TIME - Science

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx Probe Punched an Asteroid in the Name of Science. ...

Thu, 22 Oct 2020 17:22:14 GMT

There is absolutely nothing inherently special about the asteroid Bennu. A loosely-packed agglomeration of dust and rock about as big across as the Empire State Building and currently 322 million km (200 million mi.) from Earth as it orbits the sun, it is just one of about a million asteroids that astronomers have identified and catalogued. But on Tuesday, Bennu became the most famous asteroid in the solar system, after NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft made contact with it for a dramatic six seconds to blast loose and collect a sample.

“I must have watched about a hundred times last night,” said Dante Lauretta, the missions’s principal investigator, during a press conference yesterday, while talking about a video clip recorded by the probe during its harrowing maneuver, seen below. “We really did make a mess on the surface of this asteroid, but it’s a good mess.”

NASA/Goddard/University of Arizona

Asteroids are more than just space debris—they are some of the oldest, most pristine samples known of the early solar system. Studying their elemental composition can yield clues to planetary formation, cosmic chemistry and even the emergence of life on Earth. But first you’ve got to get a sample of them, and that’s where OSIRIS-REx—for Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer—comes in.

The SUV-sized OSIRIS-REx launched in 2016, arriving at Bennu two years later. It went into orbit around the asteroid, studying it in search of a smooth spot with loose soil and few boulders, making sample collection both easy and safe. But NASA investigators almost immediately realized they were out of luck—Bennu’s surface is almost nothing but boulders. Mission planners hoped for a target site hundreds of feet across, but they settled on one in a region near the asteroid’s north pole that they dubbed Nightingale Crater, which measures just 8 m (26 ft).

Collecting a sample from so small a spot would require both smart technology and deft flying. OSIRIS-REx has a 3.3 meter long, three-jointed arm, at the end of which is a circular sample collector about 0.3 m across dubbed TAGSAM—for Touch and Go Sample Acquisition Mechanism. The flight plan called for the spacecraft to extend its sample arm and then descend from orbit, slowing its speed to just 10 cm/second (0.2 mph) until the TAGSAM assembly made contact with the surface. At that point, nitrogen bottles in the TAGSAM would fire, blasting loose soil and rocks and forcing them into a collection chamber. After just a few seconds, the spacecraft would execute the go part of the touch-and-go maneuver, backing away with its sample secured.

That’s the way it was supposed to go—and that’s exactly the way it did go. TAGSAM was in contact with the surface of Bennu for six seconds, and collected material for five—the greatest share within the first three seconds. It took 18.5 minutes for the signal that the maneuver was a success to travel the 322 million km to Earth. Only once it arrived did NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine release a triumphal statement.

“This amazing first for NASA demonstrates how an incredible team from across the country came together and persevered,” he said. “Our industry, academic, and international partners have made it possible to hold a piece of the most ancient solar system in our hands.”

The question is, how big is that piece? The TAGSAM collector can accommodate up to 2 kg (4.4 lbs) of material; mission leaders want at least about 60 gm (2.1 oz). Later today, the collector arm will move to put the TAGSAM in front of one of the spacecraft’s cameras, thus giving NASA engineers a better look. A more accurate measurement will be taken on Saturday, when the collector arm is extended and the spacecraft’s thrusters nudge it into a gentle pirouette. The rate at which it spins from a given amount of thrust will be compared to the rate of spin from the same maneuver conducted before Tuesday’s collection; the more material gathered, the slower the rate of spin will now be. If there’s enough material, the sample will be transferred to a secure reentry capsule, which will be the only part of OSIRIS-REx that will ultimately return to the surface of the Earth.

“We will use the combination of data from…the post-TAG images and mass measurement to assess our confidence that we have collected at least 60 grams of sample,” said project manager Rich Burns in a statement. “If our confidence is high, we’ll make the decision to stow the sample on October 30.”

If their confidence is not high, the team can execute another collection maneuver on Jan.. 12 at a site known as Osprey. Departure from Bennu is set for March 21, with the reentry capsule set to parachute into the Utah desert on Sept. 24, 2023. Only then will the little bit of rock and dirt from the seven-year, $800 million mission be in the hands of the scientists. And only then will we begin to reveal the secrets that Bennu may hold.

U.K. Plans ‘Challenge Trials,’ Which Will Intentionally Give People COVID-19 to Test Vaccines

Tue, 20 Oct 2020 22:01:01 GMT

On Oct. 20, researchers at the Imperial College of London announced plans for the first human challenge study of COVID-19, which involves deliberately infecting volunteers with the virus that causes the disease, in order to test the effectiveness of vaccines.

The strategy is controversial, as researchers have to weigh the risks of infection against the benefits of learning how well the various vaccine candidates can fight that infection. The strongest argument in favor of the studies has to do with time. If cases of COVID-19 are waning, then the likelihood that people who are vaccinated would get exposed to and potentially infected with the virus naturally declines as well, and it takes researchers longer to accumulate enough data to tell if a vaccine is effective or not. By intentionally exposing people to the virus after they have been vaccinated, researchers can shrink this timeline significantly.

Scientists have used the model to test vaccines against a number of different diseases, including the very first one against smallpox—Edward Jenner infected his son with cowpox, and then exposed his son to smallpox as a way to test his theory that exposure to the former would protect his son from infection by the latter. Scientists tested an H1N1 influenza vaccine by exposing people to the flu, and did the same with a cholera vaccine and the bacterium that causes it. But the strategy requires a solid base of information about both the disease and the vaccine in order to justify the risks. More recently, for example, scientists considered intentionally infecting volunteers with the Zika virus to test vaccines against that disease, but ultimately decided they didn’t have enough data to justify the risk.

Adair Richards, honorary associate professor at the University of Warwick who last May published guidelines on how to ethically conduct human challenge studies, notes that during a pandemic, the risk of delays in developing treatments should be considered alongside the risks to volunteers who are intentionally exposed to disease. “There is a moral weight to inaction as well as action,” he says. “There is an unseen risk if we don’t do [these studies]. We send a lot of doctors, nurses and care workers to work every day, and some will get really sick and die of COVID-19 in the next few weeks. [Those] few weeks count—that’s the unseen risk.”

More than 38,000 people in the U.S. agree, and have registered their intention to volunteer for challenge studies on 1DaySooner.org, an online recruiting group—despite the fact that no such studies have been planned in the country yet.

The London-based scientists still need to submit a detailed proposal to regulatory agencies on how they could conduct their study. If the proposal is approved, the team won’t start exposing any volunteers until January. Before that, they will first need to determine what dose of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, is safe to give to people but can still produce enough disease to test a vaccine. They will start with the smallest possible dose and work up to one that balances safety with the ability to trigger a proper immune response. The participants will remain under quarantine at a designated facility in London until they test negative for the virus, the researchers said.

From a scientific perspective, infecting people with a known dose of the virus can help researchers be more precise about evaluating and comparing people’s immune responses to different vaccines. It will also provide those answers faster than waiting for people to be exposed naturally infected with the disease. “These could almost take the place of phase 3 trials or at least go alongside them,” says Richards.

That speed is one reason why the 1DaySooner.org volunteers have supported human challenge trials. “We could know already if some of the major vaccines in phase 3 trials are actually effective,” says the movement’s founder Josh Morrison, who also co-founded Waitlist Zero, and advocacy group for living organ donors. “It’s not to say that we wouldn’t still need phase 3 studies, but we would obviously be in a much better position if we could say that when we vaccinate healthy young people with this vaccine and then challenge them with virus, it’s 80% effective or 60% effective or 20% effective or not effective at all. It’s useful information we could have now but don’t have.”

Exposing people deliberately to a disease-causing virus, however, would only make sense if the chances of naturally being infected is low, and would delay results of vaccine trials. That’s one issue regulators in the U.K. will likely consider before approving the plan, as daily case numbers there continue to climb. That’s also the case in the U.S., where new infections continue to emerge at high rates in many parts of the country. That’s one of the main reasons that Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, said earlier this year that the studies are not ethically justified—at the time, mid-July, daily case numbers were peaking.

In an Oct. 20 statement to TIME, NIAID officials said the agency is “currently prioritizing randomized controlled clinical trials to evaluate the safety and efficacy of SARS-CoV-2 vaccine candidates. Should there be a need for human challenge studies to fully assess candidate vaccines or therapeutics for SARS-CoV-2, NIAID has begun efforts to manufacture a virus strain that could be used to develop a human challenge model, if needed, although human challenge trials would not replace Phase 3 trials.”

Any human challenge study has to be done with extreme caution, says Richards. His guidelines include giving people a mandatory period of time to think about their decision to ensure they are making the choice freely and without any duress, and that the risks of infection are conveyed in a straightforward and easily understandable way. Any financial payment should be minimal to cover time away from work and any expenses related to being quarantined for the study, but not large enough to bias people’s decisions. “We also want participants to be screened for mental health conditions and cognitive capacity,” he says, to ensure that they are making their decision to join the study autonomously.

The Imperial College of London team has yet to detail how its study volunteers will be managed, and what type of informed consent they will provide, but the announcement could change the discussion about the feasibility and utility of human challenge studies. Having studies that compare people’s immune responses to different vaccines could be useful in prioritizing which vaccines are manufactured in greater quantities. “Even if every vaccine currently in phase 3 trials works very well, we won’t be able to produce enough doses to vaccinate the whole world in 2021,” says Morrison. “It’s important that we are getting better vaccines and learning from the science and challenge studies are going to be quite useful for that.”

The Antarctic Ocean Is in Climate Crisis. ...

Tue, 20 Oct 2020 16:42:58 GMT

Sixty years ago a dozen nations, including arch-rivals the United States and the Soviet Union, agreed to preserve the Antarctic continent as a place of peace, research and conservation. Commercial exploitation of its resources and its animals was forbidden. Yet much of the ocean that surrounds the territory does not have the same protections.

This will be up for discussion during a virtual meeting of the Convention for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR) from 22-30 October. The Convention is meeting to discuss the region’s future and will decide whether or not it’s time to give some of the most biodiverse seas around Antarctica the same defenses as the land itself.

The timing couldn’t be more vital. The combined threats of global climate change and industrial fishing are weakening the crucial ecosystems that lie within its waters. Record high temperatures are breaking up ice sheets that have lasted millennia. On Feb. 6, a weather station on the Antarctic Peninsula—the 1,500 km long finger of land that reaches towards South America—reported a record temperature high of 18.3°C. While members of a nearby scientific expedition researching penguin populations relished in the balmy weather, stripping down to t-shirts and bare chests, it was an ominous sign for a species better adapted to ice. Just a few days earlier the penguin researchers were reporting a 77% decline in some colonies.

The peninsula isn’t just one of the fastest warming places on earth. It’s also home to some of the most exquisitely specialized species on the planet. Among them is Antarctic krill—the tiny, shrimp-like crustaceans that collectively form the largest biomass on the planet and are the cornerstone of the global ocean food chain. Yet the encroachment of industrial fisheries into these waters is threatening their health, as well as the penguins, seals and whales that are sustained by them.

A New Space Pact Seeks to Ensure Peace and Prosperity—on the Moon

Wed, 14 Oct 2020 20:34:31 GMT

Laws have long been portable things. Human beings settled frontiers with tools and muscle—and too often with weapons, seizing lands that belong to others. One other thing the settlers also brought along were their legal systems, rules of the road to govern their behavior in the new communities they built. That was true when all our exploring was terrestrial, and it remained true when we ventured into space. As long ago as 1967—just six years after the first human spaceflight—the U.S. and other signatory nations established the Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies—better known simply as the “Outer Space Treaty.” The pact bound partner nations to use space only for peaceful purposes, to forswear claims of sovereignty over any region beyond Earth, to lend aid to astronauts in distress, and more.

Now that old law has a new follow-up. On Oct. 13, NASA announced the completion of what it has called the Artemis Accords, an agreement among eight partner nations to cooperate and collaborate in future explorations of the moon and Mars, especially via participation in NASA’s Artemis program, which aims to land the first woman and the next man on the moon before the end of 2024. The seven other signatories to the pact include the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, Japan, Luxembourg, the United Arab Emirates and Italy. But the accords are, in a sense, open source, with other countries invited to join if they both agree with the pact’s provisions and contribute to the joint enterprise in some way.

“Both the foreign ministries and the space agencies of the various nations were involved in developing the accords,” says Mike Gold, NASA’s acting administrator for the office of international and interagency relations. “It’s important that we take not just our astronauts to the moon, but our multilateral agreements.”

“Our interest,” adds NASA deputy administrator Jim Morhard, “is to bring everyone we can in under the tent.”

That’s a lot easier to do now than it was back in the Apollo era, when the U.S. and the Soviet Union were the only powerful space players around and, as mortal enemies, were not exactly inclined to collaborate. In the years since, Russia, the U.S. and more than a dozen other partner nations have come together to build and operate the International Space Station (ISS), establishing a template for cooperation in space.

What’s more, this time around the hardware lends itself to partnerships. The key elements of the Apollo program—the Saturn V rocket, the Apollo orbiter, and the lunar module—were all one-time-use machines, good for a single mission and no more. NASA now envisions building a sort of mini space station, known as Gateway, in a permanent lunar orbit that can be used as an embarkation point for trips to and from the lunar surface. Like the Artemis Accords themselves, the Gateway would be open source, with docking ports that would allow other nations to add their own modules or bring their own crews in their own spacecraft.

“We have compared the Gateway to an iPhone, which anyone can write software for,” says Gold. “The point of Gateway is interoperability, to make it open to other nations.”

But the Accords go well beyond Gateway. The text of the 18-page agreement establishes 10 different sets of rules that partner nations agree to obey. Among them are ensuring that all lunar operations remain peaceful; that countries are transparent about the work they are doing on the moon; that they release and share scientific data; and that any resources discovered—such as water ice at the south lunar pole—can be extracted freely and sustainably, with no interference or claim-jumping by one nation over another’s digs. The partners also agree to respect lunar heritage sites, such as the locations of the six Apollo landings.

“The accords are a political commitment to live by the agreed-upon rules,” says Gold. “The goals are peace and prosperity.”

But not everyone can be part of the new enterprise. The Wolf Amendment, passed by Congress in 2011, forbids NASA from collaborating with China in any way, for fear of theft of U.S. technology. Russia, meantime, which is very much an equal partner in the ISS program, has not—so far at least—signed on to the Artemis Accords. On Oct. 12, during the first day of the annual International Astronautical Congress—being held virtually this year—Dimtry Rogozin, the head of Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, complained in a statement that the accords are “too U.S.-centric” and that only if the program were run more like the ISS—with the U.S. and Russia maintaining dual control over the station, with twin Mission Controls in Houston and Moscow—would Roscosmos “also consider its participation.”

Rogozin’s counterpart, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine pushed back—gently—telling The Washington Post that “the Gateway uses the exact same agreement…that the International Space Station uses” and that NASA has “shared with Roscosmos what we would like to do with the Gateway in terms of collaborating with them and seeing what their interest is, and we just haven’t heard back.”

It’s that kind of open-handed, soft-power negotiating that historically has made peace possible among nations on our home world. The Artemis Accords are an attempt to ensure the same on other ones.

Russian-U.S. Crew Launches on Fast Track to the Space Station

Wed, 14 Oct 2020 06:44:34 GMT

(MOSCOW) — A trio of space travelers has launched successfully to the International Space Station, for the first time using a fast-track maneuver to reach the orbiting outpost in just three hours.

NASA’s Kate Rubins along with Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov of the Russian space agency Roscosmos lifted off as scheduled Wednesday morning from the Russia-leased Baikonur space launch facility in Kazakhstan for a six-month stint on the station.

For the first time, they are trying a two-orbit, three-hour approach to the orbiting space outpost. Previously it took twice as long for the crews to reach the station.

They will join the station’s NASA commander, Chris Cassidy, and Roscosmos cosmonauts Anatoly Ivanishin and Ivan Vagner, who have been aboard the complex since April and are scheduled to return to Earth in a week.

Speaking during Tuesday’s pre-launch news conference at Baikonur, Rubins emphasized that the crew spent weeks in quarantine at the Star City training facility outside Moscow and then on Baikonur to avoid any threat from the coronavirus.

“We spent two weeks at Star City and then 17 days at Baikonur in a very strict quarantine,” Rubins said. “During all communications with crew members, we were wearing masks. We made PCR tests twice and we also made three times antigen fast tests.”

She said she was looking forward to scientific experiments planned for the mission.

“We’re planning to try some really interesting things like bio-printing tissues and growing cells in space and, of course, continuing our work on sequencing DNA,” Rubins said.

Ryzhikov, who will be the station’s skipper, said the crew will try to pinpoint the exact location of a leak at a station’s Russian section that has slowly leaked oxygen. The small leak hasn’t posed any immediate danger to the crew.

“We will take with us additional equipment which will allow us to detect the place of this leak more precisely,” he told reporters. “We will also take with us additional improved hermetic material which will allow to fix the leak.”

In November, Rubins, Ryzhikov and Kud-Sverchkov are set to greet NASA’s SpaceX first operational Crew Dragon mission, bringing NASA astronauts Mike Hopkins, Victor Glover and Shannon Walker, and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Soichi Noguchi to the space station aboard the Crew Dragon vehicle. It follows a successful Demo-2 mission earlier this year.

The Crew Dragon mission was pushed back from Oct. 31 into November, and no new date has been set yet. The delay is intended to give SpaceX more time to conduct tests and review data from an aborted Falcon 9 launch earlier this month.

‘It’s a Game for Them.’ Scientists Around the World Are Teaching Dogs to Sniff Out COVID-19

Fri, 09 Oct 2020 16:11:33 GMT

Steve Lindsay, a public health entomologist at Durham University, is midway through explaining how dogs might play a role in detecting COVID-19 infections when a decidedly less-well trained canine interrupts our conversation.

“If you’ll excuse me for a minute, I’ve got a naughty black Labrador out in the back garden doing something it shouldn’t be doing,” Lindsay says. He disappears. I hear barking. He returns accompanied by a chocolate lab. “She’s not as skilled as the detection dogs,” Lindsay says as the pup tries to lick his face. “But it’s really interesting to see how a dog sees the world through its nose. It’s amazing actually.”

It’s that olfactory prowess that could make dogs a useful ally in our battle against a virus that’s killed over 1 million people worldwide. Scientists have long known that people sick with certain diseases emit particular odors—different infections affect different parts of the body in different ways, often producing specific combinations of volatile compounds. Dogs have shown a remarkable ability to pick up on those airborne chemicals, detecting when people are infected with malaria, infectious bacteria, and even certain types of cancer. Now scientists are hoping that dogs’ keen sense of smell, 10,000 times better than that of humans, can help them identify people carrying COVID-19, too.

Lindsay, along with collaborators at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) and the U.K.-based nonprofit Medical Detection Dogs, is working on a U.K. government-funded study that will test dogs’ ability to detect COVID-19. Their goal: to train coronavirus-sniffing dogs, which could then be deployed at schools, airports and other public venues to reinforce existing nasal swab testing programs. A similar study is underway at the University of Pennsylvania.

“We’re not just doing the proof of concept work, we’re also working out actively how to deploy this and scale it up as well, because we want to hit the ground running once we’ve gotten our results,” says James Logan, the head of LSHTM’s Department of Disease Control and the project lead on the U.K. study.

Other studies have produced promising, albeit early, results. In June, a team in France using a small number of samples collected from human patients who had been tested for COVID-19 in PCR tests (the current gold standard for testing) found a high degree of evidence that dogs could detect COVID-19 infections through differences in the smell of human subjects’ armpit sweat. (Also concluded: dogs don’t particularly mind sniffing people’s armpits.) In Germany, researchers ran a small pilot study, published in July, with trained coronavirus-sniffing dogs—corona-schnüffelnder hunde—and showed that the dogs were able to distinguish between coronavirus-positive samples and a control group with an average sensitivity (the rate of detecting true positives) of 83% and a specificity (true negative rate) of 96% after only one week of training. That’s not quite as accurate as COVID-19 rapid antigen tests, which have a sensitivity ranging from 84% to nearly 98% and specificities of 100%. But antigen tests require often uncomfortable nasal swabs, and take about 15 minutes to return results. Dogs, by contrast, may be able to tell if a person is infected in seconds, no swab needed.

“It’s a game for them,” says Holger Volk, a co-author on the German study and the head of small-animal medicine and surgery at the University of Veterinary Medicine, Hannover. In that study, researchers used a device called a Detection Dog Training System, which randomly presented dogs with either COVID-19 positive or negative samples via a row of seven “scent holes” connected to sample containers. The dogs were automatically rewarded with a toy or food when they identified the correct samples. “It’s a positive experience for the dogs as well, and that’s why they learn so fast,” says Volk.

Coronavirus sniffing dogs are already in use at Helsinki-Vantaa Airport as part of a Finnish government-sponsored pilot program; canines are also currently scanning for COVID-19 in multiple airports in the U.A.E. Despite those deployments, there’s still plenty we don’t know about dogs’ ability to detect COVID-19. It remains unclear how strong any coronavirus odor smells to dogs, for instance. If sniffer dogs are sensitive to coronavirus smells, handlers could keep the animals near moving lines of people, checking lots of subjects at once—similar to how explosive-sniffing dogs work at airports. If not, sniffer dogs may only be able to pick up the scent when scanning people one at a time. Another unknown: how far a COVID-19 infection needs to progress before a dog can pick up the scent. The German study, for instance, used samples from hospitalized coronavirus patients, who were likely sicker than many people who get infected; about 40% of people with the virus show no symptoms, but may still spread it to others.

“What we want particularly is for our dogs to be picking up asymptomatic people,” says Lindsay, whose study aims to test dogs’ abilities on people presenting various degrees of symptoms. “If they do that, that’s even better because we’ll pick up people early.”

Another open question is whether dogs trained to detect COVID-19 are zeroing in on the infection caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus specifically, or if they’re detecting a broader array of similar viral infections, like seasonal flu and colds. “Like a recipe, if you get one ingredient wrong it doesn’t give you the right taste,” says Logan. His team wants to answer that question in further research, assuming they get more funding.

While researchers are optimistic that dogs may play some role in helping fight the pandemic, they’re clear-eyed about the need for more evidence that such a plan will actually work. “There are a number of projects around the world that are moving forward with deploying COVID-19 dogs, and this is happening a little bit before the robust evidence is in place,” says Claire Guest, the CEO of Medical Detection Dogs. Getting more conclusive results will mean collecting hundreds of samples to make sure dogs are learning the scent of COVID-19 infection and not just the smell of individual patients. That sometimes means getting creative; the U.K-based research team is currently collecting socks worn by COVID-19 positive patients and others worn by healthy participants to use in its trials. Guest hopes her group will be ready to publish results based on this next research phase in the next six to eight weeks. If their findings check out, researchers say we could see COVID-19 detection dogs deployed more widely within six months.

Camera Designed by Felix & Paul Studios and TIME Arrives at ISS to Capture First-Ever ...

Thu, 08 Oct 2020 16:00:35 GMT

It’s entirely possible you missed it, but on Oct. 2 at 9:16 PM ET, you lifted off for the International Space Station. Just over two days later, you docked successfully—and it’s a good thing you did. You’ve got a spacewalk planned for later this year.

O.K., technically speaking, you didn’t go anywhere at all, and unless you’re actually a highly-trained astronaut, you certainly shouldn’t be planning for a real-deal spacewalk—or extravehicular activity (EVA)—any time soon. But you could very much share in the experience when actual ISS crew members venture outside of the station for one of the most exciting and dangerous experiences an astronaut can have.

That’s because something special was included among the ISS-bound cargo on the uncrewed Cygnus supply vehicle that took off from Wallops Island, Va. earlier this week: the first-ever 3D, virtual reality camera designed to operate in the vacuum of space. It’s the product of a partnership between the Montreal-based Felix & Paul Studios (an Emmy Award-winning creator of immersive entertainment experiences), TIME Studios (TIME’s Emmy Award-winning television and film division) and Nanoracks (the leading provider of commercial space access).

Philip Andrews—for TIMEThis photograph was taken inside the mobile clean room attached to Northrop Grumman’s Antares rocket as it rests atop Pad 0A at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Wallops, Island, Va. on Sept. 28, 2020. Mechanical Technician Stephen Busch, left, and Jennie Wang, Lead Integration and Test Mechanical Engineer for Northrop Grumman, load the cargo bag containing the Space Camera through the hatch of the Cygnus Pressurized Cargo Module. The vehicle successfully docked with the International Space Station on October 5.

The new camera is not the first one TIME, Felix & Paul and Nanoracks have sent to the ISS. In 2016, TIME and Felix & Paul were independently exploring the possibility of such a project, and ultimately decided to collaborate rather than compete. The decision bore fruit when, just two years later when we launched a camera built to operate inside the ISS. It’s been shooting scenes of station life for TIME’s The ISS Experience, set for release on Oct. 22 for virtual reality headsets via the Oculus Store. The episodes will also be available later in the fall in select domes and planetariums around the country, and in 360° mobile format through 5G-enabled wireless carriers.

Designing a multi-lens camera that could shoot in 3D and VR and function in the microgravity of low-Earth orbit was challenge enough. Designing one that can function in the extreme environment outside the ship—where temperatures fluctuate from 121º C (250º F) to -156º C (-250º F), and where 16 sunrises and sunsets a day can produce extreme flaring on the camera’s lenses—was an order of magnitude harder.

The camera was hardened by Nanoracks to withstand not only the temperature variations and the solar flaring, but also ultraviolet radiation, charged particle (ionizing) radiation, plasma, surface charging and arcing, and impacts from micrometeoroids and orbital debris. “This may well be one of the most complex and exciting projects that we have ever worked on at Nanoracks,” says Conor Brown, senior manager of the company’s program office.

Adds Jonathan Woods, executive producer for The ISS Experience at TIME Studios and Emmy-winning producer of A Year in Space: “Getting this camera to space was the culmination of five years of exceedingly hard work. Only 228 humans have ever conducted a spacewalk. It’s one of the most thrilling yet perilous tasks an astronaut can undertake.”

The astronauts whose spacewalk will be recorded for The ISS Experience will not have to worry about managing the camera themselves. Instead it will be mounted on the Canadarm 2, the station’s 17.6 m (58 ft) remote manipulator arm that can be operated by astronauts within the station, capturing the experience of those who are working outside. TIME will provide updates on when the first EVA to be filmed will take place, and when the footage will be released for viewing. The experience should be a profound one.

“Our space camera,” says Félix Lajeunesse, co-founder of Felix & Paul Studios, “purpose-built to capture this historic event in fully-immersive 3D, brings us one step closer to our goal of taking billions of minds to space, and having them experience a spacewalk as if they were astronauts themselves.”

Why Pence and Harris Couldn’t Stop Talking About Fracking During the Vice Presidential Debate

Thu, 08 Oct 2020 05:17:54 GMT

The moderator of Wednesday’s vice presidential debate hadn’t even brought up climate change when current Vice President Mike Pence jumped into the topic. But instead of talking about the science of the issue or offering a plan to address it, he sought to portray former Vice President Joe Biden’s climate stance as a radical ploy that would destroy the economy.

“They want to bury our economy under a $2 trillion Green New Deal,” Pence said when asked about how the U.S. would recover economically from the pandemic. “[They] want to abolish fossil fuels, and ban fracking, which would cost hundreds of thousands of American jobs all across the heartland.” The statement was misleading at best. Biden hasn’t proposed banning fracking, and doesn’t have the ability to do so. Nor does he have a plan to abolish fossil fuels in the near term.

But what’s perhaps more significant about Pence’s statement is that it signals the rise of climate change as a key issue in the presidential contest. In a race filled with dramatic twists and turns, the discussion about climate change on display Wednesday was notable for how closely it hewed to talking points and represented the back and forth on the issue playing out in both parties’ campaigning across the country, and particularly in the swing state of Pennsylvania.

In recent years, as extreme weather has intensified and scientists have sounded alarm bells, climate change has risen on the list of Democratic Party priorities. The issue ranked as a top issue alongside health care in the Democratic primary, and polling suggests that Democratic voters continue to rank it as a top concern even amid the ongoing public health and economic crises. Biden responded with an aggressive plan to stem emissions and eliminate the U.S. carbon footprint by 2050.

The rise of climate change as a top-tier political issue has left Republicans in a bind. Many Republicans now recognize climate change as a real issue, and the long-time strategy of casting doubt on the science no longer works. Still, many Republicans refuse to embrace significant climate measures, in large part because of the fossil-fuel industry’s strong and persistent lobby in Washington. So, instead, many Republicans have sought to portray climate action as unaffordable. The “vast majority of Americans” understand that climate change is happening, John McLaughlin, one of Trump’s top pollsters, told the podcast Climate 2020 last year. But “they don’t want to lose their jobs over this and they don’t want to pay a lot of money.”

The Green New Deal, a resolution introduced by Congressional Democrats in 2019 that calls for bold public spending to address climate change and other social ills, has become the center around which partisan arguments have churned. Republicans have claimed that the resolution would ban cows and planes, among other things, and that it would cost $90 trillion. (Needless to say, these claims are both false and outlandish). In response, Biden has tread carefully, calling the congressional resolution a “crucial framework,” but stressing that he has his own, different plan. (He’s priced that plan at $2 trillion).

The Republican strategy of trying to pillory Biden for the Green New Deal was on full display Wednesday. Asked about the economy, Pence pivoted to the Green New Deal. Following criticism of the administration’s position on health care, Pence pivoted to the Green New Deal. Asked about the science of climate change, Pence pivoted to the Green New Deal.

Harris, who co-sponsored the congressional resolution, mostly dissembled on the question of how closely Biden’s climate plan hews to the Green New Deal, but she did push back hard against Pence’s claim that Biden would ban fracking. “I will repeat, and the American people know, that Joe Biden will not ban fracking,” Harris said. “That is a fact.”

While most Americans want to see the federal government take action to address climate change, there are a range of views about what policies to implement. That’s particularly the case in places heavily dependent on fossil fuels, like parts of rural Pennsylvania, a swing state that could be decisive in the presidential race and is home to a sizable oil-and-gas industry presence that uses fracking to drill. “It’s how you get there that really creates the challenge in rural America,” Heidi Heitkamp, a former Democratic U.S. senator from North Dakota, told me on a panel hosted by D.C.-based think tank Third Way earlier this week. “If the Green New Deal means you get there by stopping all fracking, all development, you’re not going to buy into that” if you live in a part of the country that depends on the industry.

The Trump campaign has sought to make the climate issue all about fracking and the Green New Deal. In campaign visits to Pennsylvania, Trump himself has repeated the claim that Biden would ban fracking, and the President is currently running at least one campaign ad in the state seeking to drive that message home. In response, while on the ground in Pennsylvania, Biden has repeatedly told voters that he would not ban fracking and instead has sought to draw attention to his plan to create millions of clean energy jobs.

Harris made those points during the debate. “Joe Biden has been very clear that he thinks about growing jobs,” she said. “Part of those jobs that will be created by Joe Biden are going to be about clean energy and renewable energy.”

It’s not clear that the Trump campaign’s strategy to hammer Biden on fracking is actually resonating. Polling has shown that voters believe a transition to renewable energy will actually create jobs and the messaging has given Biden an opening to talk to Pennsylvanians about his actual plan.

Ahead of the debate, Michael Catanzaro, a former energy and environmental policy in the Trump White House, said that the Trump campaign sensed Biden was vulnerable on energy in Pennsylvania, but noted that the issue also provided an opening for Biden. “I think the [former] vice president has been on the defensive a bit,” on fracking, he said. “But I think it’s actually working for him. He’s coming out; he’s talking to union voters.”

And, for the voters who may have missed Biden’s fracking remarks on the campaign trail, Harris left no room for misinterpretation during Wednesday’s debate.

The 2020 Physics Nobel Winners Helped Us Better Understand the Universe’s Most Mysterious ...

Wed, 07 Oct 2020 19:45:43 GMT

An awful lot of time elapsed between the day Roger Penrose was walking to work in 1964 and the moment his phone rang while he was in the shower on the morning of Oct. 6, 2020. Back then, his walk was interrupted by “some strange feeling of elation,” as he told the Associated Press yesterday, about the moment he had his first glimmers of insight into the equations that would eventually make him famous. It was surely with another kind of elation that he answered his phone yesterday to learn that those same equations—which were the first to prove the existence of black holes—had earned the 89-year-old University of Oxford mathematical physicist the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Penrose was not alone alone in his delight. Also honored this year were astronomers Andrea Ghez, 55, of the University of California, Los Angeles; and Reinhard Genzel, 68, of the Max Planck Institute in Germany, for their research on what, to humanity anyway, is the most important black hole of all: the supermassive Sagittarius A*, which sits at the center of the Milky Way.

“The discoveries of this year’s Laureates have broken new ground in the study of compact and supermassive objects,” said David Haviland, chair of the Nobel Committee for Physics, in a statement that accompanied the announcement. “But these exotic objects still pose many questions that beg for answers and motivate future research.”

It was very much past research that earned Penrose his recognition—but research that was a prerequisite for much of the black hole science that followed. As with so many other insights into exotic physics, the road to Penrose’s work runs straight through Albert Einstein. In 1915, Einstein developed his theory of general relativity; the following year he postulated that the physics he had discovered could, at least in theory, support the idea of an exceedingly dense body—say, a collapsed star—with a gravitational pull so powerful not even light could escape. Within the maw of such an object—which was not yet known as a black hole—conventional physics and the very laws of nature as we know them would break down.

It was a nifty idea, but Einstein himself, who died in 1955, was not convinced that black holes existed. They made sense in the rarefied world of chalkboard equations, but in the far messier realm of the universe itself, the conditions might not exist to allow so tidy a stellar collapse. Nine years after Einstein’s death, Penrose took his walk to work and began contemplating “what it would be like to be in this situation where all this material is collapsing around you,” as he told the AP. “That’s a place where densities and curvatures go to infinity. You expect the physics to go crazy.”

Crazy maybe, but within a year, Penrose had set the physics straight, publishing a whole new collection of equations that put muscle on the theoretical bones Einstein had left, proving mathematically that black holes could exist in reality, not just as theories in the very big brains of very smart physicists.

“Penrose convinced physicists that black holes were tightly woven within Einstein’s mathematical tapestry,” Brian Greene, best-selling author and theoretical physicist at Columbia University, tells TIME. “Before his discovery, many imagined that black holes could only form in highly idealized conditions that might never occur in the real universe. Penrose took a mathematical sledgehammer to this possibility, establishing that in fairly commonplace circumstances, black holes—according to the math—should form. It has been nearly half-a-century since these breakthroughs and so this recognition is both well deserved and long overdue.”

Ghez’s and Genzel’s work is decidedly more recent, but even they started a while back, independently investigating Sagittarius A* as long ago as the mid-1990s. Back then the nature—even the existence—of a supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way was in doubt. Instead, as the Nobel Committee put it in its commendation, the best astronomers could say was that there was “an extremely heavy, invisible object that pulls on [a] jumble of stars, causing them to rush around at dizzying speeds.” Not exactly conclusive stuff.

The two researchers quickly established themselves as competitors—Ghez conducting her research with the Keck Telescope in Hawaii, Genzel using the European Southern Observatory in Chile’s Atacama Desert. Slowly, both began to peel back the mysteries of Sagittarius A*. Infrared imaging allowed them to penetrate some of the haze of dust and gas that obscures the black hole. Closer to home, they had to contend with the distorting effects of Earth’s atmosphere. They overcame that issue first with something known as speckle imaging—essentially short-exposure snapshots that freeze images in place. Later they used adaptive optics that rely on distortion-correcting mirrors.

Ultimately, their competition led to shared rewards, as the pair successfully observed the paths of thousands of stars circling the galactic center, precisely plotting the orbits of 30 of them. Their findings allowed them to take the measure of Sagittarius A*, calculating that it weighs about 4 million times the mass of the sun.

“Genzel and Ghez were the first to provide convincing observational evidence that black holes are really out there, and that a monstrous-sized one is at the center of our own Milky Way galaxy,” says Greene. “It was a heroic feat to peer at the center of our galaxy with such astonishing precision, establishing that Einstein’s math brightly illuminates reality.”

Ghez is distinguished for another reason too: she’s only the fourth woman since 1901 to be honored with the physics Nobel. More and more women are thriving in the head-cracking fields of astronomy and theoretical physics, but their work has been all too slow in being recognized. “Andrea Ghez is sure to inspire many girls to follow their passion for understanding the cosmos,” says Greene, “some of whom no doubt will one day follow her footsteps to Stockholm.” That, surely, will be a powerful human dividend of this year’s physics prizes. The scientific dividends already speak for themselves.

Siberia Burned. Arctic Ice Shrank. This Was the World’s Hottest September Ever

Wed, 07 Oct 2020 15:50:33 GMT

Well, we’ve done it again. Last month was the warmest September on record, blazing past September 2019’s record global average by 0.05°C, and 2016’s by 0.08°C, according to the latest report from the European Commission-backed Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), which tracks global climate trends.

If you’re not surprised given past trends, you’re not alone. “In a way it would have been more surprising if suddenly we had seen the 10th warmest September on record, instead of the warmest,” says Freja Vamborg, Senior Scientist at C3S and lead author of the report. The record is not in itself significant, she adds. “But put together with past monthly records, and the fact that the last five years have also been the warmest on record, it shows that there is an ongoing trend in increasing global temperatures.”

At the current rate, 2020 is well on its way towards cracking 2016’s record for the hottest global averages over the course of a year. In a year already defined by the record melting of Greenland’s glaciers, near-record levels of shrinking Arctic sea ice, wildfires blazing across Siberia, and the hottest temperature ever recorded in Antarctica, this is one superlative we could do without.

September’s was not even the first monthly record to tumble this year. May 2020 was also the hottest May on record, with temperatures in Siberia a full 10°C above average. That’s the difference between wearing a coat or cut-offs to walk the dog.

Siberia still isn’t getting a break, according to Copernicus: the region’s long, hot, summer has extended into September, with higher-than average temperatures. And the Middle East is racing to catch up. Turkey and Israel also had their warmest Septembers on record. In Jordan, a rare September heatwave forced outdoor work to a halt and schools to close.

In the United States, Los Angeles broke temperature records not just for the month, but for the entire summer, reporting 49°C (121°F) on Sept. 6, an all-time high for the county, and contributing to a spate of disastrous wildfires that blanketed the state in choking smoke. In the Southern Hemisphere, Paraguay and southern Brazil also experienced excessively warm springtime Septembers. Australia, not a novice when it comes to heat, did comparatively well: last month was only the second highest on record.

With nearly three months left in the year, it’s impossible to say if we will surpass 2016’s record heat, or just meet 2019’s second-hottest figures, says Vamborg. An el Niña weather cycle is lowering temperatures in the Pacific, but the unprecedented high temperatures in the Arctic could mitigate that cooling effect. And the near-record decline in Arctic sea ice coverage going into autumn will affect temperatures as well.

Either way, the trend lines are clear. Human induced climate change has caused at least one degree warming since the pre-industrial era, and global average temperatures are edging ever closer to the 1.5°C goal limit set by the Paris Climate Accords. “The key message is that the earth is warming,” says Vamborg. “Some months it’s warming more, and some months less, some years more, and some less. It’s not too late to do something about it, but in order to stop the warming, emissions need to be reduced.”

Nobel Prize for Chemistry Awarded for ‘Genome Scissors’

Wed, 07 Oct 2020 10:34:03 GMT

(STOCKHOLM) — French scientist Emmanuelle Charpentier and American Jennifer A. Doudna have won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for developing a method of genome editing likened to “molecular scissors” that offer the promise of one day curing genetic diseases.

The recipients were announced Wednesday in Stockholm by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

“There is enormous power in this genetic tool, which affects us all,” said Claes Gustafsson, chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry. “It has not only revolutionised basic science, but also resulted in innovative crops and will lead to ground-breaking new medical treatments.”

Gustafsson said that as a result, any genome can now be edited “to fix genetic damage.”

Gusfafsson cautioned that the “enormous power of this technology means we have to use it with great care” but that it “is equally clear that this is a technology, a method that will provide humankind with great opportunities.”

The prestigious award comes with a gold medal and prize money of 10 million krona (more than $1.1 million), courtesy of a bequest left more than a century ago by the prize’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel. The amount was increased recently to adjust for inflation.

“I was very emotional, I have to say,” Charpentier told reporters by phone from Berlin after hearing of the award.

On Monday, the Nobel Committee awarded the prize for physiology and medicine to Americans Harvey J. Alter and Charles M. Rice and British-born scientist Michael Houghton for discovering the liver-ravaging hepatitis C virus. Tuesday’s prize for physics went to Roger Penrose of Britain, Reinhard Genzel of Germany and Andrea Ghez of the United States for their breakthroughs in understanding the mysteries of cosmic black holes.

The other prizes are for outstanding work in the fields of literature, peace and economics.

American Andrea Ghez and 2 Others Win Nobel Prize in Physics

Tue, 06 Oct 2020 10:28:28 GMT

(STOCKHOLM) — Three scientists won this year’s Nobel Prize in physics Tuesday for advancing our understanding of black holes, the all-consuming monsters that lurk in the darkest parts of the universe.

Briton Roger Penrose received half of this year’s prize “for the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity,” the Nobel Committee said.

German Reinhard Genzel and American Andrea Ghez received the second half of the prize “for the discovery of a supermassive compact object at the center of our galaxy.”

The prize celebrates “one of the most exotic objects in the universe,” black holes, which have become a staple of science fact and science fiction and where time seems to stand still, according to the committee.

Black holes are perhaps the most mysterious and powerful objects in astronomy. They are at the center of every galaxy, and smaller ones are dotted around the universe. Nothing, not even light, can escape their incredible gravity. They are the ultimate cosmic dead end.

“Black holes, because they are so hard to understand, is what makes them so appealing,’’ Ghez told The Associated Press Tuesday morning. “I really think of science as a big, giant puzzle.”

Penrose proved with mathematics that the formation of black holes was possible, based heavily on Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity.

“Einstein did not himself believe that black holes really exist, these super-heavyweight monsters that capture everything that enters them,” the committee said. “Nothing can escape, not even light.”

Penrose’s detailed his studies in 1965, but it wasn’t until the 1990s that Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez, each leading a group of astronomers, trained their sights on the dust-covered center of our Milky Way galaxy, a region called Sagittarius A(asterisk), where something strange was going on.

They both found that there was “an extremely heavy, invisible object that pulls on the jumble of stars, causing them to rush around at dizzying speeds.”

It was a black hole. Not just an ordinary black hole, but a supermassive black hole, 4 million times the mass of our sun.

Now scientists know that all galaxies have supermassive black holes.

In 2019, scientists got the first optical image of a black hole, and Ghez, who was not involved, praised the discovery.

“Today we accept these objects are critical to the building blocks of the universe,” Ghez told an audience at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences by phone shortly after the announcement.

Ghez is the fourth woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize for physics, after Marie Curie in 1903, Maria Goeppert-Mayer in 1963, and Donna Strickland in 2018.

“I hope I can inspire other young women into the field. It’s a field that has so many pleasures. And if you’re passionate about the science, there’s so much that can be done,” Ghez said.

The Nobel Committee said black holes “still pose many questions that beg for answers and motivate future research.”

“Not only questions about their inner structure, but also questions about how to test our theory of gravity under the extreme conditions in the immediate vicinity of a black hole,” it said.

It is common for several scientists who worked in related fields to share the prize. Last year’s prize went to Canadian-born cosmologist James Peebles for theoretical work about the early moments after the Big Bang, and Swiss astronomers Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz for discovering a planet outside our solar system.

The prestigious award comes with a gold medal and prize money of 10 million Swedish kronor (more than $1.1 million), courtesy of a bequest left 124 years ago by the prize’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel. The amount was increased recently to adjust for inflation.

The other prizes, to be announced in the coming days, are for outstanding work in the fields of chemistry, literature, peace and economics.

It’s Been 25 Years Since We Found the First Exoplanet. ...

Tue, 06 Oct 2020 06:00:15 GMT

Nobody gives out awards for Worst Planet in the Galaxy—and it would be a dubious honor at best. Somewhere out there may be other garden planets like Earth. Somewhere too may be near-miss worlds like Mars. And somewhere out there are planets like 51 Pegasi b which, if it didn’t win the Worst Planet nod, would surely make it to the medal round.

Located about 50 light years from Earth, 51 Pegasi b is a gas giant like Jupiter, with a mass about 150 times that of Earth, circling its host star at a distance of just 7 million km (4.3 million mi.). Orbiting so close, 51 Pegasi b has a surface temperature estimated at 1,000º C (1,800º F). It’s also tidally locked, meaning one side is always facing that solar oven.

But 51 Pegasi b is more than just an overheated gas ball. In fact, it’s one of the most significant planets ever discovered—so important that, in 2019, the astronomers who found it were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics. Why? Because whatever its shortcomings, it was the first planet ever discovered outside our own solar system orbiting a main sequence star like the sun. With that, the field of exoplanets was born.

51 Pegasi b was discovered on October 6, 1995, and 25 years later, the exoplanet count has grown tremendously. By the most recent tally, there are 4,354 known exoplanets, including 712 multi-planet systems, for a total of 3,218 solar systems beyond our own. Virtually every one of the hundreds of trillions of stars in the universe is now believed to harbor at least one world—and many are home to whole litters. The Earth, which once sat at the center of humanity’s map of the cosmos, is now known to be an impossibly tiny part of an impossibly vast planetary census.

Astronomers didn’t spot 55 Pegasi b directly—it’s no more possible to visualize a planet in the glare of its parent star from a distance of 50 light years than it is to see a moth fluttering near a streetlight from half a dozen blocks away. Instead, the investigators used the radial velocity method, which involves looking at the slight gravitational wobble a planet causes in its star as it makes its orbit. It’s a nifty method for discovering planets, but it’s slow, as only one star can be observed at a time.

With the 2009 launch of the Kepler Space Telescope, astronomers switched to a technique that can scoop up whole netfuls of worlds at once. Known as the transit method, the technique involves looking for the slight dimming in light that occurs when a planet passes across the Earth-facing side of its parent star. The greater the dimming, the bigger the diameter of the planet. The more frequently the dimming occurs, the faster the planet orbits. Both Kepler and and its follow-on observatory, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), stare unblinking at entire patches of sky at once, observing thousands of potential transits for astronomers to study.

The transit method had turned up far more promising worlds than 55 Pegasi b. There’s Proxima Centauri b, an Earth-like planet just 4.2 light years away, which orbits its star in the “Goldilocks zone,” where temperatures are just right for liquid water to exist. There’s Ross 128 b, another Earth-sized world just 11 light years away, where surface temperatures are estimated to be a balmy 23º C (73º F). There’s the Trappist-1 solar system, just 39 light years distant and home to no fewer than seven Earth-like worlds, at least six of which could orbit in the Goldilocks zone.

The 25 years in which we went from knowing of no other exoplanets to identifying thousands of them (and being certain of trillions more) is a long time when measured against a human lifespan. On the scale of cosmological time, it’s hardly a flicker. But in that flicker, our grasp of our place in the universe was transformed forever. Earth may seem far less special than it did when it was one of only just eight known planets. But it’s home to a species both wiser and humbler for the knowledge it has gained.

3 Win Nobel Medicine Prize for Discovering Hepatitis C Virus

Mon, 05 Oct 2020 11:51:38 GMT

(STOCKHOLM) — Americans Harvey J. Alter and Charles M. Rice and British-born scientist Michael Houghton won the Nobel Prize for medicine on Monday for their discovery of the hepatitis C virus, a major source of liver disease that affects millions worldwide.

Announcing the prize in Stockholm, the Nobel Committee noted that the trio’s work identified a major source of blood-borne hepatitis that couldn’t be explained by the previously discovered hepatitis A and B viruses. Their work, dating back to the 1970s and 1980s, has helped saved millions of lives, the committee said.

“Thanks to their discovery, highly sensitive blood tests for the virus are now available and these have essentially eliminated post-transfusion hepatitis in many parts of the world, greatly improving global health,” the committee said.

“Their discovery also allowed the rapid development of antiviral drugs directed at hepatitis C,” it added. “For the first time in history, the disease can now be cured, raising hopes of eradicating hepatitis C virus from the world population.”

The World Health Organization estimates there are over 70 million cases of hepatitis C worldwide and 400,000 deaths from it each year. The disease is chronic and a major cause of liver cancer and cirrhosis requiring liver transplants.

The medicine prize carried particular significance this year due to the coronavirus pandemic, which has highlighted the importance that medical research has for societies and economies around the world.

Will Irving, a virologist at the University of Nottingham, said that identifying hepatitis C had been the “holy grail” in medicine.

“After hepatitis A and B were discovered in the 1970s, it was clear there was still at least one other virus or more that were causing liver damage,” he said.

“We knew there was a virus in the blood supply, because when people had blood transfusion they would get liver damage,” Irving said. “It was recognized as a risk but there was nothing we could do. We didn’t know what the virus was and we couldn’t test for it.”

Nobel Committee member Patrik Ernfors drew a parallel between this year’s prize and the current rush by millions of scientists around the world to combat the coronavirus pandemic.

“The first thing you need to do is to identify the causing virus,” he told reporters. “And once that has been done, that is, in itself, the starting point for development of drugs to treat the disease and also to develop vaccines against the disorder.”

“So the actual discovery, viral discovery itself, is a critical moment,” said Ernfors.

Unlike hepatitis A, which is transmitted via food or water and causes an acute infection that can last a few weeks, hepatitis B and C are transmitted through blood.

American scientist Baruch Blumberg discovered the hepatitis B virus in 1967 and received the 1976 Nobel Prize in medicine, but this did not explain all cases of chronic hepatitis, a disease that was becoming more common even in apparently healthy people who had received or given blood.

“Before the discovery of the hepatitis C virus, it was a bit like Russian roulette to get a blood transfusion,” said Nobel Committee member Nils-Goran Larsson.

Alter, who was born in 1935 in New York, was working at the U.S. National Institutes of Health in Bethesda when he discovered that plasma from patients who didn’t have hepatitis B could also could transfer the disease.

“The breakthrough came in 1989, when Michael Houghton and colleagues working at Chiron Corporation used a combination of molecular biology and immunology-based techniques to clone the virus,” said Nobel Committee member Gunilla Karlsson-Hedestam.

Later, Nobel winner Rice confirmed that a cloned hepatitis virus alone could cause persistent infection in chimpanzees and reproduce the disease observed in humans.

The hepatitis C virus belongs to a group known as flaviviruses that also includes West Nile virus, dengue virus and yellow fever virus.

Thomas Perlmann, the Secretary-General of the Nobel Committee, said he managed to reach two of the winners, Alter and Rice.

“I had to call a couple of times before they answered,” he said. “They seemed very surprised and very, very happy.”

The prestigious Nobel award comes with a gold medal and prize money of 10 million Swedish kronor (over $1,118,000), courtesy of a bequest left 124 years ago by the prize’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel.

Graham Foster, professor of hepatology at Queen Mary University, said the discovery of hepatitis C had prevented millions from getting sick or dying of the disease or other liver problems and that the awarding of the Nobel to Alter, Houghton and Rice was very well deserved.

Foster said the discovery has had significant impacts in both developing countries, like Egypt and Pakistan, where millions were infected by the disease via contaminated medical equipment or procedures, and in developed countries like the U.S., where the blood supply itself was often contaminated.

“This discovery allowed for safe blood transfusion and it allowed the rapid development of treatments for hepatitis C,” Foster said. “We are now in a position where we have drugs that are 96% effective if you take a pill for eight weeks.”

He said Egypt had implemented a massive screening program to detect hepatitis C and virtually eliminated the disease.

Foster estimated in recent years, tens of millions of people have been infected with hepatitis C.

“Identifying the virus has allowed us to protect the majority of those people.”

The Nobel Committee often recognizes basic science that has laid the foundations for practical applications in common use today.

“It takes time before it’s fully apparent how beneficial a discovery is,” said Perlmann. “Of course these serological tests have been around for quite a while, but the antiviral drugs that emerged as a consequence of this significant discovery have been much more recent.”

Monday’s medicine award is the first of six prizes in 2020 being announced through Oct. 12. The other prizes are for outstanding work in the fields of physics, chemistry, literature, peace and economics.

___

Jordans reported from Berlin. Maria Cheng in London contributed to this report.

Republicans Claim Addressing Climate Change Is Too Expensive. ...

Wed, 23 Sep 2020 11:00:20 GMT

“It’s too expensive.” Republicans have uttered this refrain time and again to reject nearly every proposal aimed at addressing climate change. It’s what drove the U.S. rejection of global climate deals in the 1990s and essentially the only context in which the Trump campaign brings up climate change today.

But few Americans are buying it, a new poll shows. Nearly half of Americans think addressing climate change will help the economy while only 29% believe that climate policy will cause harm, according to a new report by researchers at Stanford University, Resources for the Future (RFF) and ReconMR. “It’s just an argument that doesn’t work,” says report author Jon Krosnick, a Stanford social psychologist professor who studies political behavior of the argument that climate policy hurts jobs. “The argument has never convinced even a majority of Republicans.”

The report—shared exclusively with TIME—relies on a survey of 999 American adults between May and August and shows broad U.S. support for a range of climate policies. Significant majorities support tax incentives, carbon pricing and regulations as means to reduce emissions. More than 80% of Americans believe the U.S. should offer tax incentives for utilities that make power with renewable energy; more than 80% support key U.S. commitments under the Paris Agreement; and nearly two-thirds support a requirement for all cars to get at least 55 miles per gallon by 2025. “It’s not like 52-48, or that kind of thing,” says Krosnick. “There are clear leanings.”

The research speaks to a fault line that has come to define rhetoric around climate policy over the past decade. Barack Obama ran for president in 2008 promising a climate policy that would create “millions of new jobs.” Republicans fought his climate measures throughout his presidency, with some denying the science of climate change and others saying it would be too expensive.

That debate hit a fever pitch in recent years as Americans have grown increasingly aware of and concerned about the science of climate change. Republicans have changed their tactics as a result, increasingly arguing that mitigation efforts are too expensive.

Before the coronavirus pandemic hit the U.S., climate change was poised to be a central topic on the campaign trail. And, while COVID-19 may have eclipsed climate change in the headlines, polls have shown that voters remain concerned. Data from RFF, Stanford and ReconMR shows that 81% of Americans believe that Earth’s temperature has increased over the last 100 years—an uptick over recent years.

Former Vice President Biden has sought to campaign on this concern, proposing a suite of policies that he says would eliminate the U.S. carbon footprint by 2050 while creating millions of jobs. “When Donald Trump thinks about climate change he thinks: ‘hoax,’” Biden said during a Sept. 14 speech. “I think: ‘jobs.’ Good-paying, union jobs that put Americans to work building a stronger, more climate resilient nation.” Many leading economists and others who study climate policy have called for such measures to boost economic growth and reduce emissions.

Meanwhile, Trump has railed against the proposed Green New Deal and accused Biden of supporting climate policies that the Democratic nominee has not in fact endorsed—like abolishing the U.S. production of fossil fuels. “Millions of jobs will be lost, and energy prices will soar,” he said at the Republican National Convention. However, most climate scientists and economists agree that leaving climate change unchecked will create a wide range of environmental and social harms that will significantly hinder the global economy.

Even though this approach lacks broad appeal, the Trump’s campaign strategy could still activate select voters in influential pockets of the country. Voters in western Pennsylvania who depend on revenue from fracking, for instance, may be concerned about losing their jobs if the oil and gas industry suffers under new climate policy. Some voters—particularly rural Americans who drive long distances and spend a larger share of their income on energy than their urban counterparts—might waiver at the prospect of increased energy costs.

Still, the report finds that U.S. concern on climate is driven less by personal economic concerns and more by broader societal interests. Concern that climate change will significantly harm future generations better predicted support for action on climate change than respondent concern that it would harm them personally. “It’s not about the pocketbook,” says Krosnick.

The report is the third in a series from RFF and Stanford released ahead of the election to look at American behavior and climate change. A previous report showed that the percentage of Americans who care passionately about climate change and personally prioritize it has risen dramatically in recent years, from 13% in 2015 to 25% in 2020. The second report found that three quarters of Americans believe they have seen the effects of climate change and 80% say they support more stringent building codes to adapt to the effects of climate change.

The survey is the latest in a string of polling that shows sustained interest and concerned in climate change in the U.S. An NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll released Sept. 19 showed climate change as the top concern for Democratic voters and trailing coronavirus and the economy overall. A June poll from Pew Research Center found that nearly two-thirds of Americans want more aggressive action from the federal government on climate change.

All of this suggests that public opinion will be eager for new climate policy should Democrats win control of the White House and Congress in November. But public opinion is just the start.

Donald Trump’s Campaign Crafted a Careful Climate Message. Trump Ignored It

Mon, 21 Sep 2020 20:22:27 GMT

For months, the Trump campaign’s public statements and the President’s prepared remarks have repeated a message on climate change carefully calibrated not to alienate Republicans worried about the health of the planet: regardless of the science, Democratic plans to address the issue are too expensive. Last week, President Trump disregarded his own campaign’s meticulous messaging and offered an assessment of climate change so out of touch with most voters that it may have made even some of his loyalest supporters cringe.

During a stop in California to observe the destruction caused by the state’s wildfires, Trump called for better forest management to reduce the risk of fire. When pressed by a state official on the link between climate change and worsening wildfires, Trump spoke bluntly — and inaccurately. “It will start getting cooler,” he said, seemingly conflating the upcoming change of season with the long-term shifting climate. Challenged further, he replied, “I don’t think science knows actually.”

The moment — and Trump’s dismissal of climate change more broadly — indicates how disconnected Trump has grown from the popular understanding of the problem. Voters increasingly understand that climate change is happening, and Republicans, including in Trump’s own campaign, are seeking to adjust their message on the issue to match public sentiment. Trump hasn’t seemed to notice.

“I would encourage the President to look at the science,” Sen. Lindsey Graham, a close Trump ally who represents South Carolina, said at an event last year. “Admit that climate change is real, and come up with solutions that do not destroy the economy like the Green New Deal.”

Understanding the Trump campaign’s strategy on the issue requires looking back to last year, when the Democratic primary was heating up and the word “coronavirus” would have elicited blank stares in most circles. At the time, climate change seemed poised to be a major issue on in the 2020 race. Some polls showed the issue ranking neck-and-neck with health care as the top issue among Democratic primary voters, and most of the wide field of Democratic contenders scrambled to endorse proposals for a Green New Deal, a massive government spending program that paired emissions reduction with a focus on social justice issues.

But Democrats weren’t alone. Polling from the Pew Research Center found that 67% of all U.S. adults thought the federal government wasn’t doing enough to address climate change. And these findings seem to match the Trump campaign’s internal polls. John McLaughlin, one of Trump’s top pollsters, said in an interview last year for the podcast Climate 2020 that the “vast majority of Americans” understand that climate change is happening, but that they remain receptive to arguments that proposed solutions are too costly. “Voters are highly cynical,” he said. “They don’t want to lose their jobs over this and they don’t want to pay a lot of money.”

The Trump’s campaign’s official message has played out along those lines. The campaign avoids questioning the science of climate change and instead offers exaggerated claims about the price tag of climate policy. In recent months, the Trump campaign has sent email blasts saying Biden has endorsed “a job-killing war on energy” and called his climate policy “socialism.” After Biden delivered a speech on climate change on Sept. 14, for example, the Trump campaign released a “fact check” that took issue with everything from Biden’s claim that Trump didn’t listen to experts regarding wildfires to Biden’s promise of clean energy jobs. Notably absent was any skepticism about the fundamental fact that the Earth is warming and humans are to blame.

Knowing that an ever-increasing number of voters are concerned about these issues, Trump’s aides have also sought to soften the President’s environmental record of regulatory rollbacks and unilateralism with a more positive narrative. Last year, Trump hosted an event at the White House to highlight his environmental “accomplishments,” which he claimed included reducing carbon emissions and ensuring the “cleanest air” and “crystal clean” water. During a Sept. 8 event in Florida, a state already facing many climate-related challenges, Trump simultaneously endorsed a ban on offshore drilling in the state and claimed that he was “number one since Teddy Roosevelt” on environmental protection.

The ongoing efforts to paint Trump in a green light aren’t matched with substantive policy. Trump’s environmental agenda has consisted largely of undoing rules and regulations created under President Barack Obama, from a rollback of vehicle emissions standards to a nixing of emissions rules for power plants to the departure from the Paris Agreement, the landmark global deal aimed at combating climate change. A Sept. 17 analysis from the Rhodium Group, an independent research that analyzes energy and climate data, found that Trump’s climate rollbacks could add as much as 1.8 gigatons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere by 2035. That’s about a third of the country’s emissions last year.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the message of Trump, as an individual candidate, has at times departed from the calibrated message constructed by his campaign. When left to improvise, Trump has made light of climate science and rejected the scientists responsible for producing it.

That messaging aligned with many Republicans a decade ago, but today most of the party’s leaders either say they understand that man-made climate change is a reality or avoid talking about the issue entirely. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, for example, said he accepted the scientific consensus on global warming last year as talk of the Green New Deal rippled across Capitol Hill. “I do. The question is how do you address it,” he said when asked whether he believed in man-made global warming. “The way to do this consistent with American values and American capitalism is through technology and innovation.”

McConnell hasn’t offered anything in the way of substantive climate policy, but other Republicans have proposed piecemeal legislation, calling for measures to promote the planting of trees and funding for clean-energy innovation. The desire to promote climate-change credentials has been especially strong among vulnerable Republicans. Graham and Cory Gardner of Colorado, both GOP senators up for re-election in November, have both put their names on a handful of modest environment issues this year and last, including the formation of the Roosevelt Conservation Caucus last year.

This is a far cry from Trump’s climate denial, but, in some ways, it is a distinction without a difference. Acknowledging that climate change is real does nothing if that admission isn’t accompanied by meaningful policies to address it. And on that score, there isn’t much to show.

‘A Climate Emergency Unfolding Before Our Eyes. ...

Mon, 21 Sep 2020 19:15:06 GMT

From the bridge of the Arctic Sunrise, an old ice-breaking fishing trawler turned research vessel now plying the polar waters between Greenland and northern Norway, Laura Meller has an unparalleled view of our planet’s future. It is both gorgeous, and terrifying. The early autumn sunlight bathes the scattered icebergs in soft pink and orange hues that glimmer with the gentle swell.

“It is so soft and quiet out here that it’s difficult to remember that we are literally looking at a climate emergency unfolding before our eyes,” she says by satellite-enabled WhatsApp. Meller is a polar advisor for a Greenpeace expedition plying the edge of the polar ice cap to document the minimum extent of sea ice this year, a potent indicator for overall global climate health. The prognosis is grim.

On Sept.21, scientists at the United States-based National Snow and Ice Data Centre (NSIDC), announced that Arctic sea ice coverage had contracted to a near-unprecedented minimum of 3.74 million square kilometers on Sept. 15, the second lowest in 42 years of records. Arctic sea ice has already lost two-thirds of its volume over the past four decades, part of an alarming trend in polar warming that that is already seeing impacts across the globe. “It is a traumatic picture,” says Meller, of the satellite images provided by NASA that the NSIDC used to make its assessment. “The rapid disappearance of sea ice is a sobering indicator of how closely our planet is circling the drain.”

Polar sea ice minimums—the extent that ice melts during the summer months before starting to form again as winter returns— are not merely a problem for polar bears and Inuit hunters who rely on ice to preserve their traditions and culture. When there isn’t enough ice to reflect the sun’s rays back into space, that heat is instead absorbed by the ocean, accelerating further ice melt while altering ocean currents, weakening the jet stream and changing wind patterns. The effects ripple through the global ecosystem, manifesting in greater drought, heat, floods and storms. While this year’s record breaking wildfire season in the U.S., or the series of hurricanes wreaking havoc in the country’s south, cannot be directly linked to this year’s near-record loss of ice in the Arctic, they are all symptoms of the same ailment: increasing carbon emissions.

The symptoms are also apparent elsewhere in the northern polar region. On Sept. 14, just a day before the Arctic officially reached its minimum level of ice cover, The Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland reported that Greenland’s largest remaining ice shelf had just jettisoned a chunk of ice twice the size of Manhattan. The Arctic Sunrise was too far away to see the glacier break apart, but the resulting flotilla of icebergs could easily be spotted on satellite images. “Such a massive piece of ice collapsing into the ocean like that—the planet doesn’t really have much more powerful ways of alerting us to the crisis,” says Meller.

Daniella Zalcman—GreenpeaceAn aerial view of the Arctic Sunrise in the Arctic, on Sep. 15, 2020.

It’s the second year in a row that Greenland’s glaciers have seen record losses of ice; overall, the region has warmed by an average of about 3C since 1980, resulting in unprecedented levels of melting. New research published in the journal Nature Communications Earth & Environment last month indicates that Greenland’s melting ice sheet has already passed the point of no return. Even if the climate were to stop warming today, researchers found, the glaciers will continue to melt for some time.

Meanwhile, another study published in the journal Nature Climate Change, says that the effects of global warming in the Arctic are so severe that the climate there is already shifting from one dominated by ice and snow to one characterized by open water and rain. The beginnings of that transition can already be seen from space.

Satellites have been taking snapshots of Arctic sea ice since 1979, and ice coverage had been declining by about 12 percent per decade, until 2007, when it started accelerating into near record lows almost every year. The year 2012 saw the least amount of ice, but 2020 is a close second, says Twila Moon, the deputy lead scientist at the NSIDC. “We should be thankful for any year we are not seeing a record, but second place is still abysmal and indicative of the completely changed world we are living in.”

NSIDC/NASAThis graph shows the average September extent of Arctic sea ice over the years. (Arctic sea ice reaches its minimum each September. )

Global sea levels are largely unaffected by sea ice melt, as it was already displacing ocean water when frozen. The loss of land based glaciers and ice shelves, however, has serious consequences. Were it to melt entirely, Greenland’s ice sheet could raise sea levels by at least 20 feet (6 meters), putting many of the worlds’ coastal cities under water. Even at current rates of warming that eventuality is still a few centuries away. But when the sea ice disappears, it can accelerate the loss of land-based ice as well, by pulling out the stoppers that keep it locked up on shore, says Moon.

Scientists estimate that meltwater running off the Greenland ice sheet in 2019 was enough to raise global sea levels by more than 2 mm. It may not sound like much, but over time it is enough to flood low-lying islands and cities, especially combined with storm surges and high tides. “Our ice sheets, our glaciers, they are all holding water that would otherwise be in the ocean,” says Moon. “The more rapidly we warm the climate, the more rapidly we lose the ice, and the more rapidly it moves to our shores.”

Daniella Zalcman—GreenpeaceThe Arctic sea ice edge off the coast of Greenland, on Sep. 15, 2020.

The solution, she says, is as obvious as it is difficult: stop the rate of fossil fuel emissions. “If we take decisive action now, we can slow the rate of ice loss, we can slow the rate of changing water levels, we can slow coastal erosion and flooding. And that gives us more time to adjust to the changes that already are coming.”

Even if carbon emissions were to somehow to end today, much of the Arctic’s ice melt would stay locked in for years to come, the result of global warming over the past few decades. That’s all the more reason to act now, Moon says. “We are behind the curve of how we are going to adapt to sea level rise that is already coming from past actions, and if we continue with this pace of emissions, we will have even more to catch up to.”

Signs of Life on Venus Hint at Biology Pretty Much Anywhere in the Universe

Tue, 15 Sep 2020 17:58:40 GMT

To go to Venus is to go to hell. One of the most brilliant and beautiful objects in the night sky, Venus is a near twin of Earth in size and mass but it is radically different in almost every other way. Its surface temperature averages 470º C (880º F), or hot enough to melt lead. Its atmosphere is 96% carbon dioxide, with a ground-level pressure 90 times greater than that on Earth—the equivalent of being under 914 m (3,000 ft.) of water. Spacecraft that descend through the Venusian atmosphere can make much of the trip without a parachute, descending like a marble in a can of house paint.

This is not—it needn’t be said—a place that could likely harbor life. Except that now it very much needs to be said that it looks like it might.

That astonishing possibility arose out of observations made by the James Clerk Maxwell telescope in Hawaii and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array telescope in Chile’s Atacama Desert, and published yesterday in Nature Astronomy. The study’s authors, led by Cardiff University astronomer and professor Jane Greaves, did not find life itself. What they found instead were significant quantities of the toxic gas phosphine, which is a known byproduct of microorganisms that thrive in anaerobic environments—or those lacking free oxygen. In theory, the gas could be produced by volcanoes or the interaction of lightning with the atmosphere, but the concentrations in which the researchers found the stuff on Venus seemed far too high for those periodic, non-biological processes to be responsible. Instead, something must be steadily producing and regularly replenishing the gas, and that something looks to investigators like it could well be biology.

“[We] exhaustively went through every possibility and ruled all of them out: volcanoes, lightning strikes, small meteorites falling into the atmosphere,” Sara Seager, an MIT planetary scientist and co-author of the paper, told the Associated Press. “Not a single process we looked at could produce phosphine in high enough quantities to explain our team’s findings.”

This is by no means the first time investigators have contemplated the possibility of life in so inhospitable a place as Venus. Early in the planet’s history, Venus, like Mars, was likely a watery world similar at least in that way to Earth. Due to its lack of a magnetic field, Mars’s atmosphere was stripped away by the sun at some point, causing the water to sputter away into space. In the case of Venus, the planet’s lack of global plate tectonics prevented carbon dioxide from being plowed back into the ground, leading to a runaway greenhouse effect—exacerbated by the planet’s closer proximity to the sun than Earth’s—causing the oceans to boil away. The water vapor in the air only made the greenhouse heating worse.

But Venus had hundreds of millions of temperate years before it lost its water in which microbial life could have formed on the ground and then migrated up through the atmosphere to higher elevations—50 or so km (31 mi.)—where the pressure is closer to that of the Earth at sea level and the temperature is a balmy, shirtsleeves 30º C (86° F). There, bacteria could survive and thrive.

Not everyone is persuaded that the new findings mean biology on Earth’s sister planet. For one thing, the Venusian clouds are exceedingly high in sulfuric acid, meaning the microbes would have had to evolve a way to deal with its corrosive effects. For another thing, just because investigators have ruled out known alternative sources of phosphine doesn’t mean unknown ones aren’t responsible.

“It’s not a smoking gun,” co-author David Clements, an Imperial College of London astrophysicist, told the AP. “It’s not even gunshot residue on the hands of your prime suspect, but there is a distinct whiff of cordite in the air which may be suggesting something.”

One of the things it suggests is that the solar system—and perhaps the universe by implication—could well be teeming with life. If a blast-furnace world like Venus could harbor atmospheric organisms and frigid desert like Mars could harbor them in aquifers underground, what does it say about rich water worlds like the Jovian moons Europa and Ganymede, the Saturnian moon Enceladus and the dwarf planet Pluto, which are believed to harbor salty, liquid oceans beneath their surface, where life would have had billions of years to evolve? What does it say about the larger cosmos, where water is abundant? What does it say about even humble asteroids and meteorites that have landed on Earth carrying hydrocarbons and amino acids?

Life may well be exceedingly hard to achieve—found only on a one-off world like Earth and nowhere else. Or, it might be exceedingly easy, requiring nothing more than chemistry, energy and time to emerge—or maybe it falls somewhere in between. Today, the betting feels a little more like it tips to the easy side. Our solar system is more dynamic than we ever believed—and there is no reason the same could not be true of the cosmos as a whole.

How Climate Change May Be Contributing to Our Political Instability

Tue, 15 Sep 2020 13:18:05 GMT

If you pick up the newspaper these days, it’s hard not to be overwhelmed by the headlines: historic wildfires, a deadly pandemic and an impending U.S. election unlike any in recent memory. When you take a step back, it seems a bit like the fabric of society is fraying. Climate change isn’t entirely responsible for any of these problems, but there is a growing body of literature suggesting that climate change shapes political and social stability.

Research has shown repeatedly that warmer temperatures and more extreme weather contribute to a slew of adverse outcomes: violent crime, political instability and the collapse of regimes, to name a few. This year is likely to be the first- or second-hottest year on record, and extreme weather and climate-related events have struck from coast to coast in the U.S., not to mention around the world, and so it’s worth asking: what role does climate change play in our current political instability?

It’s a controversial question. For years, many politicians and commentators shuddered when scientists or climate activists discussed climate change in relation to individual storms or wildfires, accusing them of politicizing disaster—and, in those cases, the link to climate change was relatively straightforward. The evidence connecting climate change and political stability has been less obvious, but is becoming increasingly impossible to ignore. Warmer temperatures and extreme weather exacerbate social stress and worsen economic outcomes; these in turn affect political behavior. A landmark 2013 paper in the journal Science found that a change in temperature of one standard deviation was associated with a 2.3% increase in interpersonal conflict rates and a 13.2% increase in the rate of intergroup conflict. By 2050, temperatures are expected to rise by two standard deviations in most places across the globe and by as much as four standard deviations in some places.

Those percentages may seem small, but in many cases they can be enough to lead to serious problems. “A lot of the way in which climate change is really bad is like death by 1,000 cuts,” says Solomon Hsiang, author of the 2013 study and director of the Global Policy Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley. “Some of the biggest problems are situations in which we don’t realize we’re being affected by the climate, because then we don’t do anything to protect ourselves.”

The past: a history of climate change-induced political upheavals

Climate has shaped human life from the very first civilizations. A range of studies have shown how weather and climatic conditions have led to the collapse of societies, from the decline of the Tang dynasty in China in the 10th century to the decline of the Mayan civilization around 900 A.D. to the reshaping of settlement in Africa before the common era.

A prime example is the city of Angkor, the capital of the Khmer Empire in Cambodia from the 9th to 15th centuries. In its 600-year existence, the Khmer civilization built a complex system of waterways to meet Angkor’s needs as well as to protect the city from flooding. But, as a 2010 study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences laid out, the region was hit with a decades-long drought in the 15th century that came as global temperatures transitioned from a warm period to a cool period. At the same time, the empire faced other pressures—namely, conflict with a neighboring kingdom and economic pressure from a change in trade patterns. The combined effect was the collapse of Angkor.

It’s easy to think about ancient civilizations and chalk up their failures to naiveté. They didn’t surf the internet or zip around the world on airplanes; surely, 21st century civilizations can better adapt to climactic changes. The thing is, while we may be far more technologically advanced today, ancient civilizations didn’t spew hundreds of billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The result of those emissions—created over a tiny fraction of human history—is a sharp temperature rise poised to blow the climatic changes faced by ancient civilizations out of the water. “We’re so tempted to look at the historical record and say, ‘those guys didn’t know what they were doing, but we are super sharp now,’” says Hsiang. “I’m pretty sure those guys thought the exact same thing.”

The present: a tumultuous time, politically and climatically

Today, the U.S. faces a wide range of challenges, most of which, at their core, have nothing to do with climate change: centuries of systemic racism, an ailing health care system and rampant economic inequality, to name a few. Globally, there’s a wide range of similarly vexing problems. There’s a case to be made for how climate change exacerbates these problems: urban heat islands make people of color more vulnerable to heat waves, flooding spreads water-borne diseases that stress health care systems and extreme weather hits the poorest hardest.

More subtly, extreme temperatures and weather shape human behavior, which in turn affects social and political stability. “We are creatures that live in an environment, our environment is our climate,” says Alexander Cohen, an assistant professor of political science at Clarkson University who studies climate and political behavior. “To analyze political behavior, or really any social behavior, without looking at this huge variable is to not tell the whole story.”

In these tumultuous times—both politically and climatically—there are several key factors of human behavior to consider. Research has shown that warm temperatures increase the odds of violent interpersonal interactions: cities see spikes in violent crime and police are more likely to use force in extreme heat. Studies have also found that people dealing with extreme heat are more likely to distrust outsiders. And research has shown that challenging weather shapes political decisions. “When people are uncomfortable, weather explains some of that,” says Cohen. “It can explain how they respond to public opinion surveys, we know that it affects how they vote, or if they vote at all.”

The research on these linkages is fairly nascent, and it’s hard to lay out precisely the subtle role climate is playing in our current turmoil. But, in recent weeks, hundreds of thousands have been displaced in California and Oregon, more than 10 million acres of farmland have been damaged by a storm in Iowa, and a pair of hurricanes have flooded parts of Louisiana and Texas. Temperatures across the country are on track to make this one of the hottest years on record. It’s hard to imagine this upheaval isn’t subtly feeding into the zeitgeist.

The future: what could come next if climate change is left unchecked

Climate change’s role in shaping politics and geopolitics today may be subtle, but in the future, its influence is certain to be more pronounced—and concerning. If climate change is left unchecked, bigger storms, unsurvivable heat and disappearing coastlines will leave billions displaced or struggling to survive. This would in turn create unprecedented strain on political and social institutions, not mention the global economy.

No one really knows exactly how the fallout will occur. But there’s a strong scientific basis to assume that without urgent action to stem emissions we’ll be in for many more years and decades of disturbing newspaper headlines—and they won’t be just about storms and heat waves.

A version of this article was originally published in TIME’s climate newsletter, One.Five. Click here to sign up to receive these stories early.

Astronomers Find Potential Sign of Life in Venus’ Atmosphere

Mon, 14 Sep 2020 18:17:03 GMT

Astronomers have found a potential sign of life high in the atmosphere of neighboring Venus: hints there may be bizarre microbes living in the sulfuric acid-laden clouds of the hothouse planet.

Two telescopes in Hawaii and Chile spotted in the thick Venutian clouds the chemical signature of phosphine, a noxious gas that on Earth is only associated with life, according to a study in Monday’s journal Nature Astronomy.

Several outside experts — and the study authors themselves — agreed this is tantalizing but said it is far from the first proof of life on another planet. They said it doesn’t satisfy the “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” standard established by the late Carl Sagan, who speculated about the possibility of life in the clouds of Venus in 1967.

“It’s not a smoking gun,” said study co-author David Clements, an Imperial College of London astrophysicist. “It’s not even gunshot residue on the hands of your prime suspect, but there is a distinct whiff of cordite in the air which may be suggesting something.”

As astronomers plan for searches for life on planets outside our solar system, a major method is to look for chemical signatures that can only be made by biological processes, called biosignatures. After three astronomers met in a bar in Hawaii, they decided to look that way at the closest planet to Earth: Venus. They searched for phosphine, which is three hydrogen atoms and a phosphorous atom.

On Earth, there are only two ways phosphine can be formed, study authors said. One is in an industrial process. (The gas was produced for use as chemical warfare agent in World War I.) The other way is as part of some kind of poorly understood function in animals and microbes. Some scientists consider it a waste product, others don’t.

Phosphine is found in “ooze at the bottom of ponds, the guts of some creatures like badgers and perhaps most unpleasantly associated with piles of penguin guano,” Clements said.

Study co-author Sara Seager, an MIT planetary scientist, said researchers “exhaustively went through every possibility and ruled all of them out: volcanoes, lightning strikes, small meteorites falling into the atmosphere. … Not a single process we looked at could produce phosphine in high enough quantities to explain our team’s findings.”

That leaves life.

The astronomers hypothesize a scenario for how life could exist on the inhospitable planet where temperatures on the surface are around 800 degrees (425 degrees Celsius) with no water.

“Venus is hell. Venus is kind of Earth’s evil twin,” Clements said. “Clearly something has gone wrong, very wrong, with Venus. It’s the victim of a runaway greenhouse effect.”

But that’s on the surface.

Seager said all the action may be 30 miles (50 kilometers) above ground in the thick carbon-dioxide layer cloud deck, where it’s about room temperature or slightly warmer. It contains droplets with tiny amounts of water but mostly sulfuric acid that is a billion times more acidic than what’s found on Earth.

The phosphine could be coming from some kind of microbes, probably single-cell ones, inside those sulfuric acid droplets, living their entire lives in the 10-mile-deep (16-kilometer-deep) clouds, Seager and Clements said. When the droplets fall, the potential life probably dries out and could then get picked up in another drop and reanimate, they said.

Life is definitely a possibility, but more proof is needed, several outside scientists said.

Cornell University astronomer Lisa Kaltenegger said the idea of this being the signature of biology at work is exciting, but she said we don’t know enough about Venus to say life is the only explanation for the phosphine.

“I’m not skeptical, I’m hesitant,” said Justin Filiberto, a planetary geochemist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston who specializes in Venus and Mars and isn’t part of the study team.

Filiberto said the levels of phosphine found might be explained away by volcanoes. He said recent studies that were not taken into account in this latest research suggest that Venus may have far more active volcanoes than originally thought. But Clements said that explanation would make sense only if Venus were at least 200 times as volcanically active as Earth.

David Grinspoon, a Washington-based astrobiologist at the Planetary Science Institute who wrote a 1997 book suggesting Venus could harbor life, said the finding “almost seems too good to be true.”

“I’m excited, but I’m also cautious,” Grinspoon said. “We found an encouraging sign that demands we follow up.”

NASA hasn’t sent anything to Venus since 1989, though Russia, Europe and Japan have dispatched probes. The U.S. space agency is considering two possible Venus missions. One of them, called DAVINCI+, would go into the Venutian atmosphere as early as 2026.

Clements said his head tells him “it’s probably a 10% chance that it’s life,” but his heart “obviously wants it to be much bigger because it would be so exciting.”

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Follow Seth Borenstein on Twitter: @borenbears

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The Associated Press Health & Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.