James' World 2

Click the link below the picture

.

If you’ve never heard of arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi before, I wouldn’t blame you—unless you happen to be a ficus. With symbiotic trade relationships spanning roughly 70 percent of plant species on Earth, these charismatic topsoil denizens should be on the radar of any self-respecting photosynthesizer. Yet although AM fungi haul roughly four billion metric tons of carbon from plants into the soil each year, there’s still a lot we humans don’t know about this type of fungus, starting with how much of it there actually is.

Until now: in a new paper published in Science, researchers combined data from more than 300 studies to estimate the total global biomass of AM fungi. The task is deceptively difficult. Biomass depends in part on the thickness of fungal filaments, meaning that even small errors in estimating their average diameter can dramatically affect the final calculation. To illustrate the challenge, co-author Justin D. Stewart, a data scientist at the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks (SPUN), offers an analogy: Imagine lying beneath a tree and trying to determine the average width of all its branches. Some are long and incredibly thin, while others are short and thick. 

To tackle the problem, the team used a custom-built robot named Prince, which captured more than 300,000 measurements of growing fungal networks. (For those interested, other robotic residents of the lab include Donna Summer and Aretha Franklin.) Combined with mathematical modeling and published data from around the world, those measurements let the researchers estimate global fungal biomass and, with data visualizer Moritz Stefaner, create an interactive mycorrhizal infrastructure map covering Earth’s landmasses down to each square kilometer.

“We’re surrounded by numbers and data,” says Stefaner, who was immediately drawn to the aesthetic qualities of the dataset. “Everybody wants to make sense of it. Everybody wants to see the big picture.”

So, how much of this type of fungus is there?

The answer is simultaneously more and less than you might expect. By biomass, the world’s AM fungi weigh roughly five times as much as all humans combined. That’s substantial but not nearly as much as many researchers anticipated.

“I was kind of surprised that the numbers weren’t higher,” says Kyra Skye Gibson, a postdoctoral researcher at Northern Arizona University, who was not involved in the study.

Stewart says the research team felt much the same way. “When we first calculated how heavy these fungi were,” he says, “I think we spent two or three weeks recalculating it to make sure we weren’t missing zeros.”

Perhaps mass is the wrong way to think about it. In terms of length, the numbers become genuinely absurd. Earth’s topsoil contains an estimated 110 quadrillion kilometers of AM fungi laid end to end— enough to stretch from Earth to our neighboring star Proxima Centauri and back or to reach the 11.9 light-years to Tau Ceti, the setting of Andy Weir’s sci‑fi hit Project Hail Mary.

Yet despite such staggering numbers, Stewart is just as eager to discuss what the researchers haven’t found. “We’re treating these maps as living documents, not static images,” he says, emphasizing the importance of the nearly 200 researchers working with SPUN to fill in the remaining gaps. To help identify those gaps, the team created supplemental “maps of ignorance” that highlight where the estimates are most uncertain.

“I’m very comfortable with uncertainty, as long as we quantify what type of uncertainty it is and how large it is,” Stewart says. “These maps of ignorance are also treasure maps of where we need to go sample data in the future.”

.

.

.

Click the link below for the complete article:

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

.

A firefighter monitors flames caused by the Hughes fire in Castaic, California, on 22 January 2025. Photograph: Jae C Hong/AP

.

.

Click the link below for the complete article:

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

Claiming there was progress in the peace negotiations, President Trump said he had canceled his next wave of planned attacks after two days of U.S. airstrikes.

Here’s the latest.

After two days of pounding Iran with airstrikes, President Trump on Thursday promised to hit Iran hard again for a third day and mused about invading a strategic island — then abruptly called off the attacks.

Mr. Trump said in a social media post that he changed his mind because progress had been made in peace negotiations with Iran. While he claimed that the discussions had “been brought to the highest level of Iranian leadership and approved,” Iran’s leadership did not immediately confirm any progress. Earlier this week, Mr. Trump had claimed a peace deal was imminent, but hours later, the two countries attacked each other.

Shortly before he called off strikes on Iran on Thursday, President Trump spoke to the Pakistanis, who have been mediating with the Iranians. The Pakistanis told Trump that “we have a deal” with Iran, according to a senior administration official. We have yet to independently confirm this with the Iranians, and it’s unclear what, if anything, has been agreed. International oil prices fell more than 3 percent, below $90 a barrel, after President Trump said he had canceled planned strikes against Iran.

In a social media post, President Trump said that he had “cancelled the scheduled strikes and bombings against Iran” that he had threatened for later this evening. The president said he had canceled the attacks because of progress on a peace deal. He said that discussions “have been brought to the highest level of Iranian leadership” and approved. The president said the naval blockade would remain and suggested, without further explanation, there would be a “signing” announced soon.

Trump has repeatedly claimed over the last several months that a peace deal was imminent, often threatening escalating strikes against Iran soon after. Iranian officials, in turn, have often denied Trump’s claims that they have agreed to terms of a potential peace deal.

The commander of Iran’s military headquarters warned on Thursday that any new U.S. attack would draw a “response harsher than before” that would make the war “broader and more widespread,” the country’s state broadcaster reported.

The commander also appeared to issue a veiled threat against other countries’ energy exports, saying that in light of recent U.S. threats against Iran’s oil infrastructure, “either everyone” will be able to export oil and gas, “or no one will.”

The State Department said on Thursday that it was speaking with the Indian government after officials in Delhi summoned the top U.S. diplomat in India at the moment to denounce what appears to be U.S. involvement in a strike on a commercial oil tanker near Oman that left three Indian sailors dead. “The Department of State is in direct contact with the government of India regarding this matter,” the agency said. India summoned the diplomat, Jason P. Meeks, the deputy chief of mission at at the U.S. Embassy in Delhi, on Wednesday. The U.S. ambassador, Sergio Gor, is out of the country. “We condemn the attack on the commercial vessel Settebello off the coast of Oman,” the Indian ministry of external affairs had said on Wednesday.

Data from Kpler, a global-ship tracking firm, shows one vessel has crossed the Strait of Hormuz so far on Thursday, and another one crossed on Wednesday, as military clashes between the United States and Iran have heightened tensions in the vital waterway. Those crossing numbers are down from earlier in the week; six ships crossed on Tuesday, and eight on Monday, Kpler found.

The data might not reflect the full number of crossings, because ships can turn off or misdirect their location signals to avoid being tracked. In a report published Thursday, Kpler found that non-Iranian crude oil shipments have picked up since Tehran initially closed the strait — but the vast majority of that traffic has been through dark transits or other workarounds.

Iran’s speaker of Parliament, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, warned on Thursday that further escalation by the United States could threaten energy infrastructure and global markets.

“Wrong strategies and impulsive decisions will reset the entire board for the worse,” Ghalibaf wrote on social media, adding that the United States would see “a different Iran.”

.

Tehran on Monday.Credit…Arash Khamooshi/Polaris for The New York Times

.

.

Click the link below for the complete article:

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

The U.S. is finally getting a new, better sunscreen ingredient. Today, the Food and Drug Administration added bemotrizinol, an effective chemical filter that’s been used in sunscreens made in Asia and Europe for decades, to its list of permitted active ingredients in over-the-counter sunscreens. This list hasn’t seen a new entry in more than 20 years.

Bemotrizinol, also called BEMT, brings the list of approved active sunscreen ingredients in the U.S. to 17—a number that still lags behind Europe, which has more than 30 approved filters. While the FDA’s official action comes just seven months after the agency initially proposed it, critics have pointed out that the lengthy regulatory process prolonged bemotrizinol’s approval; the application was filed in 2005. The Environmental Working Group, an environmental health advocacy organization, has claimed this delay has caused U.S. sunscreens to fall behind in better coverage against harmful ultraviolet (UV) rays. Experts say today’s decision is a move in the right direction, offering people stronger protection from the sun.

Expanding sunscreen ingredient options in the U.S. is “a pretty big deal,” says AJ Addae, a chemist and doctoral candidate a University of California, Los Angeles, who studies cosmetics and sunscreen formulations. “It’s definitely something that we haven’t had in a very long time.”

How Bemotrizinol Works

There are two main classes of sunscreen filters: inorganic, or “physical,” and organic, or “chemical.” Sunscreens with physical filters—such as titanium and zinc—are mineral-based and are known to leave a white cast on skin. Chemical filters, such as avobenzone, octocrylene, and homosalate, appear clear when rubbed on the skin but sometimes feel oily. There are more organic filters than inorganic ones, but there aren’t as many approved ones in the U.S. as in other parts of the world, Addae says.

Contrary to popular belief, both types primarily work by absorbing UV light and converting that radiation energy into heat that is released from the skin, explains Saranya Wyles, a dermatologist at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. All sunscreens have the ability to reflect some light, though inorganic filters can reflect a little more, Addae adds.

UV radiation comes in two types: UVA and UVB. UVB is high-energy radiation that is typically associated with sunburns and can cause genetic mutations that lead to skin cancer, but UVA rays have increasingly become recognized as relevant for skin health, too. UVA is a longer-wavelength radiation that can penetrate deeper into the skin than UVB, breaking down the skin’s structure and creating harmful, skin‑aging molecules.

In the U.S., “the only thing that is really tested is a sunscreen’s ability to absorb UV light—specifically UVB light,” Addae says. This is how sun protection factor (SPF) is determined, but the measurement doesn’t capture UVA light. U.S. sunscreens offer only 24 percent of the protection indicated on SPF labels against UVA radiation, according to an analysis by the Environmental Working Group.

“When we think about a sunscreen, we want something to be broad spectrum,” Wyles says—meaning it covers both UVA and UVB. “What’s so exciting about this new BEMT filter is that it has more coverage in that UVA spectrum” compared with other organic filters. BEMT covers those “deeper UVA” rays that are often linked to photoaging of the skin, she says.

Safety and Stability Properties

Between various countries’ regulatory approval and real-world use, bemotrizinol has some of the most robust safety and efficacy testing among sunscreen filters. Following the ingredient’s development in the late 1990s by the now defunct Switzerland-based company Ciba Specialty Chemicals, the European Union adopted it into sunscreens in 2000. Canada and several countries in Asia followed suit soon after.

“A ton of safety data have had to be accrued in a lot of different populations,” Wyles says. Companies developing sunscreen filters need lots of funding to get the data needed for approval in the U.S., she adds.

Not only is bemotrizinol now the first filter to obtain the FDA’s stamp of approval since 1999, it’s also the first and only organic filter to receive the FDA’s safety and effectiveness standard, known as generally recognized as safe and effective (GRASE), for over-the-counter drugs or ingredients that don’t require full regulatory approval. The GRASE designation “is huge,” Addae says.

“I think that will kind of debunk the consumer’s perception that inorganic filters are generally recognized as safe and effective and organic filters tend to not be,” she says. “This shows that there can be organic filters that are that are determined GRASE.”

It’s impossible to draw “a clear line in the sand” on whether certain sunscreen ingredients are completely healthy for people or not, Addae says. But she adds that evidence has emerged that has given researchers some insight into how sunscreen filters generally interact with our bodies. Chemically, BEMT has larger chromophores—light-absorbing molecules—than other organic filters, which makes them less of a concern for adverse biological interactions, Addae says. In pharmacology and dermatology, researchers use the “500 dalton rule,” in which molecules with a molecular weight of more than 500 daltons are usually too large and bulky to pass through the skin.

“BEMT exceeds this limit quite well,” Addae says. “I think that’s likely a large reason why the GRASE status was on the table for this particular filter.”

Scientists are investigating whether BEMT degrades in pool water. It’s unclear if subsequent chemical by-products after a breakdown of BEMT might cause irritation or damage to the skin. In sunlight, though, most evidence suggests that BEMT is quite stable and longer-lasting than other filters. “BEMT is one that does stay on longer, but this doesn’t mean you can apply this and then you don’t have to reapply for a long time,” Wyles says. “That degradation curve varies for everybody.”

The FDA evaluated the safety and efficacy of BEMT concentrations of up to 6 percent and considered how BEMT interacts with other sunscreen filters and ingredients. Because companies will only be able to use up to 6 percent concentrations of BEMT in formulations, Wyles doesn’t anticipate it will fully replace existing U.S. filters.

“A lot of times, you’re not going to see BEMT standing alone; it’s going to be combined with other sunscreen filters,” Wyles says.

The Future of UV Filters

Researchers are keeping tabs on how BEMT’s approval will affect the approval of other UV filters in the U.S. Wyles says others in the BEMT family might see similar approvals. Another organic filter, Mexoryl 400, has also demonstrated coverage of the UVA spectrum and is increasingly found in sunscreens produced in Asia and Europe. “I can see that coming to the U.S. at some point,” Wyles says.

Addae, who also created a research-and-development lab to make products for cosmetic chains, recently worked with her colleagues at U.C.L.A. to create a mineral-based filter with less of a white cast. She changed the chemical properties of zinc oxide to reduce aggregation that causes a white cast. The filter scattered light differently but still absorbed UV rays effectively. It was more effective with UVB than UVA rays, however. Further efficacy testing is needed, but the filter wouldn’t require new regulatory approval, she says.

BEMT sunscreens are anticipated to hit U.S. shelves later this year. The Dutch company DSM Nutritional Products will be the first in the U.S. to sell its BEMT-formulated sunscreen, Parsol Shield, according to the Associated Press. The company has an 18-month exclusivity period, after which the other manufacturers can start using the ingredient. Addae adds that it will take some time for U.S. chemists and companies to incorporate the filter into new products and learn best practices.

“At the end of the day, what matters is that people wear their sunscreen, no matter what’s in it,” she says.

.

Pablo Jeffs Munizaga/Fototrekking/Getty Images

.

.

Click the link below for the complete article:

.

__________________________________________

Hmmmm … No Lamborghini for me! Can’t afford repairs!

Click the link below the picture

.

Owning a $4 million Lamborghini collection sounds like a dream – until reality kicks in. Behind the perfect looks, these cars are filled with problems, from oil leaks and misfires to failing clutches and electrical chaos. Years of putting off repairs have finally caught up, and now the cost to fix everything is overwhelming. What seems like luxury quickly turns into a constant battle just to keep them running. It’s a rare look at the truth behind owning some of the most desirable cars in the world.

.

.

.

Click the link below for the complete article:

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

After nearly four years, the World Cup is back to take over the summer. But alongside celebration for the sumptuous soccer to come, there’s ample cause for consternation. This year’s tournament, jointly hosted by the United States, Mexico, and Canada, will play out against a backdrop of endemic FIFA corruption, President Trump’s depredations, and severely strained relations between the host nations.

To gauge the mood on the eve of the competition, we asked three writers — an American, a Mexican, a Canadian — what the World Cup means to them and their countries. Their varied responses testify to both the maddening complexity of contemporary life and the enduring wonder of world soccer.

It’s Not U.S. 1994, but It’s Something

It’s not easy to explain, to kids growing up today surrounded by screens and viral videos, the epiphanic force with which the men’s World Cup landed on American TV in 1994. It certainly did on the old Magnavox TV in my parents’ house in northern New England’s woods. Like many American kids in the waning years of the Cold War, I spent my Saturday mornings kicking a ball around American fields. I had joined a travel team whose sponsor’s logo (“CABOT: Cheese from Vermont”) vied for space with Adidas on our chests. But I’d never seen the game played at the highest level — until 1994.

To live in range of ABC’s coverage of the games that summer was to glimpse the world’s finest players and best-loved teams. It was also to be treated to vivid and at times incongruous tableaux of ethnic fervor and comity, involving not merely those teams but their impassioned fans, too. They filled America’s biggest arenas — green-clad Nigerians and sombrero-wearing Mexicans, Swedes in Viking hats and Argentines singing songs about Diego Maradona. Feelings of national rivalry and pride occasioned not war but play.

To take in those games, as ABC’s commentators informed us, was to watch telecasts also being absorbed by billions of other humans — and to participate in the world.

In 2026, the world doesn’t look like we hoped it might from the sunny vantage of the early 1990s, when history still felt like it was moving in a positive direction. The United States, which seemed destined to be increasingly open-minded, is more closed off. But the return of the World Cup, a competition founded in the same era as the League of Nations and involving a sport that Americans have now learned to love, will still channel conflicts between countries into “peaceful contests in the stadium,” as Jules Rimet, the man who masterminded the competition, once put it. As important, it will offer us all a chance to experience, even if just for a moment, a mighty form of communion.

In 1994, the Cold War was over, and America — notwithstanding Washington’s frequently awful proxy wars in developing countries — was admired as the global paragon of democracy and the rule of law. But the sporting culture in the United States was insular and jingoistic. It was defined by sports that Americans evolved from the games of our colonial masters: Gridiron football was a more dynamic and violent form of English rugby; baseball was an American riff on cricket. Americans took pride in the fact that few others in the world cared about or played our “national pastime.”

Association Football — a game with ancient global roots but whose modern form was, like rugby and cricket, codified in England — became the globe’s game thanks to factors both of history and of form. The British Empire brought British sailors, engineers, and miners to the world’s ports. The game they played by wharves from Buenos Aires to Accra to Hong Kong was embraced by people who founded clubs in those cities and a thousand more. Soccer became the 20th century’s pre-eminent way for people around the world to hail, as the soccer historian David Goldblatt put it, “the miracle of our own solidarities.”

Except in the United States — until 1994, anyway. That summer’s World Cup was the best-attended and most-watched tournament that soccer’s worldwide governing body, FIFA, had ever staged. This was the goal. FIFA and its partners, among them some of the world’s biggest companies and media conglomerates, aimed to make the globe’s best-loved sport a big business in the world’s richest market.

In the 32 years since the 1994 World Cup, the dreams of FIFA and its corporate cronies have in large part come to pass. We follow the world’s top leagues on TV, and our women’s team are worldbeaters. Soccer, according to one recent poll, has surpassed baseball as Americans’ third-favorite sport. Among teens, it comes close to rivaling the N.B.A. for hearts and eyeballs.

Now the World Cup is back. Since 1994, the reputations of both the United States and FIFA have taken some profound dings. FIFA’s corruption was never exactly a secret, but has now been exposed to the world. President Trump’s contempt for the rule of law and international norms has done vast damage to America’s global standing and American society alike.

The reason FIFA’s flagship event has returned to the world’s richest country, this time sharing hosting duties with our North American neighbors and cosignatories to NAFTA that Mr. Trump loves to hate, is the same reason that Gianni Infantino, FIFA’s unctuous current head, expanded this World Cup from 32 nations to 48: cash.

.

World Cup

.

.

Click the link below for the complete article:

.

__________________________________________