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Brain imaging and neuropsychological assessment of individuals recovered from a mild to moderate SARS-CoV-2 infection | Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences – pnas.org
- Brain imaging and neuropsychological assessment of individuals recovered from a mild to moderate SARS-CoV-2 infection | Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences pnas.org
- An mRNA-based T-cell-inducing antigen strengthens COVID-19 vaccine against SARS-CoV-2 variants Nature.com
- Endemic SARS-CoV-2 Demonstrating Workforce/Health Consequences Infection Control Today
- Evolutionary characteristics of SARS-CoV-2 Omicron subvariants adapted to the host | Signal Transduction and Targeted Therapy Nature.com
- Disinfection of SARS-CoV-2 by UV-LED 267 nm: comparing different variants | Scientific Reports Nature.com
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Failed crypto exchange FTX has recovered over $5 bln, attorney says
NEW YORK/WILMINGTON, Del., Jan 11 (Reuters) – Crypto exchange FTX has recovered more than $5 billion in liquid assets but the extent of customer losses in the collapse of the company founded by Sam Bankman-Fried is still unknown, an attorney for the company told a U.S. bankruptcy court on Wednesday.
The company, which was valued a year ago at $32 billion, filed for bankruptcy protection in November and U.S. prosecutors accused Bankman-Fried of orchestrating an “epic” fraud that may have cost investors, customers and lenders billions of dollars.
“We have located over $5 billion of cash, liquid cryptocurrency and liquid investment securities,” Andy Dietderich, an attorney for FTX, told U.S. Bankruptcy Judge John Dorsey in Delaware at the start of Wednesday’s hearing.
Dietderich also said the company plans to sell nonstrategic investments that had a book value of $4.6 billion.
However, Dietderich said the legal team is still working to create accurate internal records and the actual customer shortfall remains unknown. The U.S. Commodities Futures Trading Commission has estimated missing customer funds at more than $8 billion.
Dietderich said the $5 billion recovered does not include assets seized by the Securities Commission of the Bahamas, where the company was headquartered and Bankman-Fried resided.
FTX’s attorney estimated the seized assets were worth as little as $170 million while Bahamian authorities put the figure as high as $3.5 billion. The seized assets are largely comprised of FTX’s proprietary and illiquid FTT token, which is highly volatile in price, Dietderich said.
ASSET SALES
FTX could raise additional funds in the coming months for the benefit of customers after Dorsey approved FTX’s request for procedures to explore sales of affiliates at Wednesday’s hearing.
The affiliates — LedgerX, Embed, FTX Japan and FTX Europe — are relatively independent from the broader FTX group, and each has its own segregated customer accounts and separate management teams, according to FTX court filings.
The crypto exchange has said it is not committed to selling any of the companies, but that it received dozens of unsolicited offers and plans to hold auctions beginning next month.
The U.S. Trustee, a government bankruptcy watchdog, opposed selling the affiliates before the extent of the alleged FTX fraud is fully investigated.
In part to preserve the value of its businesses, FTX also sought Dorsey’s approval to keep secret 9 million FTX customer names. The company has said that privacy is needed to prevent rivals from poaching users but also to prevent identity theft and to comply with privacy laws.
Dorsey allowed the names to remain under wraps for only three months, not six months as FTX wanted.
“The difficulty here is that I don’t know who’s a customer and who’s not,” Dorsey said. He set a hearing for Jan. 20 to discuss how FTX will distinguish between customers and said he wants FTX to return in three months to give more explanation on the risk of identity theft if customer names are made public.
Media companies and the U.S. Trustee had argued that U.S. bankruptcy law requires disclosure of creditor details to ensure transparency and fairness.
In addition to selling affiliates, a company lawyer on Wednesday said FTX will end its 19-year $135 million sponsorship deal with the NBA’s Miami Heat and a 7-year about $89 million deal with the League of Legends video game.
FTX’s founder, Bankman-Fried, 30, was indicted on two counts of wire fraud and six conspiracy counts last month in Manhattan federal court for allegedly stealing customer deposits to pay debts from his hedge fund, Alameda Research, and lying to equity investors about FTX’s financial condition. He has pleaded not guilty.
Bankman-Fried has acknowledged shortcomings in FTX’s risk management practices, but the one-time billionaire has said he does not believe he is criminally liable.
In addition to customer funds lost, the collapse of the company has also likely wiped out equity investors.
Some of those investors were disclosed in a Monday court filing, including American football star Tom Brady, Brady’s former wife supermodel Gisele Bündchen and New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft.
Reporting by Dietrich Knauth in New York and Tom Hals in Wilmington, Del.; Editing by Alexia Garamfalvi, Mark Porter, Matthew Lewis and Anna Driver
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
GM’s U.S. Sales Recovered From Early 2022 Woes to Post Full-Year Rise
The U.S.’s largest auto makers confronted another challenging year in 2022 with supply-chain snarls and poorly stocked dealership lots denting sales results and concerns mounting about an economic downturn.
The Detroit auto maker also retook its U.S. sales crown from
Toyota Motor Corp.
TM -0.65%
, outselling its Japanese rival by about 165,630 vehicles last year.
Toyota had overtaken GM in 2021 as the U.S.’s top-selling auto maker, an upending of the traditional pecking order that was largely due to parts shortages that both car companies viewed as temporary.
Toyota said its U.S. sales were down 9.6% in 2022, and
Hyundai Motor Corp.
closed last year with a 2% decline.
Most other car companies report throughout the day Wednesday.
Ford
plans to report 2022 sales results Thursday.
Industrywide, U.S. auto sales are projected to total 13.7 million vehicles in 2022, the lowest figure in more than a decade and an 8% decrease from the prior year, according to a joint forecast by J.D. Power and LMC Automotive. Sales are expected to remain well below prepandemic levels of roughly 17 million.
The drop-off marks a reversal for a sector that started the year hoping historically low interest rates and an end to parts shortages would fuel a rebound in sales. Instead, vehicles continued to be in short supply as car makers mostly waited for scarce computer chips. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a key supplier of auto parts, added to the supply-chain troubles.
A prolonged shortage of semiconductors created pent-up demand for new vehicles, which meant that cars and trucks went to waiting buyers almost as soon as they hit the dealer lot. The lack of availability left buyers paying top dollar for the rides they could secure, pushing the average price paid for a vehicle in December to a near record high of $46,382, according to J.D. Power.
The record high prices buoyed auto maker profits last year despite shrinking sales volume and insulated the industry from a broader decline in consumer spending.
Now, while some supply constraints are easing, auto executives are confronting other obstacles, such as rising interest rates and soaring materials costs. Inventory levels are bouncing back, putting pressure on car companies to resist the kinds of profit-damaging discounts that have been historically used to counter slowing demand.
Photos: The EV Rivals Aiming for Tesla’s Crown in China
Some analysts caution that it is still too early to tell if rising prices are pushing buyers away. Heavy snowfall in large parts of the northern U.S. weighed on December sales, making it hard to see the impact of higher prices, JPMorgan analysts wrote in a note to clients.
Still, there are early signs that demand might be slowing, even for the hottest car makers.
Tesla Inc.
reported Monday that it fell short of its growth projections last year, in part because of Covid-related shutdowns at its Shanghai factory and changes in the way it manufactures and distributes vehicles.
Analysts have pointed to decreased wait times for Tesla vehicles as a sign of softening demand. Tesla offered a rare discount on some of its vehicles if buyers agreed to take delivery before the end of 2022.
Electric-vehicle sales accounted for 3% of the U.S. retail market in 2021 and nearly 6% in 2022, according to J.D. Power.
Executives have been investing billions of dollars on new models and factories, in the belief that sales will continue to expand rapidly over the next decade.
But rising prices for raw materials used in lithium-ion batteries pushed up EV prices throughout 2022, and some executives warned of a looming battery shortage.
General Motors cut its EV sales target for 2023 because of a slower-than-expected increase of battery production.
The semiconductor shortage, while easing for some other sectors, such as smartphones and personal computers, remains a challenge for autos, in part because car companies typically use inexpensive, commodity silicon for vehicles. Toyota, citing a lack of chips, cut its production outlook for the current fiscal year through March.
Falling used-car values are also discouraging to potential buyers, who have trade-ins and are looking to use them to offset the higher cost of a new vehicle.
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That bodes poorly for sales this year, as retailers worry that buyers who were unable to buy a car as a result of shortages will now be priced out of the market, according to a survey of dealers conducted by Cox Automotive.
The research site Edmunds expects new-car sales to hit 14.8 million in 2023, a marginal increase from last year but well below prepandemic levels. A combination of rising rates, inflation and economic turmoil could push vehicles out of reach for many buyers, Edmunds said.
Write to Sean McLain at sean.mclain@wsj.com
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Six bodies recovered during search for missing marines from sunken Thai warship | Thailand
Thailand’s navy has discovered the bodies of six marines after a small warship sank in the Gulf of Thailand. One marine was rescued alive on Monday as the military mobilised helicopters, warships and unmanned drones off its central coast.
Twenty-three people remained unaccounted for after the HTMS Sukhothai was knocked over by four-metre waves and strong winds late on Sunday. Some were without life vests.
“The latest person was found 41 hours from when the ship sank and he was alive. So we believe that there are those still alive out there … we will continue to search,” said Admiral Chonlathis Navanugraha, the navy’s chief of staff.
Helicopters, two unmanned surveillance aircraft, four warships and a C130 transport plane were sent to find the marines as the weather improved.
The vessel had suffered an engine malfunction as it took on water and went down about 20 nautical miles off the Bang Saphan district. The US-made corvette had been in use since 1987 and was carrying 105 military personnel.
Most on board were rescued before the boat sank but dozens had to abandon ship in rafts and lifejackets.
Lieutenant Colonel Pichitchai Tuannadee, captain of the sunken ship, said he was in the sea for two hours before he scrambled on to a raft and was found by search teams on Monday.
“To see something as small as a life ring or a person’s head above the surface of the water, it’s very hard to see with the big waves,” he said, adding that the missing sailors were likely to be fatigued by now from having to tread water and make sure those without vests stayed afloat.
One of the marines was found late on Monday clinging to a buoy.
“He was floating in the water for 10 hours. He was still conscious, so we could take him out of the water safely,” said the commander of one of the search vessels.
Relatives of the missing gathered at rescue centres awaiting news of loved ones.
Malinee Pudphong, aunt of missing marine Saharat Esa, said she spoke to her nephew by phone before the boat went down and was shocked to hear he did not get a lifejacket.
“It’s a body of a 21-year-old,” she said. “He’s not strong enough.”
Navy chief Admiral Choengchai Chomchoengpaet said the sinking would be investigated, including reports that there were not enough lifejackets on board.
6 Years Later, Marine Life Still Hasn’t Recovered From The Monstrous Ocean Heat Blob : ScienceAlert
Nicknamed ‘the Blob’, a large patch of abnormally warm water covering a section of the Pacific Ocean from 2014 to 2016 behaved just like a B-grade horror movie, having a devastating impact on a wide variety of species.
A new study on the Santa Barbara Channel off the Californian coast highlights how this environmental horror show continues to affect marine ecosystems.
The Blob caused significant shifts in aquatic ecosystems at the time, particularly impacting sessile animals, those stuck in place like anemones. This latest research shows that six years later, underwater populations inhabiting the kelp forest ecosystem still aren’t back to where they were.
While the levels of sessile invertebrates – filter feeders attached to reefs – have bounced back overall, the numbers belonging to the invasive species Watersipora subatra (a recent arrival) and Bugula neritina (a long-term resident) have boomed. These are types of bryozoans; tiny, colonial, tentacled animals that essentially act together in groups as a single organism.
“The groups of animals that seemed to be the winners, at least during the warm period, were longer-lived species, like clams and sea anemones,” says ecologist Kristen Michaud, from the University of California, Santa Barbara.
“But after the Blob, the story is a little different. Bryozoan cover increased quite rapidly, and there are two species of invasive bryozoans that are now much more abundant.”
The numbers of sessile invertebrates saw an initial drop of 71 percent across 2015 when the Blob took hold, as the warmer water meant creatures like anemones, tubeworms, and clams run out of phytoplankton to feed on.
Plankton relies on nutrients brought up by colder water, which was limited thanks to the warm water’s presence. The metabolisms of these sessile invertebrates was increased by the heat too, meaning they needed even more of the food they weren’t getting.
Several causes could be responsible for the dominance of W. subatra and B. neritina, the researchers say: they include the ability to survive at higher temperatures, and to compete more aggressively for space on reefs. In addition, the ongoing resilience of kelp forests in the region possibly helped to clear space for these bryozoans.
Another native sessile gastropod known as the scaled worm snail (Thylacodes squamigerous) has also been doing well, most likely because it’s better able to tolerate warmer waters, and because its food source options go beyond plankton.
The problem with these changes is that the newcomers do not play the same role in the ecosystem as the species they’ve replaced. For example, the bryozoans are shorter-lived and experience rapid growth, and aren’t as adept at surviving the less intense but more prolonged periods of warming as those animals they’ve replaced.
“This pattern in the community structure has persisted for the entire post-Blob period, suggesting that this might be more of a long-term shift in the assemblage of benthic animals,” says Michaud. “These communities may continue to change as we experience more marine heat waves and continued warming.”
The water in the Santa Barbara Channel often undergoes temperature fluctuations, such as those caused by El Niño events. However, unlike the Blob, these events are also accompanied by significant wave and storm action – which, for example, rip out kelp forest coverings.
While the reefs have shown they’re capable of bouncing back from these warmer periods, the Blob increased temperatures without whipping the seas into a frenzy. That makes it a very interesting period for researchers to study, not least because ocean temperatures continue to rise due to global warming.
The region has been carefully monitored for decades, and that monitoring will continue. The researchers expect the ongoing effects of the Blob to continue, including the ways in which it has an impact on marine species higher up the food chain.
“The Blob is exactly the kind of event that shows why long-term research is so valuable,” says marine ecologist Bob Miller, from the University of California, Santa Barbara. “If we had to react to such an event with new research, we would never know what the true effect was.”
The research has been published in Communications Biology.
FBI Recovered 11 Sets of Classified Documents in Trump Search, Inventory Shows
FBI agents who searched former President
Donald Trump’s
Mar-a-Lago home Monday removed 11 sets of classified documents, including some marked as top secret and meant to be only available in special government facilities, according to a search warrant released by a Florida court Friday.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation agents took around 20 boxes of items, binders of photos, a handwritten note and the executive grant of clemency for Mr. Trump’s ally
Roger Stone,
a list of items removed from the property shows. Also included in the list was information about the “President of France,” according to the three-page list. The list is contained in a seven-page document that also includes the warrant to search the premises which was granted by a federal magistrate judge in Florida.
The list includes references to one set of documents marked as “Various classified/TS/SCI documents,” an abbreviation that refers to top-secret/sensitive compartmented information. It also says agents collected four sets of top secret documents, three sets of secret documents, and three sets of confidential documents. The list didn’t provide any more details about the substance of the documents.
Mr. Trump’s lawyers argue that the former president used his authority to declassify the material before he left office. While a president has the power to declassify documents, there are federal regulations that lay out a process for doing so.
“They could have had it anytime they wanted—and that includes long ago. All they had to do was ask,” Mr. Trump said in a statement issued Friday.
On Friday afternoon, U.S. Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart issued an order making the warrant and inventory list public, after the Justice Department said in a court filing that Mr. Trump’s lawyers told federal prosecutors they didn’t object to the government’s request to unseal the information.
The search and seizure warrant, signed by Judge Reinhart, shows that FBI agents sought to search “the 45 Office,” as well as “all storage rooms and all other rooms or areas within the premises used or available to be used by [the former president] and his staff and in which boxes or documents could be stored, including all structures or buildings on the estate.”
They didn’t seek access to search private guest rooms, such as those of Mar-a-Lago members, according to the document.
The former president and his team don’t have the affidavit, which would provide more detail about the FBI’s investigation, according to people familiar with the process. An affidavit would explain what evidence, including witnesses, the government had collected and describe why investigators believe that a crime may have been committed. Mr. Trump’s lawyers have asked for a more specific account of what was removed from Mar-a-Lago.
The disclosure of the warrant and the inventory marks the culmination of an extraordinary week, which began last Friday at 12:12 p.m., when the judge signed off on the unprecedented warrant to search a former president’s home. Three days later, at 6:19 p.m., a lawyer for Mr. Trump, Christina Bobb, signed a receipt for the items the FBI took that day.
Former President Donald Trump, departing Trump Tower in New York Wednesday, has said he wouldn’t oppose releasing the search warrant.
Photo:
Julia Nikhinson/Associated Press
To the Justice Department, the search was the result of a monthslong effort to get the classified documents remaining in Mr. Trump’s possession after at least two prior attempts. They were at first primarily interested in securing the documents, but pursued a criminal investigation as they began to doubt that Mr. Trump’s team was being forthright about the documents still in their possession, people familiar with the matter said.
To Mr. Trump’s allies, the search was a heavy-handed approach to obtaining documents they say Mr. Trump was willing to return and was in the process of negotiating the return.
It is unclear how the investigation may progress and whether prosecutors are considering bringing any charges against Mr. Trump or others in connection with the investigation now that the documents have been recovered.
Rep. Markwayne Mullin (R., Okla.)—who sits on the House Intelligence Committee and has questioned the need for the search by federal agents—said Attorney General
Merrick Garland
should brief the Intelligence Committee. “It’s a high threshold to say it was an immediate national security threat, if it wasn’t an immediate national security threat then I think there’s a lot of questions that need to be answered,” he said.
The warrant said investigators were seeking all records that could be evidence of violations of laws governing the gathering, transmitting or losing of classified information; the removal of official government records; and the destruction of records in a federal investigation.
The U.S. government has three main levels of classification. In ascending order, the levels are confidential, secret and top secret. They are designed to reflect how sensitive a document’s underlying contents are considered, meaning that a breach of a higher classification level could potentially cause more damage to national security.
SCI documents are typically reserved for military, civilians with special clearance, and contractor personnel who work in a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, or SCIF, including those who are responsible for the security of a SCIF.
As the investigation progressed, someone familiar with the stored papers told investigators there may still be more sensitive documents on the premises beyond what they had already received in January and June, people familiar with the matter have said.
It is not known when the documents stored at Mar-a-Lago arrived there, during Mr. Trump’s presidency or as he left office.
Mr. Stone didn’t immediately respond for comment.
Mr. Trump, while in office, would regularly feud publicly with French President
Emmanuel Macron
over
about various policy disagreements, particularly trade and Mr. Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Iran nuclear agreement. Privately, Mr. Trump used to tell aides that he believed Mr. Macron to be a “leaker” and untrustworthy, according to several former officials. The French embassy didn’t immediately respond for comment.
The search, while Mr. Trump was in New York, stoked a political firestorm with Republican lawmakers demanding an explanation for the unprecedented search of a former president’s home. The showdown began after the National Archives in January retrieved more than a dozen boxes of White House documents from the resort earlier this year, some of which officials deemed classified national-security information.
Mr. Garland and FBI officials deliberated for days about whether to respond to the criticism of the search and how much to say, people familiar with discussions said. The attorney general ultimately decided to let the Justice Department’s work speak for itself and directed the agency to request the warrant be unsealed.
Millions of people in the U.S. hold some level of clearance that grants them access to classified documents, though far fewer have access to the highest levels. While intelligence agencies can declassify information and release it to the public, the process for doing so is often slow and may require multiple intelligence agencies to sign off.
A list of documents recovered from former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Fla., cites 20 boxes of items, binders of photos and a handwritten note.
Photo:
giorgio viera/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
A sitting president generally has the authority to unilaterally declassify any material of his or her choosing, but such a privilege is rarely used. Mr. Trump at times did disclose classified information during his time in office, including when he tweeted a surveillance satellite image showing damage at an Iranian space facility.
While a president has the power to declassify documents, federal regulations lay out a process for doing so. Those rules must be followed for a declassification to become legally effective, said Dan Meyer, a national-security lawyer at Tully Rinckey in Washington.
Once Mr. Trump left office on Jan. 20, 2021, he became bound by the same rules as other private citizens, Mr. Meyer said.
—Vivian Salama and Dustin Volz contributed to this article.
Write to Alex Leary at alex.leary@wsj.com, Aruna Viswanatha at Aruna.Viswanatha@wsj.com and Sadie Gurman at sadie.gurman@wsj.com
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2 workers killed after construction trench collapses in St. Paul; 1 body recovered
ST. PAUL, Minn. — Two workers were killed Friday afternoon when a construction trench collapsed in St. Paul. Hours after the fatal incident, crews are still working into the night to recover one of the bodies.
The St. Paul Fire Department says the collapse happened around 3 p.m. in a construction zone on the 700 block of Mount Curve Boulevard, near the Mississippi River in the Highland Park neighborhood.
While fire crews responded quickly to the scene, it was too late to secure the trench and save the workers who’d been buried underground.
“We feel horrible for the victims when anything like this happens,” said Assistant Fire Chief Matt Simpson. “We train for this every single day … Unfortunately, time was not on our side to make that difference today.”
Lahens St. Fleur watched as dozens of first-responders flooded the street near his home. He and others were heartbroken for the workers and their families.
“I’m just very, very sad that this happened,” he said. “My heart really goes out to those people.”
Fire officials say crews will work through the night until the second body has been recovered. The names of the two workers have yet to be released.
Oldest shoe in Norway recovered from melting ice patch
The oldest shoe in Norway — a 3,000-year-old bootie from the Bronze Age — is just one of thousands of ancient artifacts that were recovered from the country’s melting mountain ice patches in the past two decades, according to a new report from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU).
Unlike objects trapped in acidic soil or beneath gargantuan glaciers, the artifacts recovered from Norwegian ice patches are often found in impeccable condition, showing minimal decomposition and deformation, even after thousands of years of frozen slumber. That’s because ice patches are relatively stable, unmoving and free from corrosive compounds. Perfectly intact weapons, clothing, textiles, and plant and animal remains have all emerged from the ice, helping to bring thousands of years of Norwegian history to light.
But now, the report authors said, climate change could bring that all to an end.
Within just a few decades, vast swaths of Norway’s ice patches have begun to melt, exposing undiscovered artifacts to the elements and almost certain deterioration, the authors wrote.
“A survey based on satellite images taken in 2020 shows that more than 40 percent of 10 selected ice patches with known finds have melted away,” report co-author Birgitte Skar, an archaeologist and associate professor at the NTNU University Museum, said in a statement. “These figures suggest a significant threat for preserving discoveries from the ice, not to mention the ice as a climate archive.”
The melting past
Ice patches form at high elevations, where snow and ice deposits accumulate and don’t completely melt in the summer. Unlike glaciers, ice patches don’t move, so objects deposited in ice patches can remain stable for hundreds or thousands of years. When the ice begins to melt, those objects return to the light of day, preserved just as they were when the ice swallowed them up. However, if scientists aren’t able to recover these objects soon after the melting begins, then they run the risk of losing the artifacts to the elements.
Ice patch archaeology has been a tremendous boon to researchers studying the ancient cultures, plants and animals in frosty, elevated regions around the world. In Norway, researchers have uncovered thousands of artifacts belonging to the Bronze Age hunting tribes who hunted reindeer across Northern Europe and southern Scandinavia. According to the new report, reindeer are drawn to the region’s mountainous ice patches in summer months to seek relief from biting insects and the heat. Where the reindeer went, hunters followed, leaving troves of artifacts behind.
The 3,000-year-old shoe, which was discovered in 2007 in the mountainous region of Jotunheimen in southern Norway, remains a standout find. The small leather shoe would be a size 4 or 5 in today’s U.S. sizes, suggesting it belonged either to a woman or a youth. The shoe was discovered alongside several arrows and a wooden spade, suggesting the site was an important hunting ground. Dated to approximately 1100 B.C., the shoe is not only the oldest shoe in Norway, but possibly the oldest article of clothing discovered in Scandinavia, according to the researchers who discovered it.
Further surveys of the Jotunheimen site revealed even older artifacts, including a 6,100-year-old arrow shaft — the single oldest object discovered in a Norwegian ice patch, according to the researchers. Its presence near the shoe, suggests that the site was continuously used by humans over many millennia.
Despite these remarkable finds, the report authors worry that countless other cultural artifacts could disappear before they are recovered, thanks to the effects of climate change. A 2022 report from the Norwegian Water Resources and Energy Directorate estimates that 140 square miles (364 square kilometers) of ice patches — an area roughly half the size of New York City — have melted since 2006. If artifacts are not recovered from these patches soon after they are exposed, they risk being lost, damaged or destroyed forever.
Few ice patches in Norway have been systematically surveyed, especially in northern Norway, which remains mostly unstudied. To mitigate this, the researchers suggest launching a national ice patch monitoring program, using remote sensors to systematically survey ice patches and secure any objects that emerge from the melt.
“We used to think of the ice as desolate and lifeless and therefore not very important. That’s changing now, but it’s urgent,” report co-author Jørgen Rosvold, a biologist and assistant research director at the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research, said in the statement. “Large amounts of unique material are melting out and disappearing forever.”
Originally published on Live Science.
China air crash: All 132 people on board China airliner confirmed dead as second black box recovered
For days, rescue teams had been combing through the crash site — wading through heavy mud and thicket, scattered with debris and plane parts — in southern China’s Guangxi region, while desperate family members waited for news of their loved ones.
China’s Civil Aviation Administration (CAAC) said they have identified 120 of the victims using DNA testing, including 114 passengers and six crew members.
Monday’s crash of the Boeing 737-800 plane marks China’s worst air disaster in more than a decade. Flight MU5735 was en route from the southwestern city of Kunming to Guangzhou with 123 passengers and nine crew members on board, when it lost contact over the city of Wuzhou, the CAAC said in a statement.
The cause of the crash has not yet been determined but on Sunday recovery teams found the plane’s second so-called “black box,” according to state media outlet Xinhua. State television channel CGTN also showed images of what it too reported was the black box.
The recovery of the flight data recorder, along with the cockpit voice recorder discovered on Wednesday and sent to Beijing for analysis, should provide crucial clues to how the disaster unfolded.
Zhu Tao, director of the CAAC’s Aviation Safety Office, said at a press conference Saturday that teams found an emergency locator transmitter, which is usually installed close to the second black box.
An airline representative said on Tuesday, the plane was “flying normally” before it suddenly began dropping and lost contact with ground control, just over an hour into the flight. Pre-flight examinations showed nothing amiss, and all crew members were healthy and qualified, he added.
An investigation by the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) is ongoing, with the US National Transportation Safety Board and the US Federal Aviation Administration also involved. But it could take months, or even more than a year, before families receive any answers — the final report for the fatal 2010 Henan Airlines crash wasn’t released until almost two years later.
Air crash investigators warned on Tuesday that their probe into the cause of the crash will be “very difficult” due to how severely damaged the plane is.
China Eastern Airlines and its subsidiaries temporarily grounded 223 Boeing 737-800 aircraft, airline spokesperson Liu Xiaodong said on Thursday.
The grounded aircraft are undergoing safety inspection and maintenance to ensure that they are safe to fly, he said. The airline also launched a sweeping safety overhaul after the crash, he added.
The 737-800 is the most common version of Boeing’s jets now in service, and it is the workhorse of many airlines’ fleets.
There are 4,502 of the 737-800s now in service worldwide, according to aviation analytics firm Cirium, making it by far the most common Boeing (BA) aircraft in use today.
CNN’s Jessie Yeung, Angus Watson, Laura He, Chris Isidore and CNN’s Beijing bureau contributed to this report.