James' World 2

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Warnings of a potentially dangerous invasive ant have popped up on news sites and social media this week. You’d be forgiven for thinking a new threat had arrived. But this insect, the Asian needle ant (Brachyponera chinensis), is no newcomer—just a master of remaining inconspicuous.

The ant is getting attention after University of Georgia (UGA) entomologist Dan Suiter issued a warning that its sting can be remarkably painful and sometimes cause a serious allergic reaction called anaphylaxis. The ant is not new or spreading any faster than it used to, Suiter says. Rather, as a UGA Cooperative Extension entomologist, he’s been getting calls about people being stung by the ant and needing hospital care. With summer in full swing, the insect is active, and people are likely to be in the woods or in their gardens where they might encounter it, prompting Suiter to raise awareness of the species.

“By this time last year, I had fielded three calls of people who had been stung by an Asian needle ant—they knew it was an Asian needle ant—and suffered anaphylaxis,” Suiter says. The problem, he adds, is that the insect is small, black, and nondescript. “You’re not thinking that ‘this tiny little creature right here could have consequences if it stung me.’”

The Asian needle ant is native to Japan, Korea, and China. It arrived in the U.S.  around or before the 1930s, probably in ships carrying plants and livestock, “before we even realized that is a great way to spread things around,” says Theresa Dellinger, a diagnostician at the Insect Identification Lab at Virginia Tech. It’s not clear precisely where the ant has spread within the U.S., but it’s plentiful in the Southeast and appears to range as far north as Massachusetts, according to sightings on the community science app iNaturalist. It’s not often seen farther west than Missouri, probably because it’s not well-adapted to arid conditions, Dellinger says.

Studies have found that when Asian needle ants move into an area, they outcompete native ants, reducing ant diversity.

These ants don’t lay down pheromone trails to lead their colony to food, so you won’t see them marching in a line like the little black ant (Monomorium minimum). Instead, when an Asian needle ant finds food, it will return to its colony, pick up another worker and physically carry it to the jackpot, says Christopher Hayes, an entomologist at North Carolina State University.

And unlike fire ants, Asian needle ants don’t build big nest mounds. Instead they love nesting in damp wood, such as fallen logs or wet mulch. While they aren’t particularly aggressive, they will sting to protect their nest, making them a danger to the home gardener.

Their sting is initially more painful than a fire ant sting, Hayes says, but also irritatingly persistent, like fiberglass under the skin. The pain can also come and go. Hayes’s two-year-old son recently got a sting. The little boy was fine after a few minutes, Hayes says, but then woke up after midnight that night crying about the pain again.

In their native range, Asian needle ant bites are associated with a 2 percent risk of anaphylaxis compared with a 0.5 to 1.5 percent risk from the bites of fire ants, Hayes says.

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My family tree has always felt more like an orchard. I have two half-siblings who are unrelated to each other, but I’m so close to both of them you’ll never catch me using that term again. Ashley is nine years older than me, and my little brother, Garrett, is 20 years my junior. Now that I’m a mom to a 4-year-old boy, I hear many parents wondering if they should have more kids now, “you know, so they’re close in age.”

I’m not sure where that comes from, this pervasive idea that in order for siblings to have a close relationship, they have to be close in age. That has never been my reality. When I was a baby, our mom had to tell Ashley to stop carrying me everywhere or I’d never learn how to walk. She continued her diligent older sister duties in new ways, though, teaching me to read and write before I’d started preschool, my bubbly big letters matching hers almost exactly.

Early on, we quibbled like all siblings do. When I was a toddler, she convinced me my family had rescued me from a dumpster behind the hospital; that’s why I didn’t look like her or mom. I repaid her on other occasions, like the time I slammed her face into an alphabet peg puzzle. She was trying to convince me the M was a W so I hissed, “Don’t mess with the baby,” and let her have it.

Once everyone’s frontal lobe developed more fully, we didn’t fight much at all. I think this was because, at nine years apart, there was never any competition between us. I coveted everything she owned, sure, from her Abercrombie & Fitch clothes to the Bath & Body Works Cucumber Melon body spray she was allowed to wear to school. It didn’t matter that my mom said it smelled like stale fruit salad and made her roll down her window for the whole drive. To me, Ashley was the epitome of everything pretty and cool, and I wanted to be just like her. When she’d let me sit in her room while she straightened my hair, and I didn’t even care how many times she clamped the tops of my ears with the hot iron in the process, I was at the height of my glory.

Like all siblings, we had secrets just between us. After she’d moved out of the house and gotten a car — a decrepit Ford Taurus with a hole in the bumper — she’d pick me up from fourth grade or drive me to our grandparents’ house. We’d cruise across the causeway between the barrier island and Florida’s mainland, windows down, Ash rapping the lyrics to an absolutely vile Nate Dogg song I knew Mom would loathe. (I tracked it down and put it on my iPod as soon as I got one.)

If you have another baby in five, seven, 10 more years, your firstborn will still be close with their sibling — just not in age.

 

Sometimes I blabbed her secrets, like once when I was 7 and she had her boyfriend over to hang out when she was supposed to be watching me. I’m pretty sure she’s never told a single one of mine, though. Once she had a job and was all moved in with Jason, her high school sweetheart and now husband, in their first apartment, cobbling together her own life, she still came to all of my award ceremonies, birthday parties, and science fair events. My favorite picture of my college graduation is one my friend snapped of my face on the Jumbotron while crossing the stage, my mom and sister’s hands thrown up to the sky in front of it, both of them screaming, I’m sure.

Then, when I was 20, my little brother was born — my dad and the woman I considered my stepmom had told me she was pregnant shortly after my 19th birthday. I was shocked but excited. I spent my entire spring break hanging around their house, waiting for him to come. When I met him in the hospital, I thought he was the cutest thing I’d ever seen.

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You don’t have to have kids close together for them to be close at all.

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In the predawn darkness on Friday local time, Israeli military aircraft struck one of Iran’s uranium-enrichment complexes near the city of Natanz. The warheads aimed to do more than shatter concrete; they were meant to buy time, according to news reports. For months, Iran had seemed to be edging ever closer to “breakout,” the point at which its growing stockpile of partially enriched uranium could be converted into fuel for a nuclear bomb. (Iran has denied that it has been pursuing nuclear weapons development.)

But why did the strike occur now? One consideration could involve the way enrichment complexes work. Natural uranium is composed almost entirely of uranium 238, or U-238, an isotope that is relatively “heavy” (meaning it has more neutrons in its nucleus). Only about 0.7 percent is uranium 235 (U-235), a lighter isotope that is capable of sustaining a nuclear chain reaction. That means that in natural uranium, only seven atoms in 1,000 are the lighter, fission-ready U-235; “enrichment” simply means raising the percentage of U-235.

U-235 can be used in warheads because its nucleus can easily be split. The International Atomic Energy Agency uses 25 kilograms of contained U-235 as the benchmark amount deemed sufficient for a first-generation implosion bomb. In such a weapon, the U-235 is surrounded by conventional explosives that, when detonated, compress the isotope. A separate device releases a neutron stream. (Neutrons are the neutral subatomic particle in an atom’s nucleus that adds to their mass.) Each time a neutron strikes a U-235 atom, the atom fissions; it divides and spits out, on average, two or three fresh neutrons, plus a burst of energy in the form of heat and gamma radiation. And the emitted neutrons in turn strike other U-235 nuclei, creating a self-sustaining chain reaction among the U-235 atoms that have been packed together into a critical mass. The result is a nuclear explosion. By contrast, the more common isotope, U-238, usually absorbs slow neutrons without splitting and cannot drive such a devastating chain reaction.

To enrich uranium so that it contains enough U-235, the “yellowcake” uranium powder that comes out of a mine must go through a lengthy process of conversions to transform it from a solid into the gas uranium hexafluoride. First, a series of chemical processes refine the uranium, and then, at high temperatures, each uranium atom is bound to six fluorine atoms. The result, uranium hexafluoride, is unusual: below 56 degrees Celsius (132.8 degrees Fahrenheit) it is a white, waxy solid, but just above that temperature, it sublimates into a dense, invisible gas.

During enrichment, this uranium hexafluoride is loaded into a centrifuge: a metal cylinder that spins at tens of thousands of revolutions per minute, faster than the blades of a jet engine. As the heavier U-238 molecules drift toward the cylinder wall, the lighter U-235 molecules remain closer to the center and are siphoned off. This new, slightly U-235-richer gas is then put into the next centrifuge. The process is repeated 10 to 20 times as ever more enriched gas is sent through a series of centrifuges.

Enrichment is a slow process, but the Iranian government has been working on this for years and already holds roughly 400 kilograms of uranium enriched to 60 percent U-235. This falls short of the 90 percent required for nuclear weapons. But whereas Iran’s first-generation IR-1 centrifuges whirl at about 63,000 revolutions per minute and do relatively modest work, its newer IR-6 models, built from high-strength carbon fiber, spin faster and produce enriched uranium far more quickly.

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“What’s your support system like?” my doctor asked as I tried to calm my baby. I was at my PCP’s office to get some insight into the persistent elbow pain that was making it difficult for me to open my apartment door or pull the covers over me at night — not to mention feed, hold, and soothe my baby who especially liked to fall asleep in the crook of that injured elbow.

My daughter had arrived six weeks early and needed to be fed in a specific position that required me to hold her head up with my left hand, the weight of her tiny body settling into my joint. But, like a lot of people I encountered in those early days, my doctor was having trouble getting past the single mother thing. “I’m worried about you,” she said, when I made the mistake of mentioning that I wasn’t sleeping. I was worried about me too, but I really needed help with my elbow.

“What’s your support system like?” was the first question almost anyone asked when finding out I was raising a baby without a partner — from potential mom friends at tot gyms to all kinds of medical professionals.

When I was pregnant, I got “what’s your support system like?” from a homeowner who was renting out an upstairs suite in a cohousing community. In cohousing, people usually live in separate houses on shared land, sharing resources. Because buying into a cohousing community can be expensive, I saw renting as a way in for me. But the homeowner balked as we tried to nail down a time for a tour. Instead, she wanted to schedule a call to talk about my support system.

The question was tough for me — it was something I had been asking myself, with some trepidation, since before I had gotten pregnant. Would the life I had made, the seeming haphazard connections collected over the years, be enough to sustain both me and a baby? I didn’t particularly want to get into this with my future landlord or, worse, be evaluated based on my ability to obtain this magic system. I told her that I thought her question was discriminatory (since she was not asking non-parents the same thing), she apologized profusely, and we parted ways.

But the incident jolted me: It was the first of a series of interactions that made me aware that by deciding to have a baby, I had stepped into a role loaded with cultural baggage.

The question about my support system was not about my own trepidations, romantic failures, or giddy hubris in deciding to get pregnant on my own. It was about the asker. “Are you going to need too much from me?” my potential housemate was asking. “Should I pity and worry for you?” my doctor wanted to know. “Can I view you as having agency?” the mom at the tot gym tried to clarify.

“Where do I place you on the scale of superhero to sad sack?” was how the question sounded to me.

“We are seeing the fabric of this country fall apart, and it’s falling apart because of single moms,” Pennsylvania Senate candidate (and future U.S. senator) Rick Santorum said in a speech in 1994. I was a teenager in the 1980s and 1990s when “unwed mothers” were used as cultural (and racial) boogeymen to push through Bill Clinton’s welfare cuts. Single mothers, the rationale went, were a drain on federal resources.

In the intervening years, with the rise of single parents by choice, an alternative narrative has taken hold, one of people who can afford to have babies on their own and are doing just fine. Yet, the words “single mother” remain a powerful cultural and political category that bring up anxieties about the cracks in our social system. And conservatives still seek to punish us, using the flawed logic that this will somehow force people into nuclear family structures.

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While you do the dishes or drive to work, your mind is likely not on the task at hand; perhaps you’re composing a grocery list or daydreaming about retiring in Italy. But research published in the Journal of Neuroscience suggests you might be taking in more than you think.

During a simple task that requires minimal attention, mind wandering may actually help people learn probabilistic patterns that let them perform the task better.

“The idea to study the potentially beneficial influence of mind wandering on information processing occurred to us during the COVID pandemic, when we had plenty of time to mind wander,” says Péter Simor, lead author of the recent study and a psychology researcher at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest. Study participants practiced a simple task in which they pressed keyboard buttons corresponding to the direction of arrows that lit up on a screen. But there were patterns hidden within the task that the participants were unaware of, and they learned these patterns without consciously noticing them. The researchers found that when participants reported letting their minds wander, they adapted to the task’s hidden patterns significantly faster.

“This is an exciting and important piece of work, especially because the authors opted for a nondemanding task to check how [mind wandering] would affect performance and learning,” says Athena Demertzi, a cognitive and clinical neuroscientist at the University of Liège in Belgium. Previous related research focused more on long and demanding tasks, she says—on which zoning out is typically shown to have a negative effect.

But the results are not clear-cut, says Jonathan Smallwood, a psychology researcher at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. “I don’t think that this means the spontaneous mind-wandering episodes themselves cause implicit learning to occur,” he says. “Rather, both emerge at the same time when people go into a particular state.” Neither Smallwood nor Demertzi was involved in the new study.

Simor, who studies sleep, was interested in whether participants’ mind wandering displayed any neural hallmarks of dozing off. Using electroencephalogram recordings, the team showed that in those test periods, participants’ brains produced more of the slow waves that are dominant during sleep. Perhaps, the researchers say, mind wandering is like a form of light sleep that provides some of that state’s learning benefits. To better understand whether mind wandering might compensate for lost sleep, Simor and his colleagues next plan to study narcolepsy and sleep deprivation.

“We know that people spend significant amounts of time not focused on what they are doing,” Smallwood says. “The authors’ work is important because it helps us understand how reasonably complex forms of behavior can continue when people are focused on other things—and that even though our thoughts were elsewhere, the external behavior can still leave its mark on the person.”

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Thomas Fuchs

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The Supreme Court delivered an important victory to disabled children on Thursday, unanimously affirming their right to reasonable accommodations in public education. Chief Justice John Roberts’ opinion for the court reiterated that schools engage in unlawful discrimination when they deny these accommodations to kids, even if officials are not acting in bad faith. His ruling provides a lifeline to schoolchildren throughout the country who are wrongly denied equal access to learning opportunities because of a disability.

Yet this victory comes with an asterisk: In a concurrence, Justice Clarence Thomas, joined, alarmingly, by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, launched an assault on civil rights law that would devastate disabled Americans’ ability to receive an education and participate in all aspects of public life. Thomas and Kavanaugh suggested that the long-standing interpretation of disability law is, in fact, unconstitutional, arguing that states should have far more leeway to discriminate against those with disabilities. We should expect such callous radicalism from Thomas. But Kavanaugh’s endorsement of this position is yet another ominous sign that the justice is drifting toward the hard-right flank of the court.

It is difficult to know exactly what to make of Kavanaugh’s drift to the right because he remains an intellectual lightweight who struggles to articulate and defend his views with any coherence. Is he just another MAGA-pilled jurist eager to promote Trump’s agenda? Did his bruising confirmation battle leave him with a lifelong grudge against Democrats that he acts upon by trashing progressive priorities from the bench? Has he fallen under the influence of Thomas and Justice Samuel Alito, who spurn centrism as craven capitulation to their perceived enemies on the left? Whatever the cause of his transformation, it is by now an undeniable fact that he has abandoned the middle of the court, sliding to the right of Roberts, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, and sometimes even Justice Neil Gorsuch.

Thursday’s case, A. J. T. v. Osseo Area Schools, shows exactly why robust federal protections for disabled Americans remain so vital. The plaintiff, Ava Tharpe, “suffers from a rare form of epilepsy that severely limits her physical and cognitive functioning,” as Roberts put it. Her seizures are worst in the morning, leaving her able to learn only after about 12 p.m. each day. When Tharpe transferred to a new school district in 2015, officials refused to provide her with special evening instruction, leaving her with far fewer hours of instruction than her peers.

Eventually, Tharpe’s parents sued under several laws, including the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Rehabilitation Act, which broadly bar discrimination on the basis of disability. But the federal courts tossed out their suit. These courts acknowledged that Tharpe was denied equal access to education because of her disability. But they held that Tharpe was not entitled to an injunction or damages under the relevant statutes because she had not proven that school officials “acted with bad faith or gross misjudgment.” Mere “non-compliance” with the law, the courts concluded, was not enough to justify judicial intervention.

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Thomas and Kavanaugh suggested that the long-standing interpretation of disability law is, in fact, unconstitutional. Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Pool/AFP via Getty Images.

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Hmmmm…

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Medicare Usage by State

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Covid is stil killing people…

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For the first time since the COVID vaccines became available in pharmacies in 2021, the average person in the U.S. can’t count on getting a free annual shot against a disease that has been the main or a contributing cause of death for more than 1.2 million people around the country, including nearly 12,000 to date this year.

“COVID’s not done with us,” says Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at Brown University. “We have to keep using the tools that we have. It’s not like we get to forget about COVID.”

In recent weeks, the Department of Health and Human Services, led by prominent antivaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., has announced a barrage of measures that are likely to reduce COVID vaccine access, leading to a swirl of confusion about what will be available for the 2025–2026 season. HHS officials did not respond to a request for comment for this article.

Government officials appear to be limiting COVID shots to people who are aged 65 and older and to those who have certain preexisting health conditions—groups that have long been known to face a higher risk of developing severe COVID. Pregnant people and some children, meanwhile, appear to be explicitly excluded from access, despite plentiful evidence that vaccines are very safe and effective for them and that COVID infections can cause them significant harm.

Scientific American spoke with clinicians and public health experts about the latest COVID vaccine recommendations, what access may look like this fall, and how these policies might influence people’s vaccination choices and health.

What COVID vaccines will be manufactured this year?

Public health experts are monitoring a strain of the COVID-causing virus SARS-CoV-2 called NB.1.8.1, which was first detected early this year and last month became responsible for one in 10 COVID cases globally. So far, the new variant has mostly been reported in Asia and Europe. But it has also been picked up in airport surveillance in multiple U.S. states, says Peter Chin-Hong, an infectious disease physician and a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco.

The emergence of a new variant isn’t surprising, particularly at this time of year, Chin-Hong says. “It’s kind of acting like clockwork—maybe this might be the variant of the summer,” he adds. Still, NB.1.8.1 has led to concerns about a potential surge in cases, although Chin-Hong and other scientists don’t have any evidence so far that it causes more serious disease than other currently circulating strains.

“All of these new variants, they might be more transmissible, they might be more immune evasive, but I’ve seen no data whatsoever that suggests that they’re more pathogenic,” says Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan.

Within the U.S., a strain called LP.8.1 has been the most common one detected since March. Both NB.1.8.1 and LP.8.1 are among the alphabet soup of strains that descended from a key ancestor lineage called Omicron JN.1, which dominated U.S. cases by early 2024.

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Indian police say more than 200 bodies have been recovered after a plane crashed shortly after takeoff from Ahmedabad. Most of the 242 people on board were Indian or British. DW has the latest.

A Boeing 787 Dreamliner crashed shortly after takeoff from Ahmedabad, en route to London’s Gatwick Airport. Some 242 people were on board

Flight 171, including 169 Indians, 53 Britons, 7 Portuguese, and 1 Canadian

The cause of the crash has yet to be determined

Ahmedabad police have said more than 200 bodies have been recovered, and there appear to be no survivors. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi said the incident was ‘heartbreaking beyond words.’ The crash is the first fatal incident involving a Boeing 787 Dreamliner

Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner had strong safety record before Ahmedabad crash

The Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner, which crashed in Ahmedabad, is one the world’s most advanced aircraft.

Unlike Boeing’s 737 Max series, the Dreamliner has had a strong safety record, with no fatal accidents until Thursday’s crash, in which all 242 people on board died.

The plane that crashed in Ahmedabad is the smallest of three types of 787, and was delivered in 2014.

The 787 Dreamliner entered commercial service in 2011. Boeing has sold more than 2,500 787s, of which 47 were sold to Air India.

The plane can normally hold up to 248 passengers, while the larger 787-9 can carry up to 296 people, according to Boeing.

The 787 is powered by twin engines, which are supplied by American firm GE Aerospace or Rolls-Royce from the UK.

The engines on the plane that crashed were provided by GE. In a post on X, GE said it was “deeply saddened” by the incident, adding that the company is “prepared to support our customer and the investigation.”

While this is the first fatal incident involving a Dreamliner, there have been previous accidents.

In July 2013, an Ethiopian Airlines flight, which had no one on board, caught fire while on the ground at London’s Heathrow airport after a short-circuit.

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