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Iceberg roughly the size of London breaks off in Antarctica
CNN
—
An iceberg nearly the size of Greater London broke off the Brunt Ice Shelf in Antarctica on Sunday according to the British Antarctic Survey.
Scientists first discovered significant cracks in the ice shelf a decade ago, but in the last two years there have been two major breaks. The BAS Halley Research Station is located on the Brunt Ice Shelf and glaciologists say the research station is safe.
The iceberg is around 600 square miles, or 1550 square kilometers. The researchers say this event was expected and not a result of climate change.
“This calving event has been expected and is part of the natural behavior of the Brunt Ice Shelf. It is not linked to climate change. Our science and operational teams continue to monitor the ice shelf in real-time to ensure it is safe, and to maintain the delivery of the science we undertake at Halley,” Professor Dominic Hodgson a BAS glaciologist said in a news release.
The calving comes amid record-low sea ice extent in Antarctica, where it is summer.
“While the decline in Antarctic sea ice extent is always steep at this time of year, it has been unusually rapid this year,” scientists at the National Snow and Ice Data Center reported in early January, “and at the end of December, Antarctic sea ice extent stood at the lowest in the 45-year satellite record.”
Researchers at the data center say the low sea ice has been due in part to a large band of warmer-than-normal air temperatures, which climbed to 2 degrees Celsius above average over the Ross Sea in November and December. Strong winds have also hastened the sea ice decline, they reported.
Recent data shows the sea ice has not since recovered, suggesting the continent could end the summer with a new record on the books for the second year in a row.
Antarctica has experienced a roller-coaster of sea ice extent over the past couple of decades, swinging wildly from record highs to record lows. Unlike the Arctic, where scientists say climate change is accelerating its impacts, Antarctica’s sea ice extent is highly variable.
“There’s a link between what’s going on in Antarctica and the general warming trend around the rest of the world, but it’s different from what we see in mountain glaciers and what we see in the Arctic,” Ted Scambos, a glaciologist at the University of Colorado Boulder and lead scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center, previously told CNN.
Satellite data that stretches back to 1978 shows that the region was still producing record-high sea ice extent as recently as 2014 and 2015. Then it suddenly plunged in 2016 and has stayed lower than average since.
Recalled Fisher-Price sleeper now linked to roughly 100 deaths, CPSC says
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The Consumer Product Safety Commission and Fisher-Price “reannounced” a recall of Rock ‘n Play Sleepers on Monday, saying that eight fatalities have occurred after the initial recall announcement nearly three years ago.
About 4.7 million of the sleepers were sold before the recall was announced in April 2019, with the CPSC saying at the time that 30 infant fatalities were linked to the product.
Since then, about 70 additional fatalities have been reported, including eight that occurred after the first recall announcement, according to the CPSC.
“Infant fatalities have occurred in the Rock ‘n Play Sleepers, after the infants rolled from their back to their stomach or side while unrestrained, or under other circumstances,” the CPSC said in the recall announcement.
Fisher-Prices’s Rock ‘n Play Sleepers have been linked to approximately 100 deaths, according to the Consumer Product Safety Commission. (John McDonnell/The Washington Post via Getty Images / Getty Images)
Fisher-Price did not respond to a request for comment on Monday.
The company said at the time of the original recall that it continues to “stand by the safety of all of our products,” but issued the recall “given the reported incidents in which the product was used contrary to safety warnings and instructions.”
COMPANY RECALLING BLOOD PRESSURE PILLS BECAUSE OF POTENTIAL IMPURITY PRESENCE
Separately, the recall for Kids2 Rocking Sleepers was also reannounced on Monday, with the CPSC saying that 15 deaths have been linked to the product, including four since the initial recall.
A recall of Kids2 Rocking Sleepers was ‘reannounced’ on Monday. (Consumer Product Safety Commission / Fox News)
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“We are issuing this announcement because, despite their removal from the marketplace and a prohibition on their sale, babies continue to die in these products,” CPSC Chair Alexander Hoehn-Saric said in a statement.
“I urge all parents, grandparents, and caregivers to follow the guidance of this announcement and stop using these products immediately.”
A spokesperson or Kids2 did not respond to a request for comment on Monday.
Walgreens Unit Close to Roughly $9 Billion Deal With Summit Health
A unit of
Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc.
WBA 3.78%
is nearing a deal to combine with a big owner of medical practices and urgent-care centers in a transaction worth roughly $9 billion including debt, according to people familiar with the matter, the latest in a string of acquisitions by big consumer-focused companies aiming to delve deeper into medical care.
The drugstore giant’s primary-care-center subsidiary, Village Practice Management, would combine with Summit Health, the parent company of CityMD urgent-care centers, in an agreement that could be reached as early as Monday, the people said.
Health insurer
Cigna Corp.
CI 0.73%
is expected to invest in the combined company, the people said.
There is no guarantee the parties will reach a deal, the people cautioned, noting that they are still hammering out details of an agreement.
Summit Health, which is backed by private-equity firm Warburg Pincus LLC, has more than 370 locations in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Pennsylvania and Central Oregon, according to the company’s website. Current and former physicians also own a large interest in the business.
Village Practice Management, which does business as VillageMD, provides care for patients at free-standing practices as well as at Walgreens locations, virtually and in the home. In 2021, Walgreens announced it had made a $5.2 billion investment in VillageMD, boosting its stake to 63%. At the time, Walgreens said the investment would help accelerate the opening of at least 600 Village Medical at Walgreens primary-care practices across the country by 2025 and 1,000 by 2027.
The expected deal follows a string of mergers involving companies like VillageMD and CityMD as big healthcare providers seek more direct connections with patients.
Amazon.com Inc.
in July agreed to purchase primary-care operator
1Life Healthcare Inc.,
which operates under the name One Medical, for about $4 billion. In September,
CVS Health Corp.
struck a deal to acquire home-healthcare company Signify Healthcare Inc. for $8 billion.
Cano Health Inc.,
which operates primary-care centers, has attracted interest from both CVS and insurer
Humana Inc.
in recent months, The Wall Street Journal has reported.
Bloomberg a week ago reported VillageMD’s interest in Summit Health.
Walgreens appears to have pre-empted a sale process for Summit Health that was set to kick off next year, according to the people, who said the company was about to interview banks before it received interest from VillageMD.
Summit Health has been backed by Warburg Pincus since 2017, when it took a stake in CityMD, a large chain of New York City urgent-care centers.
Since that time, Warburg has helped the company complete multiple transformative acquisitions, including the 2019 merger of CityMD and multi-speciality medical-practice group, Summit Medical Group.
New York-based Warburg, which has more than $85 billion in assets under management, is no stranger to healthcare. The firm counts healthcare-IT business Modernizing Medicine Inc. and Ensemble Health Partners, a revenue-cycle management business for hospitals, among its portfolio companies.
—Anna Wilde Mathews contributed to this article.
Write to Laura Cooper at laura.cooper@wsj.com
Copyright ©2022 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
Appeared in the November 7, 2022, print edition as ‘Walgreens Nears Deal For Urgent Care Firm.’
Roughly 100 homes burned by Mill Fire in Northern California; Mountain Fire grows nearby – Sacramento Bee
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Super Long-Distance NASA Fix Restores Voyager 1, Roughly 15 Billion Miles Away : ScienceAlert
The Voyager 1 space probe launched from Earth in September 1977, and is now around 23.5 billion kilometers (or 14.6 billion miles) away from home – and counting. But despite that mind-blowing distance, NASA scientists just carried out a repair job on the craft.
Since May, Voyager 1 has been sending back garbled information from its attitude articulation and control system (AACS), which is the part of the probe that ensures that its antenna is pointed towards Earth.
Although the rest of the probe continued to behave normally, the information it sent back about its health and activities didn’t make any sense. Through a switch in the way data is sent back from Voyager 1, the issue has now been fixed.
“We’re happy to have the telemetry back,” says Suzanne Dodd, Voyager’s project manager at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.
Scientists were able to figure out that the spacecraft had begun transmitting data through an on-board computer that was known to have stopped working years ago. The NASA team commanded Voyager 1 to switch back to the correct computer for communications.
What we don’t know yet is why Voyager 1 decided to start switching up how it was sending data back to its home planet. The most likely explanation is a faulty command generated from somewhere else on the probe’s electronic systems.
That in turn suggests that there’s another problem somewhere else, otherwise the computer switch would never have been made. However, the Voyager 1 team is confident that the long-term health of the spacecraft isn’t under threat.
“We’ll do a full memory readout of the AACS and look at everything it’s been doing,” says Dodd. “That will help us try to diagnose the problem that caused the telemetry issue in the first place.”
Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 (which actually launched a month earlier than its twin) have traveled so far in 45 years that they’re now both beyond the point known as the heliopause, where the Sun’s solar winds can no longer be felt and space is officially regarded as interstellar.
Despite Voyager 1 shutting down some of its systems and losing some functionality in that time, and Voyager 2 needing some troubleshooting also, both the probes continue to report back to Earth – even though a message can take around two days to travel the required distance.
The spacecraft have sent back images from close to Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto, and in recent years have carried on recording and analyzing the weird and wonderful experiences they’re having out in space.
Voyager 1 hasn’t triggered its ‘safe mode’ routine, which suggests it doesn’t detect anything faulty, and the signal from the spacecraft hasn’t weakened. All being well, it can continue reporting back for many years to come.
“We’re cautiously optimistic, but we still have more investigating to do,” says Dodd.
You can keep track of the probe on the Voyager Mission Status website.
New bacterium roughly the size, shape of an eyelash smashes size record
Enlarge / The bacteria, Ca. Thiomargarita magnifica, discovered in the French Caribbean mangroves is a member of the genus Thiomargarita.
Tomas Tyml
Clinging to sunken debris in shallow, marine mangrove forests in the French Caribbean, tiny thread-like organisms—perfectly visible to the naked eye—have earned the title of the largest bacteria ever known.
Measuring around a centimeter long, they are roughly the size and shape of a human eyelash, batting away the competition at 5,000 times the size of garden-variety bacteria and 50 times the size of bacteria previously considered giant. In human terms, this is akin to coming across a person as tall as Mount Everest.
Enlarge / Views of the sampling sites among the mangroves of Guadeloupe archipelago in the French Caribbean, April-May 2022.
Pierre Yves Pascal
Olivier Gros, a biologist at the University of the Antilles, discovered the prokaryotes in 2009, noticing them gently swaying in the sulfur-rich waters among the mangroves in the Guadeloupe archipelago. The bacteria clung to the leaves, branches, oyster shells, and bottles that sunk into the tropical swamp, Gros said in a press briefing.
He and colleagues first thought they might be complex eukaryotic organisms or perhaps a string of linked organisms. But years of genetic and molecular research revealed that each string is, in fact, one towering bacterial cell, genetically related to other sulfur-oxidizing bacteria. “Of course, this was quite a surprise,” Jean-Marie Volland, a microbiologist at the Joint Genome Institute in Berkeley, California, said in the briefing.
This week, Gros and colleagues published an article in Science laying out everything they’ve learned about the new, enormous bacteria, which they’ve dubbed Candidatus (Ca.) Thiomargarita magnifica.
Their findings expand our understanding of microbial diversity in ways microbiologists didn’t think possible. Scientists previously hypothesized that the size of bacteria would be limited by several factors, including a lack of intracellular transport systems, reliance on inefficient chemical diffusion, and a surface-to-volume ratio needed to satisfy energy needs. Yet, the volume of a single Ca. T. magnifica cell is at least two orders of magnitude higher than the predicted maximum that a bacterium can theoretically achieve, Volland said.
-
Filaments of Ca. Thiomargarita magnifica.
Jean-Marie Volland -
Filaments of Ca. Thiomargarita magnifica.
Jean-Marie Volland
Volland, Gros, and colleagues are still learning how—and why exactly—Ca. T. magnifica manages its massive size. But, so far, it’s clear that Ca. T. magnifica oxidizes hydrogen sulfide from its sulfur-rich environment and reduces nitrate. About 75 percent of its cell volume is a sac of stored nitrate. The sac crushes up against the cell’s envelope, limiting the depth that nutrients and other molecules need to diffuse.
While bacteria tend to have free-floating DNA, Ca. T. magnifica appears to have more than half a million copies of its genome bundled up into numerous membrane-bound compartments that the researchers named pepins, after small seeds in fruit. The distribution of pepins throughout the bacteria’s outer edges could allow for localized protein production, eliminating the need to transport proteins long distances.
The next step to studying these gargantuan bacteria is for scientists to figure out how to culture them in labs. For now, the researchers have collected new specimens from the mangrove forests every time they run out. But, this has been tricky since they appear to have a mysterious life cycle or seasonality. For the last two months, Gros has not been able to find any. “I don’t know where they are,” he said.
Water has been detected in a galaxy roughly 12.8 billion light years away, researchers say
Scientists said they have discovered evidence of water in a galaxy roughly 12.8 billion light-years from Earth, making it one of the most distant discoveries of water in the universe.
The properties of the galaxy, named SPT0311-58, were discovered by scientists from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign at the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array in Chile. The galaxy had first been discovered at the observatory in 2017.
Not only were water molecules found, but the galaxy where it was found comes from the early parts of the universe, when it was only 780 million years old. Scientists said in 2020 that the universe is 13.8 billion years old.
Sreevani Jarugula, an astronomer at the University of Illinois and lead investigator, said carbon dioxide also was detected in the massive galaxy. With the presence of oxygen and carbon, something Jarugula said is “critical to life,” the galaxy proves molecular life began not too long after the Big Bang, the gigantic explosion that scientists believe led to the rapid expansion of the universe we see today.
“This galaxy is the most massive galaxy currently known at high redshift, or the time when the universe was still very young. It has more gas and dust compared to other galaxies in the early universe, which gives us plenty of potential opportunities to observe abundant molecules and to better understand how these life-creating elements impacted the development of the early universe,” Jarugula said in a statement.
The discovery of water also shows the galaxy had stars already ending their life cycle in such a short time. Hydrogen was developed when the Big Bang happened, but oxygen comes from dying stars.
NASA has said that most stars typically live for billions of years, but these findings indicated that stars in SPT0311-58 went through their life cycle in under 1 billion years. Jarugula said the findings show how far away water can exist from Earth, but it now leaves the question of how stars and galaxies formed so early in the universe.
“Early galaxies are forming stars at a rate thousands of times that of the Milky Way,” Way,” Jarugula said. “Studying the gas and dust content of these early galaxies informs us of their properties, such as how many stars are being formed, the rate at which gas is converted into stars, how galaxies interact with each other and with the interstellar medium, and more.”
Joe Pesce, astrophysicist and director at the National Science Foundation, said the results are “exciting” and could help understand how the universe has evolved into what it is today.
“These molecules, important to life on Earth, are forming as soon as they can, and their observation is giving us insight into the fundamental processes of a universe very much different from today’s,” Pesce said.
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Follow Jordan Mendoza on Twitter: @jordan_mendoza5.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Water discovered in galaxy roughly 12.8 billion light years away