uncovered the existence of an extinct branch of the Nile. Their analysis found the extinguished channel would have passed right by the site of many of the pyramids, indicating water transport was used by the Ancient Egyptians to transport the huge quantities of stone needed for their construction.
Clarke expects the water-transport hypothesis will draw a mix of responses from the archeological community but is confident this new Stonehenge study will help focus the search for the true source of the material used at the ancient site.
"I'm sure there's going to be a mixture of amazement and perhaps skepticism," Clark said.
"But this is something we welcome going forward, to really narrow down the source of the Altar Stone, perhaps to the individual outcrop or even quarry it might have been sourced from."
The new findings were published in the journal Nature.
Edited by: Derrick Williams
Primary source:Clarke et al (2024). A Scottish provenance for the Altar Stone of Stonehenge. Nature. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07652-1
Additional sources:Bevins et al. (2023). The Stonehenge Altar Stone was probably not sourced from the Old Red Sandstone of the Anglo-Welsh Basin: Time to broaden our geographic and stratigraphic horizons? Published in Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jasrep.2023.104215
Bradley, Richard (2024). Beyond the bluestones: links between distant monuments in Late Neolithic Britain and Ireland. Antiquity. https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2024.3
Ghoneim et al (2024). The Egyptian pyramid chain was built along the now abandoned Ahramat Nile Branch. Communications Earth & Environment. https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-024-01379-7
West Nile virus cases are rising in Europe and the United States as the mosquito-borne infection reaches its seasonal peak.
Data from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) shows 69 cases had been reported across eight countries by the end of July, with eight deaths reported across Greece, Italy and Spain.
The number of infections is consistent with the ECDC's expectations, though Greece and Spain's cases are higher than previous transmission seasons.
More than 100 cases across 26 US states have been reported so far in 2024.
Historically, August has been the most severe month for West Nile infections in the US. Nearly 28,000 cases and 3,000 deaths from the virus have been reported over the last 20 years, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
What is West Nile virus?West Nile virus — or WNV — is a single stranded RNA orthoflavivirus in the same genus as dengue, yellow fever and Zika. Many of these viruses can pose severe health risks to infected humans.
How does it spread?West Nile virus is spread by the common house mosquito (Culex pipiens), which was originally native to Africa but has spread across the world. It is now found not only in Sub-Saharan and North Africa, but also most of Europe and Central Asia, the northern United States and Canada.
Other Culex species capable of spreading WNV are also distributed across southern regions of the world, including South Asia, the Asia-Pacific and the Americas.
Culex mosquitoes act as WNV vectors that transmit the virus when they bite other animals. As well as humans and mammals, birds are susceptible to infection, and migratory species have helped take the virus global.
What are the symptoms and risks?Health agencies have noted that a WNV infection will be symptomless for many people.
However, in some cases — around 20%, according to the ECDC — a person may develop West Nile Fever, with symptoms including headaches, nausea, fatigue and malaise, and swelling of the lymph nodes. Most of the time, these symptoms will clear within a week, but severe cases may require special medical attention.
Fewer than 1% of cases result in West Nile Virus Disease, a serious infection of the central nervous system that leads to meningitis, encephalitis or acute flaccid myelitis — conditions that can be fatal or result in lifelong complications.
Older age groups, those with high blood pressure or blood disorders, diabetes, kidney disease or alcohol-related illnesses are among the groups most at-risk.
Prevention and treatmentThere is currently no vaccine for WNV, and prevention usually comes down to the use of local control against mosquito exposure.
These measures can include barrier controls, such as wearing body-covering clothing, using mosquito nets and screen doors, or chemical controls such as insect repellents. Individuals and communities can also help restrict environmental conditions that favor mosquito breeding and habitat.
Climate change's role in spreading West Nile virusWhile current case numbers are consistent with previous outbreaks, there are concerns WNV may become more widespread amid future climate change scenarios. In Europe, for example, cases are currently most common in nations close to the Mediterranean Sea.
However, a 2023 study published in the journal One Health found even in best-case climate change scenarios, the "high risk" range for WNV-transmitting mosquitoes could see much of central and western Europe at risk of infection by around 2050.
This phenomenon doesn't just apply to WNV, but to many other vector-borne diseases as well. In March, researchers writing in the Journal of the American Medical Association cited changes to "geographic range, seasonality, and intensity of transmission" of mosquito, tick and rodent borne diseases, as consequences of increasing global temperatures.
Edited by: Derrick Williams
Sources and data:European projections of West Nile virus transmission under climate change scenarios. Published by Zia Farooq et al. in One Health (June 2023). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.onehlt.2023.100509
Infectious Diseases in a Changing Climate. Published by Matthew C. Phillips et al. in JAMA (March 2024). https://doi:10.1001/jama.2023.27724
2024 West Nile virus transmission season. Published by European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (August 2024). https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/infectious-disease-topics/west-nile-virus-infection/surveillance-and-disease-data/monthly-updates
Clinical Signs and Symptoms of West Nile Virus Disease. Published by U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (May 2024). https://www.cdc.gov/west-nile-virus/hcp/clinical-signs/index.html
7:00 am – wake up and check blood sugar. 9:00 am – eat breakfast, calculate carbohydrates, check blood sugar. 11:30 am – eat lunch and take insulin. 1:00 pm – eat a snack, calculate carbohydrates, take insulin. Repeat steps every 1-2 hours, depending on blood sugar levels.
This is what a typical day in the life of approximately 9 million people with type 1 diabetes (T1D) can look like.
"With type 1 you have to think about every decision you make, right from the moment you wake up," says Grace Bennett, who works for the type 1 diabetes charity Breakthrough T1D.
Grace was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes when she was 12.
"If I want to eat a snack, I have to ask myself if I want a snack badly enough, is my blood sugar at a point where I really should be having a snack, am I eating it because I am hungry?," says Grace.
The bodies of people with type 1 diabetes can't produce their own insulin, so they must regularly dose themselves with a synthetic version of the hormone. Living with the daily demands of T1D includes closely monitoring blood sugar and carefully regulating insulin doses.
But what if a single injection of insulin just once a week were enough? Or if the insulin formulation itself could "feel" levels of blood sugar, making hourly checks a thing of the past?
Six new research projects in universities in the US, China and Australia are trying to achieve this as researchers develop newer and "smarter" insulins.
What is type 1 diabetes?Sugar in the blood, also called blood glucose, is the primary source of energy for the body.
When you eat food, the body breaks down most of it into glucose, which is released into the bloodstream. When glucose levels go up, the pancreas releases the hormone insulin. It helps glucose to be used as energy by your cells.
In people with type 1 diabetes, the pancreas either can't produce insulin or produces very little of it. No or low insulin prevents the uptake of glucose in the body's cells, causing it to build up in the bloodstream.
High levels of glucose in the blood are dangerous. If left untreated, they can lead to heart disease, kidney problems, extreme fatigue and other serious conditions.
In 2019, diabetes was the direct cause of 1.5 million deaths globally.
"You have this thing that runs essentially your entire life. At the same time, it's also a largely invisible illness, unless you see my insulin pump or my continuous glucose monitor," says Grace.
Why do we need better insulins?Glucose levels in the blood change constantly. They go up and down depending on your stress levels, whether you have exercised, what foods you have eaten, and levels of other hormones in your body. Even the weather can affect them.
"Insulin-wise, food-wise, exercise-wise, I can be doing things the exact same way as I did the day before. But my blood sugars might look vastly different, depending on hormones or exercise. It's not something you can ever not be thinking about," says Grace.
This makes it very hard for the bodies of people with type 1 diabetes to maintain stable levels of blood sugar, even with the newest technology available to monitor glucose and administer insulin when needed.
"There have been times where I've had to say to myself that I literally don't have an option. There is no 'Oh, I'll skip my medicine because I don't like the way it makes me feel' or 'I need a day off'. That's gonna end in an ER visit and possibly worse," says Grace.
What could "smart insulins" look like?Glucose-responsive insulins (or smart insulins) promise an end to the constant glucose monitoring that can be so burdensome for many people with T1D.
Instead, they could take a pill or inject insulin once a day in the morning that remains inactive in the body until blood sugar levels rise.
Once the smart insulin detects a change in glucose levels, it can "wake up" and stabilize them before returning to an inactive state again.
The effect would be similar to that produced by a functioning pancreas, which only releases insulin when it's needed in the body.
For Grace, the possibility of using glucose-responsive insulins not only would impact the physical aspect of T1D, but ease out the mental burden that comes with daily routine.
"If I knew I was using an insulin that could sense what my blood sugar was and respond, that is less time that I have to think about what I'm doing. I could, for example, go for a walk around the block without having a packet of honey with me just in case I go low," says Grace.
Are we there yet?Although research on smart insulins is still in its early stages, the hope is that one day they can take the pressure off people who currently have to monitor their blood glucose levels multiple times a day.
The Type 1 Diabetes Grand Challenge is funding six projects involving universities from the United States, China and Australia with more than €3 million (£2.7 million) to develop novel insulins.
One of the projects at Stanford University in the US aims to develop an ultra-fast insulin which gets released more quickly in the bloodstream, mimicking a type of insulin cone snails use to immobilize prey.
Another project from Zhejiang University in China hopes to reduce insulin injections to once a week by fine-tuning how the hormone is released from a reservoir in the body.
"If you told 12-year-old me that one day they would be researching insulins that might have the capability to behave like this in the human body, I'd be like 'No way, that's insane'. The progress that's been made in researching these novel insulins or management tools is truly incredible," Grace adds.
Edited by: Derrick Williams
Following the record discovery of hundreds of kilos of Captagon tablets in Germany in December 2023, the trial against four men began in Aachen on Wednesday. They are alleged to have sold tablets worth more than €58 million ($63 million) abroad.
Captagon, commonly known as "poor man's cocaine," has emerged as the drug of choice among young adults throughout the Middle East and North Africa.
The 2023 bust in Germany indicates the drug could be more common in European countries than previously thought.
Captagon was made illegal in 1986 in most countries and discontinued in medical markets. However, an illicit version of Captagon emerged in eastern Europe and the Middle East in the early 2000s.
What is Captagon?Captagon is a synthetic drug which was originally manufactured in Germany in the 1960s and 1970s where it was intended to treat attention deficit disorders.
Use of captagon is prevalent among young people in the Middle East, most commonly as a party drug.
Reports also suggest fighters in the Syrian conflict commonly use the drug to boost combat performance and reduce fatigue.
The pill contains fenethylline, a synthetic amphetamine, caffeine, and other stimulants. Fenethylline is metabolized by the body into two molecules: amphetamine and theophylline, both of which are stimulants.
How addictive is Captagon?Its effects on the nervous system are similar to amphetamine. As a psychostimulant, Captagon can induce euphoria, increased wakefulness and increased physical and mental performance.
But heavy use carries risks of impaired cognitive function and cardiovascular defects. It can also be addictive.
A major issue is that some of the pills being produced in illicit labs contain high quantities of fenethylline. The makeup of today's Captagon can vary wildly, and the lack of knowledge increases the risk of them containing toxic chemicals.
Where is Captagon made?Syria has become the largest producer and exporter of Captagon over the last decade, leading experts to name it the Middle East's narco state.
A UK government statement estimated that 80% of the world's Captagon is produced in Syria.
Captagon's popularity skyrocketed in Syria following the 2011 Arab Spring protests. Investigative reports by major media outlets like the BBC have revealed how the Syrian drug industry facilitates all stages of Captagon production and smuggling.
Syrian President Bashar Assad has denied any organized efforts by his government to profit from the drug.
With severe international sanctions in place since the outbreak of the Syrian civil war in 2011, Captagon has become an economic lifeline for the Syrian government. In 2021 alone, the Captagon drug trade had an estimated worth of $5.7 billion (€5.35 billion) in Syria.
The drug is predominantly exported to Gulf countries and neighboring Iraq and Jordan, often hidden in products like grains and fruits.
Hezbollah in Lebanon, a close ally of the Assad regime, is also reportedly a large manufacturer of the drug.
Where is Captagon exported?Captagon has become a major concern for countries in the Middle East like Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.
All surrounding countries have strict anti-drug laws, with harsh penalties for those caught in the trade. However, Captagon is still smuggled in large quantities from Syria and Lebanon.
Jordan is a serious player in the fight to stem the illegal trade. The country's foreign minister, Ayman Safadi, announced in July that more than 65 million Captagon pills had been seized over the last two years.
The Jordanian army has reportedly instituted a "shoot-to-kill" policy against drug smugglers along its border with Syria.
In August 2022, Saudi authorities seized over 46 million pills being smuggled in a shipment of flour passing through the Riyadh Dry Port.
Is Captagon spreading elsewhere? Reliable statistics on the use of Captagon are nonexistent, and authorities remain blind to how widespread the drug is around the world.
However, there are rising concerns Captagon is increasingly becoming an issue for European countries as well.
A recent report from the European Monitoring Center for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA) suggests Europe could become a key transshipment area for Captagon bound for the Middle East. The 2023 bust in Germany gives credence to the report.
The report states that around 127 million tablets (1,773 kilograms) of the drug were reportedly seized by EU member states from 2018 to 2023. The largest seizure of 84 million tablets was in Salerno, Italy, in 2020.
Captagon is reportedly also being produced in the EU, predominantly in illegal laboratories in the Netherlands. The drug is most commonly produced from amphetamine powder.
The EMCDDA report also underlines the need for coordinated EU action to tackle the production of Captagon within the EU, and prevent the EU being used as a transshipment zone for Captagon produced in the Middle East.
At the time of writing, no data was available on the estimated usage of the drug in EU countries and the Middle East.
This article was first published on September 19, 2023. It was updated on August 14, 2024 to reflect the beginning of the Captagon trial in Aachen, Germany.
Edited by: Sushmitha Ramakrishnan
A vast reservoir of water may be hiding beneath the surface of Mars, within the crevices of igneous rocks, enough to form a global ocean, a new study has revealed.
Scientists have based these findings on seismic data gathered by NASA's InSight lander which helped decode the interior of Mars with a seismometer from 2018 to 2022.
The water is believed to be located 7.2 to 12.4 miles (11.5 to 20 km) below the Red Planet's dusty surface, according to the research published on Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
What have scientists found?The water would have most likely trickled from the surface billions of years ago when Mars had rivers, lakes and possibly oceans, said the lead scientist, Vashan Wright of the University of California San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
"At these depths, the crust is warm enough for water to exist as a liquid. At more shallow depths, the water would be frozen as ice," Wright said.
If the location of InSight at Elysium Planitia near the planet's equator is representative of the rest of the Martian territory, the underground water would be enough to fill a global ocean a mile or so deep, he added.
"On Earth what we know is where it is wet enough and there are enough sources of energy, there is microbial life very deep in Earth's subsurface," Wright said.
"The ingredients for life as we know it exist in the Martian subsurface if these interpretations are correct."
Too deepWater would be a crucial resource if astronauts are ever to be placed on Earth's planetary neighbor or to establish a long-term settlement.
Mars has water at its polar regions and sub surfaces in the form of ice.
However, the depth of the apparent underground liquid water would make it difficult to be reached.
It would take drills and other equipment to confirm the presence of water and look for any potential signs of microbial life.
"Drilling to these depths is very challenging. Looking for places where geological activity expels this water, possibly the tectonically active Cerberus Fossae (a region in the northern hemisphere of Mars), is an alternative to looking for deep liquids," the study's co-author Michael Manga of the University of California, Berkeley, said.
He stressed that concerns about protecting Mars' environment would have to be addressed.
dvv/jsi (AP, Reuters)
Mars has a massive, liquid water ocean, according to new analysis of data from NASA's retired InSight lander. InSight was launched in 2018, with a mission to record seismic activity on the Red Planet and quickly detected that Mars was still alive.
The new analysis is yet another piece of evidence to suggest that water wasn't vaporized when the planet lost its atmosphere billions of years ago, or that water is confined to the polar ice caps. But accessing the water is practically impossible.
Instead of being a surface ocean, the water is distributed throughout layers of rock, starting at least 11 kilometers (6.8 miles) beneath the planet's crust.
Calculations made by researchers from the University of California San Diego and Berkeley estimate there's enough liquid water infused through the rock to create a planet-wide ocean spanning two kilometers in depth.
But with no drill capable of burrowing that far on Earth, there's little hope of achieving the feat on Mars.
Using InSight's seismic data to detect waterIn the absence of technology to drill deep into Mars's mantle, the scientists said they analyzed wave data to understand the composition of the planet's crust and the material held inside.
That data was collected by the Mars InSight lander during its four-year mission, which ended in December 2022.
Among its data collection were recordings of so-called 'Mars Quakes' and meteor impacts that cause surface motion on the planet and InSight recorded the speed that seismic waves travel during these events.
The research group used rock physics models to calculate the properties of Mars' crust when these fast-travelling waves pass through.
"The goal is to connect what's inside the rock to the speed of sound," said Vashan Wright, a geophysicist from UC San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography, who led the analysis. "The more dense the rock, the faster the speed of sound will go in. You add in some liquid water, the speed will go up. If you crack it, the speed will go down."
Rather than expecting to find liquid water beneath the surface, Wright and colleagues took an "agnostic" approach to their search — expecting to find anything from 0% to 100% water, or water spread throughout rock layers.
The InSight data suggests that any water on Mars in its ancient past moved underground, forming an aquifer, much like groundwater on Earth.
"There are deep and long-standing questions on Mars, that [this study] helps us answer — it gives us clues into a water cycle that is unaffected by humans," Wright says.
Where there's water, is there life?Wright's group is not the first to find the potential for liquid water to exist on Mars.
In 2022, Caltech researchers used the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to study salt deposits on the planet's surface, estimating that water persisted until as recently as two billion years ago.
Studies of the northern polar ice cap had also suggested liquid water might exist beneath the frigid surface, but a recent investigation quelled those findings as a possible misinterpretation of radar measurements.
A decade ago, NASA studies showed water may occasionally flow on the planet's surface.
That's exciting for scientists still searching for evidence of life on Mars. As on Earth, liquid water is considered an essential ingredient to allow life to evolve.
"Water seems to be essential for life," Wright says. "What we know about life and water at depth is that on Earth you have life surviving in very 'harsher' conditions than it is at the surface. If you find water deep down, it does not mean life, but it means the possibility exists."
Data from the study are published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Edited by: Zulfikar Abbany
Primary source: Liquid water in the Martian mid-crust. Published by Vashan Wright et al. in PNAS (August 2024) https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2409983121
The discovery of 700,000-year-old bone fragments on the volcanic Indonesian island Flores suggests the smallest known human species was even shorter than previously thought.
An analysis of fossilized remains of two teeth and an upper arm bone — called the humerus — of an extinct hominin species called Homo floresiensis have been published today in the journal Nature Communications.
These pint-sized cousins of our own Homo sapiens species lived on the Indonesian archipelago until around 50,000 years ago, when they became extinct.
When the first Homo floresiensis specimen was unearthed in Flores' Liang Bua cave in 2003, archaeologists were struck by how small this species likely was — an adult would have stood at 106cm (3'6), which is about as tall as a modern four-year-old.
It inspired them to call the species ‘Flores man' or ‘Hobbit man', owing to its diminutive stature and the popularity of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings films at the time.
But the species' origin and the cause of its short stature remain a mystery. Now, this new discovery has further shaken our understanding of the Flores hominins.
World's smallest humans Finding ancient humans on Flores Island is hard, says archaeologist Adam Brumm from Griffith University in Australia, who was part of the team that made the discovery.
"There's been years and years of digging. [We've been] finding thousands of fossils from other types of animals, [like] Stegodon, Komodo dragons, and giant rats. But it's only this tiny little handful of human fossils that we've found," Brumm said.
About a decade ago, Brumm's research group were chiseling through layers of hardened sandstone in Mata Menge, a site 76km (47 miles) from the Liang Bua site where the first Hobbit man was found, when they first uncovered the new humerus.
It took a moment to realize what they'd found, but surprise quickly turned to delight.
"We weren't really sure what it was," Brumm said, "but it was quite similar to the fossils from Liang Bua cave, which is on the same island.”
Analysis confirmed the humerus to belong to an individual H. floresiensis who lived around 700,000 years ago.
Now, fresh comparisons to other specimens found the humerus to be the smallest ever recorded from any hominin species found.
The individual H. floresiensis was about one meter (3'3) in height. The authors say this indicates the species did not change in physical features much before it went extinct 50,000 years ago.
"Now we have these three extra fossils… when we move forward 650,000 years in time, the species had not changed that much … you can see that there's definitely an ancestral relationship with the earlier species," said Brumm.
Did the Hobbits of Flores shrink over time?Flores Island's Hobbit man have been puzzling archeologists since their first discovery.
Some theories suggest the species was already a small sized hominin before it landed on the island.
The study authors say their research supports a different theory that Hobbit men were descendants of a larger bodied species of humans that shrank over time.
"[We think they] migrated from the continent, getting stuck on this remote island of Flores and then [undergo] dwarfing through time following this principle known as the ‘Island Rule'," said Brumm.
‘Island Rule', he explained, is a phenomenon where large-bodied mammals become isolated on islands and smaller over time many generations.
But if this was the case, archaeologists would have predicted finding another Flores hominin of an intermediate height between Homo erectus and Homo floresiensis, said Susan Larson, Stony Brook University, US, who was not involved in the study.
"The fact is this [specimen] is as small, if not smaller, than the Liang Bua [specimen], suggesting that the dwarfism happened very rapidly and was maintained for hundreds of thousands of years," said Larson.
Larson says it's hard to trace their evolution for certain because there is a possibility the new fossils could be of an ‘outlier' individual.
"When you have one isolated specimen it's a possibility that you've got an oddball. [However,] the fact that this humerus is very similar to the LB1 humerus makes me think this was pretty typical of the species," she said.
More Hobbit bones requiredMatt Tocheri, an anthropologist specializing in human origins at Lakehead University in Canada, said the study adds to the mystery surrounding the origins of Hobbit man.
"The question is whether it is a dwarfed descendant of Homo erectus, a dwarfed descendant of some other early species of Homo (like Homo habilis), or simply the descendant of small-bodied early species of Homo. I think this question remains unanswered," Tocheri told DW via email.
The issue, he said, is that there is too little archeological evidence of Hobbit man to know their history and their origins.
"These authors argue that the 'dwarfing' must have therefore occurred earlier on Flores. Sure, that might be the case, but maybe there was no dwarfing at all or perhaps only a slight size reduction. We simply can't say for certain yet," said Tocheri.
Filling in the gaps with more specimens would help expand the history of Hobbit man, but doing so will take time — and luck.
Edited by: Fred Schwaller
Source:
Kaifu et al (2024). Early evolution of small body size in Homo floresiensis. Nature Communications.
The men's Olympic triathlon planned for Tuesday has been postponed over concerns about water quality in Paris' Seine river, where the swimming portion of the race was supposed to take place.
The event has been postponed to Wednesday, which is the same day the women's competition is also scheduled to take place. However, both events are subject to water tests desmonstrating that the Seine is safe to swim in.
Questions also remain about the women's and men's 10-kilometer (6.21-mile) marathon swimming races, which are due to be held in the Seine on August 8 and 9.
Water contamination in the Seine has been a controversial topic in recent weeks. A triathlon training session due to be held in the Seine was cancelled on Monday, which is the latest event to be scuttled by water pollution.
JeChieDansLaSeinePollution in the Seine is no new controversy — swimming in the river has been illegal for more than 100 years due to health concerns. The first ban came into effect in 1923, causing swimmers during the 1924 Paris Olympic games to compete in swimming pools.
Most of the city's wastewater has been flowing into the Seine since the ban came into effect. Leaking and overflowing sewage systems are the main source of pollution.
French authorities have been working to clean up the water for the 2024 Paris Olympic Games, spending €1.4 billion ($1.5 billion) on improving water quality.
The goal was to cut bacterial contamination by 75% before the first Olympic swimming event, but the city has so far been unsuccessful in quelling the concerns of athletes and local Parisians.
Parisians disgruntled at the project's costs pledged to protest poo in the Seine en masse, led by #JeChieDansLaSeineLe23Juin, which tranlastes as # I shit in the Seine on June 23.
Despite this campaign, Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo swam in the river earlier in July in a bid to demonstrate the Seine's cleanliness first-hand.
Seine E. coli levels a health concernWater tests from the Eau de Paris monitoring group showed levels of Escherichia coli (E. coli) in the river were significantly higher than is safe to humans over the last weeks.
Recent rainfall over Paris has made the issue worse — heavy rains often cause levels of E. coli and other bacterial colonies in rivers and lakesto rise.
In a statement, organizers said that the heavy rain over Paris on Friday and Saturday had compelled them to "reschedule the event for health reasons."
E. coli is often linked to fecal matter in water and can indicate contamination from sewage. Even a mouthful of contaminated water containing high levels of E.coli can lead to diarrhea, urinary tract infections, pneumonia or sepsis. Skin rashes and ear or eye pain are also common.
Waterborne diseasesE. coli infections are not the only concern, however. Leptospira, transmitted by rodent urine, can be found in contaminated water and can cause severe kidney disease.
Infections from other waterborne bacteria like cyanobacteria and enterococci can also cause gut-related health problems.
And then there are parasites like cercarial larvae, often found in water populated by waterfowl, which can cause itchy skin rashes.
Seth Rider, one of 55 triathletes entered in the men's race, has been taking unconventional measures to prepare for exposure to bacteria.
"We know that there's going to be some E. coli exposure, so I just try to increase my E. coli threshold by exposing myself to a bit of E. coli in your day-to-day life," the US athlete said in a press conference on Saturday.
"Just little things throughout your day, like, not washing your hands after you go to the bathroom and stuff like this," he said.
Other Olympic athletes have suffered long-term from swimming in contaminated waters, however. Emma Frodeno (née Snowsill), an Australian triathlon athlete, retired in 2014 after struggling with health problems related to swimming in polluted water at a World Cup event.
Edited by: Timothy Jones
If you've ever dealt with head lice, you'll know how difficult it is to get rid of them.
There's a range of products in pharmacies — from special combs to shampoos — but sometimes it's not enough.
You need to understand how they live, spread and survive to beat them to get rid of them once and for all.
What are head lice?The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention describes head lice as insects the size of a sesame seed.
Lice feed on human scalp blood. When they suck blood, they release a spit that can cause an allergic reaction and an itchy sensation. They live for about 30 days.
Female lice can lay up to eight eggs per day. They crawl — they cannot jump and do not fly.
Unlike body lice, head lice are not dangerous and do not carry diseases.
How do lice spread?Lice spread through direct contact — they crawl from one head to another.
They can also spread via scarves, combs, towels, hair ties, pillows, sheets, and coats — almost anything that's had contact with an infested person's hair.
"If they fall off a head, they can survive for 48 hours on a surface without feeding. As soon as someone enters the room, they will move toward him or her to feed," said Rosario Melero, an expert in medical parasitology at the Fundación iO in Madrid, Spain.
Can lice survive in water?Yes, lice can survive for several hours in water. In fact, you can even get them at swimming pools.
"Their body allows them to float," Melero said, adding that they "find it much easier to cling to a head" when hair is wet.
Who is most at risk of getting lice?Children are most at risk of getting lice.
"[Kids] don't have hormonal changes," said Melero. And lice like that.
They also have much thinner skin than adults, which makes it easier for a louse to bite.
"Maximum efficiency, minimum effort," said Melero. "But it also helps that [kids] have much closer contact with each other [than adults], putting their heads together at school or while playing."
Yael Adler, a dermatologist in Berlin, said that girls, who often have longer hair than boys, are more likely to get them. "Lice have it easier, moving from one strand to the other [when hair] is long," said Adler.
Similarly, in families it is often the mothers who get lice from their kids, not the fathers.
"[Mothers] are usually the ones who delouse their children and often have long hair," said Melero.
But that can be true for anyone — of any gender — with long hair, who helps children with lice.
Does it help to wash your hair more regularly?No. Melero said clean hair makes it easier for lice to reach the scalp.
Why are lice so hard to get rid of?One of the main problems is identifying lice and their eggs in the first place — if you can't find any, you might think you're okay.
"There may be only one louse on the scalp that you can't detect. Especially on dark hair. If it lays eggs, it will lay them behind the ears and they are so small that they can be mistaken for dandruff," said Adler.
Melero, meanwhile, said it would help if there was more of a culture of prevention with lice, just as there is with mosquitoes and malaria.
"There are repellents that you can apply to the head to prevent lice from biting or laying eggs. It is also important to use a fine-toothed comb several days after the last time lice were seen on the head to eliminate any hidden eggs," Melero said.
What can you do if you have lice?The most common treatment is insecticidal shampoos. They need to be applied several times to kill all the living lice. But they are less effective against lice eggs, which are called nits. You can apply a silicone oil, soaking the hair and scalp.
"After ten minutes, all the lice will be dead and you can remove them with a nit comb. The whole process should be repeated after eight days in case there are any nits left. It is also recommended that the rest of the family receive the same treatment to avoid any transmission," Adler said.
Wash clothes that have been in contact with lice at 60 degrees Celsius (140 degrees Fahrenheit).
Put any items that can't be washed at high temperatures in a freezer for several hours, or seal them in a bag for a couple of days.
And always consult your family doctor or general practitioner.
Edited by: Zulfikar Abbany
Sources:Parasites A-Z Index, US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention https://www.cdc.gov/dpdx/az.html
Veterinary Parasitology, North Carolina State University https://parasitology.cvm.ncsu.edu/
The World Health Organization says cancer is a "major contributor to global mortality." It projects that the global cancer burden will increase by about 77% by 2050. But at least some forms of cancer can be avoided.
Destiny is in your hands: Don't smokeBeing diagnosed with cancer is a shock that hits you hard. And yet almost half of all cancer cases could be prevented. Smoking alone triggers about every fifth tumor.
The toxic cigarette smoke does not only cause lung cancer but many other kinds of tumors as well. Smoking is the most frequent self-imposed cause for cancer, but not the only one.
Regarding vaping, the science is a bit thin. But a decade-long study published in 2024 suggested that ex-cigarette smokers who vaped were at a greater risk of lung cancer than those who did not vape.
Being overweight increases cancer riskIn second place of cancer-causing agents: obesity. Why does obesity cause cancer? Enhanced insulin levels increase the risk of almost all sorts of cancer, especially when it comes to kidney, gall bladder, and esophagus cancer.
Overweight women produce increasing amounts of female sex hormones in their fat tissue and hence have a higher risk for uterine or breast cancer.
Get off the couch, get active!People who don't move enough are especially likely to get cancer.
Long-term studies show that exercising prevents tumors. Working out lowers insulin levels and prevents you from gaining weight. It doesn't have to be high-performance sport. Even just going for a walk or a bike ride makes a big difference.
Avoiding consuming too much alcoholAlcohol promotes tumors in the oral cavity, the throat and the esophagus.
The combination of smoking and drinking alcohol is especially dangerous and increases the risk of cancer up to a hundredfold.
While drinking one glass of wine a day is healthy and supports the cardiovascular system, you shouldn't drink more than that.
Avoid red meat, eat fish insteadLong-term studies suggest there's a correlation between the consumption of red meat and intestinal cancer. Beef is especially dangerous, and pork is thought to cause cancer to a minor degree.
Barbecuing meat can release carcinogenic substances, such as polycyclical aromatic hydrocarbons.
Fish, on the other hand, is said to prevent cancer.
Use sunscreen to avoid skin cancerSunscreens protect against ultraviolet (UV) radiation from the sun. UV rays can damage skin cells and cause different types of cancer, including melanoma.
The higher the "sun protection factor" the better. Some health bodies recommend using at least factor 30. But the protection you need will depend on your personal skin tone and where you are in the world, so it's best to consult a doctor.
Cancer triggered by modern medicineX-rays harm genomes. With an ordinary radiogram the exposure is only minor. But it's a different story for computed tomography, which you should only undergo when necessary. Magnetic resonance imaging is harmless. But did you know that you're even exposed to cancer-causing radiation when you're on an airplane?
Cancer triggered by infectionHuman papillomaviruses can cause cervical cancer.
Hepatitis B and C can cause hepatocytes to degenerate. The bacterium helicobacter pylori settles in your stomach and can cause stomach cancer.
But you can get vaccinated against many of these pathogens and antibiotics help fight helicobacter pylori.
The pill: Better than its reputationThe oral contraceptive pill can increase the risk of breast cancer, but it can also decreases the risk of ovarian cancer. Consult your personal doctor to find out what is best for you.
Some cancer can't be avoidedBut even if you do everything right, you're never completely immune from getting cancer. Half of all cancer cases are caused by the wrong genes or age. Brain cancer is particularly likely to be inherited.
This article was originally published March 12, 2018. It was updated July 12, 2024.
Are you a "night owl" or a "morning lark" — do you get up early to seize the day or stay up working late into the night? Whether you think it's a preference, a habit, or just the way you are, it's your "chronotype".
And a study suggests your chronotype can impact your general cognitive skills. The found night owls generally had higher cognitive scores than morning larks.
The UK-based study, published July 11, 2024 in the journal BMJ Public Health, looked at data from more than 26,000 people, who had completed a number of cognitive tests.
The aim was to find out how different aspects of sleep, including duration, patterns, and quality, affected mental sharpness and overall cognitive ability.
What the 'night owl' study foundThey found that sleeping between 7-9 hours a night was optimum for brain function. But they also found that a person's chronotype affected their test scores.
"Adults who [were] naturally more active in the evening tended to perform better on cognitive tests than those who [were] 'morning people,'" said lead author Raha West, Imperial College London, UK, in a press statement. "Rather than just being personal preferences, these chronotypes could impact our cognitive function."
But that didn't mean all morning people have worse cognitive performance. "The findings reflect an overall trend where the majority might lean towards better cognition in the evening types," said West.
What's more, your chronotype is not set in stone — you can adapt, either way. And simply getting a good night's sleep can improve your cognitive performance, too.
The science of sleep chronotypesChronotypes are not permanent — they can shift over our lifetimes.
"Children tend to be morning types, adolescents and young adults shift towards being evening types, and older adults often revert to being morning types," said Feifei Wang, a sleep expert at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, Hungary.
But Wang said there was clear evidence that our preferences for sleep and activity times were persistent, even when we shift time zones.
"A combination of genetic, hormonal, environmental, and lifestyle factors determines whether a person is more active in the morning or evening, and these factors interact to shape an individual's chronotype," said Wang, who was not part of the new study.
Chronotypes are partly related to differences in our circadian rhythms — the body's biological clock, which runs essential functions, such as sleep and metabolism.
Genes involved in a person's circadian rhythm, include genes called "CLOCK", "PER", "CRY". They have a strong impact on chronotype. They "influence whether a person is a morning or evening type," Wang told DW.
But you can train yourself to be a morning or evening type.
"We've shown undergraduate students can advance their chronotype by almost two hours over two years," said Ignacio Estevan, a sleep expert at Universidad de la República in Montevideo, Uruguay. Estevan was also not involved in the new study.
'All-nighters' reduce academic test performanceEstevan has researched the association between chronotypes and school grades. He has found that test performance in night owls and morning larks depended on when during the day you tested them for your study.
"We found that late chronotypes had worse academic performance compared to early chronotypes in the morning shift, and not in the afternoon shift," Estevan told DW, adding that his research contributed to a body of evidence showing that school start-times have an impact on children's academic performance.
Some experts argue that better alignment between school timing and students' biological rhythms would enhance their opportunities later in life.
Ultimately, said Estevan, test and cognitive performance depended on good quality sleep. Studies tend to show that people who sleep longer perform better in tests.
Estevan said that can be explained by the importance of sleep for learning and good cognitive functioning. His research has found that doing an 'all-nighter' to revise last-minute has a bad effect on test scores.
"Around 15% of the students [in our study] did not sleep before the test, and they had the worst performance," said Estevan.
So, what's the best way to get a good night's sleep? Wang recommended keeping "a regular sleep schedule, have a dark and quiet environment to sleep in, try to relax, do not consume caffeine or stimulants after nightfall, and reduce exposure to light at night, particularly before going to sleep."
Edited by: Zulfikar Abbany
Primary source:Sleep duration, chronotype, health and lifestyle factors affect cognition: A UK Biobank cross-sectional study; published by Raha West, Daqing Ma et al. in BMJ Public Health (July 2024) https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjph-2024-001000
So, there's speculation about US President Joe Biden's health. Many "experts" have delivered their verdicts on Biden's fitness for a second term in office. Is Biden hiding dementia? There's no way of telling by remote diagnosis.
But presidents and their challengers are loath to be explicit about their health. They assume, rightly or wrongly, that the electorate wants strong, healthy leaders. So, they keep schtum. And that can create more speculation.
In a historical review, the researchers concluded that [several] presidents hid their "infirmity outright or otherwise minimize[d] its severity."
Before we take a look, let's first clear up that speculation about Biden.
Joe Biden (In office 2021-): His official 'health summary'In February 2024, The White House published Biden's latest (at time of writing in July 2024) official health summary. It stated Biden had or was being treated for the following:
- A basal cell carcinoma (removed)
- Obstructive Sleep Apnea
- Gastroesophageal reflux
- Stiffened ambulatory gait
Kevin C. O'Connor, official Physician to the President, wrote the president was a "healthy, active, robust 81-year-old male, who remains fit to successfully execute the duties of the Presidency." And there were "no findings consistent with cerebella or central neurological disorder."
Donald Trump (In office 2017-2021): 'COVID? What COVID?'In the fall of 2020, it is alleged that while running for reelection, Donald Trump waited several days before disclosing publicly he had tested positive for COVID-19.
Trump's infection with the respiratory illness was later confirmed by his then-chief of staff, Mark Meadows. The COVID infection combined with hypoxia, a lack of oxygen in the blood.
John F. Kennedy (In office 1962-1963): His secret chronic illnessesJohn F. Kennedy was diagnosed with Addison's disease in the 1940s and suffered from chronic back pain — the result of a war injury — but we usually only hear about his assassination in Dallas in 1963. The thing is, the Addison's could have killed him, too.
Kennedy actively denied rumors he had Addison's disease during his election campaign in 1960 — despite visible symptoms, including discolored skin.
Addison's disease can be a severe form of hormone deficiency, when the adrenal glands fail to produce enough of certain hormones, including cortisol. Cortisol, also known as the stress hormone, is essential for life. If untreated, Addison's disease is fatal.
Dwight Eisenhower (In office 1953-1961): A dickie heartEisenhower's first term in office was tough on him: He had a heart attack in 1955 and an operation for bowel obstruction less than a year later.
The press secretary disclosed Eisenhower had suffered a cardiac event but reduced its severity by describing it as a "mild" coronary thrombosis. He then developed a ventricular aneurysm, a weakness of the heart, which can happen after a cardiac attack. It was kept secret from the public.
Later, having left office, Eisenhower had multiple heart attacks, a stroke, and died of hypertension and heart disease.
Franklin D. Roosevelt (In office 1933-1945): How to hide polioStruck by polio a decade before his presential career, Franklin Roosevelt couldn't keep that secret — not fully, anyway. He used braces and crutches to allow him to stand at a podium during speeches. But the image of "FDR" in his home-made wheelchair and a dog in his lap is legendary.
FDR did, however, conceal a hypertensive heart disease, cardiac failure, and acute bronchitis.
Woodrow Wilson (In office 1913-1921): One stroke after anotherA stroke in 1919 is said to have left Woodrow Wilson not only physically impaired — he was partially paralyzed — but also emotionally impaired for the rest of his life. In fact, Wilson suffered multiple strokes, which he denied publicly — the first, in 1896, left a weakness in his right hand. Another affected his eye sight.
He may have also lived with dyslexia, which back in Wilson's day was considered a disability, as well as psychosomatic disorders which lacked a medical explanation.
Theodore Roosevelt (In office 1901-1909): The bullet can waitTheodore Roosevelt was shot at a rally — but went onto speak publicly for 84 minutes before realizing he should get medical help. He either underestimated the severity of the shot or decided to keep it secret.
It's thought that the bullet was deflected by "Teddy" Roosevelt's 50-page speech and metal glasses case before puncturing the right side of his chest. The bullet was lodged between his 4th and 5th rib.
Grover Cleveland (In office 1885-1889, 1893-1897): Dental surgery for cancerWhen Grover Cleveland developed a cancerous lesion in his mouth, he decided to have surgery aboard a secret yacht. The anesthetist was a dentist who also removed two teeth during the operation. That allowed The White House to later claim Cleveland had had an emergency dental procedure, nothing more.
But the operation impaired Cleveland's speech and resulted in some loss of hearing. He was later said to have experienced depression and died of gastrointestinal disease complicated by heart disease, which was a secret to the very end.
Abraham Lincoln (In office: 1861-1865): A gun got himIt was speculated that Abraham Lincoln had Marfan syndrome, a genetic condition that affects the heart, eyes, blood, and skeleton. Marfan can be fatal if it affects the heart.
The speculations were never confirmed. Closer to the truth was that Lincoln experienced depression. But in the end, he was assassinated by gun-shot.
Edited by: Fred Schwaller
Sources:Presidents of the United States; The White House https://www.whitehouse.gov/about-the-white-house/presidents/
Secret illnesses of the Presidents; University of Arizona Health Sciences Library https://lib.arizona.edu/hsl/materials/collections/secret-illness
The American Presidency Project https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/presidents
Stricken Before Election: Presidential Health Crises From 1880 to 2020, published by Justin Barr and Theodore N. Pappas in the journal Annals of Surgery (January 2022) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10431273/
A week may be a long time in politics — for some, a day is quite enough — but in rocket science, not even a single year would get you passed the first post.
It took Ariane 6 — Europe's flagship heavy-lift rocket — two full years just to get a green-light to be developed. And another eight years being built before its inaugural flight in 2024.
Building a whole new rocket system takes more than just creating a new rocket that shoots satellites into space.
A rocket system not only includes the rocket, often in various constellations, but also its engines, the fuel — which in Ariane 6's case is a new concoction of liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen — a dedicated launchpad, and a manufacturing network to create it all.
Throw a global pandemic into the mix and 10 years is nothing. Here's how Ariane 6's decade in development evolved.
Ariane 6 Timeline: 2014-2016It all started in 2014, with a proposal from European industry: They said they wanted to completely change the way rockets were designed, developed, produced and launched.
The plan was, and still is, for Ariane 6 to be the main workhorse for Europe's space industry, launching European satellites into space on European-built rockets.
The European Space Agency (ESA) took the proposal to its 22 member states. Each had to sign off on the idea.
But the engineers were already hard at work designing the system.
"You need to have your concepts ready. You lay out your production system, how you want to manufacture and assemble your rocket," said ESA's Tina Büchner da Costa, an Ariane 6 launch system architect based at Europe's spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana.
"We had to demonstrate that we could double the launch rate [compared to the rocket's predecessor, Ariane 5], and at the same time reduce the cost," said Büchner da Costa.
In 2015, the first contracts were drawn up: The ArianeGroup, an aerospace company based in France, would produce the rocket, and the French space agency, CNES, got the launchpad.
And in 2016, they got the green light.
Ariane 6 Timeline: 2017-2019In 2017, the ArianeGroup began developing its manufacturing chain and producing the first elements of what's called a Flight Model 1 (FM1) version of the rocket.
During 2018 and 2019, four engines were tested and qualified. First, the Vulcain 2.1 engine, which powers the lower stage of the rocket. Then, the Vinci engine in the upper stage of the rocket — the Vinci engine can reignite in space, allowing Ariane 6 to release satellites at different locations on a single mission.
There was also a solid booster P120 engine, and, finally, a new, auxiliary propulsion unit (APU) — all had to be built, tested and verified, step-by-step.
"On every engine, you have several valves and other components that have to be tested at their own level before you can integrate them into an engine," said Büchner da Costa. "Once you go to full engine testing, that's a huge system that you need to test on a dedicated bench."
They built a brand new test bench at a German Space Agency site at Lampoldshausen to test the entire upper stage of Ariane 6.
Meanwhile, in French Guiana, CNES had been digging a massive hole in the ground where eventually they would build the Ariane 6 launch site.
"It all happens in parallel. You take with the smallest products and keep integrating them into a system that becomes more and more complex," Büchner da Costa said.
Ariane 6 Timeline: 2020-2022The pandemic years: even Ariane 6 took a hit. COVID-19 had an "immense impact" on construction at the launch site in Kourou, said Büchner da Costa.
"There were 700 people working here and within a few days, they got reduced to 50. The supply in materials slowed, logistics broke down, production in Europe slowed significantly," she said. "You don't feel it at the paper stage, but you do feel it in production."
By 2021, however, they had started moving bits of the rocket from Europe to French Guiana and conducted "early combined tests."
They tested a mock up of the central core of the rocket, the cranes that move it to the launchpad, and the cryogenic arms that fuel and cool the rocket at launch.
And — almost as if it's a side note — they also custom-built the ship they used to transport launcher components so it was more climate-friendly: The "Canopée" sailing cargo ship uses a hybrid propulsion system, partially powered by wind.
Ariane 6 Timeline: 2023-2024Things started to pick up again in 2023. "We spent the whole of 2023 marrying the launchpad with the rocket," said Büchner da Costa.
The mainstage was tested in French Guiana: "We fired up the main engine and tested the full flight up to [the rocket's initial] separation," Büchner da Costa said. That's after 2'15'' minutes of flight.
The next part of the flight, where the upper stage goes in orbit, was qualified at the new test bench in Germany, "completely separately."
At the same time, engineers in Switzerland tested the fairing — that's the bit that carries the cargo and, perhaps one-day, a capsule for human-spaceflight — and the separation of the fairing.
"You test your system, step-by-step, in an incremental way, before you add any critical elements," said Büchner da Costa.
They did five complete countdowns and Büchner da Costa was there for them all: "It was really impressive to see, a full success."
A full success up to 2024: the year of Ariane 6's first full mission with cargo, including cubeSats and scientific experiments.
At time of writing in late June 2024, there were six launches planned for 2025, eight for 2026 and by 2027, they aim to achieve a launch rate of 10 per year.
And then keep evolving. Ariane 6 is about versatility, said Büchner da Costa.
"It's die eierlegende Wollmilchsau," she said, but unfortunately, there's no direct English translation. "It's a pig that gives you milk, wool, and lays eggs. That's what we want from Ariane 6. The exciting thing is that [Ariane 6] gives us versatility. We want to fly anywhere."
Edited by: Fred Schwaller
Asteroids and comets were formed about 4.5 billion years ago, during the earliest moments of our solar system.
They orbit the sun, just as planets do. But while it takes a terrestrial year for our planet to fly around the sun, an asteroid can take anywhere between three and six years — they are located in an "asteroid belt" between Mars and Jupiter.
Comets, on the other hand, can spend thousands, if not millions, of years way out in the solar system before coming back round the sun. Others don't even have fixed or "closed" orbits — so, their flightpaths can be quite random.
How long it takes planets and comets to orbit the sunThe duration of planetary orbits ranges widely. Mercury — the closest planet to the sun — has an 88-day orbit, while Earth, the third from the sun, takes 365 days (1 year).
Mars needs almost twice that time to fly around the sun, while Saturn takes 10,759 days (29.4 years). Neptune, the furthest planet from the sun, has an orbit of 60,190 days (164.9 years).
Comet orbit periods have an even wider range. Here's a select few as an example:
- 67P Churyumov-Gerasimenko: 6.6 years
- 1P Halley: 76.1 years
- Hale-Bopp: 4,000 years
- Hyakutake: 40-THOUSAND years!
How asteroids and comets orbitAsteroids and comets have elliptical orbits — in fact, all orbits are elliptical — but there are differences in how elliptical they are.
Planetary orbits, for instance, are almost circular. As are asteroid orbits; and quite stable, too — there's not a lot of variation over time. But a comet's orbit can be what's called "highly eccentric" or even "squashed."
So-called "long-period comets" have orbital periods of more than 200 years. Their orbits can be highly inclined to the ecliptic, and if that's the case, it suggests they are from the Oort Cloud.
The Oort Cloud is about 100,000 astronomical units (AU) from the sun — 1 AU is the distance between the sun and Earth. So, 100,000 times that distance is a long, long way away. The North American space agency, NASA, estimates that these comets can have orbital periods of up to 30 million years.
Some comets are found in the Kuiper Belt, which is just beyond the orbit of Neptune — it's a little closer to Earth but still way out there in the solar system.
Have we ever landed on an asteroid or comet?Yes! More often, we fly by other planets, moons, asteroids and comets. But we have landed on a few comets and asteroids and even retrieved bits of rock and dust and close-up images.
The Japanese Space Agency JAXA was the first to successfully land a spacecraft — Hayabusa — on an asteroid called 25143 Itokawa. It was also the first mission to have a spacecraft take off from an asteroid.
In 2010, after seven years in space, Hayabusa completed its "sample return mission" by releasing a capsule, carrying primitive asteroid rock, down to Earth.
In 2022, JAXA repeated the feat with its Hayabusa 2 mission, which returned 5.4 grams of samples from asteroid Ryugu.
Then, in 2023, NASA's OSIRIS-REx returned a capsule of samples from the asteroid Bennu. So what if it took them three months to open the capsule? (It's true: Two "stubborn" bolts refused to loosen at first.)
Space scientists have also landed probes on comets. NASA's Deep Impact mission was the first, with an "impact" (or planned crash) landing on comet 9P/Temple 1 in 2005.
The first "soft" landing was performed by the European Space Agency's Rosetta mission and its Philae probe, which landed on comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko (a.k.a "Chury") in 2016.
What is the chance of an asteroid or comet hitting Earth?Comets have crashed into Earth before, but asteroids never quite make it. They may be a greater threat to satellites orbiting Earth.
Asteroids enter Earth's atmosphere about once a year. They can be about the size of a car. But they tend to burn up before they hit the surface.
Meteoroids, meanwhile, do make it through the atmosphere. A meteoroid is a small particle from a comet or asteroid. It becomes a "meteorite" if it survives its journey through the atmosphere and lands on the surface.
It's generally thought that asteroids pose no immediate threat to Earth. But a meteoroid measuring about 25 meters (82 feet) could do significant damage on impact if it did hit the ground. NASA says that anything between one and two kilometers could have "worldwide effects."
Comets have an average diameter of between 9 and 40 kilometers (6 to 25 miles). Asteroids can be small rocks or more than 965 kilometers in diameter.
But they don't have to be that big to be a threat: Toutatis is one of the largest known "potentially hazardous" asteroids for life on Earth, and it's only 5.4 kilometers across.
So, why do comets wow us and asteroids scare us?In this writer's opinion, it's all in the look. Because comets are made of ice, rock and hydrocarbons, they produce a spectacular tail when they get close to the sun. They become "active," emitting gases or jets of dust, as their surface warms up and their materials melt and vaporize. It's like Perseid meteor showers — everyone comes out for a glimpse of them.
Asteroids, on the other hand, are made of "inactive" rock and metal. They are solid and stable and a potential source of valuable minerals. But they don't glow with life — they look heavy and brooding instead.
If we've piqued your interest, check out the United Nations' annual Asteroid Day, which takes place on June 30.
Edited by: Clare Roth
Select sources:United Nations' Asteroid Day https://asteroidday.org/about/
The SAO Encyclopedia of Astronomy, Swinbourne University https://astronomy.swin.edu.au/cosmos/l/Long-period+Comets
Hayabusa 1, Institute of Space and Astronautical Science https://www.isas.jaxa.jp/en/missions/spacecraft/past/hayabusa.html
Hayabusa2, JAXA https://global.jaxa.jp/projects/sas/hayabusa2/
Deep Impact, NASA https://science.nasa.gov/mission/deep-impact-epoxi/
Scientists injected two radioactive chips into a live rhino's horns at a South African rhino orphanage June 25, 2024.
The rhino was the first of 20 slated to receive the injection in an effort to stop poaching, which a conservationist at the rhino orphanage called "the best idea I've ever heard."
How the anti-poaching chips workThe chips will do two things: Scientists leading the project told the AFP news agency the chips will set off radiation detectors at border control points, alerting authorities of potentially poached material; they will also render the injected horns poisonous for human consumption, depleting their value on illegal markets, where rhino horns are as valuable as gold.
The pilot initiative, called the Rhisotope Project, is led by researchers in the radiation and health physics unit at South Africa's University of the Witwatersrand.
They told AFP that although the radioactive dose is strong enough to set off alarms, it isn't enough to cause damage to the animals themselves or the surrounding environment.
The injection, which will need to be boosted every five years, does not cause the rhino pain, they said.
Poaching problemEfforts to halt poaching have been ongoing for decades. Conservationists have tried a number of initiatives, such as global trade rules against extinction, but the animals are still being killed.
In 2023, 499 rhinos were killed in South Africa, according to AFP. That's up by 11% on 2022 .
The researchers said they will follow up with the rhinos over the course of the coming years to ensure they are protected and are not experiencing any adverse effects caused by the radioactive chips.
Rhino horn is highly valued in Asia, particularly in Vietnam and China. The material, which is considered therapeutic, is used in traditional medicine.
In South Africa, home to 80% of the world's rhinos, horns have been poached in national and provincial parks and private reserves.
cr/za (AFP)
Italy reported its first-ever case of Oropouche fever, a mosquito-borne disease, on June 15. It’s also the first case ever to be detected in continental Europe. Latin America and the Caribbean have already seen outbreaks this year.
The patient diagnosed in Italy had recently returned from a trip to the Caribbean, Italian newspaper Il Messaggero reported, citing public health authorities.
Oropouche virus disease is transmitted through the bites of infected midges and mosquitos. Although the disease has long been circulating in Central and South America and the Caribbean, some countries have seen a sharp rise in diagnosed cases this year. Brazil has reported more than 5,500 cases so far in 2024, compared to about 840 cases in 2023.
The disease is also spreading to countries that have never detected cases of Oropouche fever before. On June 11, the WHO reported the first-ever outbreak in Cuba, which included some 70 confirmed cases. "This is the first detection of the disease in the country, therefore, the population is likely highly susceptible and there is significant risk of additional cases being detected," the report noted.
Symptoms similar to dengueOropouche fever is caused by the Oropouche virus, which is transmitted most often through the bite of the Culicoides paraensis midge. There is no evidence of human-to-human transmission of the disease.
Symptoms of the disease are similar to dengue, and typically start between four and eight days after the bite. The onset is sudden, and symptoms usually include fever, headaches, pain, chills, joint stiffness, and sometimes nausea and vomiting. Most patients recover in about seven days. According to the WHO, severe cases are rare.
There is no specific vaccine or antiviral treatment available for the disease.
Climate may play a roleOropouche fever is an understudied illness, as the authors of a May 2023 paper published in the journal Infectious Diseases of Poverty noted. As a result, the disease’s epidemic potential and areas of likely spread remain "unexplored."
Although most cases of Oropouche fever thus far have been linked to tropical climate conditions, the authors noted that the lack of available data makes it difficult to draw precise conclusions. For example, some outbreaks have occurred outside the tropical conditions typically associated with transmission events.
Although much remains unclear about the virus and its spread, the authors also noted that vegetation loss and deforestation appear to be associated with outbreaks of the disease.
Edited by: Patricia Szobar
Sources
Oropouche virus disease - Cuba: https://www.who.int/emergencies/disease-outbreak-news/item/2024-DON521
Transmission risk of Oropouche fever across the Americas: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37149619/
China's lunar probe landed safely in the remote steppes of northern China's border region with Mongolia on Tuesday.
It returns bearing the first samples ever taken of rock and soil from the largely unexplored far side of the moon, the side that is never visible from Earth.
"I now declare that the Chang'e 6 Lunar Exploration Mission achieved complete success," Zhang Kejian, the director of the China National Space Administration agency said in a televised news conference shortly after the landing. State TV carried live footage of the vessel touching down.
China's President Xi Jinping sent a message of congratulations to the Chang'e-6 team, saying that the mission was a "landmark achievement in our country's efforts at becoming a space and technological power."
The samples were set to be transported by air to Beijing for further study, according to Chinese broadcaster CCTV.
What are researchers hoping to find and learn? Chinese scientists anticipate that the samples will include volcanic rock that's more than 2 million years old and other materials. Researchers hope to learn more about the differences between the two sides of the moon. They had hoped to collect roughly 2 kilograms (4.5 pounds) of samples.
The probe left Earth on May 3 for what was ultimately a 53-day mission. It both scooped up rocks from the surface and also drilled into the ground for deeper-rooted samples.
The far side of the moon is known to have mountains and impact craters, whereas the side visible from Earth is relatively flat.
Past US and Soviet moon landing missions have gathered samples from the near side of the moon, but only from there.
The payload is "expected to answer one of the most fundamental scientific questions in lunar research: what geological activity is responsible for the differences between the two sides?" said Zongyu Yue, a geologist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, in a statement issued in a journal supported by the academy.
Among other things, scientists are hoping to find evidence of past meteorite strikes.
Longer term, the prospect of identifying usable reserves of ice, and therefore water, on the moon are particularly enticing for the future of space exploration. The resource, crucial to any crewed space mission, is very heavy and cannot practically be launched out of earth's high-gravity atmosphere in large quantities.
As well as being suitable for hydration, water can also be separated into oxygen to breathe and hydrogen that could be used as rocket fuel.
Signs of a new 21st century space raceSeveral major countries have intensified their space activity in recent years, as more cost effective and simpler launch methods become available. The US, Russia, China, India and others have all shown renewed interest in lunar exploration in recent years. China's Chang'e-5 probe successfully collected samples from the near side of the moon in 2020.
NASA administrator Bill Nelson earlier this year expressed mixed feelings on this renewed interest, saying it was unfortunate that the latest "space race" seemed to be taking place amid intensifying global competition, not cooperation.
"I'm glad there has been a resurgence in this [space] race, but of course I would like to see us racing alongside each other and together," said Neil Melville-Kenney, a technical officer at the European Space Agency (ESA) who is working with Chinese researchers on one of the Chang'e-6 payloads.
That said, for now space has been one area where a degree of international cooperation persists even amid global tensions. This is probably best embodied by the continued US-Russian cooperation aboard the International Space Station, even amid Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
msh/rmt (AFP, AP, Reuters)
A study has found a major earthquake 2,500 years ago caused one of the largest rivers on Earth to suddenly change course.
The high-magnitude earthquake completely rerouted the main channel of the river Ganges in what is now densely populated Bangladesh, and completely changed the surrounding landscape.
While it is "normal for river channels to move with time, this was an absolutely extreme event. The river moved to an entirely new area," said lead-author Elizabeth Chamberlain of Wageningen University in the Netherlands.
The study, published in the journal Nature Communications, is the first evidence of a large river delta being completely relocated by an earthquake.
The study authors warn that Bangladesh is vulnerable to big quakes and that it is possible for the Ganges river to relocate again if another high-magnitude earthquake hit the region.
"Although infrequent, the risk of such an event could be huge, especially because Bangladesh hosts one of the most densely populated landscapes on the planet," Chamberlain said.
How an earthquake re-routed the Ganges riverThe Ganges begins as streams in the Himalayas and flows for 2,500km (1,600 miles), eventually combining with other major rivers, including the Brahmaputra and the Meghna.
It's a huge delta river system that empties into a wide stretch of the Bay of Bengal, spanning Bangladesh and India.
As with other rivers, the Ganges periodically changes course due to the natural erosion of its riverbanks.
This process takes decades to occur, but "the Ganges-Brahmaputra river system has moved several times over the past 6,000 years," said Christoph von Hagke of the University of Salzburg, Austria. Von Hagke was part of the study.
The researchers used satellite imagery to spot the former main channel of the river around 100 kilometers south of the Bangladeshi capital, Dhaka.
The team had been exploring the area when they found signs of historical earthquakes — such as vertical dikes of light-colored sand cutting up through horizontal layers of darker mud.
Chemical analysis of the sand and mud showed several eruptions happened at the same time, about 2,500 years ago. The eruptions were estimated to be magnitude 7 to 8 — about the same as the earthquake which hit Turkey and Syria in 2023.
The vast Ganges-Brahmaputra river system is located close to an active plate boundary and is a tectonically active region.
"This proximity brings frequent major earthquakes," said Till Hanebuth, a specialist in geosciences at Coastal Carolina University in the US. Hanebuth was not part of the study.
Bangladesh is particularly susceptible to catastrophic earthquake events due to its proximity to seismic zones.
While the region is not currently thought to be at risk, the researchers said it was possible for an earthquake to be strong enough to re-route the Ganges in the next few hundred to a thousand years.
Ganges re-routing would be "catastrophic for the region"The researchers said their study showed it was entirely possible for delta rivers to be dramatically re-routed if they are hit by high-magnitude earthquakes.
"It was indeed a very extreme event — in fact two extreme events occurred. An earthquake of magnitude 7 to 8 is already extreme, but it caused redirection [known as avulsion] of the main channel of the Ganges," said von Hagke.
Von Hagke said a new event of the same size would be catastrophic for the region because it would hit "a super densely populated region."
River breaching and relocation does not only depend on earthquakes — they can also be caused by extreme weather, said Hanebuth.
"Abrupt river avulsions could be caused by a major monsoon or cyclone flooding event, or the collapse of a major river dam," Hanebuth said, adding that while such could be caused by natural events, they were also "largely human-made."
Can earthquakes be predicted?Von Hagke said that researchers needed to know more about the likelihood of large-scale river avulsion events in the future, particularly those from earthquakes.
The hard part, he said, was that scientists cannot predict when earthquakes will occur, or how big they will be when they do hit.
"For different earthquake scenarios, one could estimate landscape changes and then possible effects on rivers and water masses. But we cannot pinpoint the timing of an event that only happens every few hundred to a few thousand years," von Hagke said.
Chamberlain said, however, that knowing it was possible for earthquakes to completely re-route rivers, and the Ganges in Bangladesh in particular, meant that researchers could now begin to understand and predict how seismic events occur.
"We hope this knowledge can be helpful for hazard planning and mitigation before a modern event," said Chamberlain.
The Ganges is not the only river facing earthquake-related hazards. Others include China's Yellow River, Myanmar's Irrawaddy, the Klamath, San Joaquin and Santa Clara rivers on the US West Coast, and the Jordan river, which spans the borders of Syria, Jordan, the Palestinian West Bank and Israel.
Edited by: Zulfikar Abbany
Primary source:Cascading hazards of a major Bengal basin earthquake and abrupt avulsion of the Ganges River. Published in the journals Nature Communications by E.L. Chamberlain, S.L. Goodbred, M.S. Steckler, et al. (2024) https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-47786-4
In the mountains near gambler's paradise in the US, Las Vegas, people have discovered another "alien" monolith.
It's sparked a fresh wave of monolithic hype, even though there's a perfectly earthly explanation.
The monolith, a stele, was found 30 kilometers from Las Vegas in a barren rocky landscape, near the summit of Gass Peak, reported local police.
And — perhaps — to ensure the rectangular mirror structure was quickly discovered, it was conveniently placed next to a hiking trail.
You can't drive directly up to it by car, but it wouldn't be so mysterious then, would it?
Worldwide imitationThere's been "monolith hype" on social media and other channels, with people voicing suspicions that aliens might have erected the monolith in the US — as one in Wales in March 2024.
When that one was discovered in the Welsh countryside, it made similar headlines.
A resourceful hiker posted a picture of themselves in front of the 3-meter-high shiny object and told The Guardian newspaper that it "looked like a UFO."
The hiker and the newspaper did everything right: They created a mystery about the monolith's origin, using key buzzwords: "eerie" and "UFO", and the news spread around the world.
Aliens are the answer — what else?It is striking that aliens seem to be particularly interested in very remote areas.
Back in 2020, while humans were fighting a small virus called SARS-CoV-2, US officials discovered a monolith in Red Rock County, Utah, while counting sheep. A sensation! Everyone reported on the strange structure in the middle of nowhere.
Soon after, similar objects were discovered in California, Romania, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Turkey, and the German state of Hesse. Often in places where there is mostly one thing: almost nothing!
The fascination with the unfathomableThe unexplained, mysterious, and undiscovered have captivated us since ancient times. Mystical places and things that we (initially) cannot explain arouse our curiosity.
American psychologist W. McDougall said at the beginning of the 20th century that curiosity was the essential core of all types of motivation, and thus the basis for humanity's special scientific and cultural achievements.
Curiosity is an instinct and can be observed in toddlers even before the onset of language. The more remote and unreachable, the greater the curiosity.
The legendary island of Atlantis, the Bermuda Triangle swallowing ships in the western Atlantic, UFOs and aliens, astrology, supernatural powers, or gigantic crop circles — the more inexplicable, the more attractive.
The search for explanationsWe not only want to perceive things but also to understand them. We are conditioned to investigate, to "grasp" and explain things. What remains a mystery to us, what is "unfathomable", we call "mysterious".
"It's the fascination with the unusual," said psychologist Günter Molz at the University of Wuppertal. "Those who advocate unusual theories are 'not normal' in the sense of inconspicuous, boring. They represent an exclusive position and may feel narcissistically gratified," Molz told DW. These people may have an exaggerated need for admiration.
If something is mysterious, we look for plausible explanations — for example, in science, in para- or pseudo-science, in esotericism, in superstition or in religions. All areas tend to claim a certain degree of absoluteness. "Non-scientific explanations also have the advantage of exclusivity," said Molz.
Attention instead of aliensIt may be that an extraterrestrial life form has a heightened interest in the barren rocky landscape in Nevada or Wales. However, in the past, the monoliths turned out to be relatively crude attempts to attract attention.
Immediately after a monolith becomes known, hordes of tourists, onlookers and seekers of meaning flock to the objects. And in their wake, souvenir traders, snack stalls and other soldiers of fortune.
The artist Matty Way was responsible for the first monolith in Utah. When the hype reached its peak, Way identified himself as "The Most Famous Artist". Replicas of the monolith could be ordered from his artist collective for $45,000 (€42,000).
Four amateur artists from California thought it was a great business idea and erected their own monoliths in the Sunshine State. Other copycats followed and so the monolith phenomenon grew.
But the monoliths in Romania, Spain, and Hesse were so badly welded that aliens would probably be ashamed of them.
The downside of the hypeOnce attention is drawn to a mysterious object, which has become much easier through social media, everyone wants to see it or profit from it. Who knows how long it will be on display.
The resourceful explorer from Wales pointed this out straight away: "I can't say how long the object will be there, quite honestly," he said. "Knowing our national parks, they don't think it's funny if someone just puts something up."
He was probably right. After all, the brief joy at the unexpected windfall is quickly followed by the anger of local residents or conservationists in the affected region, who have to witness how the previously untouched landscape is littered and devastated by the crowds.
"We would like to remind public land visitors that using, occupying, or developing the public lands or their resources without a required authorization is illegal, no matter what planet you are from," joked the Bureau of Land Management Utah on X.
Many of the monoliths were soon destroyed or removed by the authorities. As a precautionary measure, the Utah Department of Public Safety concealed the exact location of the monolith so that streams of tourists would not set in motion in the first place and no further objects would be erected in the untouched nature.
This article was originally published in German.
It sounds like the stuff of horror movies, but Japan is seeing record levels of a highly fatal "flesh-eating" bacterial infection.
Official figures show there have been over 1,000 cases of streptococcal toxic shock syndrome (STSS) since January in the country, surpassing the total number recorded last year.
STSS is a rare but serious disease typically caused by infection with the bacteria Streptococcus pyogenes. It initially causes fever and throat infections but can develop very quickly into a life-threatening emergency, causing "toxic shock” and organ failure within days of infection.
"Even with treatment, STSS can be deadly. Out of 10 people with STSS, as many as three people will die from the infection," say the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on their website.
Why are STSS cases rising in Japan?The reason for the sudden rise in STSS cases in Japan remains unclear to health professionals.
"Experts don't know how the bacteria got into the body for nearly half of people who get STSS," according to the CDC.
In March, Japan's National Institute of Infectious Diseases (NIID) also said, "There are still many unknown factors regarding the mechanisms behind fulminant (severe and sudden) forms of streptococcus, and we are not at the stage where we can explain them."
STSS occurs around the world at low levels, but the recent rise in cases in Japan has caused concern among health experts concerned that bacterial infections could spread to other countries.
Currently, there is no indication that STSS is spreading beyond normal levels elsewhere in the world. In the US, for example, the CDC has counted 395 reported cases so far this year, which is similar to the 390 reported at this time last year.
Why is STSS so deadly?Many people carry Streptococcus pyogenes on their skin without ever getting sick, but the bacteria can cause serious STSS if they get into the bloodstream or deep tissue. STSS develops when the bacteria spread into deep tissues and the bloodstream and begin to produce exotoxins. Exotoxins are toxic compounds that destroy cells and tissues in our bodies — hence the term "flesh eating bacteria."
If the bacterial infection gets out of control, it can lead to organ failure and turn fatal. STSS is particularly deadly because of the rapidity of organ failure after infection. After the onset of initial symptoms like fever, aches, and nausea , it only takes about 24 to 48 hours for low blood pressure to develop.
Once this happens, STSS quickly turns much more serious. Heart rate and blood pressure change, and organs like the kidneys or liver begin to fail.
STSS is normally treated in a hospital with antibiotics like ampicillin. However, some strains of Streptococcus pyogenes have shown antimicrobial resistance (AMR) to a range of antibiotic agents.
To prevent the bacteria from spreading further around the body, infected tissues can also be surgically removed.
Is STSS infectious?However, the CDC warns that less severe bacterial infections, like a Group A strep infection, can also turn into STSS. Group A strep bacteria are much more contagious, spreading via talking, coughing, or sneezing or via direct contact with infected skin sores.
STSS is most common in older adults over 65 years old, as well as in people with health factors like diabetes or alcohol use disorders.
Open wounds also increase the risk of developing STSS. Therefore, it is recommended that people with recent surgeries or those who have viral infections that cause open sores (e.g., chickenpox or shingles) cover wounds to reduce the risk of being infected with Streptococcus pyogenes.
The CDC also recommends people avoid contact with others who have Group A strep infections, and receive treatment for them as soon as possible.
Edited by: Derrick Williams
Avid virus-watchers will know that influenza viruses that make the news often feature the letters "H" and "N" in their names, such as H5N1 or H9N2.
Those are examples of "Type A" influenza viruses, classed as highly infectious pathogens and a significant threat to influenza viruses that make the news.
However, there are also B, C and D types, with various subtypes and lineages, many of which are colloquially known as avian/bird, cow and swine flues.
You can forgive yourself for feeling confused because it is confusing, and it's not immediately clear which types of flu risk public health to the extent of the Spanish flu of 1918 or a COVID-style pandemic.
So, here's DW's guide to help you navigate the maze of influenza code. We'll start with those four types of the virus.
The four types of influenzaAs mentioned above, there are four types of influenza: A, B, C and D.
Types A and B cause seasonal, epidemic outbreaks of influenza among humans during winter months. But only type A is known to cause pandemics.
Type A influenza viruses often originate in aquatic birds and spread among bird species, which is then known as avian influenza or bird flu. But they can also spread to other mammals if the virus has the right mutations.
Some strains of the Type A virus H1N1 are endemic (consistently present) in humans, birds and pigs. Annual flu vaccines help protect us against strains of H1N1 viruses, among others.
The A(H1N1)pdm09 viruses, adapted from H1N1, caused the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918, which killed 20-50 million people. The variant has been genetically traced to flu outbreaks in swine populations (swine flu) as recently as 2009.
At the time of writing in June 2024, only two subtypes of influenza A — A(H1N1)pdm09, and A(H3N2) — were co-circulating (at the same time) among humans.
A major outbreak of H5N1 is also currently ongoing in birds and cattle in the US, but there is no evidence yet that it is spreading in humans.
Type C influenza viruses can infect humans and other mammals like pigs but cause mild illnesses in people. Flus due to Type C viruses are rare compared to type A viruses.
And Type D influenza viruses primarily affect cattle. They can spread to other animals, but no human infections have been observed.
The subtypes of influenza A virusesNow, let's unpack those "HxNy" codes. We'll stick to Type A influenzas because those are the ones that use this specific denomination and pose the greatest threat to human public health.
Type A influenza viruses are classified according to two types of proteins found on the surface of the virus: hemagglutinin (H or HA) and neuraminidase (N or NA).
Hemagglutinin and neuraminidase are found in all types of influenza, and they work as a viral team. The hemagglutinin helps the virus attach itself to a cell to infect it, and the neuraminidase releases the virus to allow it to infect other cells. That, in the simplest of terms, is how the virus spreads in your body.
These two proteins determine the "infectivity" and "pathogenicity" of the virus — essentially, how dangerous they are for your health.
There are 130 known H + N combinations. But since viruses are good at "reassortment," a process by which viruses swap genetic information, there is the potential for many more. Reassortment in viruses can happen when, for example, two subtypes of a virus infect the same host (a person or non-human animal) at the same time.
Add to that the fact that new H + N subtypes do emerge in the wild. Until recently, for instance, researchers spoke of 16 hemagglutinin subtypes in influenza, but now two further subtypes are known to exist: H17 and H18 found in two species of bats.
When the H and N numbers are unknown, H takes the variable "x" and N takes the variable "y".
Type B influenza denominationsType B influenza viruses are named according to their lineage. And there are two: Yamagata and Victoria.
The names for Type B influenza viruses aren't as varied as those for Type A because the H + N subtypes in Type B influenza viruses don't appear to vary within their lineage.
However, they can be further defined into clades and subclades, or groups and sub-groups.
B/Victoria influenza viruses, for example, include the V1A clade and sub-clades V1A.1, V1A.2 and V1A.3. B/Yamagata include Y1, Y2 and Y3 clades but no known sub-clades.
Types of influenza to watch out for (if you are human)Influenza viruses originating in animals don't often affect humans, but when it does, we speak of zoonotic transmission. That's the same for any disease where there is a transmission from animal to human-animal or the other way around.
Five subtypes of avian influenza A viruses do cause human infections: H5, H6, H7, H9 and H10 viruses.
Most of the zoonotic forms of influenza, from birds to humans, are A(H5N1) and A(H7N9).
A(H5N6), known as a Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI), and A(H9N2), a Low Pathogenic Avian Influenza (LPAI), have also caused human infections.
As mentioned above, Type C influenza viruses tend only to cause mild illnesses and Type D influenza viruses are not known to affect humans at all.
Edited by: Fred Schwaller
Sources:Types of Influenza Viruses. US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, accessed June 13, 2024 https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/viruses/types.htm
Influenza hemagglutinin and neuraminidase: Yin–Yang proteins coevolving to thwart immunity. Published in the journal Virus, 2019 https://doi.org/10.3390/v11040346
Avian Influenza Type A Viruses. US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, accessed June 14, 2024 https://www.cdc.gov/bird-flu/about/?CDC_AAref_Val=https://www.cdc.gov/flu/avianflu/influenza-a-virus-subtypes.htm
Genetic characterization of a new candidate hemagglutinin subtype of influenza A viruses. Published in the journal Emerging Microbes and Infections, June 2023 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10308872/pdf/TEMI_12_2225645.pdf
Emerging HxNy Influenza A Viruses. Published in Cold Spring Harbor Perspectives in Medicine, February 2022 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8805644/pdf/cshperspectmed-INF-a038406.pdf
It's not often that a dark spot in space illuminates our planet, but that is exactly what professional and amateur astronomers expect to happen in September when a once-in-a-lifetime nova explosion 3,000 light-years from Earth will light up our night sky.
What is a nova explosion?A nova explosion is the dramatic instance of a star exploding as it interacts with another, nearby star. It's a one of many, repeated moments during the long, slow, death of two neighboring stars in the same system.
Astronomers are waiting for the fiery explosion of T Coronae Borealis, also dubbed the "Blaze Star" and known to astronomers as "T CrB".
The system contains two stars — a white dwarf and a red giant. The white dwarf is an incredibly dense remnant of a once larger star. It's about the size of planet Earth but with the same mass as our Sun.
Its neighbor, the red giant, is in its final years of existence and is slowly being stripped of hydrogen by the gravitational pull of the denser white dwarf.
This star "cannibalism" causes a tremendous buildup of pressure and heat, which eventually triggers a huge thermonuclear explosion. The explosion doesn't completely destroy the stars, however, and so this event repeats over time. It can carry on for hundreds of thousands of years.
For T CrB, this nova event happens roughly every 80 years — it's a like Halley's Comet event every 76 years — so, astronomers call T CrB a "recurrent" nova.
They believe T CrB's prior eruptions were observed as long ago as December 1787 and even October 1217 AD.
Is a nova the same as a supernova?No. A supernova is the final explosion that utterly destroys stars. In a nova event, the dwarf star remains intact, which is why nova events typically repeat themselves.
Different nova events have different cycles, ranging from a few years to hundreds of thousands of years.
What does a nova look like?The explosion of a nova blasts away star matter in a blinding light, but it won't look like a star explosion you see in the movies — thankfully, we're too far away to see this level of detail.
To the naked eye, the nova will instead look like a new star has appeared in the sky. People with high-powered telescopes will be able to see the nova's brightly colored luminosity in some detail.
Will we be able to see the nova without a telescope?Yes! When T CrB erupts, its luminosity will increase dramatically, making it visible to the naked eye for several days.
The Northern Crown is a horseshoe-shaped curve of stars west of the Hercules constellation, ideally spotted on clear nights.
To find the Northern Crown, locate the two brightest stars in the Northern Hemisphere: Arcturus and Vega. Tracing a line between the two stars will lead you to the Northern Crown, where T CrB lies.
The European Space Agency told DW that all telescopes were already pointing towards T CrB, waiting to capture the event, but that there are no images as yet.
When will the nova be visible?All signs point to the nova explosion happening in September 2024. However, novae can be unpredictable, so astrophysicists say it's difficult to know exactly when the T CrB nova will occur.
Have nova events been seen during history?T CrB nova was last seen from Earth in 1946. The first recorded sighting of the T CrB nova was believed to be more than 800 years ago in 1217, when an abbot in the town of Ursberg, Germany, noted "a faint star that for a time shone with great light."
The abbot wrote the light lasted for "many days” and was thought to be a "wonderful sign." Other celestial events like comets were believed to be bad omens.
Astronomers have recorded supernova events much further back in history. The first sighting of a supernova goes back almost 2000 years to 185 CE, when Chinese astronomers saw a strange "guest star" appear in the night sky for eight months.
Edited by: Zulfikar Abbany
Sources:NASA Astrophysics https://science.nasa.gov/astrophysics
NASA, Global Astronomers Await Rare Nova Explosion, June 2024 https://www.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/marshall/nasa-global-astronomers-await-rare-nova-explosion/
The recurrent nova T CrB had prior eruptions observed near December 1787 and October 1217 AD. Journal for the History of Astronomy, November 2023 https://doi.org/10.1177/00218286231200492
Travel-related cases of dengue, like travel-related cases of malaria, are not uncommon in Europe. People get home from a trip to a hotspot, they come down with dengue, rest for a few days and then get back to their normal lives.
Problems arise when dengue-infected individuals find themselves in a statistically unlikely situation: the weather in their home country is warm, they live in an urban area, or they get bitten — at home — by an Aedes mosquito, which then carries the dengue virus to another person.
The chance of all these circumstances coming together in Europe is very low.
Cases of locally transmitted dengue on the European mainland were rare, as statistics collected between 2015 and 2019 show: European countries where the mosquito that spreads dengue is established, saw about 3,000 cases of travel-related dengue, but only 9 cases of local transmitted dengue.
But in 2022, cases rose higher than in the past seven decades on the European mainland combined — with 65 cases in France alone.
In 2023, the number of cases rose even higher to 130 cases, largely in France and Italy, and a handful in Spain.
By June 2024, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) said countries had already reported an increased number of imported dengue cases. But it was too early in the year for data on any locally acquired cases — the earliest we would see that data would be at the end of the year.
But the ECDC's Director Andrea Ammon said that "increased international travel from dengue-endemic countries will also increase the risk of imported cases, and inevitably also the risk of local outbreaks."
Dengue is not endemic in Europe — the virus cannot live on its own here, it needs a so-called "vector", a body in which to live, such as someone who is bitten by a mosquito in a dengue-endemic region and comes home with dengue in their blood.
This is how dengue spreads in a non-endemic regionDengue is generally transmitted through the Aedes mosquito.
In order for local transmission to occur in Europe, the mosquito needs to have established itself in the community. That means, it needs to be able to live, breed and survive there. There are different types of Aedes mosquito, but the one most widespread in Europe is the aedes albopictus.
Temperatures need to be high — between 15 and 35 degrees Celsius — for the mosquitos to thrive, so the threat is restricted to warmer months.
And the virus has to be introduced into the community. Because dengue is not endemic in Europe, this occurs when a traveler brings the virus from abroad.
Dengue is a viral infection that can involve high fever, headache and nausea, but the majority of cases are asymptomatic. Death is extremely rare but can occur in situations in which severe illness — also rare — goes untreated.
Why are numbers so high?Experts say there are a lot of potential explanations for 2023's rise in locally transmitted dengue cases, but that there's no clear answer yet.
"I believe that what we saw in southern France this past summer [2023] and in other parts of southern Europe is part of a threshold phenomenon," Thomas Jaenisch, a professor of global health at the Colorado School of Public Health, told DW. "It is true that temperatures have been rising for a long time, but we have more and more [other] factors acting together synergistically."
Research conducted by Jaenisch helped provide evidence for the WHO's dengue classification of 2009, which distinguishes between severe and non-severe dengue.
Jaenisch said that weather, growing mosquito populations, increased occurrence of the virus abroad and vector control all offer some potential explanation of the trend observed over the past two years. We'll explain each of these threats below.
Higher temperaturesHigher temperatures, not only during the day but also at night, may contribute to the spread of dengue in southern Europe. Longer stints of high temperatures offer more time for the mosquitoes to breed, ultimately resulting in more mosquitoes as summers start early and stretch late into fall.
Expansion of established mosquito populations"The Aedes albopictus mosquito was first detected in Europe in the early 2000s," said Oliver Brady, a professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, who leads the Dengue Mapping and Modelling Group.
"It has since spread to many more areas around the Mediterranean and Central Europe and has increased in abundance in areas close to larger population centers," he told DW.
The Aedes mosquito population is currently established in all of Italy, Croatia, Bosnia, Albania, Slovenia, Hungary and in the majority of France. Since 2017, it has been established in Switzerland, parts of southern Germany and Austria.
However, unlike other types of mosquitoes, the Aedes doesn't venture far from its breeding area over its lifetime — only around 100 meters — which means it may take longer for it to spread to other areas, said Marianne Comparet, director of The International Society for Neglected Tropical Diseases.
This may help explain why we are just now seeing a heightened number of cases, Comparet told DW.
More travel-related transmission of the virusIncreased spread of dengue in Europe also depends on the increased spread of dengue in countries where the virus is endemic. The more dengue in a place, the more likely travelers are to become infected and bring it home.
"Dengue cases outside of Europe have doubled between 2010 and 2022, meaning we are now much more likely to see introduction of the virus," said Brady.
Cases reported to the WHO increased from around 500,000 cases globally in 2000 to 5.2 million in 2019. So far, cases reported in 2023 total more than 4.5 million.
But the WHO says cases are under-reported and estimates the actual number per year is probably closer to nearly 400 million worldwide.
Vector control and awarenessVector control describes measures used to limit or eradicate human contact with the "vector," the thing that transmits a disease — in this case the mosquito.
Research suggests that European communities do not know how to respond to emerging public health threats.
For example, Comparet cited an example where health officials in Paris fumigated the home of a person who had arrived back with dengue in August 2023. It was the first time insecticide had been used in this fashion in the French capital to fight the spread of the virus. But it may have been an unsuitable response, said Comparet, because the fumigation was done at night — but the Aedes species is most active during the day.
Comparet said doctors across Europe should increase their awareness of the symptoms of dengue, because most cases are mild or asymptomatic and therefore hard to spot if you don't know what to watch out for.
Jaenisch said we don't even know how the threat will develop over the summers — and warm springs and autumns — to come.
"Honestly, we could be witnessing a stochastic event that will not repeat itself in the next 2-3 years and then again materialize," said Jaenisch.
Even if no one knows for sure, though, it pays to be aware.
Edited by: Zulfikar Abbany
This article was originally published November 28, 2023, and then updated with new ECDC data and a map showing where the aedes albopictus mosquito had established itself in Europe, June 12 and 13, 2024.
Abstain from sex. That's "the only way to completely avoid STIs," is what we hear from public health bodies. Do not have any vaginal, anal or oral sex.
It makes for sobering advice. But it also makes perfect sense when you read the latest data from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) on the spread of gonorrhea, a bacterial sexually transmitted infection (STI), and antimicrobial resistance (AMR).
Antibiotics, such as azithromycin, ceftriaxone and cefixime, are common medical treatments to cure gonorrhea, but they are growing increasingly ineffective. And that may be contributing to a European, if not global, increase in gonorrhea cases and STIs more generally.
The ECDC said in a report published June 10, 2024, that the total number of confirmed cases of gonorrhea in 28 EU/EEA (European Union/European Economic Area) countries in 2022 rose to 70,881 — a jump of 48% compared to the year before.
AMR is one reason why antibiotics across the board — whether it's for STIs or an earache — are failing public health efforts. Either we use them too much, or we don't bother to take all the pills, with the result that bacteria are able to build up a resistance to many of our "go-to" drugs of the past 100 years.
What is gonorrhea?Gonorrhea is caused by the Neisseria gonorrhea bacterium. It can affect the genitals, rectum and/or throat. Infections are prevalent among young people aged 15-24 years.
Women often don't have symptoms, and if they do, the symptoms tend to be mild and can be mistaken for another vaginal or bladder infection — women are higher at risk than men simply because diagnosis is tougher. And especially pregnant women because they can pass STI infections to an unborn child. Women can experience prenatal complications due to undiagnosed STIs or become infertile.
Men, on the other hand, do have symptoms, including a burning sensation when urinating, a white, yellow or green discharge, and/or painful or swollen testicles.
"But this is rarer than what you see in women. We must prioritize women because they are asymptomatic," said Teodora Elvira Wi, who leads the World Health Organization's "Global HIV, Hepatitis and STIs Programmes" in Geneva.
"We need opportunities for women to be screened for STIs, and especially people at higher risk, people who have multiple partners and sexually active adolescents," said Wi.
Antimicrobial resistance to common antibiotics for gonorrhea 'concerning'The ECDC report featured an analysis of 4,396 samples (or "isolates") of gonorrhea collected in 2022 from 23 countries.
They found "isolates resistant to azithromycin increased significantly to 25.6%, compared to 14.2% in 2021."
As azithromycin is often combined with ceftriaxone, the ECDC labeled this finding "particularly concerning."
Resistance to ciprofloxacin also increased, but not as significantly — 65.9% of isolates exhibited resistance in 2022, up from 62.8% in 2021.
Resistance to cefixime remained "low at 0.3%."
Overall, the ECDC figures are reflected in data that the World Health Organization is seeing in other regions, including Africa and Asia.
"Antimicrobial resistance is not the only cause [there], but in countries where antimicrobial resistance is even higher than in Europe, it is contributing to the increase in bacterial STIs," said Wi, adding that, globally, 73 countries report antimicrobial resistance data in gonorrhea.
The ECDC data indicated a rise in pharyngeal (throat) gonorrhea, while cases of genital and anorectal gonorrhea remained stable in 2022.
How to slow the spread of STIsGlobal WHO data from 2020 showed 374 million new cases of syphilis, gonorrhea, chlamydia and trichomoniasis among people aged 15-49 years per year. The WHO cites the following reasons for the growing number of STI cases:
- Increase in unsafe sexual behavior, including low condom use, increase in number of partners and casual partners
- Asymptomatic infections and socio-economic influences; biologic factors
- Poor access to STI services, lack of STI services and lack of tools for diagnostic tests due to underfunding of services
- Stigma: STI patients do not seek care, and stigma results in underfunding of STI services and research
Addressing and/or reversing these factors would be good a start in public health efforts to get STIs under control.
But don't stop having sex completely, said Wi, but get educated about sex. "Have sex, have pleasure in sex, make it a voluntary thing, do it for your sexual well-being and protect yourself the way you protect yourself from other infections."
Edited by: Davis VanOpdorp
Primary source:Gonococcal antimicrobial susceptibility surveillance in the EU/ EEA, European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, June 2024 https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/publications-data/gonococcal-antimicrobial-susceptibility-surveillance-eu-eea
There are countless reasons why people drink alcohol on airplanes: For many, an alcoholic drink can help celebrate the start — or end — of a vacation. Some believe that they sleep better after a glass of wine. Others say alcohol helps to reduce flight jitters.
But a new paper published by researchers at the German Aerospace Center (DLR) and RWTH Aachen University suggests that drinks in the clouds can pose significant health risks, particularly to older passengers or those with pre-existing conditions.
Less oxygen, higher heart rateDuring the flight, artificial pressure is created in the aircraft cabin. This does not correspond to the air pressure at sea level, but rather an altitude of around 2,500 meters. That's sort of like being at the peak of a mid-sized mountain.
The higher the altitude, the lower the air pressure. The lower the air pressure, the lower the oxygen saturation in the blood. A healthy oxygen saturation sits at around 90%, according to the study, published in the journal Thorax. When it drops below that, the muscles and organs stop getting the amount of oxygen they need, because the body is trying to supply the oxygen it has to the brain.
This lack of oxygen can cause dizziness or nausea. Sensitive passengers may start to breathe more deeply or rapidly than normal. Oxygen deficiency can also occur if alcohol causes heart rate to increase during sleep.
Poorer oxygen supply in drunk peopleFor the study, the 48 test subjects were divided into two groups: one that was examined in a sleep laboratory with normal ambient pressure, and another that was examined in an altitude chamber featuring air pressure akin to that of an airplane cabin.
Within each group, some test subjects drank alcohol before sleeping and others did not.
The study showed that the average heart rate of the drunk test subjects in the simulated aircraft cabin rose to 88 beats per minute while they slept. Their oxygen saturation fell to around 85 percent.
Their average heart rates were higher than the participants in the other [control] groups, and their oxygen saturation levels were lower.
The difference does not seem to be that serious at first glance. However, the negative effect was clearly observable even among the very young and healthy test subjects, the authors wrote.
For older or ailing people, low oxygen saturation and a significantly increased heart rate can be life-threatening.
Should alcohol be banned on airplanes?The question of whether alcohol should be banned on flights has been debated for decades.
The study, which is certainly not the last of its kind, hardly allows for any direct conclusions — the test group was too small, too young and too healthy. In addition, the participants slept lying down.
Nevertheless, the researchers hope that the study will stimulate more research into the topic.
The results of the study indicate that alcohol consumption and sleeping while flying "represent a significant strain on the cardiac system, even in young and healthy people,” the authors wrote. And in older people or those with heart or lung diseases, symptoms could be even more serious.
The researchers advocate changing the existing regulations on airplanes and limiting alcohol consumption on board.
This article was translated from German.
Sources:Effects of moderate alcohol consumption and hypobaric hypoxia: implications for passengers' sleep, oxygen saturation and heart rate on long-haul flights, 2024, https://thorax.bmj.com/content/early/2024/05/03/thorax-2023-220998
Antidepressants are some of the most commonly prescribed medicationsin rich countries, including the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and much of western Europe.
The question of what happens when a person stops taking these drugs, which are typically not prescribed for long-term use, has been controversial since they were identified in the 1950s.
Now, a new study published Wednesday in the journal The Lancet Psychiatry, has found that 14% of people — roughly one in six — who discontinued antidepressants experienced withdrawal symptoms such as dizziness, headaches, nausea, insomnia and irritability.
The one-in-six figure is lower than some researchers who study antidepressants say they expected.
"It will be gratifying to know rates of withdrawal are nowhere near as high as reported [at around 50%]," Sameer Jauhar, a psychiatrist at King's College London who specializes in affective disorders, said in a press statement. Jauhar was not part of the study.
Nonetheless, for those who experience them, withdrawal symptoms "are real and patients need to be informed, monitored and helped if [they] occur," lead author Christopher Baethge, a psychiatrist at the University of Cologne in Germany, stressed in a press statement.
Low incidence of severe symptomsThe meta-analysis, which is the most comprehensive to assess the prevalence of antidepressant discontinuation symptoms to date, included 79 scientific studies featuring a total of 21,002 adult participants.
The studies included 44 randomized control trials and 35 observational studies related to antidepressant discontinuation symptoms published between 1961 and 2019.
The authors estimate that around one in seven people reported experiencing at least one symptom after stopping antidepressants, while a small number — around one in 35 — reported severe symptoms.
"Severe discontinuation symptoms occur much less, but should be taken seriously, and are important as many millions of patients take antidepressants. Unclear is which patients will suffer from (severe) discontinuation symptoms," said Eric Ruhé, a psychiatrist at Radboud University Medical Center in the Netherlands, who was not involved in the study.
It was also unclear from the study how long withdrawal symptoms might last after cessation of antidepressants, but Baethge said research indicates "they often resolve after two to six weeks, or when antidepressants are resumed."
The authors found that the medications desvenlafaxine, venlafaxine, imipramine and escitalopram were most often linked to withdrawal symptoms. Fluoxetine and sertraline had the lowest rates of discontinuation symptoms.
What causes antidepressant discontinuation symptoms?Most antidepressants belong to a group of drugs known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs).
SSRIs work by blocking serotonin reuptake in the brain, meaning more serotonin is around to act on brain cells.
Scientists don't fully understand how withdrawal symptoms arise, but one theory is that "if you take away the increased serotonin by stopping SSRIs, this leads to the withdrawal symptoms," said Baethge.
Fluctuations in the level of serotonin signaling in the brain can impact a range of brain states, like sensory perception, emotional states and sleep-wake states. But how withdrawal of SSRIs relates to specific symptoms like dizziness, headaches or insomnia remains unclear.
Some theories related to a link between serotonin and depression have been criticized as oversimplified by researchers. Scientists are now developing more comprehensive theories of depression.
'Background noise' of symptomsThe study also found that nearly one in five people in the studies' placebo groups described symptoms similar to those reported by the participants in the group that had discontinued antidepressants.
Baethge said this was likely down to a "nocebo" effect, in which "the expectation of bad things to happen once you take or stop taking a drug creates a heightened awareness of worsening anxiety or depression after taking helpful medication. This effect might be amplified in patients whose doctors told them to expect symptoms."
Baethge said the findings suggest there is a general "background noise" of non-specific symptoms in normal life for many people, akin to normal fluctuations in sensory perception.
"We are not saying it's all in their heads. It's tempting to think if something occurs under placebo, it's all imagination. The point is the patients do truly feel dizzy, for example, and it needs to be taken seriously, no matter what causes it," said Baethge.
Edited by: Clare Roth
Sources:
Henssler J, et al., Incidence of antidepressant discontinuation symptoms: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Lancet Psychiatry 2024 https://doi.org/10.1016/S2215-0366(24)00133-0
The mood's gone cold, there's a growing indifference between you and you're always arguing — it can take months or even years for the hurt to build in a relationship, but it always comes out in the end. And when it does, it can spell the end of the relationship. You might have seen it coming, but it may just as well have taken you by complete surprise.
If you're the one who's left behind, you'll probably feel the separation differently from the person who's left you, or how people feel when couples make a mutual decision to go their separate ways.
The end of a relationship is — for many people — the beginning of a painful process. But it's about more than the loss of an important person: It can feel like "an entire design for life has failed," said psychologist and psychotherapist Doris Wolf.
Four phases of separationThe initial shock and disbelief are quickly followed by a fighting spirit and some embarrassing attempts to win the other person back.
Then there's the emotional cyclone of grief, despair, feelings of guilt, bitterness and a raging anger.
It's chaos. But it's a chaos that has a crazy kind of order about it, one with four distinct phases, according to Wolf.
"In my experience, it can be helpful for the person to know they're going through a process that will end," said Wolf, adding that some psychologists say the four phases model fails to take individual circumstances into account. But she said it worked for her in her practice.
The four phases:DenialErupting emotionsNew orientationFuture perspectivesEach phase has its own emotional palette. Wolf said that understanding this can help people realize that what they are feeling is normal: "It can also help them realize when they get stuck in a particular phase and are struggling to move on."
- Denial: I can't go on without youYou keep calling them. You promise that it'll be different this time. You become affectionate and loving. Sex in separation? Sure, why not? Anything to save us!
Wolf said it's a feeling of helplessness and loss of control that drives people who have been left to pull all the stops in a bid to keep the old relationship alive.
"The risk of humiliation is real," said Wolf.
Denial in separation can go so far as a person pretending their partner is on an endless business trip or looking after an aging parent — rather that than be open about it.
Wolf advises people to throw out any objects that remind them of their ex.
For one, it's important to protect yourself if the simple sight of a half-empty can of shaving foam is enough to throw you into a state of despair. And on the other hand it's important to remove those reminders and talk to people about your separation because that will help you accept the reality for what it is: It's over.
- Erupting emotions: I love you, I miss you, I hate youWhen all your pleading and begging has failed, there's no avoiding what's next: "Now's time for the pain, the loneliness, the fear, the anger, the self-doubt and the feelings of guilt," said Wolf.
It sounds brutal, and it is. Breakups are common. Some people go through a load of them. But they are never trivial. Some people find it really hard to move on, said Wolf — and that can lead to depression and anxiety.
One way to avoid the worst of this phase is to accept those emotions as they come and go, said the psychotherapist.
Instead of expecting yourself to continue as if nothing had happened, you should channel your emotions into a diary, for instance, or talking to friends, people in a similar situation or seek professional help.
It's tougher to live through these emotions than to suppress them with things like drugs, sex or too much work. But how much talk does it take? How much distraction is good? Doris Wolf said it was important to consciously take time out every day to focus on your emotions, and to be just as conscious about carrying on with your life. Life has to go on, somehow. And anger can be quite helpful.
"Anger often comes later on and it's an important sign,” said Wolf. "When you're angry, you [feel like you] want to do something, you don't feel so helpless."
- New orientation: Perhaps I can go on without youAll of a sudden, you not only realize that life can go on, but that you can also imagine enjoying it again. You begin to realize how much you neglected your friends while you were in the relationship, although they're very dear to you.
While in the first two phases your thoughts kept revolving around the person you had lost, in the third phase, anger helps you refocus on yourself.
"There are moments this phase when you even forget that you're separated," said Wolf.
It's in this phase that many people begin to venture into new relationships. But it's still too early, said Wolf. "It's only now that you start to work through the reasons why you broke up," she said. So, there's a danger that you might make the same mistakes with your new partner, if you fall in love again too soon.
- Future perspectives: It was nice that you were there and good that you're goneThis is the phase when Wolf hears a lot of people say: "The breakup was the best thing that could've happened to me!"
To get to this point, you've had to go through grief, anger, acceptance and a painful review of the lost relationship. But all those emotions are history now. And even if some old relationships go on to feel like badly healed bone fractures, this is the time for something new.
This article was originally published in German.
Antimicrobial resistant infections kill millions every year. They have the potential to take us back to the dark ages, when common infections like urinary tract infections (UTIs) or pneumonia were lethal and untreatable.
Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) occurs when the germs that cause infections — bacteria, viruses, or fungi — develop ways to evade the drugs used to treat them.
Over-use of antibiotics in places like chicken farms and healthcare clinics has become a leading driver of AMR.
The good news is that a major scientific push is making significant progress in the fight against AMR.
"Antibiotic resistance is still far from solved, but there has been a lot of progress in both better understanding and better practices for discovering new antibiotics [which overcome antimicrobial resistance]," said Luis Pedro Coelho, a computational biologist at Queensland University of Technology in Australia.
Coelho led a new study published in the journal Cell, which presents a huge database of nearly one million potential antibiotic compounds.
The study is proof we can be optimistic about AMR, said Sebastian Hiller, a structural biologist at the University of Basel in Switzerland, who was not involved in the research: "This is just one example of ongoing research showing our scientific capabilities to fight superbugs are huge," Hiller told DW.
Using AI to discover new antibioticsThe study used machine learning to search for potential antibiotic agents in a huge database of microbes which live in environments such as soil, the ocean, and human and animal guts.
"Bacteria fight against each other constantly in these environments, using warfare tools called peptides which are shot against other bacteria to kill them. The researchers mined this space for antibiotic peptides and found some hidden gems," Hiller said.
The algorithm sifted through billions of potential protein sequences and narrowed it down to the top candidates with predicted antimicrobial actions.
In total, 863,498 new antimicrobial peptides were predicted, more than 90% of which had never been described before.
Coelho said all the peptides had the same general mechanism of action for killing bacteria — by disrupting the cell membranes which protect bacteria from the environment.
"We also see that some peptides are more effective against certain bacterial strains than others, but we cannot yet predict exactly why, or [say] which peptide will work against which bacterium," Coelho told DW.
Peptide antibiotics effective against bacterial infectionsTo find out which of these peptides could be useful as antibiotics, the researchers synthesized 100 peptides and tested them against 11 disease-causing bacterial strains in laboratory dishes.
They found that 79 peptides disrupted bacterial membranes and 63 peptides specifically targeted antibiotic-resistant bacteria, such as Escherichia coli (E.coli) and Staphylococcus aureus.
The researchers also tested the compounds in mice with infected skin abscesses, but only three of the peptides showed antimicrobial effects in vivo (in a living organism).
"This indicates that their efficacy may be limited in vivo. Still, this is a remarkable result, and the compounds might circumvent severe toxicity side effects of last-resort antibiotics like polymyxins," said Seyed Majed Modaresi at the University of Basel in Switzerland, who was also not involved in the study.
Are these reasons to be optimistic about the fight against AMR?The authors published their dataset with open access, which allows other scientists to review the 863,498 peptides and develop antibiotic drugs with specific uses in mind.
For example, scientists could tailor antibiotic properties to minimize effects on "friendly" bacteria in the human gut. Many antibiotics in use are known to destroy beneficial gut microbiota, which can lead to health issues and potentially deadly pathogens to take over.
Scientist could also use the dataset to create antibiotics against which bacteria do not develop resistances, greatly helping in the long-term fight against AMR.
Modaresi said the new study shows that artificial intelligence has become instrumental in the scientific fight against AMR and that "the application of machine learning has accelerated the process of discovering new antibiotics."
He added that the type of peptides discovered in this latest study were just one type of many antimicrobial agents out there, and that the same techniques could be used to discover many other types of antibiotics, including bacteriophages.
Hiller said that while there are reasons to be optimistic about the scientific fight against AMR, the next major challenge is creating new antibiotic agents which are commercially viable.
"We only use new antibiotics when the old ones don't work anymore. This is good as it prevents bacteria from developing resistances to them but means they're not financially viable," said Hiller.
Hiller said health organizations and governments were working on ways to make antibiotic commercialization more viable so that they can draw from the huge pools of potential antibiotics that scientists have discovered.
Edited by: Zulfikar Abbany
Sources:Discovery of antimicrobial peptides in the global microbiome with machine learning, published in Cell (2024) by Santos-Júnior et al. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2024.05.013
Antimicrobial Resistance Collaborators. Global burden of bacterial antimicrobial resistance in 2019: a systematic analysis. Published in The Lancet (2022) https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(21)02724-0
If you read German reports about the recent flooding disaster in the southern part of the country, you will likely come across mention of "Vb weather conditions."
These conditions, which are seldom reported in English-language media, were first described in 1891 by German meteorologist Wilhelm Jacob van Bebber, who cataloged typical paths of low-pressure systems and labeled them with Roman numerals.
Although the terms Va, Vc and Vd have since fallen out of popular usage, Vb (pronounced five-B weather conditions, V = Roman 5) is still used by meteorologists to describe a rare pressure system that can bring heavy rainfall, and often catastrophic damage, to Europe.
Unusual trajectoryIn Europe, weather is often determined by low pressure systems that move across the continent from west to east. In a Vb weather situation, however, the path of the low pressure system changes: The low pressure system moves towards the Mediterranean Sea due to colder air masses over western Europe.
Depending on the position of the core, such low pressure areas in the Mediterranean are also known as Genoa, Adriatic or Balearic lows.
The low pressure area pushes very humid air from the Mediterranean region past the eastern side of the Alps and north across the Czech Republic and Poland to Scandinavia.
As it moves across Europe, the low pressure system causes heavy precipitation — like the current flooding in southern and eastern Germany.
Mediterranean lows bring rain to southeastern Europe's mountainsMediterranean lows generally pump warm air masses from the Sahara across the Eastern Mediterranean.
There, the lows usually accumulate moisture, causing heavy rain in southern European mountain areas. This not only affects the Alps, but also the Pyrenees, Dinarides, Carpathians and the Rhodope Mountains, among others.
Strong Mediterranean lows generally occur in winter. In exceptional cases, a Mediterranean low can form a cloud-free area in the center, sort of like the eye of a hurricane.
Hurricane Daniel, which hit Europe in September 2023, offers an example of this system at work. The storm, which first hit in the Eastern Mediterranean, caused flooding in southeastern Europe and North Africa, pummeling Greece, Libya, Bulgaria and Turkey with heavy rainfall.
Flooding due to sluggish Mediterranean lowsAlthough they can develop at any time of the year, Vb weather conditions usually occur in spring and fall, when a strong exchange occurs between the cold northern and warm southern air masses.
Such conditions can present for several weeks on end: One Mediterranean low follows the next, each channeling humid air to the north.
In such situations, the problem is not only a large amount of water, but, above all, a lack of wind.
As a result, Mediterranean lows often move very slowly or even stop, causing massive amounts of rain to fall on a limited area. If these precipitation events go on long enough, the ground can become so soaked that it loses its ability to absorb more water, causing flooding.
The warmer the Mediterranean and the air above it, the more water moves north with the low pressure area. This is why Vb situations have led to catastrophic flooding in the past, especially in summer.
Germany's 2002 "flood of the century," which occurred near the country's Elbe river in the month of August, is a well-known example of a Vb weather situation.
Potential of worsening due to climate changeForecasts show climate change could cause Vb weather conditions to become more extreme.
Although there will be fewer summertime Mediterranean lows in the coming decades, according to meteorologists, climate change will cause the atmosphere to warm, allowing for increased absorption of water vapor and subsequent rainfall.
Climate change may also have an effect on the jet stream. At high altitudes, this broad band of very strong westerly winds over the Arctic determines the wind conditions and therefore the weather. Recently, the jet stream has shifted significantly to the south.
This could also bring about serious weather changes, such as very long periods of precipitation or phases of extreme heat in the fall.
This article was originally published in German.
I was 17-years-old the first (and only) time I used laughing gas — nitrous oxide — for fun. I was with some friends who showed me it was sold at the grocery store.
As an anxious teenager, I was wary, but the fact it was available for legal purchase at the supermarket helped assuage my concerns. If it was really that harmful, I thought, surely it wouldn't be available for anyone to buy.
Health experts say this is a common introduction to the party drug. Kids are told, often by peers, that laughing gas won't harm them. They may believe it because there are no warnings plastered across whipped cream canisters in stores. You don't have to find a dealer, or even be 21, to get hold of the substance.
Many teenagers don't realize laughing gas is dangerous In 2018, a report published in the journal Frontiers in Psychiatry reported that 92% of teenagers in the UK who had heard of laughing gas "were not aware of any side effects" associated with its use.
Now, governments are moving to regulate the substance. The UK passed a law in 2023 banning nitrous oxide. It is classified as a drug in the Netherlands. And as recently as May 2024, Louisiana became the first US state to sign a law prohibiting laughing gas from being sold in retail. German regulators are also considering a ban.
But why? What makes nitrous oxide dangerous? Here's what you should know about laughing gas and how it can affect your health.
What is laughing gas and why is it widely available?Laughing gas is the colloquial term for nitrous oxide, a clear gas.
It is used in medicine to relax patients when they are having wisdom teeth removed, for instance, or during childbirth.
Nitrous oxide can cause a euphoric feeling that users describe as a "head rush." You may feel light-headed, dizzy or disoriented.
When used recreationally, the effect of the gas is short-lived, lasting 30 seconds to a minute. Users may inhale it multiple times in a single session.
Along with its use in medical settings, nitrous oxide is used to make whipped cream, hence its availability at your local grocery store.
The canisters are reportedly also sold at kiosks and corner shops across Europe and in vape shops in the US.
Health experts say they have seen a boom in the number of vendors selling nitrous oxide since 2017. That's according to Devan Mair of a student campaign at Queen Mary University of London called N2O: Know the Risks.
N₂O is the chemical formula for nitrous oxide — a compound of two nitrogen atoms and one oxygen atom.
Can nitrous oxide be addictive?Although health experts say most laughing gas users take the substance infrequently, some research has indicated a subset of individuals who appear to get hooked. But the evidence is thin.
Researchers set out to determine whether nitrous oxide could be addictive in an evaluation of the evidence, a so-called meta study published in the journal Addiction in October 2023.
They found that, although the research is sparse, what has been published indicates "consistent evidence for the presence of at least four substance abuse disorder criteria in heavy N2O [nitrous oxide] users."
The authors concluded that nitrous oxide "could well be addictive." They advised that it should be handled as a "potentially addictive substance" until more assessments are conducted.
How common is laughing gas usage?Recreational use of nitrous oxide varies from country to country.
The UK, for example, has reported some of the highest levels of its illicit use: A British government report in 2020 warned that nitrous oxide was second on the list of the most commonly used recreational drugs among people aged 16 to 24 years.
In other European countries and in the US, people also use the substance to get high, with numbers of these users reportedly growing.
A study of nitrous oxide use in China in 2018 indicated that teens picked up the habit from peers who studied abroad. Nitrous oxide is banned for recreational sale in Australia and Japan.
Research on the drug's ubiquity in places like India, the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa is largely non-existent.
What are the negative side effects of laughing gas?Apart from the initial short-term effects described above, regular use of laughing gas has been associated with neurological complications.
In heavy users, nitrous oxide can inactivate vitamin B12, which aids in the formulation of myelin, Mair told DW.
Myelin, or the myelin sheath, is a protective layer on nerves — including those in the brain and spinal cord. When myelin fails to form, a person's nerves can become damaged, resulting in numbness, the feeling of pins and needles in the hands and feet, loss of balance and general weakness.
Mair said such cases were common in the UK: "At the Royal London Hospital in East London, in Feb 2023, there was a case of nitrous oxide-related nerve damage every nine days."
Experts say that if a heavy recreational user of nitrous oxide starts to notice serious symptoms of a B12 deficiency, they should seek emergency care immediately.
According to a 2023 report on nitrous oxide published by the British government, these warning symptoms include: tingling and numbness in the hands or feet, skin crawling, and later, "staggering uncoordinated walk, lower limb weakness, muscles stiffening or tightening, overactive or overresponsive bodily reflexes such as twitching, bladder/bowel complaints of incontinence or retention and sexual dysfunction."
The adverse effects of nitrous oxide can be reversed, but only if they are addressed quickly. Seek medical advice if you feel unsure and require more information.
Edited by: Zulfikar Abbany
Sources:
Up: The rise of nitrous oxide abuse. An international survey of contemporary nitrous oxide use. Journal: Journal of Psychopharmacology. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26912510/
Laughing gas inhalation in Chinese youth: a public health issue. Journal: The Lancet. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpub/article/PIIS2468-26671830134-8/fulltext
No Laughing Matter: Presence, consumption trends, drug awareness, and perceptions of "Hippy Crack" (Nitrous Oxide) among young adults in England. Journal: Frontiers in Psychiatry https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5786547/
Does nitrous oxide addiction exist? An evaluation of the evidence for the presence and prevalence of substance use disorder symptoms in recreational nitrous oxide users. Journal: Addiction Opinion and Debate https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/add.16380
Nitrous oxide: updated harms assessment, UK government report, 2023 https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/nitrous-oxide-updated-harms-assessment/nitrous-oxide-updated-harms-assessment-accessible#uk-prevalence-and-patterns-of-use
To mark 2024's World No-Tobacco Day, the World Health Organization (WHO) published a report called Hooking the next generation. It outlined a lot of information about e-cigarettes that we've known for years.
According to the report, big tobacco companies have arranged their messaging and products to target kids in an attempt to replace the millions of customers who die from their products each year.
Kids are excellent targets for these companies because if you pick up a nicotine addiction before the age of 21, there's a good chance you will be addicted for life, the report said.
The WHO said the industry targets children by selling products with fruit and candy flavors and cartoonish designs. The companies, meanwhile, deny that they explicitly target children.
In a 'vaping public health crisis'In 2018-2019, public health officials in the US acknowledged a "vaping public health crisis."
Since then, initiatives have been introduced worldwide attempting to rein in the situation, but what was a "crisis" then now appears to be a mere fact of life. It is hard to walk down the street in a busy city without noticing someone blowing a large puff of vapor out their nose.
Many members of Gen Z have spent their formative years sucking on highly addictive plastic objects that, at first glance, look like flash drives or, more crudely, adult pacifiers.
According to the WHO report, children between 13 and 15 years old use e-cigarettes at higher rates than "adults in all WHO regions."
The authors wrote that 32% of 15-year-olds surveyed in the European region reported using e-cigarettes at some point, with 20% reporting use in the past 30 days.
Most of these children were not using the vapes to wean themselves off cigarettes, states the WHO report.
What is a vape?If you are unfamiliar with the world of vaping, you may be wondering what the WHO is talking about when they use words like "vape" or "e-cigarette."
E-cigarettes, or vapes — the WHO report and this article use the term interchangeably — first hit the American and European markets in the mid-2000s.
These products, which were often designed to resemble regular cigarettes, used "free-base" nicotine.
Free-base nicotine has existed since the 1960s when tobacco companies realized that by adding ammonia to nicotine, they could strip it of its protons to make it more intense when heated and inhaled. This form of nicotine is extracted directly from the tobacco plant.
The problem with free-base nicotine, at least when it comes to attracting children, is the fact that it becomes physically painful to vape at high levels of concentration and still provides a "throat burn" that former cigarette smokers crave but would be uncomfortable for people who have never smoked.
These early iterations of vapes typically contained between 3 to 12 milligrams of nicotine.
In 2016, the company Juul introduced a vape that featured a new kind of nicotine delivery: nicotine salts.
Nicotine salts have a lower pH solution, essentially eliminating the throat burn caused by free-base nicotine, even at very high concentration levels.
These devices hit the US market at a highly addictive concentration of 50 milligrams. In Europe, these vapes cannot be sold at a concentration higher than 20 milligrams.
When it comes to attracting kids, these devices are magic, because they are discrete. They can be smoked in bathrooms or into your sleeve or shirt, and the fruity smell of a hit only lingers in a room for a few minutes.
Unlike cigarettes, which mark users with their acrid smell, vapes can be easily hidden from nosy parents.
Long-term health effects of vaping are unknownThe WHO suggests that along with sticking their hands and millions of dollars into public health policy on vaping, tobacco industries also try to influence the scientific research that is conducted to measure the health effects of vaping devices.
The authors noted that in 2024, the tobacco company Philip Morris International funded a series of courses about smoking cessation on Medscape, a US-based medical news website, that portrayed "nicotine products as relatively harmless." The series was canceled following complaints.
Science communication on vapes is confusing, including for advice about vaping while pregnant or using vapes to get off cigarettes and whether vaping causes cancer — even for a journalist who follows the issue closely. For example, public health messaging out of the UK suggests that vaping is safer than cigarettes and should be encouraged for smoking cessation, while messaging out of other countries, like the US, abstains from recommending vapes under any circumstances.
Which of these policies is correct is anyone's guess. Because these products are still so new, we simply don't have the studies needed to truly understand the long-term health consequences of inhaling watermelon-flavored nicotine vapor dozens of times a day, every day for multiple years, and particularly not when it comes to the impact on kids.
We do know, however, that there is virtually no health benefit to smoking nicotine or tobacco, and there is certainly no benefit to prepubescent never-smokers taking up the habit. Some studies have indicated that children who start vaping later are more likely to smoke cigarettes.
Numerous studies have shown that nicotine has a negative impact on brain development and increases the risk of cancer.
Smoking impacts reproductive health, causes a decreased immune response, affects cell and tumor proliferation and causes resistance to chemotherapeutic agents. We know all this.
Over the past few decades, enormous public health efforts were initiated worldwide to get people off cigarettes. They were largely successful. According to WHO estimates, cigarette use has been steadily decreasing for the past two decades across the globe.
Authorities thought they had gotten ahead of the tobacco companies. And perhaps they had, for a few years. But just like that, the companies found a new generation of customers.
Edited by: Zulfikar Abbany
Primary source:Hooking the next generation: how the tobacco industry captures young customers. World Health Organization, 2024. https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789240094642
Landslides are the most common geological event. That's a fact.
They affect millions of people and cause many thousands of deaths. They often occur in countries with poor or inadequate infrastructure — such as Papua New Guinea, where a reported 2,000 people were buried alive following a landslide on May 24 — but are also reported in high-income areas, like the United States.
Thousands of landslides per year globallyIn 2020, the World Bank estimated the average annual number of significant rainfall-triggered landslides between 1980 and 2018, by country:
- United States of America: 36,150
- China: 35,280
- India: 31,430
- Philippines: 23,110
- Indonesia: 22,220
- Russian Federation: 18,340
- Myanmar: 15,080
- Brazil: 13,360
- Canada: 11,780
- Vietnam: 11,490
The World Health Organization says that between 1998 and 2017, landslides affected about 4.8 million people and caused more than 18,000 deaths worldwide: "Climate change and rising temperatures are expected to trigger more landslides, especially in mountainous areas with snow and ice. As permafrost melts, rocky slopes can become more unstable resulting in a landslide."
Four main types of landslideLandslides are classified by the way the land moves into four rough groups:
- falls,
- topples,
- slides and
- flows.
A fall involves material such as rock that falls through the air from a cliff or other steep slope. The rock may also roll or bounce as it falls.
A topple happens when, for example, a slab of rock moves forward from its base and topples toward the ground.
Slides occur when the material at the base of a slope falls due to a rupture, or what is known as a slip surface.
And flows happen when the slope material gives way and slides down like a liquid. This is usually how mudslides and rock avalanches occur.
Then it depends on the type of geologic material that moves: bedrock, debris or earth.
Debris flows, often called mudflows or mudslides, are among the most common types of landslides. Rock falls are also common.
Why do landslides happen?Landslides happen when the materials that make up a slope fail to resist the forces acting down upon them.
That pressure can grow when there's excessive rainfall, snowmelt, changes in groundwater, earthquakes, volcanic activity or human activity.
In India, a rainfall-triggered landslide that hit during Cyclone Remal was blamed for the collapse of a quarry in Mizoram state.
And the West Coast of the United States experienced numerous landslides in the first months of 2024, destroying homes and coastlines and blocking roads in California's Big Sur region. Those were caused by extreme weather, rockfall and plain old gravity.
Can landslides and mudslides be prevented?Yes, landslides can be prevented.
Research indicates that the simplest way to do this is to counter the very forces that cause landslides and mudslides in the first place. That can be done by improving surface and sub-surface drainage; constructing piles, buttresses and retaining walls that reinforce the base of a slope; or creating paths to divert debris.
The US Geological Survey advises against building "near steep slopes, close to mountain edges, near drainage ways, or natural erosion valleys" because quite often, human activity, including industrial and mining activity, is the main cause. The rest is nature responding.
Edited by: Clare Roth
Sources:The Global Landslide Hazard Map, The World Bank, June 2020 https://datacatalog.worldbank.org/search/dataset/0037584
Landslides, World Health Organization https://www.who.int/health-topics/landslides#tab=tab_1
Remote sensing data tracks Big Sur landslides of 2024, US Geological Survey https://www.usgs.gov/programs/cmhrp/news/usgs-remote-sensing-data-tracks-big-sur-landslides-2024
How to classify a landslide, British Geological Survey https://www.bgs.ac.uk/discovering-geology/earth-hazards/landslides/how-to-classify-a-landslide/
Prevention and Remediation of Landslides, Kansas Geological Survey https://www.kgs.ku.edu/Publications/pic13/pic13_5.html
Children born with Type 1 diabetes in sub-Saharan Africa died in childhood, said Biyi Adesina, a diabetologist in Nigeria. That was certainly true until very recently.
Now, increased awareness of the condition throughout the region has allowed many of children with Type 1 diabetes, who depend on daily insulin injections, to live past their first and second birthdays.
But Adesina told DW that diagnosis was just half the battle.
In Nigeria's private health care system, the majority of the population is uninsured. Drugs for non-communicable diseases — such as insulin — are frequently an out-of-pocket expense for patients or their parents.
Parents can't pay their children's diabetes treatmentA month's dose of insulin costs 15,000 Nigerian naira — half the monthly minimum wage salary of 30,000 Nigerian naira ($20, €18). Depending on a person's condition, they may need up to three doses per month.
Parents of children with Type 1 diabetes find themselves at a loss for what to do, Adesina said. They have other children, and themselves, to feed.
"Sometimes the parents will prefer that [their children] die," he said. "We listen to young people who say, 'My parents would prefer that I die so I won't continue to be a burden.' They just cannot afford insulin."
This is a common story of diabetes, both Types 1 and 2, in sub-Saharan Africa.
Although doctors know how to diagnose and treat the non-communicable disease, there is no existing infrastructure to ensure patients receive the prohibitively expensive care they need.
Data show people with diabetes are dying unnecessarily in sub-Saharan AfricaThe number of diabetes cases in sub-Saharan Africa has increased tenfold since 2000, a development largely attributed to globalization and industrialization in the region.
Unlike 20 years ago, people are now driving cars, working in sedentary jobs and consuming more junk food, which is cheap and ubiquitous in countries, including Nigeria, Adesina said.
Diabetes killed more than 416,100 people in sub-Saharan Africa in 2021, according to data from the International Diabetes Federation.
During the same year in the African region, World Health Organization data show that about 410,000 people died of HIV/AIDs related diseases, about 365,000 of tuberculosis and another 580,000 died of malaria.
In an article published by The Lancet medical journal, health experts project that non-communicable diseases, including diabetes, and particularly Type 2 diabetes, would overtake "communicable, maternal, neonatal and nutritional diseases combined" as the leading cause of death in sub-Saharan Africa by 2023.
These statistics and projections only offer a glimpse into the breadth of the problem. Diabetes is severely underdiagnosed in sub-Saharan Africa — doctors estimate that some 50% of cases go undocumented.
In Nigeria, hospitals are seen as a 'last resort'Adesina knows the problem well. He told DW that he chose to specialize in diabetes medicine because of his family's own history with the disease.
When he was a child, he said, his grandfather had a gaping sore on his leg which — "for years and years" — refused to heal. He remembers looking at that lesion, at the age of 10, wondering what it could be.
He now knows why his grandfather's leg never healed. He had diabetes foot, one of the telltale signs of diabetes in sub-Saharan Africa.
It is common, he said, for Nigerians to attribute wounds or foot ulcers, such as the one his grandfather had, to what he called a spiritual attack. "The hospital is always the last resort," said Adesina.
"That is the traditional belief," he said. "Oh, it was a spiritual attack against you that made you have an ulcer on your leg that is not healing … So instead of going to a hospital, people begin to look for alternatives to counter the spiritual attack."
It is only when all home remedies have failed that patients will seek care in a hospital, Adesina said. But by then, the infection has often gotten so bad that amputation is the only option.
Diabetes foot represents the top cause of amputations in sub-Saharan Africa.
Private health care is too expensive for many peopleExperts maintain, however, that many people simply cannot afford the necessary health care.
While most sub-Saharan Africans can get HIV drugs, malaria antiretroviral therapy and TB shots for free, they are required to pay out of pocket for care related to non-communicable diagnoses like diabetes or hypertension.
This can result in people putting off treatment until it's too late, or simply never seeking it, said Felicia Anumah, a professor of medicine/endocrinology and diabetology at the University of Abuja in Nigeria.
And even when they do receive a proper diagnosis, patients often can't afford the drugs needed to get better. Individuals with Type 2 diabetes often have other health problems and require a number of different medications to stay stable, Anumah told DW.
A poor patient with diabetes, hypertension and dyslipidemia, for example, could require up to six drugs to stay healthy, she said, but may only realistically be able to afford two.
"The patient will likely choose the two that he or she can afford," Anumah said, adding that when those drugs run out, the patient may not have enough money to immediately refill their prescription.
"Blood sugar is going up and down, blood pressure is going up and down," Anumah said. Over an extended bout of such inconsistent treatment, "What do you expect?" she asked.
"Complications and premature death," she said, answering her own question. "Can you imagine?"
Edited by: Zulfikar Abbany
In the winter of 2023, health experts across the European continent started noticing something weird. Cases of whooping cough, also known as pertussis, were rising.
And it wasn't just happening in Europe. US health officials also began reporting a spike in whooping cough cases. And in the UK, case numbers had risen to their highest point in two decades.
By March 2024, cases had spiked higher in Europe than in the past decade (the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) did not release figures earlier than 2011).
Some 32,000 cases were reported across Europe between January and March 2024. According to the ECDC, the yearly average of pertussis cases in Europe is around 38,000.
If the trend continues, whooping cough cases could increase some tenfold in 2024 compared to a typical year.
According to figures outlined in the ECDC's latest report on the situation, the majority of European cases occurred in infants — the population for which whooping cough can turn deadly. The second highest group of reported cases occurred in 10-14-year-olds.
These figures need to be interpreted with caution, Paul Hunter, a professor of medicine at the University of East Anglia in the UK, told DW. Cases could be higher than reported, he said. Because babies are at such high risk when it comes to whooping cough, they are far more likely than other groups of the population to receive a diagnosis. So many older members of the population might also have contracted whooping cough that's gone undiagnosed.
On the other hand, Hunter said it's also possible there's a sort of contagion effect going on. Because doctors are becoming more aware of whooping cough, they may be more likely to give a diagnosis than in the past, he said, which could also distort the numbers.
Vaccine uptake in pregnancyIn its initial stages, whooping cough presents like a cold. Patients may experience a runny nose, low-grade fever, sneezing and an occasional cough. After a few weeks with pertussis, however, coughing fits characterized by a high pitched "whoop" may start. The illness is most severe in children and infants, and mild cases may not come with the associated whoop. This stage can last up to 10 weeks.
Experts say they don't know why cases are spiking. As with most infectious disease outbreaks, the culprit could be that a range of different factors comes together at once.
Along with an overall decline in vaccine uptake in babies, it could be the result of the steady decline in pertussis vaccinations during pregnancy across Europe. This would help explain what's happening with the infants. When babies are born, they have no protection against whooping cough if their mothers weren't vaccinated during pregnancy.
"You only start vaccinating children against whooping cough at about eight weeks," Hunter said. "And most of the most severe disease is actually often before that."
Pertussis vaccination rates in pregnancy vary broadly across the European continent, according to the May ECDC report. In Spain, around 88% of pregnant people were vaccinated against pertussis in 2023. In the Czech Republic, where the population has seen a sharp spike in pertussis cases, only 1.6% had received the shot that same year.
In the UK, uptake among pregnant people has declined over the course of the past decade, from around 70% in 2016 to around 60% in 2023.
COVID's roleOn top of that, the spike might be at least partially due to what health officials refer to as a drop in population-wide immunity since the COVID-19 pandemic. With the strict protocols adopted during the pandemic to ward off SARS-CoV-2 — mask-wearing, handwashing, less mixing in public places — flu and strep cases reached historic lows.
Since the pandemic ended, cases have been rising again. But Hunter says that can't fully explain the dramatic spike in whooping cough.
That's because whooping cough wasn't present in the population at high levels before the pandemic. It was there, but it was rare. Not like the flu. And flu cases have maybe doubled in the years since the pandemic, Hunter said — they haven't risen tenfold, as we're seeing with whooping cough.
Pertussis vaccineThe third likely complicating factor could be the whooping cough vaccines themselves, experts say.
The first pertussis vaccine was introduced in the mid-20th century in developed countries like the US, Canada and parts of Europe. Although it was very effective, it was associated with negative side effects. The sharp drop in uptake that subsequently caused led to outbreaks in the 1970s and 80s.
During the late 1990s and early 2000s, countries began introducing a second- generation pertussis vaccine.
This new iteration was an acellular, rather than a whole-cell, shot. Although it did not lead to the side effects associated with the first vaccine, it was slightly less effective, conferring immunity for a shorter period of time.
Where to go from hereThe rise in cases presents difficult questions to doctors working on whooping cough, Andrew Preston, a professor and whooping cough expert at the University of Bath in the UK, told DW.
Boosters may be an option to lower spread, he said, but "it's not entirely clear how often you can boost without losing effectiveness."
"Or are we happy with the situation whereby as long as we can stop babies from becoming really ill, and dying, is that good enough, and everyone else just has to cope with some chronic cough once in a while?"
There are new pertussis vaccines out there, Preston said, some which could transfer "far superior" immunity compared with the two vaccines available now.
But he said these shots would be tricky to introduce into the current vaccine schedule. The pertussis vaccine is combined with five other vaccines in a single shot in the UK and most of Europe, so introducing a new one would require a restructuring of that combination vaccine.
"You'd have to reformulate all those other vaccines, and that's just a monstrous task," said Preston.
Edited by: Derrick Williams
Tornadoes can be terrifying — whether you experience them or only see images of the aftermath.
Most tornadoes are harmless and brief. But when a tornado falls outside the norm and collides with humans, it can cause severe damage and even death.
That is what happened when a series of tornadoes hit the United States in early December 2021, leaving a trail of destruction from Arkansas to Kentucky. Dozens of people were killed.
The US National Weather Service described one of the tornadoes as "potentially historic" — due to it possibly being on the ground for the longest distance on record.
How does a tornado form?Scientists know the basic ingredients for a tornado, but they are still trying to work out exactly what causes them.
"The truthful answer is we don't know," says Walker Ashley, an atmospheric scientist at Northern Illinois University.
Ashley is — what you might call — a storm chaser.
"I spend about a month and a half out of the year chasing these weather events, and they never want to [turn into a tornado] when I'm sitting there," Ashley told DW.
Specific weather conditionsTornadoes form in very specific weather conditions. It usually starts with a kind of rotating thunderstorm called a supercell. A supercell can bring lightning, strong winds, hail and flash floods.
If the wind speed and its direction are different at different altitudes, you can then get a "wind shear."
Wind shears are often harmless but they can cause air currents to spin and create a horizontal tube of air. That's common in supercell thunderstorms, but it's not a tornado yet.
Sometimes a storm will suck up that tube of air until it becomes vertical. And when that happens it's called a mesocyclone.
That's still not a tornado. For a tornado to form, there also needs to be spinning air near the ground.
The stronger the tube of air rotates, the closer it can get to the ground and the more likely it is that it will turn into a tornado. Ashley says: Think of it like a figure skater.
"When a figure skater brings their arms out, they slow down. When a figure skater brings their arms in, they speed up," says Ashley. "And what a storm does is it takes that rotation, tilts it into the vertical and stretches it. And when it stretches it, it increases the rotation even more."
When that happens, gusts of warm air rise and gusts of cool air sink, blowing across the land. If there are enough rising and sinking gusts, the air near the ground starts spinning.
Once it's vertical, the tornado becomes darker. It picks up dust, debris and anything else that gets in its way. A really intense tornado will pick up cars, animals and even houses.
Why are tornadoes hard to predict?Spring is considered to be tornado season in the US, but it can strike at any time, such as the ones in December 2021.
But they are hard to predict because compared to other extreme weather events, tornadoes are relatively small. That makes them difficult to observe.
"If we think about all the different hazards we have like hurricanes, droughts, floods, tornadoes might be one of the smallest," says Ashley, "even the most violent tornadoes are, at most, a half-mile (800 meters) wide — they occur typically in the order of seconds to minutes."
So, tornadoes often occur below particular levels that researchers generally use for observing, modeling and predicting weather events. Scientists can simulate tornadoes using computers, but "it requires an immense amount of computing power," says Ashley.
It's important to be able to predict extreme weather events so that authorities can issue warnings and give people a chance to get to safety. So, what do they do?
To issue warnings, scientists look out for supercell thunderstorms and use radar technology to measure how fast the mesocyclone is rotating. The faster it's rotating and the closer it is to the ground, the more likely it is that it will turn into a tornado.
"A majority of the storms and tornadoes [we observe] are on the cusp, like a storm is rotating like crazy in the mid-levels, but just because it's rotating up there doesn't necessarily mean it's going to come to the ground," says Ashley.
But researchers "don't have very good observations in the lowest levels of the atmosphere," says Ashley, and that seems to be a critical piece in the puzzle."
How does climate change affect tornadoes?The role of climate change in tornadoes is complex. But Ashley says it's not a question of whether climate change causes tornadoes. The question is whether climate change contributes to the exact "ingredients" needed for tornadoes to form.
"As it relates to climate change, we know that some of the fundamental ingredients that [contribute to] severe thunderstorms and go on to produce hail and tornadoes are increasing," says Ashley.
And the modeling shows that that is particularly true in the United States, but it may also be happening in the UK and Europe.
Edited by: Zulfikar Abbany
People who quit smoking and then took up vaping were more likely to develop lung cancer than those who did not vape, according to the study conducted in South Korea.
"This is the first large population-based study to demonstrate the increased risk of lung cancer in e-cigarette users after smoking cessation," said Yeon Wook Kim, who led the study at Seoul National University Bundang Hospital.
Ex-smokers who vape at higher risk of lung cancerThe researchers examined 4,329,288 individuals in South Korea, who had a history of conventional smoking. They took readings at two time points: 2012-2014, 2018, and in a follow-up in December 2021.
By the time of the follow-up reading, the researchers found that 53,354 individuals had developed lung cancer and 6,351 had died from lung cancer in the intervening period.
Former cigarette smokers who took up e-cigarettes were at a greater risk of a lung cancer diagnosis and cancer-related death than ex-smokers who had quit and avoided e-cigarettes as well.
"Our results indicate that when integrating smoking cessation interventions to reduce lung cancer risk, the potential harms of using e-cigarettes as an alternative to smoking must be considered," Kim said.
Are vapes less harmful than tobacco cigarettes?E-cigarettes heat a liquid that becomes a vapor you inhale. They sometimes contain tobacco, which is the main harmful part of cigarettes that causes cancer.
However, e-cigarettes contain other potentially harmful chemicals, albeit at lower levels than tobacco cigarettes.
"Dangerous chemicals found in vaping products that can damage lungs include acrolein, formaldehyde, diacetyl, and ultrafine particles that can be deeply inhaled. Vaping products can also include heavy metals such as lead," said Ashley Merianos, an associate professor at the University of Cincinnati in the US.
Many health care professionals and organizations believe e-cigarettes are substantially safer than smoking tobacco. Vaping is also recommended as a tool to help quit smoking cigarettes.
Experts have said e-cigarettes are safe in the short to medium term, but it's unlikely they are risk-free in the long term.
Merianos said there were many unknowns about vaping, especially those concerning long-term human health effects.
"Budding evidence suggests that vaping may be linked to lung problems, including asthma. Additionally, the limited studies we have indicate that secondhand aerosol exposure is associated with respiratory symptoms and illnesses," Merianos told DW, adding that it was possible secondhand exposure to aerosols from vaping products could also be harmful.
Do e-cigarettes cause cancer?E-cigarette liquids can contain very low concentrations of numerous chemicals that are known to cause cancer. A heavy user may inhale these chemicals multiple times a day, every day, for many years.
But is there evidence that vaping directly causes cancer? No, not really — it's currently unknown what extent of exposure is sufficient to cause cancer.
On the one hand, studies show that vaping short-term, for less than two years, is not associated with a rise in cancer diagnoses.
But this latest study from South Korea is one of several more recent studies indicating that vapes may increase the risk of developing cancer later in life, at least for people who used to smoke conventional cigarettes.
A study published in March 2024 found that vape users and cigarette smokers had similar changes to DNA of cells in their mouth.
Such changes have elsewhere been linked to future development of lung cancers in smokers, but do not prove that people who vape will necessarily develop cancer.
Merianos said researchers lack the overall evidence to make conclusions about the long-term health effects of vaping, including cancer outcomes.
The science is also inconclusive about whether vaping is harmful to some people more than others, for example in pregnant women or in children.
Edited by: Zulfikar Abbany
Sources:Cigarette smoking and e-cigarette use induce shared DNA methylation changes linked to carcinogenesis. Published in Cancer Research, 2024, by Herzog C, Jones A, Evans I, et al. https://aacrjournals.org/cancerres/article/doi/10.1158/0008-5472.CAN-23-2957/741851/Cigarette-smoking-and-e-cigarette-use-induce
Cohort study of electronic cigarette use: effectiveness and safety at 24 months. Published in Tobacco Control, 2017, by Manzoli L, Flacco ME, Ferrante M, et al. https://tobaccocontrol.bmj.com/content/26/3/284
Health authorities have confirmed that a highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) has been spreading among dairy cattle in nine US states since March 2024.
The H5N1 bird flu virus has been found in the raw milk of infected cows, including in samples of milk sold in grocery stores.
US health agencies said milk products were safe to consume when pasteurized because the pasteurization process kills the virus. But they recommend against consuming raw milk products.
H5N1 bird flu adapted to spread among other animalsThe H5N1 virus is primarily adapted to infect birds. Outbreaks have been common in wild birds in the past two decades. There have been sporadic outbreaks in poultry farms around the world since 2022, including the US and Europe.
Outbreaks in cows and other mammals, including foxes, bears, and domesticated minks, cats and dogs, demonstrates it is possible for H5N1 to adapt and transmit to other species.
"Since 2022, the H5N1 virus spread particularly quickly and transmitted to other animals. Every time it transmits to a mammal, it gives the virus the opportunity to adapt and transmit between animal species," said Andrew Pekosz, an immunologist at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, US, in a media briefing May 15, 2024.
Can humans get H5N1 bird flu?The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said in an update on May 14, 2024, that there was no solid evidence to suggest that bird flu was spreading among people. It also said the current public health risk was low.
It is even rare for H5N1 to spread from one infected person to a close contact, because the virus hasn't adapted to replicate inside human cells.
When infections in humans have occurred since the virus was first identified in 1997, the virus did not spread to many people. Since then, there have been fewer than 1,000 (909) human cases of Asian HPAI H5N1 around the world.
Two people have been confirmed to be infected with H5N1 virus in the current outbreak in the US. The first was in 2022, while a second case was confirmed in April 2024 after exposure to dairy cattle, presumably infected with bird flu.
"The current risk to humans is highest for those with occupational exposure to susceptible animals. This would include those who work on farms (livestock, swine, poultry, etc.) and with wild animals," said Matthew Miller, an immunologist at McMaster University in Canada.
How is bird flu spreading?Scientists think the virus spreads through a variety of ways, such as saliva, mucus, or feces from birds.
The virus is thought to spread between cows via two ways: Through the milking process via contaminated milk, and through respiratory routes. But it's unclear what the most common route of transmission is between animals.
"It seems likely that contaminated milking equipment may be a source, given the high amount of virus found in the udders and milk — but other routes of transmission may also be possible," Miller told DW via email.
It's also unclear whether the high levels of virus in the wastewater indicate infections in cows, birds or other animals.
Transmission of the virus between cows could cause it to adapt to be able to replicate in humans, but there isn't evidence that this has happened yet.
"Every time a human is infected, the virus has a "lottery ticket" that gives it an opportunity to "learn" how to spread in humans efficiently. Therefore, really robust measures should be put in place to protect those with known high occupational exposure risk," said Miller.
But the good news, said Pekosz, is that the current evidence shows the virus hasn't changed quickly after recent outbreaks.
Health authorities are monitoring multiple bird flu indicators, including spread of the virus to, or among, people in areas where the virus has been identified.
Wastewater sampling shows that an influenza A virus has been detected in several sites across the US, including in Alaska, California, Florida, Illinois and Kansas. But it's unclear in which species the virus originated from this analysis.
"Scientists have sequenced the gene of H5N1 virus found in cows and other animals. That data suggests all the outbreaks are highly associated and linked to a single source outbreak, likely at a dairy farm in Texas," said Pekosz, adding that animal transport accounted for "pretty much all the cases in the nine US states outbreaks."
Is there a vaccine for H5N1?There are vaccines for the H5N1 virus. Vaccination of poultry against H5N1 is widespread in some countries, such as France.
Several vaccines have been approved for use in humans. Some governments have stockpiled various influenza vaccines, which could be moved into production quickly in the event of H5N1 outbreaks in human communities.
"For many years, we've been looking at avian [influenzas] as a potential for the next pandemic. We're much better prepared to react and respond to a potential H5N1 pandemic compared to COVID-19," said Pekosz.
The CDC recommends people avoid unprotected exposure to sick or dead animals, including wild birds, poultry, and domesticated animals.
It also recommends people avoid preparing or eating uncooked or undercooked food or related uncooked food products, such as unpasteurized (raw) milk.
Edited by: Zulfikar Abbany
African nations are particularly vulnerable to severe weather events. These not only cripple economies and people's livelihoods but also cost lives across the continent.
In West Africa, for instance, more than 70% of the population is affected at least once every two years by flood, drought or sandstorms.
But like other less-developed regions, many parts of Africa have gaps in the ability to warn people of both imminent natural disasters, such as flash flooding, or future hazards, such as drought.
This has dramatic consequences. Over the last two decades, the average number of deaths caused by a flooding event in Africa is four times higher than in Europe or North America, according to a 2024 article in Nature, a science journal.
The continent, where the vast majority of people are dependent on rain-fed agriculture, also suffers the most deaths from droughts. From 2006 to 2015, 99% of deaths from all droughts worldwide were in Africa, even though it only experienced half of globally reported droughts in that time.
Push to improve Africa's forecastingWith climate change predicted to increase the intensity and frequency of such extreme events, said Victor Ongoma, an assistant professor of climate change adaptation at Morocco's Mohammed VI Polytechnic University, "there's pressure on weather providers in Africa to provide more reliable, accurate and timely weather forecasts."
They've made great strides in terms of quality and timing, he told DW. "It's still below average, but there is still lots of effort going on and I'm hopeful things will get better with time."
Weather forecasting is complex. In the best case scenario, it needs millions of data points — measurements of things like temperature, rainfall, humidity, solar radiation and wind intensity and direction.
These observations are collected on land, lakes and oceans, in the atmosphere and by satellites, and then crunched by powerful computers using complex mathematical models to predict weather patterns.
Data observation still poor in AfricaBut weather forecasting still has a way to go on the continent, which has the world's least developed land-based weather observation network. And, according to a 2019 report by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), this aging network is deteriorating due to lack of maintenance.
Angola, for example, went from more than 150 working weather meteorological stations before independence from Portugal in 1975 to 20 in 2022.
In West Africa, more than 60% of weather data is still collected manually by non-professional and voluntary staff, leading to poor quality data that can't be used for real-time monitoring.
According to a WMO database, Africa only has 37 radar facilities, which are vital for tracking weather fluctuations and rainfall and for forewarning of floods and other hazards. In comparison, 345 radars cover Europe and Russia, which together have a smaller land mass than Africa.
Moreover, more than half of Africa's radar stations are unable to produce accurate enough data to predict weather patterns for the coming days or even hours, the 2024 Nature article noted.
Weather models weak for AfricaOn top of this, the global models used to predict the weather perform poorly in Africa.
"The main disadvantage is that most of these models were developed for the global North," said climate scientist Benjamin Lamptey, explaining that these models work well in the mid-latitudes (about 30 to 60 degrees north or south of the equator), where much of Europe and the USA fall.
But African weather patterns, such as monsoons, haven't been incorporated into the models, said Lamptey, a visiting professor of meteorology at the UK's University of Leeds, which is why "we're seeing shortcomings in the forecasting."
"Just developing things in the global North and transferring them to the global South does not work. We need to have ownership and things must be viewed from the African perspective," he said.
Many African nations lack computing facilities powerful enough to run complex weather models, while power cuts and weak internet connections limit the access to global data sets.
Increasing efforts and fundingThere is some good news. For climate expert Jeffrey N.A. Aryee from Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, weather forecasting in Ghana, and across many other sub-Saharan nations, is quickly evolving.
Ghanaians used to complain that forecasts were "way off" what the actual weather was, Aryee tells DW. But the Ghana Meteorological Agency has "undergone a revolution," he said, where it is now able to provide a realistic short-term forecasts because of better access to satellite and radar data (although Ghana's radar recently broke down) and prediction models.
The numbers of surface weather stations across Africa sending data to the global observing network known as GBON nearly doubled in the first half of 2023, going from 589 to 1,045.
And thanks to the WMO and other organizations, African nations are making inroads into digitizing the millions of data points hidden in their historical weather archives.
"This will help make more data available because for you to know where you're going [with weather predictions], you need to know where you are coming from," said Victor Ongoma.
Both Ongoma and Lamptey also praise the development of regional climate centers.
"For example, if you take countries along the Gulf of Guinea in West Africa, they have two rainy seasons, and the rainfall originates in the east and moves towards the west," said Lamptey.
"So, weather systems are unique to the regions," he said, meaning the five climate centers can tailor their expertise to boost regional forecasting.
Amid the flurry of efforts to close Africa's weather forecasting gaps, it's important not to forget the end users, warn experts, and how they access information and in what languages.
Fishermen going out on the ocean want different weather information to pastoralists looking for water for their herd. And farmers trying to decide when to plant or harvest need a reliable seasonal forecast to help with decision making.
"You need to know what people really want to know, so you don't just tell them, 'OK, it's going to rain,'" said Jeffrey N.A. Ayree. "A fisher is not just interested in whether it's raining or not. He's also interested in the nature of the sea."
Edited by: Keith Walker
While you're here: Every weekday, we host AfricaLink, a podcast packed with news, politics, culture and more. You can listen to AfricaLink wherever you get your podcasts.
Counterfeit fentanyl pills are being seized by US law enforcement at an unprecedented rate. A study published May 13, 2024, in the International Journal of Drug Policy indicated that more than 115 million pills containing illicit fentanyl were seized by US law enforcement in 2023.
The researchers behind the study said the number had grown from 71 million pills in 2022 and 50,000 pills in 2017.
The counterfeit fentanyl pills are made to look like legal prescription opioid medication — such as oxycodone and tramadol — but are often far deadlier than the originals.
"Fentanyl in pill form is now beginning to dominate the drug supply [in the US]. Pills are easy to ship and disguise and can also be marketed easily, as Americans have a reputation of loving their pills," said Joseph Palamar of NYU Langone Health in the US. Palamar led the study.
Fentanyl is exacerbating the US opioid crisisPublic health officials have warned that a growing illicit fentanyl supply into North America is the main factor in the country's ongoing opioid crisis.
Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid 50 times stronger than heroin — doses as small as two milligrams of fentanyl can be lethal.
A single pill of illicit fentanyl can contain enough of the drug to cause an overdose.
Fentanyl was responsible for 70% of drug overdose deaths in 2022 in the US, and more than 200 deaths every day. More than a quarter of a million Americans have died from fentanyl overdoses since 2018.
Drug dealers often mix fentanyl with other drugs — including heroin, methamphetamine, and cocaine — without the user's knowledge. As a result, said Palamar, many young people were overdosing after taking pills that they didn't know contained fentanyl.
"Public health efforts are needed to help prevent these pills from falling into the hands of young people," said Palamar told DW via email.
Where does fentanyl come from?Most of the chemicals needed to make fentanyl are synthetically produced in labs in Asian countries, predominantly in India and China.
These chemicals are then transported to North America, typically via Mexico or Canada, where they are synthesized into fentanyl.
"Most illicit fentanyl is coming into the US through Mexico, but not all of it. Fentanyl can also arrive by other means, including mail. A lot of powder is converted to pills in the US," Palamar said.
The drug is most often smuggled across the US-Mexico border by individuals acting as so-called drug mules for the cartels.
"This global production line means that there is an increased need for moving things across borders. The fentanyl market is highly reliant on ways of moving illegal substances across borders in one way or another," said Peter Ejbye-Ernst, a sociologist at the Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement.
But experts said it was difficult to determine whether the increase in fentanyl seizures represented an increased supply of the drug, or higher successes from law enforcement in tackling drug smuggling.
Is illicit fentanyl a problem outside the US?Where available, estimates show the vast majority of illegal fentanyl use and related deaths are in the US. Ejbye-Ernst said the US was facing an opioid crisis due to many factors unique to the country's society.
"[Like] the way the healthcare system is structured, the drug culture, the history with prescription of certain medications, the way people struggling with addiction are treated and viewed," Ejbye-Ernst told DW.
By comparison, fentanyl is considered a small issue in the European Union — it was linked with 49 deaths in 2021 in the EU — but misuse of opioids is on the rise in Germany and some other countries.
"A striking example is Estonia, where fentanyl entered the market in the early 2000s and where overdose deaths to this date are almost six times higher than the European average," said Ejbye-Ernst.
But in terms of scale, Ejbye-Ernst said North America was still the "epicenter" of the opioid crisis.
Edited by: Zulfikar Abbany
Primary source:National and Regional Trends in Fentanyl Seizures in the United States, 2017-2023. Published in International Journal of Drug Policy by Joseph J. Palamar, Nicole Fitzgerald, Thomas H. Carr, Linda B. Cottler, Daniel Ciccarone https://doi.org/10.1016/j.drugpo.2024.104417
The idea of talking to animals has fascinated humans for millennia. Stories are full of talking animals, like the white rabbit in Alice in Wonderland or talking lambs, wolves, asses and lions in Aesop's fables. But the communication wasn't always for good — it's a talking serpent in the Book of Genesis which tempts Eve to eat the forbidden fruit.
In the real world, scientists are getting ever closer to understanding animal communication, if not talking back to them. And the one species we might soon understand is the sperm whale.
Scientists have spent years recording sperm whales, trying to define the rules of a sperm whale language, which they "whalish".
New research reveals sperm whale phonetic alphabetThanks to machine learning, a form of artificial intelligence, scientists have identified what they call a "sperm whale phonetic alphabet."
In a study published in Nature Communications, they describe how the team applied machine learning to identify the features of sperm whale communications and predict what they will say next.
"We found that their vocalizations vary significantly in structure depending on the conversational context, demonstrating a far more intricate system than previously thought," said Daniela Rus, a computer scientist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), US.
Along with colleagues from MIT, Rus co-led the new research with others from Project CETI, a non-profit organization that says it aims to translate sperm whale communication.
Sperm whales communicate with codasSperm whales typically live in social clans of around ten animals. They communicate underwater over distances of hundreds of meters, via highly complex sequences of clicking sounds.
For the study, Rus and the team used data collected from whales from an Eastern Caribbean Clan off Dominica. In 2023, Dominica said it would set up the world's first sperm whale reserve.
The whales were tagged with recording devices which tracked their movements and recorded their clicks.
This revealed that sperm whale clicks are arranged in at least 150 known repeatable patterns, or codas.
Codas are the communication signals of sperm whales — bursts of clicks arranged in different frequencies and timescales. These vocalizations are a bit like the phonemes of human speech — like "æ", "p", "l", and "ə".
"Before, people were analyzing single clicks, but in this study, they studied long sequences of clicks, and the intervals between them," said Roee Diamant, a marine scientist at the University of Haifa, Israel. Diamant was not involved in the research by MIT and CETI.
By showing long strings of codas in relation to each other, the researchers found new ways the clicks contained information.
"It shows the clicks have rhythm, a tempo, different lengths in sounds, and extra sounds. It means you have more ways for transmitting data. The whales are really packing a lot of information into these sequences of clicks," Diamant told DW.
We don't know what whales are saying, yetIn human speech, we know the phonemes "æ", "p", "l", and "ə" put together contain meaning — they create the word "apple".
However the researchers can't yet decipher any meaning from sperm whale codas.
"We don't know what the whales are saying. We only know that, in principle, they can express a lot more [information], given the fixed set of sounds they are capable of producing," Rus told DW via email.
Diamant, meanwhile, said the field was getting closer to understanding some whalish, but that getting further would require a much broader approach than just studying vocalizations.
"We really need to see what they're doing during their communications, and this is what new research projects are doing. For example, we know there is a certain type of sound they make every time before they dive. Maybe it's like saying goodbye, I'm diving, or something like that," said Diamant.
What's fascinating, Diamant said, was that whales in different clans might carry different meanings in their codas.
"Sperm whales don't really mix between clans. Each clan uses a distinct set of coda patterns that function somewhat like dialects in human languages. It might be that each clan doesn't really understand each other," he said.
Edited by: Zulfikar Abbany
Primary source:Contextual and combinatorial structure in sperm whale vocalisations, published in Nature Communications by Sharma, P., Gero, S., Payne, R. et al. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-47221-8
Scientists have said they used a human gene editing tool, CRISPR-Cas9, to restore vision in people with a rare form of inherited or congenital blindness.
The researchers said 11 out of the 14 people in a clinical trial experienced improved vision, without serious adverse side effects.
They said the study was also the first to use gene therapy to treat children who had been born with a form of blindness.
Eric Pierce of Harvard Medical School, who led the study, said participants were "thrilled" to be able to see the food on their plates.
"These were individuals who could not read any lines on an eye chart and who had no treatment options, which is the unfortunate reality for most people with inherited retinal disorders," Pierce said in a statement.
The findings were published in The New England Journal of Medicine on May 6, 2024.
CRISPR gene editing brings 'BRILLIANCE'The trial was called "BRILLIANCE" and 12 adults and two children, who had a rare form of inherited blindness, known as Leber congenital amaurosis (LCA), participated in it.
LCA affects about one in 40,000 people and causes severe vision loss at an early age.
This blindness is caused by a gene mutation that prevents a protein from functioning properly. That protein — CEP290 — is critical for sight.
Participants in the study received a single dose of a CRISPR gene therapy called EDIT-101.
CRISPR-Cas9 is a precise way of altering DNA. It cuts out specific strands of DNA — the thing that makes us who we are — and replaces them with a new strands.
In the case of EDIT-101, the treatment cuts out the mutation in CEP290 and inserts a healthy strand of DNA back into the gene. This restores normal function of the protein CEP290, allowing the retina to detect light.
In 2020, Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer A. Doudna were awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry for discovering CRISPR-Cas9.
EDIT-101 gene therapy restores visionThe BRILLIANCE study tested how well participants could see colored lights, navigate a small maze in varying amounts of light, and read from a chart after receiving the treatment.
Almost all of the participants, except three, showed some level of visual improvements. Six participants had major improvements in vision-related quality of life and could identify objects and letters on a chart.
According to the researchers, EDIT-101 caused no serious adverse side effects in participants. Some patients reported mild adverse effects which resolved quickly.
The future of CRISPR gene editingMore than 200 people have been treated with experimental CRISPR technologies. But so far, only one CRISPR treatment has been approved for clinical use — Casgevy, a treatment for sickle-cell disease — which has been available in the US, the UK, and the EU since December 2023.
Scientists have said they are entering a new phase in genome editing technologies, which they say they can safely help and cure — not just treat — patients with a variety of diseases.
Ongoing clinical trials are testing other CRISPR therapies for HIV/AIDS, diabetes, cancer, cardiovascular diseases, and antibiotic resistance.
Edited by: Zulfikar Abbany
Dams are built to hold back water and put it to use for irrigation or creating electricity. But around the world, thousands of dams are in need of repair. Many have been too weak to protect local communities amid sustained heavy rains.
More than 300,000 people in Brazil's Rio Grande do Sul region, for example, were left without electricity when a dam at a hydroelectric power plant burst May 2, 2024.
In late April 2024, a dam collapsed north of the Kenyan capital Nairobi after heavy rains and flooding. Water levels had been described as a "historic high".
Dams do collapse: The warning signs are thereIt's becoming a regular occurrence. When the Abu Mansour and Derna dams collapsed during Storm Daniel's attack on Libya, the cries came fast: We've been warning about this for years, said the experts. If there's a flood, they said, it will be catastrophic for the residents living below. And so it was: Thousands were thought to be dead in the immediate aftermath.
The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) expressed concerns about two further Libyan dams — the Jaza Dam, between Derna and Benghazi, and the Qattara Dam near Benghazi — citing "contradictory reports" over the dams' stability.
Contrary reports about the stability of dams is not unique to Libya. There were allegations of contrary reports in Brazil after a mining dam at Minas Gerais failed. It collapsed in January 2019, causing a toxic mudslide that killed 270 people — one year after a Brazilian subsidiary of a German risk assessment firm, TÜV SÜD, had certified the dam to be safe.
What is a dam and why do we build them?A dam is a way to gather and store water. That can be natural water or wastewater from a nearby mine — if it's water from a mine, people talk of dams containing "mine tailings". Mine tailings can be a mix of materials, metals, chemicals and liquid waste leftover when ore is mined.
Dams can also be used to store up water for irrigation and as a supply of water for livestock, pollution control, energy generation and, if the water is safe, for recreation.
How are dams made and how do they resist water pressure?There are two main types of constructed, human-made dams: embankment and concrete dams.
Embankment dams are the most common and can be made with waste from mining or milling operations. But they are also made of natural soil and rock that is compacted to create a containment area, or reservoir, for the water.
Its ability to contain the water — or resist pressure from the water — depends on the mass weight, strength and type of materials used to build the dam.
Concrete dams are divided into three subtypes: gravity, buttress and arch dams.
Gravity dams are the most common concrete dams. They are made of vertical concrete blocks and sealed with flexible joints. The pressure of the water hits the dam wall and is forced downwards.
Buttress dams are similar to gravity dams in their shape, but they require less concrete. The forces of the water are diverted down to the foundation of the dam along sloping buttresses.
Arch dams look like a semi-circle or ellipse from above. The wall, which tends to be constructed with vertical slabs of concrete, can be relatively thin. The pressure of the water is carried sideways into abutments.
Dams can also be made with steel and timber.
How do you stop dams from overflowing?That's the thing — sometimes dams do break and overflow, causing massive flooding, destruction and death. It can wipe out access to roads, food and vital services.
But it is possible to control "overtopped" dams, with outlet works and spillways.
Outlet works can allow a constant stream of water into a river below the dam, for instance, or into a hydroelectric power system, or release it for farm irrigation.
Spillways, meanwhile, are often open chutes or shafts where the water flows out when its level gets high enough to enter an opening.
Why do dams fail?One of the most common causes for dam failure — that's when the dam breaks in an uncontrolled way — is their age.
In 2021, the United Nations University published a report indicating that "tens of thousands of existing large dams have reached or exceeded an 'alert' age threshold of 50 years, and many others will soon approach 100 years."
The Brumadinho dam at Minas Gerais was built in 1976, which means it was approaching the end of its lifespan. And Libya's Abu Mansour and Derna dams were also built in the 1970s — so, while Storm Daniel triggered their failure, they may have been ready to fail, anyway.
But dams also fail due to poor design and irregular maintenance.
Overtopping can occur if a spillway design is inadequate and can't cope when there's heavy rainfall. The spillway may get blocked over time, too.
The older a dam gets, the more its foundation can experience a natural process called settling. Slopes surrounding the dam can become unstable, and if the original construction materials start to erode, it can cause seepage.
There are other natural causes of dam failure, including earthquakes, floods, extreme weather and landslides.
And then there are the effects of war — bombings and intentional sabotage.
How do you prevent dam failure?Here's the long answer: ensure regular maintenance and apply engineering advice and recommendations, but also design a good emergency strategy for the event of a dam failure in your area and make sure everyone knows about it.
Because, and this is the short answer as the US Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) puts it, "no dam is flood-proof."
Edited by: Carla Bleiker
This article was originally published September 20, 2023, and was last updated May 3, 2024, to reflect developments in Brazil and Kenya, where dams collapsed after sustained heavy rains and flooding.
Durga was devastated last year when she learned that she had developed a tuberculosis (TB) infection for the third time.
Now, almost four months after completing another course of anti-TB treatment, the 28-year-old was still short of breath when we spoke.
"The doctors say I am cured, but I don't feel like I am the same person anymore," said Durga, who requested we protect her identity by not using her full name.
Beating a tuberculosis infection is only the first milestone in a long journey of recovery for many patients.
Emerging data shows that TB survivors often go on to develop long-term breathing difficulties — a result of lasting damage that the respiratory disease does to the lungs.
Even household tasks leave Durga breathless: "When I lie down, my breathing gets wheezy. I am unable to feel hunger and haven't regained the weight I lost during the infection."
How common is tuberculosis globally?Every year, more than 10 million people get tuberculosis — that makes it the second most common cause of death in the world. TB infection rates rose to a 30-year high at the end of 2023.
A majority of TB cases are reported in India, China and Indonesia. India alone accounts for more than a quarter of the global TB health burden.
A large number of TB patients continue to feel its effects long after their treatment is completed.
The effects can range from minor breathing difficulties to a patient developing Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disorder, a persistent lung condition, also known as emphysema or chronic bronchitis.
How does TB affect the lungs?A TB infection is caused by a bacteria, Mycobacterium tuberculosis.
"The bacteria first infects the airway. If the infection is severe, it moves into the lungs," said Vijil Rahulan, a pulmonologist based in India.
Shortly after the initial infection, the human immune system attacks the bacteria, which causes inflammation.
Sometimes the reaction is so severe that it damages parts of the lungs, leaving cavities which can fill with fluids or dead cells.
The inflammation can also trigger a thickening of the walls of some lung cells, which is what causes poor breathing.
"Medically, the end point of the treatment is when the patient's sputum tests negative for tuberculosis bacteria. It is not defined by the disappearance of symptoms. This seems to be the gap in the system," said Ramya Ananthakrishnan, director of REACH, a non-profit organization in India that aims to eliminate tuberculosis in local communities.
Post-TB lung damage can leave patients with lasting chest pain, coughs, shortness of breath, and a reduced capacity to do sport and other exercise, or even basic, everyday activities and errands.
Poor lung function can deprive the body of vital oxygen, leading to fatigue in other organs and poor health overall.
The rise of drug-resistant TB is affecting treatmentAs tuberculosis is caused by a bacteria, it can be treated with antibiotics. But antibiotics are losing their potency against many bacterial infections, and as Durga's case shows, it is important that patients complete the course of tablets they are prescribed.
Durga first developed TB when she was 22 years old. "I was asked to take four tablets each day. I took the prescribed tablets for two months and felt better. So I discontinued the treatment without finishing the full course," she said.
Two years later, she fell ill with TB again.
"I was diagnosed with drug-resistant TB. The doctors were baffled by how rapidly it was damaging my lungs. This time I had to take nine tablets a day," Durga said.
Ananthakrishnan said Durga's case was common among TB patients.
"But I'm having difficulty understanding how badly new drug-resistant strains of TB are affected the lungs," said Ananthakrishnan. "The way different strains of tuberculosis affect the lungs has to be studied to mitigate the long-term impact."
Having recently lost a family member to TB, Durga said she would now like to see government-run health programs that provide long-term support and monitoring of symptoms for patients.
Edited by: Zulfikar Abbany
SourcesThe WHO Global Tuberculosis Report 2023 (World Health Organization, 2023): https://www.who.int/teams/global-tuberculosis-programme/tb-reports/global-tuberculosis-report-2023
Tuberculosis and lung damage: from epidemiology to pathophysiology, published in European Respiratory Review by Shruthi Ravimohan, Hardy Kornfeld, Drew Weissman, Gregory P. Bisson (2018): https://err.ersjournals.com/content/27/147/170077
You may know the feeling. Your days are characterized by a dull haze of sameness. You want to connect with people, but even when you get the chance, you don't feel happy enough to get out and meet them. You don't want to bother friends with your issues — you don't even think there is anyone you could turn to.
Everyone else seems to be normal. You are convinced you are different. You feel lonely, and you feel it written in your face.
But we all have lonely moments or periods and health experts know it, too.
Health bodies in the UK, US and Japan have been warning of the risk of a loneliness crisis since before the COVID-19 pandemic — a time when many people said they felt an increased sense of loneliness and other mental health issues.
But why? And how widespread is loneliness? Some researchers say loneliness could be connected to pressures we feel in our everyday lives.
Loneliness and the pressures of success in the cityKamna Chhibber, a psychologist based in India, said loneliness was a byproduct of globalization, industrialization and a rapid spread of technology.
Data on loneliness in India is sparse, but some surveys have indicated that up to 40% of adults in the country say they feel lonely.
The country is undergoing significant migration, particularly among young people, from smaller towns and cities to larger urban centers, Chhibber said. This migration has weakened a sense of support that people traditionally got from their families.
"Elders, or even your neighbors, community elders, providing you with some guidance, helping you solve problems, mak[ing] decisions … that has completely gone away," the psychologist told DW.
Chhibber explained that as with other large cities of the world, life in urban India was rife with competition, long working hours and anonymity — like not knowing your neighbors — and these are all factors that can contribute to loneliness.
Social media doesn't help, either, said Chhibber — for many people, an endless scrolling through posts prevents them from getting out into the world and making real personal connections with people, in person.
But research published in 2021 indicated that even in tight-knit, rural villages, people were feeling loneliness. Despite being surrounded by people, you can still feel loneliness when you feel misunderstood by family or other people in the community.
A lack of historical data on loneliness in poorer regionsExperts say it's hard to understand the global spread of loneliness because they lack the data, especially in low and middle-income countries.
"There are marked differences in the data [we have from] high-income countries and low and middle-income countries," said Andre Hajek, a professor at Hamburg University's Center for Health Economics. "We lack valid, population-based studies on loneliness in low and middle-income countries."
While there is anecdotal evidence, some experts say they need more empirical data to understand how loneliness affects broader populations, in sub-Saharan Africa, for example.
"There is a lack of comprehensive empirical data on loneliness in sub-Saharan Africa," wrote Razak Gyasi, a member of the WHO's Commission on Social Connection, in an email to DW.
"However, anecdotal evidence suggests that loneliness is a widespread psychosocial phenomenon in sub-Saharan Africa, even more than in the Western world, and particularly among older people and women," Gyasi said. "Approximately 30-40% of adults in sub-Saharan Africa [reported] transient and chronic loneliness."
This was largely due to a perceived lack of close relationships, bereavement, and young people moving away. Gyasi said the Commission would address the problem by developing practical interventions for psychosocial conditions, including loneliness and feelings of isolation.
Tackle loneliness by prioritizing relationshipsWe may not have the best data on loneliness, but we do know how it feels, and over time, we can learn to recognize the symptoms. And we can learn how to deal with it.
Chhibber said young people should try to handle their loneliness by looking within. In the pursuit of success and achievement, Chhibber said many young people forget to pause and think about what's important to them.
You should ask yourself: "Do I need to pause and stop for a little bit and just try and understand for myself [what I want]?" said Chhibber.
When we neglect what's important to us, we often forget to focus on personal relationships with family and friends, or potential friends.
"[Young people] are just constantly moving from one thing to the next to the next" at the expense of their relationships, said Chhibber. "It almost feels like everyone's in some sort of a race — towards what, we have no idea."
Hajek, whose research generally focuses on older people, said it was also important for aging adults to try to maintain their skills, such as doing their own finances and using the phone for as long as possible to counteract loneliness.
But some things are out of our control. The death of a spouse, for example, can have a "tremendous" effect and contribute to loneliness, said Hajek. That's when "safety nets," such as family and friends and pets, or "looking after grandchildren" will help you feel connected through share experiences.
Edited by: Zulfikar Abbany
Primary source:Loneliness across cultures with different levels of social embeddedness: A qualitative study. Published in the journal Personal Relationships by Luzia C. Heu et al., February 2, 2021 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/pere.12367
The world seems to have largely got over COVID-19 — and is now making preparations for how to cope with any future pandemic. A global agreement on pandemics is designed to improve communication between countries. Members of the World Health Organization (WHO) are currently negotiating the draft accord.
Many scientists are convinced that there will be another pandemic. Flu, a new coronavirus or a pox virus are among the potential candidates.
"Bird flu would be uncomfortable," said Emanuel Wyler, a molecular biologist from Berlin's Max Delbrück Center. "Pox would be a small nightmare. "
But measles or multi-resistant bacteria are also possible — the list is long.
Our increasingly connected world and climate change mean that infectious diseases can spread increasingly quickly and easily. Intensive livestock farming and the encroachment of people into wildlife habitats make zoonoses more likely. That is when a disease jumps from animals to people.
Germany is also considering whether it has drawn the right lessons from COVID-19. Is it better prepared to face another pandemic?
Hospitals will play a critical roleImages of packed intensive care wards and overworked staff have seared themselves into our brains. It will also play a big role in any future pandemic how well Germany's hospitals are armed to cope with a sudden influx of patients. "Health care provision in times of crisis will only work well if hospitals function well in normal times," said Christian Karagiannidis, a critical care doctor at Cologne-Merheim Hospital. "That doesn't currently exist in the form we need."
There is no contingent of spare beds for unforeseen eventualities. There are almost 1,700 hospitals in Germany, but only a quarter treated COVID-19 patients during the pandemic.
Germany's health ministry is now working on transforming the hospital sector so that the load is distributed more evenly. Christian Karagiannidis is part of the government commission involved in the hospital reform. He thinks it is crucial to expand the number of clinics that have at least ten intensive care beds with intubation facilities, plus special features, like a heart catheter and a helipad. But that will mean smaller hospitals will have to be closed. "People find that inconceivably hard," said Karagiannidis.
Another problem is aging healthcare workers. In the western German state of North-Rhine Westphalia, one in three are over the age of 55, according to NRW Pflegekammer. The organization, which represents healthcare workers in Germany's biggest state, says only 15% are under 30. The health insurance company DAK says it is impossible to replace those retiring.
The fact that hospitals learned to work together rather than as rivals gives cause for hope, says Christian Karagiannidis. And the lesson has been learned that it's a good idea to have a stock of masks and medication.
While stockpiling might be working at the hospital level, there is an implementation problem at the national level. At the start of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, the German government decided to set up a national reserve of protective clothing and medical products. The idea was to stockpile centrally and supplement the stock with medication and medical products made in Germany in an attempt to avert supply chain problems. Four years later, however, the project has not made much progress. Masks that are past their best by date are being destroyed.
"That could backfire on us again next time," says Philipp Wiesener, who is responsible for national crisis management and public health protection for the German Red Cross.
On the plus side: during the coronavirus pandemic, we learned how to set up vaccination centers and vaccinate large numbers within a short space of time, says Wiesener. That's something that could be drawn on next time.
A starting point: The vaccinesThe rapid availability of effective vaccines averted a worse healthcare crisis. The mRNA technology had been the focus of research as a way to help cure cancer. "It was indeed fortunate that the development of mRNA technology had progressed so far," said Emanuel Wyler.
During the pandemic, mRNA vaccines proved to be a flexible tool. However, they only work if it is clear exactly which pathogen structures they should target. The vaccines would be useful if the next pandemic were again to involve a new coronavirus, molecular biologist Wyler says, warning that they may be less useful in the fight against some other viruses such as smallpox, for which the world's population is not sufficiently vaccinated against. That's why this would be a "small nightmare" Wyler says.
But the question is also whether Germans will get vaccinated at all next time.
German society is more skepticalShortly before the WHO declared the coronavirus pandemic over in May 2023, more than 20% of the population in Germany had not gotten vaccinated. And quite a lot of people say they lack confidence in government measures. In a survey conducted by psychologist Cornelia Betsch from the University of Erfurt in late 2022 and early 2023, a third of those questioned said they would not take protective measures in the next pandemic. And almost a third even said they would like to see the government punished for the way it handled the pandemic.
The COVID-19 outbreak exposed numerous shortcomings. It was hard for healthcare officials to reach less educated people and those with lower incomes. Digitalization in the healthcare system and schools was again shown to be way behind. Many children and young people are still suffering from the effects of Covid school shutdowns. Scientists have criticized the lack of systematic data collection to evaluate the measures.
Doctors in intensive care units, however, are clear on what needs to be done: "We need to run through what would happen if the next pandemic were to break out now," says Christian Karagiannidis. Who says it's a crisis? How do we react? What will happen to children? What will happen to schools? "We need to develop a scenario so we can see where the weak spots are," he says.
That has still not happened.
This article was originally written in German.
While you're here: Each Tuesday, DW editors round up what is happening in German politics and society. You can sign up here for the weekly email newsletter Berlin Briefing.
Reliable, cheap and low carbon — since coming into use over a hundred years ago, hydropower has become a vital clean energy source, today providing more electricity than all other renewables combined.
But recent power shortages in Ecuador and Colombia have highlighted its vulnerability in the face of climate change.
A drought fueled by the El Nino weather phenomenon has reduced reservoir water levels in hydropower plants, which both countries rely on for most of their electricity. This has led Ecuador to declare a state of emergency and institute power cuts. In neighboring Colombia, water has been rationed in the capital and the country has halted electricity exports to Ecuador.
Climate change: an increasing concern for the industry Hydropower functions by harnessing the movement of water flowing through a turbine, which generates electricity as it spins.
"Hydropower is dependent on water so clearly if there is no water at all then hydropower cannot be used, disrupting energy production and stressing energy systems," said Matthew McCartney, expert on sustainable water infrastructure with the International Water Management Institute, based in Sri Lanka.
Droughts — and sudden floods which can also damage dams — made more frequent and severe by climate change, are therefore an "increasing concern" for hydropower, he added.
Hydropower plants are built to respond to changes in the weather — storing water in the rainy season to use when it becomes dry, explains Luz Adriana Cuartas, a hydrologist at the Brazilian Center for Monitoring and Early Warning of Natural Disaster.
But Colombia and Ecuador have seen surging temperatures and low rainfall last year, says Cuartas. "And this is why regulation [of hydropower] is becoming more challenging." The problem in the region has been exacerbated by a simultaneous increased demand for energy and water as people turn on air conditioners and taps, she adds.
2023 saw historic drop in hydropower Ecuador and Colombia are not isolated cases. While hydropower remains the world's largest renewable source of electricity and had been increasing by 70% over the last two decades, in the first half of 2023 its global output saw a historic drop, according to Ember, a UK based energy think tank.
Their findings say drought — likely exacerbated by climate change — drove an 8.5% drop in hydroelectricity around the world during this period.
China, the world's largest hydroelectricity generator, accounted for three quarters of the global decline. In 2022 and 2023 droughts led to Chinese rivers and reservoirs running dry, causing power shortages and forcing the country to ration electricity.
Just over a quarter of all hydropower dams are in regions that are projected to have medium to extreme risk for water scarcity in 2050, according to one 2022 study.
Over-reliance increases climate vulnerability Countries with a high dependence on hydropower are particularly vulnerable to climate impacts, says Giacomo Falchetta, researcher at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis.
In Africa, where his research has focused, hydropower accounts for over 80% of electricity generation in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Malawi, Mozambique, Uganda and Zambia — many of which are also struggling with severe droughts.
"On top of that [high dependence], they have limited installed capacity for alternative power generation and limited transmission infrastructure to import power," said Falchetta.
The solution for these countries is to diversify their power sources by incorporating other renewable technologies — such as wind and solar — into their energy mix, said Falchetta. He highlighted Ghana and Kenya as two countries that are successfully moving from high reliance on hydropower towards a more "robust portfolio of technologies".
Innovations around placing floating solar panels on the water's surface in hydropower plants — as countries such China and Brazil are exploring — have significant potential, says McCartney. "In some cases, you only need to cover like 15-20% of the reservoir and you can generate as much electricity alone as you do from the hydropower."
Countries like Colombia, Ecuador and others with high hydropower reliance need to work towards an optimum mix of renewables, says Lei Xie, energy policy manager at the International Hydropower Association (IHA). "We say that water, wind and sun get the job done."
The road to net-zeroDespite the climate-risks associated with the technology, it is still considered by many to have a continued role in decarbonizing the global economy.
"I would say that hydropower is a technology that will definitely still be expanded because it allows to provide cheap power at large scale," said Falchetta.
Building more medium scale plants, rather than the mega dams of the past, would help mitigate the climate-risks associated with overdependence on one big piece of infrastructure, he explains.
While the International Energy Agency predicts hydropower will eventually be overtaken by wind and solar, they state it will remain the world's largest source of renewable electricity generation into the 2030s. Yet the agency anticipates a significant slowdown in industry growth this decade could jeopardize net-zero ambitions.
Hydropower capacity needs to double by 2050 if the world is to stay on track for limiting global temperature increases to 1.5C, according to the International Renewable Energy Agency. The IHA estimates this would require a significant increase in investment — approximately $130bn annually from now to 2050.
Hydropower's stabilizing role While climate change is going to increase the risks for hydropower, better management of water within a basin and how plants are integrated with other renewables can improve resilience to drought, says McCartney.
Hydropower is also needed to stabilize electricity generation, providing power when wind and solar can't, he adds. "Hydropower can act as a very large battery, because you can switch it on and off very quickly," said McCartney. Hydropower plants are usually also able to ramp electricity generation up and down more quickly than coal, nuclear or natural gas.
"Pumped-storage hydropower, which pumps water uphill when electricity is cheap and releases it downhill when electricity is expensive can also help," said McCartney. "These schemes consume relatively little water because it is recycled. They are not totally immune to drought but are more so than traditional hydropower schemes."
Edited by: Sarah Steffen
Sources:
Hydroelectricity, International Energy Agency: https://www.iea.org/energy-system/renewables/hydroelectricity
Insights from 2023, Ember: https://ember-climate.org/insights/research/global-electricity-mid-year-insights-2023/
Report on projected biodiversity and climate risks for hydropower: https://ember-climate.org/insights/research/global-electricity-mid-year-insights-2023/
Dust from the Sahara blew thousands of miles to Athens, Greece, this week, resulting in a striking natural event that appeared to position the Acropolis, at least momentarily, on Mars, giving everything a reddish-orange tint.
Storms that carry dust from the Sahara into European capitals are common and have been happening for years. Here's what you should know about how they form, how they move and whether they present a risk.
How does a dust storm develop in the Sahara?Dust storms occur when high winds blow through the Sahara Desert, which stretches across northern Africa, in dry conditions. The sands of the desert are made up of many different particles, Carlos Perez Garcia Pando, a sand and dust expert at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, told DW.
Some particles are large and heavy. These are the first particles picked up with high winds, but they are not the ones that will ultimately blow their way over the Mediterranean Sea to Europe.
Rather, when these larger particles inevitably drop to the ground, their impact breaks up other clumps of sand, dispersing into ultra-small dust particles, said Garcia Pando. These smaller particles are the ones that ultimately blow long distances, because they are so tiny and light.
The conditions need to be dry in order for these storms to occur, because otherwise particles clump together and become too heavy to fly long distances. Sandstorms are most likely to pick up in areas where there is little vegetation, which could interact with the wind and slow a storm down.
Why are these storms bringing dust to Europe?Dust storms occur regularly in the Sahara Desert. But in order to blow thousands of miles north, these storms need to interact with a weather system that will provide the strong winds necessary to push them long distances.
In most cases, a low pressure weather system transports Sahara dust over the Mediterranean to Europe. These systems are energetic, Garcia Pando said, and exert strong winds counterclockwise. They typically occur in spring. High-pressure weather system can also cause these events, but that's less likely.
The dust particles that ultimately fly to Europe are able to stay in the air for so long because they're much smaller than sand, which falls out of the air much faster, Stuart Evans, a dust expert at the University of Buffalo in New York, told DW in an email.
"What arrives in Europe is a dust storm but not a sand storm," he said.
Are these dust storms a problem?"This has happened repeatedly throughout history, dust is almost as old as the Earth," said Garcia Pando. "It's nothing new."
He explained that analyzing these dust storm events is not about stirring up fear. Rather, he said, it's about understanding the phenomenon and what it represents for society and the climate. Dust, he explained, is not always a bad thing: For example, it serves as a sort of nutrient to forests and oceans, feeding them iron and phosphorus.
The amount of dust on Earth has been increasing since pre-industrial times, Garcia Pando said. This is largely due to human cultivation of land, but also the changing climate.
To explain how this works, he said to imagine a piece of crusted up dirt. If you step on the dirt, or a car runs over it, tons of particles or dirt break loose, and "all those particles are more easily affected by wind."
With climate change, he gave the example of water sources that dry up in response to a drought. Once a lake has dried up, he said, "the sediments that remain in the lake are very, very erosive and can be emitted very easily to the atmosphere."
But at this point, scientists still aren't sure whether climate change will cause more or less wind on Earth, so it's hard to say what the future of dust storms may be.
"This is one of the key uncertainties that we have in projecting the future of the dust," Garcia Pando said. "Understanding how winds in different situations will evolve — not only the average wind, but also the extremes."
Stay safe in a dust stormIf you find yourself caught in a dust storm in Europe, Garcia Pando said you should follow the same advice given by experts on days when air quality is particularly low. Dust is a respiratory hazard, so wear a mask and abstain from outdoor sport activities. This is particularly true for people with respiratory diseases.
Edited by: Carla Bleiker
Although rare, Tsunamis can be very destructive. They are usually caused by earthquakes along tectonic plates under the ocean. This sudden underwater movement causes a large displacement of water, sending waves across the ocean. These are often small, but move at high speeds — up to 500 miles (800 kilometers) per hour.
These waves can be hundreds of miles long. It can take up to a day for a tsunami to travel through the ocean and reach the shore depending on where the underwater quake occurred.
The waves that make up a tsunami are typically not noticeable to the human eye until they are close to shore. They appear on land as a series of multiple waves in a row and can arrive as huge walls of water that can sweep away people, buildings, cars and trees.
These waves can hit land in lengthy intervals that are hard to predict, Robert Weiss, a professor of Natural Hazards in the Department of Geosciences at Virginia Tech told DW in an email.
"The arrival pattern can be pretty complex because waves are complex features," he explained. "Just throw two stones in a pond and observe the complex wave pattern they form. There is no standard spacing and number that one can count on."
Earthquakes larger than 6.5 on the Richter scale generally cause tsunamis, experts say. This 1-10 scale classifies the magnitude of quakes using a device called a seismograph. Earthquakes with a magnitude of 1 are common and usually go unnoticed, while earthquakes with a magnitude of 10 are very rare but can cause catastrophic damage.
Less commonly, tsunamis are caused by underwater volcanic eruptions, landslides or asteroids hitting the ocean.
Where do tsunamis occur?Tsunamis most commonly occur in the Pacific Ocean around the "Ring of Fire", a tectonic plate with a string of volcanoes and earthquakes. According to the US NOAA Tsunami Program, nearly 80% of tsunamis that occurred in the last century occurred there.
One of the most destructive tsunamis in history occurred in 2004 in Sumatra, Indonesia, when a 9.1-magnitude quake struck off the coast. The tsunami reached a height of 50 meters and caused damage 5 kilometers inland, killing about 230,000 people.
The 2011 earthquake and tsunami off the coast of Japan's main island of Honshu is also well known for its destruction — a 9.0-magnitude quake caused a tsunami that killed some 20,000 people.
Weiss told DW this tsunami also traveled around 5 kilometers inland.
The Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea, the Mediterranean Sea and the Indian Ocean have also experienced Tsunamis.
How do we know a tsunami is coming?It is impossible to precisely predict when and where tsunamis will hit.
"The problem is that earthquakes, the most common cause of tsunamis, are not very predictable, nor is it possible to say where, when, how deep, and with what magnitude," Weiss said.
He said the time between the earthquake and the appearance of the tsunami on land is short.
"Preparation for such events is critical, but it is hard to prepare for something that people rarely experience twice in their lifetime," he explained. "Large earthquakes and subsequent tsunamis may occur reasonably often on a global scale but seldom happen twice in the same region on the same destructive level. It is essential to understand that preparation is vital alongside good warning. Only having one or the other is not enough."
Global tsunami warning centers scan the oceans using observation systems to try to predict when earthquakes will strike underwater, and local authorities send out warnings when a threat is detected.
But the UN warns these systems aren't ubiquitous.
"Half of the world's countries lack adequate systems, and even fewer have adopted legislation to connect these systems to preparedness and response," the organization said in 2023. "The impact of tsunamis is not experienced evenly: the poor and those facing societal barriers often suffer the most."
Edited by: Ashutosh Pandey
In the 1990s, charities, governments and individual philanthropists invested billions of dollars into one goal: malaria control. They wanted to halve the global number of malaria deaths by 2010.
At the time, malaria represented one of the biggest health threats in the world. At least 1 million people were dying of the disease each year, the vast majority of them young children.
The "Roll Back Malaria" campaign officially launched in 1998. With billions of dollars in funding from global organizations like the World Health Organization and World Bank, partners started dispersing mosquito bed nets and indoor insecticide sprays in affected regions. They also introduced new drugs to treat patients in areas where the mosquitoes had grown resistant to chloroquine, the main antimalarial used at the time.
These efforts worked to nearly halve the number of malaria deaths in less than two decades.
Stagnation, then sharp increase in malaria case numbersBut in 2015, things started to stagnate. For the next few years, estimated cases stayed the same ― and then they started to rise.
In 2020, global malaria deaths hit their highest level in six years. And in 2022, the number of estimated global malaria cases shot up to more than 248 million, from around 230 million in 2014 .
These disappointing estimates prompted Nicholas White, a malaria scientist and professor of tropical medicine at the University of Oxford, to publish an appeal to the WHO in the Lancet medical journal. According to their own numbers, he said, the number of estimated malaria cases in 2000 were the exact same as the 2022 figure.
If this was true, he said, what was going wrong? Was it really the case that after billions of dollars of global investment, years of research on preventative therapies and the disbursement of billions of treatments, the number of cases had not budged?
The WHO responded to White's question, saying he had falsely interpreted the numbers because he hadn't taken global population growth into account.
"If the global malaria incidence and mortality rate in 2000 were applied to populations at risk annually to 2020, the investments made over the past 20 years would have contributed to an estimated 11 million lives saved and 1.7 billion cases averted since 2000," the WHO wrote.
Still, the organization acknowledged in the headline of their response that "the message on malaria is clear: progress has stalled."
'Arms race' to control malariaThe reasons for this stall are "complex," the organization said. In its response to White, it explained that sub-Saharan Africa, the area most threatened by malaria, is seeing less funding for interventions and a lack of access to quality care. Available tools are compromised by "biological threats," they said.
Experts consulted by DW said it's likely the stagnation is due, at least in part, to the ability of malaria-spreading mosquitoes to quickly adapt to and circumvent interventions.
Across the globe, many of the mosquitoes which spread malaria have become resistant to the main insecticide used. In some regions, the parasite which causes malaria has become resistant to the drugs used to treat the disease, Jackie Cook, a co-director of the Malaria Center at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, told DW.
Additionally, a new mosquito, the Anopheles stephensi, has emerged in East Africa over the past 10 years. Unlike other malaria vectors, it is able to spread in cities, posing a threat to populations living in tight urban areas.
"Malaria control, you have to see it as an arms race," Umberto D'Alessandro, a malaria researcher and leader of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine's medical research unit in Gambia, told DW.
As quickly as insecticide sprays, medications or rapid tests are developed, the mosquitoes or parasites adapt, he said. "It's a continuous search for intervention."
On top of this, researchers said, malaria research funding is down. In 2022, the most recent year available on record, funding for malaria research and development reached its lowest recorded level in the past 15 years, according to the WHO.
"In 2007, Bill and Melinda Gates announced they wanted it [malaria] eliminated... in their lifetime, which I think is extremely unlikely, but there was a big push to try and do that," said Cook. "Obviously there have been successes, but I think people are starting to realize it's not going to be a very straightforward thing."
Calling for an in-depth look into malaria crisisWhite, the malaria researcher at Oxford, pushed back on the idea that the stagnation can be conclusively explained by vector ability to quickly circumvent interventions.
"There's been no in-depth analysis, at least that I'm aware of — and I should be aware of it — which really explains why they estimate malaria has got worse since 2015," White told DW, speaking about the WHO's malaria case estimates.
He said he suspects much of the stagnation is related to factors that are not under the gambit of health systems, like "war, privation and economic downturn" and things, he said, "that nobody wants to talk about, such as corruption and inefficiencies."
DW approached the WHO for a comment. They referred the question to the author of the response to White, Abdisalan Noor, who is no longer working at the WHO. He did not respond to a request for comment.
In its 2023 world malaria report, the WHO attributed the stagnation in the 11 most-affected countries to limited access to health care, ongoing conflicts, COVID's effect on service delivery, lack of funding and issues with interventions, like insecticide resistance.
Vaccines are also starting to play a role in the fight against the disease. Two malaria vaccines, the RTS,S and the R21/Matrix M, have been approved by the WHO so far. Distribution of the RTS,S has already begun, while the rollout of the R21 is set to start in May 2024. Experts are optimistic, but have warned that vaccination is not a silver bullet.
Edited by: Carla Bleiker
The world is currently experiencing its highest levels of violent conflict in at least 30 years. Along with the ongoing war in Ukraine and the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, there are at least 110 armed conflicts taking place across Africa, Asia, Latin America and Europe.
Many of these wars are being fought in cities and crowded civilian areas. Indiscriminate missile and drone strikes across multiple war zones are affecting civilians, schools, hospitals and children's shelters.
Officials warn that, more than ever before in modern history, the biggest victims of these geopolitical battles are kids. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has repeatedly warned that children are "disproportionately" bearing the brunt of modern conflicts.
Some of that impact is physical. Many kids living in war zones are recruited into conflict. Some experience sexual abuse at the hands of armed attackers. But even without direct physical abuse, children in areas of armed conflict experience severe psychological distress.
Children in cities in Ukraine's frontline areas, for example, have spent between 3,000 and 5,000 hours — equivalent to between four to seven months — sheltering underground since Russia's invasion two years ago.
"The combination of fear, grief and separation from loved ones is having a massive impact on children as the war drags on. Forty percent of kids are not attending in-person school," Leah James, a mental health support specialist at the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), told DW. "The consequences are just massive."
The result is likely to be disproportionately high levels of mental and psychiatric health issues for millions of people in the future, experts say.
Developmental abnormalitiesIn Ukraine, a conflict under close monitoring, psychosocial workers are concerned the protracted nature of the Russia-Ukraine war is causing severe developmental delays in children.
Christoph Anacker, a neuroscientist at Columbia University in the US, told DW the science bears that concern out.
"Early life stressors can cause specific abnormalities in the development and neural circuit function in adulthood, particularly those involved with stress responses," he said.
Anacker explained that trauma in early childhood changes stress and fear responses in the amygdala, "priming" the brain to be more susceptible to stress in adulthood. Stress hormones are often released more frequently in response to stressors among people who experienced adversity in childhood than those who didn't, he said.
Kids who experience this face an increased risk of anxiety and depression disorders and Alzheimer's disease later in life, he explained.
Although PTSD will always be a concern for individuals experiencing war, whether they are a child or adult, overall "the adult brain is much more resilient to stressors because it's less plastic," he said.
Frontline psychologists supporting children and caregiversIn childhood, the brain goes through so-called sensitive periods of development. Overstimulation due to grief or anxiety of being shelled or deprivation of inputs during these periods, like separation from family or a lack of social and emotional stimulation, can essentially rewire the brain, Anacker said.
"There are no effective ways to reverse the effects of childhood trauma when we are adults," he said.
That's why it's so important, he explained, to minimize the exposure of stressors to children when they are in this sensitive period of development.
James said UNICEF has been working to reduce the long-term effects of early life stressors for children growing up in Ukraine.
"Some of the interventions we do are simple — ensuring kids have a safe space to play and connect with others, teaching basic coping skills to help deal with grief and separation," said James. "But a lot of it is about supporting caregivers so they can act as positive role models for kids. Being a caregiver in wartime is incredibly difficult. Relieving their stress impacts their children too."
James said the programs have been particularly helpful for identifying children and families who might need more hands-on assistance.
However, children in conflicts in other regions are not getting the same support, UNICEF spokesperson Joe English told DW.
English explained that "Given the scale of the need in conflicts around the world, and the chronic and critical underfunding of humanitarian appeals in general and child protection more specifically, many children are not able to access the support they may require."
While data about Ukrainian children and families are more readily available, the extent of the issue in other active war zones in the world, including Gaza, Yemen, and South Sudan, is unknown due to the lack of reliable data.
Edited by: Clare Roth
Sources:
Charlson, F., et al., (2019). New WHO prevalence estimates of mental disorders in conflict settings: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Lancet. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(19)30934-1
Some 800 years ago, mystery gripped a Chinese village when a body was discovered with multiple stab wounds.
Upon inspection, local detective Song Ci determined the wounds had been wrought by a sickle. To locate the culprit, he gathered the villagers together on a hot afternoon and told them to lay down their sickles for inspection.
Blowflies started swarming around. They eventually settled on a single sickle. Attracted by trace amounts of the victim's blood, the flies had identified the offender, who was led away pleading for mercy. Case closed.
This is the first known case of a detective identifying a murder suspect by studying insects — a field now known as forensic entomology.
Mark Benecke, a forensic scientist based in Germany, routinely analyzes the life cycles of insects like flies, ants and beetles on dead bodies at crime scenes. As gruesome as it sounds, his work has been instrumental in court cases by helping pinpoint when, and often how, someone died.
In one 2017 case, for example, Benecke determined that an 80-year-old man in Italy had died from neglect by studying the life cycles of flies and ants found in the man's home.
"There are not many forensic entomologists around," Benecke said. But their work can provide the missing link in hard-to-crack cases.
"We can help answer specific questions like: ‘Was the body ever at the edge of a forest, yes or no?'"
Insects at the crime sceneBut although bugs can prove helpful under very specific circumstances, Benecke said it's often difficult to collect the right information at the crime scene to provide an analysis useful for a court case.
Insect life cycles are dependent on the surrounding levels of temperature, humidity and light. They are particularly challenging to determine in winter or colder climates when insects are less likely to be around.
Moreover, "often, not enough insects are collected [at the scene] or they are stored badly," Benecke told DW via email. "I was once asked to do a case with a photograph of a photograph of one smashed insect."
FInally, studying the life cycles of insects usually doesn't offer enough precision to determine the exact time of death — crucial information in cases of suspected murder.
Bacteria and fungi may provide a closer lookEnter microbes.
In recent years, scientists have been researching whether analyzing bacteria and fungi could offer an accurate method of pinpointing precise times and causes of death.
In a recent study, researchers appear to have found some support for that hypothesis. They identified a group of microbes that seem to drive the decomposition of bodies, regardless of climate or season.
The study involved analyzing cadavers in different climates of the US during all four seasons. Researchers left the bodies in different locations for 21 days, then analyzed genetic material from tissue samples and created a detailed map of each body's bacterial and fungi populations. Afterward, they entered that data into an AI algorithm which could accurately identify a body's time of death.
The researchers were then able to locate 20 microbes that, like clockwork, appeared on every body they analyzed over the 21-day period.
The joy, at least for pathologists, was that the same microbial species always colonized dead bodies with the same speed, regardless of the location of the body or the climate it was in.
Researchers were also able to pinpoint distinct microbial communities that colonized cadavers in different environments. Some of the microbes that colonized bodies in the desert, for example, were different from those that colonized bodies in forests.
This could allow scientists to tell where a body likely decomposed based on small variations between microbiomes.
Microbes not studied at crime scenes, yetStudying microbes at crime scenes could aid forensic pathologists in better determining potential suspects and confirming or refuting alibis in suspected murder cases, particularly when the time of death is unclear.
Microbial evidence is guaranteed to be present at the death scene, unlike fingerprints, bloodstains, witnesses, or the gathering of blowflies on a murder weapon.
But forensic scientists aren't using microbes as evidence at crime scenes yet. Benecke said researchers still need more data to understand the many factors that influence their growth.
"It's still at the research stage for the moment. But it's always worth using all the available information [at a crime scene]," he said.
"Mass data and artificial intelligence-powered statistics may allow a good estimation of the post-mortem interval [time passed since death, editor's note], and much more. It's a lot of work though — people need to love the topic, and not many do," Benecke added.
Edited by: Clare Roth
Sources:Burcham, Z.M., Belk, A.D., McGivern, B.B. et al. A conserved interdomain microbial network underpins cadaver decomposition despite environmental variables. Nat Microbiology. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41564-023-01580-y
Nigeria has become the first country in Africa's "meningitis belt" to introduce the new Men5CV or 'MenFive' meningitis vaccine. It is the world's first vaccine to provide protection against all five strains of the meningococcal bacteria that cause meningitis.
Around half of meningitis cases and deaths occur in children under 5 years old, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).
Since 2010, Africa, which sees the highest burden of meningitis infection in the world, has been fighting outbreaks using the MenAfriVac vaccine. Although it has successfully eradicated about 80% of meningitis infections across the continent, the vaccine only protects against a single strain of the meningococcal bacteria, serogroup A.
That means Africans haven't had protection against the four other strains of the bacteria (C, W, Y and X), all of which cause the disease. Cases of meningitis have continued to rise in meningitis-prone areas, and have been attributed to the C, W, Y, and X strains, but not the A strain.
Last year, reported meningitis cases jumped 50% across Africa, according to the WHO.
"According to any standards, it's unbearable to keep this disease burden," Marie-Pierre Preziosi, an expert on meningitis at the WHO, told DW.
Between October 2023 and mid-March of this year, Nigeria experienced an outbreak of the C strain, which led to around 1,700 suspected meningitis cases and some 150 deaths across the country, the WHO reports. The vaccine was rolled out to address that epidemic.
Other countries, such as Togo, have seen similar outbreaks in past years.
Meningitis beltAfricans located in the 26 countries considered part of the continent's meningitis belt are more susceptible than anyone in the world to meningitis. Preziosi said that is because of the area's climate.
At any given time, around 10% of the global population is carrying the bacteria that causes meningitis in the back of their throat or nose. The bacteria normally sits in mucus membranes, which protects against the spread of bacterial infection. Trouble only comes when the membrane is breached, allowing the bacteria to enter the bloodstream.
Preziosi said that when the dry season arrives in Africa's "meningitis belt" — generally between December and June — dry, dusty winds blow from east to west. When inhaled, the material that these winds carry can breach mucus membranes. Many studies have shown that meningitis outbreaks can be clearly tracked to dry season.
Before the rollout of the MenAfriVac shot, countries in the belt saw major outbreaks of meningitis every five to 12 years, according to Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, an international health organization that will help distribute the shot. During the worst of these outbreaks, up to one-in-100 people were infected.
Africa's 1996-97 meningitis outbreak, which caused at least 25,000 deaths and 250,000 infections, remains one of the continent's worst.
Meningitis causes serious long-term health issuesEven with early diagnosis and antibiotics, meningitis is deadly in about 10% of cases, and about 20% of those infected experience long-term health issues.
"For those who survive, one-in-five can develop long-lasting disabilities — that can be neurological disabilities, loss of hearing, deafness, also losing limbs," said Preziosi. "So it's quite dramatic, and it can drive a whole community into poverty."
Meningitis is most commonly spread through droplets from coughing, sneezing or kissing. The incubation period is generally between three and four days.
Initial symptoms are usually non-specific and can look like the flu. If untreated, the carrier can develop high fever, light sensitivity, neck stiffness, bleeding in the skin and, in the worst cases, blood poisoning that can lead to sepsis. Infection leads to the inflammation of membranes surrounding and protecting the brain and spinal cord.
By protecting people from all five strains of meningitis, experts hope the new Men5CV vaccine will prevent the burden of the disease initially in the African meningitis belt, but eventually in other meningitis-prone regions.
Men5CV vaccine rolloutThe Men5CV vaccine rolled out in Nigeria has been in the works for 13 years,, and uses the same infection fighting mechanism as the MenAfriVac.
"When you get the vaccine … your body will react by creating antibodies, these are the defense mechanisms to protect from infectious diseases," said Preziosi. "Those antibodies could also generate some specific mucus antibodies at the surface of your nose or throat," she said, which prevent the bacteria from latching on.
At this point, the new Men5CV vaccine will only be used to address outbreaks. The WHO says it hopes countries can begin using it as preventative protection for all children two and older by 2025.
At $3 (€2.80) per shot, this vaccine is slightly more expensive than the MedAfriVac, which is less than $1 (€0.94). But Preziosi says that if there is broad uptake, the price could go down.
Preziosi hopes the new five-strain vaccine will be as successful in eradicating all strains of meningitis as the A vaccine was in nearly ridding the meningitis belt of that particular type.
Edited by: Fred Schwaller
The highly mutated COVID-19 variant has recently been detected in countries like Denmark, the UK and the US. It has been labeled a "variant under monitoring" by the WHO.
Chinese officials have dismissed reports of a ban on state employees using iPhones and other foreign-made communication equipment. However, Beijing does say it has concerns about Apple devices.
Summer is coming to an end in Germany and the number of COVID-19 cases is starting to increase again. Is this the beginning of a new post-pandemic wave of infection?
Worldwide, many regions are afflicted with frequent earthquakes. While high magnitude earthquakes are rare, Morocco's Atlas Mountains are a site of heavy tectonic plate activity.
Reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete, or RAAC, is a type of concrete used in roof structures and cladding.
"RAAC was used in the UK and many European countries for public buildings in particular because it was quick to construct and low-cost," said Alice Moncaster, Professor of Sustainable Construction at the University of the West England, UK.
The UK government has closed more than 150 schoolsdue to safety risks. Hospitals, university buildings and courts, are also believed to contain the material.
Experts told DW this is a safety concern for every country that used RAAC in construction, not just the UK.
"RAAC is very commonly used in buildings all across Europe. It's used most commonly in public sector buildings like schools, but also in commercial properties," said Adrian Tagg, Associate Professor in Building Surveying at the University of Reading, UK.
"Believe me, if you've started to conduct to look for this material in buildings in other countries, you will find similar problems," Tagg told DW.
RAAC safety concerns growing for decadesExperts first raised concerns about RAAC in the 1990s, saying the material deteriorateswithin decades after its construction. In the 2000s, more concerns were raised that the material was reaching the end of its 30 year shelf life.
"RAAC has been a concern for a while, but it has only recently hit the press. West Suffolk Hospital, built in the 1970s, is the most notorious example. It has for many years had ceilings held up with props," Moncaster told DW.
In 2018, a school roof in the UK collapsed due to serious corrosion of the material. Another roof collapse in August 2023 led the UK government to announce the closure of a number of schools.
"Thankfully we haven't had any fatalities yet from roofs collapsing, but we need investigations to ensure the safety of all buildings at risk," said Tagg.
How does RAAC corrode?RAAC was developed in the 1920s. It's a lightweight, prefabricated concrete reinforced with steel bars to give it tensile strength.
The material is coated in waterproof layers, but if the material becomes exposed to the elements through lack of maintenance, moisture causes the concreteand inner steel reinforcements to corrode.
"As with any material, RAAC is expected to be replaced after a certain design life. There is nothing intrinsically unsafe about RAAC – it had a design life which has now been exceeded," Moncaster said.
Defects in RAAC are exacerbated by poor building maintenance and frequent safety checks, Tagg said.
"This problem is a result of building maintenance being a lower priority in terms of building occupancy," Tagg said.
RAAC corrosion not just a UK safety concern Experts are calling for large-scale building surveying and safety inspections to determine whether RAAC concrete has been used in their construction, and if so, what condition they are in.
In the UK alone, tens of thousands of government and privately owned buildings are expected to contain the material, although only a small percentage will be an immediate safety concern.
Tagg emphasized that the issues in the UK should concern all countries with a history of using RAAC in construction.
"We need widespread audits of buildings in countries for their proactive maintenance. This is what countries had to do to find asbestos," Tagg said.
"Of course the wet and increasingly stormy weather makes it worse [in the UK] — but the changing climate across Europe has made many regions wetter than before, so again this isn't just the UK," said Moncaster.
Edited by:
Children are raised on stories about big bad wolves: how they prowl around forests, disguise themselves as sheep or grandmothers, and raze houses to eat little pigs living inside. We learn early that wolves are a menace in the dark, a symbol of savagery that lurks beyond the safety of urban society.
We learn to fear wolves, either through fables or experience. Our fear of wolves almost drove them to extinction in the 1800s. Once widespread in Europe, mass eradication policies decimated wolf populations.
Wolves made a comeback about a hundred years later.
Today, they're thriving — around 17,000 wolves live in mainland Europe and are steadily returning to their ancestral homelands.
Wolves: good for ecosystems but deadly for livestockThe science suggests that wolves are good for ecosystems as a whole. Studies in the US and Canada suggest that wolves have a restorative effect on ecosystems when they are reintroduced to their habitats.
But not everyone is happy about the wolves' return to Europe. Some reports suggest that wolves are increasingly encroaching on human civilization, attacking livestock and, on occasion, humans.
Farmers in Lower Saxony, Germany, have felt the worst of such wolf attacks. Between January and August 2023, more than 600 animals were killed there by wolves.
The attacks have led farmers to take matters into their own hands, often illegally hunting wolves.
EU under pressure to change wolf protection lawsRising tensions have led the European Commission to step in, including its president, Ursula von der Leyen.
Von der Leyen has been at the centre of discussions around wolves since 2022, when a wolf killed her pony, Dolly. Von der Leyen put a kill order on the wolf, identified as GW950m, but it managed to avoid hunters and is thought to be at-large.
In a statement on September 4, 2023, Von der Leyen said:
"The concentration of wolf packs in some European regions has become a real danger for livestock and potentially also for humans. I urge local and national authorities to take action where necessary. Indeed, current EU legislation already enables them to do so."
The European Commission is now to decide whether to modify the protection of wolves within the EU, potentially allowing easier hunting rights.
Farmer and hunter lobby groups are pushing for a downgrade of wolf protection laws and less bureaucracy when they apply for permission to hunt wolves.
"There is a need for a faster and more efficient culling of wolves that repeatedly prey on grazers, as well as a reliable method for controlling wolf populations," said Joachim Rukwied, the President of the German Farmers' Association, in a statement in August.
Let us hunt wolves or traditional farming will vanish!Rukwied said in the same statement that if politicians did not tackle the wolf issue, grazing in Germany would disappear. "Grazing cattle, sheep, goats and horses in the landscape would be a thing of the past," he said.
Conservationists, on the other hand, and animal protection groups, are urging the EU Commission to keep wolf protection laws as they are.
"Wolves are part of the evolutionary history of Europe's landscapes. We almost eradicated them once, so we need to protect their place in our ecosystems," Fabien Quétier, a conservation expert at Rewilding Europe, told DW.
The science says wolves help restore ecosystemsQuétier is concerned that moves to make it easier to hunt wolves would have a knock on effect on European wildlife.
In the 1990s, reintroduction of wolves to the Yellowstone National Park in the US helped restore river and forest ecosystems. The region had been plagued by erosion and defoliation due to rising deer and elk populations.
The wolves hunted the deer and elk and also changed their behavior patterns so that they avoided the valley and gorges Yellowstone National Park. As a result, wildlife began to regenerate, with plants, insect, bird, and mammalian species making their own comebacks. It even reduced river erosion.
There is evidence in Europe that reintroducing wolves has generated movement among prey, which decreases the pressure their prey has on crops or young trees.
"The bottom line is that wolves help maintain ecosystem balance," Quétier said.
Our fear of wolves: a return to the 1800s?Wolf attacks on humans are extremely rare. A WWF report found that there were a total of 12 attacks in Europe and North America combined — over an 18 year period — from 2002 to 2020.
But Quétier is concerned that attitudes towards wolves are influenced by the same kind of fear people felt in the 1800s.
"There's a danger wolf eradication programs could start again. The effects of wolf hunting and poisoning would have horrible effects on the environment," said Quétier.
Attitudes to wolves grew more positive in the 1970s when wolves gained better legal protection so hunters were banned from shoot or poison them. All this was due to a cultural shift in how carnivores are viewed in the wild.
"There was a change in mindset about wolves that led to their protection. As the environmental crises has marched on, people's concerns for wildlife grew, and this is reflected in policies we have to protect wildlife," Quétier said.
The task for the European Commission now is to explore how best wolves and humans can live side-by-side, while minimizing the costs incurred on rural communities.
Edited by: Zulfikar Abbany
The United Kingdom is set to rejoin the European Union's flagship science research program, Horizon Europe, as part of what the British government has called a "bespoke new deal."
With a budget of €95.5 billion ($102.33 billion) per year, Horizon Europe funds scientific research in fields ranging from terminal diseases to climate technology to food and energy security.
Horizon has partnerships with several non-EU countries, but the UK had been locked out of the program for almost three years following a dispute over post-Brexit trading arrangements with Northern Ireland.
Now, following negotiations concluded by British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in a call on Wednesday night, the UK is set to return not only to Horizon but also to the EU's observation satellite program Copernicus Earth.
The UK and the EU science program"As part of the new deal negotiated over the last six months, the prime minister has secured improved financial terms of association to Horizon Europe that are right for the UK," a British government statement read.
"Horizon will give UK companies and research institutions unrivaled opportunities to lead global work to develop new technologies and research projects, in areas from health to artificial intelligence."
The agreement, which requires ratification by EU member states, will see the UK contribute around €3 billion to Horizon and Copernicus from January 2024.
Downing Street said the intervening months will "provide breathing space to boost the participation of UK researchers in open calls for grants before we start paying into the program."
"We have worked with our EU partners to make sure that this is the right deal for the UK, unlocking unparalleled research opportunities, and also the right deal for British taxpayers," Sunak said.
Key to the new deal is a so-called "underperformance clause," a mechanism that allows the UK to be "compensated should UK scientists receive significantly less money than the UK puts into the program."
Sunak had also insisted on adjustments to account for the almost three years that the UK has spent outside the program.
"The EU and UK are key strategic partners and allies, and today's agreement proves that point. We will continue to be at the forefront of global science and research," von der Leyen said.
A European Commission statement added: "Today's agreement remains fully in line with the EU-UK trade and cooperation agreement (TCA). The UK will be required to contribute financially to the EU budget and is subject to all the safeguards of the TCA."
What the UK scientific community said about the Horizon dealData from the European Commission reveals a significant decrease in research grants awarded to British science programs since 2019 when €959 million was allocated across 1,364 grants. Thus far in 2023, only 192 grants have been awarded, worth just €22 million, so reactions to the new deal within the UK scientific community have been understandably positive.
"There will be relief throughout the research community that the uncertainty of the last two-and-a-half years has come to an end," Michelle Mitchell, chief executive of Cancer Research UK, told The Guardian newspaper
"Nearly three-quarters of respondents to our survey of cancer researchers cited funding from the EU as important for their work, showing how crucial Horizon Europe association is for the future of cancer research," Mitchell added.
Paul Nurse, director of London's Francis Crick Institute for biomedical research, said, "This is an essential step in rebuilding and strengthening our global scientific standing." He also thanked "the huge number of researchers in the UK and across Europe who, over many years, didn't give up on stressing the importance of international collaboration for science."
The UK's opposition Labour Party welcomed the deal, which is being seen as the latest thawing in relations with the EU, but said Britain had already missed out on "two years' worth of innovation."
"Two years of global companies looking around the world for where to base their research centers and choosing other countries than Britain, because we were not part of Horizon," said Labour science spokesman Peter Kyle. "This is two years of wasted opportunity for us as a country."
mf/sms (AFP, Reuters)
Virtually everyone in Europe lives in polluted towns and cities where annual average levels of fine particulate matter are higher than the World Health Organization's (WHO) recommended limit.
In practical terms, this means that almost everyone on the continent is breathing bad air that has been shown to be fatal.
Air pollution increases the risk of respiratory and heart disease and lowers life expectancy.
"With the current levels of air pollution, many people [are getting] sick. We know that lowering air pollution levels reduces these numbers," said Mark Nieuwenhuijsen, director of the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal).
How bad is air pollution in Europe?DW partnered with the European Data Journalism Network to analyze satellite data from the Copernicus Atmospheric Monitoring Service (CAMS).
We found that in 2022, almost everyone in Europe — 98% of people — lived in areas where the concentration of fine particulate matter, commonly abbreviated as PM 2.5, was over the limit set by the WHO.
The WHO recommends that the annual average concentration of fine particulate pollution should not exceed five micrograms per cubic meter of air. A microgram is a thousand times less than a milligram.
Pollution levels differ from region to region in Europe. It can be especially severe in parts of Central Europe, the Po valley in Italy and in larger metropolitan areas, such as Athens, Barcelona and Paris.
Our analysis shows that the most polluted regions in Europe reach annual average PM 2.5 concentrations of about 25 micrograms per cubic meter.
High air pollution levels for individual European cities have been reported before, but this new data analysis offers a first Europe-wide comparison of pollution in different regions. We show where air quality has improved and where it's gotten worse.
We also used the data to identify two places with similar problems but a different outlook. In northern Italy, pollution levels are high and seem to remain so. In southern Poland, they are also high yet appear to be falling. We looked at how mitigation strategies are helping or not.
What is fine particulate matter?Fine particulate matter is a combination of very small solid and liquid particles of different materials and pollutants.
The pollutants are invisible to the naked eye. They have a diameter of less than 2.5 micrometers, or around 30 times thinner than a single strand of hair.
Even though there are many other pollutants that affect human health, it's common to focus on these kinds of particles as there is consistent scientific evidence of their negative effect on public health.
How does Europe compare to other parts of the world?European air quality is generally better than in other regions of the world.
In northern Indian cities, such as New Delhi, Varanasi and Agra, for example, average PM 2.5 values can get as high as 100 micrograms per cubic meter. In Europe, our data shows pollution levels of up to 25 micrograms per cubic meter.
But even at Europe's comparatively lower levels, pollution can have a significant impact on people's health.
What's the EU's proposed limit and what do experts say? Europe's new air quality rules would allow an annual average concentration of 10 micrograms of fine particulate matter per cubic meter of air.
The European Parliament's Environment Committee had suggested adopting the WHO recommendations, which are stricter at five micrograms of fine particulate matter per cubic meter of air.
But even at 10 micrograms, it would be stricter than the current standards, which allow annual PM 2.5 concentrations at 20 micrograms per cubic meter — four times higher than the current WHO recommendation.
Health researchers and environmentalists argue that the new European air quality rules should mirror the WHO's guidelines but acknowledge that that would be a challenge.
"EU limits are not only [about] health, they're also about economic arguments, [whereas] the WHO limits are made by experts that only take health into account," said Nieuwenhuijsen. "I hope they'll go with the WHO, but probably some will argue that it would be too expensive."
Let's turn to our first case study: northern Italy.
Air quality consistently bad in northern ItalyIn mid-February 2023, many cities in Italy's Po valley were covered with pollution. The regions of Lombardy and Veneto were especially affected.
The daily PM 2.5 average concentration in cities such as Milan, Padova and Verona surged above 75 micrograms per cubic meter, according to Copernicus researchers.
Geography is partially to blame: the region is surrounded by mountains and pollution created by heavy traffic, industry, agricultural emissions and residential heating is trapped in the area.
Environmental agencies report that many thousands of people die prematurely every year due to pollution-related illnesses.
A study published in the science journal The Lancet used pollution data from 2015 to estimate that around 10% of deaths in cities like Milan could be prevented if average PM 2.5 concentrations dropped by around 10 micrograms per cubic meter.
If Europe's major cities were able to hit the five micrograms per cubic meter target, the researchers concluded there would be 100,000 fewer pollution-related deaths every year.
But that's not the direction that the Po valley is headed.
"On top of having a negative geographical situation, we've been doing exactly the opposite of what we should do," said Anna Gerometta, a lawyer and president of Cittadini per l'Aria, an NGO that advocates for stricter air quality policies in Italy.
Gerometta said that measures to limit emissions from cars, residential heating and meat factories were too weak to face the scale of the problem.
In Poland, however, local strategies are showing improvements.
Poland gets rid of coal furnaces and improves air qualityIn parts of Poland, pollution levels are among the highest in Europe. But they have decreased steadily since 2018 — the first year in the data we analyzed.
Take the city of Krakow, the second largest city in the country. Back in 2018, the region saw annual pollution levels of nearly 25 micrograms per cubic meter. By the end of 2022, it had dropped by more than 20%.
Neighboring cities Katowice, Gliwice and Tychy, and also Poznan and the capital Warsaw, saw a drop in pollution, too.
The improvements came after Polish authorities launched a plan to modernize household heating systems, known commonly as "smokers." The process has been ongoing for ten years.
"We call them 'smokers' as they produce a lot of smoke, but they are old furnaces," said Piotr Siergiej at the environmental organization Polish Smog Alert. "Nearly 800,000 have been replaced, but there are still around 3 million left. It's a slow process."
In the Krakow area, where a ban on burning coal and wood for domestic heating came into effect in 2019, almost all the old heaters have been replaced.
How do public attitudes affect air quality policy?"Ten years ago, if you talked about air pollution in Poland, people said it was not a big deal it felt like banging your head against the wall," Sierjiej said. "But after years of constant banging, the biggest success is the change in perception. The law is important, but politicians will only do what [voters want]."
In Italy, environmental campaigners have noticed a similar problem in bridging a gap between science and daily life: "People don't understand the issue with air pollution. As you often don't see it, you don't realize what the impact is," said Gerometta.
But things are changing.
According to a 2022 Eurobarometer survey, a majority of Europeans see respiratory diseases caused by air pollution as a serious problem now. While many respondents said they didn't feel well informed about the current standards, the large majority of those that are aware think that air quality rules should be strengthened.
For data, code and methodology behind this analysis, see this repository. You can find more data-driven stories by DW here.
Edited by: Gianna-Carina Grün & Zulfikar Abbany
This project is a collaboration among several media outlets in the European Data Journalism Network .
Abortion is not a crime, Mexico's Supreme Court ruled on Wednesday.
The court said the section of the federal penal code that criminalized abortion would no longer have any effect, the Information Group for Chosen Reproduction (GIRE) said.
The nongovernmental organization said in a statement: "No woman or pregnant person, nor any health worker will be able to be punished for abortion."
This also means abortion is legal and federal public health service and federal health institutions must offer their services to anyone who requests the procedure, GIRE said.
Court ruling comes years after fight for abortion rightsThe Supreme Court ruling came two years after it ruled that criminalizing abortion was unconstitutional in one northern state. That ruling set off a process of decriminalizing abortion state by state in the Catholic-majority country.
The move to decriminalize abortion in Mexico began in 2007, when Mexico City passed the country’s first abortion decriminalization law. It took 12 years for a second state, Oaxaca, to follow, according to Human Rights Watch.
Last week, the central state of Aguascalientes became the 12th of Mexico's 32 states to decriminalize the procedure. Judges in states that still criminalize abortion must now take account of the top court's ruling.
Women and civil society groups have largely written the success story for the fight for abortion rights in the Latin American country, whether by taking to the streets or challenging authorities in courtrooms.
Other countries in the region have also moved recently to lift abortion restrictions.
Argentina legalized the procedure in 2020, followed by Colombia in 2022.
Fight for abortion access in the USIn neighboring United States, however, the fight over abortion access has picked up ever since the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year.
The decision removed nearly 50 years of federal protection for abortions, giving every state the right to make their own laws governing access to the procedure within their own jurisdiction.
rm/nm (Reuters, AP)
The European Commission has designated six major technology companies that it says will be subject to stricter rules in the future.
In a statement issued on Wednesday, the EU's executive branch said its new measures will target 22 "core platform services" provided by Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Google parent company Alphabet, Facebook owner Meta as well as Bytedance, the company behind TikTok.
Why is the EU targeting these companies?The EU wants to curb the market powers of these six tech firms. They are considered "gatekeepers" as they "provide an important gateway between businesses and consumers," the Commission statement said.
More specific criteria include generating a certain turnover within the EU as well as providing core platform services in three member states and to at least 45 million end users.
Commissioner Thierry Breton, responsible for the EU's digital policy, said it was "time to turn the tables and ensure that no online platform behaves as if it was 'too big to care.'"
Stricter rules on compatibility and data protectionThe designated companies will have to comply with the EU's Digital Markets Act (DMA), which aims to ensure greater competition in the EU's digital market. It entered into force in November 2022.
While the DMA includes rules for gatekeepers, the EU has only specified now who these gatekeepers will be.
To comply with the legislation, the companies will have to ensure that their services are compatible with competitors' products, and are obliged to share data with them, among other things. Compiling user data from different sources will only be allowed with explicit user consent.
The companies now have six months to comply with the regulations and will have to produce regular compliance reports.
Commission threatens stiff fines for non-complianceShould companies not comply with the DMA, the EU Commission announced it "can impose fines up to 10% of the company's total worldwide turnover, which can go up to 20% in case of repeated infringement."
Repeat offenders who systematically flout EU digital laws may be subject to even harsher punishments — including the possibility of a company breakup.
Apple and Microsoft have argued that some of their services, like iMessage and Bing, do not have enough users to be considered gatekeepers. The Commission said it is investigating these claims.
fg/sms (AFP, AP, DPA, DW sources)
The number of people aged 50 and under diagnosed with cancer has risen from 1.82 million to 3.26 million in the last three decades, a surge of 79.1%, according to a study published on Wednesday.
While the international researchers behind the study said poor diet, smoking and alcohol were the major cancer risk factors in this age group, they added that "the increasing trend of early-onset cancer burden is still unclear," although some of the rise was explained by population growth.
Physical inactivity and obesity could also have contributed to the trend, the study said.
The researchers used data from the 2019 Global Burden of Disease Study, analyzing the rates of 29 different cancers in 204 countries. The study was led by the University of Edinburgh in Scotland and Zhejiang University School of Medicine in Hangzhou, China, with the United States and Sweden also participating.
What else did the study say?The study, published in the journal BMJ Oncology, said cancer had led to the deaths of just over a million people under 50 in 2019, a rise of 28% from 1990, the study said.
The most dangerous forms were breast, windpipe, lung, bowel and stomach cancers, according to the study, with breast cancer the most commonly diagnosed in the period under consideration, 1990 to 2019.
Early onset windpipe and prostate cancers saw the fastest rise among under-50s in that period
Liver cancer cases fell by 2.9% per year.
The highest rates of cancer among under-50s were in developed countries, which could be because wealthy countries have better health care systems and catch the disease earlier, the study said.
Modelling indicates that the number of cancer cases in under 50s across the world will rise a further 31% by 2030, mostly among people aged 40-49.
In an editorial linked to the study, two doctors at Queen's University Belfast in Ireland, Ashleigh Hamilton and Helen Coleman, said it was "crucial" to work out what was driving the surge.
"Full understanding of the reasons driving the observed trends remains elusive, although lifestyle factors are likely contributing, and novel areas of research such as antibiotic usage, the gut microbiome, outdoor air pollution and early life exposures are being explored," they said.
tj/sms (AFP, EFE)
A Berlin museum said on Tuesday it had established a clear link between three skulls taken to Germany during the colonial era and living relatives in Tanzania.
The German capital's Museum of Prehistory and Early History carried out DNA analysis on hundreds of skulls with the aim of returning the remains to descendants.
Why is the research important?Berlin's SPK museum authority said in a statement that it was the first time that DNA research had provided a clear link between such remains and living descendants.
"The relatives and the government of Tanzania will now be informed as soon as possible," the statement said.
Some 1,100 skulls were tested as part of a pilot study. They came from a collection of some 7,700 such objects that the SPK acquired from Berlin's Charite hospital in 2011.
Museum researchers gathered enough information on eight of the skulls to make a search for specific descendants viable, the SPK said. Saliva samples were taken from possible descendants.
A complete genetic match for one of the skulls was found with a man still alive today.
The skull was marked with the title "Akida" which already indicated that it belonged to a known senior adviser to Mangi Meli (1866-1900), a powerful leader of the Chagga people.
Scientists confirmed an almost complete match to other descendants of the Chagga people in two more of the eight skulls examined. A direct biological relationship in an unbroken paternal line is at least "probable" in these cases, they said.
"Finding a match like this is a small miracle and will probably remain a rare case even despite the most meticulous provenance research," said Hermann Parzinger, president of the SPK.
Why were the skulls in Germany?The skulls are thought to have been pillaged from cemeteries and other burial sites during the time of the German Empire from 1871 to 1918. They were then taken to Germany for "scientific" studies that served to underpin racist ideas.
Many of the skulls had been collected by anthropologist and doctor Felix von Luschan when Germany was a colonial power in East Africa. Others were from a collection of the Charite hospital's former anatomical institute.
German East Africa covered present-day Burundi, Rwanda, mainland Tanzania and part of Mozambique.
The German Empire maintained colonies until its end. The largest were German East Africa, German South West Africa and Cameroon in West Africa, but there were also other areas, such as in the Pacific. After defeat in World War I, all colonies were ceded according to the provisions of the Versailles Treaty.
rc/nm (AFP, KNA)
Big companies and car manufacturers like Samsung and Toyota are betting big on solid-state batteries. Here's how they work and why we need them.
An outbreak of Legionnaire's disease in southeastern Poland has killed 19 people, health officials said on Saturday.
The outbreak hit the city of Rzeszow and surrounding areas.
Rzeszow's health department said that all those who died also had other illnesses.
Around 160 people in the region have been infected with the bacterium that causes the disease, including 107 people in the city of Rzeszow.
Earlier this week, authorities said that the number of infections was unprecedented in the region.
Rzeszow lies some 80 kilometers (50 miles) from Poland's border with Ukraine and is a major transit hub for military aid for Kyiv.
What is Legionnaire's disease?Legionnaire's disease is a lung infection caused by the Legionella bacterium, which can bring about flu-like symptoms and even severe pneumonia.
Legionella bacteria can infect humans through inhaled water spray, including from showers, humidifiers, air conditioners or taps. It does not spread through drinking water.
The disease is usually contracted in hotels, hospitals, and offices where the bacteria have got into the water supply.
The bacteria are common in water but are generally found in low concentrations. They find ideal growth conditions at temperatures between 25 and 45 degrees Celsius (between 77 and 113 degrees Fahrenheit).
Experts have said that the bacteria causing the disease could have spread in high temperatures during the recent heat wave.
People with diabetes or with heart and lung conditions are particularly vulnerable to the disease, as are smokers and older people.
Legionnaire's disease is fatal in about 5-10% of those infected. It is treated with antibiotics.
sdi/lo (dpa, AP)
India launched its maiden expedition to observe the sun called Aditya-L1 on Saturday.
Following the success of India's moon landing with Chandrayaan-3 this is the country's next attempt at another space milestone.
Aditya L-1 launched at 11:50 a.m local time (0620 UTC/GMT). The crowd at the viewer's gallery and within the office of the Satish Dhawan Space Centre (SDSC) in Sriharikota district of the Southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, erupted in celebration.
As the phases of the launch proceeded as planned, the ISRO said the probe had deployed the solar panels that will provide it with power long-term and that they had started functioning.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi congratulated the space agency on social media and said the country's "space journey" continued after its recent successful lunar mission.
"Our tireless scientific efforts will continue in order to develop better understanding of the Universe for the welfare of entire humanity," Modi said.
"Congratulations India and congratulations ISRO. While the whole watched this with baited breath it is indeed a sun shine moment for India" said Jitendra Singh the Minister of State in the Department of Space.
A jubilant launchWith the success of the launch, Dr. Shankar Subramaniam the principal scientist of the mission announced that "now ISRO (Indian Space Research Organisation) has established that it has the capability to send observatory class missions anywhere in the interplanetary medium."
Aditya-L1 is carrying scientific instruments to observe the Sun's outermost layers and aims to study behavior.
Dipankar Banerjee, director at the Aryabhatta Research Institute of Observational Sciences (ARIES) said that "we're proud to be Indian...the entire country is excited that we got this opportunity now to travel towards the sun."
Around an hour and a half after the launch, the Aditya-L1 satellite successfully separated from the rocket that had carried it into orbit, PSLV-C57.
"PSLV-C57 had injected Aditya L-1 satellite into the desired intermediate orbit. PSLV-C57 Aditya-L1 mission is accomplished" said the mission director.
Aditya-L1 could make a 'big bang' for scienceThe mission is named after the Hindi word for "sun."
The spacecraft is set to travel about 1.5 million kilometers for over four months towards a so-called Lagrange Point in space.
Objects tend to stay put in this space because of the balancing act of gravitational focus which also aids to reduce fuel consumption of the spacecraft.
"India has a long tradition of looking at the sun from the ground...but there are limitations of looking at the sun from the ground because you can only see the lower atmosphere of the sun. So this was very, very important that we could go to the space," said Dipankar Banerjee director of ARIES.
"It is multi-wavelength, multi-instrument and multi-direction and it measures particle, field and radiation. So you don't have such kind of satellites existing at the L1 point so far or currently. That makes Aditya-L1 absolutely unique," said Anil Bharadwaj, director of Physical Research Laboratory, a unit of the Department of Space of Government.
Somak Raychaudhury who was involved in the development of certain parts of the mission's observatory said that Aditya-L1 had the capacity to make a "big bang in terms of science."
Last month, India beat Russia into becoming the first country to land an unmanned vessel on the south pole of the moon.
Aditya-L1 to focus on several types of solar behaviorsRaychaudhury told broadcaster NDTV that one of the main things the probe will study are coronal mass ejections, a periodic phenomenon which sees massive discharges of plasma and magnetic energy from the Sun's atmosphere.
Some of these bursts are powerful enough to reach the Earth and disrupt satellites.
Aditya-L1 will help predict this phenomenon and "alert everybody so that satellites can shut down their power," he said.
"The low earth orbit has been heavily polluted due to private participation, so understanding how to safeguard satellites there will have special importance in today's space environment," said Rama Rao Nidamanuri, head of the department of earth and space sciences at the Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology.
In the long run, data from the mission could help better understand the sun's impact on earth's climate patterns, the origins of solar wind, the stream of particles that flow from the sun through the solar system, said scientists from the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO).
India's consistent rise in space workBeginning with NASA's pioneer programme in 1960's, previously, the US and European Space Agency (ESA) have sent numerous probes to the center of the solar system.
India has recently privatized space launches and is looking to open the sector to foreign investment. It targets a five-fold increase in its share in the global launch market within the next decade.
The country has been steadily matching the achievements of established spacefaring powers at a much lesser cost. Experts believe that the country is able to keep costs low by copying and adapting existing technology and due to the highly skilled engineers who typically earn a fraction of their foreign counterparts' salaries.
ns/msh (Reuters, AFP)
In the US state of Virginia, health authorities have registered a "statewide meningococcal outbreak." Since June 2022, 30 people have fallen ill —three times more than normal within such a period, it said. Five people have died, according to a statement from the Department of Health.
Meningococci are dangerous for immunocompromised personsAbout one in ten adults carries the meningococcal bacteria (Neisseria meningitidis). Meningococci are divided into at least 12 so-called serogroups, five of which are the cause of most diseases: A, B, C, W and Y. Serogroup "B" is the most frequently diagnosed, at 66%.
As long as the immune system is strong and the protection from childhood vaccinations is still working, the infection goes unnoticed. However, if the disease breaks out, it can result in damage to the brain, hearing loss or cognitive impairment.
Meningitis is a frequent consequence of meningococcal infectionIn two-thirds of all cases, the disease progresses as meningitis. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), meningococci are the most common cause of bacterial meningitis. Especially in sub-Saharan Africa,epidemics occur repeatedly with incidence rates of up to 1,000 cases per 100,000 inhabitants.
Sepsis, or blood poisoning, can also be the result of an infection. In some cases, it can require a limb amputation. Such serious consequences occur in about one in five of those infected.
And about 10% of meningococcal infections are fatal.
Spread of meningococci through dropletsMeningococci settle in the throat and nasal cavity. The incubation period is between three and four days, but in some cases between two and ten days.
Just by coughing, sneezing or shaking hands, meningococci can be transmitted from one infected person to another via droplets. Kissing can also transmit it. Carriers are infectious and can pass on the bacteria even if they do not grow sick themselves.
The initial symptoms are usually non-specific. Often, they resemble a flu or a flu-like infection. Then comes high fever, sensitivity to light and neck stiffness. There may also be bleeding in the skin, usually starting on the legs.
The meningococcal vaccine protects peopleInfants and young children are particularly at risk of contracting meningococcal disease because their immune system is not yet as robust as that of an adult.
People who live together in confined spaces, such as small apartments, mass shelters or refugee camps, are also at high risk because of the way the bacteria spread.
The WHO recommends following hygiene measures to help prevention efforts, including regular hand-washing, as well as getting vaccinated.
Edited by: Derrick Williams
This article has been translated from German.
Imagine it's 900,000 years ago and you're wandering naked in the beautiful harshness of nature. It's getting colder and drier, food is scarce and almost everyone around you is dying. Your own survival hangs in the balance.
If that feels far from reality, it couldn't have been more real for your great-great-great... times 30,000.... grandparents.
A study published in the journal Science on August 31 says our ancestors, then living in Africa, were on the brink of extinction.
There was a sudden reduction in the population, leaving only about 1,280 early humans. What caused the near full extinction is unclear, but it may well have been a form of climate change, similar to what we're experiencing today.
Most died, some survived, and then we came The fate of humanity was literally in the hands of a few, and all our history, our loved ones and everyone we know comes from those very few lucky survivors. They managed to keep the population afloat for about 117,000 years, the study authors found.
"The fact that we are here today, populating this planet with over 8 billion individuals, means that we managed to survive myriad unfavorable events thanks to our adaptive abilities and, why not, a touch of luck," said Giorgio Manzi, professor of anthropology at Sapienza University of Rome. Manzi collaborated on the research.
A bottleneck event is when a large number of living things get squeezed by a natural event — like the name suggests, much like the thin neck of a bottle — and then a lucky few come out of the opening and spread out again.
A gap in the human fossil recordScience has taught us a lot about our origins, mostly through fossils.
It's generally accepted that about 700,000 to 500,000 years ago Neanderthals, Denisovans and an ancient version of us split from a common ancestor. That common ancestor may have been what scientists call, Homo heidelbergensis, and this new study appears to support that theory.
But there's a gap in the fossil records. There's very little fossil evidence from about 900,000 years ago, and that has puzzled scientists for decades.
This new study, however, presents a possible reason for the fewer fossils. It could be that between 930,000 and 813,000 years ago around 98.5% of those early humans died out.
If there were fewer individuals, it makes sense that fewer of them would have been fossilized — hence the reduction in fossil evidence.
Did a changing climate lead to their extinction?The researchers said their findings strongly correlate with a "dramatic" climate change event that occurred about 1 million years ago.
The event, known as the Transition of the Lower and Middle Pleistocene, was a turning point for many living things.
"Our discovery draws attention to how climate changes have influenced our evolution," said Manzi, who also drew attention to how current human-caused climate change "could once again lead us to the brink of extinction."
It could have been a severe glaciation event, when ice spreads from the Earth's poles, severe droughts and the loss of other species, such as those that our ancestors may have eaten.
Sound familiar? We're seeing similar events today, the only difference being that the polar ice is melting, not spreading.
Looking into our past through human genesThe researchers analyzed the genome sequences of more than 3,000 modern humans, using a new statistical method called FitCoal.
FitCoal looks back in time through genetic material to gain an understanding about previous populations.
The findings still need to be tested against existing fossil and archaeological records. For instance, the researchers would like to find out whether those 1,280 survivors were indeed the ancestors of Neanderthals, Denisovans and modern humans.
And with FitCoal, all they need is a little genetic information.
Edited by: Zulfikar Abbany
An estimated 101 million people in India are living with diabetes, according to a recent study published in The Lancet. The estimate is higher than previously thought.
With another 136 million people estimated to be living with pre-diabetes, the South Asian country has earned the unfortunate distinction of being the diabetes capital of the world.
The study on non-communicable disease in India was carried out over a decade by the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) and the Madras Diabetes Research Foundation.
Diabetes is growing as a global health challenge. According to another recent study published in The Lancet, the number of diabetes cases world wide could to jump to 1.3 billion in the next 30 years.
India finds itself at the forefront of this epidemic. As the health care system grapples with the burden, experts believe that Artificial Intelligence (AI) holds immense potential to transform diabetes care in India.
"The potential lies in its ability to enhance early detection, personalize treatment, and empower individuals to manage their condition more effectively," said Gayathri Chodha, who is the founder of Bengaluru-based Aarca Research, which has developed technology for early detection of Type 2 diabetes.
Diabetes is a metabolic disorder that occurs when the pancreas does not produce enough insulin, which regulates blood sugar levels.
Over time, blood sugar imbalances can permanently damage blood vessels and nerves.
A "pre-diabetic" is someone with high blood sugar considered as having a high risk of developing diabetes. A sedentary lifestyle, poor diet and obesity are among the factors contributing to developing the disorder.
AI solutions to fight diabetesAarca Research claims that its Intelligent Health Risk Assessment (IHRA) technology is the first of its kind, using infrared-based thermal imaging of a patient's face to rapidly identify biomarkers related to diabetes, high blood pressure and cholesterol imbalances (dyslipidemia). Traditionally, physicians rely on blood tests for early detection of such diseases.
Bengaluru-based Artelus is another company that offers solutions for diabetic retinopathy, which is the degradation of blood vessels in the eyes that eventually causes blindness.
The company has developed a system that is capable of screening a person for diabetic retinopathy in less than a minute.
Detecting the disorder is generally a time-consuming process requiring a physician to scan hundreds of retinal images looking for blood vessel abnormalities. Using AI to streamline the detection process allows for early diagnosis and treatment.
"Our solution ensures that the eye specialist has to only provide consultation for the patients identified through our system," said Pradeep Walia, founder and director of Artelus.
Predictive analytics is another AI application that can help treat diabetes by analyzing masses of patient health data, especially glucose levels, to detect potential complications earlier.
AI also has a role to play in personalizing treatment plans to fit an individual's profile, educating and encouraging patients to adhere to those plans.
That's where apps like BeatO come in, which provide AI support around the clock to help patients stay motivated. Then there are wearable devices with sensors powered by AI algorithms that can showcase new biomarkers that did not exist earlier.
Scaling AI in Indian health careSuccessful implementation of these AI solutions hinges on several factors such as closing infrastructure gaps, ensuring data privacy, and tailoring solutions to suit the diverse socioeconomic contexts within India.
Aarca Research claims that their AI-driven method for early detection of type 2 diabetes is priced less than $5, which makes it accessible to a wide range of individuals seeking proactive diabetes management, across various socioeconomic backgrounds.
Meanwhile, Artelus says it has partnered with multiple eye hospitals, NGOs and public health departments across India to screen close to 100,000 people and has identified thousands of patients with diabetic retinopathy.
However, physicians say avoiding diabetes altogether with a healthy diet and exercise is the best course. Unfortunately, the Lancet study shows the increase in diabetes in India comes along with rising levels of risk factors such as obesity.
In terms of diabetes prevalence, the southern and northern regions of India exhibit the highest rates, with urban areas consistently showing high prevalence.
More and more children are also being diagnosed with diabetes.
However, studies published in 2021, before the new research was published in Lancet, already estimated that more than 50% of diabetes cases in India remain undiagnosed.
Edited by: Wesley Rahn
Tech giant Baidu made China's first artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot fully publicly available on Thursday, with two other companies, Baichuan and Zhipu AI, following suit in putting their bots online for general use.
China's AI developers are seeking to compete with Western rivals such as Microsoft and OPEN AI, the maker of ChatGPT.
The move comes despite government regulations that impose a tight control on certain information, such as that surrounding the deadly 1989 Tiananmen crackdown.
According to guidelines issued this month by Beijing, Chinese generative AI apps must "adhere to the core values of socialism" and refrain from threatening national security.
US-based OPEN AI's ChatGPT is banned in China.
What did Baidu say about its ERNIE chatbot?"We are thrilled to share that ERNIE Bot is now fully open to the general public starting August 31," Baidu said in a statement.
"In addition to ERNIE Bot, Baidu is set to launch a suite of new AI-native apps that allow users to fully experience the four core abilities of generative AI: understanding, generation, reasoning, and memory," the statement added.
CEO Robin Li was quoted in the statement as saying that the rollout would enable Baidu to gather "massive" feedback from the wide interaction with humans, enabling it to quickly improve the app.
Generative AI apps, of which ERNIE is one, use huge amounts of data taken both from the internet and from the humans that use them to learn to respond to questions in human-like language.
The ERNIE rollout led to Baidu shares going up 3.2% in Hong Kong on Thursday.
tj/rt (AP, AFP)
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The Facebook parent company said it purged thousands of accounts from a so-called "Spamouflage" campaign linked to Chinese law enforcement. The operation reportedly also targeted other platforms like YouTube and Reddit.
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For decades, the United States and Soviet Russia were the only countries that had landed on the moon. Then came China and India. Now, Japan is trying for the second time in 2023.
The legendary monster from the Scottish Highlands, nicknamed "Nessie," has long captivated imaginations. A new expedition is using thermal scanners and an underwater hydrophone to search for the creature.
The multinational NASA and SpaceX quartet blasted off before dawn from Cape Canaveral. The crew are led by Germany-born Jasmin Moghbeli and will stay on board the International Space Station for six months.
In an exclusive interview, the head of India's ISRO space agency, S. Somanath, told DW that the success of the Chandrayaan-3 mission is a major boost to India's space ambitions, and more exploration is planned.
The solar-powered Pragyan rover is exploring the largely unmapped lunar south pole in the Chandrayaan-3 mission.
Twelve years after the Fukushima nuclear meltdown, Japan is releasing the power plant's cooling water into the ocean. Japanese officials say it's safe, but experts are divided.
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A new report by the UN's International Labor Organization found that AI can help with certain duties rather than take over entire jobs. However, clerical workers remain exposed to full automation.
Somalia asked internet providers to comply with an order to remove TikTok and Telegram to curb the spread of indecent images and extremist propaganda.
From Russia's Luna-25 and India's Chandrayaan-3 to future NASA-ESA Artemis missions, moon landings are risky — same as it was for Apollo 11 in 1969.
Swipe left, swipe right: The advent of Tinder 11 years ago revolutionized online dating and made it mainstream. Many users, though, find the apps frustrating, and they can even harm people's mental health.
The Roscosmos space agency had earlier reported an "abnormal situation" on Luna-25, Russia's first moon probe in almost 50 years.
Space agency Roscosmos said there has been an "abnormal situation" during a manouver involving the Luna-25 space probe.
Something in the universe is pushing everything away from everything else, and it's getting faster and faster. But scientists don't know what it is
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The 5,000-year-old mummy was mostly descended from farmers who lived in present-day Turkey, German scientists say. Ötzi's body was found in the Italian Alps more than three decades ago.
The WHO says new omicron subvariant EG.5 Eris is a virus of interest. It's reignited talk about vaccines and speculation about a return of the pandemic.
Tanzania is prioritizing early testing efforts and effective treatments to meet the global target of ending the HIV/AIDS epidemic by 2030. One man is leading his community by example, opening up about his own struggle.
Fear of a German nuclear bomb spurred the Manhattan Project. But how far behind were the Nazis?
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Russia's space agency has returned its focus to the moon, almost 50 years since the Soviet Union's last lunar landing. The mission's official aim is to search for frozen water near the moon's south pole.
Scientists spotted the shape of a question mark hidden in a deep-space image captured by the James Webb Space Telescope.
The past few years have been some of the hottest ever. Scientists are able to observe these sorts of long-term weather trends using satellites and ground-based instruments through the EU's Copernicus program.
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NASA scientists are breathing a sigh of relief as data from the Voyager 2 spacecraft is again being received. The long-range one-way probe launched in 1977 and is far beyond our solar system, some 12 billion miles away.
Researchers say they've found a sugar molecule in breastmilk that may be vital for infant brain development, and that it may lead to improved baby formula.
Researchers have identified a gigantic species of extinct whale from bones excavated more than a decade ago. Perucetus colossus may have been heavier than even the largest blue whales.
The US space agency lost contact with the Voyager 2 probe after a series of routine commands misdirected its antenna. Now flight controllers are hoping to reposition the spacecraft, which is traveling between stars.
A 54-year-old man from Germany has been cured of HIV after years of treatment. DW sat down with him in his home to talk about his long journey to recovery.
With its ban on alcohol, Iran is treading a path that the United States tried and later abandoned as a failure. Is it worth the cost?
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AI tools, from ChatGPT to Google Translate, are useless to billions of people in the Global South who don't work in western languages. Researchers and startups from Africa and other parts of the world are changing that.
Blind women in India are using their highly developed sense of touch to catch breast cancer in early stages. A recent study has even shown them outperforming mammograms.
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Love — we all crave it, and some of us will go to extremes for it. Science says it’s love itself, a chemical concoction in the brain, that makes us do these things.
Movies have hinted at humans falling for their AI chatbots. Now it's happening in real life, with apps like Replika. But how real is human to AI Love?
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US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has told some 80 countries that the drug fentanyl is likely to spread further than the US. Washington at least partly blames China, which did not attend the meeting.
Robots responded to reporters' questions, sitting or standing next to their creators. They reaffirmed they had no intention to replace humans or rebel against them.
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The European Space Agency's Ariane 5 "workhorse" rocket has marked its 117th and final mission on Thursday after 27 years of service.
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Google said Canada's new Online News Act, aimed at bolstering the nation's struggling news sector, is "unworkable."
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Experts say Ukraine's biggest nuclear power plant is stable after the Nova Kakhova dam explosion and under no risk in the short term.
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The International Atomic Energy Agency has repeatedly raised concerns about the war in Ukraine and the threats it poses to the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant (ZNPP), and the risks it sees for the people who live in the area.
Russia has controlled the ZNPP since March 2022, just weeks after the war started. The ZNPP is located in the southeast of the country on the banks of the Dnipro river.
In May, IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi said that the general situation in the area near the ZNPP was becoming "increasingly unpredictable and potentially dangerous."
A month later in June, when the Kakhovka dam was blown up, the IAEA said the severe damage had lead to "a significant reduction in the level of the reservoir used to supply cooling water to the ZNPP."
The water is essential for cooling residual heat from the ZNPP reactors and its spent fuel ponds, and for cooling of emergency diesel power generators at the site.
The explosion at the Kakhovka dam came after missile strikes in March 2023 had caused outages and left the plant running on those emergency diesel generators.
That backup power supply is itself vital for cooling reactor fuel at the plant and preventing a nuclear meltdown, which would release dangerous thermal energy and radiation into the atmosphere.
Grossi said June 6 that there was "no immediate risk to the safety of the plant" and that there were "a number of alternative sources of water."
More than 1,500 people were reported to have been forcibly evacuated by Russian forces in the area in May.
Nuclear poses two threats in the Russia-Ukraine warWhen people think about nuclear threats and the war in Ukraine, most consider two possibilities: What would happen if an accident occurred at a Ukrainian nuclear plant? And what would happen if a nuclear weapon were deployed?
For this article, we talked to experts about the health impact the Fukushima and Chernobyl disasters had on surrounding populations, and asked them to explain the degree to which those disasters might provide a framework for our current understanding of risk at Zaporizhzhia.
In the next article in this series, we explain the health effects linked to the detonation of nuclear weapons at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and also look at what could happen if nuclear weapons were detonated in today's world.
Zaporizhzhia under occupationUkraine's Zaporizhzhia power plant is located close to the country's southern border. With six reactors on site, Zaporizhzhia is Europe's largest nuclear power plant. In 2022, it became the first active nuclear plant in history to continue operations in the midst of a war.
When occupying forces seized the plant in March 2022, experts tried to weigh up how a potential accident there would compare with the 1986 Chernobyl disaster — an event that for decades marked the worst nuclear power accident in history. The Chernobyl meltdown released radiation across Europe, affecting the lives of humans, plants and animals throughout the region.
Over 30 plant workers died in the three months following the disaster at the Soviet power station, Chernobyl, as a direct result of the meltdown.
A report published by the Chernobyl Forum, a group of UN agencies formed in 2003 to assess the health and environmental consequences of the accident, suggested in 2006 that it will cause at least 4,000 cancer deaths in the long term, although that estimate is contested.
Did Soviet officials try to downplay the aftermath of Chernobyl?Some experts say the impact of the disaster was concealed by Soviet officials in an attempt to downplay its severity. One of them is Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) professor Kate Brown.
Brown has conducted extensive research on the impact radiation has had on people's health in Ukraine and surrounding countries since the 1986 accident.
In a Greenpeace report published in 2006, researchers estimated the predicted death toll at around 90,000 — nearly 23 times the number suggested by the Chernobyl Forum report.
Edwin Lyman, a physicist and director of Nuclear Power Safety with the US-based Union of Concerned Scientists, said he, "doesn't consider the Chernobyl Forum report to be authoritative."
Lyman said the Forum's report based its cancer death predictions only on cases within the former Soviet Union, ignoring exposure to populations in other parts of Europe and the northern hemisphere. The original Chernobyl health impact report conducted by UN agencies and published in 1988, did address the global exposure to radiation in response to the accident, and estimated it would ultimately correspond to 30,000 or more cancer deaths, Lyman said.
"The fundamental issue is whether one believes that low-level exposures will cause cancer or not — and the worldwide expert consensus is that they do. The Chernobyl Forum essentially assumed otherwise," he said, calling the study a "highly political document with conclusions that were carefully massaged to minimize the impacts of the accident."
Studies following the survivors of the Chernobyl disaster have shown an increase in cases of thyroid cancer. In the decades following the accident, researchers detected rates of that particular condition in young people in the former Soviet Union that were around three times higher than expected. This increase is partly attributed to the consumption of tainted milk, studies reported.
However, according to Lyman, the large studies outlining overall cancer risk were published in the early 2000s, at a time when many cancers that could have been triggered by the Chernobyl disaster may not yet have started showing up. And nearly 20 years later, there hasn't been any comprehensive follow-up to these reports.
Reports on the disaster's health impact also note high rates of depression and anxiety in the surrounding population.
Fukushima — a better comparisonLyman said any fallout from an accident at the Zaporizhzhia power plant would have more in common with the fallout from the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan.
"The consequences that led to such a large and wide dispersal of radioactive activity [at Chernobyl] are probably less likely to occur at the reactors at Zaporizhzhia, which are light water reactors more similar to the reactors in Germany or elsewhere in the West," he said.
The nuclear accident in Fukushima marks the only other disaster at a plant that has been rated a "seven" on the IAEA's International Nuclear Event Scale.
It was generated by a powerful tsunami and earthquake that caused the plant to lose power, prompting three nuclear meltdowns, hydrogen explosions and extensive releases of radiation from the facility.
Official reports have concluded that although many people died in the tsunami and earthquake, none died in direct response to the nuclear incident. Aside from radiation sickness experienced by people in the direct vicinity, they say, the biggest health impact has been the psychological stress people nearby experienced when they were evacuated.
Today, researchers say the Fukushima incident has left only a negligible mark on the surrounding environment, because much of the radiation was released into the nearby sea.
"Zaporizhzhia is landlocked, so that wouldn't be the case. But still, you would expect probably less radioactive material released and dispersed less widely," Lyman said.
Lyman added that the level of radiation a potential accident at Zaporizhzhia could release would depend on whether the accident was technical, such as a response to the facility losing power for multiple days, or otherwise related to combat, in which case the radiation would be released more quickly. In a situation like that, the severity of any consequences would probably fall somewhere in between that of what happened at Chernobyl and what happened at Fukushima, he said.
"I think the likelihood of another Chernobyl-like event affecting Germany is lower," he said. "There would probably be measurable impacts, but not as great as what was experienced in 1986."
Ukraine's other reactors also present a riskZaporizhzhia drew a lot of attention when it came under direct Russian control.
But Lyman said he was also concerned about the other plants in Ukraine, including the inactive one at Chernobyl and three other active sites, which are older than Zaporizhzhia. That makes them even more susceptible to catastrophic failure in the event of an accident.
"There are three other nuclear plants in Ukraine that are closer to the western border. So, they're away from the front, but they're still within range of Russian rocket fire or drones," said Lyman.
He said that although none of those reactors were the same model as those at Chernobyl, some are older Soviet light-water reactors that wouldn't be as resistant to an attack as the plant at Zaporizhzhia.
"If things unravel, and they become more affordable to attack, that could be a greater concern to Western Europe," he said.
Edited by: Derrick Williams and Carla Bleiker
This article was originally published on November 8, 2022. It was last updated on June 6, 2023, to reflect developments in the Russia-Ukraine war and renewed concern over the stability of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant. It is the first of two articles on the threats posed by nuclear technology and weapons in the war.
A student based in Mumbai sought therapy after coming out to her family as a lesbian.
"It was a terrible time in my life. My father had disowned me, and I was guilty all the time. I felt I was letting my family down," Alina, using an alias, told DW.
The 25-year-old said seeking help had left her feeling invalidated, uncertain and low in self-esteem.
"My therapist at the time told me that my father only wants what is good for me, and I should apologize to him. This made me feel as if I should be ashamed of my sexuality." After a couple of sessions, Alina stopped seeing the therapist.
"I have now luckily found a supportive queer community and a better therapist," Alina added. "A lot of counselors and therapists advertise that they are queer-friendly, but they really are not. This is quite dangerous to the mental health of so many individuals, especially those coming from traditional or restrictive families."
Same-sex marriage debate in IndiaAs India's top court debates same-sex marriage, the Indian Psychiatric Society has extended its support for the cause of equal rights. In 2018, the umbrella body issued a statement saying homosexuality was a variant of normal sexuality and not an illness, adding that members of the LGBTQ community should be treated equally.
However, some practitioners still carry outdated views when it comes to sexuality.
"Psy disciplines are historically based on social norms, and treatments were used as a way to correct or punish," says Raj Mariwala, director of the Mariwala Health Initiative. "Women used to be diagnosed with hysteria. There are remnants of it even now. The average just happens to be cis heterosexual and able-bodied. The discipline has not looked beyond making practitioners structurally competent, and there are massive gaps in the care provided," she told DW.
Increasing mental health awarenessAccording to estimates by the World Health Organization, 56 million Indians suffer from depression and about 38 million suffer from anxiety disorders. Mental health awareness is on the rise, especially in urban India. A study by UnivDatos Market Insights shows that the mental health industry is expected to grow at an annual rate of 15% for the years 2022-2028.
Sriram, 30, shared his reasons for not having children with his psychiatrist.
"After a few sessions, when the topic came up again, she said I didn't want kids because I was selfish. I didn't understand how it impacted me at that point in time. It was only when I went to a different therapist that I was able to understand what a terrible experience I had," he told DW.
"She also discarded my porn addiction as normal. I wouldn't recommend her to anyone. She would often share stories of other patients with me, which meant she shared my stories to others as well," he said.
"Being single and, or, childfree, are choices that therapists are supposed to respect, just as any other choices that the client makes," Harini Prasad, a consultant psychologist at Chinmaya Mission Hospital, told DW. "But if it's a counselor who hasn't identified their biases and take supervision, judgments can creep into the work."
'Harmful' adviceRitika, a media professional, decided to get tested for Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) as an adult. After going through a range of expensive and time-consuming behavioral assessment tests assigned to her by a mental health clinic, she got results that did not mention the disorder. She was told that she had generalized anxiety and mild depression, for which she was already in therapy and taking medication.
"I have struggled with neurodivergence my entire life, and I finally sought out the evaluation when every aspect of my life was being affected," Ritika said. "But the psychologist I consulted had no practical knowledge of the condition at all. Moreover, these tests attempted to analyze me in ways that felt hurtful and offensive. It said I struggle with communication and therefore have trouble forming lasting relationships. I work in the communications field, have a strong support system and have been with my partner for a decade. So I don't know where the assessment was coming from. They could have gotten more from just talking to me. It was not only useless but also harmful."
When Ritika questioned the fact that ADHD was not mentioned, she was informed that she "did not qualify" for it. "The entire process left me furious and invalidated," she said.
She later sought a consultation from a professional who had been recommended to her and had a much better experience.
"Now I only seek out professionals who come personally recommended by someone I trust," she added.
The Indian Mental Health Care Act of 2017 provides individuals with the right to make complaints about deficiencies in the provision of services.
The Mariwala Health Initiative (MHI) conducts a Queer Affirmative Counselling Practice course, through which it has already trained some 500 mental health professionals in India. It lists the names of practitioners who have completed the course on its website. "Being queer, caste, disability friendly cannot be limited to one course. Professionals in the field should practice allyship and update themselves regularly and consistently," Raj Mariwala, director of the Mariwala Health Initiative, told DW.
When it comes to "bad therapy," professionals say people should not let this discourage them from seeking help.
"Clients need to trust how they feel around the therapist, counselor, psychiatrist. The same person may not be a good fit for everyone who needs support. Ask for credentials, ask for what approaches the counselor uses and what their consent policy is. Most importantly, you — the client — should feel respected, your choices are respected, and communication is respectful," said Prasad.
If you are suffering from serious emotional strain or suicidal thoughts, do not hesitate to seek professional help. You can find information on where to find such help, no matter where you live in the world, at this website: https://www.befrienders.org/.
Edited by: John Silk
Most young learners in India will no longer be exposed to key science topics in school textbooks — unless they voluntarily major in science in higher classes.
On June 1, India cut a slew of foundational topics from tenth grade textbooks, including the periodic table of elements, Darwin's theory of evolution, the Pythagorean theorem, sources of energy, sustainable management of natural resources and contribution of agriculture to the national economy, among others.
A small section explaining Michael Faraday’s contributions to scientific understanding of electricity and magnetism has also been removed.
Even as thousands of scientists across the country protested the decision to slash evolution last month, it did not deter India’s National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) — the public body that designs curriculum and textbooks — from expanding its list of omitted topics.
These changes effectively block a major swath of Indian students from exposure to evolution through textbooks, because tenth grade is the last year mandatory science classes are offered in Indian schools.
That means the only students who will learn evolution under these new cuts are those who have opted to "major" in biology in their final two years. Students who opt for a different topic, like commerce, computer science or humanities, won't have the opportunity.
In a statement, the council rationalized the reduction by stating they wanted to reduce the content load on students in light of the Covid-19 pandemic. Defending its decision to chop off evolution and the periodic table, the council said "that children may not have to study same concepts at different stages and it needs to be done at appropriate stage. (sic)"
Outside of science, topics such as democracy and governance have also been severely diluted. Scientists fear this overall move to expunge some of these foundational topics will facilitate a climate ripe for superstition and unreason to fester.
Growing influence of pseudoscience in India
In 2018, Indian minister for higher education Satyapal Singh baffled the scientific community by demanding that the theory of evolution be removed from school curriculum becaue "no one ever saw an ape turning into a human being." Other political leaders from the ruling Bhartiya Janata Party came to his defense on social media.
Shortly after, three major scientific bodies — Indian National Science Academy (INSA), the Indian Academy of Science (IASc) and the National Academy of Sciences-India (NASI) — issued a joint statement: "It would be a retrograde step to remove the teaching of the theory of evolution from school and college curricula or to dilute this by offering non-scientific explanations or myths," they said, adding that evolutionary theory, to which Darwin made seminal contributions, is well-established.
While fields like astrology have always slipped in and out of fashion in India, research institutions are seeing increased funding toward the exploration of pseudoscientific topics. One that caught the public attention was the call for research proposals on the medical benefits of cow urine. On multiple occasions, Hindu groups have spread false information about the benefits of cow urine, including claims that it cures Covid-19. Scientists took to the streets in India to counter the claims.
Fields such as Ayurveda and homeopathy have been receiving concessions in recent years, while the Indian Council of Agricultural Research has embarked on projects to promote 'spiritual farming' using the tag "Agriculture with a soul is essential for sustenance."
In 2015, a paper was presented at the Indian Science Congress claiming that an ancient Indian rishi had given detailed guidelines for making aircraft 7,000 years ago. At the same event, the then science and technology minister Harsh Vardhan said that ancient Indian mathematicians had discovered the Pythagorean theorom, although the Greeks got the credit.
And during the same year, in 2015, Prime Minister Narendra Modi made headlines after citing Hindu scriptures as proof that plastic surgery had existed in ancient India.
Sharp criticism from the scientific community
Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins responded to the issue on Twitter, calling the cuts a "tragic affront to India’s secular beginnings", blaming them on leaders' religious beliefs.
Almost 2,000 stakeholders have signed an appeal by the Breakthrough Science Society, a campaign group based in Kolkata, India, demanding the reinstatement of evolution in secondary school textbooks.
"In the current educational structure, only a small fraction of students chooses the science stream in grade 11 or 12, and an even smaller fraction of those choose biology as one of the subjects of study. Thus, the exclusion of key concepts from the curriculum till grade 10 amounts to a vast majority of students missing a critical part of essential learning in this field," the appeal read.
They further reiterated that the scientific community worries that students will remain seriously handicapped in their thought processes if deprived of exposure to this fundamental scientific discovery.
"Knowledge and understanding of evolutionary biology is important not just to any subfield of biology but is also key to understanding the world around us," they wrote.
T. V. Venkateshwaran, a senior scientist for Vigyan Prasar, an autonomous body of the Indian government that works in science popularization, expressed similar thoughts to DW in an interview.
He said the general science education that all Indian students commonly get until class 10 is instrumental in helping them develop perspectives about the world.
"For example, the periodic table not only tells you that everything is made of atoms, but why certain elements behave a certain way; how their atomic structure contributes to it," the scientist told DW. "It tells you that you and all other humans are made of the same kind of material that behaves the same way, and no one is more special. When you see a chemical reaction in nature, you don't think it magical, you know it is physical. Some elements are inert, others are reactive — both because of their electronic structure."
In August 2017, scientists across India held a 'March for Science' to protest the rampant spread of superstitious beliefs and the center’s implicit endorsement of many of them. The government did not respond.
Conflict between religion and evolution
Many conservative religious groups and states around the world have struggled, or refused, to accept scientific evidence for evolution.
A fundamental concept in evolution is that all life forms, including humans, have a common ancestor. Although it's strongly backed up by scientific observation, the theory directly contradicts many religions that say humans were deliberately created by a supernatural being.
Many American states including Texas, Tennessee, Kansas and Pennsylvania have had their tiff with evolution. Serbia, Poland and the Netherlands have also had issues with teaching evolution in schools. In 2017, Turkey dropped it. Saudi Arabia, Oman, Algeria and Morocco have banned the teaching of evolution completely. In Egypt and Tunisia, evolution is presented as an unproven hypothesis.
Edited by: Clare Roth
Claims that the World Health Organization (WHO) is attempting a power grab to force countries to lock down during future pandemics are circulating the internet, while national conservatives in the US and UK have made false claimswarning the organization is planning to threaten state sovereignty.
The claims have arisen after the publication of a draft of the WHO pandemic treaty, which seeks to shore up the world's defenses against new pathogens.
"We continue to see misinformation on social media and in mainstream media about the pandemic accord that countries are now negotiating. The claim that the accord will cede power to WHO is quite simply false. It's fake news," a WHO spokesperson told DW.
"Countries will decide what the pandemic accord says, and countries alone. And countries will implement the accord in line with their own national laws. No country will cede any sovereignty to WHO," the WHO spokesperson said.
The fake news has also made its way into traditional media outlets, with The Telegraph claiming that UK ministers fear the WHO pandemic treaty could impose lockdowns on the UK.
But the language in the treaty draft could not be any clearer: Powers to prevent and respond to pandemics will remain under national jurisdiction.
Its first consideration, listed on page 4, aims to "reaffirm the principle of sovereignty of State Parties in addressing public health matters."
What's in the WHO pandemic treaty?COVID-19 was a wakeup call for how unprepared the world was to deal with pandemics at the global level.
The treaty aims to remedy this problem by to facilitating an "all of government and all of society approach" to future pandemics by strengthening national, regional and global health systems.
"We learned that we cannot start making rules during a crisis the magnitude of COVID. It was every nation for themselves. There is a global rational choice that says unless we get out of a pandemic together, we don't get out of it at all — that's why this treaty is so important," said Gian Luca Burci, a professor of international law at the Geneva Graduate Institute.
The treaty aims to promote international cooperation by improving alert systems, data-sharing and research, as well as the production and distribution of medical and public health countermeasures like vaccines, medicines and diagnostics.
"One way we're promoting international engagement is by calling on parties to the treaty to allocate a percentage of their GDP (how much is to be decided) for international cooperation and assistance on pandemic prevention, preparedness, response and health systems recovery, particularly for developing countries," an EU official told DW.
The WHO's role will be to facilitate these efforts as a "directing and coordinating authority", according to the treaty.
But the organization will not have any powers to override sovereign legal precedence to impose lockdowns or forced vaccination programs.
"One health" approachA major part of the treaty incorporates policy that recognizes the health of ecosystems and the environment in pandemic prevention and response.
"One response is the focus on a 'one health' approach (considering the health of all living things, including animals) given that pandemics are likely to be caused by zoonotic pathogens," said the EU official.
Zoonotic pathogens are diseases caused by germs like viruses, bacteria, parasites and fungi that spread between animals and people. Ebola, HIV, swine and avian flu are just some examples of zoonotic pathogens. And while scientists aren't certain how SARS-CoV-2 originated, experts believe there is a strong possibility the virus emerged at an animal marketin Wuhan, China.
The WHO pandemic treaty aims to implement actions to prevent pandemics from pathogens resistant to antimicrobial agents, as well as work to control zoonotic outbreaks in wildlife and domesticated animals.
"This treaty contains some of the important ingredients to reduce the risk of zoonotic spillover, namely by surveillance and helping national action to reduce its risk. It goes in the right direction, stronger than before," said Burci.
International health equityThe start of the COVID-19 pandemic saw wealthier countries racing to purchase vast quantities of COVID-19 vaccines, leaving lower income countries stuck waiting for their share.
"There was a failure of solidarity. This caused mistrust from many developing countries that now want ironclad guarantees so we won't repeat the experience of COVID," said Burci.
The treaty recognizes the failures of inequitable and ineffective global supply chains and logistics.
"One idea is to use public funding as leverage to facilitate technology transfer, reserve certain quantities of vaccines ... and waive intellectual property rights," said Burci.
Burci explained the world saw a clear imbalance between the public and the private sector during the COVID-19 pandemic.
"We've been dominated by the interests of pharmaceutical companies who rushed to produce vaccines because that's what the world wanted. The treaty aims to have a private prerogative, but also public power to protect the population and assert that there is a fundamental systemic inequity," said Burci.
But does the treaty go far enough?The draft treaty has come under strong criticism for being toothless in its ability to provide equity measures for lower income countries
For example, a previous draft offered guidance that would designate a certain percentage of vaccines to the WHO for it to allocate equitably, but this has disappeared from the latest draft.
"Many people are very disappointed," said Burci. "Now, the draft treaty has language that waters down clear obligations to achieve equity."
However, the treaty isn't finalized yet. It is still at the drafting stage and won't be "submitted for consideration" until May 2024. If the treaty goes into effect, it will technically be legally binding, but the WHO doesn't have the power to penalize countries that disobey. The hope among experts like Burci is that stronger equity measures can be put in place by then.
"Compromises are painful. But the agreement is not the end of the story. It's the beginning of the story — afterwards comes implementation and development," said Burci.
Edited by: Clare Roth
Vienna's Supreme Court of Justice ruled on Thursday that the Austrian state cannot be held liable for infections during a 2020 COVID-19 outbreak that hit an Alpine ski resort.
The case was brought by a resident of Germany who had traveled to Ischgl in Austria's western state of Tyrol and stayed there from March 7 to March 13, 2020.
The plaintiff had sought damages over the "catastrophic mismanagement by the relevant authorities" in Tyrol in early March 2020.
The outbreak at the popular Ischgl resort was seen as one of Europe's first "super-spreader" events in the early days of the pandemic. The resort is known for its nightlife and its "apres-ski" scene.
Over 6,000 people from 45 countries contracted the coronavirus at the resort in March, 2020, and 32 of those infected died.
What did the court find?The federal court said that the Tyrol state government gave incorrect information in a March 5, 2020 statement. The statement suggested that passengers that had flown from Munich to Reykjavik caught COVID-19 on the plane rather than in Tyrol.
In truth, the authorities already had reason to believe that one man had developed symptoms before flying to Iceland, the court said in a verdict on May 15.
However, the court also ruled that the statement did not form a "basis of trust" that would cause people to make faulty decisions, as it noted that the evaluation was formulated vaguely, and stated it was based on initial information and that further clarification was in progress.
The federal court also upheld lower court's findings that authorities' obligations under anti-COVID-19 regulations were designed "exclusively to protect the general public."
An independent commission concluded late in 2020 that Tyrol authorities acted too slowly to shut down ski resorts, but did not find that political or business pressure influenced the decision.
In November 2021, prosecutors said they would not file criminal charges against five people under investigation over the outbreak.
'Deep disappointment' for consumersThe legal director of Austria's Consumer Protection Association, Peter Kolba, called the verdict a "deep disappointment" for those infected in the Ischgl outbreak. He argued that some of the visitors had "suffered severe damage because of the mistakes of authorities in Tyrol."
He said that the verdict amounted to "license for authorities to do whatever nonsense occurs to them during a pandemic."
Kolba said that the association would consider further action for damages against Austria.
sdi/dj (AP, AFP, dpa)
"Mum, you'll die from smoking!" The more often my son threw his hands over his head in horror when he saw me smoking, the less I could justify the habit. So I quit. That was in 2019.
Two months later, I was still a non-smoker. Addiction physician Tobias Rüther was thrilled by my smoking cessation. He heads the special outpatient clinic for tobacco addiction at the Ludwig Maximilian University Hospital in Munich.
"When you stop smoking, a lot of positive things happen in your life very quickly," Rüther said.
A lot of changes, very quicklyAfter just eight hours, the body receives a much better supply of oxygen, Rüther explained to me. After just one to two days, many people smell and taste better again. After two weeks, lung function often improves significantly, which is more noticeable during sports. However, I felt just as fit after I quit smoking as I did before.
"You may get a stronger cough than you had before," Rüther said. "This is because the lungs are starting to clean themselves out." That spring cleaning, he said, takes about a month. "Also, after a month, your immune system is much stronger."
After three months of abstinence, you can also look forward to a much better night's sleep.
"Smokers experience nicotine withdrawal at night. You don't wake up from that, but you sleep much more restlessly. After three months, sleep has returned to normal," said Rüther.
Danger from cigarette number 3Before I could decide on complete abstinence, I thought that merely smoking fewer cigarettes would automatically be healthier. But that idea is not completely true, because more than two cigarettes is enough to harm the body.
"The cardiovascular risk, i.e. the risk of having a stroke or heart attack, is barely increased between three and twenty cigarettes," said Rüther. But it's a different story with cancer. There, the risk increases with every single cigarette.
"It's really great that you've quit," Rüther kept saying. His joy is contagious — my own enthusiasm had so far been limited.
Yet one in two smokers dies because of their tobacco addiction, and 50% of them before age 70. Rüther was certain that by the age of 50 at the latest, I would have felt the consequences of smoking.
Relapse rate: 95 percentAids to stop smoking such as nicotine patches, hypnosis or acupuncture were not necessary to keep my hands off cigarettes. The fact that my will alone was enough might have something to do with the fact that I joined the smoking team so late — not until I was 21. Another positive, according to the addiction doctor.
"Most smokers start between the ages of 12 and 16, when the brain is still maturing. Nicotine is an extremely active neurotransmitter that has a major impact on the development of neural connections in the brain," the doctor said.
The result is a lifelong addiction that can hardly be overcome by sheer willpower, Rüther explained.
But, he added, "out of 100 smokers who quit without help, like you, 95 relapse in the first year." Well, great.
The smoker's illusionOne reason for a relapse could be the "smoker's illusion," a nasty psychological trick of nicotine. Rüther emphasized that in cigarette addiction, psychological dependence is very strong. That's why I, too, fell for the smoker's illusion: for years I convinced myself that smoking would calm me down, take away stress and give me a short break.
"In reality, however, every cigarette increases the heartbeat and makes you more restless," said Rüther.
The fact that smoking made me feel calmer was simply because I was experiencing withdrawal symptoms after a long period without a cigarette, and my addicted body was craving new nicotine.
"So the cigarette just takes away the restlessness you wouldn't have had in the first place if you weren't smoking," Rüther said.
Pavlov's dogThe first cigarette-free evening with friends, music and wine was pretty weird. Something was missing and it didn't feel right. For years, I had successfully conditioned myself to believe that smoking was simply part of certain situations: with coffee, with wine, with a break.
"It works like Pavlov's dog: you give the dog something to eat and ring a bell at the same time. At some point, the ringing is enough for the dog to salivate," Rüther explained.
With smokers, this bell rings permanently. Smoking is for relaxation or in order to get in the swing of things. As a reward after work, after a meal, while waiting for the bus or after sex. The list could be continued.
"The crux is that cigarettes are so firmly integrated into the everyday lives of smokers," said Rüther.
I want to quit. But how?Anyone who wants to quit is faced with difficult task. As such, Tobias Rüther initially reassures his patients that failure is normal and part of the process.
"When patients tell me that they have already tried to quit five times, I first acknowledge these attempts. After all, it seems to be an important concern to them," he said.
Not smoking, he said, is like learning to ride a bike: falls are part of the process, the important thing is just getting back on the saddle. "Decatastrophizing the relapse," the physician calls it.
In addition, it's important to signal to the brain that something has changed.
"Sit in a different chair than usual in the morning. Drink tea instead of coffee. Put the plant in a new place at your workstation." That, according to Rüther, is how to trick the Pavlovian dog in the smoker's head.
And even if the will doesn't always hold, it doesn't have to be a relapse. As Tobias Rüther said, "one cigarette is a slip. It's not a relapse until the second one."
This article is translated from a German version published in May 2023.
What's it like for health care workers in Germany? What do I need to know before trying to get a job? And how good does my German need to be? These are the questions that keep popping up on Facebook, Instagram and especially an ever-expanding WhatsApp group.
Thaiza Maria Silva Farias can answer these questions from fellow Brazilians in her sleep. As a trained nurse from Rio de Janeiro, who came to Germany in October of 2016, she's a bit of a pioneer in that respect.
Soon after her arrival, she started working in the operating room at a clinic in Darmstadt. After seeing the lack of staff in German hospitals and its daily impact on patients, she decided last year to use her experience to start the Nursewelt, or Nurse World, recruitment agency that aims to entice care workers in Brazil to come to Germany.
"I can provide Brazilian applicants with professional help. Beyond that, I know very well who would be useful in German clinics," Silvia Farias told DW.
More and more people need caring for in GermanyNursewelt seems to have the potential to be a success story because Silva Farias and her company help fill a gap in the market that gets bigger every year.
There were almost 2 million people in Germany who needed caring for in 1999, according to the Federal Statistical Office. By 2055, experts estimate that number will rise to 6.8 million.
At the same time, the number of people providing care has shrunk. Last year 53,300 people in Germany began training to be specialized nurses. That's 4,000 trainees fewer than in 2021 and represents a decline of 7%, the Federal Statistics Office said.
'Hand pick the work you want'For each unemployed care worker in Germany, there are currently three open positions. Or, as Germany's Federal Employment Office put it, "There's a clear lack of nurses."
"You can pick what job you'd want to have as a nurse in Germany. You can look and decide where you would most like to work. When you're unemployed, it only takes one or two days until you've got another offer," Silva Farias said.
In Brazil, it's much more difficult to get a position, she added.
"The competition there is enormous. There are people that studied for five years and sometimes have master's or even doctoral degrees who still can't find jobs due to a lack of work," Silva Farias said.
Who wins and who loses?According to German Labor Minister Hubertus Heil, Germany and Brazil seem to be a perfect match when it comes to nursing and care work. He will travel to Brazil with Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock in June.
The trip is part of a recruitment strategy that stretches to other countries, including Mexico and Indonesia.
"We'll be very sensitive in our approach, so we do not take workers from countries where they're needed," Heil told the daily Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung.
Heil added that the appeal to care workers could be mutually beneficial. "We benefit, the countries of origin benefit from us engaging in training there, and the people who come to us benefit by having a well-paying job and maybe even the chance to provide financial support to their family members at home."
A win-win situation for everyone? Patient advocates have doubts about filling the care-worker gap with nurses from other countries and that Germany's lack of nurses can be solved by hiring from foreign countries. In 2022, there were 656 foreign nurses hired in Germany, primarily from the Philippines, according to the Federal Employment Agency.
'A domestic German problem'"At its core, the lack of nursing staff is a domestic German problem, and . the few hundred Brazilian nurses won't fix it," Foundation for Patient Rights head Eugen Brysch told the dpa news agency.
And what about countries like Brazil and Mexico? Are there really just winners, or is it the case that Germany is relying on brain drain in Latin America to take away qualified workers from countries that might eventually need them in the future?
Mexican surgeon Xavier Tello, a leading Latin American health care expert, took a pragmatic view of people's decision to look for employment abroad.
"This brain drain is completely normal in a globalized world," he told DW. "If I'm very well trained, and this is appreciated more in a foreign country than at home where working conditions are often bad and the wages are low, than it makes sense to take this step."Tello added, however, that few people in the region are aware of foreign efforts to recruit them.
"But when people are exposed to it, their approach is more like, 'Well, at least in foreign countries our nurses get the appreciation they don't get at home."
Silva Farias knows why nurses in Latin America decide to try their luck in Germany: The quality of life is better and they have more security; pay can be six times higher than at home while working for just one employer instead of for two or three hospitals in Brazil.
Still, Tello said he is not afraid countries like Mexico would soon struggle with a lack of nurses.
"Mexicans are very connected to their home," he said. "Emigrating to Germany and learning a new, difficult language would be quite the culture shock, so for them it's really the last option. Interestingly, people here do not regard it as a big career opportunity with a good salary."
Room for improvement on integrationSilvia Farias said the nurses sending her questions regarding a move to Europe as just one phase in their life and career plans rather than a professional endgame.
If Heil and Baerbock want to attract more workers from Latin America, Farias said there are changes they should make in Germany as well.
"Hospitals have to be better prepared for their new employees," she said. "Staff often has no patience when people don't speak German well. [Foreign nurses] should get a year to get a handle on the language. Germany needs to work on integrating foreign care workers."
This article was originally published in German.
Twitter has withdrawn from a voluntary European Union agreement to stamp out disinformation online, a top EU official said late Friday.
"Twitter leaves EU voluntary Code of Practice against disinformation. But obligations remain," EU Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton wrote on Twitter.
"You can run but you can't hide. Beyond voluntary commitments, fighting disinformation will be legal obligation under #DSA as of August 25. Our teams will be ready for enforcement," Breton added, referring to the EU's new Digital Services Act which takes effect in less than two months.
Twitter has yet to confirm its withdrawal from the code, but the decision appears to be the latest move by billionaire owner Elon Musk to loosen the reins after he bought the social media firm last year.
Musk cut thousands of jobs to save money, slashing entire departments, including those responsible for content moderation.
Pursuing a goal of turning Twitter into a digital town square, where freedom of speech is prioritized, Musk has rolled back previous anti-misinformation rules, and has thrown its verification system into chaos.
Light-touch moderationThe platform now says it "deboosts" and demonetizes extremely negative or hateful tweets so they can only be seen if a user searches for them, while posts that contain fake news are moderated to include corrections, often from the Twitter community.
The current EU Code of Practice of Disinformation includes obligations to track political advertising, stop the monetization of disinformation, and to work with fact-checkers.
Twitter signed the code in 2018, along with other social media platforms including TikTok, Facebook owner Meta and Google.
The platforms are meant to issue regular reports on their progress in combating disinformation.
In February, Brussels published reports on how online platforms were implementing the code and noted that Twitter gave no "specific information and no no targeted data" related to transparency commitments.
Tougher EU rules from AugustUnder the new Digital Services Act, tech companies will have to moderate their platforms for harmful content like disinformation and introduce protocols to block the spread of dangerous material.
Companies must also increase transparency regarding interactions with users and simplify user agreements.
Twitter, among others, has been designated as a so-called Very Large Online Platform (VLOP), which means it will be monitored more strictly by Brussels than smaller platforms.
Twitter currently boasts nearly 330 million monthly active users, with more than half coming from the United States, Japan and India.
Only one European country, the United Kingdom, makes Twitter's Top 10 user list, but the UK is no longer an EU member.
Twitter says it has between 7 and 9 million users each in France, Spain and Germany, its three biggest EU-based markets.
mm/fb (AP, dpa)
Producing food is terrible for the environment. According to the online scientific publication Our World in Data, agriculture is responsible for a quarter of the carbon emissions in the atmosphere and the vast majority of world's biodiversity losses.
And while environmental decline goes on, the world's population keeps growing. The UN predicts the world population will reach 10 billion in 2057. This raises the question: how do we increase food production by 50% while mitigating the catastrophes of biodiversity loss and the climate crisis?
"We've come to understand that using more land for agriculture is the biggest sin with respect to climate change and biodiversity. This means we need to produce food on less land so we can protect nature," said Matin Qaim, a specialist in food economics and director of the Center for Development Research at the University of Bonn in Germany.
How do we feed 10 billion people?Qaim explained that, broadly speaking, there are two different approaches for how to do this.
"One strand says we need dietary changes to make consumption more sustainable. That means less waste, less meat. The other strand argues we need better technologies to create more environmentally friendly methods of agriculture," he told DW.
Qaim thinks both approaches are necessary. For one, we need to change the way food is produced — in particular, reducing human consumption of proteins and nutrients from animal sources. But it's not enough. Like many experts, he thinks gene technologies are a crucial part of the strategy for a sustainable food system.
"Everyone wants to produce more food from less area and with less chemical pesticides, and with less fertilizer. If you're able to [use gene technologies to] develop plants that are more tolerant and more resistant, it's a good thing," said Qaim.
What really is GM food?Genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are organisms that have altered DNA to change their properties. Genetically modified crops can improve yield, build resistances to pests, frost or drought, or add nutrients. Crops can also be modified to reduce carbon emissions and boost the sustainability of food production. While widespread, GM crop production uses only about 10% of the land non-GM crop production uses.
"GM is nothing more than a breeding technique, much like crossing that we've been doing for thousands of years. But it's more sophisticated, so we can make very precise changes, very rapidly," said David Spencer, a phytopathologist and spokesperson for Replanet, an alliance of NGOs advocating for science-based solutions to climate change and the loos of biodiversity. It's campaign Reboot Foodfocuses on sustainable food production.
GMOs were first introduced in the US in 1994, with modified tomato plants that ripened more slowly to prolong their shelf life. Since then, a wide range of crops, such as soybeans, wheat and rice have been approved for agricultural use, along with GM bacteria grown to produce large amounts of protein.
Scientists in India have also developed strains of Sub-1 rice, which are much more resistant to flooding. Flooding is a major issue in rice-growing regions of northern India and Bangladesh, set to become worse as the climate crises develops, and now 6 million farmers in the region are using Sub-1 rice to safeguard their crops against inundation.
Golden rice, on the other hand, is a GM strain modified to contain vitamin A, designed to combat the shortage of dietary vitamin A in parts of Asia and Africa.
GM disease resistanceGene editing technology has also helped save crop production from blights. In the late 20th century, the papaya ringspot virus almost wiped-out papaya crops in Hawaii, but a local scientist developed a modified papaya that was resistant to the virus. Seeds were distributed to farmers, saving papaya production a decade later.
David Spencer has also worked on protecting soybeans from fungal diseases spreading through America.
"Currently there's no real solution except for massive fungicide applications. No one wants that, so we worked on adding genes or DNA changes from distantly related plants to achieve better resistances to the fungus," Spencer told DW.
GM controversyAnd yet, many people find the idea of GM foods hard to swallow — a 2020 opinion poll found 50% of people in 20 surveyed countries perceived GM foods as unsafe.
When GM crops were first developed 30 years ago, uncertainty and concerns about safety were shared by scientists, but things are different now.
James Rhodes, a biosafety analyst at Biosafety South Africa, explained that 30 years of safety data and scientific insight show GM foods are as safe as non-GM foods.
"We have 30 years of safety information showing that GM food is completely safe to eat, and 30 years of information showing it's not dangerous for the environment," said Rhodes.
According to Rhodes, it's not possible in any country to start using GMOs without going through extensive regulatory requirements.
"By the time it's taken to the field and commercial approval, it's gone through a long history of development, especially looking at the risks," he said.
Monsanto ruined GM food's reputationMatin Qaim thinks the controversy around GMOs has been muddled up with a debate about corporate industrial agriculture. The specter of Monsanto still hangs over the industry.
"There are concerns big corporate interests from companies like Monsanto, which promote more pesticides and monocultures and wrong forms of agriculture and seeds sold to farmers and expensive prices," said Qaim.
Qaim shares the concerns but argues the problems have more to do with how technology is regulated than gene editing itself.
"It's the wrong model to have corporate industrial agriculture dominated by a few. But this has nothing to do with gene technology. Banning GMOs would be like banning the internet because of the sale of bad drugs and pornography," he said.
GM food industry is changingGM agriculture is moving on from the Monsanto big-dog corporate model. GM products are increasingly focused on social and public enterprise and the industry is looking at more local solutions that help smallholder farmers in developing countries.
Regulation and licensing are a huge part of this. Many, including Replanet, strongly advocate for open-source seeds and GM technologies.
"You can develop GMOs without patents developed by humanitarian public organizations. We need to regulate in a smart way and ensure there's competition in the market. Corporate industrial agriculture is the wrong model," said Qaim.
Ultimately, it's about creating a licensing landscape that empowers local farmers to adapt to the demands of sustainable agriculture, but quickly enough to meet rising populations and climate change.
But as Rhodes said, new GM technologies will be more accepted as their need becomes greater, like with the case of the papaya virus.
Edited by: Helen Whittle
OpenAI — the company behind the popular artificial intelligence (AI) platform ChatGPT — has no plans to leave Europe, CEO Sam Altman said on Friday, reversing a threat made earlier this week.
"We are excited to continue to operate here and of course have no plans to leave," Altman said in a tweet.
The remark is a U-turn from comments made to journalists on Wednesday where he accused the European Union's proposed AI Act of potentially "overregulating" platforms like his.
"The current draft of the EU AI Act would be overregulating, but we have heard it's going to get pulled back," Altman told Reuters. "They are still talking about it."
Altman was cited by the Financial Times as saying that the draft EU rules were causing him "a lot of concern" but that OpenAI would indeed try to comply with them. "But if we can't comply with them, we will cease operations [in Europe]."
During an event at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) on Wednesday, Altman said that he thinks typically, regulators should take a wait-and-see approach, but noted how AI regulation is an area "where we should be proactive."
Brussels says AI rules 'cannot be bargained'Altman's initial threat was met with a strong response from Brussels, with European Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton insisting that Europe's AI rules are not up for negotiation.
Breton said there was no point making speculative threats and claiming Europe was holding up the rollout of generative AI, referring to the type of AI that can create text, images and other content.
"Let's be clear, our rules are put in place for the security and well-being of our citizens and this cannot be bargained," Breton told Reuters.
"Europe has been ahead of the curve designing a solid and balanced regulatory framework for AI which tackles risks related to fundamental rights or safety, but also enables innovation for Europe to become a frontrunner in trustworthy AI," he said.
Microsoft's President Brad Smith said during an event in the United States on Thursday that he was optimistic "reason will prevail" and that the final AI Act would be an acceptable compromise.
What is ChatGPT and why is it so controversial?ChatGPT is an AI platform that is able to write emails, essays and software code with minimal human guidance. It can also give detailed answers on a wide range of topics.
Microsoft has invested nearly $10 billion in Open AI, the laboratory behind ChatGPT, while Google and Chinese tech giant Alibaba have rushed out their own versions.
The arrival of such chatbots has surprised many policymakers and business leaders, who hadn't expected AI technology to advance so quickly.
Concerns are now rising that AI may grow too powerful, cause hundreds of millions of job losses and be used for nefarious purposes.
Critics say it will decimate entire industries, lead to a flood of misinformation and copyright infringements, and entrench race, gender and political biases.
AI's supporters claim that the technology will improve lives by doing menial tasks better and revolutionize human interaction with machines.
When will the European AI Act be passed?The EU is in the final stages of approval of its regulations to cover generative AI tools, such as OpenAI's Chat GPT.
After being sent back to the drawing board by the arrival of ChatGPT, EU lawmakers reached common ground on the draft of the act earlier this month.
EU lawmakers and EU national governments are expected to thrash out the details of the rules in the coming months before they become legislation that may become the global standard for the technology.
The final law isn't expected to take effect until 2025.
mm/sri (dpa, Reuters)
Nine out of ten people do not survive pancreatic cancer, and the survival rate has not improved for almost 60 years. There are hardly any effective treatment options. That's why every advance in therapy is a revolution. And that is exactly what is happening now.
Researchers in the US treated 16 pancreatic cancer patients with a personalized mRNA vaccine after they had their tumors surgically removed. By the end of the 18-month trial period, half of the patients had not relapsed. For a cancer that usually returns within a few months of surgery, that's a huge success.
In the world of medical science, superlatives are few and far between. In this case, however, pancreatic cancer experts are more than a little excited: Niels Halama, a tumor immunologist at the German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg, described the latest development as "fantastic" and "unexpected" news. Thomas Seufferlein, a gastroenterologist from Ulm, declared it a decisive breakthrough with a "completely new approach". His colleague Alexander Kleger called it a "huge step" that will revolutionize the field.
With only 16 patients, the study, published in the journal Nature, is small. However, it provides the first evidence of the successful use of mRNA technology for one of the deadliest and most difficult-to-treat forms of cancer. It's also a decisive breakthrough in the years-long effort to develop cancer vaccines tailored to the tumors of individual patients.
What was done during the study? At the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, tumors were removed from patients and sent to Germany. The tumor tissue's genome was then sequenced by the biotechnology company BioNTech and examined for the presence of mutations, so-called neoantigens.
A selection of neoantigens to be targeted was then compiled individually for each patient — itself a highly complex process based on years of research — and an mRNA-based vaccine was produced. Like the mRNA vaccine against COVID-19, the goal was to induce an immune reaction against these neoantigen structures.
This vaccine was administered for the first time nine weeks after the patients went through surgery to remove the primary tumor in the pancreas. In addition, the patients also received chemotherapy and so-called checkpoint inhibitors (these are molecules that prevent cancer from shutting down the immune system).
In the eight patients who showed an immune response, the tumor had not returned by the end of the study. The other eight patients did not show an immune response – they relapsed.
"I am very excited about the fact that there is an apparent correlation between the induction of immunity and the early indication of longer-term survival," said Nina Bhardwaj, who researches cancer immunology at New York's Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, adding that the findings would need to be confirmed by larger clinical trials.
Why is pancreatic cancer so deadly?The pancreas is a small organ located deep in the abdominal cavity. Carcinoma there is one of the leading causes of cancer death worldwide. The main problem is that pancreatic cancer is usually detected at a very late stage. There is no early detection method, and patients don't usually have any symptoms until the cancer becomes unusually large or has spread to other organs. Even if it is possible to surgically remove the tumor, it often returns.
Another factor that complicates therapy is that the cancer is constantly changing. It modifies its environment and is itself modified by its environment. s a result, no two pancreatic cancers are alike. This makes it particularly difficult to treat.
"Every pancreatic cancer is like a disease in its own right," said Alexander Kleger. That makes it a "prime example of a tumor for which you want to generate an individualized therapy," explained Thomas Seufferlein.
Scientists surprised by vaccine efficacy The idea of fighting cancer with the help of a vaccine is not new. A vaccine against prostate cancer was approved in the US. back in 2010. And research into mRNA vaccines for cancer has also been going on for some time. Only recently, an mRNA vaccine developed by the companies Moderna and Merck showed success in the treatment of high-risk melanoma.
Still, many scientists did not expect a vaccine against pancreatic cancer to work. Pancreatic cancer, after all, is categorized as "cold tumor," meaning that it does not elicit a strong immune response and thus hides better from the immune system. Cold tumors usually do not respond to immunotherapy.
"I know they were looking at a bunch of different types of cancer," said Drew Weissmann, an immunologist at the University of Pennsylvania. "I'm surprised that pancreatic was one that it worked so well in.”
Cautious optimism — and many unanswered questions Despite all the initial excitement, some measure of caution is also called for. With only 16 patients, the study was as small as the 18-month observation period was short. It was also conducted without a control group, meaning without a comparison group that received only surgery, chemotherapy and checkpoint inhibitor. The effect of vaccination alone is therefore difficult to measure, and a comparison with previous therapy methods is also difficult. The fact that each patient received a tailor-made vaccine also makes it hard to produce a comparative assessment of the study's results.
It is still unclear why the vaccination resulted in an immune response against cancer in only half the patients, or whether and how the selection of neoantigens can be optimized in the future. Interestingly, an mRNA vaccine against COVID-19 administered during the same period led to an immune response in all patients, indicating their reaction to neoantigens was not impaired in some way.
It is also unclear whether the vaccination helps those patients whose tumors are already so advanced that they are effectively inoperable. The study only included patients who could have their tumors removed.
"In advanced disease, I think the situation is different," said Nina Bhardwaj. “There are probably many immune suppressive factors already in play. And even if you generate a good immune response, getting the right cells — in this case the T cells — into tumor itself could be difficult. It's a big bulky tumor."
For this reason, vaccination alone might prove to be an insufficient treatment. However, experts emphasize that it is conceivable that it could be used as a supplemental therapy, for example at the metastatic stage.
Will mRNA vaccines revolutionize cancer treatment? At this stage, there are also a great many practical questions: How much can the process be accelerated? How expensive will a vaccine be once it is established? BioNTech founder Ugur Sahin told the New York Times that within the last few years, the company has been able to lower production times to under six weeks, and reduce production costs from $350,000 to $100,000 per treatment. "And with a clinical application on this scale, we can assume that there will be more opportunities with the reduction of the price further on down the road," said tumor immunologist Niels Halama.
It is also questionable whether the process, which experts describe as highly complex, can be established outside of specialized centers. "This is a vaccine that right now probably requires two or three centers in the world that can do it," said Drew Weissman. "But ultimately, we're going to want a vaccine that can be used throughout the world."
There is still much work to be done, and many unanswered questions remain. For now, trial and error is the order of the day, according to Drew Weissman. He is convinced that not all cancers will respond to an RNA vaccine. So perhaps this is not yet a revolution. But it could well prove to be a crucial next step in overhauling how we currently treat pancreatic cancer.
It happens in almost every work and social environment: people are affected by abuse of power in politics, business, scientific research and healthcare. It can happen between friends and in families, as well.
Either way, it's done by people who hold positions of authority — such as leaders, supervisors or managers — people who have the power to make decisions that affect others.
But psychologists say that if you learn to understand how power abusers think and behave — their common characteristics — you may be able to stop it before it happens to you.
What is abuse of power?Abuse of power is when someone misuses their authority or higher position in a hierarchy to take advantage of, coerce or harm other people.
And it can lead to different types of abuse, such as psychological, physical, financial and sexual abuse.
It can affect the atmosphere in a work environment, reduce productivity and affect people's mental health.
But abuse of power often goes unreported or unnoticed, especially when the abuser has a high social status, reputation or influence.
Red flags to help you identify abuse of powerPeople who abuse power often use intimidation, humiliation, criticism or coercion to get what they want. They lie and manipulate others.
They tend to dominate conversations and situations and can often interrupt or talk over other people. They also like to control personal and professional relationships.
To avoid being exposed, power abusers often demand loyalty and secrecy from others, but at the same time are secretive about their own behavior.
They can also have excessive or unreasonable demands or expectations.
Not only that, but power abusers show a lack of empathy and concern for the well-being of others or tend to dismiss or belittle their concerns. They may deny your perception of a situation and make you question what you see as the truth and how you feel, or refuse to accept any blame.
What can I do against abuse of power?First, you should try to resist pressure to do anything that makes you feel uncomfortable. That is easier said than done because not everyone is able to do that for a range of social, economic or cultural factors.
So, if you can, say "No," and if you can't do that, try to find help. Get familiar with your organization's policies on abuse of power, learn about healthy interactions with your peers and supervisors and learn what types of interactions are appropriate and inappropriate. You may need to check your own behavior.
"That will empower people to recognize more quickly, more easily, when power is being abused," said Daniel Leising, a professor of psychology at Dresden Technical University in Germany.
Although it can be hard, psychologists say it is important, and can help, to speak up, report abuse of power, talk with colleagues, friends and family that you trust, or get help and advice from professionals.
Now that we’ve had a look at the basics, let’s dig deeper into the underlying psychology of abuse of power.
Does power make good people bad?The philosopher Lord Acton famously wrote in the 1800s that "power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."
But more recently, studies have challenged the idea that power turns people into abusers, suggesting instead that power amplifies existing traits in people.
"Power is your capacity to influence and alter the states of mind of people around you," said Dacher Keltner, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley.
People with power may feel less compassion for others and prioritize their own interests and desires, Keltner said. It can reduce a person's ability to empathize.
But it can also make them more impulsive or antisocial.
In a paper published in 2017, Ana Guinote, a professor of Social Cognition at University College London, wrote that power boosts a person's confidence, their optimism, their sense of self-expression, and lowers their inhibition.
The Stanford Prison ExperimentOne famous study into abuse of power is known as the Stanford Prison Experiment. Done in the 1970s, the experiment put volunteer students in the role of either prisoner or guard.
With time, the students given the guard roles became more abusive, aggressive and indifferent to the prisoners and their well-being.
It suggested that power had turned the guards into bad people. But when researchers took a second look at the results, they proposed that instead of power leading to abuse, it may have been that people with an existing, high propensity to abuse were attracted to take part in the experiment in the first place.
"Some people just enjoy having power and exerting it for the sake of it," said Leising.
Deeper psychological traits in power abuseThe researchers that reanalyzed the Stanford Prison Experiment reported that the volunteers had scored higher for traits such as narcissism, machiavellianism, aggressiveness, authoritarianism and social dominance but lower on empathy and altruism.
Research has shown that there's a link between narcissistic personalities and tendencies to abuse power and aggression.
And low scores for empathy and altruism are generally associated with aggressive forms of abuse.
But Leising said psychologists don't fully agree on what machiavellianism and narcissism actually mean. Some psychologists argue that they might be just one core trait, often referred to as the D factor — D for dark.
Power abusers can display a lack of remorse or guilt for their actions.
Power abusers can be authoritarian and insecureWhat makes things even more complicated is that power abusers can seem to have contradictory traits.
They may have a rigid, hierarchical worldview and a desire for control and dominance over others. They may not like people disagreeing with them or criticizing them and may use intimidation or coercion to hold onto power. These are common traits of authoritarianism, a personality trait.
At the same time, they may show insecurities. They may feel that they are not good enough for the job or fear losing power so much that they try even harder to reinforce a sense of control and authority.
But not all people who show such traits are necessarily abusive, and some people who lack these traits may in fact be power abusers. The one thing experts agree on is that you can't say for sure.
Edited by: Zulfikar Abbany
Wait, have I met you before? Ah! Have I been here before? Also, sorry if you think you've read this before. It must be deja vu.
Have you ever moved to a new city, and somehow felt like it's familiar? Or met a person for the first time, but had the sense you’d met them before? Then you can count yourself among those who've experienced deja vu.
In 1876, Emile Boirac, a French philosopher and researcher, coined the term, which means "already seen."
But intellectuals have tried to explain the phenomenon as far back as Plato, who saw it as evidence of past lives. More recently, Sigmund Freud described this as a "recollection of unconscious fantasy coupled with a desire to improve the present situation." Carl Jung thought it was related to the collective unconscious, while modern Hollywood describes it as a ‘glitch in the matrix'.
"But there is nothing supernatural about it, and it is extremely normal to experience deja vu," said James J Giordano, professor of neurology at Georgetown University in Washington D.C.
"Deja vu is literally a person's subjective experience of repeating a particular set of events, activities, thoughts and feelings, even though that has never in reality occurred before," Giordano said.
Around 90 percent of the population has experienced deja vu and the frequency of it decreases as we age.
But do you know why exactly you get this spooky feeling sometimes?
A real mystery in science"Our brain basically works like a time and space machine," Giordano told DW. "It takes everything in our present and relates it to something similar or dissimilar in our past. This way, it will be able to essentially plan the future. But there's a possibility that these signals could get mixed up."
Giordano suggests the phenomenon could have to do with an area in the middle of the brain called the thalamus. All information such as hearing, taste, touch etc. must pass through the thalamus to the brain's cerebral cortex (the outermost layer) for further interpretation and processing.
"And if the speed of those interactions is a bit different, it then feels to us as if we're experiencing the present, as though we remember it. So what our brain has done is literally confused the present with the past," Giordano explained.
Roderick Spears, associate professor of migraine research and clinical sciences at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, agrees that there is no solid explanation of why and how deja vu happens.
It’s also difficult for researchers to reach a conclusion, as deja vu is a difficult phenomenon to reproduce in a laboratory setting.
A window to a parallel universe?"It is difficult to study because it happens spontaneously. We don't know how to trigger the episodes in a lab," said Spears.
Over the decades, scientists have come up with various theories about why and how it happens.
One popular theory from a neurological perspective is dual processing – in which information is stored and retrieved through different processes in the brain.
For example, you are sitting in your living room reading this article. The smell of your mom's cooking is in the air, your pet is cuddled up on the sofa, you hear the notification sound on your mobile, and feel the sunlight touching your skin. All these sensations add up during processing and are interpreted as a single event.
According to the dual processing theory, when there is a slight delay in the brain while processing one of these inputs, it interprets the experience as two separate events, giving you the feeling of familiarity.
There are also studies linking deja vu with a parallel universe. Theoretical physicist Dr. Michio Kaku believes that deja vu is a form of memory glitch that happens when "fragments of memories stored in the brain… are elicited by moving into an environment that resembles something we’ve already experienced."
But he also theorizes about the possibility of flipping between different universes – and whether deja vu could be trying to tell us something about our position in those universes.
Deja vu as a symptom of stressThere are also studies suggesting that stress could be a factor in deja vu.
"The brain works better when it is rested and energized. When you are under excessive stress, or worrying a lot, the brain gets tired. So what can happen is the pattern of our brain activity changes a bit. Given those changes, it is not uncommon to experience deja vu," explained Giordano.
Spears added that highly educated people tend to get deja vu more often than less educated people. "People who travel a lot, who remember their dreams and people who hold liberal beliefs can more often experience it," he said.
Is it a sign of an unhealthy brain?"Not at all," said Giordano. Deja vu happens to healthy people all the time, and is most common between the ages of 15 and 25.
But Spears advises anyone experiencing it more than a few times a year – for example multiple times a month – to seek medical attention.
He further notes that if deja vu is associated with loss of consciousness, or an abnormal dream-like state, then it could be a symptom of something serious.
"Things to look out for include, experiencing deja vu for more than a few seconds, or having a difficult time distinguishing between what's real and what's not. Or you might notice someone developing unconscious behaviors like playing with their hair or not being able to hold objects in their hand. Also, an increased heart rate or an overwhelming sense of fear should prompt medical evaluation," Spears said.
That’s because in rare cases, deja vu is a sign of a seizure, specifically an epileptic seizure.
"The temporal lobe is where most seizures come from. It happens when the lobe is over activated and the person is semi conscious, but not completely out. This can produce feelings of deja vu," Spears said.
But while there’s widespread agreement on what deja vu feels like, and various theories as to what causes it, scientists still don’t have a definitive answer when it comes to this eerie sensation.
"We just don't have a solid structural explanation yet," said Spears.
More than 2 billion Christians worldwide base their faith on the New Testament. It is one of the most influential pieces of writing that has ever existed. So, every new discovery about the text has the potential to be a big deal.
That's what Grigory Kessel, a researcher from the Austrian Academy of Science, must have felt when he unearthed a 1,750-year-old translation of the New Testament — one of the oldest that we know about.
Kessel discovered the translation — a fragment of text — by applying ultraviolet light to digitalized images of manuscripts kept at the Vatican Library.
The ultraviolet light allowed Kessel to see layers of text that had been erased and were invisible to the naked eye. He found a text that had been translated from Greek into Syriac in the third century AD. Syriac was a language spoken in ancient Syria.
The fragment of text is one more piece in the complicated puzzle that is biblical history. Such translations allow us to understand how the Bible developed through the centuries, on its way to becoming the most read book in human history.
Where did the newly discovered fragment come from?Syriac translations of the Bible are among the oldest that exist. "The oldest one of them that has the whole text dates from the fifth century AD,” said Kessel.
There are hundreds of manuscripts of this full translation, and that was the text that he used to compare with the fragment he found in the Vatican Library. "The differences were clear: you find different phrases and words that indicate this is an older translation."
He explains that the fragment was most likely written in what is today northern Iraq, but which was formerly part of Persia, an empire whose state religion was Zoroastrianism, a monotheistic belief of the Indo-Iranian tradition.
Christianity was a minoritarian religion whose followers were partially tolerated and partially persecuted. Syriac Christianity was the main form of Christianity in the Middle East, Kessel says, and together with Greek, it was the most important language of the religion's first centuries.
How scientists date ancient manuscriptsScientists use various methods to date ancient manuscripts. By doing this, they can better understand who wrote it, when it was written, and where.
The materials they are made of, for instance, can tell a lot about when they were written.
Papyrus — which is paper made out of the Egyptian papyrus plant — was mostly used before the third century AD. Afterwards, it was mostly replaced with parchment and vellum, materials made from animal skin. They were of better quality and more durable, which is also the reason why we have a lot more biblical documents from the fourth century AD on.
Another useful clue is the type of handwriting. It will often vary, even from one generation to the next, and paleographers — or experts in historic handwriting — have a very nuanced understanding of how people wrote in specific time periods. They will not be able to point to a specific date, but they can give accurate approximations.
By looking at such indicators, scientists have been able to determine when and where the oldest biblical manuscripts we know about were written. These were produced centuries before the translation found by Kessel, and are manuscripts of the Old Testament, one of the two parts of the Bible.
What do we know about the origins of the Old Testament?The writings that make up the Old Testament, as it is called in the Christian canon, serve as the basis for world's three biggest monotheistic religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
"The earliest Old Testament texts we have date from the first century BC. They were written in Hebrew and Aramaic," Christoph Markschies tells DW. He is a professor of ancient Christianity at the Humboldt University in Berlin, as well as president of the Brandenburg-Berlin Academy of Sciences. The texts, he adds, were found in Qumran, an archeological site at the Dead Sea near Jerusalem.
"The documents were written on papyrus by scribes who specialized in making manuscripts. This was done with extreme care, because they were convinced these were holy texts," Markschies said. In Qumran only those considered "pure" were allowed to work on the manuscripts, and impeccable hygiene had to be maintained by constantly washing one's hands. The documents were written by Jewish scribes in a scriptorium, a room used for the purpose of producing manuscripts.
It wasn't until Paul the Apostle, who is believed to have lived from 5 to 65 AD, that the text came to be seen as the first part of the Bible. A second part, including the teachings of Jesus, began to be compiled from the end of the first century AD, and eventually became known as the New Testament.
What about the origins of the New Testament?According to Markschies, the New Testament gospels were composed around the year 70 AD.
"The earlier transcriptions we have are papyrus from the first half of the second century, which were found in modern day Egypt,” he said.
Compared to other ancient texts, this is a very early transmission. The oldest manuscripts of Plato's teachings, for example, were written centuries after his death.
"These biblical manuscripts were originally in Greek, because that was the main language of the eastern part of the Roman Empire,” Markschies said. Like the aforementioned Old Testament texts, these were most likely written in scriptoria. Such manuscripts were reproduced all throughout the empire.
The oldest complete version of the New Testament we have – the Codex Sinaiticus – dates from 400 AD, according to Markschies. It is one of the three oldest remaining codices which originally contained the entire Bible in Greek. The other two – Codex Vaticanus and Codex Alexandrinus – are from the same time period.
These codices are a significant part of the history of the Bible and its related disciplines. Grigory Kessel and Christoph Markschies are just two of the many academics around the world who dedicate part of their professional lives to learning more about the Bible and contributing to our scientific understanding of this hugely influential book.
In 2018, a scientist called He Jiankui shocked the world when he announced the birth of two babies with edited genomes.
Jiankui used the CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing tool on the twins when they were embryos to rewrite their individual CCR5 genes, creating resistance to HIV.
These two children, along with a third gene-edited child born a year later, represent the world's first gene-edited babies. Five years on, all three are reportedly living healthy, normal lives.
The event sparked major outcry among scientists and non-scientists alike, ultimately leading to Jiankui's three-year imprisonment in China for conducting "illegal medical practices."
But although the three children may represent the first cases of embryo-stage genome editing, they aren't the only humans with an edited genome. More than 200 adults have been treated in clinical trials using CRISPR-Cas9 to treat sickle cell disease. Gene editing therapies have completely changed their lives, curing the blood disorder that once disabled them. Right or wrong, new trials are in the pipeline for other genetic diseases.
CRISPR-Cas9 gene editingThe sudden explosion in gene therapies in the last decade comes down to the development of CRISPR-Cas9. While gene editing has existed since the 1990s, CRISPR was so revolutionary because of its precise and programmable way of altering DNA.
CRISPR-Cas9 is a two-part molecular system. CRISPR is the part you can program to find one specific part of DNA in a gene, while Cas9 is the editing part which cuts out a strand of DNA and adds a new piece in.
Sounds simple enough, but the hard part is delivering it — the process must occur in trillions of cells inside us if we want to use it to treat a disease.
As such, CRISPR is only suitable to treat diseases with "simple" genetic mutations in one cell type. If you know with certainty that a disease is caused by one error in one gene, like sickle cell anemia or certain forms of cancer, CRISPR has the potential to treat it.
The limits of gene therapyWhat CRISPR can't treat are complex genetic disorders — anything with multiple mutations in multiple genes in different types of cells.
"Very few patients have an identifiable genetic cause [of a disease] that you can target," said David Curtis, a professor of medical genetics at University College London, UK.
Curtis is doubtful whether CRISPR can be used to treat any diseases that have more than one genetic mutation involved, at least for the time being.
"If you take a complex genetic disorder like schizophrenia, gene therapy isn't going to help. The brain is an insanely difficult target to treat — you'd have to make multiple DNA changes in billions of brain cells to rewire brain cells that have developed in the wrong place. This doesn't seem likely to work," Curtis told DW.
Designer babiesThere are two main approaches to gene editing: germline editing and somatic cell therapies.
Germline editing is performed during embryonic development. If you edit the embryo when it's a single or small number of cells, you edit all the cells that will divide from them, meaning the gene edit is in all the cells of the body.
Great for curing diseases, but the kicker is that this includes sperm and egg cells, meaning the edited gene is passed down to children and grandchildren. So by editing embryos, you alter the course of evolution for generations after. The use of this method, which sits at the heart of the "designer baby" debate, put Jiankui in jail.
Advocates say we could ensure none of our kin develop diseases like HIV/AIDS or multiple forms of cancer, essentially eradicating them from existence.
On the other hand, there are the problems of playing God. More on this later.
Somatic cell therapies have potentialIn somatic cell therapy, genes are edited in cells removed from the patient (or donor stem cells), then returned to the patient. It's the method that is being used to treat sickle cell anemia and has potential for the treatment of multiple other genes with single point mutations.
Most scientists argue that somatic cell therapies have much more potential than germline editing. We've seen that it can work, and it sidesteps the awkward issues of designer babies.
But somatic cell therapy has its problems, the most serious being potential off-target effects on the genome.
"There's a chance you can introduce mutations into unwanted sites of the genome when you use CRISPR, changing or inactivating the function of other genes. The effects of this on the body are not really known," said Van Trung Chu, a CRISPR scientist working at the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine in Berlin.
Some random mutations in the genome could be harmless, but others could also run the risk of causing cancer or other genetic disorders. There are ways of combing the genome to look for mutations, but it's unclear yet what would happen if mutations were found. More gene editing to fix the first gene editing errors?
"The mutations aren't completely random. Depending what Cas gene editing tool you use, you have an idea of where those mutations are likely to be," Chu told DW.
All scientists can do now is perform deep sequencing analysis of genomes to find potential orthogonal mutations. It's a bit of a needle in a haystack situation, but you know roughly in which part of the haystack to look.
"In the long-term, new forms of CRISPR-Cas9 technologies are being created that have less potential for off-target effects," said Chu.
The ethics of gene editingGene editing hasn't been developed in a scientific ivory tower. Scientists and non-scientists alike have been challenging the technology before it was even feasible.
Scientists are in part self-monitoring themselves on the ethics front, and most agree that editing embryos is off-limits. The legal disaster around Jiankui's HIV-resistant babies set the precedent for how seriously countries take gene editing.
"It's pretty clear right now — you cannot edit germline DNA," said Chu.
Gene editing is here to stay, but not without pushback. For many, there's the issues of scientists "playing God". For others, there's a sense of discomfort, even disgust, with the idea of editing genes. After all, it interferes with nature.
But then again, wouldn't people want their disease or their child's disease to be fixed with gene editing? We have the tool to treat and even eradicate some diseases. What is more ethical — to use that technology to cure people, or to not use it at all?
Edited by: Clare Roth
Twenty years ago today, an international group of scientists in the Human Genome Project (HGP) published the very first sequence of the human genome.
"This is the most important, most wondrous map ever produced by humankind," then-US president Bill Clinton said in June 2000, when the first draft of the human genome sequence was revealed at the White House.
The map itself consisted of three billion units of DNA, essentially a blueprint of a human being. While the sequence was partially incomplete and assembled from bits of several people's DNA, the HGP was a monumental achievement of technology and science.
Genome mapping promised many things. We would discover our ancestral histories. We would discover how genes are involved in diseases. We would read our genome sequences like coffee grains in a cup to predict if we develop diseases in the future. But by then we would have developed the therapies needed to treat those diseases.
Some of these developments have come to pass, others were fanciful. But a revolution in biological sciences began in 2003, as genome technologies transformed our understanding of human disease, our evolutionary history and what it means to be human.
The medical genetics revolutionGenomic medicine has been at the heart of the biological revolution. By sequencing the genomes of more than a million people since 2003, scientists have seen how genetic variation between people affects the risk of disease.
"The idea that you can get the whole genome sequence of a sick baby and understand why they're sick within days is remarkable," said David Curtis, a professor of medical genetics at University College London, UK.
For Curtis, it's this routine use of genetic technology in clinical practice that is the biggest benefit to come from the HGP.
"In the last few years of big sequencing studies, we've found the first gene for schizophrenia. Now we have 10. If these genes are damaged, it has a huge effect on your schizophrenia risk," Curtis told DW.
And it's not just schizophrenia where we've linked genes with diseases. Scientists have found mutated genes that cause cancers, heart disease, diabetes, you name it. The next big benefit lies in being able to create new therapies by studying the genetic mutations in the lab.
We've already seen some success in gene-based therapies, from retraining immune cells to fight cancer to using CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing tools to treat sickle cell disease.
"Genetics is very helpful to study diseases and there's massive scope for genetic therapies," said Curtis.
The limits of medical geneticsBut the new boom has also shown the limits of genetic medicine. The fact remains that genes are just one factor in disease outcome, and few inherited diseases are caused by mutation in a single gene.
In the case of schizophrenia, Curtis said, only about 1% of people with the disease have a mutation in one of those 10 identified genes. In total, there are more than 250 genetic "risk factors" for schizophrenia. The sheer number of risk factors, plus the fact we don't understand how these contribute to the disease, create a real challenge for medicine.
"Some people have a mutation and they haven't got schizophrenia, or they've got a different disease entirely. The whole relationship between genetic mutation and disease has gotten shakier [since genome sequencing]," said Curtis.
Grandad was a neanderthal, and other human evolutionary talesWhere genome sequencing has been truly groundbreaking is in evolutionary biology.
"We can compare the human genome sequence to those of our close relatives and place our species within that broader evolutionary context. It's shown us that human history was much more dynamic than anyone could have predicted," Anders Bergstrom, an evolutionary biologist at the University of East Anglia, UK, told DW.
Scientists studying the genome sequences of early and modern humans have shown that our ancestors interbred with other hominins like Neanderthals and Denisovans. We now have insights into the lives of Neanderthal communities in central Europe, providing clues about their population decline, as well as tracing the genetic heritage of long-lost people like the Minoans in modern-day Cretans.
By studying ancient DNA and the little traces of ancestors inside of us, we're understanding how our species has expanded across the world, brought cultural advances like farming to distant lands, and developed resistances to diseases along the way.
What is a human?The biggest questions about genetics have yet to be answered. For one, only about 1% of the genome codes proteins — we don't really understand what much of the other 99% does.
For Bergstrom, the biggest question genetics can answer is what makes us human.
"Almost all of the progress that has been made in genetics in the last 20 years is about explaining differences among humans, but it doesn't tell us about what's universal among us," he said.
Genome sequencing has changed how we view ourselves, but mostly by giving scientific backing for the idea of individualism. The thinking goes that everyone's genetic code is different (even identical twins don't have exactly the same code), so by identifying all the tiny genetic variations between people, we can see what makes each of us different.
This is often productive. Genome sequencing has shown, for example, that "race" is a social construct not rooted in genetics (there is more genetic variation within racial groupings than between them). But by always looking for differences, we lose track of what makes us collectively humans rather than 8 billion individual ape-like beings on the same planet.
Take chimpanzees. We know we have 96% genetic similarity to them, but we don't really understand how the 4% difference makes us more "human" than our lice-grooming cousins.
"It's a fundamental question," said Bergstrom. "What is it that makes us humans and unique as a species?"
Increasing genome diversityThe progress made in the last twenty years was not without its failings. More than a million genomes have been sequenced so far, but 95.2% of the data in genetics studies comes from European genomes.
"It didn't represent diversity among humans at all. If our science is biased towards people of a particular type of ancestry, then we won't be able to offer the same quality of personalized medicine to different people," said Bergstrom.
Things are changing. The Nigerian 100k Genome Project aims to sequence, well, 100,000 genomes in Nigeria. Similar efforts are underway elsewhere in Africa, and Asia and South America. The hope is that more routine and cheaper genome sequencing technologies around the world will benefit all of humanity.
Edited by: Carla Bleiker
It's a big mission that will launch from the spaceport in Korou, French Guyana on Thursday. The European Space Agency (ESA) is sending up their Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer, Juice, to ― well, explore three of Jupiter's icy moons.
Doesn't sound too exciting yet? Then consider that one of the mission's goals is to characterize "these moons as both planetary objects and possible habitats," according to ESA. In other words, the mission aims to find out if life could be possible on Ganymede, Europa or Callisto, or whether life has existed on the moons in the past.
The Juice project is a mission of many firsts. The spacecraft, which is being sent up on an Ariane 5 rocket, will be the first to change orbits from another planet (Jupiter) to one of its moons. And it will be the first to orbit a moon other than our own.
The total costs of the mission stand at around €1.6 billion ($1.7 billion). Juice will carry several high-tech systems on board, "including the most powerful remote sensing, geophysical and in situ payloads ever flown to the outer solar system," according to ESA.
While the mission is European-led, it comes from international collaboration.NASA has contributed one of the instruments, a UV imaging spectrograph. The Japanese space agency JAXA has contributed hardware for several of the instruments on board the spacecraft, while the Israeli space agency ISA contributed hardware needed for a radio science experiment.
If things go according to plan, Juice will arrive at Jupiter in July 2031 — a marathon journey time of 8 years. It'll do 35 flybys of the three moons between July 2031 and November 2034. It will then enter Ganymede's orbit, where it's scheduled to stay and collect information until December 2035.
Here are a couple of facts to get you excited.
Jupiter, our solar system's largest planetWhile the Juice mission concerns itself with three moons, Jupiter has a total of 95 moons with confirmed orbits.
Jupiter is the largest planet in our solar system, twice the mass of all the other planets combined. As NASA puts it: "If Earth were the size of a nickel [a US five-cent coin], Jupiter would be about as big as a basketball."
Jupiter's size gives it a powerful magnetic field. Part of the Juice mission is finding out how it affects the icy moons surrounding the planet.
Scientists already know the magnetic field moves gases between Jupiter's moons. Sulphur and oxygen released by volcanos on Io reach the three moons Juice will be exploring. What researchers are looking to learn from Juice is how this process works.
The moons at the center of the Juice missionGanymede, Callisto and Europa were discovered by Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei in 1610. They are three of the four "Galilean moons", the other being Io, and were the first objects found in our solar system that orbited a body other than the sun or Earth.
Ganymede, the Juice mission's primary target, is the only moon in our solar system that generates its own magnetic field. It's the biggest moon in our solar system, with a diameter of 5,268 kilometers (3,273 miles) and a metallic core made up of an iron-heavy liquid. Its subterranean ocean is thought to hold more water than all of Earth's oceans combined.
Callisto is Jupiter's second-largest moon. ESA scientists hope that by orbiting Callisto, Juice will gather information about the environment around Jupiter in the planet's early days. The moon is made up of equal parts rock and ice and may have a subsurface, liquid ocean located at depths greater than 100 kilometers.
Europa is slightly smaller than Earth's moon and possibly holds vast underground oceans. It is primarily made of silicate rock and has a water-ice crust. Juice scientists suspect that Europa may vent water vapor into space via plumes and geysers. Among the mission's main goals is finding out whether there are biosignatures and pockets of water on Europa ― signs of life.
The three moons are all named after Greek mythological figures. Ganymede was a hero in Greek mythology who was supposedly the most beautiful mortal on Earth and was abducted by the gods to serve as Zeus' cup bearer. Callisto was a nymph who was turned into a bear and later became the constellation Ursa Major. Europa was the mother of King Minos of Crete and lover of Zeus, who is the Greek equivalent of Roman god Jupiter.
Jupiter's challenging environmentThe Juice spacecraft will work in extreme conditions. The area around Jupiter and its moons is one of the most intense radiation environments in our solar system. The temperature around the gas planet stands at a chilly -230 degrees Celsius (-382 degrees Fahrenheit), a stark difference from the scorching 250 degrees Celsius that Juice will have to withstand during its Venus flyby on the way to Jupiter.
The gravity-assisted flyby, a casual 300 million kilometer detour, will set the spacecraft on course for it's 2031 arrival at Jupiter.
The researchers behind Juice hope that the mission will be able to answer several questions on Jupiter's atmosphere, its magnetic field and how these factors interact with each other and influence the planet's moons.
The hope is that the answers to these questions will help scientists better understand fundamental physics of planetary environments and eventually figure out whether life on one of Jupiter's moons would be possible.
Edited by: Fred Schwaller
Singer Ariana Grande spoke out Tuesday on TikTok against commenting on other people's bodies and physical appearances. "We should be gentler and less comfortable commenting on people's bodies, no matter what," the singer said, adding that "there are ways to compliment someone, or to ignore something that you see that you don’t like, that I think we should help each other work towards. Just to aim towards being safer and keeping each other safer."
"There are many different ways to look healthy and beautiful," Grande also said.
Yet while Ariana Grande and other singers like Lizzo and Meghan Trainor trumpet body positivity, has society actually gotten any closer to embracing new beauty norms in recent years?
At this spring's Paris Fashion Week, ultra-thin models made a major comeback, according to various media reports. Vogue Business found that at the latest runway shows in New York, London, Milan and Paris, 95.6% of the looks were presented by so-called straight-size models, which corresponds to US size 0-4. The average size of an American woman is currently between 16 and 18.
What happened to the concept of body positivity, which promotes the acceptance of all types of bodies?
Size inclusivity seemed part of fashion designers' concepts in previous years, with plus-size models celebrating new looks on the catwalk. Jean-Paul Gautier, for example, promoted its perfume La Belle Fleur Terrible with model and DJ Barbara Butch, a lesbian activist who campaigns for fat acceptance.
How body positivity all beganBody positivity is often perceived as a recent social media phenomenon. Yet, the movement is much older and has its roots in the 1960s and 1970s feminist movement in the US, according to cultural scientist Elisabeth Lechner, author of a German-language book on the topic, "Riot, don't diet!".
Resisting conventional beauty ideals has been an issue in feminist circles for decades. People gathered in New York City in 1967 for protests, eating cake and banning diet guides. The activists had political concerns: "It wasn't about loving yourself 24/7; it was about demanding fair treatment of people with fat bodies, no matter who they were," Lechner told DW.
They made concrete political demands, such as "not being treated poorly in hospital because everything is blamed on your weight, which can lead to fatal consequences. Or not being discriminated against with insurances in the job or housing market, in dating, in all areas of life," added Lechner. "It was really a structural critique and not about this easily marketable self love."
Advertisers prefer standard bodiesInclusivity activists see the prevalence of size 0 models on catwalks in the US and Europe as a backlash against body positivity.
Lechner believes social media is also to blame, as it prioritizes profit over enabling political resistance.
"Platform capitalism demands the same standard bodies to sell advertising products. It is a completely unregulated market," she said, which is why she also finds it problematic to use social media to resist the trends promoted by those "deeply capitalist" platforms.
As renowned body-positive activist Lizzo has also pointed out, there is a lack of diversity among those who claim to promote inclusivity, since a majority of so-called body-positivity influencers continue to be relatively thin white women, while people of color and men are underrepresented.
If there is still much to improve, the fact that body-positivity activists such as Lizzo are world stars nevertheless remains an indication that progress is being made. As Lechner noted, when she was growing up, role models for other body types did not exist.
What comes after body positivity?Studies have proven that body positivity has many advantageous effects on mental health and self-esteem.
Now a middle-of-the-road approach is also gaining popularity: body neutrality, or being able to accept and respect your body.
Philosopher Jessica van der Schalk from the Dutch think tank FreedomLab discussed the concept in a 2018 article, noting that it is possible to neither love nor hate one's own body, to simply not concern oneself so much about it. In her view, even when a person loves their body, they place too much of their self-esteem on appearance and can end up blaming themselves if they fail to love every aspect of their body.
As Viren Swami, a professor of social psychology at the Anglia Ruskin University, writes in The Conversation, "body neutrality de-emphasizes the focus on appearance, it allows us to better appreciate all the things our bodies are able to do."
In science, the term "body functionality" is used to describe everything that a body is able to do. Physical activities of all sorts strengthen people's self-esteem and help people appreciate what their bodies can achieve.
As van der Schalk noted in her article, the main "downside" to body neutrality is that if people completely lose interest in beauty ideals, it will become more difficult for social media as well as fashion and beauty companies to capitalize on them.
But until widespread body neutrality is achieved, thin models remain popular. As fashion designers and magazines know, that's the body shape that sells.
This article was originally written in German.
China has reported the first fatal case of H3N8 bird flu in humans after registering two other non-fatal infections with the disease last year, the World Health Organization (WHO) said late on Tuesday.
The death reported was that of a 56-year-old woman from the southern Chinese province of Guangdong.
The WHO said that a wider spread of the virus between humans was unlikely but nonetheless stressed the importance "of global surveillance to detect virological, epidemiological and clinical changes associated with circulating influenza viruses which may affect human [or animal] health."
What do we know about the fatality?The woman who died had a number of underlying conditions and was often exposed to live poultry and wild birds, the WHO said.
She fell ill on February 22, was hospitalized with severe pneumonia on March 3, and died on March 16, the WHO said.
It said the source of infection might have been a wet market visited by the woman before she fell ill, as samples collected there had been positive for influenza A(H3).
No cases of infection had been found in anyone who had been in close contact with the woman, the WHO said.
"Based on available information, it appears that this virus does not have the ability to spread easily from person to person, and therefore the risk of it spreading among humans at the national, regional, and international levels is considered to be low," its statement said.
What is the H3N8 virus?The H3N8 virus is commonly detected in birds but causes few symptoms. It has also infected other mammals, such as horses, dogs, and seals.
The virus is known to have been circulating since 2002 when it was first found in North American waterfowl.
The first recorded human cases are those that have now emerged in China. The two previous cases were reported last April and May, with one person falling critically ill, while the other had only mild symptoms.
China often sees sporadic human infections with bird flu owing to its huge poultry and wild bird populations that often live in close proximity to humans.
Health authorities across the world consider it important to monitor all avian influenza viruses, as they can easily evolve and cause a pandemic.
tj/rc (Reuters, AFP, dpa)
Tens of thousands of doctors in England walked out of hospitals and clinics on Tuesday, in what's considered the most disruptive strike in the history of the publicly-funded National Health Service (NHS).
Up to 350,000 medical appointments are expected to be canceled during the four-day strike, with hospitals asked to reschedule procedures, according to health officials.
"This latest round of strikes will see unparalleled levels of disruption, and we are very concerned about the potential severity of impact on patients and services across the country," said Stephen Powis, medical director of NHS England.
He said the walkout was "probably the most disruptive period of action in NHS history."
Medical staff strikes were exceedingly rare in the UK until the last few years, often on the basis that staff shortages could pose health risks.
The strike by junior doctors is prompted by a need for pay rises to make up for increasing inflation. The term junior doctor is somewhat misleading, in that it accounts for almost half of all doctors in the UK, can even include physicians with a decade's experience, and often refers to front line staff working in hospitals and larger walk-in clinics.
They can also earn very different salaries or wages depending on how junior they are.
Crisis across UK's public health serviceThe latest round of strikes comes as the NHS is overwhelmed with around 7 million patients waiting for hospital treatment.
Senior doctors and experienced nurses have had to step in to ensure that emergency services and critical care remain intact during the four-day strike.
The British Medical Association, the union representing doctors, is calling for a 35% pay rise to make up for what it says was 15 years of below-inflation pay increases.
The union has said that the current strike could be stopped if the UK health minister Steve Barclay can make a "credible offer" on pay.
Barclay has called the 35% demand unreasonable, pointing to other medical unions recommending that their members consider a much more modest increase of 5% plus a one-off lump sum.
"Not only will the walkouts risk patient safety, but they have also been timed to maximize disruption after the Easter break," he said in a statement.
Workers protesting soaring inflationJunior doctors join hundreds of thousands of public sector workers across the UK, who have called strikes over the past months. Nurses across Britain have also been striking this winter, in the first nationwide industrial action in the 106-year history of their union.
Ambulance staff, teachers, bus drivers and postal workers are among those who have walked off their jobs in demand for pay rises aligned with inflation, which stood at 10.4% year-on-year in February in the UK.
vh/msh (Reuters, AP, AFP)
Augustine Normanyo was unemployed for months after completing his IT studies in Ghana's capital Accra. "After my studies I looked for a job in the tech industry," Normanyo told DW. But due to his lack of practical experience, he had no success.
Until a friend introduced him to the company AmaliTech. Now, a year later, Normanyo is almost finished with his advanced training as a software engineer. "At the moment, my goal is to work in the service center and further develop my skills."
AmaliTech offers graduates paid jobs that provide them with income. As a result, some of them can get a position in the German market without leaving Ghana.
The tech company, headquartered in Cologne, Germany, brings skilled workers from its two locations in Ghana and Rwanda with local and international customers. As a result, the next generation of technology experts is being built up in Africa, and in the future, it will offer Germany a way out of the shortage of skilled workers in the IT sector.
An exemplary model for the IT sector"I think once you get a new opportunity at Amalitech, you can make it in any technology field in the world," said Bilal Abubakari, who was recruited as an engineering information technology student when he met Amalitech's talent scouts on campus.
After graduation, he immediately joined the IT company and is enthusiastic about professionalism. "They give a very good insight into the industry sector, so you really know what's going on," Abubakari told DW.
According to economist Eckhardt Bode of the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, this model should set a precedent. "The African continent offers great potential to reduce the local labor shortage," Bode told DW.
"Be it by outsourcing work that cannot be done in Germany because of the lack of labor, as practiced by the company Amalitech, or through immigration of skilled workers from Africa."
Is Germany ready to welcome African workers?Bode said there needs to be a greater change in how German society perceives immigrants. "Are we Germans really willing to accept immigration?" Bode asked.
He warned that the shortage of skilled workers or labor could become a brake on growth and prosperity in Germany in the future, stressing that Berlin needed to take more decisive countermeasures than in the past.
"Without greater immigration of workers, we will, in all probability, not be able to solve this brake on prosperity."
With increasing digitization, the tech sector is particularly affected. Many IT projects in German public administrations do not function exceptionally well.
Germany's companies currently lack 137,000 IT experts across all sectors, reports the digital industry association Bitkom.
A win-win for Africa and GermanyBut the IT market offers a win-win situation for both sides through the possibility of being trained and working digitally from anywhere in the world. That's a good prospect for young Africans and German companies.
"In this way, the skilled labor base is strengthened globally to reduce harmful effects such as brain drain," Najim Azahaf, a migration expert at the Bertelsmann Foundation, told DW.
Internationally, there are many pilot projects with different models, for example, in Eastern Europe, Asia and Latin America. But according to Azahaf, there is a need to look more closely at countries in sub-Saharan Africa, where the initial hurdles may be somewhat greater, but the potential for all sides is all the greater.
Certain prejudices of investors and the question of compatibility often stand in the way, the migration expert added.
Seizing the opportunity in Africa Africa has a demographic surplus of young people. Azahaf is convinced that this opportunity must be seized and that there are promising approaches in North Africa in Tunisia and Morocco.
However, many talented young people in South and East Africa work as software developers and programmers for German and European customers. In 2019, Anja Schlösser founded the company Code of Africa in Hamburg to build flexible and well-trained young teams in East Africa.
Ten full-time employees now work at the company's headquarters in Rwanda, plus 40 additional IT staff are available for services from the networks in Kenya, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
"Our focus is that the young people do not emigrate but can build a sustainable life for themselves in East Africa and secure a working income," Schlösser told DW.
Pioneering: AmaliTech's recipe for successSalami Suleiman, a trainer at Amalitech, is convinced that his trainees can succeed. "We know that the employees with whom we started the service center and who now work for us are developing and taking on leadership positions," Suleiman said.
AmaliTech offers structure and goes on a "learning journey" with beginners. So-called "soft skills" also play an essential role, Suleiman said, adding that communication, adaptability, flexibility, and the ability to work in a team are vital too.
"In some ways, these skills have become almost more important than technical skills." In his opinion, the education system has so far short-changed that.
IT specialists Bilal Abubakari and Augustine Normanyo plan to stay in Ghana for now. Abubakari hopes to work on a client project in the future."If I stay at Amalitech, I can follow this path, and in ten years I could then look at other markets, for example in Europe."
This article was initially written in German.
Edited by: Chrispin Mwakideu
The new AI model Tongyi Qianwen — which means "truth from a thousand questions" — can draft invitation letters, summarize meeting notes and advise users on what type of makeup to purchase, as showed in a filmed demonstration on Tuesday.
"We are at a technological watershed moment driven by generative AI and cloud computing, and businesses across all sectors have started to embrace intelligence transformation to stay ahead of the game," said Alibaba Group CEO Daniel Zhang.
The model will be integrated into DingTalk, Alibaba's workplace messaging app and Tmall Genie, its voice assistant. Tongyi Qianwen can draft business proposals and emails and "will bring about big changes to the way we produce, the way we work, and the way we live our lives," according to Zhang.
Last Friday, Alibaba published a teaser to the new chatbot, with a post on social media reading: "Hello, my name is Tongyi Qianwen, this is our first time meeting, I welcome your feedback."
Alibaba Cloud plans to open Tongyi Qianwen to customization from users, so that they can build their own large language models.
The AI chatbot raceGenerative AI is a type of artificial intelligence that can create original content, such as text or images, by learning from data it is trained on.
Interest in generative AI has spiked since the Microsoft-backed OpenAI launched the chatbot sensation ChatGPT last year.
Since then, rival companies have rushed to launch similar products, such as Google's Bard and Baidu Inc's Ernie Bot. On Monday, Chinese AI company SenseTime also revealed a chatbot called SenseChat along with a range of new AI products.
Stricter regulation on AI in ChinaAlso on Tuesday, China's Cyberspace Administration (CAC) revealed draft measures for regulating generative AI services, as more companies like Alibaba introduce publicly available AI models.
The regulator wants companies to submit AI products for a "security assessment" before being released to the public.
The CAC said that while China supports innovation and the use of reliable software, content generated by generative AI "must reflect core socialist values."
Under the draft law, providers of generative AI services must require users to submit their real identities and must take measures to prevent discrimination when designing algorithms and training data.
The public can comment on the new proposal until May 10th, with the new regulations expected to come into force later this year.
Although ChatGPT is unavailable in China, its popularity has been rising as users take advantage of virtual private networks to get around the ban.
vh/es (Reuters, AFP)
For years, researchers have puzzled over the origins of metals used for the famous brass sculptures and plaques pillaged during Britain's 1897 colonial capture of the Kingdom of Benin (present-day Nigeria).
The vast majority of the Benin Bronzes were pillaged during that initial raid, before the UK took over the brass trade in West Africa.
There are over 3,000 Benin Bronzes in total, but most are displayed in European and North American institutions — like the Ethnological Museum of Berlin and the British Museum in London. Only a few are currently held in museums in Nigeria.
Benin bronze metal source a mysteryResearchers have long suspected that the brass used to create the impressive sculptures was transported to Benin via Portuguese trade routes in the 15th century, but they haven't been able to pinpoint where the metals originated in Europe.
A study published Wednesday by researchers at the Technische Hochschule Georg Agricola in the German city of Bochum offers evidence that much of the material used to create Benin's 16th and 17th century bronzes came from Germany's Rhineland region.
"The Benin Bronzes are the most famous ancient works of art in all West Africa," study author Tobias Skowronek said in a statement. "Finally, we can prove the totally unexpected: the brass used for the Benin masterpieces, long thought to come from Britain or Flanders, was mined in western Germany. This is the first time a scientific link has been made."
Manillas a possible sourceHistorians have long suspected the Benin Bronzes were crafted out of manillas, distinctive horseshoe-shaped items shipped to Africa by the Portuguese in the late 15th century.
Manillas were made from bronze, copper or brass and used as currency. They were originally made in sevearal Europen countries at different times in history then shipped to Africa via European traders.
Researchers thought that by tracing the history of manillas, they could find the source of the brass used in the Benin Bronzes.
Work by Rolf Denk, author of The West African Manilla Currency, identified three main types of manillas used in West Africa between 1439 and 2019.
Early manillas traded by the Portuguese known as "tacoais" dated back to 1450. They were traded in the Kingdom of Benin and Elmina (present-day Ghana), and were made from metal originating in Germany.
A second type were the "Birmingham" manillas, which were used from 1625 to 1949 in present-day southeast Nigeria. They were made from metals in the UK.
A third type used from 1600 to 1914 — "popo" manillas — were distinct from both the Birmingham and the tacoais and traded in Ivory Coast. They were made in the UK, Netherlands, Portugal, and France.
Manilla classification system cracks codeThe new study from Germany has pieced the puzzle together using Denk's classification system combined with chemical analysis of manillas and Benin Bronzes.
The researchers analysed around 70 manillas physically identifiable as "tacoais" from shipwrecks in African, American and European waters between the 16th and 19th centuries.
The composition of the tacoais manillas, they found, was very similar to the composition of Benin Bronzes. They both contained ores from Germany's Rhineland.
The authors concluded that artisans in Benin likely melted down the manillas originating in Germany to make the Benin Bronzes.
"This study definitively identifies the Rhineland as the principal source of manillas at the opening of the Portuguese trade," the authors wrote in the study. "Millions of these artifacts were sent to West Africa where they likely provided the major, virtually the only, source of brass for West African casters between the 15th and the 18th centuries, including serving as the principal metal source of the Benin Bronzes."
The authors added that their research provides new insights into early Atlantic trade and African use of European goods.
Edited by: Fred Schwaller
ʺThe future is going to be weird,ʺ Elon Musk said in 2020, as he explained potential uses of the brain implants developed by his neurotechnology company Neuralink.
Over the past seven years, the company has been developing a computer chip designed to be implanted into the brain, where it monitors the acitivity of thousands of neurons.
The chip — officially considered a "brain-computer interface" (BCI) — consists of a tiny probe containing more than 3,000 electrodes attached to flexible threads thinner than a human hair.
Musk wants to link the brain with computers to allow information and memories from deep inside the mind to be downloaded, like in the 1999 science fiction film "The Matrix."
Along with using the technology to try and treat conditions like blindness and paralysis, Musk has voiced ambitions to use Neuralink to achieve human telepathy, which he says would help humanity prevail in a war against artificial intelligence. He also said he wants the technology to provide people with "super vision."
Sci-fi or reality?Is any of this feasible? Short answer: no.
ʺWe cannot read people's minds. The amount of information that we can decode from the brain is very limited,ʺ said Giacomo Valle, a neural engineer at the University of Chicago, US.
Juan Alvaro Gallego, a BCI researcher at Imperial College London, UK, agreed, arguing it's hard to imagine BCIs reading our minds in this lifetime.
ʺThe fundamental problem is that we don't really know where or how thoughts are stored in the brain. We can't read thoughts if we don't understand the neuroscience behind them,ʺ Gallego told DW.
Clinical uses of BCIs grounded in realityMusk first showcased the Neuralink technology in 2019, introducing a pig with a Neuralink chip implanted in its brain and a video of a monkey controlling a pong paddle with its mind.
But the potential for BCIs goes far beyond animals playing games.
Gallego said the technology was first developed to help people paralyzed with spinal injuries or conditions like Locked-in syndrome — when a patient is fully conscious but can't move any part of the body except the eyes — to communicate.
ʺIf you [could] translate their internal communication into words on a computer, it would be life-changing,ʺ said Gallego.
In these sorts of cases, BCIs are designed to record electrical signals from neurons in the motor cortex, then send the signals to a computer where they are displayed as text.
The motor cortex isn't typically thought to be involved in thinking. Instead, it's where instructions to move are sent out to the body, like the tongue and jaw muscle movements for speech.
What the electrodes are really recording is a motor plan — more precisely, the end result of all the processing in different parts of the brain (sensory, linguistic, cognitive) required to move or speak.
So BCIs aren't really recording your thoughts, but rather the brain's plan to move a finger here, a leg there, or to open your mouth to make an "Aah" sound.
ʺScientists also showed they can read the motor cortex's intent to draw a letter,ʺ said Gallero. ʺUsing complex modelling [with the connected computer], this allowed paralyzed participants to type 10 words per minute, which was a breakthrough.ʺ
BCIs help people feel againAnother breakthrough occurred in 2016, when then US-president Barack Obama shook Nathan Copeland's robotic hand.
Copeland, who was paralyzed after a car accident, felt Obama's handshake as if they were touching skin to skin.
ʺThis demonstrated a different capability of BCIs. Rather than using electrodes to record from the brain and interpret intended movements, they instead stimulated the brain with tiny currents to produce sensation,ʺ said Gallego.
In Copeland's case, a BCI called the Utah array was implanted into his brain to improve the functioning of a disabled part of his nervous system.
The device, produced by a Neuralink rival, was implanted into his sensory cortex and connected with sensors on the end of his robotic hand.
When Copeland shook hands with Obama, those sensors sent signals causing electrodes in the sensory cortex to stimulate the "hand" region of the brain, allowing Copeland to "feel" the president's hand.
These new capabilities of BCIs represent the next generation of deep brain stimulation, a treatment that involves implanting electrodes into areas of the brain to help people with movement disorders.
ʺThese technologies have been around for a while. Deep brain stimulation has been used to help hundreds of thousands of people with Parkinson's disease since the 1990s,ʺ said Gallego.
Brain surgery for everyone? Really?For now, BCIs like the Utah array are only being used in special one-off cases like Copeland's, and Neuralink's technology has only been tested on animals.
ʺAll the clinical applications of BCIs are still at the research stage and not implemented in clinical practice yet,ʺ said Valle.
Neuralink tried to receive approval from US federal drug regulators to test its technology in human trials last year, but suffered a blow when authorities rejected the application, citing major safety concerns.
The device consists of 96 tiny, flexible probes that must be individually inserted into the brain.
Brain surgery is no joke. Even if the invasive procedure required to wire a BCI up to the brain goes well, the potential for infection or immune ʺrejectionʺ of the device remains long after implantation.
Musk's company is reportedly seeking permission to conduct human clinical trials later this year.
The birth of neuroethicsIn the long-term, Valle said, BCIs raise "a variety of ethical concerns" that will need to be considered carefully by researchers, companies, funding agencies, regulators and users themselves.
The technology is giving birth to a new field of moral inquiry: neuroethics. It's here where discussions turn more sci-fi.
ʺFor example, what are the consequences of privacy breaches when the data in question relate to peoples' thoughts? How can we ensure that a lack of access does not exacerbate societal inequity? What happens when this information can be directly input into the brain?ʺ said Valle.
After all, it's the role of science fiction to prepare us for what might come in the future.
Warnings about surveillance and technological control were all there in early 20th century novels like "Brave New World" and "1984." Have we listened to them?
Edited by: Clare Roth
Not every medicine is the same. Some can ease symptoms but have severe side effects. Others are safe, cure serious medical conditions and improve lives. The World Health Organization (WHO) gathers the most important drugs on its Model List of Essential Medicines.
The list is a recommendation for health systems worldwide and contains nearly 600 different medicines such as anesthesia, antiviral drugs or treatments for pain and fever.
"The medicines on the list are defined as the priority health needs of a population. They need to be safe, effective, available and affordable at all times," said Benedikt Huttner, Team Lead for Essential Medicines at the WHO.
The goal is to ensure that medicines are used as wisely as possible and to improve medical care worldwide.
"Our essential medicines list is a template for countries to base their own national list on," said Huttner.
More than 150 countries worldwide have already done that — low and middle income countries rely on the WHO recommendations.
Obesity drug could be added to essential medicines listEvery two years, advisers to the WHO discuss which medicines should be added to the list.
"Anyone can submit suggestions: academic institutions, pharmaceutical companies and individuals — it's completely open," Huttner told DW.
For the 2023 update, researchers in the US have suggested adding an obesity drug called Saxenda to the list. It's a daily injection that affects hunger signals to the brain and slows the rate at which a person's stomach empties, making them feel fuller for longer.
Saxenda is a prescription medication which contains the active ingredient liraglutide. The substance will soon be free patent restrictions, allowing for cheaper generic versions to be developed.
It would be the first obesity medicine on the WHO's list of essential medicines.
Obesity is a global issuePeople who live with overweight or obesity accumulate excessive fat, presenting a risk to their long-term health.
A body mass index (BMI) over 30 is considered obese.
"Obesity is a global problem that is basically increasing everywhere," said Francesco Branca, Director of the WHO Department of Nutrition for Health and Development.
The WHO says that more than 650 million adults worldwide are obese. More than 4 million people die every year from the consequences of obesity, such as heart disease, diabetes and cancer. Most affected regions are North America, Europe and the Middle East.
Once considered a problem only in high income countries, obesity is now dramatically on the rise in low and middle income countries as well, particularly in urban settings.
"This is creating an incredible pressure on health systems that already have to deal with other kind of emergencies," Branca told DW. "Now they have this additional burden of obesity they are not equipped for."
Potential side effects of obesity drugsIncluding an obesity medicine on the WHO's list of essential medicines could help reduce the burden of obesity.
But some health experts are skeptical about considering obesity drugs as essential.
Some obesity medicines have potential side effects, such as inflammation of the pancreas, gallbladder problems or increased heart rate. Also, there is a lack of long-term safety and effectiveness data.
"These drugs have actually been developed for the treatment of diabetes. The use for obesity is a relatively new application," explained WHO Director Branca. "It will be important to see what the long-term consequences are because these drugs need to be used for life. Otherwise there will be a reversal of the weight loss."
Obesity is also a complex condition which cannot be cured with medicines only.
Health experts say that medicines are only one aspect of treatment options among non-medicinal approaches, such as improved nutritional habits, exercise and psychological support.
"Lifestyle interventions are absolutely a key for the management of obesity," said Branca.
"Preventive strategies and sustained efforts at education, gender-focused interventions, must take precedence over the use of obesity drugs," said Zulfiqar Bhutta, an obesity expert at the University of Toronto in a Reuters report.
Another important aspect is that the management of obesity is not only about loosing weight but about improving the person's body functions, such as their blood pressure, mental health and capacity to move.
"That's why a drug may be a part of a therapeutic strategy, but it's not a silver bullet that will resolve the problem of obesity," said Branca.
WHO to analyze benefits and risks of obesity drugThe researchers who suggested the drug Saxenda, including Sanjana Garimella from Yale School of Medicine and Sandeep Kishore from the University of California, did not respond to DW's requests for comment before publication.
The advisers to the WHO will review the request at the end of April 2023. They are an international group of experts in health, pharmaceuticals and evidence-based medicine, who will analyze the benefits, risks and costs of the obesity drug and other suggested medicines. They will make a recommendation, which will then either be approved or denied by the WHO Director General. The updated list of essential medicines is expected to be published in July 2023.
Edited by: Zulfikar Abbany
Obesity is a chronic disease that affects millions of people worldwide and has become a major health problem.
It has spread to almost every corner of the planet to the point that "[obesity] has grown to epidemic proportions," says the World Health Organization (WHO).
More than 5 million people die every year because of the diseases and harmful effects associated with obesity.
By 2035, more than half of the world's population, more than 4 billion people, could be obese or overweight, according to the World Obesity Atlas 2023.
What is obesity?Obesity is a complex disease that can occur at any age and affects adults and children alike.
The World Health Organizations (WHO) defines obesity as "abnormal or excessive fat accumulation that presents a risk to health."
As of 2016, 1.9 billion or 39% of adults worldwide, were overweight and 650 million or 13% were living with obesity. The proportion of adults with obesity has nearly tripled since 1980, according to the WHO's Global Health Observatory. Children are not exempt — around 38 million children under 5 are overweight or obese, and more than 340 million children aged 5 to 19.
In essence, obesity occurs when a person eats an excess of calories that the body converts into fat. This imbalance between the calories you take in and the calories you burn, — for example through exercise— can be caused by many reasons, including social, lifestyle, psychological, biological, and genetic factors.
Obesity: Not an issue of self-controlContrary to a still-widespread belief, obesity is not the result of a lack of willpower.
"We know that appetite and satiety are inherited and that up to 70% of your weight is genetically determined. There is every reason to treat obesity as a chronic, relapsing disease," John Wass, professor of endocrinology at Oxford University, told The Lancet.
The factors responsible for obesity can be divided into two categories: Internal factors, such as a person's biological and genetic make-up, and external factors, such as environmental and social conditions, — like your income, access to healthcare or access to safe outdoor areas where you can exercise.
Genetics, lack of exercise, bad eating habits, psychological issues, health problems, social and economic conditions, drugs, pollutants, and more can all contribute to the development of obesity.
Medical conditions like Cushing's disease and certain medications, including steroids and some antidepressants, can also cause weight gain or obesity.
What does obesity do to your body?Symptoms related to excess fat and body weight include difficulty doing physical activities, pain in different parts of the body and even osteoarthritis, a degenerative joint disease. Obesity can also make it difficult to breathe at night, a condition called sleep apnea.
Obesity can cause type 2 diabetes, increase blood pressure, cholesterol and blood sugar, and lead to cardiovascular disease, like strokes and heart attacks due to the increasing buildup of fatty material in the arteries.
Obesity has also been associated with certain types of cancers like endometrial, esophageal, liver, kidney, and colon, among others, and it can severely affect a person's mental health, causing anxiety and low self-esteem, as well as increase the risk of depression.
How do you measure obesity?Obesity is often determined by measuring a person's body mass index (BMI) and diagnosed when a person's BMI is above 30. A value above 25 indicates overweight, according to the WHO.
The BMI is calculated by dividing the body weight in kilograms by the square of height in meters. You can calculate your BMI with the UK's National Health Service BMI calculator.
But the BMI is a contentious measure. It doesn't take into account age, sex and which percentage of body weight is made up by muscle mass as compared to fat.
For instance, a weightlifter with a lot of muscle mass can have a high BMI above 30 and not have excess fat.
There are other tools that can more accurately measure the amount of fat, but they are not widely available.
"The best way of measuring [body fat] is using magnetic resonance imaging [MRI]," Alexander Miras, professor of endocrinology at Ulster University in the UK, told DW.
But MRIs are expensive and are mostly used to determine body fat content for research purposes.
An excess of abdominal fat is linked to higher health risks than fat in the rest of the body. Because of that, medical guidelines recommend looking at waist circumference, and not just BMI, when determining someone's health.
How is obesity treated and prevented?At the individual level, the best way to prevent obesity is to eat a balanced diet, with less fats and sugars and more fruit, vegetables grains and nuts. The other component is staying active: The WHO recommends about 20 minutes of exercise a day.
But individual efforts can only fully work in conjunction with support on the policy and public health level.
"If anything, there has been far too much emphasis on blame and personal responsibility, including from doctors," Francesco Rubino, chair of metabolic and bariatric surgery at King's College London, told The Lancet.
Since obesity is a chronic disease, doctors should provide a long-term treatment plan that can include lifestyle modifications like changing eating habits, switching to a more balanced diet and changing how people move, like promoting physical activity. Regular follow-ups are important.
Weight loss doesn't have to be extreme at first. Studies have shown that even a 10% decrease in body weight can significantly reduce the risk of obesity-related risk factors, and that it can be achieved in 6 months with well-designed treatment programs. After that, more intense weight loss programs need to be discussed with your doctor.
What drugs and surgeries are available?If diet and exercise don't work, there are few medications approved in the US to treat obesity that can help in addition to diet and exercise. But they come with potential side effects.
Semaglutide, sold under the brand names Ozempic, Wegovy or Rybelsus, has been recently approved for weight loss treatment in the US and by the National Institue for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) in the UK, and might lead to more than a 10% weight loss in addition to diet and exercise. The drug has to be self-injected once a week, and can have side effects like nausea, vomiting, diarrhea and constipation.
Semaglutide reduces appetite by imitating the GLP-1 hormone that is released after we eat.
For people with severe obesity, usually a BMI higher than 40, bariatric surgery such as a gastric bypass, may be an effective treatment for weight reduction and health improvement if dieting and exercise have failed. Since every case is different, it's important to discuss benefits, risks and implications of the procedure with a doctor.
Edited by: Carla Bleiker
Scientists are already talking about the largest observed avian influenza epidemic in European history. And it started around the same time as COVID-19.
There are a number of different types of avian influenza that can infect birds.
One of them is called avian flu H5N1. It first emerged in 1997 and in the past two decades has infected about 850 people. Although that's a very small number, around half of those infected have died.
A new lineage of the virus, called avian flu A (H5N1) emerged in 2020. Since then, it has ripped not only through wild bird populations, but also through specific species of mammals, such as minks, badgers, pigs and bears.
Fewer than 10 people are documented to have become infected with this specific lineage, and at least one person has died .
Between the beginning of October 2021 and the beginning of October 2022, authorities have detected 6,615 cases in animals across 37 countries.
This year alone, since October 2022, researchers have observed a total of 2,701 cases.
Will H5N1 cause the next human pandemic?This strain of bird flu has a 50% mortality rate and public health authorities consider that cause for concern.
The H5N1 mortality rate is higher than that of other viruses that have caused recent flu pandemics, including the 2009 H1N1 swine flu pandemic.
Researchers say that if this new lineage of H5N1 were to find a way to efficiently spread between humans, the effects could be catastrophic.
But at this point, experts say the risk of that happening is very low.
All the people who tested positive for the new avian flu lineage had had close contact with wild birds, said Richard Pebody, head of the High-threat Pathogen Team at WHO/Europe (World Health Organization).
"They have either been working on a poultry farm and involved in culling flocks or had contact with backyard flocks," Pebody said.
That suggests that if you don't have close contact with sick birds, you are safer than people who do.
How would avian influenza spread through human communities?In order for avian flu H5N1 to spread more widely through the general public, it would have to adapt the ability to easily spread between people. And, so far, there is no evidence to indicate that this lineage of H5N1 has found a way to do that.
But researchers have expressed some concern that the virus is starting to spread among other, non-human mammals.
A massive outbreak occurred on a farm with 52,000 minks in Galicia, Spain, in October 2022. Researchers looking into that outbreak said it is possible that the virus had spread between the minks themselves.
However, the researchers said that it is difficult to identify how exactly the virus spread. They said it was hard to disentangle whether all the minks had been exposed to the virus through a source of food, for example, or whether the virus had spread among the minks — or a mix of the two possibilities.
Mammalian adaptation of H5N1 is a 'red flag'Pebody said that proof of the virus spreading between the minks would present a "red flag […] that the virus is changing in ways which are more concerning."
"Humans are mammals as well," he added. "So, if the virus is showing some suggestion of mammalian adaptation — its ability to spread in a mammalian host — that's just one step closer to it having biological characteristics which [would] make it more attractive to spread in the human population."
Scientists are closely monitoring all large outbreaks of the virus among mammals to understand how it is spreading and evolving.
In March 2023, authorities reported an outbreak in Peru, where thousands of sea lions — up to 3% of the population —had died of H5N1.
Researchers are in the process of trying to identify any potential sea lion-to-sea lion spread of the virus.
Sick birds also mean rising food pricesBirds often get influenza, but the H5N1 strain has been especially deadly. Researchers estimate that over 60 million wild birds have died due to the virus or a cull in the past year.
When a single bird in a flock develops the virus, farmers are required to kill the entire flock.
And fewer farm birds mean fewer chickens in shops and at markets. The current outbreak among birds has already contributed to higher egg prices in the US and could lead higher poultry prices in general in the coming months.
How to protect yourself against avian influenzaPebody said the best way for people to protect themselves — if they don't have to work in direct contact with birds — is to avoid picking up birds on the street. But the risk, said Pebody, is still low.
"It's important to highlight that there have been millions of birds that have died and we're only seeing a small number of human cases," said Pebody. "So, the risk at the moment remains relatively low. But there is a risk nonetheless."
Pebody added that people who work on poultry farms or who have chickens or hens in their backyards should wear personal protective equipment when dealing with the animals.
The WHO says that the incubation period after an infection with avian influenza A (H5N1) averages between 2 and 5 days, but it can take up to 17 days before we see symptoms.
Researchers are developing a vaccine for humans, Pebody said.
If you have had contact with dead or sick birds and develop respiratory symptoms, you should contact your doctor and local health authorities, get tested, and seek advice about antiviral treatment.
Edited by: Zulfikar Abbany
Male birth control pills aren't available yet, but there are already accusations that men won't want to take them, or can't be relied upon to take them responsibly.
"Let’s say this new non-hormonal pill for guys makes it to market, and men are willing to try it. Can we really expect them to take a pill every day?" author Susanna Schrobsdorff wrote in The Washington Post in April 2022.
Fifty percent of the pregnancies around the world are unintended. It's women who ultimately bear the burden, and the argument goes that men will never take contraception seriously unless they can get pregnant themselves.
One reason this bias exists may be that men don't have the best track record with condoms. Incidences of "stealthing" — taking the condom off during sex without your partner's consent — are common: In Australia, for example, a staggering 32% of women and 19% of men have experienced stealthing.
But male contraceptive advocates are fighting back against the criticisms, arguing that the demand for male contraceptives has never been higher. They say that men are ready to share the responsibility of birth control.
Men want the pillA new study , presented at the Reproductive Health Innovation Summit in Boston in February 2023, backs the claims, showing that men and their partners are strongly in favor of new forms of male contraception and that women trust their partners to use them responsibly.
The survey, funded by The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, involved 19,000 adult men from eight different countries: Nigeria, Kenya, Cote d'Ivoire, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Vietnam, Bangladesh, India, and the US.
"We asked men if they want contraceptives, and if they do, what forms they want. We thought by assessing the situation objectively we could set some of the issues straight," said Steve Kretschmer, executive director of DesireLine, a consultancy firm involved in the study.
The study found that 78% to 98% of men, depending on the country, would take male contraceptive pills. The demand was high among men regardless of their relationship status.
Women trust their partners to take the pillThe study also aimed to find out what women thought about the issue.
"We also wanted to ask women if they trust men to take contraceptives, and how would it change their use of contraceptives if male contraception became available," Kretschmer told DW.
The survey showed the demand for male contraception was as high among women as it was among men.
Moreover, women largely trust their partners to use contraception responsibly — 82% to 88% of women in Vietnam, Nigeria and Bangladesh agreed or strongly agreed they would believe it if their partner told them they were taking a contraceptive.
"The data shows men want new birth control forms and women trust their partners to take them," Heather Vahdat, executive director of the US-based Male Contraceptive Initiative, told DW. "But if a woman doesn't trust their male partner, then they could both contracept. This isn't an option right now."
Changing gender rolesAccording to Vahdat, society lost track of men's role in contraception and conception since the female pill was introduced in the 1960s.
"Contraception became synonymous with women's rights. But we're now reaching a tipping point with male contraceptives and people are paying attention to them," she said.
Data in the survey shows men in committed relationships want to be part of the decision-making progress around contraception, as much as they are around conception.
"It comes at a time when men are discussing masculinity more, especially toxic masculinity, and wanting to become more engaged partners," said Vahdat.
Barriers to male birth control?While men theoretically want to be part of contraceptive decision making, there are still barriers to overcome before they will actually take a pill.
Not least, the marketing needs to change. Male birth control pills work by causing temporary infertility. How many men would be happy to be infertile? Could they trust infertility to be, in fact, temporary?
On-going large-scale clinical trials testing efficacy and safety of different male birth control forms are looking positive, but some trials have even been canceled due to concerns about irreversible infertility and other adverse side effects.
Pill needs to be proven safe and effectiveCommentators on social media have suggested that men are just being wusses and that women have been suffering similar side effects with the pill for decades. But drug regulators like the FDA are being strict with male contraceptive pill trials. Concerns over sterilization are not matters to scoff at — they need to be addressed before drugs go onto the market.
After all, men need to be able to trust the pills are safe and effective before women can trust men to take them.
Edited by: Carla Bleiker
This article is the second of two articles on male birth control. You can read the first one on different kinds of male contraceptive pills here.
We've all been there: rolling around on the bed, tossing right, then left... wide awake. Not even counting sheep — 1,000 or more — does the trick.
It could be the stress of an upcoming exam, too much coffee or there might be countless other reasons for why you can't fall asleep.
It might just be the light. Sure, some people can fall asleep with the lights on. But did you know that light can affect the quality of your sleep and even your mental performance the next day?
Is sleeping with an eye mask good for memory?A study published in the journal Sleep suggests that wearing an eye mask at night could improve memory and alertness the next day.
It describes how participants in the study performed better in visual memory and vigilance tests when they spent more time in a key stage of sleep called slow-wave sleep.
Slow-wave sleep (SWS) is a deep sleep stage where you sleep like a rock, and don't wake easily. It is also a phase during which some people talk or sleep walk. SWS plays an important role both in our ability to store long-term memories and also in our memory function the next day.
There are many things that researchers don't know about sleep but what is clear is that it fulfils an essential function for maintaining our mental, physical and emotional well-being. Poor sleep quality can be very harmful and lead to immune system and heart problems, mental impairments or metabolic disorders.
Sleep study finds improved cognitive performanceThe study involved 122 young adults between the ages of 18 and 35, who were divided across two experiments.
One week-long experiment focused on studying the participants' mental performance, while the other four-night-long study focused on studying brain activity during sleep.
Participants either slept with a regular eye mask or with a so-called "control" eye mask that had holes over the eyes so that it did not block the light.
The masks with holes were used as a means to check whether it was the light-blocking capacity of eye masks, rather than the masks themselves, that was behind their effects.
To measure memory performance, the researchers used a test called paired associates learning. For alertness, they used a psychomotor vigilance task to measure the participants' reaction time.
They found significant increased memory performance and faster reaction times among participants who slept with eye masks compared to those who slept with the control mask.
They also measured motor-skills learning tasks with different tests, like typing numbers on a keyboard with the non-dominant hand, but found no differences between the two groups.
Brain waves were measured on 33 participants using a wearable EEG-device to look for differences in the duration of their SWS stages depending on whether they used the normal eye mask or the control one. The results showed that participants wearing conventional eye masks performed better on the memory test, the longer their SWS stage.
The sleep study was relatively smallOnly 89 people participated in the first study and in the second, it was 33, which is relatively small. So it's hard to draw general conclusions from the findings. Larger sample sizes would be more representative and provide more reliable results.
In addition, the study only included people aged between 18 and 35 years, so we don't know whether wearing eye masks is beneficial for other age groups.
Participants wore eye masks for a week or less, so we don't know how long the effects could last and whether they may wane with time or not.
Moreover, the study only examined healthy adults without sleep disorder and thus the findings may not necessarily apply to other people, such as those with sleep disorders or other conditions.
But do face masks work?Some people don't like the feeling of wearing an eye mask and find them uncomfortable, some say they have never slept better.
But we do know that our sleep-wake cycle is regulated by light or the absence of light.
We need dark to get a good night's sleep because that's when our body releases melatonin, the sleep hormone. Light inhibits the production of melatonin and prevents us from falling asleep.
This becomes tricky at higher latitudes, in countries where seasons are more pronounced and during summer you may experience virtually no night at all.
So, the effects of light in sleep have been well studied and eye masks offer a cheap and easy way to block light without the side effects of sleeping drugs.
Eye masks have also been found to significantly improve sleep quality among patients in intensive care units.
But more research is still necessary to better understand whether the benefits apply to other groups of people and how long they last.
Edited by: Carla Bleiker, Zulfikar Abbany
No one likes condoms; they're smelly, they dull the pleasures of sex, and someone has to slink them in the bin afterwards. And vasectomies? Who wants a surgeon with a surgical knife rummaging around down there?
But what other choices to do men have to ward against their partner's unplanned pregnancy?
"50% of the global population is missing a means to manage their reproductive health desires sufficiently," said Hannah Vahdat, executive director of Male Contraceptive Initiative (MCI), a nonprofit.
This could all be changing soon. Drug developers are working on several different methods of male birth control and the results are looking promising.
"We need multiple products, and people are working on them," Vahdat told DW. "Some people want a pill everyday to know they're protected, but others want to take a pill as and when it's needed before sex."
Two types of male contraceptionThere are two main approaches to male contraception. One is a hormonal method which acts much like the pill for women — it is taken every day for several months or years to provide long-lasting contraception.
The other approach is an on-demand drug that can be taken right before sex to provide short-lasting contraception.
"What's pretty exciting now is work on the on-demand pills, but it's the hormonal products that are probably coming out soonest," Vahdat said.
Hormone-based male contraceptionBoth methods of birth control work by preventing sperm from developing, causing temporary infertility.
But don't let this scare you. The infertility really is temporary — fertility (spermatogenesis) returns to normal when you stop taking the contraceptive.
A clinical trial in 2022 showed a topical hormonal gel applied to a man's shoulder every day successfully prevented their partner/s from getting pregnant. The gel contained synthetic hormones, including testosterone, which sends a message to the brain to inhibit sperm production in the testes.
The gel lowered sperm production to 1 million sperm per milliliter, compared to the typical 15 to 200 sperm per milliliter in healthy males. The birth control was reversible, as sperm levels returned to normal around 4 months after cessation of gel use.
But like the female pill, men needed to use the gel consistently for successful birth control.
"Spermatogenesis needs 7-10 weeks, which means a man has to take a hormone pill every day for 7-10 weeks before his sperm count is low enough for him to be essentially infertile. Then he has to take it continuously. But if he wants to stop, it takes 7-10 weeks for fertility to come back again," Jochen Buck, a professor of pharmacology at the Weill Cornell Graduate School of Medical Sciences in the US, told DW.
Non-hormonal male birth controlNon-hormonal contraceptive medications act in a similar way, but rather than altering hormonal signaling, they target specific molecular triggers of spermatogenesis.
Gossypol, a substance extracted from the cotton plant, is one such non-hormonal drug that provokes infertility in men by inhibiting spermatogenesis. Trials show the drug works, but perhaps too well, as it appears to lack reversibility in over 20% of subjects in trials.
But Buck and his colleagues are working on more promising drug candidates.
"Sperm is made in the testes," explained Buck. "Upon ejaculation they are mixed with semen fluid, which contains a signal to kickstart sperm into moving and searching. Without this they would never be able to leave the vagina to fertilize the egg."
Buck was one of the scientists who found the on-switch: adenylyl cyclase. He has since developed a drug that inhibits adenylyl cyclase and is testing its effects on birth control.
A different kind of pre-sex pillA recent study published in the journal Nature Communications showed a different male contraceptive method: The team of US and German researchers found that the contraceptive they tested really did hold sperm back in the testicles — at least in mice.
"We gave a single dose of the drug that blocks adenylyl cyclase to male mice 30 minutes before mating and found it rendered them infertile for several hours," said Buck, who led the study.
This is a game changer for male birth control. It also offers a wildly different approach to contraception as it's on demand. Men could theoretically take a single dose of the drug 30 minutes before having sex, and it would last throughout the night before fertility resumes in the morning. But so far, it has only proven successful in animals.
Are male contraceptives safe?Many men would experience similar side effects women experience when taking the female pill.
"The hormonal approaches to male contraceptives have the risk of testosterone administration, so mood effects, impact on libido, weight gain (mostly muscle), reduction in HDL (good) cholesterol and night sweats," said John K. Amory, a male reproductive health researcher at the University of Washington in the US.
According to Amory, men using hormonal male contraception could also be banned from sports that test for the administration of steroid hormones for doping.
The side effects are partly what's causing hold-ups in male contraceptive development — promising trials have been stopped earlyafter participants reported adverse side effects.
Trials are working to address these safety concerns, but it's unclear when the contraceptives will be deemed safe enough to become commercially available.
As for Buck's on-demand drug, it's too early to say. His study showed that mice given the on-demand pill were fertile again a few days later, but this says little about other possible side effects, or how men will tolerate the drug in clinical trials.
There is still much work to be done improving the chemical properties of the drug before strict safety and efficacy tests in humans can take place. All this could take five to 15 years. It's unclear when on-demand pills will become available on the market.
Until then, best to stick to condoms, preferably in France — where they're free!
Edited by: Carla Bleiker
Pregnancy means new life to most of us — and a unique experience every time, bringing your baby into this world. But in all too many cases, pregnancy also means the end of a life.
In late February 2023, the United Nations released a new report on maternal mortality around the world. The report described how one woman dies every two minutes due to child birthor complications experienced in pregnancy.
"Pregnancy is tragically still a shockingly dangerous experience for millions around the world," said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO).
In the year 2000, the global maternal mortality rate (MMR) stood at 339. That means that 339 pregnant people of child-bearing age died per 100,000 live births.
In 2020, the global MMR was 223.
But according to the UN report, most countries around the globe have failed to lower their maternal mortality rate (MMR) significantly in that 20 year period.
The UN report says there had been a small decrease between the years 2000 and 2015, but that since 2016 the global maternal mortality rate has stagnated. And that is unacceptable, said Jenny Cresswell, a scientist at the WHO and co-author of the report.
"Stagnation is absolutely not good enough," Cresswell told DW. "The Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) target is to reduce the global maternal mortality ratio to less than 70 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births by 2030. We are currently far off-track to meet this target."
The US: An increasing maternal mortality rateIn some countries, including developed ones like the US, the maternal mortality rate has been rising for years.
At more than 23, the US has by far the highest MMR of all industrialized countries. The rate increased by roughly 78% between 2000 and 2020.
With low total numbers, even minor changes make for a high increase in the percentage of a number. But that doesn't change the fact that the number of pregnant people who die during pregnancy, childbirth or shortly thereafter has been rising for decades in one of the richest countries in the world.
What is going wrong in the US?It is not easy to explain why the MMR is going up in the US said Munira Gunja, a senior researcher with the Commonwealth Fund, a foundation that supports independent research on health care issues in the US.
Gunja said that a number of factors may be contributing to the situation, including "a lot of underlying health conditions [that] have been on the rise for years now."
Then there's the fact that many Americans don't have health insurance and can't afford to visit their doctor. The cost of health services has gone up as well. And there is a shortage of midwives who can help people through their pregnancies.
"The rate at which people in the US skip [medical] care is dramatically higher compared to other developed countries," Gunja said. It all comes together to contribute to "this unacceptable maternal mortality rate," Gunja said.
But that is not all. The MMR among Black Americans is about three times higher than among white Americans.
That stark difference is due to "structural racism," Gunja said. "[Black Americans] are at a disadvantage from the start: Where they live, their education level, their jobs and salary. And when they see a doctor, they are often faced with direct racism."
Changing health care on multiple levelsGunja said it would make a big difference already if there were more active midwives in the US. Midwives can build a close relationship with the pregnant person, take care of them at home and check in during the post-partum period, too ― which is when half of all maternal deaths in the US occur.
But things may also need to change on clinical and on policy levels.
On the clinical level, healthcare professionals need to spot the warning signs right before, during and after a baby is delivered, said Usha Ranji, associate director for women's health policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonprofit organization focusing on health issues in the US.
"Some of the factors contributing to maternal deaths were hemorrhaging during and after delivery as well as sepsis [blood poisoning], eclampsia and pre-eclampsia [seizures during childbirth]," said Ranji.
When these things go unnoticed, they can be deadly.
Ranji said training among doctors and nurses was improving, those who worked in labor and delivery, and that there was "a lot more emphasis on listening and better communication with the patients."
On the policy level, Ranji said it is crucial to get everyone on health insurance because 10% of women of childbearing age are still uninsured in the US and, as a result, less likely to seek and receive the medical care they need.
"It's important to get people into care well before they're pregnant" to make sure they're in overall good health, Ranji said. "But it's hard to get into care when you don't have health insurance."
India: On the way to a success storyThe UN report says South Asia is one of the few world regions where the maternal mortality rate is decreasing. And India has seen the biggest improvement in its MMR.
Maternal mortality fell in India by more than 73% between the years 2000 and 2020.
In 2020, India's MMR was at 103 nationwide. That is still a lot higher than the MMR in the US. But while maternal mortality in the US increased at an annual rate of 2.88% from 2000 to 2020, it fell at an annual rate of 6.64% in India during the same time period.
Rajib Dasgupta, a professor at the Centre of Social Medicine and Community Health at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, said India had started to see the benefits of a more liberalized and growing economy in the past two decades.
"There has been an overall decline in absolute poverty, a sustained increase in key determinants such as women's education and income, and a growing infrastructure," said Dasgupta.
These social factors all contribute significantly to improving maternal health and preventing deaths during and after pregnancy, according to the UN report.
Countries in South Asia that have seen their MMR decrease over the past 20 years "have made good progress in terms of economic development, increasing female education and other important areas that all play a role," Cresswell told DW. "They have demonstrated sustained political commitment to increasing women’s access to quality maternity services."
Tackling the disparity between Indian statesBut the experts say India needs more political commitment to spread these improvements across the country.
"To make it to the SDG target [a maternal mortality rate below 70], the inequity between the Indian states should receive more attention," Dasgupta said.
A number of Indian states have achieved the SDG target.
The state of Kerala's MMR is 19. It is not the lowest rate in India, but it is a lower MMR than that in the United States.
At the other end of the spectrum is the state of Assam, with a maternal mortality rate of 195, more than ten times higher than Kerala's MMR.
But even in Assam things are moving in the right direction. Down to Earth, an Indian magazine on environmental and development policy, reported at the end of 2022 that Assam's MMR was 237 between 2014 and 2016. That shows a drop of more than 40 deaths in pregnancy per 100,000 live births.
India is on the right path, said Dasgupta — it has invested in medical infrastructure and increased the number of medical personnel across the country and now "it is the time to build upon this strength."
Edited by: Zulfikar Abbany
At some point, the war in Ukraine will end, hopefully. But even when it does, when the deathly explosions of all the rockets and bombs cease, their destructive potential will be far from exhausted.
Because the grenades, mines and other explosive shots have destroyed buildings and that has released asbestos into the environment. They have also hit refineries, allowing oil and other chemicals to leak into the ground, soils and water systems. That's not to mention the ammunition itself, which contains toxic elements. These corrosive chemicals have come to stay.
The news agency Reuters reports that at least 10.5 million hectares of agricultural land in Ukraine has been contaminated with chemicals, with ramifications for global food security.
Once those chemicals get into the soils and ground water, it may only be a matter of time before they get into humans via plants, animals and drinking water.
At least, that is what toxicologists say could happen. They are not entirely sure how the environment will deal with these toxic substances or what effect they could have on humans.
Explosives and heavy metals"We're only just starting to deal with the munitions left in the oceans," said Edmund Maser, director of the Institute for Toxicology at the University Clinic in Kiel, Germany.
So, many questions remain unanswered. But Maser's research has led him and his team to one conclusion already — and that is that poisonous chemicals are bad news for living things.
Alone in the German parts of the North and Baltic Seas, said Maser, there are 1.6 million tons of rusting munitions resting on the seabed.
As these munitions degrade and corrode, they release toxic cocktails into the water, endangering the ecosystem, and those toxins may ultimately end up in fish and other seafood that people eat.
TNT is carcinogenicAmong the most dangerous elements in munitions are the explosives themselves, and the heavy metals. That includes Trinitrotoluene, better known as TNT, a nitroaromatic compound that is known for its explosive power.
"We know through feeding experiments on rats and mice that TNT is toxic," said Maser, who has also observed how TNT from the sunken munitions is toxic for ocean life.
"TNT compromises the ability of marine life to reproduce, grow and develop," said Maser. "We also know from these studies that TNT and other explosives are carcinogenic."
Mercury, arsenic and lead destroy cellsSome heavy metals, such as arsenic and cadmium, are carcinogenic.
"Above all, the detonators contain heavy metals, such as mercury in the form of a fulminant that makes the TNT explode faster," said Maser. A fulminant acts as a kind accelerant.
As a heavy metal, mercury is also damaging for nerve cells: "It can lead to birth defects in unborn babies," said Maser.
Lead has similar effects and can cause development disorders or miscarriages.
Kateryna Smirnova, a researcher at the Sokolovsky Institute for Soil Science and Agrochemistry Research at Ukraine's National Academy of the Sciences, said that soil samples from Kharkiv — one of the major battle sites in the east of the country — had already shown higher concentrations of lead and cadmium.
Smirnova's colleague, Oksana Naidyonova, a microbiologist at the Sokolovsky Institute, explained that heavy metals have a negative effect on bacteria in the soil.
"They inhibit the development of plants and the supply of micronutrients, which leads to physiological defects and reduces their ability to withstand disease," Naidyonova said.
But the chemicals won't necessarily stay in the soil. TNT, for example, could be carried away by the wind and distributed farther afield, said Maser. And rain may reach some of the substances found deeper in the ground.
"The elements may then get into surface waters and contaminate streams, rivers and lakes," he said.
Based on his research in the North and Baltic Seas, Maser said it was possible that the munitions chemicals in Ukraine would enter the food chain.
"We are concerned that people could be at risk if they eat contaminated fish," he said.
And if the rains run off, allowing the chemicals to get into the ground water, "that would mean drinking water was at risk of becoming contaminated," Maser said.
If the water "seeps" in that way, plants could consume mercury and other chemicals. And if those plants happen to be crops like wheat or vegetables, then those chemicals would likewise end up on our dinner plates.
Will Ukraine's soil be toxic forever?Maser thinks the war will leave the Black Sea — off Ukraine's southern coast, where a lot of the fighting has taken place — in a similar state as the North and Baltic Seas when this war is over. He said it will be a sea full of poisonous munitions that is easily forgotten.
His team are looking for ways to extract toxic TNT from the water. "We hope that bacteria could do it," he said. But the researchers have yet to find a bacterium that could be deployed systematically. So, it's still a problem to be solved.
The toxicologist said it may be possible to remove the top layer of soil in Ukraine and use various processes to remove the heavy metals and TNT. Such methods are, however, expensive and take a long time.
Billions of damage in the groundThe experts DW contacted at Ukraine's Sokolovsky Institute said they estimated the total damage could run to more than $15 billion. But they stressed that that was a preliminary calculation.
In any case, when we talk about removing heavy metals, all we mean is moving them from one location to another, where they would be less likely to harm people and other living things. As Maser told us, heavy metals are heavy metals forever: "You can't get rid of them."
This article was translated from German.
Have you ever bought a new shirt and then suddenly noticed everyone around you wearing the same one? Or learned a new word and started hearing it more often? Has a friend told you she was pregnant and then it seemed like everyone else was pregnant, too?
If so, congratulations: you are human after all. What you've just experienced may be a frequency illusion, or "the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon."
What is the frequency illusion?A frequency illusion is a cognitive bias , which takes place in the mind and affects the way we perceive the world around us.
Arnold Zwicky, a linguistics professor at Stanford University in the US, coined the term "frequency illusion" in 2005.
The idea was that we become more aware of things when we learn about them for the first time and that that can cause us to think that they are happening more often than they are in reality.
For example, if you buy a new red car, you may start seeing red cars more frequently and think that more people are buying red cars, or that red cars are trendy, when in reality it is possible that the number of red cars hasn't changed at all.
If we counted the number of red cars, or checked official statistics for car sales, we may indeed find that there are more red cars on the roads. But we're talking about the perception of facts here, rather than the facts themselves.
And that's important because such perceptions, or frequency illusions, can affect the way we think and make decisions in our daily lives. We may, for example, overestimate crime rates when crimes are covered more frequently in the media.
Why does the frequency illusion happen?"We are evolutionarily trained to seek explanations," said mathematics professor David Hand from Imperial College London.
Seeking explanations can be helpful if you want to learn new things, but it can also lead to our forming biases or even prejudicial opinions.
If, for instance, those crime reports we mentioned earlier focus on a certain type of crime — say, knife crimes among young people — and the reports are all from a particular community, you might be led to believe that those crimes only happen there among those people.
We tend to like such easy conclusions because they trigger our brain's reward center. It feels good to be able to explain a thing, even if only to ourselves, and then have that explanation confirmed, doesn't it?
The problem is that we may then become overly confident about what we say, even if we know very few facts about the matter.
Confidence is not a strict measure of whether we are right or wrong to think a certain way. If we believe or feel our version of a story is confirmed, we are likely to be more confident about it even if we've got it all wrong — or we're missing some of the facts, or context.
Psychologist Daniel Kahneman says this can create an illusion of validity, which can make it harder for us to admit we might be wrong.
Two underlying mental processes that cause a biasThe frequency illusion is the result of two psychological processes.
First, there's selective attention. Selective attention allows us to focus on what is currently important to us. That could be our new car, a new topic or a natural disaster we saw on the news, such as a tornado or an earthquake.
Selective attention is important for our ability to learn and our memory functions.
We need selective attention to focus on tasks or pay attention to what someone is telling us in a conversation, while ignoring all the other signals around us, such as planes over head, birds chirping, smells, or any other distraction. Without selective attention, we wouldn't be able to do much.
Second, there's confirmation bias. Confirmation bias is closely related to the illusion of validity. Because we notice red cars more, we feel more confident that red cars are more common, and that further confirms our belief that there are more red cars.
Why is the frequency illusion also known as the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon?The frequency illusion is often referred to as the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon — not because the German terrorist group had had anything to do with it, but because of a discussion on a US newspaper's bulletin board in 1994.
One of the newspaper's readers, a man called Terry Mullen, posted a comment, saying that he had recently learnt about the Baader-Meinhof for the first time and that he had then started hearing the term more frequently.
Other readers on the online forum responded by sharing similar stories, also involving the name Baader-Meinhof. A discussion grew from that and the name stuck, so people now often talk about the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon when they mean the frequency illusion.
Mental shortcuts to frequency illusionThe frequency illusion is a type of a mental shortcut called a heuristic.
In a paper published by Kahneman, and a colleague called Amos Tversky, in the US journal Science in 1974, they wrote that heuristics help us make decisions and accomplish tasks quicker.
Heuristics can be helpful when we don't have all the information we might need to make a fully rational decision but need to progress — a bit like using a rule of thumb.
There are different types of heuristics, such as the availability heuristic, where we make decisions based on the information most readily available to us in our minds.
And there is the representativeness heuristic, where we judge something based on our preconceptions — or stereotypical ideas, prejudices.
We need heuristics to get by in everyday life. But they are not perfect, said Sekoul Krastev, a decision scientist and managing director at The Decision Lab, a Canadian think tank.
"Because they're imperfect shortcuts to solving problems, they do sometimes lead us to make mistakes," Krastev said.
Check out the bat and ball problem: A bat and ball together cost $1.10 (ca. €1.04). The bat costs $1 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost? Most people intuitively say 10 cents, but the correct answer is 5 cents. Do you know why?
Edited by: Zulfikar Abbany
During sharp turns, you are flattened into the seat by many times the force of gravity. You only maintain consciousness if you are in peak physical condition and wear special pants that squeeze the blood out of your legs. You rarely fly below 900 kilometers per hour (roughly 560 miles per hour).
"The acceleration is breathtaking." That's how former German Air Force pilot Joachim Vergin describes the feeling of flying a fighter jet.
One might compare it to riding a roller coaster, but not really: The power in a jet is often twice as strong. And during combat, you have to operate a large number of weapon systems simultaneously: Fighting, evading, defending. In an extreme situation, such as an air raid, everything is a matter of life and death, often at the speed of sound.
Engines under pressureThere is currently a debate about whether to give in to Ukraine's demand for fighter jets, such as the F-16 or the MiG-29. The first time fighter jets were used was at the end of the last major war in Europe: World War II. With their turbojet engine, jets fly much faster than propeller-driven aircraft, which had been used up to that point.
Jet engines suck air into the front of the motor, where it is compressed. Fuel is sprayed into the highly compressed air and ignited. This forces the air out of the engine "very powerfully," as Dr. Robert Kluge, an aviation expert at the Deutsches Museum in Munich, explains.
This air then pushes against any obstacle, be it the runway or the surrounding air, and thereby accelerates the aircraft.
A jet's targets: Airborne or on the groundFighter jets can attack targets in the air as well as on the ground. For aerial combat, a jet can be equipped with air-to-air missiles that can be fired in flight to destroy a target that is also flying.
To strike targets on the ground, a jet can use air-to-ground missiles or drop simple free-fall bombs that fall to the ground "according to the laws of physics," so to speak, said Leonhard Houben, a historian and freelancer at the Berlin-Gatow Military History Museum.
Technology of trade-offsWhen building fighter jets, compromises must be made. Questions to consider include whether a jet is likely to fight other aircraft in the air, and whether those aircraft are other fighter jets that can fight back. Or should the jet only be able to effectively engage ground targets?
Such strategic considerations are then reflected in a fighter jet's technology: Should the aircraft be built to be rather light and maneuverable for air combat, or equipped with large fuel tanks for long range missions?
The MiG-29 now being discussed for delivery to Ukraine in order to help fight off Russian attacks was designed to take to the air for a very specific purpose: To protect the borders of Warsaw Pact countries against NATO aircraft.
Thus, this so-called interceptor, which entered service in 1983, can take off very quickly and reach its destination. Due to its design, the MiG-29 is extremely maneuverable in air combat. It can even stand vertically in the air on its own for short periods of time. However, the jet was initially equipped with only short-range fuel to save weight.
The F-16: A versatile performer from the assembly lineThe majority of modern fighter jets combine a variety of capabilities. According to Houben, it is more economical to build so-called multi-purpose warplanes because they can be mass-produced in just one batch that can then be used for a variety of missions.
The F-16 is one such mass-produced multi-purpose aircraft. It was explicitly developed in the US in the 1970s for export to partner nations as a low-cost, general-purpose jet. The F-16 is the fighter jet with the largest worldwide production run that is still in service. To this day, the jet is still produced in the US and is being continually improved.
Houben says that arguably "F-16s built 20 years ago are on par with Russian jets built maybe three to five years ago". That's partly because fighter jet technology development in Russia lagged in the 1990s, he says, and so much talent has left the country.
More of a weapon system than a weaponIn addition to a jet's technology, its weaponry is crucial. Without it, a jet is "just a shell, like a fire truck without a rotatable ladder," says Kluge. Like other experts, he believes it is safe to assume that if jets are delivered to Ukraine, they will also be equipped with modern weapons.
Ukraine could then use these jets to secure its own airspace. This is because, unlike air defense missiles of the kind fired by ground-based air defense systems, jets are highly mobile and can thus safeguard a large area and, using modern air-to-air missiles, also shoot down cruise missiles in the air.
According to Leonhard Houben, it is unlikely that Russian and Ukrainian jets will engage in aerial combat like in Hollywood movies. Nowadays, fighter jets would mostly fight each other with missiles outside their line of sight.
Similar to battle tanks, the rule is usually whoever fires first and hits, wins. Modern air-to-air missiles, once fired, virtually sneak up on their target and activate their conspicuous radar only shortly before impact. By then it's often too late to dodge. The reality usually has little to do with wild maneuvers, machine gun fire, and Hollywood.
Becoming a pilot takes yearsNevertheless, a fighter pilot must also be able to engage in close combat in the event that all the missiles have been fired. They must be able to multitask under exceptional conditions. For this reason, pilots are not trained overnight: For the German Eurofighter aircraft, the training period takes five to six years and costs five million euros ― per pilot.
On his very first flight in a jet, an engine failed, says former pilot Vergin. Although he was scared, he knew exactly what to do because of "drills and training," and he remained calm and landed the plane safely.
However, each pilot often learns to fly just one type of fighter jet, as retraining for another type of jet is costly. When Vergin switched from the Phantom fighter jet to the Tornado, the training took seven months.
This is also where all the experts interviewed see a major challenge for Ukrainian pilots. All manuals, all buttons in NATO jets are labeled in English. Not easy when you can read only Cyrillic script. Also, all figures are in feet and miles. Pilots in former Soviet Union countries learn to fly on the basis of the metric system.
The Jet as a MythIn war, however, fighter jets are more than the sum of their technical capabilities.
Robert Kluge, for example, describes the aircraft as a "myth" because, unlike humans, it can also move in the third dimension.
A fighter jet can even be seen as a symbol that can boost the morale of one's own troops. And as an important chess piece in the strategy of a war, simply having it can be enough to make enemies have second thoughts.
This text was originally published in German.
A study published February 9 declared a third person free of HIV after receiving a specific type of bone marrow, or stem cell, transplant. The 53-year-old man, who researchers are calling the "Düsseldorf" patient, received the treatment in 2013 and has been monitored since.
Like the two others — known as the "Berlin" and "London" patients, respectively — the man was positive for Type 1 HIV (HIV-1) and received a specific type of stem cell transplant to help treat a cancer diagnosis.
Both the Düsseldorf and Berlin patients had leukemia, while the London patient had Hodgkin's lymphoma.
What are stem cells?"Stem cell" is an umbrella term that refers to cells that are constantly dividing and have the potential to form different cell types.
Most of the body's cells are very specialized and can't change type — they will be stuck as heart muscle cells, neurons or intestine wall cells for the rest of their "lives".
In contrast, stem cells are more like teenagers about to graduate high school.
They have the potential to become pretty much anything — a lawyer, nurse, scientist, journalist, influencer or TikToker — and must adapt to new trends.
What are hematopoietic stem cells?The three HIV-free patients all received an allogenic hematopoietic stem cell (HSC) transplant.
The terms "bone marrow" and "stem cell" are often used interchangeably when talking about this procedure, because there are HSCs in our bone marrow.
HSCs are a cell-producing machinery that can give rise to blood and immune system cells through a process called hematopoiesis, which comes from two Greek words that together mean "blood making".
You might not realize it, but every day HSCs produce around 300 billion new cells in your bone marrow.
Different types of stem cellsBut not all teenagers are equally flexible when it comes to figuring out what they want to become. Some may be really into art, while others may be passionate about science and incapable of drawing a tree.
Stem cells also have different types of potential. Some can generate many different cell types, while others only a few.
Pluripotent stem cells can generate all the different types of cells required for an embryo to develop. Multipotent stem cells, on the other hand, can only generate a few types of cells.
Adult humans have multipotent stem cells in parts of the body where the cells need constant replenishment, like the skin, bones and gonads.
Scientists received the Nobel Prize in 2012 after proving it's possible to manipulate already-differentiated cells into becoming pluripotent again through a process called "cell reprogramming".
Since then, stem cell therapy has become a very active field of research.
Hematopoietic stem cell transplantThere are several types of stem cell therapies, and despite being harsh and risky, the HSC transplant is the most popular.
The procedure attempts to fix unhealthy bone marrow by replacing it with healthy marrow from a donor. It treats conditions that are often life-threatening, like certain types of cancers or blood/immune disorders such as sickle cell disease.
Stem cell transplants are classified by the origin of the stem cells that are being transplanted. For example, if the cells come from the body of the person who is being treated, the procedure is called an autologous stem cell transplant. If they come from someone else, it's considered allogenic.
Each of the three HIV-free patients received an allogenic HSC transplant.
A high-risk transplantBefore receiving an HSC transplant, a patient is required to undergo a harsh "conditioning" regimen, which can include chemotherapy and radiotherapy.
Both treatments can have serious side effects, like infections, organ failure and even death. They are conducted in order to destroy the patient's unhealthy bone marrow and heavily suppress their immune system, which allows the transplant to properly integrate.
If the treatment is successful, the transplanted cells will trigger an immune reaction against any residual cancer cells, helping clear them in what's called a graft-versus-tumor effect.
But things can go awry. In some cases, the donor's transplanted immune cells may start to recognize the recipient's body as foreign and attack it, leading to graft-versus-host disease.
Graft-versus-host disease can affect the skin, the intestines and the liver. In some cases, it can even be life-threatening.
Not a treatment for HIVDue to its high risk, researchers from the three HIV-remission studies have repeatedly cautioned that HSC transplants should not be seen as a treatment for HIV, which can be well managed with anti-retroviral treatment.
Researchers across the world are still looking for a cure or vaccine for the virus.
Edited by: Clare Roth
Researchers have reported a third case of a person cleared of HIV after undergoing a stem-cell transplant aimed at curing his leukemia.
The study, published today in the journal Nature, describes the case of a 53-year-old male patient who underwent a bone marrow (stem-cell) transplant to treat his leukemia. Like the "London" and "Berlin" patients, the donor had a rare mutation that confers resistance to certain strains of HIV, like HIV-1.
"This underlines that these approaches are promising and also reproducible, since it does not remain an isolated case," said Jürgen Rockstroh in a statement. Rockstroh is a professor and head of infectiology at Germany's University Hospital Bonn who was not involved in the research.
However, researchers point out, the treatment has not been successful for several other patients who have received it.
The third patient to be "cured" via transplantAlthough there's still debate on what being "cured of HIV" means, the new case adds to the two previous cases of HIV cure using the same type of stem cell transplant as the Berlin patient and the London patient.
It is hard to prove conclusively that someone is cured of HIV because the virus can remain hidden inside very long-lived immune cells, and the methods available to detect them are limited, HIV expert Sharon Lewin and colleague Jennifer Zerbato wrote in The Lancet in 2020.
Why the treatment appears to workThere’s a receptor in the HIV virus's target cells called CCR5.
All three cases involved HIV-1 positive patients who underwent a stem cell transplant from a donor with both copies of a rare but naturally occurring CCR5 mutation.
Individuals with this mutation have lower or no expression of the CCR5 receptor in their cells, conferring protection against certain strains of the HIV virus.
The transplant essentially replaces the patient's immune system with the one that is resistant to HIV.
The "Düsseldorf patient"The patient, whose identity has not been revealed, was positive for type 1 HIV (HIV-1) and was monitored by researchers at Düsseldorf University Hospital for more than nine years after his transplant in February 2013.
The patient had a type of leukemia called acute myeloid leukemia. Leukemia is a type of cancer that affects the bone marrow, which is the spongy tissue inside our bones that makes new blood and immune cells.
The patient continued taking antiviral medicine for HIV until November 2018, when the researchers decided to stop the treatment because, they reported, it was the only way to know if the patient had been cured.
Four years after stopping antiretroviral therapy, the researchers could not detect any traces of HIV viruses capable of infection and measured waning levels of HIV-1 specific antibodies.
Genetic material of the HIV virus was mostly undetectable except for sporadic traces detected in some blood and lymph tissues samples. These results are strong evidence that the HIV-1 had been cured, the researchers said.
Stem-cell transplant as an HIV treatmentAlthough this study adds to two previous cases of successful "curing" of HIV, it does not mean that stem-cell transplants are a safe and viable alternative to HIV treatment.
"Another key limitation of [the transplant] is the associated pronounced toxicity.”, said Boris Fehse, head of the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf's cell and gene therapy research department, in a statement. He was not involved in the study.
Bone marrow transplants require drugs that suppress the immune system, which can increase the risk of infections and potentially lead to so called graft-versus-host disease, where the transplanted immune cells target the host tissue, added Fehse.
The authors caution that this type of stem-cell transplant is not low-risk or easily scalable. The study, they say, rather serves as further evidence that gene-editing therapies targeting CCR5 receptors may be the key to curing HIV-1.
Edited by: Clare Roth
It's easy to turn away from another news article or social media post about war and violence. After all, we're constantly bombarded with images of traumatic events when we're online.
The phenomenon, known as compassion fatigue, or empathy burnout, causes us to lose our capacity to react and help those in need.
"I felt this after the invasion of Ukraine," said Jessica Roberts, an assistant professor of communication studies at the Universidade Catolica Portuguesa in Lisbon. "When I first heard about the atrocities it was horrifying, but then I heard about another town and my reaction was less extreme."
Compassion fatigue does not have to be permanent. As Susan Sontag wrote in her 2003 essay "Regarding the Pain of Others": "Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers."
So just how can we translate compassion into action? Here we take a look at how compassion can both fatigue and be rebuilt.
Compassion fatigue and violence numbnessBrad Bushman, a psychologist at Ohio State University in the US, has conducted experiments illustrating how violence in digital media formats like video games and films can desensitize people's responses to suffering or violence in real life.
In one study, Bushman and his colleagues had 320 students play either a violent or nonviolent video game for 20 minutes. After playing, participants were instructed to answer a questionnaire, but during this time they heard a fight break out in the hallway outside.
"In reality this was a recording of professional actors having a fight. We also had a research assistant outside the room kick a trash can and start groaning," Bushman told DW.
They then measured how long it took participants to help the groaning assistant. On average, it took people who played the nonviolent game 16 seconds, whereas those who played the violent game took 73 seconds.
What's more, said Bushman, those who played the violent video game reported the fight to be less serious than those who played the nonviolent game.
It would be too simple to conclude here that violent video games cause violence, but in Bushman's experiments, they did appear to temporarily change people's responses to violence in the real world.
"The consequence of seeing violent images is that you become numb to it and you think violence is no big deal. The real-world consequences are that you're less likely to help someone who's a victim of violence," said Bushman.
Compassion fatigue is a form of emotional protectionAccording to Bushman, the underlying psychological mechanism behind compassion fatigue is desensitization.
"Really, it's a kind of emotional or attentional filtering that protects us from suffering becoming too stressful or traumatic to cope with," said Bradshaw.
It's also possible to detect desensitization to violent images in people's physiological responses to stress.
"If you measure peoples cardiovascular arousal responses or startle brain waves (using electroencephalography), you see that people's physiological shock responses to violent images are dampened in those people who've just been playing a violent video game," Bradshaw said.
But, he argued, desensitization to violence and trauma can be an important adaptive strategy for people whose work involves frequent exposure to traumatic events, like soldiers, aid workers and doctors.
The problem arises when this desensitization is detected in the "ordinary" population.
"This adaptation is one of the mechanisms that actually drives further aggression and violence in society," Bradshaw said, referring to research showing how conflict in Israel and Palestine escalates violence in children.
Compassion fatigue toward refugeesYasmin Aldamen, at Ibn Haldun University in Istanbul, emphasized the dangers of how compassion fatigue can lead to greater violence and hate speech in society. Aldamen's research focuses on the impact compassion fatigue and negative media representations have on Syrian refugees in Turkey and Jordan.
"We found that framing negative images and messages of refugees in the media opens the door for audiences to lose empathy for them or even have hatred for refugees," Aldamen told DW.
Sadly, this is not new or surprising. Violence toward refugees and migrants has existed as long as humans have fled conflict and been transplanted. But what is new is how quickly media and social media can drive compassion fatigue and subsequent hate speech and racism.
It's something we see time and time again, after refugees fleeing the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, with the crisis in Ukraine and with refugees fleeing conflict and climate change in North Africa.
"There's evidence showing that people give less aid money after a disaster over time. It's already happening with the earthquake in Turkey and Syria," said Roberts of Universidade Catolica Portuguesa.
Compassion fatigue is temporary and can be reversedCompassion fatigue can be reversed, according to Roberts and Aldamen. They say you can rebuild your capacity for compassion over time.
"We can use social media to create empathy and compassion between people. In our research, we looked at Humans of New York, where a guy focused on the positive and relatable stories of people's lives, instead of their trauma. It helped to create great empathy, " Roberts told DW.
Aldamen has a similar mission. She is calling for media outlets and people on social media to change the way they represent refugees and other vulnerable populations.
"My study recommends reporting of the Syrian refugee crisis (and other crises) from a more humanistic perspective. Media outlets need to display some of the more positive stories from the refugee crisis to ensure that people do not suffer compassion fatigue to exposure to tragic stories," Aldamen told DW.
She also said it's important for news articles to involve calls to action on individuals or policymakers so readers can help those in need rather than observing a crisis they feel cannot be solved.
Here's how to donate to earthquake aid efforts in Turkey and Syria.
Edited by: Clare Roth
Correction, February 20, 2023: An earlier version of this article misspelled the name of Yasmin Aldamen. DW apologizes for the error.
It's still impossible to say for sure whether the Chilean poet and politician Pablo Neruda was poisoned, resulting in his death in 1973. That's according to forensics experts involved in a report that outlines the findings of an investigation into the Nobel Laureate's demise.
This comes after outlets across the world reported statements from Neruda's nephew, Rodolfo Reyes, who had told journalists that the highly anticipated report — which was released to lawyers in Chile on February 15 but remains unavailable to the public — proved the poet was poisoned.
The forensics experts did not confirm Reyes' statements when they were initially published but told DW a day later, on February 16, that they were untrue.
"We note that there's something interesting, and more work should be done, but in no way can we conclude [Neruda] was poisoned," geneticist Hendrik Poinar told DW in an email.
"So, we can't close the case (no smoking gun) but we can't — yet — rule it out either," wrote Poinar, adding that this was the consensus among all the researchers involved in the report.
Their report is the culmination of years of research conducted on the poet's remains.
Neruda was a long-time member of Chile's Communist Party and an adviser to President Salvador Allende. His death came just weeks after Allende was overthrown in a coup by Augusto Pinochet, whose military regime would murder and jail thousands of political opponents.
Years of research into Neruda's deathIn 1977, four years after Neruda's death, doctors reported that he had suffered from prostate cancer.
But, almost four decades later, Neruda's driver revealed that the poet had told him, when Neruda was on his death bed, that he had been stabbed in the stomach.
That revelation prompted a renewed interest in Neruda's death and the subsequent investigation .
In 2017, researchers said they had found that Neruda had not died from prostate cancer, as originally reported by doctors, and that prompted them to try and figure out the true cause of the death.
The scientists found clostridium botulinum, a toxic bacterium, in one of Neruda's exhumed molars.
This seemed like a significant finding because in 1981 political prisoners in Chile were known to have been poisoned with that very bacteria.
Clostridium botulinum (also known as C. botulinum) produces lethal botulinum toxins, which can block nerve functions and lead to respiratory and muscular paralysis.
Proof of bacteria, but no proof of poisoningSince the discovery of C. botulinum in Neruda's tooth, a team of Chilean, Danish and Canadian researchers have studied the poet's remains.
First, they wanted to see whether the bacteria could be detected elsewhere in the poet's body.
They found some C. botulinum in Neruda's bones, but they have yet to discern whether it's from the same source as that found in the tooth, said Poinar.
Second, they wanted to know whether the bacteria had been present in Neruda's body at the time of his death. That would enable them to rule out the possibility that the C. botulinum had entered his body afterward — transferred from the material of the coffin, for example.
The researchers investigated the DNA of the bacteria and compared it to other bacteria found in Neruda's remains. They found that the DNA of the C. botulinum from Neruda's tooth was damaged in a similar way to other DNA samples taken from Neruda's oral bacteria. That suggests, the researchers say, that the C. botulinum could have been present when the poet died.
An independent expert on botulism, John Austin, said the researchers' conclusion seemed plausible, assuming that their DNA sequencing was correct. Austin leads the Botulism Reference Service for Canada and conducts research on botulinum toxin-producing strains of clostridium.
But both Austin and the scientists who conducted the research on Neruda's remains told DW this doesn't explain how C. botulinum came to be in the poet's tooth, and it doesn't confirm he died of botulism.
Austin added that the mere presence of C. botulinum is not harmful to humans — what's harmful is the toxins that it produces when it grows.
He said when a person dies, bacteria multiply in the body to start the decomposition process. It's possible there was a small number of harmless C. botulinum spores in Neruda's mouth when he died that eventually grew after death.
The researchers said one way to conclusively prove the poet had been poisoned would be to compare the C. botulinum strains found on Neruda's tooth with the C. botulinum strains found in the remains of the 1981 political prisoners.
But "we don’t even know if those remains exist," Poinar told DW. "If they do... we would want to conduct those experiments."
Death still a mysteryA lot is still unclear. For example, Austin said if Neruda did indeed die from the C. botulinum found in his molar, his driver's stabbing claim doesn't add up.
"If someone were killed by injection of botulinum toxin, this would not result in the presence of C. botulinum DNA in a tooth," he told DW.
Fabrizio Anniballi, another botulism expert who was not directly involved in the research on Neruda's remains, said "based on the publicly available information, it is unlikely that Pablo Neruda died of botulism." Anniballi runs Italy's National Reference Center for Botulism.
"I read that he was given an injection into the belly and that, after six hours, he died," Anniballi told DW. "Six hours is generally too short to trigger botulism and cause the subject's death. To better assess the plausibility of botulism, it would be desirable to know his symptoms before the end."
Poinar said it was hard to get exact information on the poet's condition at the time of his death.
"Others working on the case in Chile may have a better handle on this, but my sense is that it was a very difficult situation with few people attending to those in the hospital," said Poinar.
Spores of bacteria do not confirm poisoningMeanwhile, Anniballi questioned how it was possible that the researchers found C. botulinum in DNA form.
He said botulism poisoning was not caused by C. botulinum but by its neurotoxins. And because neurotoxins are proteins, they degrade if they come into contact with enzymes called a protease.
The stomach and intestines contain many such proteases, said Anniballi, and that makes it very unlikely that researchers would find these neurotoxins in a 40-year-old corpse.
Anniballi said when a person gets botulism poisoning, they consume both the neurotoxins and the C. botulinum.
The bacteria is a spore-forming microorganism found in any environment that can contaminate foods — such as soils, sediments, dust and water.
If food containing the C. botulinum bacteria is not properly preserved, the spores can grow and replicate. And unlike the aforementioned neurotoxins, which can degrade, the spores "are highly resistant to environmental conditions and can be found after hundreds or thousands of years," said Anniballi.
Anniballi said it is therefore likely that the researchers working on Neruda's remains had recovered damaged DNA from these spores. But he said the spores still don't necessarily indicate that Neruda was poisoned. They just indicate that he may have died with some of the bacteria in his mouth.
Edited by: Zulfikar Abbany
If you Google "porn addiction" you will be presented with hundreds of seemingly reputable articles about how to handle the problem. These pieces, published on websites like MedScape, Medical News Today, and Healthline, explain the condition, advise how to get help, and assure you are not alone.
In addition, there are many websites committed exclusively to supporting people afflicted with this so-called addiction, like "NoFap" and "Your Brain on Porn."
What's curious, however, is the fact that, according to all psychological classification frameworks, a person cannot actually be clinically addicted to pornography. Neither sex addiction nor porn addiction are part of the DSM, a classification system for mental disorders by the American Psychiatric Association (APA), or the ICD, a similar system for diseases of all kinds, maintained by the World Health Organization (WHO).
But if you have ever experienced it yourself or seen it in your partner, you know: Porn consumption can get out of hand, to the point where it hurts your relationship. All those articles, websites, and Youtube confessions did not come from nowhere, after all. So what is actually going on with this so-called porn addiction?
Morality complicatesThe phrase "porn addiction" first surfaced in the late 1970s in the US, according to a 2016 paper published in the journal Sexual Addiction and Compulsivity. It was tied to the moral majority movement, a political organization associated with the Christian right and Republican Party in the US that believed in promoting what they called "traditional family values." Movement leaders believed the consumption of porn posed a threat to a "pure" marriage and therefore to these values.
Porn addiction is often self-diagnosed. According to Joshua Grubbs, an Ohio-based Bowling Green State University clinical psychologist and porn addiction researcher, whether a person believes they have a porn addiction often depends on their moral beliefs about porn consumption.
Grubbs calls this phenomenon "moral incongruence" — those who think porn is morally bad, but continue watching it, might believe they have a problem, even an actual addiction, although their consumption is considered normal by most standards.
For these people, porn is not impacting their lives in the way a classic addiction would impact them, and the problem may have more to do with shame and stigmatization than anything that could be considered an actual dependence.
Pathologization of sexPart of the problem with including sex in addiction frameworks has to do with the stigma it is shrouded in.
Moral judgments often shape how socially acceptable sexual desire is "supposed" to look. This can play a role in the improper medical pathologization of sexual behaviors that may be perfectly ordinary despite not fitting accepted norms.
The best example of this is the pathologization of homosexuality. Until the early 1970s, homosexuality was considered an actual psychological illness in the US, a categorization steeped in moral and religious stigma.
Stanford psychologist and former Obama White House drug policy advisor Keith Humphreys told DW that when trying to understand whether someone's sexual behavior is causing problems that should be treated by psychologists or psychiatrists, he will ask a patient: "Are you genuinely enjoying this? Are you functioning in your life, or is this interfering with things you have to do, like your job or your health? Is it destroying your relationships with other people?"
"If none of those things are true, we say, okay, well, then it's down to how you want to live, right?" said Humpreys. "Because there isn't that harm. Until you get that damage — damage to the person, damage to other people — it really doesn't belong in medicine. That's not really what we're supposed to do. We're here for people who are in some ways impaired, ill, whatever word you like. We're not here to render judgments, sanctify people's moral opinions."
Moral debates aside, out-of-control sexual behavior existsHowever, setting moral prejudices and judgements aside, excessive desire for porn and sex does exist and can cause harm, psychologists agree. It can become compulsive and endanger people's jobs and relationships.
Over the course of her 30-year career, Isabella Hauser, professor of psychiatry and director of the outpatient clinic for psychiatry and psychotherapy at the Charite University hospital in Berlin, has treated two patients for sex addiction. They were having sex or watching porn up to five times per day, every day, which interfered with their relationships and literally rubbed their penises raw, she said.
Sex-related impulse control issues are observed more often in men, but women can experience them too.
Despite abundant chatter about so-called sex addicts — Harvey Weinstein famously identified as one in his legal defense — in-depth research on the ubiquity and causes of this problem is scant. Along with being difficult to study in general, sex and porn research is not well-funded, and stigma poses a big barrier to finding study participants.
"We have known for thousands of years that some people have excessive and out-of-control sexual behaviors that create major problems in their lives," said Grubbs. "Whether or not an excessive, compulsive, out-of-control behavior pattern is an addiction is a slightly separate question."
Can humans be addicted to more than drugs?Traditionally, experts only thought people could become addicted to substances. But in the 1990s, psychologists started pushing to expand classification systems to include something called "behavioral" addictions — so-called porn or sex addiction would fall under this umbrella.
Psychologists said people could become behaviorally addicted to using the internet, playing video games, sex, gambling, exercise, eating, and shopping.
Whether these problems can be considered actual addictions or mere impulse control disorders is highly debated — there is no clear scientific consensus.
"The persistence of a behavior in the face of consequences that results in some sort of physiological dependence — that's how I would define addiction," said Grubbs. "But that's not a benchmark that everyone would hold. I know very good researchers that would say dependence doesn't matter. Or I know other researchers that would say, 'Well, no, dependence is the only thing that matters.' These kinds of factors are fuzzier than people want to admit."
Humphreys said he thinks impulsive behaviors only creep into addiction territory when they start producing genuine harm to a person and others. The person experiencing the problem might think, "I know this is bad, but I can't seem to stop doing it."
Classification systems do not mean much for individual careAddiction experts don't seem overly concerned with the semantic debate over whether compulsive porn consumption, or hypersexuality, or video gaming should be considered actual addictions or not. Ultimately, they seem to say, it does not really matter.
Everyone consulted for this article agreed that these problems exist in some circumstances, even if they are not currently recognized as addictions by psychological classification systems.
Although it may be difficult to say a person can be "addicted" to porn in the way a person can be addicted to heroin, if they are watching porn 18 hours of the day or frequently enough that they do not spend time with their partner anymore, there is probably some kind of psychological problem going on that should be addressed — regardless of what you decide to call it.
Edited by: Carla Bleiker
No one can agree on what should be considered humanity's greatest invention. The wheel? Antibiotics? The dishwasher? All valid contenders. But today we are looking at another scientific innovation that, although perhaps innocuous, has transformed life on Earth: The condom.
Thanks to these little latex sleeves, humans can have sex without passing on STDs or getting (someone) pregnant. The protection isn't 100% guaranteed ― according to Planned Parenthood in the US, condoms are 98% effective at preventing pregnancy when used perfectly. Since humans are not, in fact, perfect, in reality the contraceptive is about 87% effective ― around 13 of 100 people who use condoms as their only birth control will conceive.
Still! Condoms have saved lives and granted women autonomy in periods of history when getting pregnant out of wedlock threatened them with pariah status, if not worse. Let's dive into the history of happy hats, as the Internet calls them.
Condoms to protect against snakes down thereThe first mention of a condom-like device dates back to 3000 BC. King Minos ― whom you might remember for his giant labyrinth containing a minotaur at its center ― was said to use a goat bladder to protect his sexual partners from contracting a rather unusual sexual disease: Legend has it, Minos' semen contained serpents and scorpions.
Sounds unpleasant indeed. Some accounts claim that Minos sheathed his penis with the goat bladder, while others say his wife Pasiphae inserted it into her vagina in order to prevent those pesky animals from biting her private parts. Either way, it's the earliest account of a barrier device used to prevent what we today would consider a sexually transmitted disease.
Class-coded condomsThe ancient Egyptians used protection as well. Archaeologist Howard Carter and his team found a condom in Tutankhamun's tomb containing samples of the pharaoh's DNA. It was made of fine linen soaked in olive oil and had been attached to a string that, the researchers believe, would have tied around his waist. They dated it to around 1350 BC.
Condoms weren't just for the god-kings, either. Other Egyptians used them too ― but only in the color assigned to their social class. No chance at fooling your date into believing you were part of the pharaoh's inner circle when the color of your condom made you out to be a lowly farmer.
In ancient Rome, condoms were also made of linen, as well as intestines or bladders of sheep and goats. The Romans did not wrap up as a way to prevent conception ― rather, the main motivator was stopping the spread of diseases like syphilis. They were also said to make condoms out of muscle tissue from men they killed in battle, "but no hard evidence for this exists," the authors of a study published in the Indian Journal of Urology point out.
The rubber revolutionThere are various theories about where the term "condom" originated. It could go back to the Latin word "condus," meaning receptacle or vessel, or to the Persian word "kemdu," which refers to a long piece of animal intestine used for storage, the authors of the Indian study point out.
In their book "Contraception through the ages" from 1964, B.E. Finch and Hugh Green write that the name most likely comes from a physician at the court of King Charles II, who ruled in the 17th century. Charles was, as the story goes, upset about the growing number of his illegitimate children. So Dr. Condom (yes, that was his actual name) did some research. He came up with a sheath made from softened lamb intestine and advised his master to wear it during sex to finally stop impregnating his mistresses.
We have to thank American inventor Charles Goodyear for the first version of the modern condom as we know it today. In the mid-1800s, he discovered the process of vulcanization, in which natural rubber is heated up together with sulfur to form a material that is more malleable, durable and elastic. By 1860, condoms were produced on a large scale. They were expensive, but back in the day, men were told to clean and then reuse them. (Condoms today are strictly one-use only!)
Second-most popular contraception method globallyThe invention of latex in the 1920s revolutionized the condom industry. Today's latex condoms can be stretched to up to eight times their original size before they rip and also come pre-lubricated, ribbed or flavored.
According to a UN study, the male condom was the second-most common contraceptive method used worldwide in 2019, beaten only by female sterilization. In 2019, 21% of people using contraception used a condom ― some 189 million users that year.
Condoms are also vital in preventing the spread of HIV. According to a meta analysis conducted by the Center for AIDS Intervention Research in the US, when used consistently and correctly, condoms are 90% to 95% effective in protecting against HIV.
International Condom Day, which is celebrated on February 13, was established by the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, a US-based non-profit founded in 1987 in response to the AIDS epidemic. The organization celebrates the holiday by handing out free condoms.
Edited by: Clare Roth
Man-child, mama's boy, adult child — if you know the type, you know.
Cooking anything beyond an egg ends in disaster. And they still receive a steady allowance from their parents … at age 35. Wholly dependent on their mothers, they are stuck in a perpetual adolescence. They may have grown to rely on it or struggle to achieve independence — families can be complicated — but either way, such relationships can be bad for the whole community.
While humans are lucky this behavior is more the exception and less the rule, it's the other way around for male orca whales, who, according to a paper published in Current Biology on February 8, remain big babies for their entire lives.
That occurs to the detriment of their mothers, who, by devoting all their time, resources and energy to their demanding sons, abstain from further reproduction.
It is a pattern that could explain the decreased reproductive output of the critically endangered species, the researchers write in the paper.
Orca moms fully invest themselves in male offspringThe study took place over nearly half a century and followed the lives of 40 female orca whales. The researchers wanted to understand why the species was becoming increasingly endangered.
They found that when female orca whales had sons their chances of giving birth to future offspring reduced by 50%. This remained the case throughout the mother's lifetime and was not observed in orcas who gave birth to daughters.
"Killer whale mothers pay a high cost in terms of their future reproduction to keep their sons alive," said researcher and co-author of the study, Michael Weiss, in a statement.
Weiss is based at the Center for Research in Animal Behaviour at the University of Exeter. He and his colleagues used data from a "southern resident" orca whale population, which generally lives off the coasts of British Columbia and the U.S. states of Washington and Oregon.
The southern resident species of orca whales has been endangered since 2005.
Unlike other types of killer whales, members of this population subsist almost entirely on Chinook salmon, many species of which are considered threatened or endangered themselves.
As such, there's a lack of food for the whales and that's contributing to the dwindling numbers of the southern resident orca population, which totals only 73 whales at time of writing.
Close mother-son relationshipIt was along with these findings about the decreased reproduction rates that the researchers also noted how orca mothers continued a very close maternal relationship with their male offspring. The mothers gave their sons half the salmon they caught for themselves, for example.
That wasn't the case for the orca daughters, who were generally fed by their mothers until they reached their own reproductive age.
There is an idea that this behavior — to ensure the young male ocas are fed and fit — could be an attempt by their mothers to increase the overall reproductive output of their population. Healthy males mate with many females, and that ultimately could increase the number of future offspring.
But the researchers say that given the critical state of the orca population, the tactic looks like it is having the opposite effect.
"This strategy of indefinitely sacrificing future reproduction to keep their sons alive may have been beneficial in their evolutionary past, but it now potentially threatens the future viability of the southern resident killer whale population," said Dan Franks, a professor of biology and computer science at the University of York in a statement.
Edited by: Zulfikar Abbany
It is entirely unclear how many people are still trapped under the rubble left behind by the earthquakes in Turkey and Syria. Rescue workers search for survivors virtually around the clock, even though the chances of finding survivors are fading with each passing day.
There are several ways to find people still alive under the rubble. Sometimes, direct communication is possible when rescue workers think they hear a sign of life — trapped people drawing attention to themselves by shouting or knocking, or sending text messages to family or friends.
Those are exceptions, however.
As a rule, rescue workers rely on other methods to search for survivors. On Tuesday, the EU presented the CURSOR (Coordinated use of miniaturized robotic equipment and advanced sensors for search and rescue operations) project: robots and drones to help rescue people from earthquake rubble.
Small robots on wheels, equipped with infrared and thermal cameras, use a tube to check the air for CO2 and proteins typical of humans. That can point to people trapped under the rubble. With the help of loudspeakers and microphones, emergency workers can then try to get in touch with potential survivors. Drones can provide additional help with 3D images of the collapse site.
During aftershocks, the search for survivors "is highly dangerous for rescue teams because everything collapses," says Karsten Berns, a computer scientist and head of the Robotic Systems Chair at the Rhineland-Palatinate Technical University of Kaiserslautern-Landau. That's something autonomous systems are supposed to improve.
What are rescue robots able to do?Berns is an expert in the field of robot earthquake rescue. In 2016, his team was part of a project similar to CURSOR. The robots used in the ICARUS project were also designed to facilitate relief work, including small tracked vehicles with infrared sensors and large excavator-like robots that can move heavy rubble or parts of buildings. They are operated from a distance of 1 kilometer to make sure no excavator operator is in danger while a camera transmits to the control center what the robot "sees."
Robots that can drive into collapsed houses were equipped with gas sensors — explosions from damaged gas pipes can pose a serious risk.
Cursor project
Both Berns' robots and the newer ones in the CURSOR project are prototypes developed by researchers and tested in individual presentations. None of these machines can help locate buried victims in the Turkish-Syrian earthquake zone. Production for use in real disasters is still a long way off. Many questions remain: Who is going to pay for the production of the expensive machines, who foots the bill for the transport to earthquake zones? No one in research has the funds, Berns told DW, adding that is where industry comes in.
Robot or rescue dog?One clear advantage of the rescue dogs is that they are not just prototypes but can be used here and now. Rescue dogs are on site searching for survivors under the rubble in Turkey and Syria. Dogs can smell sweat, hormones, blood, excrement or even people's breath. When they have sniffed out someone lying under the rubble, they bark and paw at the spot.
Unlike rescue robots, they need neither electricity nor the internet but only water and food. And the robots are not yet sophisticated enough to beat the nose of a good sniffer dog, says Berns — at this point, the German shepherd is still better. Robots do have some advantages though, he concedes. They can transmit images and can be steered to a precise location.
While working on the ICARUS project, Berns and his team thought about using technology to automate the decision process which buildings to send rescuers to. But specialists with real-life experience soon talked them out of the idea, warning that any such decision was already hard enough for a human expert. "There are people under the rubble who are happy that someone is coming, and the experts know that they can't save them," Berns says.
If the danger of collapse is too big, the rescue team might have to decide to leave trapped people behind so as not to endanger the rescuers' lives. You can't leave that decision to a robot.
This article was originally written in German.
The 7.8-magnitude earthquakethat struck near the Turkey-Syria border Monday and its aftershocks have caused immense damage across the area, killing more than 11,000 people and wiping out many multi-story buildings.
Other earthquakes of similar magnitudes have seen much lower death counts — fatalities in the 2014 and 2015 earthquakes in Chile with respective magnitudes of 8.2 and 8.3 for example did not exceed 15.
So what are the reasons for such massive destruction this time around?
Old buildings not designed for earthquakesVideos from cities near the epicenter have captured a devastating form of collapse some call "pancaking” — this happens when an entire building falls, each story collapsing one on top of the other. The chance of survival for someone in a pancaked building is slim.
Multi-story buildings that experience this sort of destruction are likely old and have a "soft story" design, said Mehdi Kashani, Associate Professor of Structural and Earthquake Engineering at the University of Southampton, United Kingdom.
A soft story building has floors with windows, wide doors and other openings in places where an actual solid wall would be better for withstanding an earthquake. When one of these stories is located on the bottom floor of the building, the entire structure can come down with it.
Although some buildings in earthquake-prone areas along the Turkey-Syria border are now built to withstand the Earth's tremors, many were constructed before seismic design was conceived.
"The basic principles started being developed in the 1960s and 70s, so it's not that old,” said Kashani. "The Kobe earthquake (in Japan) in 1995 was a big, big, big pivot point in changing a lot of things that went wrong in that earthquake and resulted in more research. So essentially late 1990s, early 2000s, is when many of these (seismic) codes began to change."
Seismic codes are regulations governing how to build in areas close to fault lines. Buildings not constructed in lines with seismic design were especially vulnerable in Monday's earthquake.
Kashani said older buildings can be retrofitted to better withstand earthquakes — this has happened in Japan and Chile, where quakes are frequent. However, he said, this requires money and political will and therefore doesn't happen everywhere it should.
The earthquake was shallowBut the damage isn't only due to building design. The power of earthquake itself was unforgiving. According to Kashani, the quake was shallow. This means the shock of the plate tectonics colliding happened closer to the surface, making the on-ground impact much stronger than if the shock had occurred deeper in the ground and had taken a longer time to reach the surface.
It's kind of like a wave in the ocean, Kashani said. Particularly massive waves will immediately knock a nearby surfer off his board. But once those waves have traveled through the ocean far enough, they'll have little impact on even the rookiest surfers.
Whether an earthquake is shallow or deep helps explain why some earthquakes with relatively low magnitudes in comparison with others experience more destruction.
Kashani mentioned the Bam earthquake that occurred in Iran in 2003. Despite having a magnitude of 6.3, which, in other circumstances, has resulted in few if any casualties, the shallow quake killed more than 25,000 people.
Structure matters more than materialsMaterials aren't the most crucial part of ensuring a building's capacity to withstand an earthquake, Kashani said. Structure is more important. For example, he said, with the right design, concrete can provide a great foundation to earthquake-proof a building. But if improperly structured, a concrete building can crumble like those captured in the videos coming out of Turkey and Syria.
Currently seismic design allows for buildings to withstand very strong quakes without crumbling or falling down, which spares people nearby. But they still experience some damage, which Kashani said will likely improve in coming years.
In the following months, researchers will travel to the area of the earthquake in Turkey and Syria to study the buildings. They will try to understand which features allowed those that didn't collapse to stay upright.
Edited by: Carla Bleiker
Turkey and Syria can't catch a break. Since Monday's devastating quake, aftershocks have ripped through the region. Altogether some 5,000 people have been announced dead so far. The number is expected to rise because countless people are still trapped below the rubble — and because continued aftershocks will cause already-unstable buildings to collapse.
What is an aftershock?Large earthquakes are almost always followed by small earthquakes called aftershocks. They are generally strongest in the 48 hours following the main quake and can last weeks and even years in some cases.
Typically, the magnitude of aftershocks starts around one degree less than the initial event — so, for example, if the quake has a magnitude of 7, seismologists might expect an aftershock of 6.
"That's the average occurrence but it sometimes happens that it isn't like that at all," seismologist Roger Musson, an honorary research associate with the British Geological Survey, told DW. "Sometimes you get an aftershock that's actually larger than the main shock. So as a seismologist, you always have to be prepared to be surprised by what the Earth throws at you."
In the Turkey-Syria border region, the aftershocks have been almost as strong as the initial quake.
An earthquake is considered an aftershock and not an individual quake when it occurs between 1 and 2 fault lines away from a preceding earthquake. Generally, aftershocks are the result of the Earth's tectonic plates trying to shift back into place along a fault line.
More than 100 aftershock earthquakes have occurred since the initial earthquake in Turkey and Syria.
According to Musson, aftershocks may not occur if the initial earthquake is very small. But in the case of larger earthquakes, they are a given.
Why was this aftershock so much bigger than normal?The 7.5-magnitude aftershock that occurred after Monday's 7.8-magnitude earthquake is significantly stronger than typical aftershocks.
Musson, who also does research at the University of Edinburgh in the UK, said that is because rather than occurring along a single fault, the initial earthquake can be better described as having occurred in the East Anatolian fault zone. This is like a large fault line with several minor fault lines congregating around it, he said.
The main quake on Monday triggered what Musson called a "swarm" of earthquakes happening along new faults coming out of the main fault rather than the typical aftershock movement, which takes place along the same fault as the initial earthquake.
When do aftershocks occur? And for how long?This depends on the size of the initial earthquake. Although the more intense aftershocks will probably stop around two days after the initial quake, according to Musson, it is possible for the aftershocks to gradually decay, but not completely cease until a year after the main quake.
Other research suggests that in some areas, like the New Madrid fault in the US state of Missouri, small aftershocks can continue for centuries after the initial shock.
How high is the risk of more big aftershocks in Turkey and Syria?We will have a better idea of the answer to this in a day or two. The activation of the fault where the 7.5 aftershock occurred could in turn produce aftershocks of its own, which means we are not in the clear yet. Even when they are smaller in magnitude, aftershocks can still be devastating. A small tremor may be enough to lead an already half-demolished building to collapse, causing major destruction.
"An aftershock will often do a disproportionate amount of damage relative to its size, just because the buildings are in a weakened state," said Musson. "This is one reason why, after major earthquakes, civil defense authorities will go around and mark buildings which are in a damaged state and therefore unsafe, warning people not to get back into them."
Edited by: Julia Vergin
- Death toll rises to 1,651 in Turkey, and about 970 in Syria
- Rescue workers continue to search for victims in rubble
- Turkish President Erdogan declares a week's national mourning
- World powers rush to offer Turkey, Syria aid over quake
- Turkey requests help from NATO allies
- A 7.8 magnitude quake struck near Gaziantep early Monday, followed by a new 7.5 tremor after midday
This article was last updated at 18:23 UTC/GMT.
Erdogan declares 7-day period of national mourningTurkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said that the country will observe seven days of national mourning in response to the fatal earthquake.
"A national mourning period has been declared for seven days. Our flag will be hoisted at half-mast until sunset on Sunday, February 12, 2023, in all our national and foreign representative offices," Erdogan said on Twitter.
Turkish and Syrian authorities revise casualty figuresTurkey's Health Ministry says the death toll from the quakes has risen to 1,651 and the number known to be injured is at 11,119.
In Syria, authorities had reported 539 deaths in government-controlled areas.
The White Helmets organization in rebel-held Syria said at least 430 people had died.
Search and rescue operations continue after the two major tremors and multiple aftershocks across a broad region in southern Turkey and northern Syria. All the responsible authorities have warned they are likely to find more victims.
Idlib residents hope for international aidOn Idlib's streets, residents spoke to DW about the horrors they witnessed. One described how he spent hours searching for his friend's family under debris.
"We kept on searching for them until 6 in the morning. We found his wife and two of his children dead. And this is what people are going through."
Many called for international support, saying that though immense, the White Helmets' effort was not enough.
"I hope that humanitarian organizations can just help us remove the debris. Just equipment and medical help, nothing more," one said.
Another resident described the moments of the quake, saying: "Horrifying moments that we experienced at 4 in the morning. We have never witnessed such an earthquake. Many buildings collapsed. My family and I survived and the neighbors did too, but five people died here. The civil defense [the White Helmets] is putting in all its effort. This seems to me like it was the Day of Judgment."
UN appeals for international supportThe UN General Assembly observed a minute's silence in tribute to the victims on Monday.
It also appealed to other countries to provide assistance to a region already scarred by conflict with only limited access for humanitarian aid.
"Our teams are on the ground assessing the needs and providing assistance," Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said. "We count on the international community to help the thousands of families hit by this disaster, many of whom were already in dire need of humanitarian aid in areas where access is a challenge."
DW rounds up the international responses and pledges of support so far in this story.
DW correspondent: Access and cold weather both concernsDorian Jones, DW's correspondent in Istanbul, said that a "major humanitarian crisis" was unfolding in Turkey.
"The country is reeling from this massive earthquake and this second earthquake that struck the region a few hours ago," Jones said.
He said that thousands of people were feared trapped across a large area spanning 10 major cities. Rescue work was treacherous for first responders, he said, also because of the risk of aftershocks.
"This is extremely dangerous work, because they can't use any heavy lifting equipment most of the time. It’s then simply digging their way into these piles of rubble, trying to find people buried, possibly, deep inside these collapsed buildings that were once people's homes," Jones said.
Jones said that "roads have been destroyed, and one airport at least has been put out of action", making it difficult to get aid to the worst-hit areas.
"This is a large area. We're talking about 10 major cities in Turkey that have been affected by this earthquake. And on top of that, you’ve got these ferocious, atrocious weather conditions. Winter really only hit this region only a few days before the earthquakes struck: you’ve got heavy snow in some parts, in other places freezing rain, which is adding to fears of hypothermia," Jones said.
People scared to go home in Syria: expertsAhmed Bayram, a communications and media adviser on the Middle East at the Norwegian Refugee Council, said people in the Syrian city of Aleppo are "refusing to go back home because they think the roof is going to fall on top of them."
Poor infrastructure and structural damage linked to Syria's long-running civil war is likely to exacerbate damages caused and risks in the area.
Bayram said he learnt about the information after speaking with a friend on the ground in Aleppo. Bayram added that people were looking for their relatives and children, and that the weather was cold in Aleppo and other places across Syria.
Johan Mooij, the director of World Vision Syria Response, told DW:
"It's the middle of the winter, and in that sense, the earthquake could not have come at a worse time. It's been raining for a couple of weeks now. We've had snow recently. It is very cold. And many of the Syrian people live in tents or temporary shelters."
Ghanaian football star Christian Atsu reportedly among the missing in TurkeyEnglish Premier League club Newcastle United said they were "praying for some positive news" over the fate of its former player Christian Atsu.
The Ghana international winger plays for Turkish side Hatayspor and is reportedly among those trapped under the rubble in Kahramanmaras.
He spent several years with Newcastle and Chelsea before signing with Hatayspor last summer.
The club's sporting director Taner Savut, was also reportedly missing
Domestic football matches in Turkey have been called off following Monday's quake.
Turkey deploys nearly 10,000 to help with rescue operationsTurkey's disaster agency, AFAD, said nearly 9,698 search and rescue personnel had been deployed to help search for survivors.
AFAD said the death toll from the 7.8-magnitude quake that struck the country's southern region early on Monday had risen to 1,498 people, with at least another 7,634 people injured.
It said a least 2,834 buildings were destroyed in the quake.
On top of other emergency supplies, the agency was also handing out thousands of tents, blankets, and beds to help the survivors cope with the frigid weather.
Syria's Aleppo 'not trained' for rescue operations, eyewitness saysSyria's government-controlled Aleppo, which was badly hit by the devastating Monday earthquake, is not equipped to deal with the aftermath, with most helpers working without proper training, an anonymous eyewitness told DW.
The female 30-year-old resident of Aleppo, who did not wish to give her name for security reasons, said most of those helping with the rescue operations were ordinary civilians.
"Most of them are not trained for this. They help with their bare hands because there is hardly any recovery equipment. This is dangerous, they could be buried under the rubble themselves at any time."
The woman said the city was in urgent need of blood donation, amid a continuous rise in the number of those injured.
"I'm in total shock, I feel all the time that the earth keeps shaking underneath me, but it can also just be that it's my body that's shaking."
Though urged to evacuate their homes, the woman said the people of Aleppo had not heeded the calls.
"Because they don't know where to go, and they don't have money to stay in hotels further away from here."
UK sending 76 search-and-rescue specialistsA rescue team from the United Kingdom consisting of 76 search and rescue specialists, four search dogs and rescue equipment will arrive in Turkey this evening.
"We stand ready to provide further support as needed," Foreign Secretary James Cleverly said.
The foreign ministry added that the UK-aid-funded White Helmets were mounting a "significant search and rescue response" in northwest Syria and have "mobilized all their resources to respond to emerging needs."
Idlib lacks technical equipment to rescue earthquake survivors, local journalist tells DWSyria's opposition-held Idlib province lacks the technical equipment to rescue survivors of the earthquake, a local journalist has told DW.
Omar Albam spoke from Sarmada, a small town some 30 kilometers north of Idlib city and on the border with Turkey. He said the town has been hit hard, nearly leveled to the ground by the quake.
"The earth shook twice. The aftershock felt much longer," Albam said, describing the first moments after the quake in Idlib. "People in Idlib streamed out of their homes, they were in panic."
He said the collapsed buildings were already in bad shape due to the country's civil war, ongoing for some 12 years, and particularly "the Russian airstrikes."
"But newer buildings also collapsed, all over Idlib province," the journalist said.
He said that entire families remained buried under the rubble.
The voluntary Civil Defense Forces were unable to pull people from under the rubble. Also known as the White Helmets, the group has been known for years for their ability to rescue people from under rubble as a result of airstrikes bringing down buildings.
Albam said the earthquake also struck connection networks, with some areas completely cut off from communication.
"There are currently no reliable estimates of how many people have died as a result of the earthquake. There is chaos and it is still unclear at this time."
The White Helmets had said that the earthquake killed at least 380 people in the opposition-held northwest Syria.
Quake death toll in Turkey and Syria risesThe death toll has continued to rise rapidly following a strong earthquake that rocked southern Turkey and northern Syria in the early hours of Monday morning.
The death toll has climbed to 1,121 in Turkey, emergency services said.
Earlier, Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said over 5,300 people had been injured. Erdogan said that the priority at this stage was the ongoing search and rescue operation.
In Syria, the health ministry said about 430 people had been killed and more than 1,000 injured.
The White Helmets rescue group meanwhile said at least 380 were killed and more than a 100 injured in rebel-held areas.
The US Geological Survey (USGS) said a 7.8 magnitude earthquake struck near the city of Gaziantep, a key industrial hub near the border with Syria. Tremors could also be felt as far as Lebanon, Cyprus, and Egypt.
The USGS meanwhile has reported a second earthquake measuring 7.5 in magnitude in southeast Turkey at 13:24 local time (10:24 UTC).
Rescue efforts underwayRescue workers have been deployed in Turkey and Syria to pull survivors from the rubble. Residents have also been helping search for survivors.
Heavy snowfall was hampering rescue efforts in some parts with roads covered in ice and snow.
"I convey my best wishes to all our citizens who were affected by the earthquake," Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Twitter.
"We hope that we will get through this disaster together as soon as possible and with the least damage."
While Turkey's Disaster and Emergency Management Presidency (AFAD) was coordinating search and rescue operations, international agencies were also deploying resources to help.
EU sending search and rescue teamsThe EU's Crisis Commissioner Janez Lenarcic confirmed that rescue teams were traveling to Turkey to help local agencies.
"Ten Urban Search and Rescue teams have been quickly mobilized from Bulgaria, Croatia, Czechia, France, Greece, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania to support the first responders on the ground," EU commissioners Josep Borrell and Lenarcic said in a statement.
Turkey's military has established an air corridor to enable search and rescue teams to reach disaster zones as quickly as possible.
"We mobilized our planes to send medical teams, search and rescue teams and their vehicles to the earthquake zone," a statement citing Defense Minister Hulusi Akar said.
The World Health Organization said one of the primary concerns was trauma care of those caught up in the quake.
"National authorities will be focusing on search and rescue at the moment," a WHO spokesperson told Reuters news agency in a statement. "Then we will expect an increased need for trauma care to treat the injured and to support the entire health system in affected areas."
Buildings destroyed in Turkey, SyriaAccording to early reports a large number of buildings have been destroyed in provinces in southern Turkey.
Turkey's president said that more than 2,800 buildings had collapsed in a situation update.
Syria's state media also reported that some buildings had collapsed in Aleppo and the central city of Hama. Tremors were also felt in Damascus.
The head of Syria's National Earthquake Center, Raed Ahmed, told local media that this was "historically, the biggest earthquake recorded in the history of the center."
The White Helmets rescue organization said buildings also collapsed in the rebel-held areas of northwestern Syria, adding that the situation was "disastrous."
The region is one of the world's most active earthquake zones.
Thousands of people were killed and many more displaced when a 7.6 magnitude earthquake struck the western city of Izmit in 1999.
In 2011, more than 500 people were killed by a 7.1 magnitude earthquake in the eastern city of Van.
Turkey makes formal request for helpTurkey's government has declared a "level 4 alarm" that calls for international assistance.
Emergency medical teams along with equipment and search and rescue units have been listed in a request published by NATO.
Also listed are "extreme weather-proof fully equipped field hospitals."
NATO's response to the earthquakes is being coordinated by the disaster response coordination center.
EU in 'full solidarity' with Turkey — Von der Leyen"We stand in full solidarity with the people of Türkiye and Syria after the deadly earthquake that hit this morning," European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen wrote on Twitter.
French President Emmanuel Macron said his country also stood ready to provide emergency aid to Turkey and Syria and said that "thoughts are with the bereaved families."
Greece has been among the countries offering assistance to Ankara. "Greece will help immediately," said Greek head of government, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, despite tensions between his country and Turkey.
Germany ready to helpGerman Chancellor Olaf Scholz expressed his dismay at the news of the earthquake and said: "We mourn with the victims and fear for those buried. Germany will of course send help."
Germany's Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said: "My thoughts are with the relatives of the victims of this terrible earthquake," and went on to say "Together with our partners, we will quickly get help on the way."
US ready to provide 'all needed assistance'White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said he had been in communication with Turkish officials to offer assistance.
Sullivan said he had been in communication with Turkish officials to relay that Washington stood ready to help. "We will continue to closely monitor the situation in coordination with [Turkey],'' Sullivan said.
US President Joe Biden wrote on Twitter that he was "deeply saddened by the loss of life and devastation caused by the earthquake in [Turkey] and Syria" and that he had asked his team to provide Turkey "any and all needed assistance."
NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg expressed "full solidarity with our ally Türkiye" and said that he was in touch with President Erdogan. Stoltenberg said that allies were mobilizing support.
Ukraine, Israel and India pledge supportUkrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy sent a message of support and also offered assistance.
"I am shocked to learn of deaths and injuries of hundreds of people as a result of the earthquake in Turkey," Zelenskyy wrote in a tweet. "At this time, we stand by the friendly Turkish people and are ready to provide the necessary assistance,'' Zelenskyy said.
Israel's Defense Minister Yoav Gallant also said his country was prepared to provide any assistance if needed.
India said it would send rescue and medical teams to Turkey, with the decision being confirmed by the country's foreign ministry.
msh, lo,kb,zc/rt (AFP, Reuters, AP)
More than 2,500 people died and many more were injured in the massive earthquakes that struck Turkey and Syria on Monday. The number of victims is expected to rise. Emergency workers are working around-the-clock to rescue people from the rubble, but they have to contend with adverse weather conditions. Temperatures in the affected areas frequently dip below freezing, and some affected areas have seen heavy snowfall.
The epicenter of the 7.4-magnitude quake was located in the province of Kahramanmaras near the Syrian border, according to Turkey's Afad disaster management agency. Another 6.6-magnitude earthquake was measured shortly after in Gaziantep province, Afad said.
Dynamic puzzleEarthquakes are not uncommon in Turkey and other regions of the world. But why? It's important to know that the Earth's crust is a kind of puzzle ― albeit a dynamic one that consists of many individual pieces: A few gigantic oceanic plates and several small continental crustal plates. The science is not conclusive on exactly how many.
Scientists know that these plates move a couple centimeters (approximately 1 inch) each year. They can move away from each other, toward each other or sometimes up against each other, causing the continent above them to move. These movements are called plate tectonics.
'The question is not if an earthquake will occur, but when'In October 2020, an earthquake shook the Aegean Sea. The epicenter was located off the province of Izmir near the surface of the sea. More than 100 people died and over 1,000 others were injured.
Turkey has long been of particular interest to earthquake researchers. The German Research Center for Geosciences (GFZ) in Potsdam installed measuring equipment in Turkey and has been conducting seismic monitoring in the country since the 1980s. GFZ records show that the earthquake risk is very high throughout the region around the Sea of Marmara, for example, where Istanbul lies.
"The question is not whether an earthquake will come. The question is when it will come," Marco Bohnhoff, a seismologist at GFZ and an expert on the region, said in 2019.
Bohnhoff and other experts base this estimate on the occurrence of several strong earthquakes throughout Istanbul's history, the ongoing continental drift beneath the Sea of Marmara and an the existence of an area of the earthquake zone located just outside Istanbul that has long been suspiciously quiet.
Bohnhoff said that there was a lot of evidence suggesting that the plates in this area were "snagged," causing tension to build up. Eventually, he suggested, the rock would not be able to withstand the tension anymore and the plates pushing against each other would move in a jolt of several meters in a matter of seconds.
Stable building structure and subsoil crucial for earthquake safetyThe real danger to buildings, infrastructure and the local population is posed by the earthquake-waves in which the ground moves. How much damage they do depends on how strong the earthquake is.
A good way to keep people safe is earthquake-resistant construction. Unfortunately, this is very expensive, Bohnhoff said, adding that builders have to ask themselves whether to retrofit old buildings or tear them down and start from scratch.
During the quakes in the Turkish-Syrian border region on Monday morning, more than 1,700 buildings are said to have collapsed in Turkey alone.
"Photos shows that some of the collapsed buildings may have been built prior to modern seismic design code so they might not be appropriately designed and detailed for such a large magnitude earthquake," said Mohammad Kashani, associate professor of structural and earthquake engineering at the University of Southampton in the UK.
"The combination of large magnitude and shallow depth made this earthquake extremely destructive. We need to investigate the collapsed structures in detail and learn from this devastating event to design our structures and cities to be resilient to such events."
But it is not just a building's bones that play a significant role in whether it can withstand an earthquake ― the ground on which it is built matters, too. As a general rule, the firmer the better, Bohnhoff said: "It is best if the subsoil is granite. Dry-laid sediments such as sand or clay are less preferable."
On soft bedrock, he said, ground motion amplification is more likely to occur, sometimes along with what is called liquefaction. The seismologist compared this process to what happens with wet sand on a beach. If you repeatedly tap the same spot in the sand, water collects in the pit.
"Then the subsurface becomes unstable," he said.
Editor's note: An earlier version of this article appeared in German on November 2, 2020.
Drug policy remains a hotly debated topic among experts and politicians. What should a state's policy toward soft and drugs be and how can it reach certain goals? While many countries rely on prohibition and punitive measures, others have begun taking a more liberal approach.
Canada legalized the sale and consumption of cannabis in 2018, with the aim of decreasing demand on the black market and decreasing drug-related crime.
Now, the country's western province of British Columbia has launched an ambitious pilot project that will run for at least three years: Since January 31, people found in possession of up to 2.5 grams of hard drugs will no longer be committing an offense. Adults carrying a combined total of fewer than 2.5 grams of cocaine (in powder or "crack" form), methamphetamine, MDMA, heroin, morphine, fentanyl will not be arrested or prosecuted. Nor will the substances be confiscated.
Carolyn Bennett, Canada's mental health and addictions minister, said she had "thoroughly reviewed and carefully considered both the public health and public safety impacts of this request."
"Eliminating criminal penalties for those carrying small amounts of illicit drugs for personal use will reduce stigma and harm and provide another tool for British Columbia to end the overdose crisis," she said.
The government hopes decriminalization will reduce the number of drug-related deaths. The idea is that the move will lessen the stigma attached to drug use, and encourage people to seek the help they need.
No easy solution in sight for opioid epidemicThe United States also has a big problem with drug addiction and drug-related deaths. Jonathan Caulkins, a professor and drug policy expert at Carnegie Melon University in Pittsburgh, said that the "root causes are twofold."
"The first was very liberal, prescribing prescription opioids, which led distressingly large numbers of people to develop opioid use disorder. In the United States to the order of 5 million people, and in Canada proportionately roughly the same."
The addictive nature of legal opioids was concealed and downplayed by pharmaceutical companies for years. Many patients who used them eventually transitioned to illegal drugs such as heroin or even fentanyl, which is even more potent. Since then, the number of people who have died from overdoses in Canada has probably increased significantly.
But what's the best approach to this epidemic? Caulkins said it's striking that though the US and Canada have applied different policies, the outcomes are devastatingly similar. "The horrible truth, though, is that even if we do everything right, it doesn't make the problem go away," he said.
That's why the Canadian government has stated for years that it's "committed to a comprehensive public health approach to the overdose crisis that is focused on reducing harms, saving lives and getting people the supports they desire and need." This includes access to drug tests and the opportunity for those struggling with addiction to use substances while being monitored by a medical professional.
Other countries, including Portugal, have also experimented with decriminalizing small amounts of drugs. So far, Oregon is the only US state to do so. But according to Caulkin, the results of these measures have been modest at best.
Canada has also experimented with other approaches. In adherence with the country's "safer supply" policy, the government provides drug users with medication to discourage them from relying on the black market. That prevents them from consuming dangerous substances or taking doses that are too high.
'War on drugs' has failedThe fact remains that the "war on drugs," which involves prohibition and draconian punishments, has been a spectacular failure. The Global Commission on Drug Policy, an independent commission comprised of politicians, businesspeople and human rights experts, issued a report on the matter in 2011. It stated: "Policymakers believed that harsh law enforcement action against those involved in drug production, distribution and use would lead to an ever-diminishing market in controlled drugs such as heroin, cocaine and cannabis, and the eventual achievement of a 'drug free world.' In practice, the global scale of illegal drug markets — largely controlled by organized crime — has grown dramatically over this period."
But many also have reservations about complete legalization. The opioid crisis was largely triggered by widespread and easy access to substance. And alcohol and nicotine, which in many countries are the only legal drugs, are also responsible for addiction issues that are at least partially related to the fact that they're readily available.
What remains, experts believe, is something of a compromise between complete legalization and complete prohibition — the decriminalization of certain amounts of particular drugs, as part of a safer supply strategy for instance, can at least help to limit damage.
Most observers agree on one thing: There's never been a world without drugs, and in all likelihood there won't be one in the future either. Canada's efforts will probably have little impact on how illegal drugs are produced and traded.
Caulkins doubts drug use will be reduced, considering that it is actually being made easier. However, he's optimistic that progressive measures will help to lessen drug-related damage to society and public health.
This article was translated from German.
A patient lies unconscious in the intensive care unit of the University Hospital in Bochum. Her facial features are hard to identify because of all her injuries. Her body is connected to various pipes and sensors, and the patient is fighting for her life.
But this sight does not affect the composure of the Ukrainian anesthesiologists Tetiana Buryak and Dmytro Sadyraka. They are calm as they stand next to the hospital bed, listening to their German colleagues and asking questions.
Buryak is from the city of Dnipro, while Sadyryka is from the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv. They are both specialized in treating patients with severe burns, including soldiers and civilians who have been injured during the ongoing war in Ukraine.
They are the third pair of Ukrainian doctors to have come to Bochum to take advantage of a hospital program that was established after German Health Minister Karl Lauterbach visited Ukraine last year and pledged to do more to help the wounded. The goal is to share German expertise with doctors who have to treat severely injured patients in Ukraine. By the end of 2022, 30 Ukrainian doctors had taken part in the program; another 10 arrived in January of this year.
Bochum is not the only city where Ukrainians can do internships and receive further training: Clinics in Ludwigshafen, Duisburg, Halle, Hamburg, Murnau and Tübingen are also taking part in the program.
Hands-on training for Ukrainian doctorsUkrainian doctors aren't permitted to treat German patients on their own, explains Marcus Lehnhardt, the director of the University Clinic for Plastic Surgery and Hand Surgery, the Intensive Care Unit for Severe Burns and the Sarcoma Unit in Bochum. He is responsible for the Ukrainian doctors doing internships in Bochum.
"The Ukrainian doctors accompany us in the morning on bedside visits, they're with us during operations, and are also trained in areas that they specifically requested to be trained in. For example, when we administer anesthesia, they're present for the entire operation. They can ask questions and assist with the procedure," says Lehnhardt.
"Ukraine is a fully developed country; that's why the know-how of the doctors interning here is already very extensive," he says. "But there are still things that can be learned through observation. There are specific things we do a bit differently and perhaps even a bit better."
In just two weeks, Buryak has been able to acquire a lot of practical knowledge, such as about how German doctors communicate with each other, how patients are washed and shaved, how medication is administered and which bandages to put on wounds.
She says that her hospital in Dnipro received a lot of foreign aid, medicine and other materials. "But sometimes we looked at that stuff and did not know what it was. When I got here, I took pictures, sent them to my nurses and explained what purpose the items served. Little things like that improve treatment overall," says Burjak, who's also the director of a physiology and intensive care unit at a hospital in Dnipro.
Successful treatment after trainingBuryak says her surgeon colleagues, who were trained in Germany before she was, are already putting their new knowledge into practice.
She also says that her hospital has already been able to compare results. For example, three out of five miners who came in with burns were treated with German methods and recovered more quickly than the two who were treated with previous methods.
She also mentions another innovation that's now being used in her clinic in Ukraine: the team timeout.
"Before we start an operation, we have what we call a team timeout," explains Marcus Lehnhardt. "That's when we take a minute to stop, look around and ask some very important questions. Is this the right patient? Is the indication correct? Is the side correct? Do we have all the necessary instruments? Have we remembered everything? The team timeout is a last check before we start operating."
After talking with Ukrainian health-care workers, Lehnhardt came to the following conclusion: Ukrainian medical professionals do not lack knowledge or ability, but material supplies such as bandages.
Ukrainian doctors face major challengesThe Burn Center at Kyiv's City Clinical Hospital No. 2 has already sent many doctors to Germany for internships.
They all agree about the differences between German and Ukrainian hospitals. In their opinion, German hospitals are better equipped, have more supplies, and — perhaps most importantly — they're better staffed. The Ukrainian doctors say that the war has increased the burden on health-care workers in their country significantly.
To make matters worse, they say, the number of doctors hasn't increased but in fact has actually decreased because many doctors are either on the front or have left the country.
"Treatment has gotten more difficult because the cases have gotten more difficult," says Andriy Shernov, who also did an internship at a German hospital last November. "There are more soldiers and fewer children because many of them are outside of the country. Things have also become more difficult because water and electricity has been turned off."
Dmytro Sadyraka, one of the anesthesiologists who arrived in Bochum in January, says that wounds from land mines are especially challenging. Aside from visible burns, there are also injuries that are not immediately obvious — for example, when organs have internal damage.
Another challenge is the risk of infection on the front. "There's dirt and earth. Someone might possibly be dragged on the ground, which would prevent an injury from healing right away. They might lie on the battlefield for a while. Some go from one hospital to the next and get infected, or ambulances aren't adequately disinfected," says Sadyraka.
'As many colleagues as possible should come to Germany'Marcus Lehnhardt from the BG University Hospital Bergmannsheil Bochum is pleased that doctors from Ukraine are receiving further training at his hospital.
"Of course it's always great to have an exchange with colleagues — to know what you're going there and what we're doing here. It's also a good feeling to be able to teach something to a person from a war zone. That's a positive aspect. We all feel a certain helplessness, like we can't do much. If people here can help them to learn, it contributes to the feeling that there is actually support available, and that's great," says Lehnhardt.
When asked what they plan to do after their training, Tetiana Buryak and Dmytro Sadyraka say they intend to rest, sleep and live a peaceful life for a while. Buryak says that because of the war and the intense burden on health-care workers, further training is no longer possible in Ukraine.
She recommends that as many of her colleagues, including nurses, come to Germany as possible. Now, she also knows what devices and supplies her colleagues in Ukraine need so that they can better treat the wounded.
This article was translated from German.
Imagine you have sex with a man, who, after impregnating you, goes out into the night, climbing, jumping, galloping and bounding through the streets in search of other sex partners. Each day, he travels up to 35 kilometers.
When you meet him a few weeks later, you notice he's not doing very well. He has lost some hair and is thinner than when you first met him. He tells you he's only been sleeping one hour per night.
You are concerned, but he keeps at it. After leaving your apartment, he takes off on another 35km jaunt across the city, seeking new sex partners.
The cycle continues until one day, about a month later, you find out he is dead.
Sex drives male quolls to deathThis is the story of how endangered male quolls — a sharp-toothed, rat-like marsupial native to Australia — reproduce. They are the largest mammal known to die within a single mating season, a reproductive process called semelparity.
Pacific salmon are also known to be semelparous, as well as some species of butterflies and octopus.
But their female counterparts don't experience this early death nearly as often. On average, female quolls survive around four mating seasons.
Researchers looking to understand this difference in lifespan set out to track the daily activity of the male and female sexes to see if the males were engaging in riskier behavior than the females.
They fitted 13 northern quolls on the Australian island of Groote Eylandt with tiny backpacks containing a little speedometer-type device that tracked the animals' movements. In order to trap the quolls, the researchers baited them with dog food.
Their results were published in the journal Royal Society Open Science.
The researchers found that over the course of a day, some of the male quolls were traveling very far distances and resting much less than the females. Some of the male quolls traveled 10km in a day — the human equivalent is around 35km, author Christofer Clemente told DW in an email.
And they only rested an average of 7% of the day. That's about one hour.
The females, on the other hand, rested around 24% of the day — five hours — which Clemente said was normal.
This lack of sleep could be making the quolls more vulnerable to predator attacks, the researchers wrote, or could simply be causing death due to exhaustion.
What's the rush?When quoll mating season starts, all females become receptive at the same time, and only for a very short period — around three weeks. During this period, the male quolls invest virtually all their time in breeding, said Clemente, in order to increase their reproductive output.
The study forms part of a larger investigation into animal movement and behavior.
Scientists hope to understand how movement is linked to habitat and animals' ability to escape predators.
"The quolls are of conservation significance, so if we can understand their movement, we might be better able to conserve this species," said Clemente.
Edited by: Zulfikar Abbany
An HIV diagnosis doesn't carry the death sentence it once brought. Over the past 30 years, enormous improvements have been made in medicine's ability to treat the virus. For most people across the world, these drugs are available for free.
Now, people treated for HIV can live normal, productive and healthy lives — those who take medication can have sex without worrying about infecting their partner. That's why doctors who treat the virus told DW the recent news about Johnson and Johnson's failed vaccine trial was disappointing, but not the end of the world.
The US pharmaceutical firm stopped phase 3 trials on a highly sought HIV vaccine in January after results that the jab was ineffective at preventing infection.
Still, despite these improvements, HIV cases aren't falling as quickly as desired and are still increasing in some parts of the world. A UN report released last summer reported that more than 1.5 million people became infected with HIV in 2021, around three times the global target.
Of the 38 million people infected with the virus, around 73% were under treatment, and around 15% still didn't know they had it, the report said. Pandemic-related funding cuts to global HIV and AIDS prevention programs offer one reason for the 2021 stagnation, the report said. But that doesn't tell the whole story.
Why are numbers continuing to rise in some areas?The first step in preventing the spread of HIV is knowing whether you have it.
But sometimes people avoid testing out of fear of judgment, experts say. The homophobic, moralistic public health campaigns that emerged in the 1980s in response to the AIDS crisis are still deeply ingrained in people's perceptions of the virus across the globe.
"People don't want to get tested and don't want to go to the treatment center if they are going to be stigmatized and then afterwards, discriminated against,” said Josip Begovac, a physician who specializes in treating HIV in Croatia.
Begovac said this is why "integrated" clinics specializing in testing for all kinds of sexually transmitted diseases that are less stigmatized — like syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia — are generally more successful at reaching those at risk for HIV.
Treatment is available for free in Croatia for anyone who seeks it and has insurance. But it is not available to people who do not have insurance, like undocumented migrants, Begovac said. And there is only one HIV treatment center in Croatia, so some have to travel long distances — up to four or five hours — to access care.
Access to treatment, but lost home and workLike Begovac, Herbary Cheung, a social science professor in Hong Kong who has studied HIV stigma among single mothers in Thailand, said HIV care requires long travel for people living in rural remote areas. In some Thai provinces, it can take up to a day to get to a facility that treats the condition.
Once a woman arrives at a center that treats HIV, medication is cheap and available. But treatment is just one part of the struggle. If that woman comes from a tight-knit rural area, news of her positive status can spread fast among family and community members. Some of the women Cheung spoke with, who worked in restaurants or massage parlors, were forced to leave their jobs after their bosses heard about their HIV status.
Religion also impacts how HIV is perceived in Thailand — in the Buddhist tradition, the virus is often seen as bad karma, a sign of bad actions in a past life.
This stigmatization caused some of Cheung's interview partners to uproot their lives in their small villages to larger metropolitan areas after receiving their HIV diagnosis. There, he said, the women were more anonymous and had better access to care and emoployment.
Despite the fact that HIV rates are similar in men and women in Thailand, Cheung said, it is often stereotypically considered a "woman's disease". That's because the first reported case of the virus, in 1984, was spread from a Western man who had sex with a Thai female sex worker.
Children's HIV status reflects on the familyCyrus Mugo is a researcher studying HIV stigma in young people in Kenya, where the virus is endemic. He said in his country, HIV status can impact access to education.
Kenya has had access to life-saving HIV drugs since around 2016, he said. But even if people have those drugs, the HIV label often causes families to abstain from sending their HIV-positive kids to the country's popular boarding schools, where school authorities are certain to find out about their positive status.
"Parents will say, ‘I do not want my child to go to boarding school because they'll be asked about the HIV status',” said Mugo. "It's not just about the child. When you talk about a child's HIV status, you're actually talking about the HIV status of the family, because there's a chance that they got it from the mom.”
In 2020, children accounted for 35% of new HIV infections in Kenya, according to UNICEF.
Lackluster PrEP uptake also result of stigmaMugo said he also thinks stigma plays a big role in Kenya's struggles with uptake of PrEP, a preventative medication for at-risk groups that, if taken correctly, can reduce a person's chances of getting the virus through sex by up to 99%.
"Uptake is not as good as we'd want it to be,” he said. "We were hoping we could reach as many high-risk people as we could, but we've not been able to reach those high levels… People are wary about taking pills for prevention. You know, taking medicine to prevent yourself from getting sick is not the same as taking medicine because you're sick.”
He said this wariness, plus concern about what others might think, deters people from using the medication.
"You're taking PrEP and so someone might misconstrue it to mean that you're HIV infected,” he said. "Or you're taking PrEP and so you must have loose morals — that's the other thing that's associated with PrEP and even use of condoms… They think that your sexual activity is all over the place and that's why you need it.”
Mugo said there are lots of factors that play a role in people's disinterest in PrEP, but that it ultimately comes down to fear of judgment from others.
"Stigma, I think, is the heartbeat of it,” he said.
How HIV is treatedThe treatment for HIV is a combination of drugs taken daily called antiretroviral therapy (ART). ART was first introduced in many developed countries in the mid-1990s, but only became available in developing countries around 2003, when international funding lowered distribution costs.The treatment has been very successful at lowering HIV mortality rates — HIV patients on treatment currently have the same mortality rates as those who don't have HIV. However researchers say a daily pill is inconvenient, and a longer acting treatment would be easier for people to take. These are in the pipeline and available in some Western countries, but not everywhere.
Another preventative treatment is the aforementioned PrEP, a daily oral medication that is highly effective if taken correctly. But only some of the world's countries have access to the drugs, and those that do might have trouble with uptake for some of the reasons Mugo explained in Kenya.
Edited by: Carla Bleiker
On the morning of February 1, 2003, US President George W. Bush went live on television to address to the American public. It was the second time during his still young presidency that Bush had had to break bad news to the nation. What Bush had to say said would shake America and, indeed, the entire world.
"My fellow Americans, this day has brought terrible news and great sadness to our country," he said, "the Columbia is lost. There are no survivors."
A few hours earlier, just before 8:50 a.m. eastern time in the US, a sensor on the shuttle had reported a strain on the spacecraft's left wing. The wing was higher than it should have been. But that warning was not displayed to the crew.
And within minutes, Columbia's return to Earth turned to disaster, leaving the crew of seven to perish.
A vehicle of explorationColumbia was the American space agency NASA's first active space shuttle.
The shuttle or orbiter, as it was also known, was a white, plane-shaped spacecraft that became symbolic of NASA's space program, and more generally, space exploration in the late 1970s and 80s.
From 1981 to 2003, Columbia flew 28 times, including that fateful, final mission.
Columbia STS-107 was a routine mission to conduct scientific experiments in space. It launched from Kennedy Space Center in Florida, USA, on January 16, 2003.
But right from the start, things had gone wrong. A piece of foam — used to insulate the shuttle's super-cold fuel — had broken off from a booster rocket during the launch from Earth. And that bit of foam had hit the wing of the orbiter.
Failure of damage assessmentBy the second day of the mission, NASA had discovered what had happened. But a decision was made to continue with the mission without fixing the damage or evacuating the astronauts.
The crew was notified about the debris strike via an email from mission control, but was assured that the "same phenomenon [had been seen] on several other flights" and that there was "absolutely no concern" about its affecting their re-entry into Earth's atmosphere.
But when the Columbia shuttle began its descent back to Earth after roughly two weeks in space, the decision to do nothing proved to be wrong — and fatal.
Fate of the astronautsAfter the accident, a team of investigators known as the Columbia Accident Investigation Board (CAIB) looked into what had happened.
The CAIB concluded that when the foam broke off during launch, it "breached" or damaged an outer thermal protection system. That damage had then allowed "superheated air" to melt the orbiter's aluminum structure.
Ultimately, that had caused the orbiter to breakup during its re-entry and descent to Earth. The investigators found debris scattered on the ground.
The astronauts onboard the Columbia shuttle probably experienced a rapid depressurization due to the breakup about a minute and thirty seconds after the final words of the crew were transmitted to mission control. Then, they lost the connection.
It is unclear whether that depressurization was their cause of death. They were likely also exposed to severe physical trauma when the spaceship started spinning rapidly.
Then as the spaceship disintegrated, their now unprotected bodies would have been exposed to extreme heat due to atmospheric friction.
And, finally, there was the impact on the ground. But it could also be seen, as it happened above people's heads in the sky.
Spaceflight is still difficult and dangerousThe story and investigation into the 2003 Columbia space shuttle accident illustrates how dangerous and difficult spaceflight was — and is to this day.
At the time, the CAIB described spaceflight as being in a "developmental" phase — and that was 30 years after the Apollo moon missions. Those missions were a huge success for space exploration overall, but they were also marked by technical difficulties and tragedy.
A 2022 research papernoted that the highest fatality rate in spaceflight was in the 1960s. The lowest was in the 1990s and that "since 2003, no astronaut fatality has been reported."
The study authors calculated a total fatality rate (deaths per spaceflight) of 5.8% up to the paper's publication in 2022.
"With greater international cooperation and maintaining of the International Space Station (ISS), the number of manned spaceflights and days spent in space has constantly increased," wrote the researchers, adding that there had been "constantly lower rates of incidents and accidents."
Spaceflight is no less difficult today than it was 20 years ago, or in the 1960s, but space agencies have introduced safety reforms and regulations as our knowledge and experience of space improves.
Was NASA to blame for the Columbia shuttle accident?As the Investigation Board concluded, there were — what they called — "organizational causes" for the disaster.
That suggests that NASA, as an organization, bore some responsibility for what happened. But no individuals at NASA or elsewhere were ever charged with any form of culpability.
An option left untakenIt is likely that the lives of the Columbia's crew could have been saved.
While the Investigation Board judged that it was unlikely that the damage to the orbiter could have been repaired in space, the CAIB said it would have been "challenging but feasible" to launch the Atlantis, another space shuttle, to save the astronauts on the Columbia shuttle.
They said that by working around-the-clock shifts, seven days a week, the Atlantis could have been prepared for launch by February 10 — five days before food and other resources on the Columbia would have run out.
But the plan was not put into action.
Edited by: Zulfikar Abbany
International mining company Rio Tinto and emergency services in Western Australia may never find a tiny, radioactive capsule, which they have confirmed went missing en route from an iron ore site in the Pilbara region to Perth earlier in January.
The capsule is about the size of the eraser at the end of a pencil, and could be anywhere along a 1,400 kilometer (870-mile) stretch of highway.
Some have said it may even have become lodged in the tire of a passing car and may now be many more kilometers away.
The capsule is silver and measures 6 millimeters by 8 millimeters (0.31 inches by 0.24 inches) in size.
If you see something that could this object, do not go near it and do not touch it. Inform the authorities.
Why is the capsule radioactive? The capsule contains cesium-137, which is a radioactive material that emits gamma rays, a very dangerous type of radiation — ionizing radiation — that can penetrate deep into the body.
Gamma rays are the most energetic and dangerous type of ionizing radiation. They can strip electrons from the atoms in your body, damaging your cells and your DNA.
The capsule has a radioactive load of 19 gigabecquerels, a unit of radiation. And 19 gigabecquerels is roughly equal to 10 medical X-rays per hour.
This type of capsule is commonly used in the mining industry as part of gauges to measure the density of iron ores. The radiation from the gauge (the capsule) is absorbed by the material (iron ore) proportional to the material's density.
Mining companies need that data to measure what they are extracting from the ground.
How did it get lost? The radioactive capsule seems to have fallen off a truck that was transporting it from Rio Tinto's Gudai-Darri mine, north of Newman, in the Pilbara region to Perth.
But it was only found to be missing after an inspection on January 25, and the last time it was seen was on January 12.
The authorities have said the truck's vibrations as it drove along the road may have caused screws and bolts to come undone, and that the radioactive capsule from the gauge tumbled out of its package and slipped through a gap in the truck.
How dangerous to health is the capsule?Authorities have said the risk to the general public is "relatively low." And, they say, the capsule "can't be weaponized."
But if you happen to see something like it along that road, don't touch it. Take immediate distance, and don't go within 5 meters (16.5 feet) of it. Call the local emergency authorities, the Department of Fire and Emergency Services.
Even though the silver capsule is very small, it poses serious health risks because it contains gamma radiation. Health risks depends on the proximity and duration of the exposure.
Exposure to this capsule can cause radiation burns or radiation sickness.
Radiation burns can show as skin redness or irritation — like sunburn — and can cause blisters, or worse symptoms in more severe cases.
Radiation sickness or acute radiation syndrome can happen if you are exposed to high levels of ionizing radiation, such as gamma rays.
Symptoms include nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, fatigue, skin irritation and a decreased number of white blood cells, which may weaken your immune system. In more severe cases it can lead to organ failure and death.
Long-term exposure to gamma rays can increase the risk of certain types of cancers, such as thyroid cancer and leukemia.
How are they looking for the capsule?Emergency services have the GPS data of the truck, so they know exactly where to look for the capsule.
But finding an 8-mm capsule over a distance of 1,400 kilometers may be almost impossible. The Western Australia authorities are trying to find it by slowly driving with radiation detectors along the Great Northern Highway.
What happens if they never find it?There is no easy answer to that question.
However, cesium-137 has a half-life of around 30 years. That means that it takes 30 years for half of its radioactive value to have decayed.
Radioactive materials are generally considered safe(r) once they reach their half-life.
Edited by: Zulfikar Abbany
In mid-January, Brazil's President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva accused the country's former president, Jair Bolsonaro, of facilitating genocide against the Indigenous Yanomami people, who live deep in the Amazon rainforest along the border of Venezuela and Brazil.
The Yanomami people lived in almost complete isolation until the 1980s, when gold was found in their territory. Over the decades since this discovery, some 40,000 illegal miners have edged their way in, spreading illnesses like tuberculosis and malaria and polluting rivers with mercury in their search for gold.
On January 20, Brazil's Health Ministry declared a medical emergency in the territory. A reported 570 children have died of malnutrition and preventable diseases during the last four years of the Bolsonaro presidency, which Lula said actively ignored the illegal mining activities and ensuing humanitarian emergency.
There have been a number of studies since the 1990s that have raised awareness about the negative health effects that the illegal gold mining has had on the Yanomami population, which consists of about 30,000 people.
These studies show gold mining can be linked to tuberculosis, malaria, mercury poisoning and malnutrition.
TuberculosisFor hundreds of years, the isolation of the Yanomami spared its people of many of the plagues of the "civilized" world — including tuberculosis.
A 1997 study published by Brazilian researchers in the journal PNAS found that tuberculosis, which raged in Europe and the United States in the 18th century, only started spreading among the Yanomami after outsiders made contact with them in the middle of the 20th century.
The study said the first reported case of tuberculosis dated back to 1965, and a small number of cases were noted in the 1970s. But it was only in the 1980s, when gold was discovered and outsiders started flocking to the region, that the infection spread throughout the area and became an epidemic.
MalariaIn the decades since gold mining — and logging — began in the area, and especially in recent years, researchers have observed a "remarkable" increase in cases of malaria among the Yanomami.
In a study published in BioMed Central's Malaria Journal in late 2022, researchers outlined two reasons for the spike in cases.
First, they said it was difficult for health authorities to control the virus in border areas, and that was illustrated by cases imported from Venezuela.
Second, they cited mining in the area, including illegal mining, as being responsible for increasing vector activity. Human-caused alteration of the environment through open-pit mining and the digging of hollows and benches produce lush mosquito breeding places, they wrote.
Between 2016 and 2020, the number of miners in the area increased. At the same time, the number of malaria cases rose by 1,090% in Indigenous areas and a 75,576% in mining areas, the researchers wrote.
Mercury poisoningThe miners search for gold by mixing liquid mercury into excavated sediment of the Amazon's rivers.
The illegal expulsion of this mercury into the natural environment has polluted Yanomami areas traditionally used for hunting, fishing and gathering and has resulted in the deforestation of wide swaths of the nearby rainforest.
Research conducted by Paulo Basta, a medical doctor and scientist at Brazil's National School of Public Health of the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation, shows evidence that this practice has caused abnormally high levels of mercury in Yanomami populations closest to the mining areas.
Another study published by Basta and others in May 2019 revealed that the nutritional deficits of the Yanomami children they found "[were] the most severe ever reported among Indigenous children on the American continent."
"The prevalence of stunting, underweight and wasting that we report have no precedents in the specialized literature," the authors wrote.
Their results also indicated that these conditions were being passed down to generations of Yanomami people.
Research on the potential link between the mercury pollution and the stunting is still underway.
Malnutrition Historically, the Yanomami have sustained themselves from the land. They eat wild game — birds, pigs and fish — and fruits from self-planted gardens, such as bananas.
"The problem is that the gold miners have really destroyed the forest," said Christina Haverkamp in an interview conducted from the Amazon region via voice message.
Haverkamp is a German human rights activist who has been working with the Yanomami for over 30 years.
"[The miners] leave bald spots and flooding where the Yanomami can't build anything. In these areas, all the wild game have fled and the fish are poisoned by mercury. In Papiu [a Yanomami territory], we had to bring our own drinking water. You can't drink the river water because of mercury poisoning," she said.
In many parts of Yanomami territory, the miners have not only interrupted but destroyed the food chain, making it impossible for the Yanomami to sustain themselves from the land, said Haverkamp.
She said when the gold miners arrived some 30 years ago, it was like a true invasion. Over the following years, the numbers of miners began to drop, but then started picking up again during the Bolsonaro presidency.
"For the gold miners, [Yanomami territory] is like a free area where they can kind of do whatever they want because they're all armed," she said. "The Yanomami don't have any chance to fight the gold miners — if they try, they will be killed. That's also the reason why some groups of the Yanomami have started cooperating with the miners and working with them — because they haven't had any help from the outside to defend themselves."
In exchange for their labor, these Yanomami often receive ultra-processed foods from the miners as compensation, Haverkamp said.
Lack of health careA report by the nonprofit organization Socio-Environmental Institute notes that many of the troubles afflicting the Yanomami are preventable and could be treated by medication and access to health care. But in their report, called "Yanomami Under Attack", they say clandestine mining trails have blocked many of the airfields that have traditionally facilitated the delivery of health care and medication through plane and helicopter.
"Last year, I was in Papiu to help renovate a health station we built 19 years ago," said Haverkamp. "The gold miners came into the station to get treatment, overwhelmingly for malaria. That was naturally very difficult for me, to see that the gold miners were being handled [in a station made for the Yanomami] but the nurse said that, by law, we must help everyone."
DW's Brazil Correspondent Nadia Pontes also reported that in December, miners and loggers burned down a health post in Yanomami territory, putting the lives of 700 Indigenous people at risk. The medical team working at the post had abandoned the site days before, after rumors that miners were going to attack the unit.
Edited by: Zulfikar Abbany
If asteroid watchers have got their calculations right — and we're confident they have — we can all relax. The American space agency NASA made it plain a day before Asteroid 2023 BU was due to fly by Earth: "There is no risk of the asteroid impacting Earth. But even if it did, this small asteroid […] would turn into a fireball and largely disintegrate harmlessly in the atmosphere."
They call it "small," but the asteroid is estimated to be 3.5 to 8.5 meters (11.5 to 28 feet) across. If any of it survives its interaction with the Earth's atmosphere, NASA said "some of the bigger debris [could] potentially [fall] as small meteorites."
What time is the asteroid passing Earth?Predictions were that asteroid 2023 BU would fly over the southern tip of South America at about 4:27 p.m. PST on Thursday, January 26 (7:27 p.m. EST or 1:27 a.m. CET on Friday, January 27).
How close will the asteroid come to Earth — and what damage could it do?At time of writing, it was estimated that the asteroid would get as close as 3,600 kilometers (2,200 miles) to our planet's surface. That is "well within" the orbit of geosynchronous satellites, said NASA.
Geosynchronous satellites orbit at about 37,000 km from Earth. So asteroid 2023 BU will fly by these spacecraft as it gets closer to our planet. It is vital that the asteroid does not hit a satellite: Some GEO are used for TV communications, others are weather satellites.
As the asteroid flies by Earth, it will veer into what is known as medium-Earth orbit, but the predictions were that it wouldn't get into the low-Earth Orbit zone, which is between 160 and about 2,000 km above Earth's surface. And that's some relief, because that is where most of our communications and Earth observation satellites live these days.
Asteroid 2023 BU is a new discoverySpace science has grown increasingly concerned about planetary defense. That's an area of research, technology and innovation aimed at defending our planet against threats such as this very asteroid.
If a seriously big asteroid were to hit Earth (again… remember the dinosaurs), it would wipe out a city or two, potentially cause devastating tsunamis and/or a massive dust cloud that could smother the planet, inhibit sun rays and block our access to light and life itself. At least that's what some scientists say led to the extinction of the dinosaurs. The sun light got blocked, vegetation failed to grow and the dinosaurs starved to death.
But planetary defense technology, such as NASA's DART mission, aims to track asteroids and, if they ever become a direct threat to life on Earth, to nudge them into a different orbit.
The problem is that scientists have yet to detect every asteroid out there.
An amateur astronomer spotted 2023 BUWe have only known about asteroid 2023 BU since Saturday, January 21 — we've had five days warning. Any future DART-like mission would need more time that that to save us from damnation. It takes time to prepare and launch a rocket with a precisely calculated and programmed probe onboard, eject that probe and successfully impact the asteroid. All that would have to happen far enough away from Earth, because you don't want to create space debris that hits the International Space Station, as has happened in the past.
But credit goes to amateur astronomer Gennadiy Borisov, who discovered the asteroid 2023 BU from an observatory in Nauchnyi, Crimea.
And, luckily, there is a process in place for what to do when an asteroid like this is discovered, and it appears to have worked well.
"Within three days, a number of observatories around the world had made dozens of observations, helping astronomers better refine 2023 BU's orbit," said NASA, and the asteroid's approach was announced by the Minor Planet Center — internationally recognized "clearinghouse" for monitoring the movements of small celestial bodies.
Edited by: Carla Bleiker
People tend to associate mercury with its silvery liquid form — as found in old thermometers. But it was also used in electrical switches or relays that were built into machines until the mid-20th century. Later, it was florescent lamps and some early energy saving lamps.
The liquid form of mercury is especially dangerous because it vaporizes at room temperature. And when it vaporizes, it fills the air with tiny, invisible mercury atoms that are both scentless and soluble in oils or fats.
If mercury vapor is inhaled, it is easily absorbed by the body, where it first gets into the lungs and from there into the blood and the brain. It's a nerve poison that can cause sleep disorders, agitation and paralysis.
Exposure to mercury can cause a neurological disorder called erethism mercurialis, which can cause irritability and depression.
Mercury vapor is its most dangerous formEven a simple thing such as a broken thermometer can lead to mercury poisoning. It can be particularly dangerous in a children's playroom if liquid mercury seeps into cracks and corners and is left undisturbed to vaporize.
Fortunately, many thermometers, even household ones, are digital now. In the European Union, mercury "measuring instruments" such as thermometers have long been banned. In other regions, such as the United States and Asia, some mercury thermometers are still used in industry, but they are being phased out.
It can take weeks for the symptoms from mercury poisoning to clear up.
Risk from mercury for fertilityIn addition to liquid mercury, mercury salts and compounds are also dangerous, especially when they get into water systems through industrial waste.
Mercury poisoning via heavily contaminated seafood and fish can harm a person's fertility as well as threaten their nervous system.
The World Health Organization says people are mainly exposed to methylmercury when they eat fish and shellfish that contain the compound.
Methylmercury is very different to ethylmercury. Ethylmercury is used as a preservative in some vaccines and does not pose a health risk.
Deadly: Historical use of mercuryWhile mercury is considered highly poisonous today, doctors in the late 19th century gave patients significant amounts of the element to treat intestinal obstructions.
As a vapor, the mercury is inhaled as individual atoms and quickly absorbed by the lungs where its poisonous effects begin to develop.
If, however, you drink mercury, hardly any of it stays in the system and is less of a health risk than if you inhaled it.
But you really shouldn't drink mercury — under any circumstances — most of the patients in the 19th century didn't survive.
When Doris Wessels logged into ChatGPT for the first time, it was a "magical moment," she told DW. That's coming from a professor of business informatics who has researched artificial intelligence (AI) and its effects on education for years.
It was only a few days after ChatGPT, an AI-powered chatbot, had been released to the public on November 30, 2022, by a company called OpenAI.
Anyone can interact with ChatGPT via an internet browser. You type in questions or commands and ChatGPT responds (to almost anything). Within five days of its release, 1 million people had signed up to use it.
The claim is that ChatGPT can explain, program and argue with humanlike efficiency.
Wessels, who is based at Kiel University of Applied Sciences, is amazed by the technology. "It's like entering another world," she said.
Mike Sharples, an emeritus professor at the Open University in the United Kingdom, has seen a few such "major breakthroughs" during his 40–year career in artificial intelligence — including a precursor to ChatGPT called GPT-3.
Sharples warns that "GPT democratizes plagiarism." Some students have been open about using the technology to help them write essays in perfect academic language. It's like free ghostwriting for everyone, but there are examples that show ChatGPT's responses can be factually incorrect.
Is ChatGPT a threat to university education?ChatGPT can be used to write research papers. Sharples had the AI generate a scientific article that he said "could pass a first academic review."
This worries Wessels, who said universities were in danger of being left behind. On the one hand, there's the software industry, which is developing ever-more-powerful AI systems. And, on the other hand, there are the students, who are learning how to use AI in education faster than their teachers can keep up with the developments.
Students often learn about new AI technology rapidly in real time via social media and are keen to try new methods, while some academic staff and professors may be slower on the uptake, or set in their ways.
Wessels sees a "possible horror scenario" in which unsuspecting professors might think that they have done an excellent job of teaching if all their students submit error-free assignments — when, in fact, it's all down to ChatGPT or a similar system.
Too little data to assess the threat from ChatGPTDebarka Sengupta, an AI expert based in New Delhi, has similar concerns.
"Everyone in India knows about ChatGPT," said Sengupta, who leads the Infosys Centre for Artificial Intelligence at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi.
Sengupta worries that academic standards could suffer if students start to depend on the technology. If they stop learning how to write essays themselves and use ChatGPT instead, Sengupta said, they could become "extremely incompetent and addicted."
But there is still far too little data to support such fears — ChatGPT has only been out for two months.
Sengupta said "plagiarism and cheating have always existed," and students' motivation to learn should not be underestimated.
Sharples added: "Students go to university to learn, not to cheat."
How AI chatbots can help studentsBernadette Mathew is one of Sengupta's students, and she is researching cancer growth for a PhD in biology.
Mathew's experiments generate large amounts of data that need to be analyzed, but that can't be done by hand. So she has been learning how to code to help her use computers to automate and speed up the process of analyzing the data — but learning to code left her struggling to keep up with her research.
Sengupta heard about Mathew's difficulties and introduced her to ChatGPT, and Mathew has found it to be a big help.
The chatbot explains what she doesn't understand about coding, it finds errors in her own coding, and sometimes Mathew lets it code for her.
Mathew said it works in "99%" of the time. The best part, she said, is that ChatGPT doesn't just do her work, but helps her to understand coding.
The AI makes her feel "empowered" to work independently, Mathew said.
"Chatting with ChatGPT is like chatting with a real person," Mathew added. "If I had known this earlier, I could have saved myself so much time and work."
Mathew said these chatbots would "revolutionize" the work of experimental biologists, allowing the researchers to focus on their research, rather than on having to learn how to code.
Wessels said ChatGPT could also help students in other areas. It can prompt them to write the difficult first words or first paragraph of an essay, for example, to get them past their "fear of the blank page."
Think of ChatGPT as the calculator in mathDaniel Lametti, a Canadian psycholinguist at Acadia University in Nova Scotia, said ChatGPT would do for academic texts what the calculator did for mathematics.
Calculators changed how mathematics were taught. Before calculators, often all that mattered was the end result: the solution. But, when calculators came, it became important to show how you had solved the problem — your method.
Some experts have suggested that a similar thing could happen with academic essays, where they are no longer only evaluated on what they say but also on how students edit and improve a text generated by an AI — their method.
Artificial intelligence is not all-intelligentChatGPT does not understand the essays it writes — it does not understand the meaning of the language. Like a parrot in a professor's office that listens to conversations and "parrots them," an AI chatbot merely processes and presents the language and facts that it has been fed. And that can lead to problems.
There are examples of ChatGPT texts in which the language reads as though it was written by an expert — but the text is factually incorrect.
So, as with other AI technologies, humans are still required to review and correct AI-generated texts. That editing is often complicated and requires real knowledge of a subject, and that could be graded at universities in the future.
The experts DW spoke with said the technology is not going away. Adapting to ChatGPT will be a challenge for teaching, they said, but it can also be an opportunity for universities to get better at educating and teaching.
And, Sengupta said, tech-savvy India will be particularly quick at making use of the opportunities that AI presents.
The article was originally written in German.
Renan Rodrigues had been working as a food delivery driver at Swiss company Smood for about a year and a half when "the robot" took over. This is how the 33-year-old describes the algorithm-powered program that allocated deliveries and shifts for him and his colleagues.
Smood had used such software since he started working there in 2020, Rodrigues told DW. But at a certain point, "the robot" became entirely responsible for planning his working day, according to him, and appealing to human managers was no longer possible.
The goal of "the robot" was to organize deliveries in the most efficient way possible. From his employer's perspective, Rodrigues is sure that it worked. When he started at Smood in the small Swiss town of Yverdon-Les-Bains, it was typical to do around two deliveries an hour, he said. By the time he left, it was more like four or five.
"I quickly understood that it would be a disaster on a human level," Rodrigues told DW. He saw "the robot" pitting employees against each other. The quickest, best-performing drivers got more deliveries, he claimed. Ultimately, he said, he found himself getting less work. His zero-hour contract didn't guarantee him a minimum number of working hours or a fixed monthly wage, and he found it difficult to anticipate his income.
"For me, the worst part was to tell me that I have a stopwatch running at all times, hours and places, when I'm already being tracked by GPS systems, for my speed, etc.," he said. It created what he called "social stress." Instead of greeting a restaurateur when picking up a meal, he would bark at them to hurry up, running in and out. "It's sad on a human level."
Reckoning with robotsWhat Rodrigues and his colleagues dubbed "the robot" is also known as algorithmic management, when workplace decisions are made according to computer-powered calculations known as algorithms. It is closely linked to artificial intelligence (AI), which according to the European Commission "refers to systems that display intelligent behavior by analyzing their environment and taking actions — with some degree of autonomy — to achieve specific goals."
The use of algorithmic management is particularly associated with the gig economy, companies like Uber and Deliveroo, whose workers are typically freelance or on zero-hour contracts.
In fact, AI tools are quickly making inroads into various sectors of the economy. For white-collar office jobs, they can be deployed in recruitment or to track performance. A 2022 survey of 1,000 companies by professional services consultancy PwC found that between a sixth and a quarter had used AI in recruitment or employee retention in the past 12 months. Among the companies that were most advanced in the use of AI, around 40% had used it to improve employee experience and skills acquisition, or to increase productivity.
Companies can use data about employees or candidates in a variety of ways, as a report published last year by OpenMind, a nonprofit initiative of Spanish bank BBVA, highlighted. "Human resources professionals make decisions about recruitment, that is, who to hire; in worker appraisals and promotion considerations; to identify when people are likely to leave their jobs; and to select future leaders. People analytics are also used to manage workers' performance."
Take the example of HireVue, a US company that, according to its website, has more than 800 clients, including major multinationals like Amazon, G4S and Unilever. Using video job interviews, the company claims it can massively speed up recruitment, offer candidates greater flexibility and actually make hiring fairer. Algorithms can be trained to eliminate unconscious race and gender biases common in human hirers, so the argument goes. Citing the example of a British customer, the Co-Operative Bank, HireVue said its tools helped push down a gender bias favoring men from a 70/30 ratio to 50/50 — gender parity.
However, a number of experts and journalists have in recent years flagged the risk of reproducing racist, ableist or sexist bias in AI-enabled recruitment. A US study last year found that AI-trained robots repeatedly discriminated against women and non-white people.
The US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has even issued guidance on the use of workplace AI, warning that "the use of these tools may disadvantage job applicants and employees with disabilities." What if you scored poorly on a test that required high keyboard dexterity, for example?
Legal changes in the pipelineIn the European Union, two key pieces of bloc-wide legislation are on the way that should affect the way AI is deployed at work. The European Commission has stressed that, in general, AI can be beneficial for citizens and businesses, but that it also poses a risk to fundamental rights.
Under the proposed AI act, employment, management of workers and access to self-employment are specifically mentioned as high-risk uses. For makers and buyers of such AI tools, the law should provide specific obligations before products hit the market, chiefly a conformity assessment.
This test would scrutinize, among other things, the quality of data sets used to train AI systems (poorly trained systems can produce biased results), transparency provisions for buyers and levels of human oversight. AI developers would also have monitoring obligations once a product hits the market.
From a workers' perspective, what the AI legislation doesn't do is specifically regulate how it can be used by your boss, according to Aida Ponce Del Castillo of the European Trade Union Institute. "It's a missed opportunity," the researcher told DW. The obligations fall on the sellers of technology. Certain technologies are banned outright under the AI act — like the "social scoring" system associated with the Chinese government — but this doesn't have huge implications for the workplace.
The second upcoming piece of relevant legislation is the Platform Work Directive, Ponce said. It has a dedicated chapter on algorithmic management, but as the name suggests, it only covers the estimated 28 million workers in the EU platform sector. The proposed law, according to the European Commission, "increases transparency in the use of algorithms by digital labor platforms, ensures human monitoring on their respect of working conditions and gives the right to contest automated decisions."
These draft laws — both still working their way through the EU legislative process — should give workers the tools to challenge potentially problematic use of AI by their bosses, Ponce said, cautioning that they won't outright prohibit them. Two things she believes should be banned are emotion-reading tech (one of the most contested forms of AI; many experts doubt that emotions are simple or universal enough to measure) and the suspension of accounts for gig workers like Uber drivers.
"I don't want to say that AI is bad. I've dedicated 20 years of my life to studying technologies," Ponce said. It's always about managing the risks for people, she said.
Former delivery driver Rodrigues' feelings about "the robot" are clear enough: he believes there ought to be much more regulation on what companies can and can't do. He was ultimately fired by Smood, he admitted. But Rodrigues he explained that he doesn't mind: he has landed a training contract for his dream job, and is now set to become a train driver.
Edited by: Ashutosh Pandey
China continues to pour massive resources into developing artificial intelligence that will have a greater reach into everyday life and functions of the state. Now, even Chinese courts are using AI to assist with making legal decisions.
A court in the city of Hangzhou located south of Shanghai started employing AI in 2019. The judge's assistant program called Xiao Zhi 3.0, or "Little Wisdom," first assisted in a trial of 10 people who had failed to repay bank loans.
Previously, it would have taken 10 separate trials to settle the issue, but with Xiao Zhi 3.0, all the cases were resolved in one hearing with one judge and a decision was available in just 30 minutes.
At first, Xiao Zhi 3.0 took over repetitive tasks such as announcing court procedures during hearings.
Now, the technology is used to record testimony with voice recognition, analyze case materials, and verify information from databases in real time.
Xiao Zhi 3.0 is mainly used in cases involving simple financial disputes. However, similar technology has been applied by a court in Suzhou to settle disputes over traffic accidents. AI examined evidence and wrote the verdicts, sparing the judge's time.
Xiao Baogong Intelligent Sentencing Prediction System, another legal AI platform, is also used by judges and prosecutors in criminal law.
The system is able to suggest penalties based on big data analysis of case information and prior judgments from similar cases.
"I can see the temptation for Chinese courts to adopt AI even in criminal cases. One of the challenges for Chinese criminal justice is to ensure the uniformity. They want to make sure that across different regions of China, the penalties are consistent with one another," Shitong Qiao, professor of law at Duke Law School in the US, told DW.
However, Zhiyu Li, an assistant professor in law and policy at Durham University, said there are ethical issues presented by using AI to assist with more complicated legal decisions in cases where a decision made based on AI calculations might be deemed more credible than a decision made by a human.
"While judges and prosecutors have the liberty to ignore or reject these suggestions for criminal punishments, we don't know if it may nonetheless sway their decision-making unconsciously due to cognitive biases," Li told DW.
Putting the law in the hands of tech companies?Around the world, AI-based solutions are mostly used to optimize legal databases and make them more accessible for both professionals and the public.
In Canada, the negotiation app Smartsettle ONE managed to resolve a three-month dispute over unpaid fees in less than an hour.
The parties had to move flags on a screen to indicate the possible space for compromise. Then the application used bidding tactics to nudge the stakeholders into settlement without revealing their secret bids.
However, only a few countries are currently ready to go further with using AI in legal matters.
France prohibited any development of AI-based predictive litigation in 2019. One of the reasons was to avoid the commercialization of judicial decision-making data, as courts do not have the capacity to develop AI by themselves.
The process would be outsourced to private technology companies. For example, Alibaba, a Chinese e-commerce corporation and one of the biggest tech companies in the world, participated in the development of AI for online transaction disputes.
"Motivations of these companies must be different from public institutions. The process needs to be made accountable. Making sure that the data itself is not biased and the algorithms are fair is a fundamental challenge not only for China but for the whole world," said legal expert Shitong.
The limits of automated lawIn China, people can use smartphones to file a complaint, track the progress of a case and communicate with judges.
AI-based automated machines found in so-called "one-stop" stations provide legal consultations, register cases, and generate legal documents 24 hours a day. They can even calculate legal costs.
However, there is debate over the reliability of information provided by these automated lawyers. The machines are said to consider material, emotional and time costs involved in cases and provide users with calculated information on predicting the outcome. The limitation is that automation can miss nuances and lead people to make the wrong decision.
"Based on our interview results, some disputants were quite skeptical about the reliability and usefulness of the machine-generated predictions because the predictions were based mainly on answers to multiple-choice questions instead of face-to-face, interactive communications," said legal expert Zhiyu.
Another issue is that the AI systems make assessments based on an incomplete public record, due to the uneven digitization of China's regions.
Some controversial cases have been removed from the government database China Judgements Online after public outrage over what was seen as inadequate punishments handed down to the alleged perpetrators. This has raised concerns about whether AI based on fragmented data can make unbiased decisions.
"I think it's both a special Chinese and a universal problem to make the best use of AI and at the same time to ensure accountability. Even judges do not understand the mechanism of AI decision-making because it is a black box. With AI, it will be so much more difficult for individual citizens to hold judges and government officials accountable," Qiao said.
Edited by: Wesley Rahn
Do you like chocolate? Silly question, right, so how about: Why do you like chocolate? Is it the sweet taste? The burst of joy you get from the first bite alone? Or is it perhaps the way it slowly melts on your tongue, how it dissolves and deliciously coats the inside of your mouth before you swallow it all down and reach for the next piece?
As you might be able to tell, I identify as a chocoholic. For me, chocolate is one of humanity's best inventions for all three of the above reasons. But scientists from the University of Leeds, UK, have focused on the latter for a study published this month in the journal ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces.
Lead researcher Siavash Soltanahmadi from the university's School of Food Science and Nutrition and his team determined that it's the mouth-feel of chocolate that triggers our delight. Their research results say: It's all about lubrication.
That melty, chocolatey deliciousness that fills your entire mouth when you're enjoying a treat arises from the way the chocolate is lubricated ― from the way certain ingredients mix with our saliva.
And the most relevant ingredient for that is fat.
Not exactly surprising, but still a little disheartening for the health-conscious among us. There is good news though: Soltanahmadi and his fellow researchers claim they have found a way to make chocolate healthier without changing its characteristic gooey goodness. Spoiler alert: It's all about the location of the fat inside the chocolate.
Fatty cocoa butter makes for good mouth feelBut first, let's take a step back. Chocolate is made up of several components. There are the solid solids, if you will (sugarand cocoa particles), and a solid that turns liquid: Cocoa butter, the aforementioned fat. Cocoa butter is solid at low temperatures, but once it enters our mouth and hits our tongue, it turns into an oily liquid.
"That's what gives you the smooth feeling on your tongue that we all like," Soltanahmadi told DW.
To figure out how exactly that appealing feeling in our mouth comes to be, the researchers divided the eating process into three stages: First, you lick the chocolate while you take a bite of it. Then the top layer of the chocolate melts in the mouth, bringing out the liquified cocoa butter. And finally, the chocolate components mix with our saliva, turning into an emulsion that we eventually swallow. Happily.
Excuse me while I test this theory.
Chocolate and the artificial tongueMmmh. Can confirm. Back to the science: To analyze chocolate's mouth feel over these three stages, Soltanahmadi and his research team employed an apparatus best described as an artificial tongue.
"It's a machine that holds a tongue-like surface," Soltanahmadi said. "We collected data from real human tongues and analyzed them to have an idea of the texture of our tongue. Then we came up with an average, put that into a model and 3D-printed some molds."
That's how the researchers ended up with models that look and act "like [a] tongue," Soltanahmadi said.
The scientists rubbed dark chocolate on the artificial tongue, then rubbed the tongue against another surface doubling as a palate to analyze what would happen with the chocolate and how the components would dissolve.
Human nature too fickle for chocolate testingBut why not simply use human testers? I would have happily flown to the UK to volunteer as a chocolate taster for this experiment, and I imagine it wouldn't have been too difficult to find a few others willing to eat chocolate in the name of science.
"One of our aims with this was actually to reduce the number of human panelists [or testers] needed, and the reason for that lies in the nature of humans," Soltanahmadi explained. "Me and you, we can try the same chocolate and we'd describe it in different ways. We're trying to reduce that and create more lab-based measurements."
In short, humans aren't suitable to produce reliable, comparable data when it comes to testing the mouth feel of chocolate. There goes my dream job.
Less fat, same melty mouth feel…All disappointment aside, test runs with the artificial tongue showed that the level of lubrication that makes for chocolate's pleasant mouth feel can be achieved with a fat content lower than that of most current chocolates.
"We're not aiming for zero-calorie chocolate," Soltanahmadi said. "I'm not sure that's achievable. But we aimed to reduce the cocoa butter, the fatty part. Because in our observation we saw that rather than the amount of the fat, the location of the cocoa butter is more important."
The fat should go mostly on the surface of the chocolate and around the solid cocoa particles. The body of the chocolate, the researchers have found, can have less fat than it currently has and more cocoa particles.
"This would be healthier and the chocolate would have fewer calories as well," Soltanahmadi said.
… but not quite as sweetLower-calorie chocolate! That's great news! One little downer for milk chocolate lovers like me: The resulting treat won't be quite as sweet. The amount of cocoa particles is what translates to the percentage that you see printed on chocolate packaging (i.e. 70% or 85%), and as we know, the higher the percentage, the darker and the more bitter the chocolate.
If you're a dark chocolate lover, good for you. The rest of us will have to remember the age-old saying: You can't have it all.
Edited by: Clare Roth
New Canadian government-backed guidance considers just two alcoholic drinks per week low-risk. That's a sharp reduction from the country’s previous guidance deeming around two drinks per day safe, depending on sex.
For years, health authorities in most Western governments have maintained that up to two drinks per day for men and one for women can be considered "moderate" and generally safe. In Germany and the US, 7 to 14 drinks per week (depending on sex) are considered low-risk, while in Britain around six per week are considered low-risk.
But research published in recent years calls that guideline into question, with a number of studies maintaining that even a drink or two per day can have negative health effects. Canada marks one of the first Western countries to adhere to the suggestions made in this newer research.
Moderate drinking and the brainBut what have scientists actually found?
A study published in Nature in March 2022 offers some of the most compelling evidence yet that what is generally considered "moderate drinking" can harm the brain.
After examining brain scans from more than 36,000 middle-aged and older people from the UK Biobank, researchers found that 50-year-olds who drank an average of one 175 milliliter (6 oz) glass of wine or half-liter (roughly 1 US pint) can of beer per day over the past year had brains that appeared 1.5 years older than counterparts who drank half that amount or not at all.
Aging increased with alcohol consumption, the researchers wrote.
The study is one of the largest addressing the health impact of moderate drinking on the brain to date. Researchers defined moderate drinking as up to 14 drinks per week, and light as more than one drink per week but less than seven.
But a lot of questions remain open.
Still few straightforward answersThough the results of the brain study seem straightforward at first glance, digging a little deeper reveals how much we still don't know.
Patricia Molina, who directs Louisiana State University's Alcohol and Drug Abuse Center of Excellence, said it remained unclear what the effects of two years of brain shrinkage — which caused the appearance of aging — were on cognition and behavior.
Several lines of evidence show a relationship between loss of brain volume and cognitive impairment, she said. But she is also unaware of any conclusive studies showing a direct relationship between specific percentages of decreased brain volume and clinical manifestations that are evident to people or their doctors.
Molina said the study's design also made it difficult to answer questions about how its results compare with the shrinkage caused by other activities and illnesses known to cause a decrease in brain matter, such as a lack of physical fitness or Huntington's disease.
"A meta-analysis would be the closest way of getting to the answer," Molina said. In other words, someone would have to look at the entire body of literature and analyze the results in a way that allows such comparisons to be made.
And another reason why such comparisons are hard to track, Molina said, is that different activities or illnesses cause different shrinkage in different places. Lounging around all day and eating only processed food, for example, might cause shrinkage in a different area of the brain than Huntington's disease.
Then there's the chicken-and-egg dilemma. Could it be that people inclined to drink alcohol regularly just have smaller brains in general than those who choose to abstain?
"That is a distinct possibility," Molina said. "The only way of answering that question is by collecting brain images from early life."
Researchers are looking to address this question through the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development study, Molina said. That study tracks changes in brain volumes over time while collecting data on alcohol and drug use.
But isn't red wine good for you?The evidence that binge drinking is harmful for the body and brain is conclusive. But again, when it comes to moderate drinking, things get a little trickier. A number of studies published over the past few decades, including one presented just a day before the brain study, appear to claim moderate drinking can actually be good for you.
Analyzing data also obtained through the UK Biobank from about 312,000 current drinkers, the researchers found that consuming the alcohol equivalent of about 5 ounces of wine with meals per day for women and 10 ounces for men was associated with a lower risk of developing type 2 diabetes.
Jeanette Tetrault, a professor of medicine at Yale who specializes in alcohol addiction, said it was important to read beyond the headlines with this type of research.
Ultimately, she said, the study has merely found that, if you drink alcohol with food, you are less likely to develop type 2 diabetes than if you drink alcohol without food. It's less about alcohol being good for you.
"If you don't read those nuances," she said, "your interpretations can lead to some significant issues."
Critics of such studies also say they often don't account for important socioeconomic factors, and that touting the benefits of red wine is inherently biased. That's because people with higher socioeconomic status, who are often already healthier to begin with, are more likely to report drinking a glass of red wine per day than those who aren't.
Tread with cautionA 2018 New York Times investigation found that researchers involved in a large-scale 10-year study looking to track the impact of moderate alcohol consumption on health were heavily lobbied by the alcohol industry.
The $100 million used to fund the National Institute of Health (NIH) study was largely solicited from major players in the alcohol industry, among them Anheuser-Busch InBev. Its lead author, a professor of medicine at Harvard, assured alcohol executives in emails and conference calls that the results would lean in their favor.
When NIH investigators caught wind of the questionable practices, the study was stopped. Although nothing ended up being published, the situation is a reminder to be wary of results that seem too good to be true.
No level of alcohol consumption improves healthA large 2018 study attempted to settle the moderate drinking debate: No level of alcohol consumption improves health, it said.
Using data from 195 countries over a 26-year period, the study offered the most comprehensive estimate of alcohol's global burden to date. But some scientists have pointed out flaws in the study's design — for instance, that instead of tracking their results in numbers, the authors tracked results using relative language. When they did offer hard numbers, the level of harm seemed negotiable at best.
Risk of developing an alcohol-related health problem was 0.5% higher among people who had one drink per day compared with those who didn't. In numerical terms, the study found that 914 in 100,000 people between the ages of 15 and 95 would develop a condition in one year if they did not drink. That number increased by a mere four people — to 918 people in 100,000 — if they did.
Given what we know today about alcohol consumption, Tetrault said she was not telling her patients to abstain altogether. She said she might use the brain study with patients who already have underlying conditions affecting their cognition or their brain function as a further means to counsel.
"But I wouldn't necessarily utilize this data to try to change behaviors in patients who are really having no health consequences [and] know what their potential risks are," she said. "I'm not telling all my patients they have to abstain."
The less the betterIf you're trying to get healthy, the occasional glass of red wine probably won't help. It probably won't hurt much, either. But Canada's new guidelines highlight a shift in how researchers in the scientific community are defining "moderate" when it comes to drinking.
Editor's note: This article was originally published on March 14, 2022. It was updated with the recommendation by Canada's health authorities on January 18, 2022.
Edited by: Derrick Williams and Carla Bleiker
Summer months: Spring-stepped and charged with energy, enjoying the sun, staying out socializing late into the evenings. Winter: Mornings all dopey and lethargic, lit only by the glow of electrical light. The bed and sofa beckon after dinner, offering comfy respite from the dark outdoors.
We're all a little bit sensitive to the seasons. Even if you're lucky enough not to suffer from season affective disorder, it's still likely your daily habits change.
But for those who do suffer from SAD, or lighter versions like January blues, those winter dips go deeper. People with SAD experience mood swings, a lack of excitement or joy, intense drowsiness and fatigue. The effects can be detrimental, not least on relationships with your partner, family members and friends.
Do you feel SAD?SAD has been recognized as a psychiatric disorder since 1984. It's characterized by depressive symptoms, manifesting behaviorally as social isolation, increased appetite, longer sleeping.
But it also feels dreadful - irritability, social timidity, and lack of motivation or concentration that can render one inert. Joy can feel like a vague memory.
While anyone can be affected by it, it's particularly common in people already suffering from disorders like depression or anxiety, or those who suffer from physical illnesses like headaches and rheumatism.
What causes SAD?Scientists don't really know what causes SAD. It's possibly an evolutionary hangover related to the innate mammalian behavior of bedding down for the winter, something akin to a psychological hibernation that's gone pathological.
In terms of what happens in the body, the so-called serotonin theory is a commonly cited cause of SAD. It's hypothesized that less serotonin is produced during the winter months from lack of exposure to sunlight.
Lower serotonin is often said to cause low moods and depression, but experts say this is an erroneous oversimplification that misses much of the complexity of how neurotransmitters and emotions interact.
Other studies suggest people with SAD overproduce melatonin – a hormone that maintains the normal sleep-wake cycle. Different researchers have shown that vitamin D deficiency might also be an issue for many who suffer from SAD.
But it's unclear exactly how generalizable these deficiencies are to all people with SAD, or how they cause such a wide array of symptoms in the body.
How to deal with SADStudiesshow light therapy can help many people with SAD. 30 to 60 minutes per day of exposure to specialized lamps with the full visibile light spectrum has been shown to instantly lift the mood in those with SAD. However, the results are temporary and don't tackle the root causes.
Talking therapies such as cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) or counselling can help get to the root of the causes of depression. And for more serious forms of the illness, medications like antidepressants are also sometimes recommended by clinicians, usually in combination with therapy.
Lifestyle changes work to relieve SADThere are also variety of lifestyle measures that can really help relieve the melancholy and the apathy, particularly for less extreme SAD or for those who simply have January blues.
Here's a list of things that could help:
- Relaxation, mindfulness and meditation techniques. They can help lower stress levels, a co-factor of SAD. Even a couple of minutes a day of dedicated meditation, helps mental wellbeing and build better self-awareness.
- Brave the outdoors, especially on the rare brighter days in winter. Tramping around in the drizzle can help, too, even if the greater pleasure is the reward of getting home afterwards.
- Keep the exercise up, even if it's just simple stretching exercises. It'll be good for your sleep cycle, too.
- Get socializing. It can be tempting to hermit away when you have SAD but keeping up social contact with friends and family help you to get out of your shell.
- Taking vitamin D supplements might be of some help, but they won't do much without lifestyle changes as well.
Edited by: Carla Bleiker
Since antibiotics were introduced to the world in the mid-20th century, deaths attributable to infections dropped from over 50% to 10-15%. Experts have been warning for decades that the threat of antibiotic resistance could take us back in time to when even simple infections were deadly.
But how serious is the issue really?
A study in 2019 found more than 1 million peoplea year died from infections linked to microbes that are resistant to antibiotics — more than those who died due to malaria or with HIV/AIDS.
Experts describe antibiotic resistance as one of the greatest challenges facing humanity. They predict that if the problem remains unsolved, 10 million people could die as a result by 2050.
"Antibiotic resistance will remain a problem for the foreseeable future," said Paul Blainey, a biological engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "Maintaining modern medicine and standards of health in the way we know them today will depend on the development of new antibiotic drugs."
What causes antibiotic resistance?Antibiotic resistance occurs when bacteria evolve to evade antibiotics. Overuse and misuse of antibiotics are the biggest drivers of resistance. That means that the more we use antibiotics, the worse the problem of antibiotic resistance becomes.
Antibiotics work by binding to a specific target protein on a bacteria, then entering to kill it from the inside. Penicillin, for example, weakens the bacterial cell wall, causing the cell to disintegrate.
The most common ways bacteria evade antibiotics come from mutations that allow them to stop drugs from binding to bacteria. It's like the bacteria changed the locks so the antibiotic key no longer opens the cell door.
"Bacteria can also achieve resistance by producing proteins that inactivate or modify the antibiotic, so it no longer binds to the bacteria. Or the target protein is mutated so the antibiotic can no longer bind to it," said Gerry Wright, a biochemist who specializes in antibiotic resistance.
But worst of all is when bacteria evolve many of these mechanisms in backup, so even if you overcome one, other resistances might fill the gap.
Solving the problem of antibiotic resistanceAntibiotic resistance will always be with us. It's the nature of evolution by natural selection that means bacteria will always find ways to evade antibiotics.
But experts are optimistic we can find ways to limit antibiotic resistance in the next decades, at least enough to stop the issue from spiraling into a bigger crisis.
"I'm hopeful we can overcome the concerns about antibiotic resistance. Scientists in the field are dedicated to solving these big problems and preserving our ability to control infectious diseases that is so important to our quality of life," said Wright.
Unfortunately, it isn't as simple as developing a drug that will permanently overcome antibiotic resistance. It's incredibly complex science, even more so than finding a vaccine for a virus such as COVID-19. For one, there's huge diversity among bacteria — not all drugs work on a given organism, and not all organisms are killed by a given drug.
Option 1: Modify existing antibioticsScientists have been working on the issue from many different angles. One approach is to modify old antibiotics so they overcome resistance.
"Penicillin and cephalosporin antibiotics have undergone many rounds of modifications by medicinal chemists to improve their drug-like properties and overcome resistance," said Wright.
But Wright explained that the ability to tinker with these structures is not infinite. It's more of a delaying tactic than fundamentally fixing the core issue of antibiotic resistance.
"At some point, there are diminishing returns in that new compounds either have poor drug-like properties or toxicities that make them unsuitable," he said.
Toxicity is the ability of a substance to have a poisonous effect and either cause harm or death.
Option 2: Develop new antibioticsAnother strategy is to make brand-new drugs, but this approach hasn't been very successful in recent decades.
"The reality is that the last genuinely new chemical structure that has resulted in a drug that is currently being used in humans was discovered in the mid-1980s," Wright said.
But there are some signs of progress. For one, scientists are now armed with much more sophisticated drug discovery technologies, not least artificial intelligence (AI).
"Examples of scientific innovations include computational machine learning approaches to screen drugs in silico, and methods to screen many different combinations of compounds for antibiotic effects," said Blainey.
"In silico" refers to experiments performed via computer simulation.
These new innovations are helping scientists overcome older challenges in drug discovery. The hope is that antibiotic-resistant drugs can be pushed through drug development pipelines quickly enough for them to make an impact in global health care.
But central to the issue is that antibiotic resistance develops quickly whereas antimicrobials — the basis of antibiotic drugs — are developed slowly. Scientists hear the clock ever ticking.
Global fight against antibiotic resistance lackingAs with the race for COVID-19 vaccines, overcoming antibiotic resistance will require tremendous international effort dedicated to the problem. But that's exactly what's missing.
"What makes the resistance challenge so acute in 2023 is that there is no longer a well-organized, well-funded, and functioning pipeline of new drug candidates, yet resistance continues to emerge," said Wright.
Reports indicate there were 43 antibiotics in clinical trials or pending approval in December 2020. For comparison, over 1,300 anticancer agents were at similar stages of development.
Blainey said that many of the issues here came from the commercialization of drug development.
"Sadly, some large companies have given up their antibiotics programs based around commercial considerations and several small companies developing new antibiotics have failed financially before their candidates reached the clinic. We really need more investment in all antibiotic discovery strategies," he told DW.
Buying time with antibiotic regulationIn the short term, some experts want more regulation of antibiotics so their use is limited to situations when they are strictly necessary. The hope is this will buy us some time to slow down antibiotic resistance while drug discovery catches up.
Antibiotics are not well regulated in many parts of the world. For example, antibiotics were "flying off the shelves" during the COVID-19 pandemic in India, where people can buy them over the counter in pharmacies.
Limiting the use of antibiotics in agriculture would also have a major impact, experts say.
The EU and US have banned the use of antibiotics for livestock growth, and in 2022, the EU brought in legislation to prohibit all forms of routine antibiotic use in farming.
Edited by: Zulfikar Abbany
Lots of women tell a similar story: There are times when their desire for sex is so extreme that they should put out a warning.
Achtung, baby! My libido's out of control!
But they can also be the best days in a relationship. And then it's all over, almost from one moment to the next. Sex? No, thanks!
That lust, that sexual drive that overpowered them just before, is all but gone. Only the finest seductive artistry has a chance — but sex won't even enter a woman's mind.
Science in the swings of sexual desireIn 1980, a study suggested that these swings in sexual desire were influenced by a person's hormone levels, which change during the menstrual cycle.
It wasn't only the direct influence of hormones — such as estrogen and progesterone — but also that these variations in hormone levels had an impact on a person's physical and psychological sense of well-being.
A menstrual cycle begins with the first day of one's period and ends on the day before the next period begins. The duration of a cycle varies from person to person, but anything from 21 to 35 days is possible.
Roughly halfway through the cycle, the woman ovulates.
As in every month, the uterus will have prepared itself for a pregnancy by developing a lining of blood and tissue. That's known as the uterine lining or endometrium.
If there is no pregnancy, the level of progesterone in the ovaries and estrogen in the blood drops so drastically that bleeding occurs. So, at the start of the first half of the cycle, a woman bleeds.
At this point, a woman's sexual desire is relatively low, within limits. That's because of the lower level of estrogen in the blood and the fact that periods can be painful or associated with discomfort.
That can change suddenly when the so-called follicular phase begins.
Estrogen raises libidoOnce the body has shed the uterine lining, the pituitary gland starts producing a follicle-stimulating hormone, and that results in new, maturing follicles.
These ovarian follicles are where eggs are located, and they also produce estrogen.
As the follicles mature, the level of estrogen rises — and, with it, a woman's sexual desire. But not only that: Many women feel more confident during this phase, sport feels easier, and they can concentrate better than in other phases.
Women who use contraceptives such as the pill are mostly spared the hormone roller-coaster ride. Such contraceptives prevent any large changes in hormone levels.
Both the level of estrogen and a woman's libido peak at ovulation. The high level of estrogen causes the release of luteinizing hormone, which in turn causes the ovulation.
The follicle releases the mature egg into the fallopian tubes, where it can be fertilized with sperm for about the next 24 hours. And the estrogen does what it can in those hours to seduce the woman into having sex.
Progesterone inhibits the libidoMeanwhile, the follicle that hosted the egg turns into what's known as the corpus luteum, or yellow body of the ovary.
This is the second phase of the menstrual cycle. It's known as the luteal phase.
During this phase, the yellow body of the ovary produces some estrogen but mainly progesterone — and progesterone ends the sex party!
The fun and games stop, and things get serious: The uterine lining continues to thicken to prepare for pregnancy. If the woman becomes pregnant, progesterone does what it can to make it stay that way.
But, if the woman doesn't get pregnant, the yellow body of the ovary and progesterone levels decline.
And progesterone clears the stage just in time for the next period and the production of new estrogen to begin. So some women report that their libido rises again before and even during menstruation — at least, that is, compared with the dry spell just before.
This article was originally written in German
The Indian government recently announced that it will begin a nationwide immunization drive in April for girls aged between 9 and 14 using a newly developed vaccine targeting human papilloma virus (HPV), the main cause of cervical cancer and a potential cause of other cancers.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), 4.1 million women in India have died from the disease since 2019 and without intervention as many as 5.7 million will die by 2070.
The WHO has specified that countries should reach and maintain an incidence rate of fewer than four new cases per 100,000 women a year by 2030. Preventative vaccination of girls is therefore essential to lowering the incidence rate.
"We have prepared a proper roadmap and a social mobilization strategy for the vaccine rollout. Our experience with the COVID vaccine program has helped us immensely," N.K. Arora, chairperson of the National Technical Advisory Group on Immunization, told DW.
The quadrivalent vaccine, called "Cervavac," developed by the Serum Institute of India (SII), offers protection against four strains of HPV.
At present, India is fully dependent on foreign manufacturers for the vaccines, which are expensive.
Following positive data from a large clinical trial, marketing authorization was granted by the Drugs Controller General of India in July 2022.
India seeks more affordable immunization against HPVHPV is a sexually transmitted viral infection, which affects the genitals, mouth and throat. Other than treating symptoms, there is no treatment for the virus itself, and prevention is key.
Although HPV vaccines have been available in India since 2008, attempts to establish a national vaccination program have stalled, mainly due to unfounded worries about side effects, as well as affordability, according to the medical journal, Lancet.
Production of Ceravac began at the end of 2022. It will be made available at a price of 200 to 400 Indian rupees ($2.45 to $4.90, €2.25 to €4.55) per dose.
SII is expected to produce around 200 million doses in about two years. Physical trials for the vaccine were held in ten health centers across India.
"First, it will be extended to citizens of India, and later the vaccine will go global. We have made it for all women around the world. It is very important for women's health and safety," Adar Poonawalla, CEO of SII, told DW.
The Serum Institute is the world's largest vaccine manufacturer by volume of doses it has produced and sold globally. It makes vaccines against diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, hepatitis B, measles, mumps and rubella, and ships out more than 1.5 billion vaccine doses annually at affordable prices.
It is estimated that about 65% of the children in the world receive at least one vaccine manufactured by SII. Its vaccines are used in around 170 countries for national immunization programs, saving millions of lives throughout the world.
Community prevention of cervical cancerPublic health experts point out that screening is the core pillar of cervical cancer control. Well-organized and accessible national screening programs are essential.
Given that fewer than 10% of women in India have been screened for cervical cancer in the past five years, much remains to be done.
"At primary and community health centers, staff nurses and medical officers should receive training for screening cervical cancer," Sarojini Nadimpally, public health researcher, told DW.
"It is important to look into health care infrastructure, including human resources at these centers. They are lacking in potential staffing that could be trained to carry out the screening," she said.
"For any vaccine, long-term monitoring is important. In the case of Cervavac, which is a two-dose program, it is important to understand the monitoring mechanism," she added.
The government has clarified that girls who do not attend schools will be given the vaccines by community outreach and mobile health teams.
A recent statewide health screening program revealed that for every 100 women examined, one was detected with undiagnosed cervical cancer in the western state of Maharashtra.
In 2020, the northern state of Uttar Pradesh recorded 10,046 cases, making it the state with the highest estimated incidence of cervical cancer.
The Indian vaccine is expected to be a game changer that would bring down the incidence of cervical cancer because of its much lower cost.
"Partnering the strategy though public-private partnerships can expand the coverage to around 50 million girls aged 9 to 14 years. Generating awareness regarding the disease and vaccine can increase the acceptability of the vaccine," Giridhara Babu, an epidemiologist at the Public Health Foundation of India, told DW.
"Coupled with this, we need measures such as increased cancer screening at a very early stage," Babu added.
India has a robust vaccine distribution infrastructure. An "electronic vaccine intelligence network" enhances management of vaccine supplies, logistics and temperature tracking at all levels of vaccine storage from the national to the district level.
"In remote and inaccessible places, intensive outreach vaccination campaigns can be integrated into national health missions," said Babu.
Edited by: Wesley Rahn
Coughing so hard it's difficult to breathe. Shivering with the chills or sweating with a fever. Worrying who you might have sneezed at over the past three days. There is no shortage of reasons for why people with COVID-19 might have trouble sleeping.
But according to several studies, sleep problems in patients with coronavirus infections can persist after the acute phase of the disease is over as well. Various research teams from around the world have looked into how people who had COVID or who suffer from long COVID sleep, and found that many reported so-called "sleep disturbances." The term refers to problems with drifting off to the land of dreams or with staying asleep through the night.
The most well-known of these issues is insomnia. Those who suffer from it take a long time falling asleep, rise multiple times during the night or wake up early in the mornings.
Sleep problems during and after coronavirus infectionStudies show sleep problems after COVID exist on a population level. A meta-analysis of 250 studies comprising more than 493,000 participants from 49 countries found that 52% of people with COVID-19 suffer from sleep disturbances during the infection.
Again, not surprising ― but still relevant information for a COVID patient lying awake at night, frustrated that sleep eludes her when she needs the rest most.
As anyone who has googled their COVID symptoms knows, "you are not alone" is sometimes a comfort, even though it doesn't help ease said symptoms.
It's not just those in the acute phase of the disease that suffer. In an observational study from 2022, US researchers fitted 710 study participants with wearable health devices that recorded their respiratory and heart rates, oxygen saturation and heart variability, among other factors.
Using these variables, they discovered that the 122 long-COVID patients not only got less sleep-time in a night compared to the 588 control group participants who had not had COVID, but that their sleep quality was lower too.
In another study, published in the journal e-Clinical Medicine, researchers sent out online questionnaires and surveyed 3762 participants from 56 countries who had suffered from long COVID between June and November 2020. Almost 80% of participants reported sleep disturbances, most frequently insomnia.
Whether physiological, psychological or environmental factors (or a combination of those) are responsible for the lack of sleep and worse sleep quality varies from patient to patient.
Why does the lack of sleep matter?A night with less sleep isn't just an unpleasant experience that makes concentrating or even functioning as a human being harder the next day. Our bodies also use the time we spend in dreamland to regenerate ― and to strengthen our immune system's ability to fight infections.
Sleep facilitates redistribution of T-cells to lymph nodes in the body.T-cells are the white blood cells that play a central role in the immune response, releasing antibodies that kill virus particles.
Furthermore, preserving key memories and processing new information, as well as getting rid of excess information, all take place while we sleep. Sleeping after studying, for example, can turn information into memory that is stored in our brains. And sleep prepares our brains for learning new information the following day, according to the independent Sleep Foundation run by US researchers and doctors.
Edited by: Fred Schwaller
Yet another new coronavirus subvariant is here: XBB.1.5. The subvariant is spreading rapidly in the United States, responsible for 41% of positive COVID-19 cases at the end of December.
"At the start of December, about 2% of cases in the US were caused by XBB.1.5. Now in early January it's probably over 50%. That is an astonishing rate of growth," Paul Hunter, an epidemiologist at the University of East Anglia, UK, told DW.
XBB.1.5 has already spread from the United States. Cases have been detected in several European countries, including the UK, Germany and France. India and Singapore have also reported cases.
"It is likely XBB.1.5 will become the dominant variant in Europe, perhaps even by the end of January. But we'll be able to manage it; there's no doubt about that," said Hunter.
XBB.1.5 transmits more easilyXBB.1.5 is a subvariant of omicron, which is currently the dominant coronavirus variant globally. XBB.1.5 is a "recombinant" subvariant of omicron, meaning it contains genetic material from different coronavirus subvariants.
"Since we first discovered XBB some months back, it's been evolving. XBB.1.5 has evolved escape mutations, meaning the virus is better at evading immunity," Hunter said.
XBB.1.5 is still neutralized by immune cells, Hunter said, but the immune system doesn't recognize it as well.
"It takes longer for the immune system to decide which antibodies to produce to stop XBB.1.5 virus particles' reproducing. That's important because how sick you get depends on how much virus is circulating in your body," said Michael Head, an epidemiologist at the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom.
With a slower immune response, XBB.1.5 has more time to reproduce, increasing the likelihood of developing COVID-19 symptoms.
Is XBB.1.5 more dangerous?Early indications in the United States suggest that XBB.1.5 is not more deadly than other omicron subvariants.
"Credible sources in the US tell us people with XBB.1.5 variant do not have more severe COVID symptoms," Hunter said.
Experts are concerned that, if XBB.1.5 spreads rapidly, the number of people with severe symptoms similar to those from other omicron subvariants will rise from sheer weight of infections.
According to Michael Head, the spread of the new subvariant comes at a bad time for health services.
"There are already high circulating levels of most respiratory viruses, including COVID-19 and influenza, this winter. There will be consequences on other areas of health [from XBB.1.5], for example routine surgery where operations will be postponed to address current health care demands," Head said.
The World Health Organization and other health institutions are keeping a close eye on infection and hospital data to track the subvariant's impact on patients.
Vaccines effective against XBB.1.5Because XBB.1.5 is a subvariant of omicron, vaccination and/or prior COVID-19 infection will still provide systemic immunity to XBB.1.5.
"Vaccines still give us the same protection from severe COVID disease if you get XBB.1.5. However, it might be that we are slightly less protected from XBB.1.5 being transmitted," Hunter said.
According to experts, COVID-19 is here to stay, meaning that subvariants such as XBB.1.5 are likely to keep emerging.
"A high vaccination uptake is crucial to minimizing the impact of COVID-19 as a public health problem. But, in the longer term, we really do need a ‘second generation' vaccine that protects against infection and illness from all coronavirus variants," Head said.
Authorities in Kano State in Nigeria's North West region are attempting to weed out an unknown number of unlicensed doctors and pharmacists, raising fears that impostors may have infiltrated the country's healthcare system.
An investigation is currently underway to determine the exact figure of unlicensed individuals in Kano State. The quack doctors allegedly operate in unregistered private clinics where they often prescribe medicine and even attend to patients.
Fatima Nuhu Umar, an unlicensed doctor who was recently arrested and swiftly paraded before the media, admitted to attending to patients and begged for leniency.
"It is true that I'm not a trained health practitioner," Umar said. "I administer drips, blood, drugs, and injections to patients. I'm begging for mercy."
According to local media outlet The Daily Post, up to 130 hospitals, and pharmacies — which in Nigeria includes all health facilities, such as clinics — were being run by unlicensed doctors. In one case, an unqualified individual allegedly carried out a blood transfusion infected with HIV while attempting to treat a malaria patient.
The lack of health facilities in Nigeria's rural regions often leaves patients with few options, making them more likely to unwittingly seek treatment at unlicensed clinics.
Nigeria suffering 'brain drain' of medicsIn recent years, an increasing number of doctors and nurses in Nigeria have left the country in search of better pay and conditions in Europe and North America. According to the Nigeria Association of Resident Doctors (NARD), six out of ten doctors in Nigeria plan on leaving for greener pastures.
Experts say the exodus is being driven by a lack of funding and infrastructure, a shortage in medical kids and poor logistics.
Yarma Ahmad Adamu, a senior lecturer at the College of Medical Sciences at Gombe State University, believes the resulting void has made it easier for unscrupulous individuals to set up unlicensed clinics and make quick money.
"Many people use this title (Dr.) that they didn't earn through training and they commit many terrible activities that result in deaths," he told DW.
"The government is only after the revenue, but the monitoring is not being done."
Adamu stressed that the federal government needs to urgently step up inspections at hospitals and other medical facilities.
"Before a license is issued to any hospital, authorities have to verify the academic qualifications of the doctors," he said.
According to the Nigerian Medical Association (NMA), only 24,000 licensed medical doctors are currently available in Nigeria. However, the country needs at least 363,000 doctors to cover its entire population, the Premium Times, ones of Nigeria's leading online media outlets reported.
Nigeria is Africa's most populous country by a wide margin, with approximately 220 million inhabitants. NMA says the country requires a pool of 23 doctors, nurses and midwives per 10,000 people in order to deliver essential health services, as recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO).
Despair looms highAs more arrests of unlicensed doctors and nurses hit the headlines in Nigeria, many have lost confidence in the already-struggling health sector — particularly in northern Nigeria where the Boko Haram insurgency has wreaked havoc since 2009, killing thousands, including medical doctors, and displacing over 3 million.
Fadila Kabiru, a resident of Maiduguri in Nigeria's north, said the issue of unlicensed clinics has led to anxiety among residents over where to seek medical attention and whether or not to trust local medics.
"Seriously, these days, we don't have professional doctors," he told DW.
"All of our doctors are just doctors by name but not by qualification. So, I'm afraid of seeing a doctor at any hospital or clinic."
In an attempt to address the situation, Isah Isiyaku, the director of operations at the Private Health Institution Management Agency (PHIMA) in Kano State, said a new law is in the pipeline which would allow the state prosecutor to take on cases of unlicensed doctors.
"There will be a bill called the 'Anti-Quackery Bill'," he told DW. "It will help us to apprehend and prosecute such people quickly."
Al-Amin Muhammad contributed to this report
Edited by: Ineke Mules
Lipedema causes fat cells accumulate uncontrollably in the body. When it comes to a disease where most women receive several misdiagnoses (cases in men are extremely rare and only occur in conjunction with other illnesses), the search for a doctor who is familiar with it disease is an odyssey.
This was the case for Claudia Effertz, who, at the age of 30, developed lipedema at the beginning of her pregnancy. She kept visiting different doctors' offices, but none recognized the illness. Most of the time she was advised to lose weight, to eat less, to exercise. There was no shortage of misconceptions.
"I even got wild diagnoses like 'periostitis.' Then after two or three years, I came to terms with the fact that no one could seem to help me," she told DW. "When everyone tells you that there's nothing wrong with you, eventually you believe it yourself."
She tried to push through and not let herself down, and continued to work as a self-employed consultant and business coach.
A long road to the right diagnosisIn 2014, Effertz collapsed with severely elevated blood pressure. Because her mobility was now reduced, her blood pressure was 250 over 180.
"I then went to a rehabilitation center. They also had also a lymphology department there," she said. "They finally made the right diagnosis: Lipedema, stage three on arms and legs, which is the highest stage. That was the first time I had ever heard of it."
That was where Effertz, who is 53, received proper care for the first time. She was treated with what is known as complex physical decongestive therapy, or CPD. Regular lymphatic drainage is part of it, as well as exercise in water and compression of the arms and legs.
This therapy improves the microcirculation of the blood and stimulates the body's metabolism. This in turn leads to the tissue, which is often hardened by lipedema, being relieved and the pain decreasing, at least temporarily.
It took Effertz 15 years to eventually get the right diagnosis.
Tobias Hirsch from the Hornheide specialist clinic, who is also active in the German Lipedema Society, said that what happened to Effertz is not uncommon. "In a study, we examined when the first symptoms appeared in the female patients. Most said it was during puberty. Then we looked at when they were diagnosed, and that was an average of 20 years later,” he told DW.
Lipedema is a chronic diseaseHow do you distinguish lipedema from obesity?
"[In lipedema] it is important to emphasize that fat accumulation has nothing to do with obesity," Hirsch said.
In women with lipedema, it's common for the upper part of the body to be slim. Fat deposits appear on the upper and lower legs and on the arms. In the course of the disease, the limbs become increasingly thicker and misshapen. In the worst cases, patients can hardly move. Pain is common.
Sexual activity is almost impossible. For teenagers, dealing with the condition is especially difficult, because they usually have to wear compression stockings to alleviate the discomfort a little.
In addition, patients bruise quickly in the affected regions.
"Hormones are an important trigger. Classic triggers for the disease are puberty, the pill, pregnancy or menopause," Hirsch explained. But hereditary factors also play a role. Often, the mother or grandmother of those affected also had the disease.
Lipedema often triggers other problemsAbout 70% of patients with lipedema also develop obesity over the course of the disease, even when they still exercised and ate normally at the onset of the disease. Then their arms and legs became more and more misshapen and the patients became more and more immobile as a result.
"Fewer calories are burned, and the patients gain weight, whether they eat little or eat a lot. They get into a vicious circle," said Stefan Rapprich. The dermatologist has specialized in the treatment of lipedema for more than 30 years.
The fat distribution disorder is divided into three stages, depending on how advanced the disease is. "At severity three, the fat distribution is so pronounced that the fat tissue is virtually hanging [down their arms or legs] in lobes," Rapprich said. "The classification is based primarily on the silhouette of the body and does not reflect the actual symptoms the person has. For example, a young woman in stage one may have worse pain than a 60-year-old in stage three."
A widespread diseaseClinicians have only known about lipedema since the 1940s. For decades, the medical community paid little attention to the fat distribution disorder. Only in the last 15 years or so has it come into scientific focus.
Epidemiological studies do not yet exist, meaning it is difficult to know exactly how many women are affected. Estimates put it at around 370 million worldwide. Experts think there are differences in how lipedema manifests around the world.
"In Germany, probably one in ten women suffers from it. In general, Caucasian women in Europe are particularly affected. In Asia, on the other hand, lipedema is not known at all. There is a special form in African women — they tend to develop lipedema in the hip area and above the rump. There it occurs more frequently in the form of painful so-called breech fat," explained Rapprich.
Liposuction is the treatment of choiceLiposuction currently promises the greatest treatment success. Small incisions are made in the affected body region, through which an infiltration solution is injected. This loosens the tissue, allowing fat cells to be extracted and suctioned out via fine cannulas.
Effertz has already undergone four such operations on her legs and buttocks. She said she had severe pain for the first few days, but it quickly subsided.
"When I saw my lower legs after the surgery, I immediately started crying, because I finally had calves without any deformities. With the surgeries, I lost about ten, twelve kilos." After that, she said, she was able to lose more weight — more than 25 kilograms.
Such an operation is usually only performed at an advanced stage of lipedema. By then, however, many women have already developed other diseases like obesity or high blood pressure. The malpositioning of the legs often also causes orthopedic problems.
LipLeg study should provide new insightsThe German LipLeg study is currently researching the benefits that early surgery would bring to women. "Final data will probably be available in 2024," Hirsch said. "The study will probably show that patients benefit when liposuction is performed relatively early."
Digital help is also expected to be available soon. In an app called Lipocheck, there is an electronic questionnaire. Using their smartphone, patients take two full-body photos. The app can then use the body silhouette to identify whether is the woman has lipedema and whether further clarification is needed.
"The app is currently still being tested in my practice and will be presented to the public in February or March," said Rapprich.
By then, Effertz will have already undergone another operation. This time, liposuction will be performed on her arms, where she hopes to lose several more kilos of fat, and further improve her quality of life.
This article was originally written in German.
India has been monitoring China's unprecedented wave of COVID-19 cases and is taking proactive contingency measures to prevent a potential outbreak of the virus.
Several Indian states have issued safety advisories, recommending that people wear masks and take precautions to keep infections at bay.
Earlier last year, India relaxed its COVID-19 restrictions after a drop in infections, and most people stopped wearing masks outside. However, last week, authorities conducted mock drills across a number of health facilities in several states to ensure their readiness.
India on alertMeanwhile, the virus is spreading rapidly through China, where the authorities dropped the country's "zero-COVID" policy.
The move has triggered a surge of cases and deaths in a population with little natural immunity and low levels of vaccine boosting.
Experts observing the outbreak are predicting hundreds of thousands of deaths in the coming months.
In a fresh advisory, airports and entry points across India have been asked to strengthen surveillance and conduct genome sequencing to detect new variants. Random tests have been mandated for travelers from China and five other nations, along with random sampling of 2% of all international passengers.
"Early detection of new variants of the virus and their containment are among the key surveillance measures the government is focusing on," NK Arora, chairman of the COVID-19 working group of the National Technical Advisory Group on Immunization told DW.
Over 90% of India's adult population had been fully vaccinated by July last year. In addition, at least a quarter of adults have received booster shots and a large percentage of the population have been naturally infected. As such, experts say that the chances of India witnessing large-scale deaths — as seen during the second wave in 2021 — from existing variants are slim.
However, given that the virus has changed and mutated so much in the past two years, authorities are aware of the potential for further mutations and have been deploying resources.
Many virus experts have their attention on the XBB.1.5 and BF.7 variants as well as other, more transmissible subvariants.
"Hospitalizations have not risen despite the detection of XBB and BF.7 cases, indicating that Indians may be better protected because of hybrid immunity [vaccine plus infection]," Giridhara Babu, an epidemiologist at the Public Health Foundation of India, told DW.
"But we need to be proactive and sustained strengthening of surveillance mechanisms to detect new variants early enough and respond appropriately."
"Currently, there are no signs of increasing cases based on the data. The transmission rate and severity of a variant cannot be uniform everywhere; it varies depending on the susceptibility of the local population and the environment," added Babu.
Vigilance is vitalThe Indian Sars CoV-2 Consortium on Genomics — a network of laboratories monitoring genomic variations of the COVID virus — will hold a meeting this week to review data from China on the viral wave that's gripped the country.
Given that a large percentage of the population enjoys hybrid immunity leading to all Omicron sub-lineages causing only a mild disease, some feel the focus in India should not be on daily new infections but only on any increase in hospitalizations, particularly ICU admissions.
"Until recently the BF.7 variant was not found in any measurable numbers in India," Vineeta Bal, an immunologist from the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research told DW.
"That situation might change with rapidly rising infections in China. India's worry should be about monitoring the new cases, identifying which variant is responsible for increase in the number of cases."
'No worries'Bal also pointed out that — based on India's vaccination history and last year's high Omicron infection rate which resulted in significant hybrid immunity — India should not be worried about the rapid and uncontrollable spread of severe COVID infections.
Gautam Menon, a professor of physics and biology at Ashoka University, pointed out that the India's at-risk population has largely been vaccinated, although booster coverage could be increased.
"We should be vigilant against variants which might lead to more severe disease. For this, integrated surveillance — both genomic and clinical — is necessary," Menon told DW. "We could, and should, encourage our population to get booster shots."
Menon, who works on mathematical and computational models tracking the spread of COVID-19, maintained that authorities should be attentive against variants which might lead to more severe disease.
"For this, integrated surveillance, both genomic and clinical, is necessary," he said. "It may be essential to explore the use of the new protein sub-unit vaccines as additional boosters for the vulnerable population."
"Transparency is important, an area where the Chinese government appears to be failing at the moment. We should not fall into the same trap."
Last April, India approved two homegrown vaccines for children under the age of 12. Covaxin, made by Hyderabad based Bharat Biotech, was granted emergency use permission.
Two other vaccines were also given emergency approval: Corbevax for children aged between 5 and 12 years of age, and Zydus's two-dose jab for children over 12.
"One has to be watchful and practice COVID-appropriate behavior," Shally Awasthi, pediatric pulmonologist at Lucknow's King George's Medical University told DW. "The BF.7 variant in India will be like influenza where there could also be mortality. The word is caution and prevention, even if deaths are low."
According to the Health Ministry's website, over 2.2 billion doses of COVID vaccine have been administered in the country under the nationwide vaccination drive so far. The overall death toll to date stands at 530,707.
Edited by: Keith Walker
China has announced plans to drop the government's strict COVID-19 restrictions for travel in and out of the country. From January 8, people traveling into the country will no longer have to quarantine.
The abrupt decision comes after China ended its strict domestic lockdowns and zero-COVID strategy earlier in December — a decision that has been followed by an unprecedented rise in COVID cases.
The move to drop quarantine for overseas visitors has prompted concerns about the potential for new subvariants of the virus to spread around the world.
Commenting on China's decision on Monday, US State Department spokesperson Ned Price said any time the virus was spreading it had "the potential to mutate and to pose a threat to people everywhere."
Countries impose restrictions on Chinese travelersThe rule change has already sparked a rush to book trips outside the country. Traffic on the travel website Trip.com showed searches for popular destinations like Japan, Thailand and South Korea had increased tenfold.
People in China have been under strict travel restrictions since the start of the pandemic in early 2020, meaning many people haven't seen family and friends around the world since 2019.
But travel will not be easy. Officials in many countries have outlined tighter measures for Chinese travelers due to high rates of COVID-19 in the population.
After Monday's announcement, Japan announced a cap in the number of arrivals from China, and required proof of a negative COVID test or quarantine for seven days. Malaysia and Taiwan have since followed suit, and on Wednesday Italy also imposed mandatory testing on visitors from China.
Reports suggest the Untied States is also considering imposing new restrictions on Chinese arrivals.
Germany observing situation closelyFor the time being, the German government has not responded to China's new travel regulations.
"We are observing the situation in China very, very attentively," said a Health Ministry spokesperson on Wednesday.
With no indication at present that a more dangerous situation is developing in this outbreak there are no travel restrictions for those entering from China, the spokesperson added. However, if a more dangerous variant develops in China, travel restrictions would be put in place to reduce the likelihood of it spreading.
China sees major COVID outbreakExperts have warned that the situation is difficult to monitor due to inaccurate reporting on cases in China. China has stopped mass testing and no longer reports asymptomatic cases. The combination means the official data is unlikely to be a true reflection of the situation.
Modelling data from the United Kingdom estimates there are now more than 1 million cases per day in China, and predicts a peak of 4.2 million cases a day by March 2023. But little data exists about the subvariants currently in circulation.
As the zero-COVID strategy came to an end in early December, experts warned that herd immunity in China from COVID-19 is relatively low after faltering booster campaigns.
Recent reports have suggested high numbers of serious COVID-19 cases are overcrowding hospitals, with death rates causing backlogs in crematoriums and morgues.
China's National Health Commission has initiated a large vaccination and booster campaign, but experts have said it's too late to prevent a major increase in COVID deaths in the coming months.
Edited by: Martin Kuebler
When China relaxed its zero-COVID policy at the start of December, international observers warned there would be mass outbreaksin the Chinese population, which, it was estimated, lacks sufficient herd immunity or vaccine protection.
One statistical model published by healthdata.org predicts that 300,000 people could die from COVID-19 infections by April 2023 and 1.6 million people could die by the end of the year.
"Infections are steeply on the rise and hospitals are overwhelmed. It's quite [certain] that the situation is spiraling out of control, at least in Beijing and other big cities," said Björn Alpermann, a sinologist at the University of Würzburg in Germany.
COVID wave in China 'thermonuclear bad'On December 19, a prominent epidemiologist, Eric Feigl-Ding, tweeted that the situation was "thermonuclear bad."
Feigl-Ding predicted "over 60% of China's and 10% of the Earth's population likely infected over the next 90 days. Deaths likely in the millions — plural."
In scenes reminiscent of the early months of the pandemic in 2020, Feigl-Ding posted a video of what looks like an overcrowded hospital, with patients lying close next to each other on the floor.
Other reports suggest morgues and crematoriums are overloaded, with backlogs running into the thousands. "The reports that crematoriums are working 24/7 are deeply disturbing," said Alpermann.
How accurate are the statistics?It's not known how many people are currently infected with COVID-19 in China or the number of those who have recently died from the disease.
Oliver Radtke who lives in Beijing and is the chief representative of the Heinrich Böll Foundation, an independent political foundation affiliated with Germany's Greens, said it was impossible to know how severe the current COVID wave was by reading the official statistics.
"Judging strictly from personal evidence, scrolling through WeChat [social media] and having conversations with colleagues and friends, I reckon about one third in the city is sick, one third is taking care of the sick and one third simply doesn't dare to venture out," Radtke told DW.
Alpermann said the Chinese government had more or less admitted that its statistics were artificially low when it said that it would only count COVID deaths that had happened due to lung failure. That's Alpermann's personal assessment, but it suggests that those statistics tell only a partial truth.
The lack of accurate statistics about the current COVID situation in China makes predictions about deaths and illness difficult.
"There are so many moving parts in models, so there's a lot of guess work. The subvariant [of omicron, BF.7] circulating in China now isn't well studied, and we don't know how fast people will get boosters this winter," Alpermann said.
Booster campaign to target elderlySo, how are Chinese health authorities responding to the situation? Radtke said authorities had placed responsibility on individuals to keep safe.
"The official slogan these days is 'everybody is responsible for the prevention and control of the pandemic,'" he said.
But the Chinese National Health Commission (NHC) has initiated a large vaccination and booster campaign, especially for the elder and other high-risk groups.
Many health experts outside China have been critical about the effectiveness of Chinese vaccines from Sinovac and Sinopharm compared to mRNA vaccines, such as the BioNTech-Pfizer and Moderna jabs — and the NHC is only administering vaccines made in China.
However, reports suggest they may include new nasal spray vaccines in the booster program. The hope is that the new vaccine types will reduce COVID transmission as well as the risk of severe COVID-19 symptoms.
"Worries about grandparents and older parents are high. Especially regarding family members in the countryside and [remote] provinces, where Intensive Care Unit beds are rare or non-existent," said Radtke.
What caused the latest COVID outbreak in China?Experts say that the current infection and death rates in China may be because the country has a lower level of population immunity than that in other countries.
"The Chinese government boasted they won a victory against COVID with their zero-COVID strategy. For some time it looked that way in 2021, but with omicron the picture completely changed," said Alpermann.
China has pursued a zero-COVID policy since the pandemic began.
During zero-COVID, the government implemented mass testing, imposed strict lockdowns and quarantined those people with COVID-19 in special facilities.
Now that it has relaxed its lockdown rules, the population has been going out but with very little natural exposure to infection, especially the more contagious variants, such as omicron — because they were locked in for all that time. In any case, that is the theory you hear from health experts outside China.
Rates of booster vaccine uptake are estimated to be low in China, especially among older people who have a higher risk of developing severe symptoms — only about one-third of over-80s and two-thirds of over 60s have received their first booster shot, according to official data.
"In retrospect, it now looks like the Chinese government did not use the time during zero-COVID to their own advantage to get vaccination rates as high as they should have been. They did not import more advanced mRNA vaccines or approve mRNA vaccines created in China," Alpermann said.
The first of three wavesSpeaking at a conference in Beijing on December 17, Zunyou Wu, a chief epidemiologist at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, said that the current outbreak would peak this winter and run in three waves for about three months.
The modelling mentioned at the start of this article puts the potential death rate as high as 1.6 million people by the end of 2023. But that depends on whether COVID transmission can or will be contained with new lockdowns and by the success of vaccination programs.
"I am worried about what happens once the current wave reaches the lesser-developed parts of the country, especially in the western hinterland," said Radtke.
Whatever the exact figures, Chinese health authorities appear to be struggling to keep up with the spread of the disease, and that continues to cause concern outside of the country as well.
Edited by: Zulfikar Abbany
JanuaryThe year 2022 started on a high note with the world waiting for the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to reach its final position 1.5 million kilometers from Earth, which it did. And very soon we were able to see the universe like never before.
January also brought the best evidence so far that the common Epstein-Barr virus is the main cause of Multiple Sclerosis (MS).
For the first time, a person received a genetically modified heart from a pig. The hope is that one day more people will get organ transplants when they need one even if a human organ is unavailable. But in this first attempt the patient died two months later.
February In February, it was announced that the International Space Station (ISS), a hallmark of space cooperation, peace and research would retire by 2031 and rest at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean when it returns to Earth.
March March became an important month for aphasia awareness when it was announcement that Bruce Willis had been diagnosed with the language disorder and as a result was ending a decades-long career in acting.
Also in March, a study estimated that the number of deaths caused by the COVID-19 pandemic to be around 18 million globally. This was three times the number reported by the World Health Organization (WHO).
And when the wreck of Shackleton's ship Endurance was discovered in Antartica, it was hailed "one of the biggest achievements in polar history and polar science.".
April In April, research suggested human gene mutations could be strongly linked with the likelihood of a person developing schizophrenia. A further 120 genes were identified as playing a role as well.
Other research explained how psilocybin, a psychedelic compound found in magic mushrooms, could be effective in treating depression. But it's important that people do not "self-medicate": the psychoactive element was tested in a controlled setting.
May In May, the Event Horizon Telescope team said it had captured the first image of a supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy.
Then we learned that seven hours of sleep are best for cognitive performance and good mental health, after results from a big study with 500,000 participants were released.
And with humanity still struggling with the COVID-19 pandemic, the month of May was hit with yet another bit of viral news when monkeypox cases started to emerge internationally. The WHO has since changed the name of the virus to Mpox.
June In June, researchers at Germany's Alfred Wegener Institute predicted "dramatic losses" of the Siberian tundra by the middle of the millennium due to global heating. They said the tundra may disappear.
Then, adding to the many amazing astronomy events this year, it was a particular treat when five planets — Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn — aligned with a crescent moon.
July In July, DW's Science team looked at life as a LGBTQ scientist and the challenges and discrimination that people face.
There was exciting particle physics news: scientists working on the world's largest and most powerful collider, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), announced that they had discovered three new particles.
And then it was time for one of the most awaited moments of 2022 in science: scientists unveiled the first images from the JWST. The images revealed a deep look at the universe with unprecedented detail and signs of water vapor on a planet 1,150 light-years from Earth.
August In August, a study suggested that milk consumption might not be the reason why ancient humans evolved the capacity to digest lactose as adults.
We got a better understanding of long COVID with the findings from a study with 1.2 million patients conducted over a two-year period.
For almost 120 years, the writing system known as "Linear Elamite" was considered unreadable. But that changed when a team of archaeologists said they had partially deciphered the writing system.
September In September, space scientists achieved something almost sci-fi, with humanity's first attempt to nudge an asteroid's trajectory by hitting it really hard with an automated spacecraft. That was NASA's DART mission, a test to see how we might one day defend Earth from asteroid impacts.
October October started as ever with the Nobel Prize announcements. These were the winners in science:
Medicine was awarded to Svante Paabo for research into how human beings evolved.
Physics was awarded to Alain Aspect, John F. Clauser and Anton Zeilinger for their work on quantum mechanics.
And Chemistry was awarded to Carolyn R. Bertozzi, K. Barry Sharpless and Morten Meldal for developing a way of snapping molecules together.
Also in October, we learned that dating archeological objects based on the Earth's magnetic field could help pinpoint the dates of biblical military campaigns.
And this year's World Polio Day came with a reminder that the disease was present in two countries and vaccine-derived forms had been reported in UK and US wastewater.
NovemberOur understanding of human history took a step forward with findings that early humans cooked food as early as 780,000 years ago and not only 170,000 years ago as was previously thought.
On November 16, Artemis I, an uncrewed mission to the moon finally launched after numerous scrubbed attempts earlier in the year. The Artemis program's goal is to take humans back to the moon, build a base there and travel on to Mars.
DecemberAnd finally, in December, the US National Ignition Facility (NIF) announced that researchers there had made a breakthrough in fusion energy. Nuclear fusion is what powers the sun and scientists hope it will become part of future, sustainable energy sources. But there is a long way to go yet.
Edited by: Zulfikar Abbany
You wake up and look at your phone to check the weather — it's going to be 5°C with a 50% chance of rain. So, you think of wearing a warm jacket, that cozy scarf your grandma made you and consider bagging an umbrella as well. And you feel set for come what may.
It feels so easy to get the information these days, with so many devices around us — our smartphones, watches, tablets and laptops — giving us immediate access to weather forecasts. But we can just as easily forget all that has to happen behind the scenes to get it right.
Accurate weather predictions can mean more that whether you get rained on or can look forward to snow. In World War II, for instance, the weather was a deciding factor in the D-Day landings at Normandy, France.
Good weather forecasting can save livesIn June 1944, the Allied forces needed clear skies, calm waters and a full moon for their invasion of northern France. But back then, there were no satellites, no radars and no computer models to predict the weather.
The Americans used historical data to prediction whether there would be any storms. The original date of the landings had been set for June 5, so the US checked how often there had been storms on that date in the past. And their data told them that June 5 would be perfect.
The British used contemporary data. They checked wind speed, temperature and atmospheric pressure to make their predictions. And they forecast storms for June 5 and recommended that the invasion wait a day.
In the end, the Allies went with the British suggestion, and that was lucky because there were storms, violent seas and winds in Normandy on June 5, 1944.
A good weather prediction "makes a huge difference, [it can] save lives," said Florian Pappenberger, who leads the Forecast Department at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF).
How weather forecasting is doneForecasting is "quite simple," said Pappenberger. It just involves "huge amounts" of observations. And, same as in 1944, current conditions give forecasters a good idea of how the weather will be tomorrow.
"Very complex and sophisticated models, sets of equations and lines of code ingest all these observations [to] give us scenarios of the future," Pappenberger said.
But predictions are limited. They rely on how much we know about the initial conditions — how the weather is now — and because "you don't have observations everywhere, you don't observe everything and the initial status is always an approximation of what the Earth really looks like," said Pappenberger.
Weather forecasts are getting betterOur forecasting abilities keep improving, with the development of better instruments and satellites.
Take Europe's new MTG-I1 satellite that was launched in early December: it promises to provide more accurate data for forecasting severe weather, such as storms, several hours ahead.
MTG-I1 will deliver observations of "unprecedented range, resolution and frequency," says the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT), which operates the satellite.
But also, improvements in computer technology and advances in our understanding of weather science have made our predictions much better than they were on June 6, 1944.
By how much? Around one day every decade — what we could predict 10 years ago for a three-day forecast, we can now do for a four-day forecast.
But there is still an element of chance.
Everything has a probability in forecasting
You might be familiar with the term "a chance of" precipitation, rain or snow. It's a bit hard to interpret. Say it's a "50% chance of rain", should you take an umbrella? Cancel the picnic?
It's hard enough to make sense of probabilities in general and the truth is that this probability of precipitation is something that not even meteorologists seem to agree on — that's according to a survey of 188 meteorologists done in 2016.
The US National Weather Service says "a chance of" refers to the probability that a given place in a forecast area will receive at least 0.01 inches (0.25 mm) of rain in a specified time period.
How they calculate that is by multiplying a number "C", which is how confident meteorologists are that it will rain in that area, and a number "A", which is the percentage of that area that they think will receive rain.
So, the calculation is C x A = chance of rain.
But that means that a "50% chance of rain" can come from either being 100% sure (C=1) that it's going to rain in 25% of that area (A=0.25), or that you have 50% confidence (C=0.5) that 50% (A=0.5) of the area is going to get rain — and a number of other combinations as well.
"I can't give you a recommendation on whether you should take an umbrella at 50% or not," said Pappenberger. "Everything has a probability."
That goes for rain, shine, snow, temperature — perhaps even the kind of day your particular weather app decides to show you.
Edited by: Zulfikar Abbany
When Megan Folwell started her PhD at the University of Adelaide in Australia in early 2021, she was looking at reproductive biology and vaginas in snakes. It was then that she noticed a discrepancy.
"'I was thinking 'I hear a lot about hemipenes, the male genitalia, but I really haven't heard anything about any form of clitoris,'" Folwell told DW. "So I started dissecting some of my own specimen."
That research led to the discovery that Folwell and her co-authors published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Female snakes of at least nine species have clitorises. And just like male snakes have a double-penis (the hemipenes), female snakes have a pair of clitorises ― the hemiclitores. The organ is separate from the cloaca, the one opening snakes have for reproductive, digestive and urinary purposes, and ranges from less than a millimeter to seven millimeters in size.
"The male genitalia is quite obvious and presents itself," Holwell said. "The hemiclitores is so small and so fragile that it makes sense it could have been missed before."
Scientists don't know yet know why male and female snakes each have a pair of genitalia instead of just one.
The clitoris, a taboo topicThere is another reason, however, that Holwell believes is also responsible for the fact that her study is the first about the genitalia of female snakes.
"There's definitely a taboo about the subject," the PhD candidate said. "It is not always the easiest one to bring up in conversation, and especially when you bring it up initially, it's kind of hard to get the respect that should be around it."
When looking at animals' mating practices, the focus lies often on what the male does, why he does it and what benefits him, Holwell says.
The field of animal sexuality "is usually male-focused, and we don't fully understand what is happening for the females," the researcher added.
Even in humans, female genitalia are under-researched. For decades, researchers believed that the clitoris was just a little pearl, or ball of flesh. By now we know that's not true and the human clitoris is in fact much bigger with wing-like features on the inside.
Hemiclitores not stimulated by the hemipenesWhen snakes mate, the process isn't so different from what it is in humans. The penis enters the vagina, or in this case, the cloaca. Male snakes only use one of their penises at a time, but it is thought that they could use the other a short while later, to go another time, if you will.
The hemiclitores is located at the underside of the female snake's tail, away from the cloaca, so it's not involved in this mating process.
"The penetration of the penis shouldn't actually be stimulating the clitoris," Folwell said. "But we think that certain behaviors such as the male wrapping his tail around the female and pulsing could then be potentially stimulating the clitoris."
That's another similarity to humans: Penetration during sex usually does not stimulate the clitoris in women either.
Do animals feel sexual pleasure?So the hemiclitores is not directly involved in the snakes' reproduction process. What could it be for?
Holwell and her team found nerve bundles in the organ, which indicates that there is "likely a lot of tactile sensitivity to it, which could be used for stimulation during mating," the researcher said.
Why exactly animals developed genitalia that allowed them to potentially feel pleasure during sex is not yet clear.
A January 2022 study, published in the journal Current Biology, found that female dolphins have a clitoris, too. The clitoral erectile tissue in female dolphins has inflatable spaces that resemble those of humans. In humans, blood rushes to these spaces when the clitoris is stimulated, making it swell. Patricia Brennan, the study's lead author and a co-author on Holwell's snake study, said this seems to be the case in dolphins as well.
The clitoral skin in dolphins is three times thinner than other nearby genital tissue, which points to the clitoris being highly sensitive. And the researchers discovered nerve endings in dolphins' clitorises that are also found in the skin of human genitalia and nipples. They are involved in the sexual pleasure response in humans, and the study states "their presence suggests a similar function in the dolphin."
Do snakes, dolphins and potentially other animals, too, have sex for pleasure then?
"We used to think animals didn't feel pain, and obviously that's been disproven," Holwell said.
Cephalopods like octopuses for example feel pain, can remember locations where someone or something caused them pain and avoid these places, a 2022 study published in the journal Science found.
And pain is not the only deep feeling animals experience. Non-human primates have a sense of self, meaning they exhibit cognitive abilities such as logical thinking, and display empathy, according to experts like Karsten Brensing, a German biologist and behavioral scientist.
Looking at what we know about animals' inner lives and taking into account what studies like Brennan's have found, it is not far-fetched to think that animals might also experience pleasure during sex.
"It might be a factor in snakes, too," Holwell said. "But we obviously need to do a lot more work to prove it."
More than 400-500 calories per day of ultra-processed foods like frozen pizza, chips and packaged cookies is enough to increase the risk of cognitive decline, a new study suggests.
That's roughly equivalent to two donuts or half a frozen pizza, depending on which brands you choose.
The study, involving 10,775 men and women in Brazil, found people who ate more ultra-processed foods had a 28% faster rate of global cognitive decline compared to people who ate the least amount of ultra-processed foods over an 8-year period.
With people in countries like the US and the UK getting over 50% of their dietary intake from ultra-processed foods, the study, published in JAMA Neurology, indicates concerning health consequences.
Diet only one factor in cognitive healthHowever, experts have been quick to point out the evidence isn't so clear cut.
"This study only provides an association between intake of ultra-processed foods and cognitive decline," said Duane Mellor, a dietitian at Aston University in the UK not involved in the study.
"The problem is that it is observational data, so there is only evidence of association and not causality."
Mellor said that researchers already know a lot about the science behind the negative impact of ultra-processed foods like donuts on people's health. However, he said, it is hard to tell whether these foods are any worse than diets high in added fat, salt and sugar.
Experts also say the study fails to consider other factors contributing to cognitive health decline.
"It may be more the case they [people with diets high in ultra-processed food] were eating less [healthy] foods such as vegetables, fruit, nuts, seeds and pulses," said Mellor.
Cognitive health is a complex issue and its decline can be due to many factors other than diet, such as exercise, smoking, alcohol, cardiovascular and metabolic disease. The study didn't include these factors in their analysis.
"This makes it virtually impossible to draw any conclusions [from the data]," said Gunter Kuhnle, a professor of nutrition and food science at the University of Reading in the UK.
Unhealthy foods are causing major global health problemsQuibbles about individual studies aside, medical and nutrition experts like Mellor agree that diet and nutrition are two of the biggest risk factors for people's health across the globe today. Evidence clearly shows obesity is now a bigger problem than world hunger.
Foods that are high in fat, sugar and salt — whether they be ultra-processed or not — are linked to everything from obesity, cardiovascular disease, cancer, and increased all-cause mortality (deaths in a given population).
A recent report from the Global Panel on Agriculture and Food Systems Nutrition, an independent group of experts on nutrition and health, suggests developing countries, where the sale of processed foods is growing at the fastest rates, are particularly at risk in the coming years.
According to the report, over 3 billion people do not have access to a healthy diet, leading to poor nutrition.
What can you do to eat healthier?It's never too late to start eating healthy foods. Studies show that healthy dietary patterns like the Mediterranean dietary pattern helps to reduce cognitive decline and reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease.
The Mediterranean dietary pattern emphasizes intake of fresh foods and minimizing intake of foods that are high in processed fats, sugars and salt.
"Try to enjoy (ideally with others) a simple and varied diet based on vegetables, nuts, pulses (legumes), seeds and fruit with wholegrain and if you eat them moderate amounts of dairy products and unprocessed meats," said Mellor.
Edited by: Clare Roth
Felix Yarwood, a 32-year-old product designer from the UK, hallucinates. He doesn't see imaginary people, nor does he hear voices telling him what to do. But sometimes he gets phantom itches and hears tones that may or may not be in his head – he's never quite sure.
Is he crazy? According to current theories, Yarwood's experiences are perfectly normal.
"Everyone experiences hallucinations," Anil Seth, a neuroscientist at the University of Sussex in the UK, told DW.
"It's important to recognize hallucinations can come and go during our lives at points of stress or tiredness," Seth said. "There is a bit of a stigma around hallucinations. It comes from people associating them with mental illness and being called crazy."
But it's actually very common and happens even daily. The itching Yarwood experiences is particularly common, especially after drinking alcohol.
"It's also common for people with reduced hearing or vision function to get hallucinations in that ear or eye," said Rick Adams, a psychiatrist at University College London. "These are non-clinical hallucinations because they are not associated with a psychiatric diagnosis."
Perception is controlled hallucinationIt might be alarming to hear that you hallucinate. But to understand what we're really seeing, we need to take a step back and look at how the brain creates sensory perceptions.
Intuitively, we may think perception is the result of reading outside information coming into the brain. But Seth thinks this is all wrong.
"Actually, it's the other way around — perception is the brain generating representations of the world from the inside. Information from the senses calibrates perceptions," he said.
What's core to this idea, he said, is the fact that the brain is a predictive organ that tries to anticipate or understand what is happening based on what has happened before.
In vision, for example, the brain creates working hypotheses about the sensory inputs coming in from the eye. It makes quick predictions about what an object might be based on what you've seen or known in the past.
Further sensory inputs from the eyes or other senses then tune and correct that prediction to make it more accurate.
"This means everyday perception is a kind of controlled hallucination or waking dream. It's generated from within but controlled by the world through sensory signals," said Seth.
Pareidolia and illusionsIt may sound strange to think that the eye plays a secondary role in visual perception, but there are cases when you can feel this happening.
First is pareidolia — the tendency to see patterns in things when there are none, like seeing a face in the moon. Here, the brain is generating the perception of a face despite inputs from the senses saying it's impossible for the moon to have a face. We may know the moon has no face, but we still see it.
Second is visual illusions like the lilac chaser illusion. If you stare at the cross for thirty seconds, you may see the magenta disks disappearing and a green disc running around the circle in place of the gap.
But of course there is no green disc. According to Seth, the brain has generated the perception of the green disc because it expects green inputs when magenta is present. It fills in the gap of color.
When do hallucinations become a problem?While we all experience "simple" hallucinations to some extent, "complex" hallucinations are much more common in people diagnosed with psychiatric conditions. 89% of people with schizophrenia and 40% of those with Parkinson's disease experience hallucinations.
When do normal day-to-day simple hallucinations tip over into something to worry about? According to Adams, it's when hallucinations start to disrupt normal life.
"It's not really how often you hallucinate, or what type of hallucinations, but it's more whether they have a kind of deleterious effect on the person themselves. They also invade life and cannot be controlled," he said.
Many people with schizophrenia, for example, tend to hear voices or see things that are unpleasant and disturbing, like voices recalling a person's darkest fears, or telling them to harm themselves. Seth describes these kinds of hallucinations as uncontrolled perception.
Another module in the brainScientists don't really know why normal perceptual hallucinations, like the ones Yarwood experiences, become strong and complex in conditions like schizophrenia.
Adams thinks a key to the puzzle might be the fact that voices seem to be coming from the outside world, despite being generated within the brain.
"We think that there is a module involved in perception in the brain that somehow gets autonomy," Adams said. "It starts spurting out perceptual predictions that have no basis on sensory inputs. The rest of the brain is sent these predictions and naturally assumes they've come from outside."
The idea is that the autonomous perception-generating module has lost feedback from sensory inputs from the eye or the ears, which would normally correct the perception. Therefore the hallucination feels like it's disassociated from your body.
Perceptual diversityBut just how common are hallucinations? Scientists don't really know — no rigorous studies looking into how often people experience hallucinations of any type have been performed.
Until now, the focus has only been on hallucinations associated with altered states of mind from drug use or mental disorders.
Seth is aiming to understand people's hallucinations better on a population level. He thinks people's individual perceptual worlds differ from one another more than we think.
"We call it perceptual diversity. These differences are subjective and private, unlike our skin or hair color, but they shape our lives,” he said.
Seth is currently leading an ongoing study measuring variations between individual people's perceptual worlds, aiming to understand types of hallucinations or perceptual oddities we experience every day. You can participate in the study here.
But the Perception Census goes beyond just perception. Seth believes the study will also help us understand how we all encounter the world around us — which bits we share and which bits are unique, and how that makes us who we are.
Edited by: Clare Roth
Once upon a time, some 12,000 years ago, an ancient, sophisticated Ice Age-era civilization flourished. Its people pursued astronomy, science, art and architecture.
Until, that is, disaster struck: A huge comet crashed into Earth, triggering violent floods. As the glaciers melted and sea levels rose, the waters erased every trace of the advanced, global civilization. Only a lucky few survived.
Those survivors, the story goes, scattered across the globe, seeking out hunter-gatherers to share their ancient wisdom with. In turn, the pupils started building gigantic temples and observatories to watch the stars and warn future generations of the dangers that might strike from above.
That is the narrative promoted by "Ancient Apocalypse", a popular Netflix docuseries that, since airing in mid-November, has found itself among the platform's most watched shows.
Archaeologists call series a conspiracy theory But there's a problem: According to scientists, the show's thesis is, to quote one commentator, "bunk". Other critics call it an eight-part conspiracy theory set to dramatic music with a whole lot of viewers.
In late November, the Society of American Archaeologists sent an open letter to Netflix executives, urging the platform to replace the show's "docuseries" classification with "science fiction". The group also urged Netflix to add disclaimers labeling the show's content "unfounded".
Flint Dibble, an archeologist at Cardiff University in the UK, told DW he was "annoyed, surprised and dismayed" when he watched the show, prompting him to write a long Twitter thread debunking it.
He says the show's producer Graham Hancock, a British journalist with a degree in sociology, was appealing to "conspiracy theory crowds by attacking a sort of mainstream archeology, as he puts it."
In fact, throughout the series, Hancock clearly shows a contempt of what he calls "mainstream archeologists", whom he says are unwilling to engage in his theory, or worse, are hiding key evidence from the wider public.
Simply no evidence of Hancock's ancient civilization, archeologists say But the theory, Dibble and many others say, is purely false. There is simply no evidence to hide.
Dibble says there have been "hundreds, if not thousands" of excavation sites dating back to the period Hancock references in "Ancient Apocalypse".
"None of them show any evidence of some sort of advanced global connectivity or something like that," he says.
Underwater evidenceDibble's research specializes in the Iron and Bronze ages, and he has taken part in numerous excavations in Greece. In a recent call with DW, his annoyance was palpable.
He addressed several of Hancock's claims: First, that key evidence might have disappeared underwater.
That, Dibble says, could easily be debunked, "because there's a lot of underwater archeology. We have a good understanding of what's going on underwater."
Archeologists have, for example, examined Doggerland, an area that once connected the UK and the European continent. Arrowheads and spear points from bone and antler were analyzed.
Off the Egyptian coast, archaeologists have excavated the ancient port of Pharos, famous for its monumental lighthouse.
Domesticated plants and animals introduced by survivorsNext, the series claims that survivors of the doomed civilization introduced hunter-gatherers across the globe to agriculture, as well as domesticated plants and animals.
Again, false, Dibble says.
"Why do we have different domesticated plants and animals, for example, in the Americas versus in the Near East?" he asks. "If it was a global civilization, there would be the same set of crops and animals."
And, he says, Hancock's hypothesis is nothing new. The idea of some mythical pre-flood global civilization dates back to a story about Atlantis that has been floating around for nearly 200 years.
But that theory has been disproven over and over again, he says.
"It's not like archaeologists are just ignoring this, we've investigated all these sites,” he says, adding that archaeologists have "millions of artifacts that date to that time."
There's also no evidence of megalithic architecture and monumental structures like the ones mentioned by Hancock suddenly appearing at a similar time, he says. Rather, excavations have proven that the pyramids, for example, have developed over a period of time — in some cases, even over generations.
Ice Age hunter gatherers were complexArchaeologists also bristle at Hancock's implication that Ice Age hunter gatherers were "simple” and incapable of architecture and science.
Rather, they say, in order to survive in the Ice Age, people needed to develop complex survival strategies, depending on the regions and climate they inhabited.
Why get involved?Why are professional archaeologists like Dibble or the American Association of Archeologists even engaging in this one-sided debate?
Because they're worried. Polls conducted by Chapman University in the US show an increase in paranormal beliefs, ranging from aliens visiting Earth to haunted houses.
The polls also show an increase in beliefs that ancient civilizations such as Atlantis existed. These beliefs, experts say, can feed into a wider, growing skepticism — if not outright rejection — of established scientific wisdom.
That is why Dibble is worried — and speaking out against "Ancient Apocalypse”.
”Once you start thinking that archaeologists are wrong, then you think doctors are wrong. Then you think, politicians are lying and so you can't trust anything,” he says.
And soon, experts worry, people are lost to ever more violent conspiracy theories, ever more difficult to reason with.
Edited by: Clare Roth
If you work in atomic energy, you've probably heard the joke: Generating electricity from nuclear fusion is always just 30 years away. But despite its complexity, scientists working on the technology say it's worth the trouble.
That's because the nuclear fusion reaction has a higher energy potential than all other energy sources we know. It can release nearly four million times more energy than chemical reactions like burning coal, oil or gas, and four times more than nuclear fission, the process currently used in all nuclear power plants around the world.
Discovered in the early 20th century, fusion is seen as the future of energy by many policymakers, especially in Europe.
'Like burning firewood'But is nuclear fusion really a ‘greener' alternative to what we're doing now, and how far have we come in generating electricity from this process?
To look into this, DW visited the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), a large collaborative project between nuclear fusion experts from 35 nations.
Located a couple of hours from the scenic coast of southern France, ITER stands out along the idyllic landscape surrounding it. The project's compound is laden with metal sheds, workshops and equipment. Busy scientists and technicians roam the reactor's campus in hard hats, rubber boots and neon vests.
Sitting at the center of this industrial landscape, Pietro Barabaschi, the Director General of ITER, promises that the future of fusion energy is bright.
He explains that generating fusion energy is like burning firewood.
"First, you start a flame, heat the wood and at some point a chemical reaction starts, and then this reaction is enough to burn the rest of the wood."
Getting energy from nuclear fusionAtoms are composed of a nucleus (containing protons and neutrons) and electrons. In fusion, two atoms are merged into one by smashing their nuclei.
In a bid to achieve a stable nucleus, the newly formed atom sometimes chucks out a high-energy neutron previously used to bind the neutron to the nucleus.
Nuclear fusion scientists want to convert this excess energy into electricity that lights up our homes.
Technically we already harness commercially viable energy from fast-flung neutrons in nuclear fission power plants. So why don't we just stick to it?
Fusion versus fissionIn fission, instead of fusing two light atoms, a heavy atom is split into two or more.
All nuclear power plants in the world use fission reactors to generate electricity. France, where ITER is located, gets 70 percent of its energy from nuclear fission. However, it is not a popular source of fuel in most countries due to public fears of harmful radiation, stoked by accidents such as the Chernobyl disaster, the meltdown at Fukushima and the US Three Mile Island partial meltdown.
The main difference between nuclear fission and fusion is the radioactivity of the fuel each method creates, says ITER knowledge officer Akko Maas. He has been with the project since its early days.
"In fission, the uranium that you use and the plutonium that you create are both radioactive. And once you have gotten the energy out of them, you are still left with radioactive material."
Of the two base materials considered most efficient for fusion energy, deuterium is not radioactive, but tritium is. However, its radiation is comparatively weak and short-lived.
"If you choose the materials correctly, even on an industrial scale, you can limit the radioactivity from fusion to 100 to 200 years, which is far more manageable than if you talk about the 40,000 years we see in fission," Maas says.
The 'green' advantageIn addition to being highly efficient, proponents say nuclear energy could dramatically reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. Nuclear energy itself is considered a carbon-free alternative to fossil fuels because its creation does not emit greenhouse gasses — its major byproduct is helium, an inert, non-toxic gas.
Further, deuterium is abundant in seawater, and scientists are trying to produce tritium using lithium in situ.
Renewable energy sources like wind and solar alone cannot meet global baseline energy needs. Nuclear fusion, if successful, could provide well above that.
While all of this sounds rosy, it is still a distant dream. For fusion to become a reality, we need a technological breakthrough in plasma physics.
Plasma 'switches off'"Technically, it's difficult to achieve a fusion reaction that is self-sustained and stable," Barabaschi says.
The sunshine and the warmth we feel on Earth is the result of fusion — the process occurs naturally in the core of the sun under extreme temperature and pressure.
The challenge is to replicate what happens in the sun's core without the pressure arising from the gravity of the sun's heavy mass.
In order to achieve fusion on Earth, gasses need to be heated to extremely high temperatures of about 150 million degrees Celsius, around ten times the temperature of the sun's core.
At this point, the gasses become plasma, which is nearly a million times lighter than the air we breathe. All the protons, neutrons and electrons that compose it are separated.
Fusion researchers have established that creating a plasma by heating a mixture of deuterium and tritium is the easiest way to achieve an environment to fuse and yield energy.
At ITER, a device called the tokamak uses a strong magnetic field to confine the plasma used for fusion experiments.
In these extreme conditions, particles in this plasma collide rapidly, creating heat. But paradoxically, as the temperature rises even further, the collision rate — and therefore the heating effect — drops.
"It is like the plasma is switched off beyond a certain point," says Barabaschi, perplexed.
To go back to the wood analogy, it is like not knowing how to ignite a fire that will sustain the "burning plasma". This is the biggest challenge faced by fusion experiments around the world.
The safety fuseWhat is one's woe is another's boon. The "switching off" of the plasma in unfavorable conditions also means that the reaction stops if there is any instability. This makes fusion safer than fission, experts say.
A meltdown like the one at Fukushima is unlikely to happen in a fusion reactor, says Gilles Perrier, head of safety and quality at ITER. In a fission reactor, there would be a radioactive core that would still need to cool if the reactor were to shut down.
"In fission, the risk of an accident is much higher. In fusion, it is really low," Perrier says.
He says safety in a fusion plant has three parts to it: Confinement of plasma, reduction of radiation exposure and prevention of tritium contamination.
The plasma is confined in a vacuum vessel.
"Even in the worst-case scenario of a plasma leak, the impact will be confined to the site," he says.
From experiment to electricityAt this point, the most electricity scientists have been able to generate from fusion is 59 megajoules of energy over five seconds. That is about enough electricity to run a small light bulb for two months.
The challenge scientists are grappling with now is how to produce this fuel at a larger scale.
Barabaschi says that going from a fusion experiment to an electricity-generating reactor is like going from burning some wood to a coal power plant. While it is a huge challenge, he is optimistic that the experimental reactor at ITER will be functional by the end of the decade and can help set up a demo power plant in the next thirty years.
At the end of the day, nuclear fusion technology will take time — which some scientists say we don't have.
Fusion power certainly cannot solve the energy crisis this winter, and it won't help cut emissions soon. In his book 'The Fairy Tale of Nuclear Fusion', nuclear scientist LJ Reinders suggests that fusion power will arrive too late to help alleviate our urgent climate problems.
Barbaschi however believes that investing in nuclear fusion is not about addressing our energy needs of today, but in the second half of the century.
Edited by Carla Bleiker and Clare Roth
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