There’s a lot of trash on the Moon right now – including nearly 100 bags of human waste – and with countries around the globe traveling to the Moon, there’s going to be a lot more, both on the lunar surface and in Earth’s orbit.
In August 2023, Russia’s Luna-25 probe crashed into the Moon’s surface, while India’s Chandrayann-3 mission successfully landed in the southern polar region, making India the fourth country to land on the Moon.
With more countries landing on the Moon, people back on Earth will have to think about what happens to all the landers, waste and miscellaneous debris left on the lunar surface and in orbit.
I’m a professor of astronomy who has written a book about the future of space travel, articles about our future off-Earth, conflict in space, space congestion, and the ethics of space exploration. Like many other space experts, I’m concerned about the lack of governance around space debris.
Space is getting crowded
People think of space as vast and empty, but the near-Earth environment is starting to get crowded. As many as 100 lunar missions are planned over the next decade by governments and private companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin.
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The Union of Concerned Scientists lists 1,459 operating satellites, though another 11,600 float around Earth as space junk. Image by ERIS
Signs in the U.S. continue to point to a rise in Covid activity as fall approaches.
Hospitalizations are rising. Deaths have ticked up. Wastewater samples are picking up the virus, as are labs across the country.
“Every single one of those things is showing us that we have increased rates of Covid transmission in our communities,” said Jodie Guest, a professor of epidemiology at Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health in Atlanta.
While individual cases have become more difficult to track as states are no longer required to report numbers to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and at-home test use has increased, experts have turned to other tools to track the virus.
Hospitalizations, for example, are “a very good indicator of severity of Covid disease,” Guest said.
The number of hospitalized Covid patients has continued to rise after hitting an all-time low in late June. The week ending Aug. 26, the most recent date for which data is available, there were just over 17,400 people hospitalized with Covid, up nearly 16% from the previous week, according to the CDC.
Stop worrying over things you cannot change. Being curious is amazing, not being anxious. People will always have opinions about you and that’s okay. Forgive others, it will bring you peace and happiness. Don’t allow your hurtful past to bring you down. Work on current problems that can prevent such situation in the future. There […]
David Gruber began his almost impossibly varied career studying bluestriped grunt fish off the coast of Belize. He was an undergraduate, and his job was to track the fish at night. He navigated by the stars and slept in a tent on the beach. “It was a dream,” he recalled recently. “I didn’t know what I was doing, but I was performing what I thought a marine biologist would do.”
Gruber went on to work in Guyana, mapping forest plots, and in Florida, calculating how much water it would take to restore the Everglades. He wrote a Ph.D. thesis on carbon cycling in the oceans and became a professor of biology at the City University of New York. Along the way, he got interested in green fluorescent proteins, which are naturally synthesized by jellyfish but, with a little gene editing, can be produced by almost any living thing, including humans.
While working in the Solomon Islands, northeast of Australia, Gruber discovered dozens of species of fluorescent fish, including a fluorescent shark, which opened up new questions. What would a fluorescent shark look like to another fluorescent shark? Gruber enlisted researchers in optics to help him construct a special “shark’s eye” camera. (Sharks see only in blue and green; fluorescence, it turns out, shows up to them as greater contrast.) Meanwhile, he was also studying creatures known as comb jellies at the Mystic Aquarium, in Connecticut, trying to determine how, exactly, they manufacture the molecules that make them glow. This led him to wonder about the way that jellyfish experience the world. Gruber enlisted another set of collaborators to develop robots that could handle jellyfish with jellyfish-like delicacy.
“I wanted to know: Is there a way where robots and people can be brought together that builds empathy?” he told me.
In 2017, Gruber received a fellowship to spend a year at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. While there, he came across a book by a free diver who had taken a plunge with some sperm whales. This piqued Gruber’s curiosity, so he started reading up on the animals.
The world’s largest predators, sperm whales spend most of their lives hunting. To find their prey—generally squid—in the darkness of the depths, they rely on echolocation. By means of a specialized organ in their heads, they generate streams of clicks that bounce off any solid (or semi-solid) object. Sperm whales also produce quick bursts of clicks, known as codas, which they exchange with one another. The exchanges seem to have the structure of conversation.
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Sperm whales communicate via clicks, which they also use to locate prey in the dark.Illustration by Sophy Hollington
You walk into a room, but can’t remember what you came in for. Or you bump into an old acquaintance at work and forget their name. Most of us have had momentary memory lapses like this, but in middle age, they can start to feel more ominous. Do they make us look unprofessional or past it? Could this even be a sign of impending dementia? The good news for the increasingly forgetful, however, is that not only can memory be improved with practice, but that it looks increasingly as if some cases of Alzheimer’s may be preventable too.
Neuroscientist Dr. Richard Restak is a past president of the American Neuropsychiatric Association, who has lectured on the brain and behavior everywhere from the Pentagon to Nasa, and written more than 20 books on the human brain. His latest, The Complete Guide to Memory: The Science of Strengthening Your Mind, homes in on the great unspoken fear that every time you can’t remember where you put your reading glasses, it’s a sign of impending doom. “In America today,” he writes, “anyone over 50 lives in dread of the big A.” Memory lapses are, he writes, the single most common complaint over-55s raise with their doctors, even though much of what they describe turns out to be nothing to worry about.
Coming out of a shop and not being able to remember where you left the car, for example, is perfectly normal: it’s likely you just weren’t concentrating when you parked, and therefore the car’s location wasn’t properly encoded in your brain. Forgetting what you came into a room for is probably just a sign you’re busy and preoccupied with other things, says Restak.
“Samuel Johnson said that the art of memory is the art of attention,” he says, down the line from his office in Washington, DC (at 80, Restak is still a practicing clinical professor at George Washington Hospital University School of Medicine and Health). “Most of these sins of ‘memory loss’ are sins of not paying attention. If you’re at a party, and you’re not really listening to someone, because you are still thinking about some work-related matter, suddenly later you find you can’t remember their name. The first thing is you put the information in memory – that’s consolidating it – and then you have to be able to retrieve it. But if you’ve never consolidated it in the first place, it doesn’t exist.”
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A father and daughter. Photo by Cavan Images/Getty Images
Every week between May and October, the Maricopa County Department of Public Health in Arizona releases a heat morbidity report. The most recent report said that 180 people have succumbed to heat-associated illness in the county this year so far. But everyone agrees that number is off.
If previous years are any indication, the true number of heat-related deaths in Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix, is much higher: At the end of last summer, the county revised its initial reports upwards by a factor of five, ultimately reporting a sobering 425 heat-related deaths in total.
This lag plagues not just heat-related mortality reporting, but climate-related death data in general. It’s hard to get a full picture of the true number of mortalities connected to a given disaster in real-time. The full death toll often isn’t revealed until weeks, months, even years after the event occurs. And an unknown fraction of deaths often slide by undetected, never making it onto local and federal mortality spreadsheets at all. For example, a recent retrospective study found the number of people who died from exposure to hurricanes and tropical cyclones in the U.S. in the years between 1988 to 2019 was 13 times higher than the federal government’s official estimates.
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People seek shelter from the heat at the First Congregational United Church of Christ cooling center on July 14 in Phoenix. Brandon Bell / Getty Images
The population of our ancestors may have plummeted to as low as 1300 around 900,000 years ago, possibly as a result of our ancestral species splitting from other early humans.
That is the conclusion of an analysis of the variation in the genomes of living people by Haipeng Li at the Shanghai Institute of Nutrition and Health and his colleagues. However, while not dismissing the idea outright, independent experts say it isn’t supported by other lines of evidence.
Population bottlenecks occur when an existing population is reduced in size, for instance as a result of a catastrophe, or when a small number of individuals leave one population to found a new one. This results in a sudden loss of genetic diversity.
There have been numerous bottlenecks of varying scales as humans evolved and moved around the world. For instance, there was a major bottleneck when a small number of modern humans left Africa around 60,000 years ago, which is why there is still much more genetic diversity among people of African descent than in everyone living in the rest of the world combined. Much more recently, there was a series of bottlenecks as Polynesians settled island after island in the Pacific.
Past bottlenecks can be uncovered by looking for the reductions in genetic diversity they cause, but more ancient bottlenecks are harder to detect than recent ones. Li’s team developed a new method for estimating past changes in population size and applied it to the genomes of more than 3,000 people from around the world.
According to the researchers’ findings, the population of our ancestors fell by 98 percent to around 1280 “breeding individuals” around 930,000 years ago, and the population remained very low until around 815,000 years ago.
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An ancestral population of humans was reduced to very low numbers, according to a genetic analysis The Natural History Museum/Alamy
He Jiankui, a young Chinese scientist known to his American colleagues as JK, dreamed of remaking humanity by exploiting the emergent technology of gene editing. He had academic polish and an aptitude for securing institutional support. As a student, he had left China for the United States, where he did graduate work in physics at Rice and a postdoc in a bioengineering lab at Stanford. At the age of twenty-eight, he was recruited into a prestigious Chinese government program for foreign-educated talent and was offered a founding position in the biology department of the Southern University of Science and Technology.
SUSTech was a newly created research institute in Shenzhen, a city in the midst of a biotech boom. JK, who arrived in 2012, likened Shenzhen’s startup culture to that of Silicon Valley—bold creativity was encouraged, and there was plenty of capital on hand. With colleagues from his lab, he often held brainstorming sessions at a café near campus, delineating his plans. In the first ten years, he would tackle a variety of genetic diseases; in the ten years after that, he’d extend the human life span to a hundred and twenty years. In a PowerPoint that he presented at the café, he wrote, “As a result of promoting genome editing, humanity is smarter, stronger, and healthier. Humanity enters an age of controlling destiny.”
JK’s agenda was spectacularly ambitious, and the pace he projected was aggressive—lifetimes of work in mere decades. To start, he would focus on what he believed was an achievable task: eradicating a disease governed by a single gene. He selected AIDS, an illness regarded in China as both pernicious and shameful but one for which there might be an elegant fix. H.I.V. enters human cells by way of a receptor created by a gene called CCR5. JK planned to use the gene-editing tool CRISPR to disrupt CCR5 in human embryos, which would, in theory, render the babies impervious to infection.
The experiment required volunteers, and, through a chat group associated with an H.I.V./AIDS charity, he began recruiting couples: H.I.V.-positive men married to uninfected women. Chinese law denies in-vitro fertilization and adoption to H.I.V.-positive people, and natural conception carries a risk of transmission. For couples with an infected partner, JK’s program was a chance at parenthood. It promised confidentiality, which was critical for a marginalized community; an H.I.V. diagnosis in China can cost a person his job. The treatments would take place discreetly, at facilities where only key employees were aware of the experiment.
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The Chinese researcher He Jiankui was jailed for creating customized babies. Some observers argue that the real problem wasn’t him—it was the lure of the technology.Illustration by Jun Cen
In the late nineteen-nineties, a neuroscientist named Mark Blumberg stood in a lab at the University of Iowa watching a litter of sleeping rats. Blumberg was then on the cusp of forty; the rats were newborns, and jerked and spasmed as they slept. Blumberg knew that the animals were fine. He had often seen his dogs twitch their paws while asleep. People, he knew, also twitch during sleep: our muscles contract to make small, sharp movements, and our closed eyes dart from side to side in a phenomenon known as rapid eye movement, or REM. It’s typically during REM sleep that we have our most vivid dreams.
Neuroscientists have long had an explanation for our somnolent twitches. During REM sleep, they say, our bodies are paralyzed to prevent us from acting out our dreams; the twitches are the movements that slip through the cracks. They’re dream debris—outward hints of an inner drama. Human adults spend only about two hours of each night in REM sleep. But fetuses, by the third trimester, are in REM for around twenty hours a day—researchers using ultrasound can see their eyes flitting to and fro—and their whole bodies seem to twitch. When a mother feels her baby kick, it may be because the baby is in REM sleep. Once born, babies continue to spend an unusual amount of time in REM, often sleeping for sixteen hours a day and dreaming for eight.
Increasingly, these facts struck Blumberg as odd. In adults, dreams are offshoots of waking life: we have experiences, then we dream about them. But a baby in the womb hasn’t had any experiences. Why spend so much time in REM before you have anything to dream about? According to the dominant theory, the rats’ twitching eyes were supposedly looking around at dream scenery. But the rat pups were just days old; their eyelids were still sealed shut, and they’d never seen anything. So why were their eyes—and their whiskers, limbs, and tails—twitching hundreds of thousands of times each day?
Blumberg decided to put the dream-debris theory to the test. He surgically removed the rats’ cortex—the brain region, involved in visual imagery and conscious experience, where dreams were believed to originate—leaving only the brain stem, which controls subconscious bodily functions, intact. The sleeping pups continued to twitch exactly as before. “There was no way that twitching was a by-product of dreams,” Blumberg told me when we spoke last fall.
A chill on our skin tells us that fall is in the air. Our noses let us know someone nearby is baking bread — or that it’s trash day. The sounds of songbirds, emergency sirens, or music playing in a passing car stir emotions. Our eyes show us that leaves are changing color. And our taste buds determine if it’s pumpkin-spice season or the soup needs a tad more salt.
Our senses provide endless information, yet unless we’re paying attention, their input can be easy to overlook. We get used to certain sounds, sights, and smells to the point that we no longer actively experience them. People who’ve ever lived near train tracks, a freeway, or an airport may know that best once they no longer notice the sound of trains chugging along, traffic whizzing by, or planes overhead.
Intentionally tuning in to our sensory perceptions can have big benefits for well-being. Senses bring us into the present moment when anxiety or panic strikes. Paying attention to what we see, hear, smell, touch, and taste can bring us deeper into the present moment, evoke meaningful memories, and help us connect with other people in the world.
The popular 5-4-3-2-1 technique grounds us in the now by asking us to notice five things we can see in our immediate environment, four things we can touch (such as the ground beneath our feet or clothing against our skin), three things we can hear, two things we can smell, and one thing we can taste (even just the inside of the mouth counts). This exercise takes us away from our spiraling thoughts and instantly puts us into what’s happening in the moment.
“It’s very easy to get stuck in our heads, so we don’t notice the beauty that’s around us,” says Gretchen Rubin, author of The Happiness Project and Life in Five Senses: How Exploring the Senses Got Me Out of My Head and Into the World. “We start to feel like our experiences are drained and flat because we’re getting information through screens, or it feels hyper-processed because we’re eating foods that hit every bliss point in a way that’s not natural. Tuning in to our five senses makes us feel that connection.”Individually exploring the senses can be a great source of delight and personal discovery, according to Rubin. We learn about ourselves and what we really like and don’t like when we tune in to what our eyes, ears, nose, mouth, and skin are telling us.
In the world, human beings are facing various problems. People who are full of greed, anger, and ignorance are seen to be fighting with each other in words and deeds. As the fighting continues, various problems such as civil wars, wars of aggression, and wars of aggression are occurring. As world peace is being destroyed, humans are facing unbearable problems. Innocent children and women are not getting the rights they deserve and deserve. I can't think of one thing every time. What is it? The United Nations. If we look at the responsibilities and duties of the United Nations, I think it is not suitable for solving the problems that are happening in the world today. In fact, the United Nations and the World Security Council, such an organization must rule the world, must be able to give orders, and must have various ways to obey orders. There must be no organization that can influence more than that organization. There should be experts from each country. They can even dominate the superpowers like the US, China, and Britain. Only then will global peace be achieved quickly. Now, if a country with power develops more militarily, economically, or socially than its own country, then powerful countries will jealously seek out enemies and wage war. Or they will attack with fighter jets. In this, innocent people are losing their lives. No one understands the value of a life. You should think about how to achieve global peace by controlling these. If the US continues to be the permanent president of the UN, world peace will never be achieved. If you think carefully, no one sees that they are working for the common good, but for their own benefit, for the benefit of their own country. The permanent president of the UN and the Security Council has rejected this, As a young Rohingya, I have come to realize that only by electing the president and secretary from among the countries in the world through a secret ballot system and governing the world fairly can we achieve global peace. The United Nations and the Security Council are organizations in which any country must govern, give orders, and make them obey their orders. For example, only when a defendant is tried in court can we hold the leaders of the countries in check and control them, can we achieve global peace smoothly. Otherwise, it will not be easy for powerful countries to use various excuses to end this war every year, every year, for the benefit of themselves and their countries. No country's leaders pay any attention to the words of the United Nations and the Security Council. If we look at it in practice, look at the Rohingya issue. Myanmar is a small country. Even that country has been under siege for 8 years. What action can be taken? Why is the UN and the Security Council Powerless? Without such Power, how can the organization bring about global peace? Everyone should think about it. Whether there is a veto or a strong one, all countries in the world can only achieve global peace if they are subject to the UN and the Security Council. Seek peace in the quiet embrace of nature. Peace is an indispensable need of the human race. It is not as if one person can kill another person, and it is as if one country can attack another country, but instead of trying to build peace, we must try to destroy the peace now, and the world is getting hotter and is on the verge of collapse. I especially appeal to all the world experts to urgently try to bring about peace in all parts of the world. Mr, Noor Muhamed Arkhan Rohingya Youth Myanmar
Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.
The Union of Concerned Scientists lists 1,459 operating satellites, though another 11,600 float around Earth as space junk. Image by ERIS
People seek shelter from the heat at the First Congregational United Church of Christ cooling center on July 14 in Phoenix. Brandon Bell / Getty Images
