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Skipping Meals, Fasting and Eating Meals Too Closely Together May Be Linked to Increased Mortality Risk
Summary: A new study links daily eating to mortality risk. Those over 40 who eat one meal a day have a higher mortality risk. Those who skip breakfast are at an increased risk of cardiovascular disease-associated death, and those who eat meals less than 4.5 hours apart have increased mortality risks.
Source: Elsevier
Eating only one meal per day is associated with an increased risk of mortality in American adults 40 years old and older, according to a new study in the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics.
Skipping breakfast is associated with higher risk of cardiovascular disease mortality and missing lunch or dinner with all-cause mortality.
Even among individuals who eat three meals daily, eating two adjacent meals less than or equal to 4.5 hours apart is associated with a higher all-cause death risk.
“At a time when intermittent fasting is widely touted as a solution for weight loss, metabolic health, and disease prevention, our study is important for the large segment of American adults who eat fewer than three meals each day. Our research revealed that individuals eating only one meal a day are more likely to die than those who had more daily meals.
Among them, participants who skip breakfast are more likely to develop fatal cardiovascular diseases, while those who skip lunch or dinner increase their risk of death from all causes,” noted lead author Yangbo Sun, MBBS, Ph.D., Department of Preventive Medicine, The University of Tennessee Health Science Center, Memphis. TN, U.S.. “Based on these findings, we recommend eating at least two to three meals spread throughout the day.”
The investigators analyzed data from a cohort of more than 24,000 American adults 40 years old and older who participated in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) between 1999 and 2014. An ongoing, nationally representative health survey of the non-institutionalized US population, NHANES collects a wide range of health-related data to assess diet, nutritional status, general health, disease history, and health behaviors every two years.
Mortality status and cause of the 4,175 deaths identified among this group were ascertained from the NHANES Public-use Linked Mortality File. The investigators observed a number of common characteristics among participants eating fewer than three meals per day (around 40% of respondents)—they are more likely to be younger, male, non-Hispanic Black, have less education and lower family income, smoke, drink more alcohol, be food insecure, and eat less nutritious food, more snacks, and less energy intake overall.
“Our results are significant even after adjustments for dietary and lifestyle factors (smoking, alcohol use, physical activity levels, energy intake, and diet quality) and food insecurity,” said the study’s senior investigator Wei Bao, MD, Ph.D., Department of Epidemiology, College of Public Health, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, U.S.. He noted, “Our findings are based on observations drawn from public data and do not imply causality. Nonetheless, what we observed makes metabolic sense.”
Dr. Bao explained that skipping meals usually means ingesting a larger energy load at one time, which can aggravate the burden of glucose metabolism regulation and lead to subsequent metabolic deterioration. This can also explain the association between a shorter meal interval and mortality, as a shorter time between meals would result in a larger energy load in the given period.
Dr. Bao commented, “Our research contributes much-needed evidence about the association between eating behaviors and mortality in the context of meal timing and duration of the daily prandial period.”
Meal frequency, skipping, and intervals were not addressed by the 2020-2025 Dietary Guidelines for Americans because the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee “was unable to find sufficient evidence on which to summarize the evidence between frequency of eating and health.”
Previous dietary studies and Dietary Guidelines for Americans have focused mainly on dietary components and food combinations.
About this diet research news
Author: Press Office
Source: Elsevier
Contact: Press Office – Elsevier
Image: The image is in the public domain
Original Research: Open access.
“Meal Skipping and Shorter Meal Intervals Are Associated with Increased Risk of All-Cause and Cardiovascular Disease Mortality among US Adults” by Yangbo Sun et al. Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics
Abstract
Meal Skipping and Shorter Meal Intervals Are Associated with Increased Risk of All-Cause and Cardiovascular Disease Mortality among US Adults
See also
Background
Previous dietary studies and current dietary guidelines have mainly focused on dietary intake and food patterns. Little is known about the association between eating behaviors such as meal frequency, skipping and intervals, and mortality.
Objective
The objective was to examine the associations of meal frequency, skipping, and intervals with all-cause and cardiovascular disease (CVD) mortality.
Design
This was a prospective study.
Participants/setting
A total of 24,011 adults (aged ≥40 years) who participated in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey 1999-2014 were included in this study. Eating behaviors were assessed using 24-hour recall. Death and underlying causes of death were ascertained by linkage to death records through December 31, 2015.
Main outcome measures
The outcomes were all-cause and CVD mortality.
Statistical analyses performed
Multivariable Cox proportional hazards models were used to estimate adjusted hazard ratios (HRs) of all-cause and CVD mortality.
Results
During 185,398 person-years of follow-up period, 4,175 deaths occurred, including 878 cardiovascular deaths. Most participants ate three meals per day. Compared with participants eating three meals per day, the multivariable-adjusted HRs for participants eating one meal per day were 1.30 (95% CI 1.03 to 1.64) for all-cause mortality, and 1.83 (95% CI 1.26 to 2.65) for CVD mortality. Participants who skipped breakfast have multivariable-adjusted HRs 1.40 (95% CI 1.09 to 1.78) for CVD mortality compared with those who did not. The multivariable-adjusted HRs for all-cause mortality were 1.12 (95% CI 1.01 to 1.24) for skipping lunch and 1.16 (95% CI 1.02 to 1.32) for skipping dinner compared with those who did not. Among participants eating three meals per day, the multivariable-adjusted HR for participants with an average interval of ≤4.5 hours in two adjacent meals was 1.17 (95% CI 1.04 to 1.32) for all-cause mortality, comparing with those having a meal interval of 4.6 to 5.5 hours.
Conclusions
In this large, prospective study of US adults aged 40 years or older, eating one meal per day was associated with an increased risk of all-cause and CVD mortality. Skipping breakfast was associated with increased risk of CVD mortality, whereas skipping lunch or dinner was associated with increased risk of all-cause mortality. Among participant with three meals per day, a meal interval of ≤4.5 hours in two adjacent meals was associated with higher all-cause mortality.
Three presidents descend on Pennsylvania in a major day for one of the nation’s most closely watched Senate contests
CNN
—
Three presidents – one sitting and two former – descended on Pennsylvania Saturday for a final-stretch midterm push that underscored the stakes of one of the nation’s most closely watched Senate races.
For President Joe Biden, who held a rare joint appearance with former President Barack Obama in Philadelphia to boost the Democratic candidate Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, Pennsylvania amounted to a political stress test in his home state, where he’s traveled 20 times since taking office.
For former President Donald Trump, who rallied Saturday night outside of Pittsburgh in the city of Latrobe, a win by his hand-selected candidate Dr. Mehmet Oz could prove his own enduring viability in a commonwealth he lost by a narrow margin in 2020.
The consequences extend well beyond next week’s election. As Trump prepares to announce a third presidential bid, potentially in the coming weeks, Biden’s aides are taking their own initial steps toward mounting a reelection campaign. For a several-hour stretch on Saturday, the dynamics of a potential 2020 rematch were laid bare.
The moment marks a historic anomaly. Former presidents have typically only waded sparingly into daily politics, mostly avoiding direct criticism of the men occupying the office they once held. Not since Grover Cleveland in 1892 has a defeated one-term president returned to win the White House again.
The convergence of presidents in Pennsylvania, each warning of dire consequences should the opposing party prevail, reflected the altered norms Trump precipitated when he took office nearly six years ago, quickly issuing false accusations against Obama of spying and general malfeasance.
In North Philadelphia, Biden told a packed crowd at Temple University that Fetterman would protect Social Security and Medicare and would look out for veterans.
“My objective when I ran for president, was to build an economy from the bottom up and the middle out. It’s a fundamental shift, compared to the Oz and the mega MAGA Republican trickledown economics,” Biden said, referring to Fetterman’s GOP opponent, Dr. Mehmet Oz.
As the crowd booed, the president continued, “No really. This ain’t your father’s Republican Party. This is a different breed of cat. I really mean it. Look, they’re all about the wealthier getting wealthy. And the wealthier staying wealthy. The middle class gets stiffed. The poor get poorer under their policy.”
Obama offered a prebuttal to the possibility of Democratic losses.
“I can tell you from experience that midterms matter, a lot,” Obama said, a reference to the 2010 election that saw the GOP retake power in the House of Representatives during his first administration.
“When I was president, I got my butt whupped in midterm elections. I was elected in the midst of a financial crisis and we did the right things to get the economy back on track but it was slow and people were frustrated, just like they are right now.”
Biden, who spent much of his first year in office trying to avoid saying Trump’s name, is no longer so cautious. He called out “Trump and all his Trumpies” at a rally in California this week and identified Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis as “Trump incarnate” during a fundraiser outside Fort Lauderdale on Tuesday. At his own rallies, Trump plays a video reel of slip-ups to cast his successor as a gaffe-prone senior citizen – though he hasn’t as frequently gone after Obama.
Obama, meanwhile, has issued his harshest criticism to the cast of candidates backed by Trump, many of whom deny the 2020 election results and have modeled themselves after the 45th president.
“It doesn’t just work out just because somebody’s been on TV. Turns out, being president or governor is about more than snappy lines and good lighting,” Obama said in Arizona last week of the Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, a former local news anchor.
Pennsylvania’s senate and gubernatorial contests are the sole marquee races of this year’s midterm cycle Biden has stumped in repeatedly. In other high-profile races, candidates have maintained their distance from a president with underwater approval ratings.
That hasn’t been true of Obama, who has been in high demand among Democrats in close races. In the final weeks of the campaign, Obama has held raucous rallies in Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona and Nevada – all states Biden has avoided in the last several months as candidates work to stave off Republican momentum.
That’s a 180-degree turn from midterm cycles during Obama’s presidency, when it was Biden venturing to more states – including conservative-leaning districts – where the sitting president was considered a drag on Democratic candidates.
Biden is hardly irritated or even surprised that Obama is more of a draw on the campaign trail this year than him, according to officials. He has discussed some of the races with his former boss and believes Obama’s message is both resonating with voters and complementary to his own.
Still, their joint appearance Saturday only served to underscore their divergent styles and political abilities – a comparison even some Democrats say ultimately favors Obama.
“I know you always ask me how we’re doing. We’re going to win this time around I think. I feel really good about our chances,” Biden told reporters Friday in California.
The president has been bullish on Democrats’ chances next week, even as many Democrats grow increasingly anxious about their party’s prospects. His campaign schedule – in blue states stumping for candidates in closer-than-expected races – is itself a signal of Democrats” vulnerabilities.
In the final days of the campaign, Biden has been traveling mostly to blue states he won, but where Democrats are nonetheless running closer-than-expected races. He stopped in New Mexico, California and Illinois before stumping in Pennsylvania on Saturday, and will campaign with the embattled New York Gov. Kathy Hochul on Sunday. He’ll spend Election Eve in Maryland.
People familiar with Biden’s thinking say he accepts that not every Democratic candidate will welcome him as a surrogate while his approval ratings remain underwater. And he has told fellow Democrats he respects their political intuition when it comes to their own races.
But he has grown frustrated at coverage suggesting he is political albatross, according to people familiar with the conversations, arguing his policies – when properly explained – are widely popular with voters.
Compared to both Obama and Trump, Biden has held far fewer campaign rallies for his party during this midterm cycle. Most of his engagements over the past month have been official events, delivered to crowds that sometimes only number a few dozen.
His rallies have begun drawing larger crowds in the waning days of the campaign. Six hundred people had to be turned away from an event in Southern California on Friday, according to the White House. And Biden addressed an overflow crowd in New Mexico that couldn’t fit inside the main venue when he was holding a rally with Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham.
“I know you don’t think it, but I think we have pretty good crowds. They’re fairly enthusiastic. You don’t write it that way, but they are,” Biden said as he was departing California on Friday.
Still, his events haven’t generated the same electricity as Obama’s. The former president has laid into Trump and his acolytes who are running for office during his string of rallies across the country over the past weeks, using stinging humor and an air of bemusement to ridicule Republicans.
Like Biden, he’s also argued the American system of government is at stake in next week’s election, telling a crowd in Arizona that “democracy as we know it” could perish if election deniers take office.
Obama and Biden last appeared together at the White House in September, when Obama’s official portrait was unveiled in the White House East Room. The event had been put off while Trump was in office, partly because neither the Obamas nor the Trumps were interested in putting on a show of friendship.
As he campaigns for his endorsed candidates this fall, Trump has made little attempt to conceal his larger intentions: to buttress his own likely presidential campaign he hopes will return him to the White House.
“Get ready, that’s all I’m saying,” Trump told a crowd in Sioux City, Iowa, on Thursday, adding that he “will very, very probably do it again.”
Top Trump aides have discussed the third week of November as an ideal launch point for his 2024 presidential campaign if Republicans fare well in the midterm elections, sources familiar with the matter said.
For Biden, the decision may take a little longer. He has pointed to family discussions around the holidays when asked about his own timeline. Members of his political team have made early preparations for a campaign infrastructure, operating under the assumption he will decide to run again.
His motivating factor, aides say: Whether Trump jumps in himself.
This story has been updated with additional details.
Alzheimer’s treatment slowed cognitive decline in closely watched trial
An investigational Alzheimer’s disease treatment from Biogen and Eisai slowed the rate of cognitive decline by 27% in a clinical trial, the companies said Tuesday, meeting the goals of a closely tracked study and strengthening the drug’s case for approval as early as January.
The positive result is welcome news for the millions of people living with Alzheimer’s and a big win for Eisai and Biogen, giving the companies a potential blockbuster product in the intravenous medicine, called lecanemab. For Biogen, which presided over the disastrous rollout of the Alzheimer’s treatment Aduhelm, the potential approval of lecanemab presents a rare second chance at a multibillion-dollar market.
The lecanemab study is an “important milestone for Eisai in fulfilling our mission to meet the expectations of the Alzheimer’s disease community,” said Eisai CEO Haruo Naito, in a statement.
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In the study, which enrolled roughly 1,800 patients with early-stage Alzheimer’s, lecanemab outperformed placebo. The treatment also met its secondary goals of reducing toxic plaques in the brain and slowing patients’ decline on three other measures of memory and function.
About 21% of patients treated with lecanemab experienced brain swelling visible on PET scans, a side effect associated with drugs of its type. Less than 3% of those patients had symptomatic cases of swelling, the companies said.
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The study, called CLARITY-AD, was the largest conducted to date to test the long-debated theory that clearing toxic brain plaques, called amyloid, might slow the pace of Alzheimer’s by slowing the pace of memory loss or delaying the onset of dementia.
Lecanemab is the first treatment of its kind to affirm the so-called amyloid hypothesis in a large, Phase 3 clinical trial after two decades of consistent failure and murkier outcomes from similar, experimental drugs.
“This is a statistically robust and positive study but the treatment effect is small,” said Lon Schneider, a physician and Alzheimer’s expert at the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California. Schneider cautioned that experts will need to take a much closer look at the lecanemab data when presented in more detail, but based on the results described in Eisai’s press release, he believes lecanemab is likely to win approval from the Food and Drug Administration. Schneider was not involved in the study.
The FDA is already considering lecanemab for a conditional approval, promising to make a decision by Jan. 6 based on preliminary evidence from a smaller study showing the drug’s effect on amyloid in patients’ brains. Eisai now plans to add the more definitive results from the CLARITY-AD study to its application, aiming to win full approval in the summer and persuade Medicare to walk back a restrictive reimbursement policy set in the aftermath of Aduhelm.
CLARITY-AD might be sufficient to win over the FDA, but lecanemab’s future depends on whether physicians, payers, and patients find the supporting data convincing. The study used a metric called the Clinical Dementia Rating sum of boxes, or CDR-SB, which measures six cognitive domains including memory, problem solving, and personal care, and produces scores ranging from 0 to 18, with higher numbers indicating more severe dementia.
In the 18-month trial, patients who received lecanemab did .45 points better on the test than those receiving placebo, a result that hit the threshold of statistical significance, meaning it’s unlikely to be the result of random chance.
Aduhelm, in a comparable clinical trial, slowed decline by 22%, outperforming placebo by .39 points on the same measure. A second, identical study failed.
Lecanemab was administered as an intravenous infusion given twice per month. Approximately 25% of the 1,800 participants in the CLARITY-AD study were Hispanic and African-Americans, making it one of the more diverse populations ever enrolled in an Alzheimer’s clinical trial.
For lecanemab, statistical significance does not necessarily make for a life-changing medicine. Alzheimer’s researchers have spent years debating just what small changes in CDR-SB scores mean for patients with the disease. A fractional improvement on an 18-point scale could be imperceptible in real life. On the other hand, the metric is not an interval scale, meaning its numerical differences aren’t proportionate to one another. Going from a 1 to a 1.5 on the CDR-SB could mean no longer being able to drive on one’s own, while going from a 14 to a 14.5 would likely make little difference for a patient already in the throes of dementia.
To Michael Greicius, a neurologist at Stanford University who studies and treats Alzheimer’s, the rate of brain swelling in the lecanemab study could be confounding. Once patients present with the common side effect, called ARIA, everyone involved in the trial can be fairly certain they are receiving the drug and not placebo, exposing the study to bias. A true test of lecanemab’s benefits would be looking only at whether it helped the patients who didn’t test positive for ARIA, Greicius said.
“I think if anything this is going to be on the cusp of what’s considered minimally clinically significant, and it may be below that,” said Greicius, who was not involved in the study. “That’s where we need to see more data.”
Experts said any definitive ruling on lecanemab’s value would require more detailed results from CLARITY-AD, which Eisai has promised to present at a medical conference in November.
Wall Street had only moderate expectations for CLARITY-AD, with analysts setting a low probability of success and declaring that even a marginal benefit would count as a positive for Biogen and Eisai. Biogen’s share price has fallen by nearly 50% since Aduhelm’s 2021 approval, and Eisai has lost about 60% of its value.
“Today’s announcement gives patients and their families hope that lecanemab, if approved, can potentially slow the progression of Alzheimer’s disease, and provide a clinically meaningful impact on cognition and function,” said Michel Vounatsos, Biogen’s CEO, in a statement.
The results kick off what will be a transformational nine months for Alzheimer’s research. By the end of this year, Roche will have data from a pair of two-year studies on gantenerumab, another antibody that reduces brain plaques. And in the first half of 2023, Eli Lilly expects to have results from a Phase 3 trial on donanemab, a similar treatment that met its goals in a small study last year.
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China says closely tracking rocket debris hurtling towards Earth | Space News
Beijing says uncontrolled re-entry of rocket debris poses little risk to anyone on the ground.
Remnants of a large Chinese rocket are expected to streak through the atmosphere this weekend in an uncontrolled re-entry that Beijing says it is closely tracking but poses little risk to anyone on Earth.
The Long March 5B rocket blasted off Sunday to deliver a laboratory module to the new Chinese space station under construction in orbit, marking the third flight of China’s most powerful rocket since its maiden launch in 2020.
As occurred during its first two flights, the rocket’s entire main-core stage – which is 100 feet (30 metres) long and weighs 22 tonnes (48,500 pounds) – has already reached low orbit and is expected to tumble back towards Earth once atmospheric friction drags it downward, according to American experts.
Ultimately, the rocket body will disintegrate as it plunges through the atmosphere but is large enough that numerous chunks will likely survive a fiery re-entry to rain debris over an area some 2,000km (1,240 miles) long by about 70km (44 miles) wide, independent US-based analysts said on Wednesday.
The probable location of the debris field is impossible to pinpoint in advance, though experts will be able to narrow the potential impact zone closer to re-entry in the days ahead.
The latest available tracking data projects re-entry will occur at about 00:24 GMT on Sunday, plus or minus 16 hours, according to the Aerospace Corp, a government-funded nonprofit research centre near Los Angeles.
Risk ‘fairly low’
The overall risk to people and property on the ground is fairly low, given that 75 percent of Earth’s surface in the potential path of debris is water, desert or jungle, Aerospace analyst Ted Muelhaupt told reporters in a news briefing.
Nevertheless, the possibility exists for pieces of the rocket to come down over a populated area, as they did in May 2020 when fragments of another Chinese Long March 5B landed on the Ivory Coast, damaging several buildings in that West African nation, though no injuries were reported, Muelhaupt said.
By contrast, he said, the United States and most other spacefaring nations generally go to the added expense of designing their rockets to avoid large, uncontrolled re-entries – an imperative largely observed since large chunks of the NASA space station Skylab fell from orbit in 1979 and landed in Australia.
Overall, the odds of someone being injured or killed this weekend from falling rocket chunks range from one-in-1,000 to one-in-230, well above the internationally accepted casualty risk threshold of one-in-10,000, he told reporters.
But the risk posed to any single individual is far lower, on the order of six chances per 10 trillion. By comparison, he said, the odds of being struck by lightning are about 80,000 times greater.
Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said the probability of debris causing harm to aviation or to people and property on the ground was very low. He said most components of the rocket would be destroyed on re-entry.
Last year, NASA and others accused China of being opaque after the Beijing government kept silent about the estimated debris trajectory or the re-entry window of its last Long March rocket flight in May 2021.
Debris from that flight ended up landing harmlessly in the Indian Ocean.
A few hours after Zhao spoke on Wednesday, the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) gave the approximate position of its latest rocket in a rare public statement. As of 4pm (08:00 GMT), the agency said the rocket was circling the globe in an elliptical orbit that was 263.2km (163.5 miles) high at its farthest point and 176.6km (109.7 miles) high at its nearest.
No estimated re-entry details were given by CMSA on Wednesday.
Middle East trip: Biden faces a crucial day of closely watched meetings in the West Bank and Saudi Arabia
Following that meeting, Biden will fly directly from Israel to Saudi Arabia, where he is expected to hold highly anticipated bilateral meetings with Saudi King Salman and his advisers, including Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. According to Biden’s schedule, the Saudi king will only be present for about 30 minutes during the bilateral meetings Friday night, the White House confirmed Thursday. The President and the crown prince will continue their meeting after the king departs, which was expected because of the king’s health.
The US has accused the crown prince in a declassified CIA report of having approved the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018. The crown prince has denied involvement.
The President’s interactions with the crown prince will be heavily scrutinized — in particular how he greets MBS and whether Biden shakes his hand. The White House has sought to downplay the significance of any greeting between Biden and MBS.
“We’re focused on the meetings, not the greetings,” one senior administration official told reporters.
The official said, “The President will greet the leaders as he does. And there’s no special rules for one leader or another. So I know we’ve gotten this question quite a bit, but for those of us doing the work, it’s really — we’re focused on the substance of the meetings and not the particular greetings. The President’s going to about a dozen leaders and he’ll greet them as he usually does.”
Biden’s handshakes — or lack thereof — have been under the microscope during this trip after the White House said the President was looking to reduce contact with others amid the spread of a transmissible subvariant of the Omicron variant of Covid-19. Biden has noticeably broken from that guidance on multiple occasions in the two days he’s been in Israel after offering fist bumps after his arrival, adding fuel to speculation that the guidance from the White House was an elaborate excuse for Biden to avoid shaking the crown prince’s hand.
Biden in Saudi Arabia
The trip to Jeddah has been particularly thorny for the White House ever since it began materializing earlier this year, given the President’s campaign trail promise to make the nation a “pariah” state for the murder of Khashoggi. Biden on Thursday stopped short of committing to raise Khashoggi’s murder directly with leaders in Saudi Arabia and said he “always” brings up human rights and that his views on the murder have been “absolutely, positively clear.” US officials had told CNN ahead of the trip that Biden was expected to raise Khashoggi with MBS.
Overnight, Saudi Arabia confirmed an expected announcement that its airspace would be opened to Israeli airlines. Biden hailed the “historic decision” that followed “months of steady diplomacy,” noting he would become the first US President to fly from Israel to Saudi Arabia.
The trip comes amid high gas prices and widespread inflation in the US and across the globe, in part due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, though the President and other officials have dismissed Saudi Arabia’s rich oil supply as a key motivator for the trip.
One senior administration official said the meetings with Saudi leadership will focus on strengthening the ongoing truce in Yemen, technological cooperation including in 5G, clean energy, global infrastructure and human rights in addition to discussing the global energy supply.
But the official suggested that the US and Saudi and other Middle Eastern officials would be talking about energy security issues and that Biden would engage with the world leaders on bringing gas prices down.
“I think the conversation is really focused on, given current market conditions, how do we see things? How do we see the next six months, and how can we keep markets balanced in a way that contribute to continued economic growth? So that’s the common focus of ours, with not just the Saudis, but other producers,” the official said.
The official added, “And of course, the President has said for months he will do everything possible to get prices down. That includes our own Strategic Petroleum Reserve release. That includes diplomacy with other producers, and it includes, of course, our own domestic production.”
Biden in the West Bank
But before flying to Saudi Arabia for the most pressure-packed portion of his trip, Biden had a series of engagements in East Jerusalem and the West Bank and several funding announcements aimed at helping Palestinians.
Biden continued to voice his support for a two-state solution but acknowledged such an agreement “seems so far away” and that “the ground is not ripe at this moment to restart negotiations.”
However, he also suggested that better relations between Israel and Arab nations could lead to momentum to a deal between Israelis and Palestinians.
“I do believe that in this moment when Israel is improving relations with its neighbors throughout the region we can harness that same momentum to reinvigorate the peace process between the Palestinian people and the Israelis,” Biden said.
Biden said the death of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, who was fatally shot while covering an Israeli military operation in the West Bank, was “an enormous loss to the essential work of sharing with the world the story of the Palestinian people.”
Biden delivered remarks at Augusta Victoria Hospital in East Jerusalem, announcing he is asking Congress to approve up to $100 million for the East Jerusalem Hospital Network. Former US President Donald Trump cut $25 million in planned funding for the network during his time in office.
“It’s part of our commitment to support health and dignity to the Palestinian people,” he said, and pointed to the “hard toll” of the Covid-19 pandemic on the hospital system.
He continued, “Working together, it is my prayer the United States will both help relieve the hospital’s burden of debt and support targeted infrastructure upgrades, key reforms in patient care to ensure long-term financial stability.”
The meetings follow a Thursday sit-down with Israel’s Prime Minister Yair Lapid, who said on Friday the President’s visit showed his “commitment to Israel’s military and diplomatic strength” and had “moved the entire country.”
The President also announced on Friday morning an additional $201 million for the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees to support Palestinian refugees in the West Bank, Gaza, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, according to the White House.
Biden said Israel has committed to working with Palestinians to speed up the implementation of a 4G network in Gaza and the West Bank, with the goal of rolling out that infrastructure by the end of next year.
“It has been a priority for President Biden to rebuild ties with the Palestinians that were severed by the previous administration,” the official said.
Biden will tell Abbas that Israel has agreed to increase accessibility to the Allenby Bridge so that Palestinians and others can access it 24/7 by September, the official said. The bridge is controlled by Israel and is the only crossing point into Jordan for Palestinians from the West Bank.
“He will also announce steps to build grassroots support for peace, including by supporting collaboration and professional exchanges between the Palestinians and Israeli health sectors as they work to build mutual trust,” the official said.
The US will also provide an additional $15 million in humanitarian assistance for Palestinians in response to rising food insecurity brought on by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Before departing for Saudi Arabia, Biden also visited the Church of the Nativity “to underscore support for Christians who face challenges across the region,” the official said.
CNN’s Kaitlan Collins contributed to this report.
ESA plans to work more closely with NASA after Russia expulsion from Mars mission
“Certainly one option which we are studying, there’s no decision made yet, but one option we are studying is also working closer with NASA,” Aschbacher told Becky Anderson on CNN’s Connect the World on Friday.
The rover, known as both ExoMars and Rosalind Franklin in honor of the English chemist and DNA pioneer, was designed by ESA and Roscosmos, Russia’s space agency. The mission was due to launch in September this year, but ESA’s member states voted to suspend the project, despite its late stage after 40 years of development.
“Geopolitically, it is clear that we need to sever our ties with Russia, and this decision has been made by the member states,” Aschbacher said. “So yes, it’s really unfortunate for all the science and technology and the engineers who have been working on this for four decades. But there is no other choice to make.”
Dmitry Rogozin, director general of Russia’s space agency, described ESA’s position as “frenzied,” saying in a Chinese television interview that Roscosmos “consider further cooperation impossible.”
Despite this lack of cooperation with Russia making “a dent,” in the ESA’s work, Aschbacher said the agency has “options.”
“Certainly from a technology point of view, we can do without the Russian expertise which we have got so far,” Aschbacher said. However, he highlighted “it is clear that we have to untangle what was built up over many decades.”
Space station ties
There are currently four NASA astronauts, five Russian cosmonauts and one European astronaut on board the International Space Station and relations are “professional,” according Aschbacher.
Rogozin previously said that sanctions against Russia could “destroy” relations on the space station, but Aschbacher denied this, saying “regardless of nationality or origin, the astronauts are a team that has to work together.”
Former NASA astronaut Scott Kelly told CNN last year that “those earthly political tensions never transmit to space.” Kelly and Rogozin recently traded barbs on Twitter, but the retired astronaut is backing off of the Twitter war.
However, a key concern of the ESA is cyberattacks, which Aschbacher told CNN have increased recently.
“We are regularly very carefully watching the situation day and night. As you can imagine, we do recognize some intensification of attempts. But I have to say that our system is pretty resilient,” he said.
He refused to say how many cyberattack attempts have come from Russia.
Geologists Have Closely Analyzed Two Bizarre ‘Blobs’ Detected Deep Inside Earth
Earth’s interior is not a uniform stack of layers. Deep in its thick middle layer lie two colossal blobs of thermo-chemical material.
To this day, scientists still don’t know where both of these colossal structures came from or why they have such different heights, but a new set of geodynamic models has landed on a possible answer to the latter mystery.
These hidden reservoirs are located on opposite sides of the world, and judging from the deep propagation of seismic waves, the blob under the African continent is more than twice as high as the one under the Pacific ocean.
After running hundreds of simulations, the authors of the new study think the blob under the African continent is less dense and less stable than its Pacific counterpart, and that’s why it’s so much taller.
“Our calculations found that the initial volume of the blobs does not affect their height,” explains geologist Qian Yuan from Arizona State University.
“The height of the blobs is mostly controlled by how dense they are and the viscosity of the surrounding mantle.”
3D view of the blob in Earth’s mantle beneath Africa. (Mingming Li/ASU)
One of the principal layers inside Earth is the hot and slightly goopy mess known as the mantle, a layer of silicate rock that sits between our planet’s core and its crust. While the mantle is mostly solid, it behaves sort of like tar on longer timescales.
Over time, columns of hot magma rock gradually rise through the mantle and are thought to contribute to volcanic activity on the planet’s surface.
Understanding what’s going on in the mantle is thus an important endeavor in geology.
The Pacific and African blobs were first discovered in the 1980s. In scientific terms, these ‘superplumes’ are known as large low-shear-velocity provinces (LLSVPs).
Compared to the Pacific LLSVP, the current study found the African LLSVP stretches about 1,000 kilometers higher (621 miles), which supports previous estimates.
This vast height difference suggests both of these blobs have different compositions. How this impacts the surrounding mantle, however, is unclear.
Perhaps the less stable nature of the African pile, for instance, can explain why there is such intense volcanism in some regions of the continent. It could also impact the movement of tectonic plates, which float on the mantle.
Other seismic models have found the African LLSVP stretches up to 1,500 kilometers above the outer core, whereas the Pacific LLSVP reaches 800 kilometers high at max.
In lab experiments that seek to replicate Earth’s interior, both the African and Pacific piles appear to oscillate up and down through the mantle.
The authors of the current study say this supports their interpretation that the African LLSVP is probably unstable, and the same could go for the Pacific LLSVP, although their models didn’t show this.
The different compositions of the Pacific and African LLSVPs could also be explained by their origins. Scientists still don’t know where these blobs came from, but there are two main theories.
One is that the piles are made from subducted tectonic plates, which slip into the mantle, are super-heated and gradually fall downwards, contributing to the blob.
Another theory is that the blobs are remnants of the ancient collision between Earth and the protoplanet Thea, which gave us our Moon.
The theories are not mutually exclusive, either. For instance, perhaps Thea contributed more to one blob; this could be part of the reason why they look so different today.
“Our combination of the analysis of seismic results and the geodynamic modeling provides new insights on the nature of the Earth’s largest structures in the deep interior and their interaction with the surrounding mantle,” says Yuan.
“This work has far-reaching implications for scientists trying to understand the present-day status and the evolution of the deep mantle structure, and the nature of mantle convection.”
The study was published in Nature Geoscience.