Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine is now not only approved for everyone over 16 years old, it’s recommended.

On Monday, an independent advisory committee to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention voted unanimously to support recommending the vaccine.

The decision of those 14 experts was based on overwhelming evidence that Pfizer’s 2-shot immunization, named Comirnaty, which was fully approved by the Food and Drug Administration last week, is not only safe but also works very well at preventing disease.

The independent experts on the CDC panel cheered on the creation of the COVID-19 vaccines in the midst of a pandemic, calling it a “miraculous accomplishment” and “a moment of incredible scientific innovation.”

Here are eight charts and graphs that lay out why Pfizer’s vaccine was given a big thumbs up:

COVID-19 vaccines are doing a great job keeping people healthy, alive, and out of the hospital.

The CDC committee looked at data from across the US showing unvaccinated adults are being hospitalized for COVID-19 at rates roughly 16 times higher than the vaccinated.

As of August 23, 0.006% of vaccinated Americans (fewer than 9,000 people) have had a severe enough case of COVID-19 to be hospitalized, according to CDC data.

The number of vaccinated people who’ve died from COVID-19 is even smaller. Of the 636,015 American COVID-19 deaths, just 2,063, or 0.3% have been in vaccinated people, a tiny fraction when you consider that more than 174 million people are fully vaccinated in the US.

Unvaccinated people under age 50 are getting hospitalized at especially high rates this year.

The CDC tracks these rates of COVID-19 hospitalizations through COVID-NET, a system which collects data from 250 hospitals across 14 states (located in different areas of the country) every week.

It’s true that more vaccinated people are now catching COVID-19, due to the Delta variant. But their cases are generally mild and the vaccines are still preventing severe disease well.

[…]

Source: CDC shares 8 new charts that show how powerful Pfizer’s vaccine is against COVID-19 and the Delta variant

Over 135 subreddits have gone dark this week in protest of Reddit’s refusal to ban communities that spread misinformation about the COVID pandemic and vaccines.

Subreddits that went private include two with 10 million or more subscribers, namely r/Futurology and r/TIFU. The PokemonGo community is one of 15 other subreddits with at least 1 million subscribers that went private; another 15 subreddits with at least 500,000 subscribers also went private. They’re all listed in a post on r/VaxxHappened which has been coordinating opposition to Reddit management’s stance on pandemic misinformation. More subreddits are being added as they join the protest.

“Futurology has gone private to protest Reddit’s inaction on COVID-19 misinformation,” a message on that subreddit says. “Reddit won’t enforce their policies against misinformation, brigading, and spamming. Misinformation subreddits such as NoNewNormal and r/conspiracy must be shut down. People are dying from misinformation.”

[…]

Last week, the moderators of over 450 subreddits joined an open letter urging Reddit to “take action against the rampant Coronavirus misinformation on their website,” saying that subreddits existing “solely to spread medical disinformation and undermine efforts to combat the global pandemic should be banned.”

Reddit published a response defending its stance, saying it will continue to allow “debate” and “dissent” on vaccines and other COVID-related matters, even when it “challenge[s] consensus views.”

“We appreciate that not everyone agrees with the current approach to getting us all through the pandemic, and some are still wary of vaccinations. Dissent is a part of Reddit and the foundation of democracy,” the company said.

Reddit does draw a line somewhere, as it said it will continue to take action against communities “dedicated to fraud (e.g. fake vaccine cards) or encouraging harm (e.g. consuming bleach).” But in general, Reddit said, “we believe it is best to enable communities to engage in debate and dissent, and for us to link to the CDC wherever appropriate.”

[…]

Source: Reddit’s teach-the-controversy stance on COVID vaccines sparks wider protest | Ars Technica

Encouraging anti-vaxxers would definitely fall under the category of encouraging harm.

Streetlights—particularly those that use white light-emitting diodes (LEDs)—not only disrupt insect behavior but are also a culprit behind their declining numbers, a new study carried out in southern England showed Wednesday.

Artificial lights at night had been identified as a possible factor behind falling insect populations around the world, but the topic had been under-researched.

To address the question, scientists compared 26 roadside sites consisting of either hedgerows or grass verges that were lit by streetlights, against an equal number of nearly identical sites that were unlit.

They also examined a site with one unlit and two lit sections, all of which were similar in their vegetation.

The team chose moth caterpillars as a proxy for nocturnal insects more broadly, because they remain within a few meters of where they hatched during the larval stage of their lives, before they acquire the ability to fly.

The team either struck the hedges with sticks so that the caterpillars fell out, or swept the grass with nets to pick them up.

The results were eye-opening, with a 47 percent reduction in insect population at the hedgerow sites and 37 percent reduction at the roadside grassy areas.

[…]

The lighting also disturbed their feeding behavior: when the team weighed the caterpillars, they found that those in the lighted areas were heavier.

[…]

The team found that the disruption was most pronounced in areas lit by LED lights as opposed to high-pressure sodium (HPS) lamps or older low-pressure sodium (LPS) lamps, both of which produce a yellow-orange glow that is less like sunlight.

[…]

there are really quite accessible solutions,” said Boyes—like applying filters to change the lamps’ color, or adding shields so that the light shines only on the road, not insect habitats.

Source: LED streetlights contribute to insect population declines: study

The observed trend in Earth’s energy imbalance (TEEI), a measure of the acceleration of heat uptake by the planet, is a fundamental indicator of perturbations to climate. Satellite observations (2001–2020) reveal a significant positive globally-averaged TEEI of 0.38 ± 0.24 Wm⁻²decade⁻¹, but the contributing drivers have yet to be understood. Using climate model simulations, we show that it is exceptionally unlikely (<1% probability) that this trend can be explained by internal variability. Instead, TEEI is achieved only upon accounting for the increase in anthropogenic radiative forcing and the associated climate response. TEEI is driven by a large decrease in reflected solar radiation and a small increase in emitted infrared radiation. This is because recent changes in forcing and feedbacks are additive in the solar spectrum, while being nearly offset by each other in the infrared. We conclude that the satellite record provides clear evidence of a human-influenced climate system.

[…]

Source: Anthropogenic forcing and response yield observed positive trend in Earth’s energy imbalance | Nature Communications

the UAE is now testing a new method that has drones fly into clouds to give them an electric shock to trigger rain production, the BBC and CNN have previously reported.

The project is getting renewed interest after the UAE’s National Center of Meteorology recently published a series of videos on Instagram of heavy rain in parts of the country. Water gushed past trees, and cars drove on rain-soaked roads. The videos were accompanied by radar images of clouds tagged “#cloudseeding.”

The Independent reports recent rain is part of the drone cloud seeding project.

[…]

The UAE oversaw more than 200 cloud seeding operations in the first half of 2020, successfully creating excess rainfall, the National News reported.

There have been successes in the U.S., as well as China, India, and Thailand. Long-term cloud seeding in the mountains of Nevada have increased snowpack by 10% or more each year, according to research published by the American Meteorological Society. A 10-year cloud seeding experiment in Wyoming resulted in 5-10% increases in snowpack, according to the State of Wyoming.

[…]

Source: Cloud seeding in UAE: Artificial rain with drones, electricity

Many cosmetics sold in the United States and Canada likely contain high levels of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), a potentially toxic class of chemicals linked to a number of serious health conditions, according to new research from the University of Notre Dame.

Scientists tested more than 200 cosmetics including concealers, foundations, eye and eyebrow products and various lip products. According to the study, 56 percent of foundations and eye products, 48 percent of lip products and 47 percent of mascaras tested were found to contain high levels of fluorine, which is an indicator of PFAS use in the product. The study was recently published in the journal of Environmental Science and Technology Letters.

“These results are particularly concerning when you consider the risk of exposure to the consumer combined with the size and scale of a multibillion-dollar industry that provides these products to millions of consumers daily,” Graham Peaslee, professor of physics at Notre Dame and principal investigator of the study, said. “There’s the individual risk—these are products that are applied around the eyes and mouth with the potential for absorption through the skin or at the tear duct, as well as possible inhalation or ingestion. PFAS is a persistent chemical—when it gets into the bloodstream, it stays there and accumulates. There’s also the additional risk of environmental contamination associated with the manufacture and disposal of these products, which could affect many more people.”

Previously found in nonstick cookware, treated fabrics, fast food wrappers and, most recently, the personal protective equipment used by firefighters across the country, PFAS are known as “forever chemicals,” because the chemical compounds don’t naturally degrade—which means they end up contaminating groundwater for decades after their release into the environment. Use of PFAS in foam fire suppressants has been linked to contaminated drinking water systems, prompting the Department of Defense to switch to environmentally safer alternatives, for example.

Studies have linked certain PFAS to kidney cancer, testicular cancer, hypertension, thyroid disease, low birth weight and immunotoxicity in children.

Peaslee and the research team tested products purchased at retail locations in the United States as well as products purchased online in Canada. The study found high levels of fluorine in liquid lipsticks, waterproof mascaras and foundations often advertised as “long-lasting” and “wear-resistant.” Peaslee said this not entirely surprising, given PFAS are often used for their water resistance and film-forming properties.

What is more concerning is that 29 products with high fluorine concentrations were tested further and found to contain between four and 13 specific PFAS, only one of these items tested listed PFAS as an ingredient on the product label.

“This is a red flag,” Peaslee said. “Our measurements indicate widespread use of PFAS in these products—but it’s important to note that the full extent of use of fluorinated chemicals in cosmetics is hard to estimate due to lack of strict labeling requirements in both countries.”

Peaslee’s novel method of detecting PFAS in a wide variety of materials has helped reduce the use of “forever chemicals” in consumer and industrial products.

Following a study from his lab in 2017, fast food chains that discovered their wrappers contained PFAS switched to alternative options. Peaslee continues to receive samples of firefighter turnout gear from fire departments around the world to test for PFAS, and his research has spurred conversations within the firefighter community to eliminate use of “forever chemicals” in various articles of personal protective equipment.

Source: Use of PFAS in cosmetics ‘widespread,’ new study finds

[…]

it looks like researchers have developed the perfect thing to combat this problem. They’ve developed a cocktail of plastic-eating enzymes which can actually degrade plastic in a matter of days — something that normally takes hundreds of years to degrade.

The enzyme cocktail includes PETase and MHETase. These are produced by a type of bacteria that feeds on PET plastic (often found in plastic bottles) dubbed Ideonella Sakaiensis.

Professor John McGeehan from the University of Portsmouth, said in a statement to news agency PA, “Currently, we get those building blocks from fossil resources such as oil and gas, which is really unsustainable. But if we can add enzymes to the waste plastic, we can start to break it down in a matter of days.”

Reuters

In 2018, McGeehan was the one who accidentally developed the first enzyme that feasted on plastic. However, the original enzyme was still slower in its process. Researchers from the team were working on different ways they could speed up the process and one such method was fusing a combination of enzymes, making a cocktail of sorts.

McGeehan explains, “PETase attacks the surface of the plastics and MHETase chops things up further, so it seemed natural to see if we could use them together, mimicking what happens in nature. Our first experiments showed that they did indeed work better together, so we decided to try to physically link them.”

He added, “It took a great deal of work on both sides of the Atlantic, but it was worth the effort – we were delighted to see that our new chimeric enzyme is up to three times faster than the naturally evolved separate enzymes, opening new avenues for further improvements.”

Reuters

Apart from PET, the enzyme can also help in degrading PEF or polyethene furoate that are found in beer bottles. Sadly these are the only two kinds of plastic it can degrade. However, McGeehan claims that they’re working on trying combinations with other enzymes to bridge this gap.

Source: Scientists Create Enzyme That Can Destroy Plastic Within Days, Not Years

It doesn’t say what the broken down plastic turns into though

A team of researchers in Germany and Australia recently used a new microscopy technique to image nano-scale biological structures at a previously unmanageable resolution, without destroying the living cell. The technique, which employs laser light many millions of times brighter than the Sun, has implications for biomedical and navigation technologies.

The quantum optical microscope is an example of how the strange principle of quantum entanglement can feature in real-world applications. Two particles are entangled when their properties are interdependent—by measuring one of them, you can also know the properties of the other.

The sensor in the team’s microscope, described in a paper published today in Science, hinges on quantum light—entangled pairs of photons—to see better-resolved structures without damaging them.

“The key question we answer is whether quantum light can allow performance in microscopes that goes beyond the limits of what is possible using conventional techniques,” said Warwick Bowen, a quantum physicist at the University of Queensland in Australia and co-author of the new study, in an email. Bowen’s team found that, in fact, it can. “We demonstrate [that] for the first time, showing that quantum correlations can allow performance (improved contrast/clarity) beyond the limit due to photodamage in regular microscopes.” By photodamage, Bowen is referring to the way a laser bombardment of photons can degrade or destroy a microscope’s target, similar to the way ants will get crispy under a magnifying glass.

[…]

“Technical hurdles … will need to be overcome before the technology becomes commercial, but this experiment is a proof-of-principle that quantum techniques developed decades ago can and will be deployed to great advantage in the life sciences.”

While other microscopes operating with such intense light end up sizzling holes in what they’re trying to study, the team’s method didn’t. The researchers chemically fingerprinted a yeast cell using Raman scattering, which observes how some photons scatter off a given molecule to understand that molecule’s vibrational signature. Raman microscopes are often used for this sort of fingerprinting, but the whole destroying-the-thing-we’re-trying-to-observe has long vexed researchers trying to see in higher resolutions. In this case, the team could see the cell’s lipid concentrations by using correlated photon pairs to get a great view of the cell without increasing the intensity of the microscope’s laser beam.

[…]

Source: New Quantum Microscope Can See Tiny Structures in Living Cells

A light-powered microscope has a resolution limit of around 200 nanometers—which makes observing specimens smaller or closer together than that all but impossible. Engineers at the University of California San Diego have found a clever way to improve the resolution of a conventional microscope, but surprisingly it involves no upgrades to the lenses or optics inside it.

According to the Rayleigh Criterion theory, proposed by John William Strutt, 3rd Baron Rayleigh, back in 1896, a traditional light-based microscope’s resolution is limited by not only the optics capabilities of glass lenses but the nature of light itself, as a result of diffraction that occurs when light rays are bent. The limitation means that an observer looking through the microscope at two objects that are closer than 200 nanometers apart will perceive them as a single object.

Electron microscopes, by comparison, blast a sample with a highly focused beam of electrons instead of visible light, and can instead achieve resolutions of less than a single nanometer. There’s a trade-off, however, as samples being observed through an electron microscope need to be placed inside a vacuum chamber which has the unfortunate downside of killing living things, so observing cells and other living phenomena in action isn’t possible. To date, there hasn’t been an in-between option, but it sounds like that’s exactly what these engineers have created.

To create what’s known as a “super-resolution microscope” the engineers didn’t actually upgrade the microscope at all. Instead, they developed a hyperbolic metamaterial—materials with unique structures that manipulate light, originally developed to improve optical imaging—that’s applied to a microscope slide, onto which the sample is placed. This particular hyperbolic metamaterial is made from “nanometers-thin alternating layers of silver and silica glass” which have the effect of shortening and scattering the wavelengths of visible light that pass through it, resulting in a series of random speckled patterns.

Those speckled light patterns end up illuminating the sample sitting on the microscope slide from different angles, allowing a series of low-resolution images to be captured, each highlighting a different part. Those images are then fed into a reconstruction algorithm which intelligently combines them and spits out a high-resolution image.

It’s not unlike the sensor-shift approach used in some digital cameras to produce super-resolution photos where the image sensor is moved ever so slightly in various directions while multiple images are captured and then combined to merge all of the extra details captured. This technology—detailed in a paper recently published in the Nature Communications journal—can boost a conventional light microscope’s resolution to 40 nanometers, while still allowing living organisms to be observed. It still can’t compete with what electron microscopes are capable of, but it’s no less remarkable given how easily it can improve the capabilities of more affordable and safer hardware already in use in labs all around the world.

Source: Simple Slide Coating Gives a Boost to the Resolution of a Microscope

New results from the Dark Energy Survey use the largest ever sample of galaxies over an enormous piece of the sky to produce the most precise measurements of the universe’s composition and growth to date. Scientists measured that the way matter is distributed throughout the universe is consistent with predictions in the standard cosmological model, the best current model of the universe.

Over the course of six years, DES surveyed 5,000 square degrees — almost one-eighth of the entire sky — in 758 nights of observation, cataloguing hundreds of millions of objects. The results announced today draw on data from the first three years — 226 million galaxies observed over 345 nights — to create the largest and most precise maps yet of the distribution of galaxies in the universe at relatively recent epochs.

[…]

Ordinary matter makes up only about 5% of the universe. Dark energy, which cosmologists hypothesize drives the accelerating expansion of the universe by counteracting the force of gravity, accounts for about 70%. The last 25% is dark matter, whose gravitational influence binds galaxies together. Both dark matter and dark energy remain invisible and mysterious, but DES seeks to illuminate their natures by studying how the competition between them shapes the large-scale structure of the universe over cosmic time.

DES photographed the night sky using the 570-megapixel Dark Energy Camera on the Victor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, a program of the National Science Foundation’s NOIRLab.

[…]

 

The Dark Energy Survey is a collaboration of more than 400 scientists from 25 institutions in seven countries. For more information about the survey, please visit the experiment’s website.

[…]

Second, DES detected the signature of dark matter through weak gravitational lensing. As light from a distant galaxy travels through space, the gravity of both ordinary and dark matter can bend it, resulting in a distorted image of the galaxy as seen from Earth. By studying how the apparent shapes of distant galaxies are aligned with each other and with the positions of nearby galaxies along the line of sight, DES scientists inferred the spatial distribution (or clumpiness) of the dark matter in the universe.

[…]

The recent DES results will be presented in a scientific seminar on May 27. Twenty-nine papers are available on the arXiv online repository.

The Dark Energy Survey photographed the night sky using the 570-megapixel Dark Energy Camera on the Victor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, a program of the National Science Foundation’s NOIRLab. Photo: Reidar Hahn, Fermilab

Source: Dark Energy Survey releases most precise look at the universe’s evolution

Although people-growing is probably a long way off, mice can now mostly develop inside an artificial uterus (try private window if you hit a paywall) thanks to a breakthrough in developmental biology. So far, the mice can only be kept alive halfway through gestation. There’s a point at which the nutrient formula provided to them isn’t enough, and they need a blood supply to continue growing. That’s the next goal. For now, let’s talk about that mechanical womb setup.

Carousel of Care

The mechanical womb was developed to better understand how various factors such as gene mutations, nutrients, and environmental conditions affect murine fetuses in development. Why do miscarriages occur, and why do fertilized eggs fail to implant in the first place? How exactly does an egg explode into 40 trillion cells when things do work out? This see-through uterus ought to reveal a few more of nature’s gestational secrets.

 

Dr. Jacob Hanna of Israel’s Weizmann Institute spent seven years building the two-part system of incubators, nutrients, and ventilation. Each mouse embryo floats in a glass jar, suspended in a concoction of liquid nutrients. A carousel of jars slowly spins around night and day to keep the embryos from attaching to the sides of the jars and dying. Along with the nutrient fluid, the mice receive a carefully-controlled mixture of oxygen and carbon dioxide from the ventilation machine. Dr. Hanna and his team have grown over 1,000 embryos this way.

Full gestation in mice takes about 20 days. As outlined in the paper published in Nature, Dr. Hanna and team removed mouse embryos at day five of gestation and were able to grow them for six more days in the artificial wombs. When compared with uterus-grown mice on day eleven, their sizes and weights were identical.  According to an interview after the paper was published, the team have already gone even further, removing  embryos right after fertilization on day zero, and growing them for eleven days inside the mechanical womb. The next step is figuring out how to provide an artificial blood supply, or a more advanced system of nutrients that will let the embryos grow until they become mice.

Embryonic Ethics

Here’s the most interesting part: the team doesn’t necessarily have to disrupt live gestation to get their embryos. New techniques allow embryos to be created from murine connective tissue cells called fibroblasts without needing fertilized eggs. Between this development and Dr. Hanna’s carousel of care, there would no longer be a need to fertilize eggs merely to destroy them later.

It’s easy to say that any and all animal testing is unethical because we can’t exactly get their consent (not that we would necessarily ask for it). At the same time, it’s true that we learn a lot from testing on animals first. Our lust for improved survival is at odds with our general empathy, and survival tends to win out on a long enough timeline. A bunch of people die every year waiting for organ transplants, and scientists are already growing pigs for that express purpose. And unlocking more mysteries of the gestation process make make surrogate pregnancies possible for more animals in the frozen zoo.

In slightly more unnerving news, some have recently created embryos that are part human and part monkey for the same reason. Maybe this is how we get to planet of the apes.

Source: Mice Develop Inside An Artificial Womb | Hackaday

Researchers from University of Arizona and University of Utah published a new paper in the Journal of Marketing that examines why most scholarly research is misinterpreted by the public or never escapes the ivory tower and suggests that such research gets lost in abstract, technical, and passive prose.

The study, forthcoming in the Journal of Marketing, is titled “Marketing Ideas: How to Write Research Articles that Readers Understand and Cite” and is authored by Nooshin L. Warren, Matthew Farmer, Tiany Gu, and Caleb Warren.

From developing vaccines to nudging people to eat less, scholars conduct research that could change the world, but most of their ideas either are misinterpreted by the public or never escape the ivory tower.

Why does most academic research fail to make an impact? The reason is that many ideas in scholarly research get lost in an attic of abstract, technical, and passive prose. Instead of describing “spilled coffee” and “one-star Yelp reviews,” scholars discuss “expectation-disconfirmation” and “post-purchase behavior.” Instead of writing “policies that let firms do what they want have increased the gap between the rich and the poor,” scholars write sentences like, “The rationalization of free-market capitalism has been resultant in the exacerbation of inequality.” Instead of stating, “We studied how liberal and conservative consumers respond when brands post polarizing messages on social media,” they write, “The interactive effects of ideological orientation and corporate sociopolitical activism on owned media engagement were studied.”

Why is writing like this unclear? Because it is too abstract, technical, and passive. Scholars need abstraction to describe theory. Thus, they write about “sociopolitical activism” rather than Starbucks posting a “Black Lives Matter” meme on Facebook. They are familiar with technical terms, such as “ideological orientation,” and they rely on them rather than using more colloquial terms such as “liberal or conservative.” Scholars also want to sound objective, which lulls them into the passive voice (e.g., the effects… were studied) rather than active writing (e.g., “we studied the effects…”). Scholars need to use some abstract, technical, and passive writing. The problem is that they tend to overuse these practices without realizing it.

When writing is abstract, technical, and passive, readers struggle to understand it. In one of the researchers’ experiments, they asked 255 marketing professors to read the first page of research papers published in the Journal of Marketing (JM), Journal of Marketing Research (JMR), and Journal of Consumer Research (JCR). The professors understood less of the papers that used more abstract, technical, and passive writing compared to those that relied on concrete, non-technical, and active writing.

As Warren explains, “When readers do not understand an article, they are unlikely to read it, much less absorb it and be influenced by its ideas. We saw this when we analyzed the text of 1640 articles published in JM, JMR, and JCR between 2000 and 2010. We discovered that articles that relied more on abstract, technical, and passive writing accumulated fewer citations on both Google Scholar and the Web of Science.” An otherwise average JM article that scored one standard deviation lower (clearer) on our measures of abstract, technical, and passive writing accumulated approximately 157 more Google Scholar citations as of May 2020 than a JM article with average writing.

Why do scholars write unclearly? There is an unlikely culprit: knowledge. Conducting good research requires authors to know a lot about their work. It takes years to create research that meaningfully advances scientific knowledge. Consequently, academic articles are written by authors who are intimately familiar with their topics, methods, and results. Authors, however, often forget or simply do not realize that potential readers (e.g., Ph.D. students, scholars in other sub-disciplines, practicing professionals, etc.) are less familiar with the intricacies of the research, a phenomenon called the curse of knowledge.

The research team explores whether the curse of knowledge might be enabling unclear writing by asking Ph.D. students to write about two research projects. The students wrote about one project on which they were the lead researcher and another project led by one of their colleagues. The students reported that they were more familiar with their own research than their colleague’s research. They also thought that they wrote more clearly about their own research, but they were mistaken. In fact, the students used more abstraction, technical language, and passive voice when they wrote about their own research than when they wrote about their colleague’s research.

“To make a greater impact, scholars need to overcome the curse of knowledge so they can package their ideas with concrete, technical, and active writing. Clear writing gives ideas the wings needed to escape the attics, towers, and increasingly narrow halls of their academic niches so that they can reduce infection, curb obesity, or otherwise make the world a better place,” says Farmer.

Source: Three ways to improve scholarly writing to get more citations

The Florida Keys Mosquito Control District and Oxitec Ltd today announced location participation plans for its landmark Florida Keys pilot project. Project managers anticipate that during the last week of April and first week of May release boxes, non-release boxes and netted quality control boxes will be placed in six locations: two on Cudjoe Key, one on Ramrod Key and three on Vaca Key. Throughout all release locations less than 12,000 mosquitoes are expected to emerge each week for approximately 12 weeks. Untreated comparison sites will be monitored with mosquito traps on Key Colony Beach, Little Torch Key, and Summerland Key.

This marks the start of the US EPA approved project to evaluate this safe, sustainable and environmentally-friendly solution to control the invasive Aedes aegypti mosquito species.

Oxitec’s non-biting male mosquitoes will emerge from the boxes to mate with the local biting female mosquitoes. The female offspring of these encounters cannot survive, and the population of Aedes aegypti is subsequently controlled.

The Aedes aegypti mosquito makes up about four percent of the mosquito population in the Keys but is responsible for virtually all mosquito-borne diseases transmitted to humans. This species of mosquito transmits dengue, Zika, yellow fever and other human diseases, and can transmit heartworm and other potentially deadly diseases to pets and animals.

Source: Florida Keys Mosquito Control District and Oxitec Announce Site Participation for Florida Keys Pilot Project to Combat Disease Transmitting Mosquito — Oxitec

There’s a lot of fear mongering on this one, based on some outright lies and old facts, eg using an old nature article that has since been rescinded, inflating massively the number of mosquitos to be released, saying people aren’t told where the mosquitos will be released (they do tell people, just read above), etc etc. I’m sure that maybe some of their fears are legitimate but throwing in all of this bullshit really weakens their case and makes me too bored to find the hidden gem in the codswallop after I keep factchecking and finding out that the fearmongers are lying yet again.

Glaciers are melting faster, losing 31 percent more snow and ice per year than they did 15 years earlier, according to three-dimensional satellite measurements of all the world’s mountain glaciers.

[…]

Using 20 years of recently declassified satellite data, scientists calculated that the world’s 220,000 mountain glaciers are losing more than 328 billion tons (298 billion metric tons) of ice and snow per year since 2015, according to a study in Wednesday’s journal Nature. That’s enough melt flowing into the world’s rising oceans to put Switzerland under almost 24 feet (7.2 meters) of water each year.

The annual melt rate from 2015 to 2019 is 78 billion more tons (71 billion metric tons) a year than it was from 2000 to 2004. Global thinning rates, different than volume of water lost, doubled in the last 20 years

[…]

Almost all the world’s glaciers are melting, even ones in Tibet that used to be stable, the study found. Except for a few in Iceland and Scandinavia that are fed by increased precipitation, the melt rates are accelerating around the world.

[…]

Source: Satellites show world’s glaciers melting faster than ever

[…]

On April 20, the MOXIE device on Perseverance produced roughly 5 grams of oxygen. That’s a tiny step for NASA and its rover, but a potentially huge leap for humanity and our aspirations on Mars. This small amount of oxygen—extracted from the carbon dioxide-rich Martian atmosphere—is only enough to sustain an astronaut for about five minutes, but it’s the principle of the experiment that matters. This technology demonstration shows that it’s possible to produce oxygen on Mars, a necessary requirement for sustainably working on and departing the Red Planet.

[…]

“Someday we hope to send people to Mars, but they will have to take an awful lot of stuff with them,” Michael Hecht, the principal investigator of the MOXIE project, explained in an email. “The single biggest thing will be a huge tank of oxygen, about 25 tonnes of it.”

Yikes—that converts to approximately 55,100 pounds, or 25,000 kg.

Some of this oxygen will be for the astronauts to breathe, but the “bulk of it” will be used for the rocket “to take the crew off the planet and start them on their journey home again,” Hecht said.

Hence the importance of the MOXIE experiment. Should we be capable of making that oxygen on Mars, it would “save a lot of money, time, and complexity,” said Hecht, but it’s a “challenging new technology that we can only really test properly if we actually do it on Mars,” and that’s “what MOXIE is for, even though it’s a very small scale model.”

[…]

MOXIE works by separating oxygen from carbon dioxide, leaving carbon monoxide as the waste product.

“MOXIE uses electrical energy to take carbon dioxide molecules, CO2, and separate them into two other types of molecule, carbon monoxide (CO) and oxygen (O2),” Hecht explained. “It uses a technology called electrolysis that is very similar to a fuel cell, except that a fuel cell goes the other way—it starts with fuel and oxygen and combines them to get electrical energy out.”

[…]

When asked what surprised him most about the first test, Hecht said it was the identical performance compared to tests done on Earth.

[…]

 

Source: NASA Generates Oxygen on Mars, Setting Stage for Crewed Missions

Google Earth has partnered with NASA, the U.S. Geological Survey, the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service, and Carnegie Mellon University’s CREATE Lab to bring users time-lapse images of the planet’s surface—24 million satellite photos taken over 37 years. Together they offer photographic evidence of a planet changing faster than at any time in millennia. Shorelines creep in. Cities blossom. Trees fall. Water reservoirs shrink. Glaciers melt and fracture.

“We can objectively see global warming with our own eyes,” said Rebecca Moore, director of Google Earth. “We hope that this can ground everyone in an objective, common understanding of what’s actually happening on the planet, and inspire action.”

Timelapse, the name of the new Google Earth feature, is the largest video on the planet, according to a statement from the company, requiring 2 million hours to process in cloud computers, and the equivalent of 530,000 high-resolution videos. The tool stitches together nearly 50 years of imagery from the U.S.’s Landsat program, which is run by NASA and the USGS. When combined with images from complementary European Sentinel-2 satellites, Landsat provides the equivalent of complete coverage of the Earth’s surface every two days. Google Earth is expected to update Timelapse about once a year.

The Timelapse images are stark. In Southwestern Greenland, warmer Atlantic waters and air temperatures are accelerating ice melt.

Tree loss in Brazil in 2020 surged by a quarter over the prior year.

Solar farms are rising in China.

This image, below, illustrates what it took to make a viewable experience. The 24 million images had to be processed to remove clouds or other obstructions and then stitched together into the final product.

“Now, our one, static snapshot of the planet”—Google Earth—“has become dynamic, providing ongoing visual evidence of Earth’s changes from climate and human behavior occurring across space and time, over four decades,” Moore said. “And this was made possible because of the U.S. government and European Union’s commitments to open and accessible data.”

Source: Google Earth Now Shows Decades of Climate Change in Seconds – Bloomberg

The production of glass—one of humanity’s oldest materials—is getting a 21st century makeover. A new approach to glassmaking treats the material like plastic, allowing scientists to injection mold vaccine vials, sinuous channels for carrying out lab chemistry, and other complex shapes.

“It’s a really exciting paper,” says André Studart, a materials scientist at ETH Zürich. “This is a great way to form glass into complicated and interesting geometries.”

[…]

In 2017, researchers led by Frederik Kotz, a microsystems engineer at the Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg, set out to change that. They reworked a 3D printer to forge glass rather than printing plastics or metals.

The scientists created a printable powder by mixing silica nanoparticles with a polymer that could be cured with ultraviolet (UV) light. After printing the shapes they wanted, they cured the polymer with UV light so it would hold its shape. They then fired the mix in an oven to burn off the polymer and fuse the silica particles into a continuous glass structure.

The approach worked, making it possible to craft shapes such as tiny pretzels and replica castle gates. The work garnered interest from companies wanting to build minute lenses and other complex transparent optical components for telecommunications equipment. But the procedure was slow, turning out components one by one, rather than a fully industrial approach that could produce parts en masse, as is done with plastic.

To speed things up, Kotz and his colleagues have now extended their nanocomposite approach to work with injection molding, a process used to mass produce plastic parts like toys and car bumpers by the ton. The researchers again started with tiny silica particles. The team then mixed the silica with two polymers, polyethylene glycol (PEG) and polyvinyl butyral (PVB). The mixture created a dry powder with the consistency of toothpaste. The team fed the paste into an extruder that pressed it into a preformed mold with shapes such as a disc or tiny gear.

Outside of the mold, the parts hold their shape because myriad weak attractive bonds, called van der Waals interactions, form between neighboring silica particles. But the parts are still fragile.

To harden them, the researchers used water to wash away the PEG. They then fired the remaining material in two stages: First at 600°C to burn out the PVB, and second at 1300°C to fuse the silica particles into the final piece.

“What you get in the end is high purity silica glass” in any shape you want, Kotz says. The glass parts also end up with the optical and chemical characteristics needed for commercial telecommunications devices and chemical reactors, he and his colleagues report today in Science.

[…]

However, Studart says this new approach to mass producing glass parts still faces a bottleneck: Washing away the PEG must be done slowly, over days, to ensure the glass parts don’t crack. Speed that up, he says, and injection molding of glass could become as popular as it is with plastic.

Source: Glass molded like plastic could usher in new era of complex glass shapes | Science | AAAS

[…]

The study, published in the journal Cell, compared ‘brain organoids’ – 3-D tissues grown from stem cells which model early brain development—that were grown from human, gorilla and chimpanzee stem cells.

Similar to actual brains, the human brain organoids grew a lot larger than the organoids from other apes.

[…]

During the early stages of brain development, neurons are made by stem cells called neural progenitors. These progenitor cells initially have a cylindrical shape that makes it easy for them to split into identical daughter cells with the same shape.

The more times the neural progenitor cells multiply at this stage, the more neurons there will be later.

As the cells mature and slow their multiplication, they elongate, forming a shape like a stretched ice-cream cone.

Previously, research in mice had shown that their neural progenitor cells mature into a conical shape and slow their multiplication within hours.

Now, brain organoids have allowed researchers to uncover how this development happens in humans, gorillas and chimpanzees.

They found that in gorillas and chimpanzees this transition takes a long time, occurring over approximately five days.

Human progenitors were even more delayed in this transition, taking around seven days. The human progenitor cells maintained their cylinder-like shape for longer than other apes and during this time they split more frequently, producing more cells.

This difference in the speed of transition from neural progenitors to neurons means that the human cells have more time to multiply. This could be largely responsible for the approximately three-fold greater number of neurons in human brains compared with gorilla or chimpanzee brains.

[…]

To uncover the genetic mechanism driving these differences, the researchers compared gene expression—which genes are turned on and off—in the human brain organoids versus the other apes.

They identified differences in a gene called ‘ZEB2’, which was turned on sooner in gorilla brain organoids than in the human organoids.

To test the effects of the gene in gorilla progenitor cells, they delayed the effects of ZEB2. This slowed the maturation of the progenitor cells, making the gorilla brain organoids develop more similarly to human—slower and larger.

Conversely, turning on the ZEB2 gene sooner in human progenitor cells promoted premature transition in human organoids, so that they developed more like ape organoids.

The researchers note that organoids are a model and, like all models, do not to fully replicate real brains, especially mature brain function. But for fundamental questions about our evolution, these brain tissues in a dish provide an unprecedented view into key stages of brain development that would be impossible to study otherwise.

Dr. Lancaster was part of the team that created the first brain organoids in 2013.

Source: Scientists discover how humans develop larger brains than other apes

It’s been well established by now that the agricultural systems producing our food contribute at least one fifth of global anthropogenic carbon emissions—and up to a third if waste and transportation are factored in. A troubling new report points to a previously overlooked source: an industrial fishing process practiced by dozens of countries around the world, including the United States, China, and the E.U.

The study, published today in the scientific journal Nature, is the first to calculate the carbon cost of bottom trawling, in which fishing fleets drag immense weighted nets along the ocean floor, scraping up fish, shellfish and crustaceans along with significant portions of their habitats.

According to calculations conducted by the report’s 26 authors, bottom trawling is responsible for one gigaton of carbon emissions a year—a higher annual total than (pre-pandemic) aviation emissions. Not only does the practice contribute to climate change, it is extremely damaging to ocean biodiversity—the “equivalent of ploughing an old-growth forest into the ground, over and over and over again until there is nothing left” according to lead author Enric Sala, a marine biologist who is also National Geographic’s Explorer in Residence.

Bottom trawling is also one of the least cost effective methods of fishing. Most locations have been trawled so many times, there is little left worth catching, says Sala. “Without government subsidies, no one would be making a penny.” But Sala didn’t set out to condemn bottom trawlers when he designed the research project back in 2018. He was looking for the incentives that just might make the fishing industry, and governments, give up on the practice on their own. The carbon findings may just do the trick.

[…]

Refuting a long-held view that ocean protection harms fisheries, the study found that well placed marine protected areas (MPAs) that ban fishing would actually boost the production of marine life by functioning as fish nurseries and biodiversity generators capable of seeding stocks elsewhere. According to the study results, protecting the right places could increase the global seafood catch by over 8 million metric tons a year, despite the challenges of overfishing and climate change.

Bottom trawling, however, would have to stop, says Sala. While mangroves, kelp forests and sea grass meadows are good at capturing carbon, the bottom of the ocean, piled deep with marine animal debris, is a far greater carbon sink. But when the trawlers’ weighted nets scrape the sea floor that carbon is released back into the water. Excess carbon in water turns it acidic, which is damaging to sea life.

Worse still, the practice also impacts the ocean’s ability to absorb atmospheric carbon: if the water is already saturated from sources down below, it will be unable to absorb human-caused emissions from above, hamstringing one of our best assets in the fight against climate change. By combining publicly-available data on global bottom trawler activity with pixel-level assessments of carbon stored in the top layers of ocean sediments, Sala and his team were able to calculate the amount of emissions produced by the technique, down to the level of national fleets. The European Union, for example, releases 274,718,086 metric tons of marine sediment carbon into the ocean a year, while Chinese fleets release 769,294,185 metric tons, and the United States releases 19,373,438.

[…]

Source: Bottom Trawling for Fish Boosts Carbon Emissions, Study Says | Time

A bit of seaweed in cattle feed could reduce methane emissions from beef cattle as much as 82 percent, according to new findings from researchers at the University of California, Davis. The results, published today in the journal PLOS ONE, could pave the way for the sustainable production of livestock throughout the world.

“We now have sound evidence that seaweed in cattle diet is effective at reducing greenhouse gases and that the efficacy does not diminish over time,”

[…]

Over the course of five months last summer, Kebreab and Roque added scant amounts of seaweed to the diet of 21 beef cattle and tracked their weight gain and methane emissions. Cattle that consumed doses of about 80 grams (3 ounces) of seaweed gained as much weight as their herd mates while burping out 82 percent less methane into the atmosphere. Kebreab and Roque are building on their earlier work with dairy cattle, which was the world’s first experiment reported that used seaweed in cattle.

[…]

Results from a taste-test panel found no differences in the flavor of the beef from seaweed-fed steers compared with a control group. Similar tests with dairy cattle showed that seaweed had no impact on the taste of milk.

Also, scientists are studying ways to farm the type of seaweed—Asparagopsis taxiformis—that Kebreab’s team used in the tests. There is not enough of it in the wild for broad application.

Another challenge: How do ranchers provide seaweed supplements to grazing cattle on the open range? That’s the subject of Kebreab’s next study.

[…]

Source: Feeding cattle seaweed reduces their greenhouse gas emissions 82 percent

Also, do the bovines eat the seaweed happily or do they need to be force fed it?