Unraveling how consciousness arises out of particular configurations of organic matter is a quest that has absorbed scientists and philosophers for ages. Now, with AI systems behaving in strikingly conscious-looking ways, it is more important than ever to get a handle on who and what is capable of experiencing life on a conscious level. As Christof Koch writes in Then I Am Myself the World, "That you are intimately acquainted with the way life feels is a brute fact about the world that cries out for an explanation." His explanation—bounded by the limits of current research and framed through Koch’s preferred theory of consciousness—is what he eloquently attempts to deliver.
Koch, a physicist, neuroscientist, and former president of the Allen Institute for Brain Science, has spent his career hunting for the seat of consciousness, scouring the brain for physical footprints of subjective experience. It turns out that the posterior hot zone, a region in the back of the neocortex, is intricately connected to self-awareness and experiences of sound, sight, and touch. Dense networks of neocortical neurons in this area connect in a looped configuration; output signals feedback into input neurons, allowing the posterior hot zone to influence its own behavior. And herein, Koch claims, lies the key to consciousness.
In the hot zone
According to integrated information theory (IIT)—which Koch strongly favors over a multitude of contending theories of consciousness—the Rosetta Stone of subjective experience is the ability of a system to influence itself: to use its past state to affect its present state and its present state to influence its future state.
Enlarge/ Packaging for Wegovy, manufactured by Novo Nordisk, is seen in this illustration photo. (credit: Getty | Jakub Porzycki)
With the debut of remarkably effective weight-loss drugs, America's high obesity rate and its uniquely astronomical prescription drug pricing appear to be set on a catastrophic collision course—one that threatens to "bankrupt our entire health care system," according to a new Senate report that modeled the economic impact of the drugs in different uptake scenarios.
If just half of the adults in the US with obesity start taking a new weight-loss drug, such as Wegovy, the collective cost would total an estimated $411 billion per year, the analysis found. That's more than the $406 billion Americans spent in 2022 on all prescription drugs combined.
While the bulk of the spending on weight-loss drugs will occur in the commercial market—which could easily lead to spikes in health insurance premiums—taxpayer-funded Medicare and Medicaid programs will also see an extraordinary financial burden. In the scenario that half of adults with obesity go on the drug, the cost to those federal programs would total $166 billion per year, rivaling the programs' total 2022 drug costs of $175 billion.
Enlarge/ A kitty named Clover prepares to play with a robot arm in the Cat Royale "multi-species" science/art installation . (credit: Blast Theory - Stephen Daly)
Cats and robots are a winning combination, as evidenced by all those videos of kitties riding on Roombas. And now we have Cat Royale, a "multispecies" live installation in which three cats regularly "played" with a robot over 12 days, carefully monitored by human operators. Created by computer scientists from the University of Nottingham in collaboration with artists from a group called Blast Theory, the installation debuted at the World Science Festival in Brisbane, Australia, last year and is now a touring exhibit. The accompanying YouTube video series recently won a Webby Award, and a paper outlining the insights gleaned from the experience was similarly voted best paper at the recent Computer-Human Conference (CHI’24).
"At first glance, the project is about designing a robot to enrich the lives of a family of cats by playing with them," said co-author Steve Benford of the University of Nottingham, who led the research, "Under the surface, however, it explores the question of what it takes to trust a robot to look after our loved ones and potentially ourselves." While cats might love Roombas, not all animal encounters with robots are positive: Guide dogs for the visually impaired can get confused by delivery robots, for example, while the rise of lawn mowing robots can have a negative impact on hedgehogs, per Benford et al.
Blast Theory and the scientists first held a series of exploratory workshops to ensure the installation and robotic design would take into account the welfare of the cats. "Creating a multispecies system—where cats, robots, and humans are all accounted for—takes more than just designing the robot," said co-author Eike Schneiders of Nottingham's Mixed Reality Lab about the primary takeaway from the project. "We had to ensure animal well-being at all times, while simultaneously ensuring that the interactive installation engaged the (human) audiences around the world. This involved consideration of many elements, including the design of the enclosure, the robot, and its underlying systems, the various roles of the humans-in-the-loop, and, of course, the selection of the cats.”
Anyone can do a simple experiment. Navigate to a search engine that offers suggested completions for what you type, and start typing "scientists believe." When I did it, I got suggestions about the origin of whales, the evolution of animals, the root cause of narcolepsy, and more. The search results contained a long list of topics, like "How scientists believe the loss of Arctic sea ice will impact US weather patterns" or "Scientists believe Moon is 40 million years older than first thought."
What do these all have in common? They're misleading, at least in terms of how most people understand the word "believe." In all these examples, scientists have become convinced via compelling evidence; these are more than just hunches or emotional compulsions. Given that difference, using "believe" isn't really an accurate description. Yet all these examples come from searching Google News, and so are likely to come from journalistic outlets that care about accuracy.
Does the difference matter? A recent study suggests that it does. People who were shown headlines that used subjective verbs like "believe" tended to view the issue being described as a matter of opinion—even if that issue was solidly grounded in fact.
Hopes that replacement fuels for airplanes will slash carbon pollution are misguided and support for these alternatives could even worsen the climate crisis, a new report has warned. The Guardian: There is currently "no realistic or scalable alternative" to standard kerosene-based jet fuels, and touted "sustainable aviation fuels" are well off track to replace them in a timeframe needed to avert dangerous climate change, despite public subsidies, the report by the Institute for Policy Studies, a progressive thinktank, found. "While there are kernels of possibility, we should bring a high level of skepticism to the claims that alternative fuels will be a timely substitute for kerosene-based jet fuels," the report said.
Chuck Collins, co-author of the report, said: "To bring these fuels to the scale needed would require massive subsidies, the trade-offs would be unacceptable and would take resources aware from more urgent decarbonization priorities. It's a huge greenwashing exercise by the aviation industry. It's magical thinking that they will be able to do this." In the US, Joe Biden's administration has set a goal for 3bn gallons of sustainable aviation fuel, which is made from non-petroleum sources such as food waste, woody biomass and other feedstocks, to be produced by 2030, which it said will cut aviation's planet-heating emissions by 20%.
Enlarge/ On Wednesday, SpaceX fully stacked the Super Heavy booster and Starship upper stage for the mega-rocket's next test flight from South Texas. (credit: SpaceX)
Welcome to Edition 6.44 of the Rocket Report! Kathy Lueders, general manager of SpaceX's Starbase launch facility, says the company expects to receive an FAA launch license for the next Starship test flight shortly after Memorial Day. It looks like this rocket could fly in late May or early June, about two-and-a-half months after the previous Starship test flight. This is an improvement over the previous intervals of seven months and four months between Starship flights.
As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.
Blue Origin launch on tap this weekend. Blue Origin plans to launch its first human spaceflight mission in nearly two years on Sunday. This flight will launch six passengers on a flight to suborbital space more than 60 miles (100 km) over West Texas. Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos's space company, has not flown people to space since a New Shepard rocket failure on an uncrewed research flight in September 2022. The company successfully launched New Shepard on another uncrewed suborbital mission in December.
Harris Wolobah, a previously healthy 14-year-old from Worcester, died September 1, 2023 hours after eating the chip—a 2023 Paqui One Chip Challenge chip—which were sold individually, wrapped in tin foil, and seasoned with two of hottest peppers in the world, the Naga Viper pepper and the Carolina Reaper pepper. Paqui sold the chip with a challenge in which eaters were dared to consume the chip, wait as long as possible before eating or drinking anything, and post the aftermath on social media, where the challenge went viral.
Harris' mother, Lois Wolobah, immediately suspected the chip was involved in his untimely death. At the time, she reportedly said she picked him up from school after getting a call from the nurse. He was clutching his stomach and, about two hours later, lost consciousness and was rushed to the hospital, where he died. She reported that he had no known medical conditions at the time.
An artist's rendering of the BepiColombo mission, a joint ESA/JAXA project, which will take two spacecraft to the harsh environment of Mercury. (credit: ESA)
This week the European Space Agency posted a slightly ominous note regarding its BepiColombo spacecraft, which consists of two orbiters bound for Mercury.
The online news release cited a "glitch" with the spacecraft that is impairing its ability to generate thrust. The problem was first noted on April 26, when the spacecraft's primary propulsion system was scheduled to undertake an orbital maneuver. Not enough electrical power was delivered to the solar-electric propulsion system at the time.
According to the space agency, a team involving its own engineers and those of its industrial partners began working on the issue. By May 7 they had made some progress, restoring the spacecraft's thrust to about 90 percent of its original level. But this is not full thrust, and the root cause of the problem is still poorly understood.
The behavior, documented in footage from researcher Chris Law, is most seen in females and sheds light on the threatened species
Floating on its back in the waters of California’s Monterey Bay, a sea otter takes a shelled animal and strikes it against a rock sitting on its chest to break open the prey.
This behavior, documented in footage from researcher Chris Law, is seen in relatively few animals and allows the otter to access food without damaging its teeth. A new study, which will be published in the journal Science on Friday, sheds light on the threatened species’ tactics.
A deadlier version of the infectious disease is ravaging the Democratic Republic of Congo, while the type that caused a 2022 outbreak among gay and bisexual men is regaining strength.
The North Carolina State Senate on Wednesday voted 30–15, along party lines, in favor of a Republican bill that would make it illegal for people in the state to wear a mask in public for health reasons. The bill is now moving to the House, where it could potentially see changes.
The proposed ban on health-based masking is part of a larger bill otherwise aimed at increasing penalties for people wearing masks to conceal their identity while committing a crime or impeding traffic. The bill was largely spurred by recent protests on university and college campuses across the country, including North Carolina-based schools, against the war in Gaza. In recent months, there have been demonstrations in Raleigh and Durham that have blocked roadways, as well as clashes on the nearby campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Some demonstrators were seen wearing masks in those events.
But the bill, House Bill 237, goes a step further by making it illegal to wear a mask in public for health and safety reasons, either to protect the wearer, those around them, or both. Specifically, the bill repeals a 2020 legal exemption enacted amid the COVID-19 pandemic, which allowed for public health-based masking for the first time in decades.
University of Rochester linguist Andrew Bray started out studying the evolution of the trademark sports jargon used in hockey for his master's thesis. For instance, a hockey arena is a "barn," while the puck is a "biscuit." When he would tell people about the project, however, they kept asking if he was trying to determine why American hockey players sound like "fake Canadians." Intrigued, Bray decided to shift his research focus to find out if hockey players did indeed have distinctively Canadian speech patterns and, if so, why this might be the case.
He discovered that US hockey players borrow certain aspects of the Canadian English accent, particularly when it comes to hockey jargon. But they don't follow the typical rules of pronunciation. In short, "American hockey players are not trying to shift their speech to sound more Canadian," Bray said during a press briefing. "They're trying to sound more like a hockey player. That's why it's most evident in hockey-specific terms."
It's a concept known as a "linguistic persona," a means of communicating how one identifies—in this case, as a hockey player— through speech. Bray gave a talk about his research today at a meeting of the Acoustical Society of America in Ottawa, Canada, held in conjunction with the Canadian Acoustical Association.
Discovery of the branch, which ran alongside 31 pyramids, could solve mystery of blocks’ transportation
Scientists have discovered a long-buried branch of the Nile River that once flowed alongside more than 30 pyramids in Egypt, potentially solving the mystery of how ancient Egyptians transported the massive stone blocks to build the monuments.
The 40-mile-long (64km) river branch, which ran by the Giza pyramid complex among other wonders, was hidden under desert and farmland for millennia, according to a study revealing the find on Thursday.
Cannes film festival Lou Ye’s docu-realist film starts as sophisticated comedy, morphs from looking like a zombie apocalypse to intimate drama, and evolves into a tribute to how a nation handled trauma
Out of agony and chaos, Chinese film-maker Lou Ye has created something mysterious, moving and even profound – a kind of multilayered docu-realist film, evidently inspired by a real-life situation in film production. As well as everything else, the film meditates on what it means to be “unfinished”. Very few of us will leave this life with a satisfied sense of everything achieved, complete, squared away. To be mortal is to feel that things have ended without being finished. It is possibly his best film since the courageous Tiananmen Square drama Summer Palace from 2006 – and set near Wuhan, the city in which his 2012 film Mystery was set in the days when that place was internationally known – if at all – simply for being almost scarily vast and impersonal.
It is 2019 and a film director and his crew gather in a production studio and excitedly unbox a big 00s-era computer, containing the digitised video and audio files for a film he had had to abandon 10 years before – without even having a title – because he had refused to bow to his producers’ demands to soften the content. It is a story of a gay man’s passion for another man who is involved with someone else. Getting the unfinished film now is clearly the end result of legal wrangling. (Lou has evidently had access to genuine footage from a real production.)
Being able to detect lowest form of wit could help AI interact with people more naturally, say scientists
Never mind that it can pass the bar exam, ace medical tests and read bedtime stories with emotion, artificial intelligence will never match the marvel of the human mind without first mastering the art of sarcasm.
But that art, it seems, may be next on the list of the technology’s dizzying capabilities. Researchers in the Netherlands have built an AI-driven sarcasm detector that can spot when the lowest form of wit, and the highest form of intelligence, is being deployed.
In 1989, a city in Utah upgraded its drinking water system, putting in a whole new system and repurposing the old one to supply cheap untreated water for irrigating lawns and putting out fires. That meant that the treated water suitable for drinking flowed from new spigots, while untreated water gushed from the old ones. Decades went by with no apparent confusion; residents seemed clear on the two different water sources. But, according to an investigation report published recently by state and county health officials, that local knowledge got diluted as new residents moved into the area. And last summer, the confusion over the conduits led to an outbreak of life-threatening illnesses among children.
In July and August of 2023, state and local health officials identified 13 children infected with Shiga toxin-producing Escherichia coli (STEC) O157:H7. The children ranged in age from 1 to 15, with a median age of 4. Children are generally at high risk of severe infections with this pathogen, along with older people and those with compromised immune systems. Of the 13 infected children, seven were hospitalized and two developed hemolytic uremic syndrome, a life-threatening complication that can lead to kidney failure.
Preliminary genetic analyses of STEC O157:H7 from two of the children suggested that the children's infections were linked to a common source. So, health officials quickly developed a questionnaire to narrow down the potential source. It soon became clear that the irrigation water—aka untreated, pressurized, municipal irrigation water (UPMIW)—was a commonality among the children. Twelve of 13 infected children reported exposure to it in some form: Two said they drank it; five played with UPMIW hoses; three used the water for inflatable water toys; two used it for a water table; and one ran through sprinklers. None reported eating fruits or vegetables from home (noncommercial) gardens irrigated with the UPMIW.
Glimpse of galactic merger, via James Webb telescope, may explain presence of monster black holes
A pair of black holes has been observed colliding in the ancient universe for the first time. The observations, by the James Webb Space Telescope, reveal a merger of two galaxies and the monster black holes at their centres when the universe was just 740m years old, about a 20th of its current age.
The discovery that massive mergers appear to have been common in the infant universe could help explain how supermassive black holes like the one at the heart of the Milky Way achieved such tremendous proportions.
An NHS trust’s attempts to bring a crucial drug to market itself is hopeful news for patients
Dr Catriona Crombie is the head of rare disease at medical charity LifeArc
Healthcare should make people’s lives better. That fact can hardly be contested. Yet for some patients with rare diseases, commercial interests are dictating who gets to access life-saving treatment and who doesn’t. Pharmaceutical companies have long been driven by global demand and the potential for the highest profits. In the past two decades, the market has exploded: pharma revenues worldwide have exceeded $1tn. For patients with common conditions, this investment in healthcare can only be good news. But the narrow focus of this strategy means that, in the UK, the one in 17 of us who will at some point be affected by a rare condition risk being forgotten.
That is until now. Healthcare providers, driven by a desire to make life-saving treatments more widely available, are increasingly finding new ways of getting them to patients for whom they would have previously been out of reach. Great Ormond Street hospital (Gosh) recently announced that it was taking the unprecedented step of attempting to obtain the licence itself for a rare gene therapy on a non-profit basis, after the pharmaceutical company that planned to bring it to market dropped out. If successful, it will be the first time that an NHS trust has the authorisation to market a drug for this kind of treatment. The move could act as a proof of concept for bringing drugs to UK patients that pharmaceutical companies aren’t willing to risk their profits on.
Dr Catriona Crombie is the head of rare disease at medical charity LifeArc
Enlarge/ The International Space Station as seen from 69 km away. (credit: HEO on X)
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 May 16, and today's image comes from an on-demand satellite imagery company named HEO. Only this image is not of the Earth, but rather the International Space Station.
According to the company, which is headquartered in Australia, one of its cameras imaged the space station at a distance of 69.06 km away, over the Indian Ocean. HEO flies its sensors as hosted payloads on satellites in Earth orbit. However, HEO's focus is not on Earth; it's on other spacecraft in low-Earth orbit to assess their status and identify anomalous behavior.
No matter who he called—his mother, his father, his brother, his cousins—the phone would just go to voicemail. Cell service was out around Maui as devastating wildfires swept through the Hawaiian island. But while Raven Imperial kept hoping for someone to answer, he couldn’t keep a terrifying thought from sneaking into his mind: What if his family members had perished in the blaze? What if all of them were gone?
Hours passed; then days. All Raven knew at that point was this: there had been a wildfire on August 8, 2023, in Lahaina, where his multigenerational, tight-knit family lived. But from where he was currently based in Northern California, Raven was in the dark. Had his family evacuated? Were they hurt? He watched from afar as horrifying video clips of Front Street burning circulated online.
Much of the area around Lahaina’s Pioneer Mill Smokestack was totally destroyed by wildfire.
ALAMY
The list of missing residents meanwhile climbed into the hundreds.
Raven remembers how frightened he felt: “I thought I had lost them.”
Raven had spent his youth in a four-bedroom, two-bathroom, cream-colored home on Kopili Street that had long housed not just his immediate family but also around 10 to 12 renters, since home prices were so high on Maui. When he and his brother, Raphael Jr., were kids, their dad put up a basketball hoop outside where they’d shoot hoops with neighbors. Raphael Jr.’s high school sweetheart, Christine Mariano, later moved in, and when the couple had a son in 2021, they raised him there too.
From the initial news reports and posts, it seemed as if the fire had destroyed the Imperials’ entire neighborhood near the Pioneer Mill Smokestack—a 225-foot-high structure left over from the days of Maui’s sugar plantations, which Raven’s grandfather had worked on as an immigrant from the Philippines in the mid-1900s.
Then, finally, on August 11, a call to Raven’s brother went through. He’d managed to get a cell signal while standing on the beach.
“Is everyone okay?” Raven asked.
“We’re just trying to find Dad,” Raphael Jr. told his brother.
From his current home in Northern California, Raven Imperial spent days not knowing what had happened to his family in Maui.
WINNI WINTERMEYER
In the three days following the fire, the rest of the family members had slowly found their way back to each other. Raven would learn that most of his immediate family had been separated for 72 hours: Raphael Jr. had been marooned in Kaanapali, four miles north of Lahaina; Christine had been stuck in Wailuku, more than 20 miles away; both young parents had been separated from their son, who escaped with Christine’s parents. Raven’s mother, Evelyn, had also been in Kaanapali, though not where Raphael Jr. had been.
But no one was in contact with Rafael Sr. Evelyn had left their home around noon on the day of the fire and headed to work. That was the last time she had seen him. The last time they had spoken was when she called him just after 3 p.m. and asked: “Are you working?” He replied “No,” before the phone abruptly cut off.
“Everybody was found,” Raven says. “Except for my father.”
Within the week, Raven boarded a plane and flew back to Maui. He would keep looking for him, he told himself, for as long as it took.
That same week, Kim Gin was also on a plane to Maui. It would take half a day to get there from Alabama, where she had moved after retiring from the Sacramento County Coroner’s Office in California a year earlier. But Gin, now an independent consultant on death investigations, knew she had something to offer the response teams in Lahaina. Of all the forensic investigators in the country, she was one of the few who had experience in the immediate aftermath of a wildfire on the vast scale of Maui’s. She was also one of the rare investigators well versed in employing rapid DNA analysis—an emerging but increasingly vital scientific tool used to identify victims in unfolding mass-casualty events.
Gin started her career in Sacramento in 2001 and was working as the coroner 17 years later when Butte County, California, close to 90 miles north, erupted in flames. She had worked fire investigations before, but nothing like the Camp Fire, which burned more than 150,000 acres—an area larger than the city of Chicago. The tiny town of Paradise, the epicenter of the blaze, didn’t have the capacity to handle the rising death toll. Gin’s office had a refrigerated box truck and a 52-foot semitrailer, as well as a morgue that could handle a couple of hundred bodies.
Kim Gin, the former Sacramento County coroner, had worked fire investigations in her career, but nothing prepared her for the 2018 Camp Fire.
BRYAN TARNOWSKI
“Even though I knew it was a fire, I expected more identifications by fingerprints or dental [records]. But that was just me being naïve,” she says. She quickly realized that putting names to the dead, many burned beyond recognition, would rely heavily on DNA.
“The problem then became how long it takes to do the traditional DNA [analysis],” Gin explains, speaking to a significant and long-standing challenge in the field—and the reason DNA identification has long been something of a last resort following large-scale disasters.
While more conventional identification methods—think fingerprints, dental information, or matching something like a knee replacement to medical records—can be a long, tedious process, they don’t take nearly as long as traditional DNA testing.
Historically, the process of making genetic identifications would often stretch on for months, even years. In fires and other situations that result in badly degraded bone or tissue, it can become even more challenging and time consuming to process DNA, which traditionally involves reading the 3 billion base pairs of the human genome and comparing samples found in the field against samples from a family member. Meanwhile, investigators frequently need equipment from the US Department of Justice or the county crime lab to test the samples, so backlogs often pile up.
A supply kit with swabs, gloves, and other items needed to take a DNA sample in the field.
A demo chip for ANDE’s rapid DNA box.
This creates a wait that can be horrendous for family members. Death certificates, federal assistance, insurance money—“all that hinges on that ID,” Gin says. Not to mention the emotional toll of not knowing if their loved ones are alive or dead.
But over the past several years, as fires and other climate-change-fueled disasters have become more common and more cataclysmic, the way their aftermath is processed and their victims identified has been transformed. The grim work following a disaster remains—surveying rubble and ash, distinguishing a piece of plastic from a tiny fragment of bone—but landing a positive identification can now take just a fraction of the time it once did, which may in turn bring families some semblance of peace more swiftly than ever before.
The key innovation driving this progress has been rapid DNA analysis, a methodology that focuses on just over two dozen regions of the genome. The 2018 Camp Fire was the first time the technology was used in a large, live disaster setting, and the first time it was used as the primary way to identify victims. The technology—deployed in small high-tech field devices developed by companies like industry leader ANDE, or in a lab with other rapid DNA techniques developed by Thermo Fisher—is increasingly being used by the US military on the battlefield, and by the FBI and local police departments after sexual assaults and in instances where confirming an ID is challenging, like cases of missing or murdered Indigenous people or migrants. Yet arguably the most effective way to use rapid DNA is in incidents of mass death. In the Camp Fire, 22 victims were identified using traditional methods, while rapid DNA analysis helped with 62 of the remaining 63 victims; it has also been used in recent years following hurricanes and floods, and in the war in Ukraine.
“These families are going to have to wait a long period of time to get identification. How do we make this go faster?”
Tiffany Roy, a forensic DNA expert with consulting company ForensicAid, says she’d be concerned about deploying the technology in a crime scene, where quality evidence is limited and can be quickly “exhausted” by well-meaning investigators who are “not trained DNA analysts.” But, on the whole, Roy and other experts see rapid DNA as a major net positive for the field. “It is definitely a game-changer,” adds Sarah Kerrigan, a professor of forensic science at Sam Houston State University and the director of its Institute for Forensic Research, Training, and Innovation.
But back in those early days after the Camp Fire, all Gin knew was that nearly 1,000 people had been listed as missing, and she was tasked with helping to identify the dead. “Oh my goodness,” she remembers thinking. “These families are going to have to wait a long period of time to get identification. How do we make this go faster?”
Ten days
One flier pleading for information about “Uncle Raffy,” as people in the community knew Rafael Sr., was posted on a brick-red stairwell outside Paradise Supermart, a Filipino store and restaurant in Kahului, 25 miles away from the destruction. In it, just below the words “MISSING Lahaina Victim,” the 63-year-old grandfather smiled with closed lips, wearing a blue Hawaiian shirt, his right hand curled in the shaka sign, thumb and pinky pointing out.
Raven remembers how hard his dad, Rafael, worked. His three jobs took him all over town and earned him the nickname “Mr. Aloha.”
COURTESY OF RAVEN IMPERIAL
“Everybody knew him from restaurant businesses,” Raven says. “He was all over Lahaina, very friendly to everybody.” Raven remembers how hard his dad worked, juggling three jobs: as a draft tech for Anheuser-Busch, setting up services and delivering beer all across town; as a security officer at Allied Universal security services; and as a parking booth attendant at the Sheraton Maui. He connected with so many people that coworkers, friends, and other locals gave him another nickname: “Mr. Aloha.”
Raven also remembers how his dad had always loved karaoke, where he would sing “My Way,” by Frank Sinatra. “That’s the only song that he would sing,” Raven says. “Like, on repeat.”
Since their home had burned down, the Imperials ran their search out of a rental unit in Kihei, which was owned by a local woman one of them knew through her job. The woman had opened her rental to three families in all. It quickly grew crowded with side-by-side beds and piles of donations.
Each day, Evelyn waited for her husband to call.
She managed to catch up with one of their former tenants, who recalled asking Rafael Sr. to leave the house on the day of the fires. But she did not know if he actually did. Evelyn spoke to other neighbors who also remembered seeing Rafael Sr. that day; they told her that they had seen him go back into the house. But they too did not know what happened to him after.
A friend of Raven’s who got into the largely restricted burn zone told him he’d spotted Rafael Sr.’s Toyota Tacoma on the street, not far from their house. He sent a photo. The pickup was burned out, but a passenger-side door was open. The family wondered: Could he have escaped?
Evelyn called the Red Cross. She called the police. Nothing. They waited and hoped.
Back in Paradise in 2018, as Gin worried about the scores of waiting families, she learned there might in fact be a better way to get a positive ID—and a much quicker one. A company called ANDE Rapid DNA had already volunteered its services to the Butte County sheriff and promised that its technology could process DNA and get a match in less than two hours.
“I’ll try anything at this point,” Gin remembers telling the sheriff. “Let’s see this magic box and what it’s going to do.”
In truth, Gin did not think it would work, and certainly not in two hours. When the device arrived, it was “not something huge and fantastical,” she recalls thinking. A little bigger than a microwave, it looked “like an ordinary box that beeps, and you put stuff in, and out comes a result.”
The “stuff,” more specifically, was a cheek or bloodstain swab, or a piece of muscle, or a fragment of bone that had been crushed and demineralized. Instead of reading 3 billion base pairs in this sample, Selden’s machine examined just 27 genome regions characterized by particular repeating sequences. It would be nearly impossible for two unrelated people to have the same repeating sequence in those regions. But a parent and child, or siblings, would match, meaning you could compare DNA found in human remains with DNA samples taken from potential victims’ family members. Making it even more efficient for a coroner like Gin, the machine could run up to five tests at a time and could be operated by anyone with just a little basic training.
ANDE’s chief scientific officer, Richard Selden, a pediatrician who has a PhD in genetics from Harvard, didn’t come up with the idea to focus on a smaller, more manageable number of base pairs to speed up DNA analysis. But it did become something of an obsession for him after he watched the O.J. Simpson trial in the mid-1990s and began to grasp just how long it took for DNA samples to get processed in crime cases. By this point, the FBI had already set up a system for identifying DNA by looking at just 13 regions of the genome; it would later add seven more. Researchers in other countries had also identified other sets of regions to analyze. Drawing on these various methodologies, Selden homed in on the 27 specific areas of DNA he thought would be most effective to examine, and he launched ANDE in 2004.
But he had to build a device to do the analysis. Selden wanted it to be small, portable, and easily used by anyone in the field. In a conventional lab, he says, “from the moment you take that cheek swab to the moment that you have the answer, there are hundreds of laboratory steps.” Traditionally, a human is holding test tubes and iPads and sorting through or processing paperwork. Selden compares it all to using a “conventional typewriter.” He effectively created the more efficient laptop version of DNA analysis by figuring out how to speed up that same process.
No longer would a human have to “open up this bottle and put [the sample] in a pipette and figure out how much, then move it into a tube here.” It is all automated, and the process is confined to a single device.
The rapid DNA analysis boxes from ANDE can be used in the field by anyone with just a bit of training.
ANDE
Once a sample is placed in the box, the DNA binds to a filter in water and the rest of the sample is washed away. Air pressure propels the purified DNA to a reconstitution chamber and then flattens it into a sheet less than a millimeter thick, which is subjected to about 6,000 volts of electricity. It’s “kind of an obstacle course for the DNA,” he explains.
The machine then interprets the donor’s genome and and provides an allele table with a graph showing the peaks for each region and its size. This data is then compared with samples from potential relatives, and the machine reports when it has a match.
Rapid DNA analysis as a technology first received approval for use by the US military in 2014, and in the FBI two years later. Then the Rapid DNA Act of 2017 enabled all US law enforcement agencies to use the technology on site and in real time as an alternative to sending samples off to labs and waiting for results.
But by the time of the Camp Fire the following year, most coroners and local police officers still had no familiarity or experience with it. Neither did Gin. So she decided to put the “magic box” through a test: she gave Selden, who had arrived at the scene to help with the technology, a DNA sample from a victim whose identity she’d already confirmed via fingerprint. The box took about 90 minutes to come back with a result. And to Gin’s surprise, it was the same identification she had already made. Just to make sure, she ran several more samples through the box, also from victims she had already identified. Again, results were returned swiftly, and they confirmed hers.
“I was a believer,” she says.
The next year, Gin helped investigators use rapid DNA technology in the 2019 Conception disaster, when a dive boat caught fire off the Channel Islands in Santa Barbara. “We ID’d 34 victims in 10 days,” Gin says. “Completely done.” Gin now works independently to assist other investigators in mass-fatality events and helps them learn to use the ANDE system.
Its speed made the box a groundbreaking innovation. Death investigations, Gin learned long ago, are not as much about the dead as about giving peace of mind, justice, and closure to the living.
Fourteen days
Many of the people who were initially on the Lahaina missing persons list turned up in the days following the fire. Tearful reunions ensued.
Two weeks after the fire, the Imperials hoped they’d have the same outcome as they loaded into a truck to check out some exciting news: someone had reported seeing Rafael Sr. at a local church. He’d been eating and had burns on his hands and looked disoriented. The caller said the sighting had occurred three days after the fire. Could he still be in the vicinity?
When the family arrived, they couldn’t confirm the lead.
“We were getting a lot of calls,” Raven says. “There were a lot of rumors saying that they found him.”
None of them panned out. They kept looking.
The scenes following large-scale destructive events like the fires in Paradise and Lahaina can be sprawling and dangerous, with victims sometimes dispersed across a large swath of land if many people died trying to escape. Teams need to meticulously and tediously search mountains of mixed, melted, or burned debris just to find bits of human remains that might otherwise be mistaken for a piece of plastic or drywall. Compounding the challenge is the comingling of remains—from people who died huddled together, or in the same location, or alongside pets or other animals.
This is when the work of forensic anthropologists is essential: they have the skills to differentiate between human and animal bones and to find the critical samples that are needed by DNA specialists, fire and arson investigators, forensic pathologists and dentists, and other experts. Rapid DNA analysis “works best in tandem with forensic anthropologists, particularly in wildfires,” Gin explains.
“The first step is determining, is it a bone?” says Robert Mann, a forensic anthropologist at the University of Hawaii John A. Burns School of Medicine on Oahu. Then, is it a human bone? And if so, which one?
Forensic anthropologist Robert Mann has spent his career identifying human remains.
AP PHOTO/LUCY PEMONI
Mann has served on teams that have helped identify the remains of victims after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, among other mass-casualty events. He remembers how in one investigation he received an object believed to be a human bone; it turned out to be a plastic replica. In another case, he was looking through the wreckage of a car accident and spotted what appeared to be a human rib fragment. Upon closer examination, he identified it as a piece of rubber weather stripping from the rear window. “We examine every bone and tooth, no matter how small, fragmented, or burned it might be,” he says. “It’s a time-consuming but critical process because we can’t afford to make a mistake or overlook anything that might help us establish the identity of a person.”
For Mann, the Maui disaster felt particularly immediate. It was right near his home. He was deployed to Lahaina about a week after the fire, as one of more than a dozen forensic anthropologists on scene from universities in places including Oregon, California, and Hawaii.
While some anthropologists searched the recovery zone—looking through what was left of homes, cars, buildings, and streets, and preserving fragmented and burned bone, body parts, and teeth—Mann was stationed in the morgue, where samples were sent for processing.
It used to be much harder to find samples that scientists believed could provide DNA for analysis, but that’s also changed recently as researchers have learned more about what kind of DNA can survive disasters. Two kinds are used in forensic identity testing: nuclear DNA (found within the nuclei of eukaryotic cells) and mitochondrial DNA (found in the mitochondria, organelles located outside the nucleus). Both, it turns out, have survived plane crashes, wars, floods, volcanic eruptions, and fires.
Theories have also been evolving over the past few decades about how to preserve and recover DNA specifically after intense heat exposure. One 2018 study found that a majority of the samples actually survived high heat. Researchers are also learning more about how bone characteristics change depending on the degree. “Different temperatures and how long a body or bone has been exposed to high temperatures affect the likelihood that it will or will not yield usable DNA,” Mann says.
Typically, forensic anthropologists help select which bone or tooth to use for DNA testing, says Mann. Until recently, he explains, scientists believed “you cannot get usable DNA out of burned bone.” But thanks to these new developments, researchers are realizing that with some bone that has been charred, “they’re able to get usable, good DNA out of it,” Mann says. “And that’s new.” Indeed, Selden explains that “in a typical bad fire, what I would expect is 80% to 90% of the samples are going to have enough intact DNA” to get a result from rapid analysis. The rest, he says, may require deeper sequencing.
The aftermath of large-scale destructive events like the fire in Lahaina can be sprawling and dangerous. Teams need to meticulously search through mountains of mixed, melted, or burned debris to find bits of human remains.
GLENN FAWCETT VIA ALAMY
Anthropologists can often tell “simply by looking” if a sample will be good enough to help create an ID. If it’s been burned and blackened, “it might be a good candidate for DNA testing,” Mann says. But if it’s calcined (white and “china-like”), he says, the DNA has probably been destroyed.
On Maui, Mann adds, rapid DNA analysis made the entire process more efficient, with tests coming back in just two hours. “That means while you’re doing the examination of this individual right here on the table, you may be able to get results back on who this person is,” he says. From inside the lab, he watched the science unfold as the number of missing on Maui quickly began to go down.
Within three days, 42 people’s remains were recovered inside Maui homes or buildings and another 39 outside, along with 15 inside vehicles and one in the water. The first confirmed identification of a victim on the island occurred four days after the fire—this one via fingerprint. The ANDE rapid DNA team arrived two days after the fire and deployed four boxes to analyze multiple samples of DNA simultaneously. The first rapid DNA identification happened within that first week.
Sixteen days
More than two weeks after the fire, the list of missing and unaccounted-for individuals was dwindling, but it still had 388 people on it. Rafael Sr. was one of them.
Raven and Raphael Jr. raced to another location: Cupies café in Kahului, more than 20 miles from Lahaina. Someone had reported seeing him there.
Rafael’s family hung posters around the island, desperately hoping for reliable information. (Phone number redacted by MIT Technology Review.)
ERIKA HAYASAKI
The tip was another false lead.
As family and friends continued to search, they stopped by support hubs that had sprouted up around the island, receiving information about Red Cross and FEMA assistance or donation programs as volunteers distributed meals and clothes. These hubs also sometimes offered DNA testing.
Raven still had a “50-50” feeling that his dad might be out there somewhere. But he was beginning to lose some of that hope.
Gin was stationed at one of the support hubs, which offered food, shelter, clothes, and support. “You could also go in and give biological samples,” she says. “We actually moved one of the rapid DNA instruments into the family assistance center, and we were running the family samples there.” Eliminating the need to transport samples from a site to a testing center further cut down any lag time.
Selden had once believed that the biggest hurdle for his technology would be building the actual device, which took about eight years to design and another four years to perfect. But at least in Lahaina, it was something else: persuading distraught and traumatized family members to offer samples for the test.
Nationally, there are serious privacy concerns when it comes to rapid DNA technology. Organizations like the ACLU warn that as police departments and governments begin deploying it more often, there must be more oversight, monitoring, and training in place to ensure that it is always used responsibly, even if that adds some time and expense. But the space is still largely unregulated, and the ACLU fears it could give rise to rogue DNA databases “with far fewer quality, privacy, and security controls than federal databases.”
Family support centers popped up around Maui to offer clothing, food, and other assistance, and sometimes to take DNA samples to help find missing family members.
In a place like Hawaii, these fears are even more palpable. The islands have a long history of US colonialism, military dominance, and exploitation of the Native population and of the large immigrant working-class population employed in the tourism industry.
Native Hawaiians in particular have a fraught relationship with DNA testing. Under a US law signed in 1921, thousands have a right to live on 200,000 designated acres of land trust, almost for free. It was a kind of reparations measure put in place to assist Native Hawaiians whose land had been stolen. Back in 1893, a small group of American sugar plantation owners and descendants of Christian missionaries, backed by US Marines, held Hawaii’s Queen Lili‘uokalani in her palace at gunpoint and forced her to sign over 1.8 million acres to the US, which ultimately seized the islands in 1898.
Hawaii’s Queen Lili‘uokalani was forced to sign over 1.8 million acres to the US.
PUBLIC DOMAIN VIA WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
To lay their claim to the designated land and property, individuals first must prove via DNA tests how much Hawaiian blood they have. But many residents who have submitted their DNA and qualified for the land have died on waiting lists before ever receiving it. Today, Native Hawaiians are struggling to stay on the islands amid skyrocketing housing prices, while others have been forced to move away.
Meanwhile, after the fires, Filipino families faced particularly stark barriers to getting information about financial support, government assistance, housing, and DNA testing. Filipinos make up about 25% of Hawaii’s population and 40% of its workers in the tourism industry. They also make up 46% of undocumented residents in Hawaii—more than any other group. Some encountered language barriers, since they primarily spoke Tagalog or Ilocano. Some worried that people would try to take over their burned land and develop it for themselves. For many, being asked for DNA samples only added to the confusion and suspicion.
Selden says he hears the overall concerns about DNA testing: “If you ask people about DNA in general, they think of Brave New World and [fear] the information is going to be used to somehow harm or control people.” But just like regular DNA analysis, he explains, rapid DNA analysis “has no information on the person’s appearance, their ethnicity, their health, their behavior either in the past, present, or future.” He describes it as a more accurate fingerprint.
Gin tried to help the Lahaina family members understand that their DNA “isn’t going to go anywhere else.” She told them their sample would ultimately be destroyed, something programmed to occur inside ANDE’s machine. (Selden says the boxes were designed to do this for privacy purposes.) But sometimes, Gin realizes, these promises are not enough.
“You still have a large population of people that, in my experience, don’t want to give up their DNA to a government entity,” she says. “They just don’t.”
Gin understands that family members are often nervous to give their DNA samples. She promises the process of rapid DNA analysis respects their privacy, but she knows sometimes promises aren’t enough.
BRYAN TARNOWSKI
The immediate aftermath of a disaster, when people are suffering from shock, PTSD, and displacement, is the worst possible moment to try to educate them about DNA tests and explain the technology and privacy policies. “A lot of them don’t have anything,” Gin says. “They’re just wondering where they’re going to lay their heads down, and how they’re going to get food and shelter and transportation.”
Unfortunately, Lahaina’s survivors won’t be the last people in this position. Particularly given the world’s current climate trajectory, the risk of deadly events in just about every neighborhood and community will rise. And figuring out who survived and who didn’t will be increasingly difficult. Mann recalls his work on the Indian Ocean tsunami, when over 227,000 people died. “The bodies would float off, and they ended up 100 miles away,” he says. Investigators were at times left with remains that had been consumed by sea creatures or degraded by water and weather. He remembers how they struggled to determine: “Who is the person?”
Mann has spent his own career identifying people including “missing soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines, from all past wars,” as well as people who have died recently. That closure is meaningful for family members, some of them decades, or even lifetimes, removed.
In the end, distrust and conspiracy theories did in fact hinder DNA-identification efforts on Maui, according to a police department report.
33 days
By the time Raven went to a family resource center to submit a swab, some four weeks had gone by. He remembers the quick rub inside his cheek.
Some of his family had already offered their own samples before Raven provided his. For them, waiting wasn’t an issue of mistrusting the testing as much as experiencing confusion and chaos in the weeks after the fire. They believed Uncle Raffy was still alive, and they still held hope of finding him. Offering DNA was a final step in their search.
“I did it for my mom,” Raven says. She still wanted to believe he was alive, but Raven says: “I just had this feeling.” His father, he told himself, must be gone.
Just a day after he gave his sample—on September 11, more than a month after the fire—he was at the temporary house in Kihei when he got the call: “It was,” Raven says, “an automatic match.”
Raven gave a cheek swab about a month after the disappearance of his father. It didn’t take long for him to get a phone call: “It was an automatic match.”
WINNI WINTERMEYER
The investigators let the family know the address where the remains of Rafael Sr. had been found, several blocks away from their home. They put it into Google Maps and realized it was where some family friends lived. The mother and son of that family had been listed as missing too. Rafael Sr., it seemed, had been with or near them in the end.
By October, investigators in Lahaina had obtained and analyzed 215 DNA samples from family members of the missing. By December, DNA analysis had confirmed the identities of 63 of the most recent count of 101 victims. Seventeen more had been identified by fingerprint, 14 via dental records, and two through medical devices, along with three who died in the hospital. While some of the most damaged remains would still be undergoing DNA testing months after the fires, it’s a drastic improvement over the identification processes for 9/11 victims, for instance—today, over 20 years later, some are still being identified by DNA.
Raven remembers how much his father loved karaoke. His favorite song was “My Way,” by Frank Sinatra.
COURTESY OF RAVEN IMPERIAL
Rafael Sr. was born on October 22, 1959, in Naga City, the Philippines. The family held his funeral on his birthday last year. His relatives flew in from Michigan, the Philippines, and California.
Raven says in those weeks of waiting—after all the false tips, the searches, the prayers, the glimmers of hope—deep down the family had already known he was gone. But for Evelyn, Raphael Jr., and the rest of their family, DNA tests were necessary—and, ultimately, a relief, Raven says. “They just needed that closure.”
Erika Hayasaki is an independent journalist based in Southern California.
Last week the founder of the dating app Bumble forecasted a near future dating landscape where AI ‘dating concierges’ filter out prospective partners for us. But does AI, or even science, really understand what makes two people compatible? Madeleine Finlay speaks to Amie Gordon, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, to find out what we know about why two people go the distance, and why she and her colleague associate professor of sociology Elizabeth Bruch, are designing their own dating app to learn more.
Hundreds of climate experts expect global temperatures to rise to at least 2.5C (4.5F) above preindustrial levels by 2100. Damian Carrington reports
When the Guardian’s environment editor, Damian Carrington, decided to survey the world’s top climate scientists, he had no idea how many of them would want to participate.
“I was astonished by the flood of responses that came back,” he tells Hannah Moore.
A Guardian survey of leading climate scientists revealed their despair about the future. John Coghlan, Rachael Orr, Natalie Bennett, Dr Robin Russell-Jones and Gregory Johnson find reasons to keep on fighting
I must commend the Guardian and Damian Carrington for the excellent reporting on the views of leading climate scientists (‘Hopeless and broken’ Why the world’s top climate scientists are in despair, 8 May). I have experienced climate despair, which has led me to take part in non-violent protests, and I can certainly bear witness to the fact that this kind of collective action goes a long way to offset the despair. However, protest is not for everyone. There are other ways to play our part.
We can help to accelerate the energy transition. Some 51% of final energy consumption is for heating and cooling, and 32% is for transport, according to the International Energy Agency, so we must ditch the old boiler and invest in a heat pump, and swap our petrol car for an electric model. By fitting solar panels, we can also generate renewable energy to power both transport and heating. Having done these things myself, I have found that the lightening of my carbon footprint brings with it a lightening of climate despair.
Empty cartridges of Kloxxado, a naloxone nasal spray that is twice as concentrated as Narcan, lay on the street after being used to revive a man in Portland, Ore., last year.
Missing a target doesn’t mean the sense of emergency should fade. What it must do is stop politicians dithering – and fast
I remember the first time I heard the 1.5C target. It was in a room at the Copenhagen climate talks in 2009. With the expectation of a binding agreement slipping away and negotiations failing, some of us activists joined delegates from vulnerable African and island nations in chanting “1.5 to stay alive”. It was a frank recognition that the 2C goal the climate diplomats were endlessly talking about – though not pursuing – was insufficient to deal with the increasingly clear realities of climate science.
Since then, three things have happened.
Bill McKibben is the founder of Third Act, which organizes people over 60 for action on climate and democracy
Philip Ball reports via Scientific American: Thomas Gingeras did not intend to upend basic ideas about how the human body works. In 2012 the geneticist, now at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York State, was one of a few hundred colleagues who were simply trying to put together a compendium of human DNA functions. Their Âproject was called ENCODE, for the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements. About a decade earlier almost all of the three billion DNA building blocks that make up the human genome had been identified. Gingeras and the other ENCODE scientists were trying to figure out what all that DNA did. The assumption made by most biologists at that time was that most of it didn't do much. The early genome mappers estimated that perhaps 1 to 2 percent of our DNA consisted of genes as classically defined: stretches of the genome that coded for proteins, the workhorses of the human body that carry oxygen to different organs, build heart muscles and brain cells, and do just about everything else people need to stay alive. Making proteins was thought to be the genome's primary job. Genes do this by putting manufacturing instructions into messenger molecules called mRNAs, which in turn travel to a cell's protein-making machinery. As for the rest of the genome's DNA? The "protein-coding regions," Gingeras says, were supposedly "surrounded by oceans of biologically functionless sequences." In other words, it was mostly junk DNA.
So it came as rather a shock when, in several 2012 papers in Nature, he and the rest of the ENCODE team reported that at one time or another, at least 75 percent of the genome gets transcribed into RNAs. The ENCODE work, using techniques that could map RNA activity happening along genome sections, had begun in 2003 and came up with preliminary results in 2007. But not until five years later did the extent of all this transcription become clear. If only 1 to 2 percent of this RNA was encoding proteins, what was the rest for? Some of it, scientists knew, carried out crucial tasks such as turning genes on or off; a lot of the other functions had yet to be pinned down. Still, no one had imagined that three quarters of our DNA turns into RNA, let alone that so much of it could do anything useful. Some biologists greeted this announcement with skepticism bordering on outrage. The ENCODE team was accused of hyping its findings; some critics argued that most of this RNA was made accidentally because the RNA-making enzyme that travels along the genome is rather indiscriminate about which bits of DNA it reads.
Now it looks like ENCODE was basically right. Dozens of other research groups, scoping out activity along the human genome, also have found that much of our DNA is churning out "noncoding" RNA. It doesn't encode proteins, as mRNA does, but engages with other molecules to conduct some biochemical task. By 2020 the ENCODE project said it had identified around 37,600 noncoding genes -- that is, DNA stretches with instructions for RNA molecules that do not code for proteins. That is almost twice as many as there are protein-coding genes. Other tallies vary widely, from around 18,000 to close to 96,000. There are still doubters, but there are also enthusiastic biologists such as Jeanne Lawrence and Lisa Hall of the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School. In a 2024 commentary for the journal Science, the duo described these findings as part of an "RNA revolution."
What makes these discoveries revolutionary is what all this noncoding RNA -- abbreviated as ncRNA -- does. Much of it indeed seems involved in gene regulation: not simply turning them off or on but also fine-tuning their activity. So although some genes hold the blueprint for proteins, ncRNA can control the activity of those genes and thus ultimately determine whether their proteins are made. This is a far cry from the basic narrative of biology that has held sway since the discovery of the DNA double helix some 70 years ago, which was all about DNA leading to proteins. "It appears that we may have fundamentally misunderstood the nature of genetic programming," wrote molecular biologists Kevin Morris of Queensland University of Technology and John Mattick of the University of New South Wales in Australia in a 2014 article. Another important discovery is that some ncRNAs appear to play a role in disease, for example, by regulating the cell processes involved in some forms of cancer. So researchers are investigating whether it is possible to develop drugs that target such ncRNAs or, conversely, to use ncRNAs themselves as drugs. If a gene codes for a protein that helps a cancer cell grow, for example, an ncRNA that shuts down the gene might help treat the cancer.
Enlarge/ Wegovy is an injectable prescription weight-loss medicine that has helped people with obesity. (credit: Getty | Michael Siluk)
A large, long-term trial of the weight-loss medication Wegovy (semaglutide) found that people tended to lose weight over the first 65 weeks on the drug—about one year and three months—but then hit a plateau or "set point." But that early weight loss was generally maintained for up to four years while people continued taking the weekly injections.
The findings, published Monday in Nature Medicine, come from a fresh analysis of data from the SELECT trial, which was designed to look at the drug's effects on cardiovascular health. The trial—a multicenter, double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled trial—specifically enrolled people with existing cardiovascular disease who also were overweight or obese but did not have diabetes. In all, the trial included 17,604 people from 41 countries. Seventy-two percent of them were male, 84 percent were white, and the average age was about 62 years old.
Last year, researchers published the trial's primary results, which showed that semaglutide reduced participants' risk of heart attack, stroke, and cardiovascular-related deaths by 20 percent over the span of a little over three years.
Enlarge/ Top: a look through the past 2,000 years of summertime temperatures, showing that 2023 is considerably warmer than anything earlier. Bottom: a bell curve of the typical temperatures, showing that the hot outliers are all recent years. (credit: Esper, Torbenson, and Büntgen)
Starting in June of last year, global temperatures went from very hot to extreme. Every single month since June, the globe has experienced the hottest temperatures for that month on record—that's 11 months in a row now, enough to ensure that 2023 was the hottest year on record, and 2024 will likely be similarly extreme.
There's been nothing like this in the temperature record, and it acts as an unmistakable indication of human-driven warming. But how unusual is that warming compared to what nature has thrown at us in the past? While it's not possible to provide a comprehensive answer to that question, three European researchers (Jan Esper, Max Torbenson, and Ulf Büntgen) have provided a partial answer: the Northern Hemisphere hasn't seen anything like this in over 2,000 years.
Tracking past temperatures
Current temperature records are based on a global network of data-gathering hardware. But, as you move back in time, gaps in that network go from rare to ever more common. Moving backward from 1900, the network shrinks to just a few dozen land-based thermometers, almost all of them in Europe.
Enlarge/ A view looking down at Boeing's Starliner spacecraft and United Launch Alliance's Atlas V rocket inside the Vertical Integration Facility at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida. (credit: United Launch Alliance)
Boeing is taking a few extra days to resolve a small helium leak on the Starliner spacecraft slated to ferry two NASA astronauts on a test flight to the International Space Station, officials said Tuesday.
This means the first crew launch of Boeing's Starliner spacecraft, running years behind schedule and more than $1.4 billion over budget, won't happen before next Tuesday, May 21, at 4:43 pm EDT (20:43 UTC). Meeting this schedule assumes engineers can get comfortable with the helium leak. Officials from Boeing and NASA, which manages Boeing's multibillion-dollar Starliner commercial crew contract, previously targeted Friday, May 17, for the spacecraft's first launch with astronauts onboard.
Boeing's ground team traced the leak to a flange on a single reaction control system thruster on the spacecraft's service module.
Penny Sackett, former director of the Australian National University’s Mount Stromlo Observatory, just outside Canberra, in the remains of the observatory, which was destroyed in a 2003 wildfire.
As AI systems have grown in sophistication, so has their capacity for deception, according to a new analysis from researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Dr Peter Park, an AI existential safety researcher at MIT and author of the research, tells Ian Sample about the different examples of deception he uncovered, and why they will be so difficult to tackle as long as AI remains a black box
To drink raw milk at any time is to flirt with dangerous germs. But, amid an unprecedented outbreak of H5N1 bird flu in US dairy cows, the risks have ratcheted up considerably. Health experts have stepped up warnings against drinking raw milk during the outbreak, the scope of which is still unknown.
Yet, raw milk enthusiasts are undaunted by the heightened risk. The California-based Raw Milk Institute called the warnings "clearly fearmongering." The institute's founder, Mark McAfee, told the Los Angeles Times this weekend that his customers are, in fact, specifically requesting raw milk from H5N1-infected cows. According to McAfee, his customers believe, without evidence, that directly drinking high levels of the avian influenza virus will give them immunity to the deadly pathogen.
Expert Michael Payne told the LA Times that the idea amounts to "playing Russian roulette with your health." Payne, a researcher and dairy outreach coordinator at the Western Institute for Food Safety and Security at UC Davis, added, "Deliberately trying to infect yourself with a known pathogen flies in the face of all medical knowledge and common sense."
Enlarge/ The business end of the Vulcan rocket performed flawlessly during its debut launch in January 2024. (credit: United Launch Alliance)
It has been nearly four years since the US Air Force made its selections for companies to launch military payloads during the mid-2020s. The military chose United Launch Alliance, and its Vulcan rocket, to launch 60 percent of these missions; and it chose SpaceX, with the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy boosters, to launch 40 percent.
Although the large Vulcan rocket was still in development at the time, it was expected to take flight within the next year or so. Upon making the award, an Air Force official said the military believed Vulcan would soon be ready to take flight. United Launch Alliance was developing the Vulcan rocket in order to no longer be reliant on RD-180 engines that are built in Russia and used by its Atlas V rocket.
"I am very confident with the selection that we have made today," William Roper, assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisition, technology, and logistics, said at the time. "We have a very low-risk path to get off the RD-180 engines."
Enlarge/ Portrait of Beethoven by Joseph Karl Stieler, 1820. Toxocology analysis of the composer's locks of hair showed high levels of lead. (credit: Beethoven-Haus Bonn)
Last year, researchers sequenced the genome of famed composer Ludwig van Beethoven for the first time, based on authenticated locks of hair. The same team has now analyzed two of the locks for toxic substances and found extremely high levels of lead, as well as arsenic and mercury, according to a recent letter published in the journal Clinical Chemistry.
“It definitely shows Beethoven was exposed to high concentrations of lead,” Paul Janetto, co-author and director of the Mayo Clinic's Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology, told The New York Times. “These are the highest values in hair I’ve ever seen. We get samples from around the world, and these values are an order of magnitude higher.” That said, the authors concluded that the lead exposure was not sufficient to actually kill the composer, although Beethoven very likely did suffer adverse health effects because of it.
As previously reported, Beethoven was plagued throughout his life by myriad health problems. The composer began losing his hearing in his mid- to late 20s, experiencing tinnitus and the loss of high-tone frequencies in particular. He claimed the onset began with a fit in 1798 induced by a quarrel with a singer. By his mid-40s, he was functionally deaf and unable to perform public concerts, although he could still compose music.
Enlarge/ An illustration depicts a NASA spacecraft approaching the metal-rich asteroid Psyche. Though there are no plans to mine Psyche, such asteroids are being eyed for their valuable resources (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU)
In April 2023, a satellite the size of a microwave launched to space. Its goal: to get ready to mine asteroids. While the mission, courtesy of a company called AstroForge, ran into problems, it’s part of a new wave of would-be asteroid miners hoping to cash in on cosmic resources.
Potential applications of space-mined material abound: Asteroids contain metals like platinum and cobalt, which are used in electronics and electric vehicle batteries, respectively. Although there are plenty of these materials on Earth, they can be more concentrated on asteroids than mountainsides, making them easier to scrape out. And scraping in space, advocates say, could cut down on the damaging impacts that mining has on this planet. Space-resource advocates also want to explore the potential of other substances. What if space ice could be used for spacecraft and rocket propellant? Space dirt for housing structures for astronauts and radiation shielding?
Previous companies have rocketed toward similar goals before but went bust about a half-decade ago. In the years since that first cohort left the stage, though, “the field has exploded in interest,” said Angel Abbud-Madrid, director of the Center for Space Resources at the Colorado School of Mines.
Galaxies pass gas—in the case of galaxy NGC 4383, so much so that its gas outflow is 20,000 light-years across and more massive than 50 million Suns.
Yet even an outflow of this immensity was difficult to detect until now. Observing what these outflows are made of and how they are structured demands high-resolution instruments that can only see gas from galaxies that are relatively close, so information on them has been limited. Which is unfortunate, since gaseous outflows ejected from galaxies can tell us more about their star formation cycles.
The MAUVE (MUSE and ALMA Unveiling the Virgo Environment) program is now changing things. MAUVE’s mission is to understand how the outflows of galaxies in the Virgo cluster affect star formation. NGC 4383 stood out to astronomer Adam Watts, of the University of Australia and the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR), and his team because its outflow is so enormous.
Enlarge/ Pink lights appear in the sky above College Station, Texas. (credit: ZoeAnn Bailey)
After a night of stunning auroras across much of the United States and Europe on Friday, a severe geomagnetic storm is likely to continue through at least Sunday, forecasters said.
The Space Weather Prediction Center at the US-based National Oceanic and Atmospheric Prediction Center observed that 'Extreme' G5 conditions were ongoing as of Saturday morning due to heightened Solar activity.
"The threat of additional strong flares and CMEs (coronal mass ejections) will remain until the large and magnetically complex sunspot cluster rotates out of view over the next several days," the agency posted in an update on the social media site X on Saturday morning.
One of the biggest mysteries in astrophysics today is that the forces in galaxies do not seem to add up. Galaxies rotate much faster than predicted by applying Newton’s law of gravity to their visible matter, despite those laws working well everywhere in the Solar System.
To prevent galaxies from flying apart, some additional gravity is needed. This is why the idea of an invisible substance called dark matter was first proposed. But nobody has ever seen the stuff. And there are no particles in the hugely successful Standard Model of particle physics that could be the dark matter—it must be something quite exotic.
This has led to the rival idea that the galactic discrepancies are caused instead by a breakdown of Newton’s laws. The most successful such idea is known as Milgromian dynamics or Mond, proposed by Israeli physicist Mordehai Milgrom in 1982. But our recent research shows this theory is in trouble.
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