Tag Archives: studied

US

‘Detached’ Suspect Bryan Kohberger Studied Under Famed Criminologist

Leave a comment

The 28-year-old grad student charged with killing four University of Idaho students in their sleep undertook a research project that asked ex-cons to map out how they committed their crimes, and took courses by the famed forensic psychologist Katherine Ramsland, who has written 68 books including How to Catch a Killer, The Psychology of Death Investigations, and The Mind of a Murderer.

Moscow Police Chief James Fry confirmed at a Friday afternoon press conference that Bryan Christopher Kohberger was arrested that morning on a warrant for the first-degree murders of Kaylee Goncalves and Madison Mogen, 21, and Xana Kernodle and her boyfriend Ethan Chapin, both 20. He was nabbed in his hometown of Albrightsville, Pennsylvania, and will appear in court Tuesday for extradition proceedings.

Fry declined to release further details, including a potential motive, until Kohberger is brought back to Idaho. An FBI surveillance team had been tracking him for four days before his arrest, according to CNN. Cops have not yet found the murder weapon, Fry said, but they did seize a white Hyundai Elantra, the same model of car seen in the vicinity of the murders in November.

A headshot of Bryan Kohberger on Washington State University’s database of criminology Pd.D students.

Washington State University

Public records list Kohberger as a registered libertarian voter and a criminology buff who comes from a family of mental health workers. He is a criminal justice and criminology Ph.D student at Washington State University—and lives on campus in Pullman, just eight miles from the Moscow crime scene.

WSU Pullman Chancellor Elizabeth Chilton confirmed that search warrants were executed Friday at Kohberger’s apartment and office on campus. “Kohberger had completed his first semester as a PhD student in WSU’s criminal justice program earlier this month,” she said, adding that campus police were working with local, state, and federal law enforcement.

Kohberger completed his graduate studies in criminal justice this year at DeSales University, in Center Valley, Pennsylvania, where students told The Daily Beast he took classes with Prof. Ramsland, whose courses included “Psychology of Death Investigations.” Ramsland declined to comment when reached by The Daily Beast Friday.

A former classmate at DeSales, who asked not to be named, said they got into a disagreement with Kohberger during an introductory biology class group project. While they didn’t remember the conversation, they recalled Kohberger as “very intelligent” and “well spoken” but “seemingly detached.”

“He was very leveled and somewhat imposing. There wasn’t much emotion displayed by him,” the classmate said, adding that he remembers Kohberger’s “intense stare.”

“He took care with how he spoke,” the person said.

In a since-removed post on Reddit from seven months ago, Kohberger asked ex-cons to participate in a DeSales research project that sought to “understand how emotions and psychological traits influence decision-making when committing a crime.”

The research project, which was taken offline Friday, asked participants questions like how they approached their victim or target, how they prepared for the crime, how they traveled to and entered the location of the crime, and “Did you struggle with or fight the victim?”

In a statement to The Daily Beast, DeSales confirmed Kohberger received a bachelor’s degree in 2020 and completed his graduate studies in June 2022. “As a Catholic, Salesian community, we are devastated by this senseless tragedy. Our thoughts and prayers are with the victims’ families during this difficult time,” a spokesperson said.

Northampton Community College in Albrightsville confirmed to The Daily Beast that Kohberger graduated in 2018 as a psychology major. He was also employed as a part-time school security officer by the Pleasant Valley School District for several years until last year.

Former friends told The Daily Beast that Kohberger’s high school years were marked by a drastic weight loss, as well as cruel bullying, and a deep interest in police movies and criminology. Meanwhile, his parents battled financial issues, filing for bankruptcy the year Kohberger was born, and again when he was 14. On the second occasion, they surrendered their house and car after facing $260,173 in debts and having just $512 in the bank, records show.

Nick Mcloughlin, 26, who was friends with Kohberger in high school and vocational school, described Kohberger as “down to earth” and overweight when they graduated junior year. But at the start of senior year, Kohberger was “thinner than a rail” and turned “aggressive,” he said. He’d also picked up a new hobby: taking boxing classes.

“He always wanted to fight somebody, he was bullying people. We started cutting him off from our friend group because he was 100 percent a different person,” Mcloughlin said, adding that he had “no idea” what might have contributed to the change that summer.

Mcloughlin said he and Kohberger would spend half the school day at Pleasant Valley High before heading to Monroe County’s vocational school, where they took classes related to heating and air conditioning work. He said Kohberger also took criminal justice courses to potentially become a cop.

Mcloughlin said the friendship ended when Kohberger began putting moves on his girlfriend. “He was, like, reaching out to her, saying, ‘I can get us a bottle and we hang out tonight.’”

Another high school friend, Thomas Arntz, recalled Kohberger as a “bully” who would point out his friends’ “flaws and insecurities” to distract from his own struggles with his weight.

“He did that to me all the time,” Arntz told The Daily Beast. “He would go after my intelligence. He would basically insinuate that I’m kind of slow-witted and that I’m forgetful and [that] I lack the intelligence to be his friend.”

Madison Mogen, Kaylee Goncalves, Ethan Chapin, and Xana Kernodle.

GoFundMe

Arntz said he cut off his friendship with Kohberger because of the incessant bullying. He said his father, a maintenance worker, and mother, a substitute teacher, were “genuinely kind people.” Arntz’s sister, Casey, said Kohberger told her after graduating that he had entered rehab.

When she ran into him at a wedding in 2017, she said, it seemed “like his life was picking up.” She added: “Apparently it wasn’t.”

Arntz said he was shocked by the news of Kohberger’s arrest, but not surprised. “He was mean-spirited, he was a bully,” he said. “I never thought he would do something like that but at the same time it doesn’t really surprise me.”

The off-campus home where four students were found dead.

Angela Palermo/Idaho Statesman/Tribune News Service via Getty Images

A former teacher of Kohberger’s at Pleasant Valley High School told The Daily Beast that he was a “good kid” and “never in major trouble.” She said that when she taught him in 11th and 12th grade, Kohberger was “passionate about criminal justice.”

“He was just a regular 12th grader, had a few friends, was a good student,” she said. “I thought he would become a police officer or correctional officer.”

“He liked to watch movies about police, and ask me the next day if I’d seen it. It was more than a hobby for him, he was always asking questions,” she said.

She said she’s feeling sick over Kohberger’s alleged crimes and wonders if she could have done more for him or said something different to prevent him from traveling down a dark path. “He liked school, got good grades, did well at vo-tech, had friends, and a plan to go to school for criminal justice,” she said. “He had his life in order.”

Another high school classmate, who asked not to be named, said of Kohberger: “I remember he was very quiet and shy. A lot of people made fun of him. I don’t know if it was because he was quiet and shy or how heavy he was. But you could tell he was a smart, organized student, like all As and really to the point.”

The arrest signifies a long-awaited breakthrough, and a stunning turn of events after police fumbled the early stages of the investigation, initially calling the killings “targeted” but later conceding they had no murder weapon, no motive, no suspect, and no clear reason why the group were killed so brutally.

In a statement to The Daily Beast after Kohberger’s arrest, Chapin’s family said they were “relieved this chapter is over because it provides a form of closure. However, it doesn’t alter the outcome or alleviate the pain. We miss Ethan, and our family is forever changed.”

“Over the last seven weeks, we stood by the Moscow Police Department, FBI, and Idaho State Police, confident they would solve this crime. So, when we received the phone call last night, we congratulated them for their diligent work and service,” they said.

“Today, we marvel at the continued stories about Ethan and the lives he touched in his short 20 years. If we all lived and loved as Ethan did, the world would be a better place.”

Fry said detectives received more than 19,000 tips, and conducted 300 interviews. Latah County Prosecutor Bill Thompson would not say whether Kohberger acted alone, but asked for anyone who knew, or interacted, with him to get in touch with investigators.

“This is not the end of this investigation,” Thompson said. “In fact this is a new beginning.”

He said a probable cause affidavit for Kohberger will remain sealed until her appears in an Idaho court.

Kohberger will be represented by a public defender and is being held without bail in Pennsylvania, Thompson said. He will be under the same order once he returns to Idaho.

—with additional reporting by Decca Muldowney and William Bredderman

Read original article here

Business

Promising Alzheimer’s drug needs to be studied for safety, researchers say

Leave a comment

Comment

An experimental Alzheimer’s drug moderately slowed the effects of the disease but was linked to patient safety risks that warrant longer clinical trials, according to a study published late Tuesday.

The study, in the New England Journal of Medicine, found that a drug developed by Tokyo-based Eisai and Cambridge, Mass.-based Biogen reduced a key marker of Alzheimer’s disease, the amyloid beta protein, and that patients who received the drug performed better on cognitive and physical measures than a placebo group.

But the detailed results also concluded that the drug, lecanemab, was associated with “adverse events” and warranted more study.

Marwan Sabbagh, a neurologist at the Barrow Neurological Institute and a co-author of the study, described two patient deaths that had raised concern about the safety of the drug ahead of Tuesday’s presentation. “Causality with lecanemab is a little difficult,” he said, noting that both patients, a 65-year-old woman and an 87-year-old man, had underlying health issues. Though the rate of brain bleeding was low, he said, the risk increases with medications to prevent blood clotting.

“That might be a relative risk that needs to be managed,” he said at the Clinical Trials in Alzheimer’s Disease conference late Tuesday.

Eisai confirmed the two deaths Tuesday night and denied they were related to the drug.

The new details have been the subject of intense anticipation by doctors and Wall Street since Eisai and Biogen announced in September that lecanemab had slowed cognitive decline by 27 percent compared with a placebo.

Lecanemab has emerged as the front-runner among a class of drugs that seeks to remove clumps of a protein in the brain called amyloid beta, which researchers have long suspected plays a role in Alzheimer’s. The Food and Drug Administration is set to make a decision on approving the drug as early as January. That could translate into a multibillion-dollar prize for treating a progressively debilitating disease that affects 6 million Americans and has few approved therapies.

Alzheimer’s drug sparks emotional battle as FDA nears deadline on whether to approve

“It’s the best data we’ve seen in Alzheimer’s in a pivotal trial,” Myles Minter, a biotechnology analyst at William Blair, said of the initial results announced in September.

Lecanemab’s positive results followed a controversy over a different drug developed by Eisai and Biogen, aducanumab. That drug, known by the brand name Aduhelm, was approved by the FDA last year despite conflicting data on its effectiveness. Aduhelm fizzled commercially after Medicare declined to broadly reimburse for it.

Lecanemab is designed to work by removing clumps of tiny proteins known as amyloids from the brain. Yet, despite the drug’s early success, some experts remain skeptical that targeting these amyloids is the key to treating Alzheimer’s. This month, Roche announced disappointing results from its anti-amyloid drug.

Matthew Schrag, a neurology professor at Vanderbilt University Medical School, said the lecanemab trial was well-designed and showed strong statistical results on a cognitive measure. But he doubted that the drug would cause a noticeable improvement for many sufferers, and noted that the medication can cause significant side effects.

“I worry any minor benefit may be washed out by the practical difficulties of living with the drug and the substantial risks associated with taking the drug,” he said in an interview.

Eisai and Biogen reported that patients in the trial experienced brain swelling and bleeding, which are known to be complications of anti-amyloid drugs, but the companies said the rates were within expectations. Concerns about the drug’s safety, however, were heightened by the two patient deaths.

Is it Alzheimer’s? Families want to know, and blood tests may offer answers.

On Sunday, Science magazine reported that a patient taking lecanemab died after suffering a stroke and receiving a medication to bust blood clots. That followed a report last month by Stat news that another patient in the trial had died while on a blood-thinner. Both deaths reportedly stemmed from a condition where amyloid binds to blood vessels in the brain and makes them more susceptible to rupture.

Research analysts at investment bank UBS questioned whether the deaths would lead to FDA restrictions for patients taking blood-thinners, which it estimated could make up as many as 20 percent of Alzheimer’s patients.

Libby Holman, a spokeswoman for Eisai, said the patients who died had underlying medical conditions and risks, including being on medications that prevent blood clots, that contributed to their deaths. “It is Eisai’s assessment that the deaths cannot be attributed to lecanemab,” she said, adding that the rates of brain hemorrhage deaths were 0.1 percent for patients in both the placebo and treatment groups.

Despite unknowns about lecanemab’s risk and benefits, it remains a draw for patients suffering from Alzheimer’s eager for any option to slow its degenerative effects and contribute to finding a cure.

Hugh Courtney, a 59-year-old economist diagnosed with early Alzheimer’s, said he feels lucky to have participated in the clinical trial even if he isn’t sure how much he’s benefited.

“It’s hard to tell how much has changed, quite frankly,” he said of the lecanemab infusions he gets about twice a month. Still, he said, “it’s given me a sense of purpose, a concrete way to help.”

Read original article here

Health

Halt Vaccination of Young People Until Vaccine-Linked Myocarditis Is Studied: MIT Professor

Leave a comment

Retsef Levi, a former Israeli military intelligence officer, an expert in risk management and health systems, and a professor at The Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School of Management, coauthored a paper that found a 25 percent rise in heart attack emergency calls among young Israelis after the country’s rollout of the COVID genetic vaccine.

Levi argues that there is enough data from this and various other studies on the vaccine’s adverse heart effects, to stop its use and run a thorough investigation into why many once-healthy young people suffer or die from heart inflammation after being vaccinated.

“The main question that we need to ask ourselves is, do we have enough evidence from this study and many other studies, to say halt!” Levi said during a recent interview with Epoch TV’s “American Thought Leaders” program. “We’re going to stop these vaccines, for young individuals, but maybe overall, and we’re going to take the time to really look very, very carefully and scrutinize every piece of data and bring together every possible piece of data to understand what is the answer.”

Levi has worked extensively in the areas of analytics and modeling, looking at issues of risk management in the field of healthcare and other related systems. Mainly, analyzing data sets to see what they reveal about quality, safety, risks, etc.

His coauthored paper in Nature Scientific Reports looked at Israel’s national emergency calls in the first five months of 2021 and found a 25 percent increase in cardiac arrest and heart attacks in men aged 16-39 as compared to the year before the national vaccine rollout.

The study found, “a temporal correlation between this increase starting in early 2021, and the launch of the vaccination campaign in Israel,” said Levi.

The paper does not conclude a causal relationship between the vaccine and the observed increase in heart problems, but it definitely gives enough evidence to warrant an in-depth investigation said, Levi.

Further, Israel’s health ministry should want to know why there was an increase in heart problems; but instead, they “launched an attack on us, both in the public domain, as well as even actively trying to approach the journal and asked the journal to retract the paper,” said Levi.

An artist rendering of a heart and SARS-CoV-2 virus particles. (By Lightspring)

Sound Scientific Process Abandoned

There is a lot of data that strongly suggests an increase in myocarditis or death in young people who have been vaccinated. Levi believes that the haste with which the vaccines were produced, approved, and deployed, neglected safety and best practices for rolling out vaccines.

This deviation from basic sound scientific principles has put health officials in Israel and the United States, “in a situation where you essentially cannot admit any wrong anymore because that will imply that you did something very, very disastrous,” said Levi. “We approve it in a very expedited way, and we approve it to everybody regardless of the risk, and that was basically the fundamental mistake that we’ve done. And I think everything else can be explained by that.”

There was strong early evidence, including a 2020 study done by Stanford University researchers John Ioannidis and colleagues concluding that people under 65, with no comorbidities, had very little risk of death from COVID-19 and should have helped target vaccines to the high-risk populations.

Levi believes health agency officials and governments should not have required vaccinations for healthy young people, and by doing so, “put them in a situation when they take an unknown risk that now we know is actually, in some cases pretty substantial, and could really compromise the future of young people and including causing their death.”

Florida Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo. (York Du/The Epoch Times)

Mounting Evidence Against Vaccinating Youth

Florida Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo, recently advised Floridians not to vaccinate healthy young people, because he found an 84 percent increase in heart problems among young men. While his study also does not prove a causal relationship, “at the very least, this should just raise your concerns that something really, really disturbing is happening here,” said Levi.

Levi thinks the public should look at a variety of studies when determining the safety of any vaccine or health guidance, and that Ladapo’s findings are in keeping with a large body of evidence that supports his guidance, even though the mainstream is dismissing this evidence.

Levi believes Ladopo was correctly following the mounting evidence of vaccine-related heart problems and deaths, and the principle of “do no harm.” “Ladopo was saying, I don’t feel comfortable to continue to give these vaccines to young individuals, given the evidence that I have,” said Levi.

Fear Is Destroying Health Systems

“I actually think that the regulatory agencies, with the support of some scientists in the media, are essentially representing a very extreme approach and a very dangerous approach, if I may say, because again, they are undermining the fundamentals of proper scientific and medical work,” said Levi. “And I’m very, very concerned about the future of science, the future trust in science and medicine.”

Fear has caused many people to make poor decisions said, Levi. “What I realized is that in many cases, it [fear] shuts down intellect, rationale, ethics, [and] scared people can do very, very bad things to each other.”

This fear caused health officials to abandon reason and prevented them from looking at the whole health of an individual, including the mental, emotional, and physical aspects, especially in the case of young people said, Levi.

Consequently, young people have been deeply affected, with among other things, a loss of education, weight gain, increased anxiety, and depression, much of which could have been prevented had leaders used a holistic and science-based approach to mitigating the threats of the pandemic, Levi said.

A cyclist with a trailer for children passes a “Beach Closed” sign on the boardwalk in Miami Beach, Fla., on March 22, 2020. (Cliff Hawkins/Getty Images)

We have failed our children, said Levi.

“And to me, that’s not only a scientifical scientific flaw, but this is also an ethical flaw. This is an ethical failure, that as a society, we then [did not] put the young and the children as a top priority. That, to me, that’s what the society is supposed to do.”

The lockdown protocol used around the world failed miserably, especially in China said, Levi.

“What is striking to me is that freedom is a fundamental value of democratic societies, but it’s also a fundamental value of science,” but was largely ignored, said Levi.

Instead, those in democratic societies used the most draconian policies to take away fundamental freedoms and in the scientific realm, people were “essentially imposing censorship mechanisms that I’ve never seen, in my over 16 years as a scientist, I’ve never seen something close to that,” said Levi.

A medical worker prepares to give 62-year-old Moshe Geva Rosso a fourth dose of the COVID-19 vaccine, at Sheba Medical Center in Ramat Gan, Israel, on Dec. 31, 2021. (Nir Elias/Reuters)

Israel’s Vaccine Monitoring

“The Ministry of Health (MOH) in Israel, is actively hiding critical information about side effects of the vaccines from the Israeli public,” said Levi. In addition, the health ministry did not have a functional monitoring system for vaccine adverse effects until recently.

This is a critically important fact because Israel has been at the forefront of requiring their citizens to get vaccinated and boosted, having signed a contract with Pfizer early on in the pandemic, “that essentially made Israel a worldwide lab for the rest of the world,” said Levi.

Israel only started to broadly monitor adverse side effects at the end of 2021, and hired a team to research what they found regarding adverse effects, which is why they leaked a video showing Israel’s health ministry discussing the issue,  said Levi.

The Israeli MOH commissioned researchers to analyze adverse event reports submitted by Israelis. The researchers presented findings from the new surveillance system at an internal June meeting, video footage of which was obtained by an Israeli journalist. This research team’s findings are contrary to the health ministry’s claim that the adverse events, if any, are short-term.

Many of the side effects are in fact, not short term. These health problems, “actually last weeks, months, and sometimes over a year. When I say side effects, I talk about menstrual irregularities, I talk about serious neurological side effects, and so forth,” said Levi.

In these videos, the team of researchers is heard advising the Israeli health ministry to use caution when speaking to the public about the vaccines’ adverse health effects.

“It seems that the Ministry of Health in Israel took this to their attention because when you look at the actual report that they post in the public domain, they essentially took out a lot of the messages, a lot of the findings that were found by the research team that they hired. And moreover, they misrepresented the data, and misrepresented the reporting rates of the different side effects and made them look like very, very rare,” said Levi.

The reports that the ministry put up for the Israeli public to see were clearly manipulated said, Levi.

“And essentially, these reports are representing only six months out of a year and a half, and only 15 to 17 percent of the population in Israel, rather than the entire population and all the doses that were given in Israel.”

The Epoch Times reached out to Israel’s MOH for comment but had not receive a reply before publishing time.

Rechallenge

“So, now I have a situation when every time they take the vaccine I see the same response, that is called rechallenge,” said Levi. A positive rechallenge was reported in 10 percent of the women who complained of menstrual issues, according to the researchers, who also identified cases of rechallenge for other adverse events.

The phenomenon of rechallenge—when adverse events reoccur or worsen following additional vaccine doses—proved that some of the events were caused by the vaccine, researchers said.

Dr. Sharon Alroy-[Preis], who is the number two healthcare official in the Ministry of Health, when interviewed on Israeli TV said the adverse reactions that women are facing with things like menstrual irregularities were fleeting, and of no great concern.

“In fact, there are women that suffer from weeks and months, and over a year sometimes, of irregular menstrual cycles and different types of irregularities,” said Levi. “And there is no acknowledgment from anybody in the Ministry of Health, there is no acknowledgment that I’m aware of, from any health authority or health agency in the world, [that] hey, there is a problem here.”

Eroded Trust

“And the worst thing is they ignore the voice of the patient.”

Public health agencies around the world, including the United States and Israel, have not been transparent about the vaccines and the adverse events from the shots, said Levi, to such an extent that it takes a lawsuit to get the data they have collected.

The public should be told, “what is the impact of these vaccines on all-cause mortality and other health outcomes in a way that is informative, so that people can make their risk-benefit decision based on their age, health background,  beliefs, whatever. But this is unheard of that health agencies behave in a way that you need to take them to court to release data,” said Levi.

These agencies need to return to basic principles of transparency and empathy, fundamental to public health, in order to eliminate the mistrust created by the lack of honesty during the pandemic.

Follow

Jan Jekielek is a senior editor with The Epoch Times and host of the show, “American Thought Leaders.” Jan’s career has spanned academia, media, and international human rights work. In 2009 he joined The Epoch Times full time and has served in a variety of roles, including as website chief editor. He is the producer of the award-winning Holocaust documentary film “Finding Manny.”

Follow

Masooma Haq began reporting for The Epoch Times from Pakistan in 2008. She currently covers a variety of topics including U.S. government, culture, and entertainment.

Read original article here

Science

What’s it like to be on Venus or Pluto? We studied their sand dunes and found some clues.

Leave a comment

This article was originally published at The Conversation. (opens in new tab) The publication contributed the article to Space.com’s Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

Andrew Gunn (opens in new tab), Lecturer, Monash University

What is it like to be on the surface of Mars or Venus? Or even further afield, such as on Pluto, or Saturn’s moon Titan?

This curiosity has driven advances in space exploration since Sputnik 1 was launched 65 years (opens in new tab) ago. But we’re only beginning to scratch the surface of what is knowable about other planetary bodies in the solar system.

Our new study (opens in new tab), published May 19 in Nature Astronomy, shows how some unlikely candidates — namely sand dunes — can provide insight into what weather and conditions you might experience if you were standing on a far-off planetary body.

Related: Weird ‘blue’ dunes speckle the surface of Mars in NASA photo

What’s in a grain of sand?

English poet William Blake famously wondered (opens in new tab) what it means “to see a world in a grain of sand.”

In our research, we took this quite literally. The idea was to use the mere presence of sand dunes to understand what conditions exist on a world’s surface.

For dunes to even exist, there are a pair of “Goldilocks (opens in new tab)” criteria that must be satisfied. First is a supply of erodible but durable grains. There must also be winds fast enough to make those grains hop across the ground — but not fast enough to carry them high into the atmosphere.

So far, the direct measurement of winds and sediment has only been possible on Earth and Mars. However, we have observed wind-blown sediment features on multiple other bodies (and even comets (opens in new tab)) by satellite. The very presence of such dunes on these bodies implies the Goldilocks conditions are met.

Windblown features on (from top left, clockwise) Earth, Mars, Titan, Venus, Pluto and Triton have been imaged by satellites. (Image credit: Nature Astronomy/Image adapted from Gunn and Jerolmack (2022))

Our work focused on Venus, Earth, Mars, Titan, Triton (Neptune’s largest moon) and Pluto. Unresolved debates about these bodies have gone on for decades.

How do we square the apparent wind-blown features on Triton’s and Pluto’s surfaces with their thin, tenuous atmospheres? Why do we see such prolific sand and dust activity on Mars, despite measuring winds that seem too weak to sustain it?

And does Venus’s thick and stiflingly hot atmosphere move sand in a similar way to how air or water move on Earth?

Furthering the debate

Our study offers predictions for the winds required to move sediment on these bodies, and how easily that sediment would break apart in those winds.

We constructed these predictions by piecing together results from a host of other research papers, and testing them against all the experimental data we could get our hands on.

We then applied the theories to each of the six bodies, drawing on telescope and satellite measurements of variables including gravity, atmospheric composition, surface temperature, and the strength of sediments.

Studies before ours have looked at either the wind speed threshold required to move sand, or the strength of various sediment particles. Our work combined these together — looking at how easily particles could break apart in sand-transporting weather on these bodies.

Windblown ripples on the Bagnold Dunes on Mars were photographed by the rover Curiosity. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS)

For example, we know Titan’s equator has sand dunes — but we aren’t sure of what sediment encircles the equator. Is it pure organic haze (opens in new tab) raining down from the atmosphere, or is it mixed with denser ice?

As it turns out, we discovered loose aggregates of organic haze would disintegrate upon collision if they were blown by the winds at Titan’s equator.

This implies Titan’s dunes probably aren’t made of purely organic haze. To build a dune, sediment must be blown around in the wind for a long time (some of Earth’s dune sands are a million years (opens in new tab) old).

We also found wind speeds would have to be excessively fast on Pluto to transport either methane or nitrogen ice (which is what Pluto’s dune sediments were hypothesized to be). This calls into question whether “dunes” on Pluto’s plain, Sputnik Planitia (opens in new tab), are dunes at all.

They may instead be sublimation waves (opens in new tab). These are dune-like landforms made from the sublimation of material, instead of sediment erosion (such as those seen on Mars’s north polar cap).

Our results for Mars suggest more dust is generated from wind-blown sand transport on Mars than on Earth. This suggests our models of the Martian atmosphere may not be effectively capturing Mars’s strong “katabatic” winds, which are cold gusts that blow downhill at night.

Potential for space exploration

This study comes at an interesting stage of space exploration.

For Mars, we have a relative abundance of observations; five space agencies are conducting active missions in orbit, or in situ. Studies such as ours help inform the objectives of these missions, and the paths taken by rovers such as Perseverance (opens in new tab) and Zhurong (opens in new tab).

In the outer reaches of the solar system, Triton has not been observed in detail since the NASA Voyager 2 flyby in 1989. There is currently a mission proposal (opens in new tab) which, if selected, would have a probe launched in 2031 to study Triton, before annihilating itself by flying into Neptune’s atmosphere.

Missions planned to Venus and Titan in the coming decade will revolutionize our understanding of these two. NASA’s Dragonfly (opens in new tab) mission, slated to leave Earth in 2027 and arrive on Titan in 2034, will land an uncrewed helicopter on the moon’s dunes.

Pluto was observed during a 2015 flyby (opens in new tab) by NASA’s ongoing New Horizons mission, but there are no plans to return.

This article is republished from The Conversation (opens in new tab) under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article (opens in new tab).

Follow all of the Expert Voices issues and debates — and become part of the discussion — on Facebook and Twitter. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher.

Read original article here

Business

FDA delays Moderna vaccine for teens until heart condition studied: report

Leave a comment

The Food and Drug Administration is delaying its approval of Moderna Inc.’s COVID-19 vaccine for teens to study whether the shot could increase the risk of a rare inflammatory heart condition, The Wall Street Journal reported.

The delay follows moves by Sweden and three other Nordic countries to limit or suspend using the Moderna jabs for people under 30, over concerns about the risks of myocarditis for younger men.

Researchers have found a link between rare cases of the heart condition in children and the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines, both of which use a relatively new technology called mRNA.

The Journal said the FDA is taking another look at data on the risk of myocarditis among younger men, and is comparing the results for those who took Moderna’s vaccine, and those who got a Pfizer shot. So far, the regulators haven’t determined if either of the vaccines elevates the risk.

Pfizer already has emergency use approval to use its vaccine for kids aged 12-15.
Jorge Gil/Europa Press via Getty Images
Moderna’s vaccine requires a two-dose regimen.
AFP via Getty Images

The delay could be several weeks, but the timing is unclear, the report said. Until the review is complete, the Moderna shot off limits for young people. The Pfizer vaccine is approved for emergency use for kids aged 12 to 15, and the New Jersey company has submitted trial data seeking approval for kids aged 5 to 11.

“I think people can be reassured that the risk of myocarditis with an mRNA vaccine is low, it appears to be balanced between the different products,” Moderna Chief Medical Officer Paul Burton told WSJ in an interview.

FDA data on vaccinations among 18- to 25-year-olds, who are cleared to get Moderna’s shot, doesn’t show any significant difference in the rate of myocarditis among people who took the Moderna or the Pfizer vaccines, Burton said.

The Moderna shot, which tens of millions of adults have received, was found safe in a study testing it in 3,700 adolescents, none of whom developed myocarditis, the company told the paper. The company submitted the findings to the FDA seeking approval for its use for 12- to 17-year-olds in June.

The agency was close to issuing a green light in recent weeks, WSJ reported, but pulled back after Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden recommended against use in people under 30 years old.

Read original article here

The Ultimate News Site