Science

the-amazing-helicopter-on-mars,-ingenuity,-will-fly-no-more

The amazing helicopter on Mars, Ingenuity, will fly no more

mars helicopter, Science, Space / /

The greatest —

Ingenuity has spent more than two hours flying above Mars since April 2021.

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A close-up view of <em>Ingenuity</em> on Mars, as seen by the <em>Perseverance</em> rover.” src=”https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/PIA24549-800×450.jpg”></img><figcaption> <p><a data-height=Enlarge / A close-up view of Ingenuity on Mars, as seen by the Perseverance rover.

NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU

Something has gone wrong with NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter on the surface of Mars. Although the US space agency has not made any public announcements yet, a source told Ars that the plucky flying vehicle had an accident on its last flight and broke one of its blades. It will not fly anymore. (Shortly after this article was published, NASA confirmed the end of Ingenuity‘s mission).

When it launched to Mars more than three years ago, the small Ingenuity helicopter was an experimental mission, a challenge to NASA engineers to see if they could devise and build a vehicle that could make a powered flight on another world.

This was especially difficulty on Mars, which has a very thin atmosphere, with a pressure of less than 1 percent that of Earth’s. The solution they landed on was a very light 4-lb helicopter with four blades. It was hoped that Ingenuity would make a handful of flights and provide NASA with some valuable testing data.

But it turns out that Ingenuity had other ideas. Since its deployment from the Perseverance rover in April 2021, the helicopter has flown a staggering 72 flights. It has spent more than two hours—128.3 minutes, to be precise—flying through the thin Martian air. Over that time, it flew 11 miles, or 17 km, performing invaluable scouting and scientific investigations. It has been a huge win for NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, one of the greatest spaceflight stories of this decade.

Getting on in Martian years

The vehicle has been showing signs of aging recently, however. And that’s not surprising. The fragile little flying machine has been exposed to the harsh Martian atmosphere for more than two and a half years, including bruising radiation, dust storms, and wide swings in temperature from very, very cold to sort of warm.

One week ago, during a simple hover test flight, NASA lost contact with Ingenuity for several hours. This is when it apparently broke one of its four blades. Later, mission operators restored communications by asking the Perseverance rover to perform long-duration listening sessions for Ingenuity’s signal.

Before that flight, on the helicopter’s 71st flight in early January, the helicopter was supposed to traverse a long distance of nearly 1,200 feet (358 meters), reaching an altitude of 40 feet (12 meters) and spending nearly 125 seconds airborne. NASA had sought to reposition the helicopter for future flights to survey new areas of the Martian surface. However, during that flight, Ingenuity made an unplanned early landing.

Now, the ingenious Ingenuity helicopter will fly no more. But just as the 1903 Wright Flyer is remembered for its first sustained, powered flight on Earth, Ingenuity will be long remembered for its contributions as humans sought to fly on worlds beyond our own.

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aluminum-mining-waste-could-be-a-source-of-green-steel

Aluminum mining waste could be a source of green steel

aluminum, chemistry, green chemistry, iron, ores, Science / /

Upcycling —

After the extraction, the remaining waste is less harmful to the environment.

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Image of a largely green landscape with a large, square area of red much in the center.

Enlarge / A red mud retaining pond in Germany.

The metals that form the foundation of modern society also cause a number of problems. Separating the metals we want from other minerals is often energy-intensive and can leave behind large volumes of toxic waste. Getting them in a pure form can often require a second and considerable energy input, boosting the associated carbon emissions.

A team of researchers from Germany has now figured out how to handle some of these problems for a specific class of mining waste created during aluminum production. Their method relies on hydrogen and electricity, which can both be sourced from renewable power and extracts iron and potentially other metals from the waste. What’s left behind may still be toxic but isn’t as environmentally damaging.

Out of the mud

The first step in aluminum production is the isolation of aluminum oxide from the other materials in the ore. This leaves behind a material known as red mud; it’s estimated that nearly 200 million tonnes are produced annually. While the red color comes from the iron oxides present, there are a lot of other materials in it, some of which can be toxic. And the process of isolating the aluminum oxide leaves the material with a very basic pH.

All of these features mean that the red mud generally can’t (or at least shouldn’t) be returned to the environment. It’s generally kept in containment ponds—globally, these are estimated to house 4 billion tonnes of red mud, and many containment pods have burst over the years.

The iron oxides can account for over half the weight of red mud in some locations, potentially making it a good source of iron. Traditional methods have processed iron ores by reacting them with carbon, leading to the release of carbon dioxide. But there have been efforts made to develop “green steel” production in which this step is replaced by a reaction with hydrogen, leaving water as the primary byproduct. Since hydrogen can be made from water using renewable electricity, this has the potential to eliminate a lot of the carbon emissions associated with iron production.

The team from Germany decided to test a method of green steel production on red mud. They heated some of the material in an electric arc furnace under an atmosphere that was mostly argon (which wouldn’t react with anything) and hydrogen (at 10 percent of the mix).

Pumping (out) iron

The reaction was remarkably quick. Within a few minutes, metallic iron nodules started appearing in the mixture. The iron production was largely complete by about 10 minutes. The iron was remarkably pure, at about 98 percent of the material by weight in the nodules being iron.

Starting with a 15-gram sample of red mud, the process reduced this to 8.8 grams, as lots of the oxygen in the material was liberated in the form of water. (It’s worth noting that this water could be cycled back to hydrogen production, closing the loop on this aspect of the process.) Of that 8.8 grams, about 2.6 (30 percent) was in the form of iron.

The research found that there are also some small bits of relatively pure titanium formed in the mix. So, there’s a chance that this can be used in the production of additional metals, although the process would probably need to be optimized to boost the yield of anything other than iron.

The good news is that there’s much less red mud left to worry about after this. Depending on the source of the original aluminum-containing ore, some of this may include relatively high concentrations of valuable materials, such as rare earth minerals. The downside is that any toxic materials in the original ore are going to be significantly more concentrated.

As a small plus, the process also neutralizes the pH of the remaining residue. So, that’s at least one less thing to worry about.

The downside is that the process is incredibly energy-intensive, both in producing the hydrogen required and running the arc furnace. The cost of that energy makes things economically challenging. That’s partly offset by the lower processing costs—the ore has already been obtained and has a relatively high purity.

But the key feature of this is the extremely low carbon emissions. Right now, there’s no price on those in most countries, which makes the economics of this process far more difficult.

Nature, 2024. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-023-06901-z  (About DOIs).

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The puzzling case of a baby who wouldn’t stop crying—then began to slip away

babybig, botulism, health, infant botulism, medical case, NEJM, New England Journal of Medicine, Science, toxins / /
A studio portrait of a crying baby.

Enlarge / A studio portrait of a crying baby.

It’s hard to imagine a more common stressor for new parents than the recurring riddle: Why is the baby crying? Did she just rub her eyes—tired? Is he licking his lips—hungry? The list of possible culprits and vague signs, made hazier by brutal sleep deprivation, can sometimes feel endless. But for one family in New England, the list seemed to be swiftly coming to an end as their baby continued to slip away from them.

According to a detailed case report published today in the New England Journal of Medicine, it all started when the parents of an otherwise healthy 8-week-old boy noticed that he started crying more and was more irritable. This was about a week before he would end up in the pediatric intensive care unit (PICU) of the Massachusetts General Hospital.

His grandmother, who primarily cared for him, noticed that he seemed to cry more vigorously when the right side of his abdomen was touched. The family took him to his pediatrician, who could find nothing wrong upon examination. Perhaps it was just gas, the pediatrician concluded—a common conclusion.

Rapid decline

But when the baby got home from the doctor’s office, he had another crying session that lasted hours, which only stopped when he fell asleep. When he woke, he cried for eight hours straight. He became weaker; he had trouble nursing. That night, he was inconsolable. He had frantic arm and leg movements and could not sleep. He could no longer nurse, and his mother expressed milk directly into his mouth. They called the pediatrician back, who directed them to take him to the emergency room

There, he continued to cry, weakly and inconsolably. Doctors ordered a series of tests—and most were normal. His blood tests looked good. He tested negative for common respiratory infections. His urinalysis looked fine, and he passed his kidney function test. X-rays of his chest and abdomen looked normal, ultrasound of his abdomen also found nothing. Doctors noted he had high blood pressure, a fast heart rate, and that he hadn’t pooped in two days. Throughout all of the testing, he didn’t “attain a calm awake state,” the doctors noted. They admitted him to the hospital.

Four hours after he first arrived at the emergency department, he began to show signs of lethargy. Meanwhile, magnetic resonance imaging of his head found nothing. A lumbar puncture showed possible signs of meningitis—high red-cell count and protein levels—and doctors began courses of antibiotics in case that was the cause.

Six hours after his arrival, he began losing the ability to breathe. His oxygen saturation had fallen from an initial 97 percent to an alarming 85 percent. He was put on oxygen and transferred to the PICU. There, doctors noted he was difficult to arise, his head bobbed, his eyelids drooped, and he struggled to take in air. His cry was weak, and he made gurgling and grunting noises. He barely moved his limbs and couldn’t lift them against gravity. His muscles went floppy. Doctors decided to intubate him and start mechanical ventilation.

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the-white-house-has-its-own-pharmacy—and,-boy,-was-it-shady-under-trump

The White House has its own pharmacy—and, boy, was it shady under Trump

ambien, OIG, pharmacy, provigil, Science, White House / /

yikes —

It wasted $750K during the Trump years and freely handed out Ambien and Provigil.

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The White House seen in the early evening.

The White House has its own pharmacy that, until recently, could perhaps best be described as a hot mess, according to a recent investigation report from the Department of Defense’s Office of the Inspector General.

For years, the White House Medical Unit, run by the White House Military Office, provided the full scope of pharmaceutical services to senior officials and staff—it stored, inventoried, prescribed, dispensed, and disposed of prescription medications, including opioids and sleep medications. However, it was not staffed by a licensed pharmacist or pharmacy support staff, nor was it credentialed by any outside agency.

The operations of this pseudo-pharmacy went as well as one might expect, according to the DoD OIG’s alarming investigation report. The investigation was prompted by complaints in May 2018 alleging that an unnamed “senior military medical officer” was engaged in “improper medical practices.” This resulted in the OIG’s investigation, which included 70 interviews of military office officials who worked in the White House between 2009 and 2018 and covers the office’s activity until early 2020. However, the investigation heavily focused on prescription drug records and care between 2017 and 2019 during the Trump administration.

During that time, staff at the White House pharmacy kept handwritten records of prescriptions, the OIG found. The records frequently contained errors in medication counts, illegible text, crossed-out text, and lacked medical provider and mandatory patient information. The pharmacy let White House staff pick up over-the-counter drugs from open bins, in violation of Navy medical regulations. It didn’t dispose of controlled substances properly, increasing the risk of diversion. Staff provided prescriptions without verifying patients’ identities, and provided prescriptions to people who were ineligible for care. And it dispensed pricey brand name products freely, rather than generic equivalents that are considerably cheaper—also a violation of regulations.

In one interview, a White House pharmacy staff member said an unnamed doctor asked “if I could hook up this person with some Provigil as a parting gift for leaving the White House.”

Provigil is a drug that treats excessive tiredness and is typically used for patients with narcolepsy, sleep apnea, and other sleep disorders. Brand-name Provigil is 55 times more expensive than the generic equivalent. Between 2017 and 2019, the White House pharmacy spent an estimated $98,000 for Provigil. In that same time frame, it also spent an estimated $46,500 for Ambien, a prescription sedative, which is 174 times more expensive than the generic equivalent. Even further, the White House Medical Unit spent an additional $100,000 above generic drug cost by having Walter Reed National Military Medical Center fill brand-name prescriptions.

White House baggies

Another White House pharmacy staff member gave clues as to what the staff was doing with those brand name prescriptions. The staffer told OIG investigators that ahead of overseas trips, the staff would prepare packets of controlled medications to be handed out to White House staff. “And those would typically be Ambien or Provigil and typically both, right. So we would normally make these packets of Ambien and Provigil, and a lot of times they’d be in like five tablets in a zip‑lock bag. And so traditionally, too, we would hand these out. . . . But a lot of times the senior staff would come by or their staff representatives . . . would come by the residence clinic to pick it up. And it was very much a, ‘hey, I’m here to pick this up for Ms. X.’ And the expectation was we just go ahead and pass it out.”

In addition to the excessive costs of Ambien and Provigil, the White House Medical Office may have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on health care for ineligible staff members. White House Medical Unit senior officials estimated that its Executive Medicine clinic has 60 enrolled patients, but it provided care for 6,000 employees, potentially billing the DoD. Between 2017 and 2019, officials also offered senior government officials a patient category code for care at Walter Reed, such that the facility was unable to properly bill them. In the three years, Walter Reed waived over $496,000 in outpatient fees because of these patient categories.

Overall, the OIG concluded that “all phases of the White House Medical Unit’s pharmacy operations had severe and systemic problems due to the unit’s reliance on ineffective internal controls to ensure compliance with pharmacy safety standards.”

The report does not mention Rear Admiral Ronny Jackson, who served as the physician to the president from 2013 to 2018 under both Barack Obama and Donald Trump. Stat, which first reported on the OIG’s new report, noted that Jackson had been accused of fostering a toxic work environment, engaging in alcohol-fueled misconduct, and misusing Ambien, specifically. OIG received those allegations during the first part of 2018, around the same time when the pharmacy complaints came in. And some of the allegations against Jackson were confirmed by a separate OIG investigation released in 2021.

Though a draft of the new report on the White House pharmacy was completed in 2020, it sat under review in the White House Military Office until July 2023.

The OIG laid out a series of recommendations for establishing oversight of the White House pharmacy, create policy to determine staff eligibility, and pharmaceutical oversight. DoD officials have agreed to the recommendations and are working to implement them, the OIG report noted.

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Urban agriculture’s carbon footprint can be worse than that of large farms

agriculture, farming, plants, recycling, Science, Sustainability, urban farming / /

Greening your greens —

Saving on the emissions associated with shipping doesn’t guarantee a lower footprint.

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Lots of plants in the foreground, and dense urban buildings in the background

A few years back, the Internet was abuzz with the idea of vertical farms running down the sides of urban towers, with the idea that growing crops where they’re actually consumed could eliminate the carbon emissions involved with shipping plant products long distances. But lifecycle analysis of those systems, which require a lot of infrastructure and energy, suggest they’d have a hard time doing better than more traditional agriculture.

But those systems represent only a small fraction of urban agriculture as it’s practiced. Most urban farming is a mix of local cooperative gardens and small-scale farms located within cities. And a lot less is known about the carbon footprint of this sort of farming. Now, a large international collaboration has worked with a number of these farms to get a handle on their emissions in order to compare those to large-scale agriculture.

The results suggest it’s possible that urban farming can have a lower impact. But it requires choosing the right crops and a long-term commitment to sustainability.

Tracking crops

Figuring out the carbon footprint of urban farms is a challenge, because it involves tracking all the inputs, from infrastructure to fertilizers, as well as the productivity of the farm. A lot of the urban farms, however, are nonprofits, cooperatives, and/or staffed primarily by volunteers, so detailed reporting can be a challenge. To get around this, the researchers worked with a lot of individual farms in France, Germany, Poland, the UK, and US in order to get accurate accounts of materials and practices.

Data from large-scale agriculture for comparison is widely available, and it includes factors like transport of the products to consumers. The researchers used data from the same countries as the urban farms.

On average, the results aren’t good for urban agriculture. An average serving from an urban farm was associated with 0.42 kg of carbon dioxide equivalents. By contrast, traditional produce resulted in emissions of about 0.07 kg per serving—six times less.

But that average obscures a lot of nuance. Of the 73 urban farms studied, 17 outperformed traditional agriculture by this measure. And, if the single highest-emitting farm was excluded from the analysis, the median of the urban farms ended up right around that 0.7 kg per serving.

All of this suggests the details of urban farming practices make a big difference. One thing that matters is the crop. Tomatoes tend to be fairly resource-intensive to grow and need to be shipped quickly in order to be consumed while ripe. Here, urban farms came in at 0.17 kg of carbon per serving, while conventional farming emits 0.27 kg/serving.

Difference-makers

One clear thing was that the intentions of those running the farms didn’t matter much. Organizations that had a mission of reducing environmental impact, or had taken steps like installing solar panels, were no better off at keeping their emissions low.

The researchers note two practical reasons for the differences they saw. One is infrastructure, which is the single largest source of carbon emissions at small sites. These include things like buildings, raised beds, and compost handling. The best sites the researchers saw did a lot of upcycling of things like construction waste into structures like the surrounds for raised beds.

Infrastructure in urban sites is also a challenge because of the often intense pressure on land, which can mean gardens have to relocate. This can shorten the lifetime of infrastructure and increase its environmental impact.

Another major factor was the use of urban waste streams for the consumables involved with farming. Composting from urban waste essentially eliminated fertilizer use (it was only 5 percent of the rate of conventional farming). Here, practices matter a great deal, as some composting techniques allow the material to become oxygen-free, which results in the anaerobic production of methane. Rainwater use also made a difference; in one case, the carbon impact of water treatment and distribution accounted for over two-thirds of an urban farm’s emissions.

These suggest that careful planning could make urban farms effective at avoiding some of the carbon emissions of conventional agriculture. This would involve figuring out best practices for infrastructure and consumables, as well as targeting crops that can have high carbon emissions when grown on conventional farms.

But any negatives are softened by a couple of additional considerations. One is that even the worst-performing produce seen in this analysis is far better in terms of carbon emissions than eating meat. The researchers also point out that many of the cooperative gardens provide a lot of social functions—things like after-school programs or informal classes—that can be difficult to put an emissions price on. Maximizing these could definitely boost the societal value of the operations, even if it doesn’t have a clear impact on the environment.

Nature Cities, 2019. DOI: 10.1038/s44284-023-00023-3  (About DOIs).

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Novel camera system lets us see the world through eyes of birds and bees

animal perception, animal vision, Biology, cameras, optics, Science / /

A fresh perspective —

It captures natural animal-view moving images with over 90 percent accuracy.

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A new camera system and software package allows researchers and filmmakers to capture animal-view videos. Credit: Vasas et al., 2024.

Who among us hasn’t wondered about how animals perceive the world, which is often different from how humans do so? There are various methods by which scientists, photographers, filmmakers, and others attempt to reconstruct, say, the colors that a bee sees as it hunts for a flower ripe for pollinating. Now an interdisciplinary team has developed an innovative camera system that is faster and more flexible in terms of lighting conditions than existing systems, allowing it to capture moving images of animals in their natural setting, according to a new paper published in the journal PLoS Biology.

“We’ve long been fascinated by how animals see the world. Modern techniques in sensory ecology allow us to infer how static scenes might appear to an animal,” said co-author Daniel Hanley, a biologist at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. “However, animals often make crucial decisions on moving targets (e.g., detecting food items, evaluating a potential mate’s display, etc.). Here, we introduce hardware and software tools for ecologists and filmmakers that can capture and display animal-perceived colors in motion.”

Per Hanley and his co-authors, different animal species possess unique sets of photoreceptors that are sensitive to a wide range of wavelengths, from ultraviolet to the infrared, dependent on each animal’s specific ecological needs. Some animals can even detect polarized light. So every species will perceive color a bit differently. Honeybees and birds, for instance, are sensitive to UV light, which isn’t visible to human eyes. “As neither our eyes nor commercial cameras capture such variations in light, wide swaths of visual domains remain unexplored,” the authors wrote. “This makes false color imagery of animal vision powerful and compelling.”

However, the authors contend that current techniques for producing false color imagery can’t quantify the colors animals see while in motion, an important factor since movement is crucial to how different animals communicate and navigate the world around them via color appearance and signal detection. Traditional spectrophotometry, for instance, relies on object-reflected light to estimate how a given animal’s photoreceptors will process that light, but it’s a time-consuming method, and much spatial and temporal information is lost.

Peacock feathers through eyes of four different animals: (a) a peafowl; (b) humans; (c) honeybees; and (d) dogs. Credit: Vasas et al., 2024.

Multispectral photography takes a series of photos across various wavelengths (including UV and infrared) and stacks them into different color channels to derive camera-independent measurements of color. This method trades some accuracy for better spatial information and is well-suited for studying animal signals, for instance, but it only works on still objects, so temporal information is lacking.

That’s a shortcoming because “animals present and perceive signals from complex shapes that cast shadows and generate highlights,” the authors wrote. ‘These signals vary under continuously changing illumination and vantage points. Information on this interplay among background, illumination, and dynamic signals is scarce. Yet it forms a crucial aspect of the ways colors are used, and therefore perceived, by free-living organisms in natural settings.”

So Hanley and his co-authors set out to develop a camera system capable of producing high-precision animal-view videos that capture the full complexity of visual signals as they would be perceived by an animal in a natural setting. They combined existing methods of multispectral photography with new hardware and software designs. The camera records video in four color channels simultaneously (blue, green, red, and UV). Once that data has been processed into “perceptual units,” the result is an accurate video of how a colorful scene would be perceived by various animals, based on what we know about which photoreceptors they possess. The team’s system predicts the perceived colors with 92 percent accuracy. The cameras are commercially available, and the software is open source so that others can freely use and build on it.

The video at the top of this article depicts the colors perceived by honeybees watching fellow bees foraging and interacting (even fighting) on flowers—an example of the camera system’s ability to capture behavior in a natural setting. Below, Hanley applies UV-blocking sunscreen in the field. His light-toned skin looks roughly the same in human vision and honeybee false color vision “because skin reflectance increases progressively at longer wavelengths,” the authors wrote.

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top-harvard-cancer-researchers-accused-of-scientific-fraud;-37-studies-affected

Top Harvard Cancer researchers accused of scientific fraud; 37 studies affected

Dana Farber, fraud, Photoshop, research, Science, scientific fraud / /

Lazy —

Researchers accused of manipulating data images with copy-and-paste.

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The Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston.

Enlarge / The Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston.

The Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, an affiliate of Harvard Medical School, is seeking to retract six scientific studies and correct 31 others that were published by the institute’s top researchers, including its CEO. The researchers are accused of manipulating data images with simple methods, primarily with copy-and-paste in image editing software, such as Adobe Photoshop.

The accusations come from data sleuth Sholto David and colleagues on PubPeer, an online forum for researchers to discuss publications that has frequently served to spot dubious research and potential fraud. On January 2, David posted on his research integrity blog, For Better Science, a long list of potential data manipulation from DFCI researchers. The post highlighted many data figures that appear to contain pixel-for-pixel duplications. The allegedly manipulated images are of data such as Western blots, which are used to detect and visualize the presence of proteins in a complex mixture.

DFCI Research Integrity Officer Barrett Rollins told The Harvard Crimson that David had contacted DFCI with allegations of data manipulation in 57 DFCI-led studies. Rollins said that the institute is “committed to a culture of accountability and integrity,” and that “Every inquiry about research integrity is examined fully.”

The allegations are against: DFCI President and CEO Laurie Glimcher, Executive Vice President and COO William Hahn, Senior Vice President for Experimental Medicine Irene Ghobrial, and Harvard Medical School professor Kenneth Anderson.

The Wall Street Journal noted that Rollins, the integrity officer, is also a co-author on two of the studies. He told the outlet he is recused from decisions involving those studies.

Amid the institute’s internal review, Rollins said the institute identified 38 studies in which DFCI researchers are primarily responsible for potential manipulation. The institute is seeking retraction of six studies and is contacting scientific publishers to correct 31 others, totaling 37 studies. The one remaining study of the 38 is still being reviewed.

Of the remaining 19 studies identified by David, three were cleared of manipulation allegations, and 16 were determined to have had the data in question collected at labs outside of DFCI. Those studies are still under investigation, Rollins told The Harvard Crimson. “Where possible, the heads of all of the other laboratories have been contacted and we will work with them to see that they correct the literature as warranted,” Rollins wrote in a statement.

Despite finding false data and manipulated images, Rollins pressed that it doesn’t necessarily mean that scientific misconduct occurred and the institute has not yet made such a determination. The “presence of image discrepancies in a paper is not evidence of an author’s intent to deceive,” Rollins wrote. “That conclusion can only be drawn after a careful, fact-based examination which is an integral part of our response. Our experience is that errors are often unintentional and do not rise to the level of misconduct.”

The very simple methods used to manipulate the DFCI data are remarkably common among falsified scientific studies, however. Data sleuths have gotten better and better at spotting such lazy manipulations, including copied-and-pasted duplicates that are sometimes rotated and adjusted for size, brightness, and contrast. As Ars recently reported, all journals from the publisher Science now use an AI-powered tool to spot just this kind of image recycling because it is so common.

Top Harvard Cancer researchers accused of scientific fraud; 37 studies affected Read More »

megalodon-wasn’t-as-chonky-as-a-great-white-shark,-experts-say

Megalodon wasn’t as chonky as a great white shark, experts say

animals, Biology, extinct animals, megalodon, megaototh shark, paleontology, Science / /

Still a pretty impressive size —

Fresh evidence points to megalodon being longer, more slender than previous depictions.

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These are the kinds of shark teeth discovered in burial sites and other ceremonial remains of the inland Maya communities. From left to right, there's a fossilized megalodon tooth, great white shark tooth, and bull shark tooth.

Enlarge / These are the kinds of shark teeth discovered in burial sites and other ceremonial remains of the inland Maya communities. From left to right, there’s a fossilized megalodon tooth, great white shark tooth, and bull shark tooth.

Antiquity

The megalodon, a giant shark that went extinct some 3.6 million years ago, is famous for its utterly enormous jaws and correspondingly huge teeth. Recent studies have proposed that the megalodon was robust species of shark akin to today’s great white sharks, only three times longer. And just like the great white shark inspired Jaws, the megalodon has also inspired a 1997 novel and a blockbuster film (2018’s The Meg)—not to mention a controversial bit of “docu-fiction” on the Discovery Channel.  But now a team of 26 shark experts are challenging the great white shark comparison, arguing that the super-sized creature’s body was more slender and possibly even longer than researchers previously thought in a new paper published in the journal Paleontologia Electronica.

“Our study suggests that the modern great white shark may not necessarily serve as a good modern analogue for assessing at least certain aspects of its biology, including its size,” co-author Kenshu Shimada, a palaeobiologist at DePaul University in Chicago, told The Guardian. “The reality is that we need the discovery of at least one complete megalodon skeleton to be more confident about its true size as well its body form.” Thus far, nobody has found a complete specimen, only fossilized teeth and vertebrae.

As previously reported, the largest shark alive today, reaching up to 20 meters long, is the whale shark, a sedate filter feeder. As recently as 4 million years ago, however, sharks of that scale likely included the fast-moving predator megalodon (formally Otodus megalodon). Due to incomplete fossil data, we’re not entirely sure how large megalodons were and can only make inferences based on some of their living relatives, like the great white and mako sharks.

Thanks to research published last year on its fossilized teeth, we’re now fairly confident that it shared something else with these relatives: it wasn’t entirely cold-blooded and apparently kept its body temperature above that of the surrounding ocean. Most sharks, like most fish, are ectothermic, meaning that their body temperatures match those of the surrounding water. But a handful of species, part of a group termed mackerel sharks, are endothermic: They have a specialized pattern of blood circulation that helps retain some of the heat their muscles produce. This enables them to keep some body parts at a higher temperature than their surroundings. A species called the salmon shark can maintain a body temperature that’s 20° C warmer than the sub-Arctic waters that it occupies.

Megalodon is also a mackerel shark, and some scientists have suggested that it, too, must have been at least partially endothermic to have maintained its growth rates in the varied environments that it inhabited. The 2023 study measured isotope clumping—which can provide an estimate of the temperature at which a material formed—in mastodon teeth. They confirmed that the megalodon samples were consistently warmer, with an average temperature difference of about 7° C compared to cold-blooded samples.

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archaeologists-discover-intact-medieval-gauntlet-at-kyburg-castle

Archaeologists discover intact medieval gauntlet at Kyburg Castle

Archaeology, Science / /

Did Thanos drop something? —

The team also unearthed fragments of the glove’s companion, worn on the opposite hand.

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Archaeologists discover intact medieval gauntlet at Kyburg Castle

Canton of Zurich

Archaeologists announced this week that they have discovered an intact 14th-century medieval gauntlet during excavations around Switzerland’s Kyburg Castle—a rare find, given that only five other gauntlets from this period have been found in the region to date. It’s remarkably well-preserved, with many design and decorative details clearly visible. The team also unearthed fragments of the glove’s companion, worn on the opposite hand.

The origins of Kyburg Castle date back to around the late 10th century, with the first mention occurring in 1027 under the name Chuigeburg (translation: “cows-fort”). That suggests it was originally used to house livestock. The Holy Roman Emperor Conrad II destroyed that early fortification sometime between 1028 and 1030, but it was rebuilt and became a possession of the counts of Dillingen. It was partially destroyed again in 1079 as Pope Gregory VII and Henry IV (who would later become Holy Roman Emperor) engaged in a bitter conflict over which of them had the power to install bishops, monastery abbots, and even the pope himself (known as the Investiture Controversy).

That conflict didn’t resolve for a good 50 years, but Kyburg Castle endured, and by the 13th century, the counts of Kyburg (descendants of the Dillingen family) were among the most powerful noble families in the Swiss plateau. Kyburg Castle is one of the largest surviving castles in Switzerland, with its existing core dating back to the 13th century. In addition to the tower and great hall, there are several residential and commercial buildings as well as a chapel, all connected by a ring wall that encloses the courtyard. It has belonged to the Canton of Zurich since 1917 and is currently run by the Verein Museum Schloss Kyburg.

Canton of Zurich

During the winter of 2021 and 2022, the archaeologists were excavating the area just southeast of Kyburg Castle in response to the discovery of a medieval weaving cellar, found during the construction of a new house. The cellar had been destroyed by fire sometime in the 14th century, and the team concluded that a blacksmith likely made use of the cellar, since researchers found about 50 metal objects on site: hammers, keys, and projectile points, in particular. But the intact gauntlet and the fragments of its twin were the most exciting and relevant finds.

The use of hand protection in battle dates back to the late 12th century, when the mail sleeves of knights’ mail vests (hauberks) were extended into something akin to a mitten, designed to be worn over a leather glove and including some mail to protect the fingers. Mail gauntlets with separated fingers appeared in the early 14th century, featuring plates that overlapped around finger and thumb joints, although only the thumb plates were articulated. The design evolved again in the late 14th and early 15th centuries to include more articulated plates attached to mail or leather gloves.

The latter is the style of the newly discovered gauntlet. It’s a right-hand glove with four fingers. The individual plates are stacked like scales and held into place with rivets. Additional rivets on the inside were used to attach the plates to the base material (likely leather), and this in turn was sewn onto a fabric finger glove. This is fairly intricate craftsmanship, judging by the still-visible manufacturing and decorative details.

Kyburg Castle will display a copy of the gauntlet as part of its permanent exhibition, along with a reconstruction of the rest of the armor the owner would have worn along with it. The original will be displayed for three weeks this September. In the meantime, archaeologists will set about learning more about who the gauntlet belonged to and hopefully determine why such finds are so rare. It’s possible that such metal objects were melted down and recycled rather than being preserved, but until more such gauntlets are found, it is difficult to reach a definitive conclusion.

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DeepMind AI rivals the world’s smartest high schoolers at geometry

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Demis Hassabis, CEO of DeepMind Technologies and developer of AlphaGO, attends the AI Safety Summit at Bletchley Park on November 2, 2023 in Bletchley, England.

Enlarge / Demis Hassabis, CEO of DeepMind Technologies and developer of AlphaGO, attends the AI Safety Summit at Bletchley Park on November 2, 2023 in Bletchley, England.

A system developed by Google’s DeepMind has set a new record for AI performance on geometry problems. DeepMind’s AlphaGeometry managed to solve 25 of the 30 geometry problems drawn from the International Mathematical Olympiad between 2000 and 2022.

That puts the software ahead of the vast majority of young mathematicians and just shy of IMO gold medalists. DeepMind estimates that the average gold medalist would have solved 26 out of 30 problems. Many view the IMO as the world’s most prestigious math competition for high school students.

“Because language models excel at identifying general patterns and relationships in data, they can quickly predict potentially useful constructs, but often lack the ability to reason rigorously or explain their decisions,” DeepMind writes. To overcome this difficulty, DeepMind paired a language model with a more traditional symbolic deduction engine that performs algebraic and geometric reasoning.

The research was led by Trieu Trinh, a computer scientist who recently earned his PhD from New York University. He was a resident at DeepMind between 2021 and 2023.

Evan Chen, a former Olympiad gold medalist who evaluated some of AlphaGeometry’s output, praised it as “impressive because it’s both verifiable and clean.” Whereas some earlier software generated complex geometry proofs that were hard for human reviewers to understand, the output of AlphaGeometry is similar to what a human mathematician would write.

AlphaGeometry is part of DeepMind’s larger project to improve the reasoning capabilities of large language models by combining them with traditional search algorithms. DeepMind has published several papers in this area over the last year.

How AlphaGeometry works

Let’s start with a simple example shown in the AlphaGeometry paper, which was published by Nature on Wednesday:

The goal is to prove that if a triangle has two equal sides (AB and AC), then the angles opposite those sides will also be equal. We can do this by creating a new point D at the midpoint of the third side of the triangle (BC). It’s easy to show that all three sides of triangle ABD are the same length as the corresponding sides of triangle ACD. And two triangles with equal sides always have equal angles.

Geometry problems from the IMO are much more complex than this toy problem, but fundamentally, they have the same structure. They all start with a geometric figure and some facts about the figure like “side AB is the same length as side AC.” The goal is to generate a sequence of valid inferences that conclude with a given statement like “angle ABC is equal to angle BCA.”

For many years, we’ve had software that can generate lists of valid conclusions that can be drawn from a set of starting assumptions. Simple geometry problems can be solved by “brute force”: mechanically listing every possible fact that can be inferred from the given assumption, then listing every possible inference from those facts, and so on until you reach the desired conclusion.

But this kind of brute-force search isn’t feasible for an IMO-level geometry problem because the search space is too large. Not only do harder problems require longer proofs, but sophisticated proofs often require the introduction of new elements to the initial figure—as with point D in the above proof. Once you allow for these kinds of “auxiliary points,” the space of possible proofs explodes and brute-force methods become impractical.

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Elizabeth Holmes barred from federal health programs for 90 years

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Excluded —

The former Theranos CEO is barred from receiving payments from federal health program.

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Theranos CEO and founder Elizabeth Holmes.

Theranos CEO and founder Elizabeth Holmes.

Elizabeth Holmes—the disgraced and incarcerated founder of the infamous blood-testing startup Theranos—is barred from participating in federal health programs for nine decades, according to an announcement from the health department Friday.

The exclusion means that Holmes is barred from receiving payments from federal health programs for services or products, which significantly restricts her ability to work in the health care sector. It also prevents her from participating in Medicare, Medicaid, and other federal health care programs. With a 90-year term, the exclusion is lifelong for Holmes, who is currently 39.

The exclusion was announced by Inspector General Christi Grimm of the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Inspector General.

Holmes is serving an 11-year, three-month sentence for defrauding investors of her blood-testing startup, Theranos, which she founded in 2003. At the time, Holmes claimed to have developed proprietary technology that could perform hundreds of medical tests using just a small drop of blood from a finger prick. The remarkable claim helped her drive the company’s valuation to a stunning $9 billion in 2014, and set up lucrative partnerships. But, in reality, the technology never worked. The company collapsed in 2018, and she was convicted of fraud in 2022.

In today’s announcement, the health department noted that the statutory minimum on exclusions for convictions like Holmes’ is just five years. But other factors are considered when determining the term, including how long the fraud took place, the length of the prison sentence, and the amount of restitution ordered. In addition to her 11-year prison sentence, Holmes was ordered to pay approximately $452,047,200 in restitution, the HHS-OIG noted.

“Accurate and dependable diagnostic testing technology is imperative to our public health infrastructure. False statements related to the reliability of these medical products can endanger the health of patients and sow distrust in our health care system,” Grimm said. “As technology evolves, so do our efforts to safeguard the health and safety of patients, and HHS-OIG will continue to use its exclusion authority to protect the public from bad actors.”

HHS-OIG also excluded former Theranos President Ramesh Balwani from federal health programs for 90 years. Balwani was also convicted of fraud and is serving a nearly 13-year sentence.

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Big Pharma hiked the price of 775 drugs this year so far: Report

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up and up —

Meanwhile, Senate to consider subpoenas to force pharma CEOs testify on prices.

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Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).

Enlarge / Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).

Pharmaceutical companies have raised the list prices of 775 brand-name drugs so far this year, with a median increase of 4.5 percent, exceeding the rate of inflation, according to an analysis conducted for the Wall Street Journal.

Drugmakers typically raise prices at the start of the year, and Ars reported on January 2 that companies had plans to raise the list prices of more than 500 prescription medications. The updated analysis, carried out by 46brooklyn Research, a nonprofit drug-pricing analytics group, gives a clearer picture of pharmaceutical companies’ activities this month.

High-profile drugs Ozempic (made by Novo Nordisk) and Mounjaro (Eli Lilly), both used for Type II diabetes and weight loss, were among those that saw price increases. Ozempic’s list price went up 3.5 percent to nearly $970 for a month’s supply, while Mounjaro went up 4.5 percent to almost $1,070 a month. The annual inflation rate in the US was 3.4 percent for 2023.

The asthma medication Xolair (Novartis) and the Shingles vaccine Shingrix (GlaxoSmithKline) saw price increases above 7.5 percent, the Wall Street Journal noted. The highest prices were around 10 percent. For some drugs, the single-digit percentage increases can equal hundreds or even thousands of dollars. For instance, the cystic fibrosis treatment Trikafta (Vertex Pharmaceuticals) went up 5.9 percent to $26,546 for a 28-day supply. And the psoriasis therapy Skyrizi (AbbVie) saw an increase of 5.8 percent, bringing the price to $21,017.

Lawmakers’ responses

The list price is typically not the price that people and health insurance plans pay, and pharmaceutical companies say they sometimes don’t make more money from raising list prices. Instead, they argue that the higher list prices allow them to negotiate large discounts and rebates from pharmacy middle managers, whose revenue and dealings are opaque. Drugmakers who spoke with the Wall Street Journal attributed this year’s price hikes to market conditions, inflation, and the value the drugs provide. Overall, the tactics increase the cost of health care.

The hefty hikes come as the federal government is trying to crack down on the high prices of drugs in the US, which pays far more for prescription medications than other high-income countries. Last year, Medicare began, for the first time, negotiating the prices of 10 costly drugs. The negotiations were a provision of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. And a provision in 2021’s American Rescue Plan Act now forces drugmakers to pay Medicaid large rebates if their drug price increases outpace inflation.

But, it’s not enough to provide Americans with relief from high drug prices. On Thursday, Stat reported that Senate health committee chair Bernie Sanders (I-Vt) took steps to subpoena pharmaceutical CEOs regarding a Congressional investigation on high drug prices. Sanders invited Johnson & Johnson CEO Joaquin Duato, Merck CEO Robert Davis, and Bristol Myers Squibb CEO Chris Boerner to testify—but only Boerner agreed, and only on the condition that he would not be the only CEO testifying. The trio were invited to a hearing titled “Why Does the United States Pay, By Far, The Highest Prices In The World For Prescription Drugs?,” which was originally scheduled for January 25. Now, Sanders will hold a committee vote on January 31 on whether to issue subpoenas for the CEOs of Johnson & Johnson and Merck. If the committee votes in favor, it will be the first time it has issued a subpoena in more than 40 years.

All three companies have sued the federal government over the new regulations requiring them to negotiate prices with Medicare. J&J and Merck accused Sanders of calling them to testify as retribution for their legal action.

“You have opted not for the most effective way of securing information relevant to the Committee’s important work on drug prices, but for a broad-ranging public spectacle, with witnesses you can question on pending litigation you disagree with,” Merck wrote to Sanders.

Sanders called the two CEOs’ refusal to testify “absolutely unacceptable.”

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