The Lambda variant, which is believed to have been first detected in Peru about a year ago, is a new concern to scientists who say mutations could potentially be resistant to COVID-19 vaccines.
The World Health Organization said the variant’s mutations could increase its transmissibility or possibly increase its resistance to “neutralizing antibodies.” The health body called Lambda, or C.37, a “variant of interest.”
“So far we have seen no indication that the lambda variant is more aggressive,” Jairo Mendez-Rico, a WHO virologist, told DW. “It is possible that it may exhibit higher infection rates, but we don’t yet have enough reliable data to compare it to gamma or delta.”
He told the German outlet that a SARS-CoV-2 evolves, it may start to become more transmissible, but not as deadly.
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Jeff Barrett, director of the Covid-19 Genomics Initiative at the Wellcome Sanger Institute in the UK, told the Financial Times that a reason it is challenging to “make sense of the threat from Lambda, using computational and lab data, is that it has rather an unusual set of mutations, compared with other variants.”
The vaccines most used in Western countries still appear to offer strong protection against the highly contagious delta variant, first identified in India and now spreading in more than 90 other countries.
This illustration shows the distant Comet Bernardinelli-Bernstein as it might look in the outer Solar System. Comet Bernardinelli-Bernstein is estimated to be about 1000 times more massive than a typical comet, making it arguably the largest comet discovered in modern times. It has an extremely elongated orbit, journeying inward from the distant Oort Cloud over millions of years. It is the most distant comet to be discovered on its incoming path. Credit: NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/J. da Silva
Estimated to be 100–200 kilometers across, the unusual wandering body will make its closest approach to the Sun in 2031.
A giant comet from the outskirts of our Solar System has been discovered in 6 years of data from the Dark Energy Survey. Comet Bernardinelli-Bernstein is estimated to be about 1000 times more massive than a typical comet, making it arguably the largest comet discovered in modern times. It has an extremely elongated orbit, journeying inward from the distant Oort Cloud over millions of years. It is the most distant comet to be discovered on its incoming path, giving us years to watch it evolve as it approaches the Sun, though it’s not predicted to become a naked-eye spectacle.
A giant comet has been discovered by two astronomers following a comprehensive search of data from the Dark Energy Survey (DES). The comet, which is estimated to be 100–200 kilometers across, or about 10 times the diameter of most comets, is an icy relic flung out of the Solar System by the migrating giant planets in the early history of the Solar System. This comet is quite unlike any other seen before and the huge size estimate is based on how much sunlight it reflects.
This image from the Dark Energy Survey (DES) is composed of some of the discovery exposures showing Comet Bernardinelli-Bernstein collected by the 570-megapixel Dark Energy Camera (DECam) mounted on the Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) in Chile. These images show the comet in October 2017, when it was 25 au away, 83% of the distance to Neptune. Credit: Dark Energy Survey/DOE/FNAL/DECam/CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/P. Bernardinelli & G. Bernstein (UPenn)/DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys, Acknowledgments: T.A. Rector (University of Alaska Anchorage/NSF’s NOIRLab), M. Zamani (NSF’s NOIRLab) & J. Miller (NSF’s NOIRLab)
Pedro Bernardinelli and Gary Bernstein, of the University of Pennsylvania, found the comet — named Comet Bernardinelli-Bernstein (with the designation C/2014 UN271) — hidden among data collected by the 570-megapixel Dark Energy Camera (DECam) mounted on the Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) in Chile. The analysis of data from the Dark Energy Survey is supported by the Department of Energy (DOE) and the National Science Foundation (NSF), and the DECam science archive is curated by the Community Science and Data Center (CSDC) at NSF’s NOIRLab. CTIO and CSDC are Programs of NOIRLab.
One of the highest-performance, wide-field CCD imagers in the world, DECam was designed specifically for the DES and operated by the DOE and NSF between 2013 and 2019. DECam was funded by the DOE and was built and tested at DOE’s Fermilab. At present DECam is used for programs covering a huge range of science.
DES was tasked with mapping 300 million galaxies across a 5000-square-degree area of the night sky, but during its six years of observations it also observed many comets and trans-Neptunian objects passing through the surveyed field. A trans-Neptunian object, or TNO, is an icy body that resides in our Solar System beyond the orbit of Neptune.
Bernardinelli and Bernstein used 15–20 million CPU hours at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and Fermilab, employing sophisticated identification and tracking algorithms to identify over 800 individual TNOs from among the more than 16 billion individual sources detected in 80,000 exposures taken as part of the DES. Thirty-two of those detections belonged to one object in particular — C/2014 UN271.
Comets are icy bodies that evaporate as they approach the warmth of the Sun, growing their coma and tails. The DES images of the object in 2014–2018 did not show a typical comet tail, but within a day of the announcement of its discovery via the Minor Planet Center, astronomers using the Las Cumbres Observatory network took fresh images of Comet Bernardinelli-Bernstein which revealed that it has grown a coma in the past 3 years, making it officially a comet.
Its current inward journey began at a distance of over 40,000 astronomical units (au) from the Sun — in other words 40,000 times farther from the Sun than Earth is, or 6 trillion kilometers away (3.7 trillion miles or 0.6 light-years — 1/7 of the distance to the nearest star). For comparison, Pluto is 39 au from the Sun, on average. This means that Comet Bernardinelli-Bernstein originated in the Oort Cloud of objects, ejected during the early history of the Solar System. It could be the largest member of the Oort Cloud ever detected, and it is the first comet on an incoming path to be detected so far away.
This image from the Dark Energy Survey (DES) is composed of some of the discovery exposures showing Comet Bernardinelli-Bernstein collected by the 570-megapixel Dark Energy Camera (DECam) mounted on the Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) in Chile. These images show the comet in October 2017, when it was 25 au away, 83% of the distance to Neptune. Comet Bernardinelli-Bernstein (precisely in the center) is estimated to be about 1000 times more massive than a typical comet, making it arguably the largest comet discovered in modern times. It has an extremely elongated orbit, journeying inward from the distant Oort Cloud over millions of years. It is the most distant comet to be discovered on its incoming path. Credit: Dark Energy Survey/DOE/FNAL/DECam/CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/P. Bernardinelli & G. Bernstein (UPenn)/DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys, Acknowledgments: T.A. Rector (University of Alaska Anchorage/NSF’s NOIRLab), M. Zamani (NSF’s NOIRLab) & J. Miller (NSF’s NOIRLab)
Comet Bernardinelli-Bernstein is currently much closer to the Sun. It was first seen by DES in 2014 at a distance of 29 au (4 billion kilometers or 2.5 billion miles, roughly the distance of Neptune), and as of June 2021, it was 20 au (3 billion kilometers or 1.8 billion miles, the distance of Uranus) from the Sun and currently shines at magnitude 20. The comet’s orbit is perpendicular to the plane of the Solar System and it will reach its closest point to the Sun (known as perihelion) in 2031, when it will be around 11 au away (a bit more than Saturn’s distance from the Sun) — but it will get no closer. Despite the comet’s size, it is currently predicted that skywatchers will require a large amateur telescope to see it, even at its brightest.
“We have the privilege of having discovered perhaps the largest comet ever seen — or at least larger than any well-studied one — and caught it early enough for people to watch it evolve as it approaches and warms up,” said Gary Bernstein. “It has not visited the Solar System in more than 3 million years.”
Comet Bernardinelli-Bernstein will be followed intensively by the astronomical community, including with NOIRLab facilities, to understand the composition and origin of this massive relic from the birth of our own planet. Astronomers suspect that there may be many more undiscovered comets of this size waiting in the Oort Cloud far beyond Pluto and the Kuiper Belt. These giant comets are thought to have been scattered to the far reaches of the Solar System by the migration of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune early in their history.
“This is a much needed anchor on the unknown population of large objects in the Oort Cloud and their connection with early migration of the ice/gas giants soon after the Solar System was formed,” said NOIRLab astronomer Tod Lauer.
“These observations demonstrate the value of long-duration survey observations on national facilities like the Blanco telescope,” says Chris Davis, National Science Foundation Program Director for NOIRLab. “Finding huge objects like Comet Bernardinelli-Bernstein is crucial to our understanding of the early history of our Solar System.”
It is not yet known how active and bright it will become when it reaches perihelion. However, Bernardinelli says that Vera C. Rubin Observatory, a future Program of NOIRLab, “will continuously measure Comet Bernardinelli-Bernstein all the way to its perihelion in 2031, and probably find many, many others like it,” allowing astronomers to characterize objects from the Oort Cloud in much greater detail.
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This research was reported to the Minor Planet Center.
NSF’s NOIRLab (National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory), the US center for ground-based optical-infrared astronomy, operates the international Gemini Observatory (a facility of NSF, NRC–Canada, ANID–Chile, MCTIC–Brazil, MINCyT–Argentina, and KASI–Republic of Korea), Kitt Peak National Observatory (KPNO), Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO), the Community Science and Data Center (CSDC), and Vera C. Rubin Observatory (operated in cooperation with the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory). It is managed by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA) under a cooperative agreement with NSF and is headquartered in Tucson, Arizona. The astronomical community is honored to have the opportunity to conduct astronomical research on Iolkam Du’ag (Kitt Peak) in Arizona, on Maunakea in Hawai‘i, and on Cerro Tololo and Cerro Pachón in Chile. We recognize and acknowledge the very significant cultural role and reverence that these sites have to the Tohono O’odham Nation, to the Native Hawaiian community, and to the local communities in Chile, respectively.
The Dark Energy Survey (DES) is a collaboration of more than 400 scientists from 25 institutions in seven countries. Funding for the DES Projects has been provided by the US Department of Energy Office of Science, US National Science Foundation, Ministry of Science and Education of Spain, Science and Technology Facilities Council of the United Kingdom, Higher Education Funding Council for England, ETH Zurich for Switzerland, National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Kavli Institute of Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago, Center for Cosmology and AstroParticle Physics at Ohio State University, Mitchell Institute for Fundamental Physics and Astronomy at Texas A&M University, Financiadora de Estudos e Projetos, Fundação Carlos Chagas Filho de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico and Ministério da Ciência e Tecnologia, Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, and the collaborating institutions in the Dark Energy Survey.
NCSA at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign provides supercomputing and advanced digital resources for the nation’s science enterprise. At NCSA, University of Illinois faculty, staff, students and collaborators from around the globe use advanced digital resources to address research grand challenges for the benefit of science and society. NCSA has been advancing one third of the Fortune 50® for more than 30 years by bringing industry, researchers and students together to solve grand challenges at rapid speed and scale. For more information.
Fermilab is America’s premier national laboratory for particle physics and accelerator research. A US Department of Energy Office of Science laboratory, Fermilab is located near Chicago, Illinois, and operated under contract by the Fermi Research Alliance LLC.
The DOE Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time.
Bernardinelli and Bernstein’s search was partially supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation.
Lambda, the latest coronavirus variant to draw the attention of the World Health Organization, is worrying officials in Latin America and puzzling scientists because of its “unusual” set of mutations.
Formerly known as C. 37, the Lambda variant was first detected late last year in Peru, and has since spread to 27 countries, including the UK. Public Health England this week said it had been identified “across” the country, although the number of cases it had identified remained small.
Pablo Tsukayama, a doctor in molecular microbiology at the Cayetano Heredia university in Peru’s capital Lima, said that when medics first noted the variant in December, it accounted for “just one in every 200 samples”.
“By March, however, it accounted for about 50 per cent of samples in Lima and now it’s about 80 per cent. That would suggest its rate of transmission is higher than other variants,” he said.
According to the WHO, Lambda accounted for 82 per cent of new Covid-19 cases in May and June in Peru, which has the world’s highest coronavirus mortality rate. In neighbouring Chile, it accounts for almost a third of new cases.
Scientists, however, remain uncertain whether the mutations in Lambda make it more transmissible.
“At the moment there’s no evidence to suggest it’s more aggressive than other variants,” said Jairo Méndez Rico, an adviser on emerging viral diseases at the Pan-American Health Organization. “It’s possible that it has a higher rate of contagion but more work needs to be done on it.”
The WHO in June named Lambda as the seventh “variant of interest” so far. The global health body believes such strains are less of a threat than its four “variants of concern” — Alpha, Beta, Gamma and Delta originally detected in the UK, South Africa, Brazil and India respectively — but says they still need to be monitored closely.
A week later, on June 23, PHE in the UK designated Lambda as a variant under investigation “due to international expansion and several notable mutations”. PHE stressed there was currently no evidence Lambda caused more severe disease or rendered vaccines less effective.
“One reason why it is hard to make sense of the threat from Lambda, using computational and lab data, is that it has rather an unusual set of mutations, compared with other variants,” explained Jeff Barrett, director of the Covid-19 Genomics Initiative at the Wellcome Sanger Institute in the UK.
Barrett added that a lack of genetic sequencing facilities in Latin America had made it difficult to know the extent to which Lambda was driving the region’s Covid-19 outbreaks.
In Brazil, where the Gamma variant has driven infections so far, a team of researchers at a hospital in the southern city of Porto Alegre analysed one patient infected with Lambda. “Considering that this variant has rapidly spread in Peru, Ecuador, Chile and Argentina, we believe that Lambda has a considerable potential to become a variant of concern,” they concluded in a preprint paper, that has not been peer-reviewed.
Latin America has been the region of the world hit hardest by the pandemic. Home to just 8 per cent of the global population, it accounts for 20 per cent of coronavirus cases. In recent weeks, Colombia, Paraguay and Uruguay have seen surges in caseloads.
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“While we’re seeing some reprieve from the virus in countries in the northern hemisphere, for most countries in our region the end remains a distant future,” PAHO director Carissa Etienne said this week.
Cases are still rising in countries including Colombia, Brazil, Bolivia and Uruguay, Etienne said, adding that hospitals were struggling to expand intensive care units.
“Despite this worrisome picture just one in 10 people in Latin America and the Caribbean have been fully vaccinated against Covid-19 — an unacceptable situation,” she said.
The fossilized remains of Llukalkan aliocranianus include a superbly preserved and uncrushed braincase and were unearthed in the Bajo de la Carpa Formation in Argentina. Llukalkan means “the one who causes fear” in the language of the indigenous Mapuche, and aliocranianus is Latin for “unusual skull.”
Part of a family of dinosaurs called abelisaurids, the creature would have broadly resembled a Tyrannosaurus rex in appearance, with tiny stubby arms.But an unusually short, deep skull, which often bore crests, bumps and horns, set it apart.At least 5 meters long — around the size of an elephant — Llukalkan aliocranianus would have roamed Patagonia and other areas of the prehistoric southern subcontinent of Gondwana, which included Africa, India, Antarctica, Australia and South America.
Its most distinctive feature was a small air-filled sinus in the middle ear zone that has not been seen in any other abelisaurid found so far, according to the research published Tuesday in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology,
It means that Llukalkan likely heard differently, and probably better, than other abelisaurids — more similar to the hearing of a modern-day crocodile.
“A peculiarity of this dinosaur is that it has cavities in the ear area that other abelisaurids did not have, which could have given this species different auditory capacities, possibly a greater hearing range. This, together with its keen sense of smell, would have given great capabilities as a predator to this species,” lead author Federico Gianechini, a paleontologist at the National University of San Luis, Argentina, told CNN in an email.
The fossilized remains were discovered in 2015 by accident during a dig in a place known as La Invernada, near the city of Rincón de los Sauces, in Neuquén Province, Gianechini said. The main purpose of the dig was to unearth a sauropod dinosaur (large, lumbering plant-eaters) that they had found a year earlier, but they noticed bones poking out on the surface of the ground a few days before finishing their excavation.
The dinosaur’s unique hearing mechanism suggests that abelisaurids were flourishing right before the dinosaurs’ extinction 67 million years ago.
“These dinosaurs were still trying out new evolutionary pathways and rapidly diversifying right before they died out completely,” said Ariel Mendez, a study co-author and paleontologist from the Patagonian Institute of Geology and Palaeontology, Argentina, in a news statement.
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After watching New Orleans Pelicans forward Zion Williamson bowl over and barrel through his team on his way to 38 points — and 18 free throws — Saturday night, Dallas Mavericks coach Rick Carlisle was at a loss for how to guard him.
“He’s an unusual force and obviously a great player,” Carlisle said after the visiting Mavs fell 112-103. “We’ll have to figure something a little better out next time, but he’s doing this to everybody. We did have some very good possessions guarding him, but he was a beast.
“It presents huge challenges for the defense and for officials. He is just creating collisions out there. This is a Shaquille O’Neal-type force of nature with a point guard skill set.”
Williamson, fresh off a career-high 39 points in Friday night’s home loss to the Denver Nuggets, followed with 38 points on 13-of-20 shooting to go along with six assists and five rebounds. Down the stretch, the Pelicans leaned into Williamson even more.
He scored or assisted on the Pelicans’ final 14 points on Saturday, all in the final 2:47, and helped the Pelicans take a 98-95 lead at that point and put the game away.
“I want to make the best play that’s going to help us win,” Williamson said. “Sometimes, that’s knowing when to shoot it and when not to shoot it. When to make the pass and when not to make the pass. I just want to win. It’s as simple as that.”
New Orleans could not put the game away on Friday, eventually falling to the Nuggets. Williamson said that contest, and the loss that came with it, played a “tiny part” in his aggressiveness in Saturday’s fourth quarter but that, ultimately, it was a new game.
As Williamson handles the ball more and more, his teammates are starting to see him develop into someone who can take over games in the final minutes.
“The ability to go in there and know the angles of the basket and know the angles of everything around the rim, it’s really beautiful,” Pelicans forward Brandon Ingram said. “To be as efficient as he is and go to the rim and sometimes get fouled and play through it, it’s beautiful to see.”
Pelicans guard Nickeil Alexander-Walker said he isn’t surprised that Williamson is making the right reads, because he has seen it happen time and time again this season.
“He’s a great player and very unselfish,” Alexander-Walker said. “He made the winning plays tonight.”
When he wasn’t dishing it off, Williamson was getting to the line frequently. He had season highs with 12 free throws made and 18 free throw attempts.
Carlisle said defending Williamson has become “a real challenge.”
“You’ve got to have a lot of courage to stand in there and get run over by that guy, because he’s coming at you fast,” Carlisle said. “He’s coming at you, like, it’s not just an Amtrak. It’s an Acela. It’s the fast one that doesn’t stop. It doesn’t stop in Westport or wherever. It just goes — phew! — straight to New York City. It’s something else.”
Saturday’s outing was Williamson’s second consecutive game with at least 35 points, five rebounds and five assists, joining Anthony Davis as the only players in franchise history to pull that off in back-to-back games.
Williamson became the eighth player in the shot clock era (since 1954-55) to have at least 75 points, 10 rebounds and 10 assists while shooting over 70% from the field in a two-game span, according to the Elias Sports Bureau.
According to ESPN Stats & Information research, it was Williamson’s 11th career game with at least 30 points while shooting 60% or better from the field, breaking a tie with LeBron James for the most in NBA history prior to a player’s 21st birthday.
Williamson also became the first player since O’Neal in 1995-96 to have four straight games with 25 points while shooting 65% or better.
But while all the accolades and comparisons are nice, Williamson made it clear whom he wants to be like.
“It’s an honor to hear my name in those categories,” Williamson said, “but I am who I am.”
SEOUL—North Korea’s military displayed unusual activities close to the South Korean border, Seoul defense officials said, while leader Kim Jong Un and Chinese leader Xi Jinping exchanged messages vowing unity amid rising U.S.-China tensions.
Seoul officials declined on Tuesday to elaborate on the nature of the activities. South Korean media had earlier reported that Pyongyang deployed 240-millimeter rocket launchers to Changrin, an island about 20 miles from South Korea.
“U.S. and South Korean intelligence officials are in close touch and monitoring North Korea’s armed forces,” a spokesman for Seoul’s military told reporters. “We aren’t ruling out any possibility.”
The latest versions of that weapon could hit South Korean military bases and warships in the Yellow Sea and were showcased at a parade in Pyongyang last year, but an expert on North Korea cautioned against reading the move as a provocation. “They’re upgrading their weapons, just like we upgrade our tanks or jets,” said Kim Dong-yub, a professor at the University of North Korean Studies in Seoul.
The development was announced hours after China and North Korea said their leaders had exchanged messages stressing stronger strategic cooperation, in the face of unnamed “hostile forces.”
Planetary nebula Abell 78 captured by the Hubble Space Telescopes’s Wide Field Camera 3 and PANSTARSS. Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, M. Guerrero, Acknowledgement: Judy Schmidt
Located around 5000 light-years away in the constellation of Cygnus (The Swan), Abell 78 is an unusual type of planetary nebula.
After exhausting the nuclear fuel in their cores, stars with a mass of around 0.8 to 8 times the mass of our Sun collapse to form dense and hot white dwarf stars. As this process occurs, the dying star will throw off its outer layers of material, forming an elaborate cloud of gas and dust known as a planetary nebula. This phenomenon is not uncommon, and planetary nebulae are a popular focus for astrophotographers because of their often beautiful and complex shapes. However, a few like Abell 78 are the result of a so-called “born again” star.
Although the core of the star has stopped burning hydrogen and helium, a thermonuclear runaway at its surface ejects material at high speeds. This ejecta shocks and sweeps up the material of the old nebula, producing the filaments and irregular shell around the central star seen in this Picture of the Week, which features data from Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 and PANSTARSS.
Meghan Markle and Prince Harry’s tell-all interview with Oprah Winfrey was certainly unprecedented — but so was Prince William’s recent response.
In the interview, Markle, 39, and Harry, 36, made allegations of racism against the royal family and the Institution at large, notably claiming there were “conversations and concerns” regarding the skin color of their then-unborn child.
Harry later clarified that Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip were not the ones to make such comments, leaving many to wonder whether it was heirs-to-the-throne Prince Charles or William to have raised such “concerns.”
Shortly after the interview aired, Buckingham Palace issued a statement, calling such allegations “concerning,” but then William, 38, followed up with a personal response.
On Thursday, the royal was confronted by reporters during a visit to an East London school where he assured that the royal family is “very much not a racist family” and noted that he has yet to speak with Harry, but planned to do so.
PRINCE WILLIAM RESPONDS TO MEGHAN MARKLE, PRINCE HARRY’S ALLEGATIONS OF RACISM FROM OPRAH WINFREY INTERVIEW
Royal expert Katie Nicholl took special note of the Prince’s response, saying that it was out of the ordinary for William to have answered the question in such a casual manner because U.K. reporters don’t often shout out questions to the royals during such engagements.
Prince William, right, responded to allegations of racism made against the royal family by his brother Prince Harry. (Getty Images)
“It was very unusual for Prince William to answer. I mean, Prince Charles was on an engagement earlier this week, and a member of the press called out …[and] Prince Charles didn’t comment — [but] William did,” she told “Entertainment Tonight.” “He answered not once, but twice. I think that’s very telling of his mood at the moment.”
Furthermore, she added that William is known for being “a consummate professional when it comes to being on engagements.”
“He’s done this for a very long time and I think he was probably very prepared for a question to be asked,” Nicholl said. “His answer was pretty to the point, it was pretty swift, it was very much off-the-cuff.”
MEGHAN MARKLE, PRINCE HARRY’S OPRAH INTERVIEW HAS LEFT PRINCE WILLIAM, KATE MIDDLETON IN ‘TOTAL SHOCK’: SOURCE
Royals like William often do not give unrehearsed comments and responses.
“The fact that he answered two questions was really very, very unusual. I think highly significant,” the expert explained, noting that sources close to the Prince have told her that he is “beyond livid over [Meghan and Harry’s] interview.”
Nicholl added: “I think he wanted the chance to say something.”
William felt “that he has to defend his family,” said the expert.
William’s off-the-cuff responses to the press are very ‘unusual’ according to royal expert Katie Nicholl. (WireImage)
During the interview, Harry noted there was “space” between himself and William and hinted at rifts with the family overall. He added that he hopes to mend his broken relationships over time.
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“I think everyone hopes that the brothers will be able to heal this rift, clearly it does run deep. I think it speaks volumes that William hasn’t yet picked up the phone to call his brother. I think that he’s clearly needed some cooling off time,” said Nicholl. “… I think the feeling though is that time is a healer. That’s something that Harry himself said.”
It’s likely that the brothers will come together July 1 for the unveiling of a statue of their late mother, Princess Diana, at the Sunken Garden at Kensington Palace.
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“[Diana] said she always wanted her boys to be close, and I think people saw an unbreakable bond between those boys,” The expert said. “Things have come to blows, the relationship is clearly under a lot of strain, but hopefully behind closed doors that can begin to heal.”
Psilocybe cubensis mushrooms, a species of psychedelic mushrooms used by some “microdosers”
Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post via Getty Images
By Cathleen O’Grady
People who take tiny amounts of LSD, “magic mushrooms,” and related drugs report a range of benefits, from more creativity to improved psychological well-being. But do these microdoses—typically less than 10% of the amount that causes a true psychedelic experience—actually benefit the mind?
That’s been a hard question to answer. Placebo-controlled trials are tricky to pull off, because psychedelics are so tightly regulated. Now, researchers have come up with a creative workaround: They’ve enlisted microdosing enthusiasts to hide their drugs in gel capsules and mix them up with empty capsules.
The upshot of this “self-blinding” study: Microdosing did lead to improvements in psychological well-being—but so did the placebo capsules. “The benefits are real,” says lead author Balázs Szigeti, a neuroscientist at Imperial College London. “But they are not caused by the pharmacological effects of microdosing.”
The findings, however, are “the least interesting thing about this study,” says Noah Haber, a study design specialist at Stanford University. The “very, very clever” method of self-blinding pushes the boundaries of what can be investigated using randomized placebo controls, he says.
Getting the new study off the ground wasn’t easy. Obtaining ethical approval to enroll psychedelic-taking volunteers was a “long and difficult process,” Szigeti says. And then he had to go out and find those volunteers, which he did by reaching out to microdosing communities, giving talks at psychedelic societies, and holding an “ask me anything” discussion on Reddit. Szigeti eventually garnered more than 1600 sign-ups, but once potential participants realized they’d have to procure their own psychedelics, interest ebbed, and only 246 ended up in the experiment.
There were also hiccups in the self-blinding procedure. The unusual approach required participants to lay out sets of weekly doses of both psychedelics and placebo capsules, group them into blank envelopes tagged with QR codes printed from the study website, then shuffle the envelopes to disguise the contents; the volunteers scanned the codes to get instructions on which envelopes to choose each week.
To ensure that the pills felt the same, study participants who used psilocybin mushrooms weighted their placebo capsules with substances like sugar, for example. Still, Szigeti says “mushroomy” burps made it easy for the participants to guess when they’d taken actual mushrooms. After having to discard some data, he and his colleagues asked the volunteers to make placebo capsules with a nonpsychedelic mushroom instead.
Even after all of this, study participants—especially those taking higher doses—were still sometimes able to guess whether they had taken a placebo. The scientists could track this because the volunteers reported their guess after every dose. (Some reported sensations like digestive issues, muscle tingling, and seeing colors differently as reasons for their guesses.)
Although that meant the self-blinding was not bulletproof, the reporting had the advantage of giving the researchers another check on whether the supposed benefits of microdosing tracked with people’s expectations.
Overall, Szigeti and his colleagues found that people who thought they had taken psychedelics felt greater well-being and lower anxiety than those who thought they had taken placebo, regardless of what they actually took, they conclude this week in eLife.
The results echo the findings of the handful of very small placebo-controlled studies, says Johns Hopkins University psychedelics researcher Albert Garcia-Romeu, who was not involved with the work. But the new study was much larger and had more long-term observations, he says. Still, he thinks the results are likely to be contentious, because microdosing enthusiasts may not be convinced by findings that go against their own experiences.
Haber also says the new study comes with caveats. Participants were free to set their own microdose regime, he notes, meaning the doses and substances varied. Volunteers also may not have perfectly followed the rules, he says, and results from a self-selected group of microdosing advocates may not generalize to other groups of people.
Szigeti and his colleagues are planning another, improved self-blinding trial on psychedelic microdosing that will give people even more flexibility on their dose schedule, but ask them about their experiences more frequently throughout the day. They also hope to take the method further, by studying other trends like cannabidiol oil use and teaming up with nutrition researchers to study the true value of supplements.
This first study is like a half-time score of two-to-zero at a soccer game, Szigeti says: It’s not impossible that psychedelic microdosing might come back against the odds and show an effect, but “from what we have, it just does not look good.”
“It seems to have a shard-like shape and is sticking out of the ground.”
Rock On
A Chinese rover has discovered an unusually-shaped rock, suspected to be a piece of a meteor, wedged into the surface of the Moon.
According to Space.com, China’s Yutu-2 rover made its discovery on the far side of the Moon. The elongated shard was described as a “milestone” by the China National Space Administration’s (CNSA) science outreach channel Our Space — and it stands out as the latest example of the fact that the long-observed lunar surface can still hold surprises for intrepid explorers.
Image via China National Space Administration
Shard Shaped
What has lunar scientists most excited by the object is its shape, which stands out from most other rocks on the Moon.
“It seems to have a shard-like shape and is sticking out of the ground,” Dan Moriarty, a NASA postdoctoral program fellow at the Goddard Space Flight Center, told Space.com. “That’s definitely unusual.”
According to Moriarty, typical lunar rocks are rounded due to “forms of weathering on the lunar surface.”
Deep Impact
Next, CNSA researchers plan to inspect the rock further using the rover’s visible and near-infrared imaging spectrometer to analyze its material composition.
Further analysis is needed to determine a more precise origin. For now, though, Moriarty hypothesized to Space.com that the rock is a fragment of a meteor impact — a reminder that the desolate surface of the Moon is a living geological environment that continues to be shaped by brutal asteroid impacts.
READ MORE: China’s Yutu-2 rover finds “milestone” on far side of the moon [Space.com]
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