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AI cannot be used to deny health care coverage, feds clarify to insurers

AI, algorithm, Artificial Intelligence, CMS, health, healthcare, humana, medicare advantage, NaviHealth, nH Predict, Science, unitedhealth / /

On Notice —

CMS worries AI could wrongfully deny care for those on Medicare Advantage plans.

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A nursing home resident is pushed along a corridor by a nurse.

Enlarge / A nursing home resident is pushed along a corridor by a nurse.

Health insurance companies cannot use algorithms or artificial intelligence to determine care or deny coverage to members on Medicare Advantage plans, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) clarified in a memo sent to all Medicare Advantage insurers.

The memo—formatted like an FAQ on Medicare Advantage (MA) plan rules—comes just months after patients filed lawsuits claiming that UnitedHealth and Humana have been using a deeply flawed, AI-powered tool to deny care to elderly patients on MA plans. The lawsuits, which seek class-action status, center on the same AI tool, called nH Predict, used by both insurers and developed by NaviHealth, a UnitedHealth subsidiary.

According to the lawsuits, nH Predict produces draconian estimates for how long a patient will need post-acute care in facilities like skilled nursing homes and rehabilitation centers after an acute injury, illness, or event, like a fall or a stroke. And NaviHealth employees face discipline for deviating from the estimates, even though they often don’t match prescribing physicians’ recommendations or Medicare coverage rules. For instance, while MA plans typically provide up to 100 days of covered care in a nursing home after a three-day hospital stay, using nH Predict, patients on UnitedHealth’s MA plan rarely stay in nursing homes for more than 14 days before receiving payment denials, the lawsuits allege.

Specific warning

It’s unclear how nH Predict works exactly, but it reportedly uses a database of 6 million patients to develop its predictions. Still, according to people familiar with the software, it only accounts for a small set of patient factors, not a full look at a patient’s individual circumstances.

This is a clear no-no, according to the CMS’s memo. For coverage decisions, insurers must “base the decision on the individual patient’s circumstances, so an algorithm that determines coverage based on a larger data set instead of the individual patient’s medical history, the physician’s recommendations, or clinical notes would not be compliant,” the CMS wrote.

The CMS then provided a hypothetical that matches the circumstances laid out in the lawsuits, writing:

In an example involving a decision to terminate post-acute care services, an algorithm or software tool can be used to assist providers or MA plans in predicting a potential length of stay, but that prediction alone cannot be used as the basis to terminate post-acute care services.

Instead, the CMS wrote, in order for an insurer to end coverage, the individual patient’s condition must be reassessed, and denial must be based on coverage criteria that is publicly posted on a website that is not password protected. In addition, insurers who deny care “must supply a specific and detailed explanation why services are either no longer reasonable and necessary or are no longer covered, including a description of the applicable coverage criteria and rules.”

In the lawsuits, patients claimed that when coverage of their physician-recommended care was unexpectedly wrongfully denied, insurers didn’t give them full explanations.

Fidelity

In all, the CMS finds that AI tools can be used by insurers when evaluating coverage—but really only as a check to make sure the insurer is following the rules. An “algorithm or software tool should only be used to ensure fidelity,” with coverage criteria, the CMS wrote. And, because “publicly posted coverage criteria are static and unchanging, artificial intelligence cannot be used to shift the coverage criteria over time” or apply hidden coverage criteria.

The CMS sidesteps any debate about what qualifies as artificial intelligence by offering a broad warning about algorithms and artificial intelligence. “There are many overlapping terms used in the context of rapidly developing software tools,” the CMS wrote.

Algorithms can imply a decisional flow chart of a series of if-then statements (i.e., if the patient has a certain diagnosis, they should be able to receive a test), as well as predictive algorithms (predicting the likelihood of a future admission, for example). Artificial intelligence has been defined as a machine-based system that can, for a given set of human-defined objectives, make predictions, recommendations, or decisions influencing real or virtual environments. Artificial intelligence systems use machine- and human-based inputs to perceive real and virtual environments; abstract such perceptions into models through analysis in an automated manner; and use model inference to formulate options for information or action.

The CMS also openly worried that the use of either of these types of tools can reinforce discrimination and biases—which has already happened with racial bias. The CMS warned insurers to ensure any AI tool or algorithm they use “is not perpetuating or exacerbating existing bias, or introducing new biases.”

While the memo overall was an explicit clarification of existing MA rules, the CMS ended by putting insurers on notice that it is increasing its audit activities and “will be monitoring closely whether MA plans are utilizing and applying internal coverage criteria that are not found in Medicare laws.” Non-compliance can result in warning letters, corrective action plans, monetary penalties, and enrollment and marketing sanctions.

AI cannot be used to deny health care coverage, feds clarify to insurers Read More »

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These states are basically begging you to get a heat pump

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feel the heat —

Nine states are teaming up to accelerate adoption of this climate-friendly device.

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Thermal imaging of two heat pumps and fan units, showing red and orange areas with elevated temperatures.

Death is coming for the old-school gas furnace—and its killer is the humble heat pump. They’re already outselling gas furnaces in the US, and now a coalition of states has signed an agreement to supercharge the gas-to-electric transition by making it as cheap and easy as possible for their residents to switch.

Nine states have signed a memorandum of understanding that says that heat pumps should make up at least 65 percent of residential heating, air conditioning, and water-heating shipments by 2030. (“Shipments” here means systems manufactured, a proxy for how many are actually sold.) By 2040, these states—California, Colorado, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, and Rhode Island—are aiming for 90 percent of those shipments to be heat pumps.

“It’s a really strong signal from states that they’re committed to accelerating this transition to zero-emissions residential buildings,” says Emily Levin, senior policy adviser at the Northeast States for Coordinated Air Use Management (NESCAUM), an association of air-quality agencies, which facilitated the agreement. The states will collaborate, for instance, in pursuing federal funding, developing standards for the rollout of heat pumps, and laying out an overarching plan “with priority actions to support widespread electrification of residential buildings.”

Instead of burning planet-warming natural gas, a heat pump warms a building by transferring heat from the outdoor air into the interior space. Run it in the opposite direction, and it can cool the inside of a building—a heat pump is both a heater and AC unit. Because the system is electric, it can run off a grid increasingly powered by renewables like wind and solar. Even if you have to run a heat pump with electricity from fossil-fuel power plants, it’s much more efficient than a furnace, because it’s moving heat instead of creating it.

A heat pump can save an average American household over $550 a year, according to one estimate. They’ve gotten so efficient that even when it’s freezing out, they can still extract warmth from the air to heat a home. You can even install a heat pump system that also warms your water. “We really need consumers to move away from dirty to clean heat, and we really want to get the message out that heat pumps are really the way to go,” says Serena McIlwain, Maryland’s secretary of the environment. “We have homeowners who are getting ready to replace their furnaces, and if they’re not aware, they are not going to replace it with a heat pump.”

The coalition’s announcement comes just months after the federal government doubled down on its own commitment to heat pumps, announcing $169 million in funding for the domestic production of the systems. That money comes from 2022’s Inflation Reduction Act, which also provides an American household with thousands of dollars in rebates or tax credits to switch to a heat pump.

These states are aiming to further collaborate with those heat pump manufacturers by tracking sales and overall progress, sending a signal to the industry to ramp up production to meet the ensuing demand. They’ll also collaborate with each other on research and generally share information, working toward the best strategies for realizing the transition from gas to electric. Basically, they’re pursuing a sort of standardization of the policies and regulations for getting more heat pumps built, bought, and installed, which other states outside of the coalition might eventually tap into.

“A consistent approach between states helps to ease the market transition,” says Matt Casale, senior manager of appliance standards at the Building Decarbonization Coalition, which is collaborating with the Northeast States for Coordinated Air Use Management. “There are all of these manufacturers, and all of these contractors, all along the supply chain, trying to plan out their next several years. They want to know: What is it going to look like?”

There’s also the less-talked-about challenge of the green energy revolution: training enough technicians to actually install the heat pumps. To that end, the memorandum calls for workforce development and contractor training. “If we’re pushing heat pumps and more installations, and we don’t have enough electricians to do the job, we’re not going to meet the goal—period,” says McIlwain. “We do need to put a lot of money and energy and resources into making sure that we have the workforce available to do it.”

In addition to the technicians working with the systems, the country needs way more electricians to retrofit homes to go fully electric beyond heat pumps, with solar panels and induction stoves and home batteries. To help there, last year the White House announced the formation of the American Climate Corps, which aims to put more than 20,000 people to work in clean energy and overall climate resilience.

With states collaborating like this on heat pumps, the idea is to lift the device from an obscure technology cherished by climate nerds into ubiquity, for the good of consumers and the planet. “We need to be sending these unmistakable signals to the marketplace that heat pumps and zero-emission homes are the future,” says Casale. “This agreement between this many states really sets the stage for doing that.”

This story originally appeared on wired.com.

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Building robots for “Zero Mass” space exploration

materials science, robotics, Science, Space, Space exploration / /
A robot performing construction on the surface of the moon against the black backdrop of space.

Sending 1 kilogram to Mars will set you back roughly $2.4 million, judging by the cost of the Perseverance mission. If you want to pack up supplies and gear for every conceivable contingency, you’re going to need a lot of those kilograms.

But what if you skipped almost all that weight and only took a do-it-all Swiss Army knife instead? That’s exactly what scientists at NASA Ames Research Center and Stanford University are testing with robots, algorithms, and highly advanced building materials.

Zero mass exploration

“The concept of zero mass exploration is rooted in self-replicating machines, an engineering concept John von Neumann conceived in the 1940s”, says Kenneth C. Cheung, a NASA Ames researcher. He was involved in the new study published recently in Science Robotics covering self-reprogrammable metamaterials—materials that do not exist in nature and have the ability to change their configuration on their own. “It’s the idea that an engineering system can not only replicate, but sustain itself in the environment,” he adds.

Based on this concept, Robert A. Freitas Jr. in the 1980s proposed a self-replicating interstellar spacecraft called the Von Neumann probe that would visit a nearby star system, find resources to build a copy of itself, and send this copy to another star system. Rinse and repeat.

“The technology of reprogrammable metamaterials [has] advanced to the point where we can start thinking about things like that. It can’t make everything we need yet, but it can make a really big chunk of what we need,” says Christine E. Gregg, a NASA Ames researcher and the lead author of the study.

Building blocks for space

One of the key problems with Von Neumann probes was that taking elements found in the soil on alien worlds and processing them into actual engineering components was resource-intensive and required huge amounts of energy. The NASA Ames team solved that with using prefabricated “voxels”—standardized reconfigurable building blocks.

The system derives its operating principles from the way nature works on a very fundamental level. “Think how biology, one of the most scalable systems we have ever seen, builds stuff,” says Gregg. “It does that with building blocks. There are on the order of 20 amino acids which your body uses to make proteins to make 200 different types of cells and then combines trillions of those cells to make organs as complex as my hair and my eyes. We are using the same strategy,” she adds.

To demo this technology, they built a set of 256 of those blocks—extremely strong 3D structures made with a carbon-fiber-reinforced polymer called StattechNN-40CF. Each block had fastening interfaces on every side that could be used to reversibly attach them to other blocks and form a strong truss structure.

A 3×3 truss structure made with these voxels had an average failure load of 900 Newtons, which means it could hold over 90 kilograms despite being incredibly light itself (its density is just 0.0103 grams per cubic centimeter). “We took these voxels out in backpacks and built a boat, a shelter, a bridge you could walk on. The backpacks weighed around 18 kilograms. Without technology like that, you wouldn’t even think about fitting a boat and a bridge in a backpack,” says Cheung. “But the big thing about this study is that we implemented this reconfigurable system autonomously with robots,” he adds.

Building robots for “Zero Mass” space exploration Read More »

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We may now know who’s behind the lead-tainted cinnamon in toddler fruit pouches

apple cinnamon fruit pouches, apple sauce, chromium, cinnamon, ecuador, fda, lead, poisoning, Science, spices, WanaBana / /

Tragedy —

At least 413 people, mostly young children, in 43 states have been poisoned.

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The three recalled pouches linked to lead poisonings.

Enlarge / The three recalled pouches linked to lead poisonings.

A spice grinder named Carlos Aguilera of Ecuador is the likely source of contaminated cinnamon containing extremely high levels of lead and chromium, which made its way into the apple cinnamon fruit pouches of US toddlers, according to an announcement by the Food and Drug Administration this week.

To date, there have been 413 cases of poisoning across 43 US states, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The FDA said Ecuadorian officials at the Agencia Nacional de Regulación, Control y Vigilancia Sanitaria (ARCSA) identified Aguilera as the cinnamon processor and reported to the FDA that his business is no longer operating. Aquilera received raw cinnamon sticks sourced from Sri Lanka, which, according to raw sample testing conducted by ARCSA, had no lead contamination upon their arrival. After Aguilera processed the cinnamon, it was supplied by a company called Negasmart to Austrofoods, the manufacturer of the apple cinnamon pouches.

According to FDA inspection documents obtained by CBS News, Austrofoods never tested its product for heavy metals at any point in production and repeatedly failed to identify the cinnamon as a raw ingredient needing such testing. “[Y]ou did not sample and test the raw material or the finished product for heavy metals,” the FDA wrote in its inspection report. Testing by the FDA immediately identified high levels of lead in the finished apple cinnamon puree and in the ground cinnamon powder Austrofoods used for the purees. The regulator also observed problems with Austrofood’s pasteurization and sanitation procedures, and noted equipment in poor condition that could have allowed metal pieces to break loose and get into food products.

Austrofood’s apple cinnamon fruit puree pouches were sold under three brands, all of which have been recalled: WanaBana apple cinnamon fruit puree pouches, Schnucks brand cinnamon-flavored applesauce pouches, and Weis brand cinnamon applesauce pouches.

The FDA reported that ARCSA’s investigation and legal proceedings are still ongoing to determine the ultimate responsibility for the contamination. The FDA acknowledged that it has “limited authority over foreign ingredient suppliers who do not directly ship product to the US. This is because their food undergoes further manufacturing/processing prior to export. Thus, the FDA cannot take direct action with Negasmart or Carlos Aguilera.”

Testing by the FDA hints that the cinnamon was contaminated with lead chromate, a vibrant yellow substance often used to bolster a spice’s appearance and weight artificially. It’s frequently been found contaminating turmeric sourced from India and Bangladesh.

The children exposed to the purees face uncertain long-term health effects. The effects of ingesting chromium are unclear, and it’s also not clear what form of chromium the children ingested from the pouches. Lead, on the other hand, is a potent neurotoxic metal that can damage the brain and nervous system. In young children, the effects of acute exposures could manifest as learning and behavior problems, as well as hearing and speech problems in the years to come.

Last year, the CDC reported that exposed children had shown blood lead levels as high as 29 micrograms per deciliter (µg/dL), more than eight times the 3.5 µg/dL threshold the agency considers the cutoff for high exposure.

We may now know who’s behind the lead-tainted cinnamon in toddler fruit pouches Read More »

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Anti-abortion group’s studies retracted before Supreme Court mifepristone case

Abortion, fda, health, mifepristone, retraction, Science, Scientific publishing, Supreme Court / /

retracted —

A large number of other, non-retracted studies find mifepristone to be very safe.

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Mifepristone (Mifeprex) and misoprostol, the two drugs used in a medication abortion, are seen at the Women's Reproductive Clinic, which provides legal medication abortion services, in Santa Teresa, New Mexico, on June 17, 2022.

Enlarge / Mifepristone (Mifeprex) and misoprostol, the two drugs used in a medication abortion, are seen at the Women’s Reproductive Clinic, which provides legal medication abortion services, in Santa Teresa, New Mexico, on June 17, 2022.

Scientific journal publisher Sage has retracted key abortion studies cited by anti-abortion groups in a legal case aiming to revoke regulatory approval of the abortion and miscarriage medication, mifepristone—a case that has reached the US Supreme Court, with a hearing scheduled for March 26.

On Monday, Sage announced the retraction of three studies, all published in the journal Health Services Research and Managerial Epidemiology. All three were led by James Studnicki, who works for The Charlotte Lozier Institute, a research arm of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America. The publisher said the retractions were based on various problems related to the studies’ methods, analyses, and presentation, as well as undisclosed conflicts of interest.

Two of the studies were cited by anti-abortion groups in their lawsuit against the Food and Drug Administration (Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v. FDA), which claimed the regulator’s approval and regulation of mifepristone was unlawful. The two studies were also cited by District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk in Texas, who issued a preliminary injunction last April to revoke the FDA’s 2000 approval of mifepristone. A conservative panel of judges for the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans partially reversed that ruling months later, but the Supreme Court froze the lower court’s order until the appeals process had concluded.

Mifepristone, considered safe and effective by the FDA and medical experts, is used in over half of abortions in the US.

Criticism

Amid the legal dispute, the now-retracted studies drew immediate criticism from experts, who pointed out flaws. Of the three, the most influential and heavily criticized is the 2021 study titled “A Longitudinal Cohort Study of Emergency Room Utilization Following Mifepristone Chemical and Surgical Abortions, 1999–2015” (PDF). The study suggested that up to 35 percent of women on Medicaid who had a medication abortion between 2001 and 2015 visited an emergency department within 30 days afterward. Its main claim was that medication abortions led to a higher rate of emergency department visits than surgical abortions.

Critics noted a number of problems: The study looked at all emergency department visits, not only visits related to abortion. This could capture medical care beyond abortion-related conditions, because people on Medicaid often lack primary care and resort to going to emergency departments for routine care. When the researchers tried to narrow down the visits to just those related to abortion, they included medical codes that were not related to abortion, such as codes for ectopic pregnancy, and they didn’t capture the seriousness of the condition that prompted the visit. Medication abortions can cause bleeding, and women can go to the emergency department if they don’t know what amount of bleeding is normal. The study also counted multiple visits from the same individual patient as multiple visits, likely inflating the numbers. Last, the study did not put the data in context of emergency department use by Medicaid beneficiaries in general over the time period.

In contrast to Studnicki’s study, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists notes that studies looking at tens of thousands of medication abortions have concluded that “Serious side effects occur in less than 1 percent of patients, and major adverse events—significant infection, blood loss, or hospitalization—occur in less than 0.3 percent of patients. The risk of death is almost non-existent.”

Anti-abortion group’s studies retracted before Supreme Court mifepristone case Read More »

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Robo-dinosaur scares grasshoppers to shed light on why dinos evolved feathers

dinosaurs, evolution, paleobiology, paleontology, robotics, Science / /

What’s the point of half a wing? —

The feathers may have helped dinosaurs frighten and flush out prey.

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Grasshoppers, beware! Robopteryx is here to flush you from your hiding place.

Enlarge / Grasshoppers, beware! Robopteryx is here to flush you from your hiding place.

Jinseok Park, Piotr Jablonski et al., 2024

Scientists in South Korea built a robotic dinosaur and used it to startle grasshoppers to learn more about why dinosaurs evolved feathers, according to a recent paper published in the journal Scientific Reports. The results suggest that certain dinosaurs may have employed a hunting strategy in which they flapped their proto-wings to flush out prey, and this behavior may have led to the evolution of larger and stiffer feathers.

As reported previously, feathers are the defining feature of birds, but that wasn’t always the case. For millions of years, various species of dinosaurs sported feathers, some of which have left behind fossilized impressions. For the most part, the feathers we’ve found have been attached to smaller dinosaurs, many of them along the lineage that gave rise to birds—although in 2012, scientists discovered three nearly complete skeletons of a “gigantic” feathered dinosaur species, Yutyrannus huali, related to the ancestors of Tyrannosaurus Rex.

Various types of dino-feathers have been found in the fossil record over the last 30 years, such as so-called pennaceous feathers (present in most modern birds). These were found on distal forelimbs of certain species like Caudipteryx, serving as proto-wings that were too small to use for flight, as well as around the tip of the tail as plumage. Paleontologists remain unsure of the function of pennaceous feathers—what use could there be for half a wing? A broad range of hypotheses have been proposed: foraging or hunting, pouncing or immobilizing prey, brooding, gliding, or wing-assisted incline running, among others.

Caudipteryx zoui skeleton at the Löwentor Museum in Stuttgart, Germany.” height=”475″ src=”https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/dino2-640×475.jpg” width=”640″>

Enlarge / Mounted Caudipteryx zoui skeleton at the Löwentor Museum in Stuttgart, Germany.

Co-author Jinseok Park of Seoul National University in South Korea and colleagues thought the pennaceous feathers might have been used to flush out potential prey from hiding places so they could be more easily caught. It’s a strategy employed by certain modern bird species, like roadrunners, and typically involves a visual display of the plumage on wings and tails.

There is evidence that this flush-pursuit hunting strategy evolved multiple times. According to Park et al., it’s based on the “rare enemy effect,” i.e., certain prey (like insects) wouldn’t be capable of responding to different predators in different ways and would not respond effectively to an unusual flush-pursuit strategy. Rather than escaping a predator, the insects fly toward their own demise. “The use of plumage to flush prey could have increased the frequency of chase after escaping prey, thus amplifying the importance of plumage in drag-based or lift-based maneuvering for a successful pursuit,” the authors wrote.  “This, in turn, could have led to the larger and stiffer feathers for faster movements and more visual flush displays.”

To test their hypothesis, Park et al. constructed a robot dinosaur they dubbed “Robopteryx,” using Caudipteryx as a model. They built the robot’s body out of aluminum, with the proto-wings and tail plumage made from black paper and plastic ribbing. The head was made of black polystyrene, the wing folds were made of black elastic stocking, and the whole contraption was covered in felt. They scanned the scientific literature on Caudipteryx to determine resting posture angles and motion ranges. The motion of the forelimbs and tail was controlled by a mechanism controlled by custom software running on a mobile phone.

Robopteryx faces off against a grasshopper and prepares to flap its wings.

Enlarge / Robopteryx faces off against a grasshopper and prepares to flap its wings.

Jinseok Park, Piotr Jablonski et al., 2024

Park et al. then conducted experiments with the robot performing motions consistent with a flush display using the band-winged grasshopper (a likely prey), which has relatively simple neural circuits. They placed a wooden stick with scale marks next to the grasshopper and photographed it to record its body orientation relative to the robot, and then made the robot’s forelimbs and tail flap to mimic a flush display. If the grasshopper escaped, they ended the individual test; if the grasshopper didn’t respond, they slowly moved the robot closer and closer using a long beam. The team also attached electrodes to grasshoppers in the lab to measure neural spikes as the insects were shown projected Cauderyx animations of a flush display on a flat-screen monitor.

The results: around half the grasshoppers fled in response to Robopteryx without feathers, compared to over 90 percent when feathered wings flapped. They also measured stronger neural signals when feathers were present. For Park et al., this is solid evidence in support of their hypothesis that a flush-pursuit hunting strategy may have been a factor in the evolution of pennaceous feathers. “Our results emphasize the significance of considering sensory aspects of predator-prey interactions in the studies of major evolutionary innovations among predatory species,” the authors wrote.

Not everyone is convinced by these results. “It seems to me to be very unlikely that a structure as complex as a pennaceous feather would evolve for such a specific behavioral role,” Steven Salisbury of the University of Queensland in Australia, who was not involved with the research, told New Scientist. “I am sure there are lots of ways to scare grasshoppers other than to flap some feathers at it. You can have feathers to scare grasshoppers and you can have them to insulate and incubate eggs. They’re good for display, the stabilization of body position when running, and, of course, for gliding and powered flight. Feathers help for all sorts of things.”

Scientific Reports, 2024. DOI: 10.1038/s41598-023-50225-x  (About DOIs).

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Virgin Galactic and the FAA are investigating a dropped pin on last spaceflight

Science, Space, Virgin Galactic, vss unity / /

Rapid Unscheduled Dropped Pin —

“The FAA is overseeing the Virgin Galactic-led mishap investigation.”

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White Knight Two carries the first SpaceShipTwo during a glide test.

White Knight Two carries the first SpaceShipTwo during a glide test.

Virgin Galactic

Virgin Galactic reported an anomaly on its most recent flight, Galactic 06, which took place 12 days ago from a spaceport in New Mexico.

In a statement released Monday, the company said it discovered a dropped pin during a post-flight review of the mission, which carried two pilots and four passengers to an altitude of 55.1 miles (88.7 km).

This alignment pin, according to Virgin Galactic, helps ensure the VSS Unity spaceship is aligned to its carrier aircraft when mating the vehicles on the ground during pre-flight procedures. The company said the alignment pin and a shear pin fitting assembly performed as designed during the mated portion of the flight, and only the alignment pin detached after the spaceship was released from the mothership.

“During mated flight, as the vehicles climb towards release altitude, the alignment pin helps transfer drag and other forces from the spaceship to the shear pin fitting assembly and into the pylon and center wing of the mothership,” the statement said. “The shear pin fitting assembly remained both attached and intact on the mothership with no damage. While both parts play a role during mated flight, they do not support the spaceship’s weight, nor do they have an active function once the spaceship is released.”

At no time, the company said, did the detached pin pose a safety threat to the spacecraft or the carrier aircraft. Additionally, as the flight occurred in restricted air space, the dropped pin did not threaten people or property on the ground.

The FAA gets involved

Virgin Galactic said it reported the anomaly to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) on January 31.

On Tuesday, the FAA confirmed that there was no public property or injuries that resulted from the mishap. “The FAA is overseeing the Virgin Galactic-led mishap investigation to ensure the company complies with its FAA-approved mishap investigation plan and other regulatory requirements,” the federal agency said in a statement.

Before VSS Unity can return to flight, the FAA must approve Virgin Galactic’s final report, including corrective actions to prevent a similar problem in the future.

The problem comes as Virgin Galactic plans to wind down its flight campaign with the VSS Unity and intends to move to its next-generation version of the spacecraft. These so-called “Delta-class” spaceships remain in development and are likely a couple of years away from making commercial flights.

VSS Unity has completed 11 spaceflights to date, reaching an impressive monthly cadence last year. However, the company is planning only one more mission before retiring the vehicle. This decision came as something of a surprise because the company’s president told Ars last August that the Unity airframe was capable of 500 to 1,000 flights.

This Galactic 07 mission, whose passengers and flight crew have yet to be announced, was scheduled for the second quarter of 2024. In its statement this week, Virgin Galactic said it remained committed to flying that mission.

Virgin Galactic and the FAA are investigating a dropped pin on last spaceflight Read More »

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Trio wins $700K Vesuvius Challenge grand prize for deciphering ancient scroll

ancient texts, Archaeology, digital unwrapping, Herculaneum scrolls, Science, Vesuvius Challenge / /
Text from one of the Herculaneum scrolls, unseen for 2,000 years.

Enlarge / Text from one of the Herculaneum scrolls has been deciphered. Roughly 95 percent of the scroll remains to be read.

Vesuvius Challenge

Last fall we reported on the use of machine learning to decipher the first letters from a previously unreadable ancient scroll found in an ancient Roman villa at Herculaneum—part of the 2023 Vesuvius Challenge. Tech entrepreneur and challenge co-founder Nat Friedman has now announced via X (formerly Twitter) that they have awarded the grand prize of $700,000 for producing the first readable text. Three winning team members are Luke Farritor, Yousef Nader, and Julian Schilliger.

As previously reported, the ancient Roman resort town Pompeii wasn’t the only city destroyed in the catastrophic 79 AD eruption of Mount Vesuvius. Several other cities in the area, including the wealthy enclave of Herculaneum, were fried by clouds of hot gas called pyroclastic pulses and flows. But still, some remnants of Roman wealth survived. One palatial residence in Herculaneum—believed to have once belonged to a man named Piso—contained hundreds of priceless written scrolls made from papyrus, singed into carbon by volcanic gas.

The scrolls stayed buried under volcanic mud until they were excavated in the 1700s from a single room that archaeologists believe held the personal working library of an Epicurean philosopher named Philodemus. There may be even more scrolls still buried on the as-yet-unexcavated lower floors of the villa. The few opened fragments helped scholars identify a variety of Greek philosophical texts, including On Nature by Epicurus and several by Philodemus himself, as well as a handful of Latin works. But the more than 600 rolled-up scrolls were so fragile that it was long believed they would never be readable since even touching them could cause them to crumble.

Brent Searles’ lab at the University of Kentucky has been working on deciphering the Herculaneum scrolls for many years. He employs a different method of “virtually unrolling” damaged scrolls, which he used in 2016 to “open” a scroll found on the western shore of the Dead Sea, revealing the first few verses from the book of Leviticus. The team’s approach combined digital scanning with micro-computed tomography—a noninvasive technique often used for cancer imaging—with segmentation to digitally create pages, augmented with texturing and flattening techniques. Then they developed software (Volume Cartography) to unroll the scroll virtually.

Brent Seales, Seth Parker, and Michael Drakopoulos at the particle accelerator.

Enlarge / Brent Seales, Seth Parker, and Michael Drakopoulos at the particle accelerator.

Vesuvius Challenge

The older Herculaneum scrolls, however, were written with carbon-based ink (charcoal and water), so one would not get the same fluorescing in the CT scans. But Searles thought the scans could still capture minute textural differences indicating those areas of papyrus that contained ink compared to the blank areas, training an artificial neural network to do just that. And a few years ago, he had two of the intact scrolls analyzed at a synchrotron radiation lab in Oxford.

Then tech entrepreneurs Friedman and Daniel Gross heard about Searles’ work, and they all decided to launch the Vesuvius Challenge in March last year, reasoning that crowdsourcing would help decipher the scrolls’ contents that much faster. Searles released all the scans and code to the public as well as images of the flattened pieces. Some 1,500 teams have been collaborating on the challenge through Discord, and as each milestone is reached, the winner’s code is also made available so everyone can continue to build on those advances.

Trio wins $700K Vesuvius Challenge grand prize for deciphering ancient scroll Read More »

new-e.-coli-strain-will-accelerate-evolution-of-the-genes-of-your-choice

New E. coli strain will accelerate evolution of the genes of your choice

biochemistry, Biology, E. coli, evolution, mutation rate, mutations, Science / /

Making mutants —

Strain eliminates the trade-offs of a high mutation rate.

–

Woman holding a plate of bacteria with clusters of bacteria on it.

Genetic mutations are essential for innovation and evolution, yet too many—or the wrong ones—can be fatal. So researchers at Cambridge established a synthetic “orthogonal” DNA replication system in E. coli that they can use as a risk-free way to generate and study such mutations. It is orthogonal because it is completely separate from the system that E. coli uses to copy its actual genome, which contains the genes E. coli needs to survive.

The genes in the orthogonal system are copied with an extraordinarily error-prone DNA replication enzyme, which spurs rapid evolution by generating many random mutations. This goes on while E. coli’s genes are replicated by its normal high-fidelity DNA copying enzyme. The two enzymes work alongside each other, each doing their own thing but not interfering with the other’s genes.

Engineering rapid mutation

Such a cool idea, right? The scientists stole it from nature. Yeast already has a system like this, with a set of genes copied by a dedicated enzyme that doesn’t replicate the rest of the genome. But E. coli is much easier to work with than yeast, and its population can double in 20 minutes, so you can get a lot of rounds of replication and evolution done fast.

The researchers generated the system by pillaging a phage—a virus that infects E. coli. They took out all of the phage genes that allow the phage to grow uncontrollably until it bursts the E. coli cell it infected open. The engineering left only a cassette containing the genes responsible for copying the phage genome. Once this cassette was inserted into the E. coli genome, it could simultaneously replicate at least three different strings of genes placed next to it in the DNA, maintaining them for over a hundred generations—all while leaving the rest of the E. coli genome to be copied by other enzymes.

The scientists then tweaked the mutation rate of the orthogonal DNA-replicating enzyme, eventually enhancing it 1,000-fold. To test if the system could be used to evolve new functions, they inserted a gene for resistance to one antibiotic and saw how long it took for that gene to mutate into one conferring resistance to a different antibiotic. Within twelve days, they got 150 times more resistance to the new antibiotic. They also inserted the gene encoding green fluorescent protein and increased its fluorescence over 1,000-fold in five days.

Evolving detoxification

Not 20 pages later, in the same issue of Science, Frances Arnold’s lab has a paper that provides evidence of how powerful this approach could be. This team directed the evolution of an enzyme the old-fashioned way: through sequential rounds of random mutagenesis and selection for the desired trait. Arnold won The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2018 for the directed evolution of enzymes, so she knows what she’s about. In this recent work, her lab generated an enzyme that can biodegrade volatile methyl siloxanes. We make megatons of these compounds every year to stick in cleaning products, shampoos and lotions, and industrial products, but they linger in the environment. They contain carbon-silicon bonds, which were never a thing until humans made them about 80 years ago; since nature never made these bonds, there is no natural way to break them, either.

“Directed evolution with siloxane was particularly challenging,” the authors note in their introduction, for various technical reasons. “We started from an enzyme we had previously engineered for other chemistry on siloxanes—that enzyme, unlike the natural enzyme, showed a tiny bit of activity for siloxane Si-C bond cleavage. The overall project, however, from initial discovery to figuring out how to measure what we wanted, took several years,” Arnold said. And it is only the first step in possibly rendering siloxanes biodegradable. The accelerated continuous evolution that the new orthologous system allows will hopefully greatly facilitate the development of enzymes and other proteins like this that will have applications in research, medicine, and industry.

We do not (yet) have machines that can efficiently assemble long stretches of DNA or make proteins. But cells do these things extremely efficiently, and E. coli cells have long been the ones used in the lab as little factories, churning out whatever genes or proteins researchers program into them. Now E. coli can be used for one more molecular task—they can be little hotbeds of evolution.

Science, 2024.  DOI: 10.1126/science.adi5554, 10.1126/science.adk1281

New E. coli strain will accelerate evolution of the genes of your choice Read More »

humans-are-living-longer-than-ever-no-matter-where-they-come-from 

Humans are living longer than ever no matter where they come from 

Biology, health, Longevity, public health, Science / /

Live long and prosper? —

Disease outbreaks and human conflicts help dictate regional differences in longevity.

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An older person drinking coffee in an urban environment.

Most of us want to stay on this planet as long as possible. While there are still differences depending on sex and region, we are now living longer as a species—and it seems life spans will only continue to grow longer.

Researcher David Atance of Universidad de Alcalá, Spain, and his team gathered data on the trends of the past. They then used their findings to project what we can expect to see in the future. Some groups have had it harder than others because of factors such as war, poverty, natural disasters, or disease, but the researchers found that morality and longevity trends are becoming more similar regardless of disparities between sexes and locations.

“The male-female gap is decreasing among the [clusters],” they said in a study recently published in PLOS One.

Remembering the past

The research team used specific mortality indicators—such as life expectancy at birth and most common age at death–to identify five global clusters that reflect the average life expectancy in different parts of the world. The countries in these clusters changed slightly from 1990 to 2010 and are projected to change further by 2030 (though 2030 projections are obviously tentative). Data for both males and females was considered when deciding which countries belonged in which cluster during each period. Sometimes, one sex thrived while the other struggled within a cluster—or even within the same country.

Clusters that included mostly wealthier countries had the best chance at longevity in 1990 and 2010. Low-income countries predictably had the worst mortality rate. In 1990, these countries, many of which are in Africa, suffered from war, political upheaval, and the lethal spread of HIV/AIDS. Rwanda endured a bloody civil war during this period. Around the same time, Uganda had tensions with Rwanda, as well as Sudan and Zaire. In the Middle East, the Gulf War and its aftermath inevitably affected 1990 male and female populations.

Along with a weak health care system, the factors that gave most African countries a high mortality rate were still just as problematic in 2010. In all clusters, male life spans tended to differ slightly less between countries than female life spans. However, in some regions, there were differences between how long males lived compared to females. Mortality significantly increased in 1990 male populations from former Soviet countries after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and this trend continued in 2010. Deaths in those countries were attributed to violence, accidents, cardiovascular disease, alcohol, an inadequate healthcare system, poverty, and psychosocial stress.

Glimpsing the future

2030 predictions must be taken with caution. Though past trends can be good indicators of what is to come, trends do not always continue. While things may change between now and 2030 (and those changes could be drastic), these estimates project what would happen if past and current trends continue into the relatively near future.

Some countries might be worse off in 2030. The lowest-income, highest-mortality cluster will include several African countries that have been hit hard with wars as well as political and socioeconomic challenges. The second low-income, high-mortality cluster, also with mostly African countries, will now add some Eastern European and Asian countries that suffer from political and socioeconomic issues most have recently been involved in conflicts and wars or still are, such as Ukraine.

The highest-income, lowest-mortality cluster will gain some countries. These include Chile, which has made strides in development that are helping people live longer.

Former Soviet countries will probably continue to face the same issues they did in 1990 and 2010. They fall into one of the middle-income, mid-longevity clusters and will most likely be joined by some Latin American countries that were once in a higher bracket but presently face high levels of homicide, suicide, and accidents among middle-aged males. Meanwhile, there are some other countries in Latin America that the research team foresees as moving toward a higher income and lower mortality rate.

Appearances can be deceiving

The study places the US in the first or second high-income, low-mortality bracket, depending on the timeline. This could make it look like it is doing well on a global scale. While the study doesn’t look at the US specifically, there are certain local issues that say otherwise.

A 2022 study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggests that pregnancy and maternal care in the US is abysmal, with a surprisingly high (and still worsening) maternal death rate of about 33 deaths per 100,000 live births. This is more than double what it was two decades ago. In states like Texas, which banned abortion after the overturn of Roe v. Wade, infant deaths have also spiked. The US also has the most expensive health care system among high-income countries, which was only worsened by the pandemic.

The CDC also reports that life expectancy in the US keeps plummeting. Cancer, heart disease, stroke, drug overdose, and accidents are the culprits, especially in middle-aged Americans. There has also been an increase in gun violence and suicides. Guns have become the No. 1 killer of children and teens, which used to be car accidents.

Whether the US will stay in that top longevity bracket is also unsure, especially if maternal death rates keep rising and there aren’t significant improvements made to the health care system. There and elsewhere, there’s no way of telling what will actually happen between now and 2030, but Atance and his team want to revisit their study then and compare their estimates to actual data. The team is also planning to further analyze the factors that contribute to longevity and mortality, as well as conduct surveys that could support their predictions. We will hopefully live to see the results.

PLOS One, 2024. DOI:  10.1371/journal.pone.0295842

Humans are living longer than ever no matter where they come from  Read More »

hermit-crabs-find-new-homes-in-plastic-waste:-shell-shortage-or-clever choice?

Hermit crabs find new homes in plastic waste: Shell shortage or clever choice?

hermit crabs, Science, syndication / /

ocean real estate bargains —

The crustaceans are making the most of what they find on the seafloor.

–

hermit crab in plastic pen cap

Enlarge / Scientists have found that hermit crabs are increasingly using plastic and other litter as makeshift shell homes.

Land hermit crabs have been using bottle tops, parts of old light bulbs and broken glass bottles, instead of shells.

New research by Polish researchers studied 386 images of hermit crabs occupying these artificial shells. The photos had been uploaded by users to online platforms, then analyzed by scientists using a research approach known as iEcology. Of the 386 photos, the vast majority, 326 cases, featured hermit crabs using plastic items as shelters.

At first glance, this is a striking example of how human activities can alter the behavior of wild animals and potentially the ways that populations and ecosystems function as a result. But there are lots of factors at play and, while it’s easy to jump to conclusions, it’s important to consider exactly what might be driving this particular change.

Shell selection

Hermit crabs are an excellent model organism to study because they behave in many different ways and those differences can be easily measured. Instead of continuously growing their own shell to protect their body, like a normal crab or a lobster would, they use empty shells left behind by dead snails. As they walk around, the shell protects their soft abdomen but whenever they are threatened they retract their whole body into the shell. Their shells act as portable shelters.

Having a good enough shell is critical to an individual’s survival so they acquire and upgrade their shells as they grow. They fight other hermit crabs for shells and assess any new shells that they might find for suitability. Primarily, they look for shells that are large enough to protect them, but their decision-making also takes into account the type of snail shell, its condition and even its color—a factor that could impact how conspicuous the crab might be.

Another factor that constrains shell choice is the actual availability of suitable shells. For some as yet unknown reason, a proportion of land hermit crabs are choosing to occupy plastic items rather than natural shells, as highlighted by this latest study.

Housing crisis or ingenious new move?

Humans have intentionally changed the behavior of animals for millennia through the process of domestication. Any unintended behavioral changes in natural animal populations are potentially concerning, but how worried should we be about hermit crabs using plastic litter as shelter?

The Polish research raises a number of questions. First, how prevalent is the adoption of plastic litter instead of shells? While 326 crabs using plastic seems like a lot, this is likely to be an underestimation of the raw number given that users are likely to encounter crabs only in accessible parts of the populations. Conversely, it seems probable that users could be biased towards uploading striking or unusual images, so the iEcology approach might produce an exaggerated impression of the proportion of individuals in a population opting for plastic over natural shells. We need structured field surveys to clarify this.

Second, why are some individual crabs using plastic? One possibility is that they are forced to due to a lack of natural shells, but we can’t test this hypothesis without more information on the demographics of local snail populations. Or perhaps the crabs prefer plastic or find it easier to locate, compared with real shells? As the authors point out, plastic might be lighter than the equivalent shells affording the same amount of protection but at lower energy cost of carrying them. Intriguingly, chemicals that leach out of plastic are known to attract marine hermit crabs by mimicking the odor of food.

As hermit crabs adapt to an increase in plastic pollution, more research is needed to investigate the nuances.

Enlarge / As hermit crabs adapt to an increase in plastic pollution, more research is needed to investigate the nuances.

This leads to a third question about the possible downsides of using plastic. Compared to real shells plastic waste tends to be brighter and might contrast more with the background making the crabs more vulnerable to predators. Additionally, we know that exposure to microplastics and compounds that leach from plastic can change the behaviour of hermit crabs, making them less fussy about the shells that they choose, less adept at fighting for shells and even changing their personalities by making them more prone to take risks. To answer these questions about the causes and consequences of hermit crabs using plastic waste in this way, we need to investigate their shell selection behavior through a series of laboratory experiments.

Pollution changes behavior

Plastic pollution is just one of the ways we are changing our environment. It’s by far the most highly reported form of debris that we have introduced to marine environments. But animal behavior is affected by other forms of pollution too, including microplastics, pharmaceuticals, light, and noise, plus the rising temperatures and ocean acidification caused by climate change.

So while investigating the use of plastic waste by hermit crabs could help us better understand the consequences of certain human impacts on the environment, it doesn’t show how exactly animals will adjust to the Anthropocene, the era during which human activity has been having a significant impact on the planet. Will they cope by using plastic behavioral responses or evolve across generations, or perhaps both? In my view, the iEcology approach cannot answer questions like this. Rather, this study acts as an alarm bell highlighting potential changes that now need to be fully investigated.

Mark Briffa, Professor of Animal Behaviour, University of Plymouth. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Hermit crabs find new homes in plastic waste: Shell shortage or clever choice? Read More »

daily-telescope:-a-wolf-rayet-star-puts-on-a-howling-light-show

Daily Telescope: A Wolf-Rayet star puts on a howling light show

daily telescope, Science, Space / /

Hungry like the wolf —

I’d like to see it go boom.

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The Crescent Nebula.

Enlarge / The Crescent Nebula.

1Zach1

Welcome to the Daily Telescope. There is a little too much darkness in this world and not enough light, a little too much pseudoscience and not enough science. We’ll let other publications offer you a daily horoscope. At Ars Technica, we’re going to take a different route, finding inspiration from very real images of a universe that is filled with stars and wonder.

Good morning. It’s February 2, and today’s image concerns an emission nebula about 5,000 light-years away in the Cygnus constellation.

Discovered more than 230 years ago by William Herschel, astronomers believe the Crescent Nebula is formed by the combination of an energetic stellar wind from a Wolf-Rayet star at its core, colliding with slower-moving material ejected earlier in the star’s lifetime. Ultimately, this should all go supernova, which will be quite spectacular.

Will you or I be alive to see it? Probably not.

But in the meantime, we can enjoy the nebula for what it is. This photo was captured by Ars reader 1Zach1 with an Astro-Tech AT80ED Refractor telescope. It was the product of 11 hours of integration, or 228 exposures each lasting three minutes. It was taken in rural southwestern Washington.

Have a great weekend, everyone.

Source: 1Zach1

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Daily Telescope: A Wolf-Rayet star puts on a howling light show Read More »