Infrastructure across the U.S. is struggling under the climate crisis. Dramatic examples include torrential rains turning New York City’s subway entrances into waterfalls, record cold temperatures shutting down Texas’s power grid, and the rising Pacific Ocean eating away at coastal highways.
Extreme heat is leaving its own, more subtle mark on the built environment. Roads, power lines, transportation systems, and hospitals are being harmed. For some types of infrastructure, researchers are just beginning to understand what heat is doing.
“Heat itself is sort of an invisible hazard,” says Sara Meerow, an urban planner at Arizona State University. “Compared to flooding, hurricanes, wildfires, you don’t immediately see the impacts. But they are there.”
Heat-induced infrastructure problems can arise not only in places such as Arizona, where temperatures can be brutal, but also in traditionally cooler locations such as the Pacific Northwest that are seeing warmer temperatures than ever before. That’s because local infrastructure was not designed to withstand a changing climate. It’s not the absolute temperature that matters so much as how far the temperature is outside of engineers’ expectations when infrastructure was built.
For example, roads across the U.S. are made with several different asphalt recipes, depending on climate conditions. No matter the recipe, when a road faces hotter temperatures than it can handle, the asphalt softens. Heavy vehicles can then push down into the asphalt as if it were mud, leaving behind ruts; overheated asphalt can also crack.
Many heat disruptions arise from ruthless physical realities, such as that most materials expand when warmed. “We don’t need to be engineers to know that when materials are subjected to temperature variations, they deform,” says Alessandro Rotta Loria, an architecture engineer at Northwestern University.
Overheated train rails can kink and bridges can buckle or lose the ability to operate as they should. For example, a New York City swing bridge got stuck open last month. Airlines struggle because it’s more difficult for planes to generate lift in thinner air, and they need extra runway. They are also more likely to encounter turbulence.
Some infrastructure can be hit by compound issues. Power lines at full capacity can sag in high heat, which becomes a fire risk if the wire touches a tree or other impediment. To lessen the risk, grid managers reduce the amount of energy flowing through the lines. Coal-fired and nuclear power plants rely on safety mechanisms that use water to keep systems cool. But in hot weather, this water starts out much warmer and can’t absorb as much heat, forcing managers to slow energy production to keep the system safe.
“The heat is actually making it harder for power plants to supply the electricity they might supply on a normal day,” says Kristina Dahl, a climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “It’s difficult for plants to keep up with the average load when it’s extremely hot, just because of the way that the plants and energy lines function.” At the same time, energy demand soars because people rely on power-hungry air-conditioning to stay safe from the heat.
The facts of the so-called fertility crisis are well publicized: Birth rates in the United States have been trending down for nearly two decades, and other wealthy countries are experiencing the same. Among those proposing solutions to reverse the trend, the conventional wisdom goes that if only the government were to offer more financial support to parents, birth rates would start ticking up again.
But what if that wisdom is wrong?
In 1960, American women had, on average, 3.6 children; in 2023, the total fertility rate (the average number of children a woman expects to have in her lifetime) was 1.62, the lowest on record and well below the replacement rate of 2.1. Meanwhile, rates of childlessness are rising: In 2018, more than one in seven women aged 40 to 44 had no biological children, compared with one in 10 in 1976. And according to a new report from Pew Research Center, the share of American adults younger than 50 who say they are unlikely to ever have children rose 10 percentage points between 2018 and 2023, to 47 percent. In mainstream American discourse, explanations for these trends tend to focus on economic constraints: People are deciding not to have kids because of the high cost of child care, a lack of parental leave, and the wage penalty mothers face. Some policy makers (and concerned citizens) suggest that expensive government interventions could help change people’s minds.
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Illustration by Matteo Giuseppe Pani. Source: Getty.
When I was 15, my mom announced at the breakfast table that I had a job interview that morning.
She said there was no getting out of it because it was all arranged. Dad would drive me to the new bakery that her friend’s son was about to open in our hometown in northern England.
Two hours later, I sat opposite the manager as she read aloud parts of the application my mom had forged without my knowledge.
“You wrote that math is one of your best subjects,” the woman said, noting that the position was for a part-time counter person at the bakery.
I was abysmal at math. Sure enough, when the manager asked me to solve a simple equation to test my mental arithmetic, I got the answer spectacularly wrong.
Next, the woman showed me the personal note my mom had mailed with my application, addressed to the business owner and introducing herself as his mother’s friend. “Congratulations, John,” she wrote. “Wishing you all the best with your new business venture.”
I cringed, barely believing Mom had tried to pull so many strings to get me the job. The manager had my number, and I didn’t get hired.
When I got home, I argued with my parents. “We were just trying to help,” my dad said. “Don’t ever do that again,” I yelled.
They had good intentions, but it was an example of helicopter parenting at its worse. They wanted to instill a work ethic in me, but it backfired.
When I was hired after showing initiative myself, I felt proud
A few months later, I secured a part-time job by randomly asking for shifts at a local café. The owner said he admired my initiative, which boosted my bank account and self-esteem.
I later found part-time work as a dishwasher at a restaurant, a sales assistant in a menswear store, and a bartender. Toward the end of college, I was a breakfast waitress at a hotel, starting at 6. am.
I tried to get my teenage daughter a job, too
You’d have thought the humiliating experience at the bakery would have taught me a lesson forever. But now, as the mom of a 16-year-old girl, it’s difficult not to copy my parents.
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Jane Ridley (not pictured) is trying not to make the same mistakes her helicopter parents did. standret/Getty Images
CLIMATEWIRE | Global losses from natural disasters eclipsed the long-term average in the first half of 2024, with thunderstorms causing more damage in the U.S. than hurricanes, wildfires, or other catastrophes.
An analysis from the reinsurance company Munich Re found that severe thunderstorms in the U.S. caused $45 billion in losses from January to June, $34 billion of which were insured. That makes 2024 the fourth-costliest thunderstorm year on record, based on the first six months.
Many of the losses were driven by tornadoes and hail spawned from the storms, the report notes.
North America accounted for $60 billion in losses — half of all damages worldwide. Globally, insured losses totaled $62 billion, compared with the 10-year average of $37 billion.
Thunderstorms may seem like small events compared with other kinds of disasters. Individually, they tend to cause less damage than earthquakes, hurricanes, fires, and floods. But they also strike more frequently than many other severe weather events, and their damages add up over time.
A January report from Munich Re found that thunderstorm losses in Europe and North America broke records in 2023, causing damages totaling $76 billion and $58 billion in insured losses.
A report from another reinsurance company, Swiss Re, also warned last year that thunderstorm damage is growing worldwide. A high number of low- to medium-severity events occurred around the globe last year, causing more than $100 billion in losses. Thunderstorms were the main contributor.
“The cumulative effect of frequent, low-loss events, along with increasing property values and repair costs, has a big impact on an insurer’s profitability over a longer period,” said Jérôme Jean Haegeli, chief economist at Swiss Re, in a statement last year. “The high frequency of severe thunderstorms in 2023 has been an earnings test for the primary insurance industry.”
Studies show that climate change worsens thunderstorms around the world. That’s largely a matter of simple physics — a warmer atmosphere holds more moisture, allowing for more intense rainfall events.
That doesn’t always translate to more frequent storms. In some places, the total number of thunderstorms might not change much — but the ones that do occur may grow stronger. Research already shows that extreme precipitation events have worsened across the U.S., according to the federal government’s Fifth National Climate Assessment. A 2023 study also found that severe thunderstorm winds are affecting a larger area of the country over time.
Research also indicates that some regions could see an increase in the number of thunderstorms as temperatures continue to rise.
The rising risks of thunderstorms are taking a toll on the United States. According to NOAA, severe storms account for half of all the country’s billion-dollar disasters since 1980. And the number of billion-dollar thunderstorms is rising over time.
“Climate change entails evolving risks that everyone — society, the economy, and the insurance sector alike — will have to adapt to, so as to mitigate the growing losses from weather-related events,” said Thomas Blunck, member of Munich Re’s Board of Management, in a statement.
Disasters around the world
A variety of other disasters caused havoc around the world in the first half of 2024, Munich Re found.
Not all were climate-related. Earthquakes in Japan and Taiwan this year caused billions of dollars in losses each. The 7.3 magnitude event in Taiwan was the worst the region had experienced since 1999.
Floods caused the greatest losses elsewhere.
Heavy rainfall triggered severe floods and landslides in Brazil in April and May, amounting to $7 billion in total losses. Devastating floods also struck Germany in May, with the costliest event totaling $5 billion in damages.
Seasonal monsoon rains caused severe floods in East Africa, including Kenya, Tanzania, Burundi, and Somalia earlier this year. And in May, tropical cyclones Hidaya and Ialy struck the same region, exacerbating previous destruction and killing hundreds, and displacing around half a million people.
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A man surveys damage from a storm Friday, May 17, 2024, in downtown Houston. Jon Shapley/Houston Chronicle via Getty Images
For many athletes, it is the pinnacle of their career. They have trained hard for years to take part in the Olympic Games. Winning a medal is a childhood dream for most of them—only surpassed by setting a new world record during the competitions.
And that happens again and again. At the Summer Olympics in Tokyo in 2021, existing world records were broken in several disciplines, six in swimming alone, mostly by a difference of tenths or even hundredths of a second. As in most Olympic sports, it’s all about precision: the slightest wrong move or external disturbance can make the difference between success and failure. Nevertheless, swimming stands out in one respect: It takes place in water, or more precisely, in a pool filled with water. And the shape of the pool can have a strong influence on the performance of Olympic athletes.
Before the start of this year’s Summer Olympics in Paris, hopes for new records were high. One of the reasons for this was new training techniques using “digital twins.” These are computer models of swimmers that mathematicians use to help the athletes achieve peak performance.
So far results for swimmers in Paris have been sobering. Only one world record had been broken as of August 1. And even worse: the Olympians seem to be falling far short of expectations. Nicolò Martinenghi, the winner of the men’s 100-meter breaststroke, only managed a time of 59.03 seconds—the slowest winning time in the event at an Olympic Game since 2004.
A cause was purportedly found: the Olympic swimming pool was not deep enough. A few days after the opening of the Games, the headlines were published: “Paris Olympics Swimmers Noticing Pool Is ‘Slow’ as Gold-Medal Times Don’t Come Near World Records,” “No World Records through Two Nights in Paris, Is the Pool in Paris ‘Slow’?,” “How Slow Paris Pool Is Thwarting Swimmers’ World Record Bids.” But can it be true? Is the pool really to blame for the lack of records? Anyone waiting for a “yes” or “no” will be disappointed. Unfortunately, there is no simple answer because the question is related to one of the most complex problems in mathematics.
The Paris La Défense Arena in Nanterre, a suburb of the city, is actually a rugby stadium and concert venue—Taylor Swift performed there in May—and has been converted into an indoor swimming pool for the Games. The huge pool will be dismantled afterward. This approach makes sense: during the summer Games, the many spectators are entitled to watch the athletes compete, but outside of these events, swimming pools with a grandstand that can accommodate 15,000 people seem completely oversize. This is why many Olympic swimming pools are designed to be temporary solutions.
What is surprising, however, is the depth of this year’s pool, which is unusually shallow at 2.15 meters. There is no standardized regulation as to what dimensions an Olympic pool should have. Until a few years ago, it had to be at least two meters deep, but now the minimum depth is 2.5 meters. A depth of three meters, however, is recommended. When construction of the Olympic pool started in 2017, the two-meter rule still applied. The pool in Nanterre is therefore permitted despite its comparatively shallow depth. And this, many are convinced, means that it is “slow.”
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Swimmers compete during an event at the Paris 2024 Olympic Games at the Paris La Defense Arena. Jonathan Nackstrand/AFP via Getty Images
I turn away from my husband and his snoring, using my back to try to block out the light from my phone. It is my favorite time of day: 10 p.m., in bed, secretly scrolling my favorite app, NYTimes Recipes. Looking at all the beautiful pictures, I feel myself getting excited, hopeful even. I click on family-friendly dinners, and my heart drops instantly: It reads like a list of rejection letters. Fajitas. Chili. Tortellini soup. Lasagna. I swipe, faster and faster, rejecting things left and right (though I still think of left swipe as rejection), and I am reminded of the years I spent swiping on other apps, picky in a different way. Back then, I rejected men for being too square, too edgy, too comfortable with typos. Now I swipe and make the rejections on my children’s behalf: This recipe looks too spicy. Too cheesy. Too saucy. Too meat-y, too bean-y.
It took me years to admit my family, happy in almost every way, would completely implode if asked to live on what the Internet tells me are “Family-Friendly Dinners.” I read other families’ meal plans like other moms read romance novels, fascinated but incredulous, sure no one is being whisked off to Paris or that people’s kids are eating fish tacos in real life.
It wasn’t always this way. For years, I persisted, an acolyte in Ellyn Satter’s church of feeding, sure that if I just put certain foods (namely, healthy home-cooked ones) on the table 10, 20, 50, 5,000 times, my kids would eventually be called “good eaters,” Internet code for adventurous, polite, nonpicky dinner companions, basically little 45-year-olds in children’s bodies. But after years of this, years of heroic dinnertime effort met with routine, resounding rejection, it finally happened. I broke.
The scene that played out in our dining room last fall was a familiar one to anyone with kids. I had spent Sunday meal planning the week’s meals, my cookbooks around me on the living room floor, avoiding the allergens (avocado, tomatoes, peppers) and preferences (no broccoli, fish, “saucy” food, spice) of my family members. I’d found some that threaded the very fine needle of food preferences and time allowances I’d have to cook during the week. I grocery shopped, labeled what food should not be eaten before it was made for dinner (“DO NOT TOUCH!” the egg carton said, as they were destined for pad Thai), and got to cooking.
And so, on that night last September, I cooked. Chicken shawarma — a recipe that promised, literally, to “change my life.” I grilled, roasted, and diced. I minced the dill, considered whether to peel the cucumber. (I split the difference, peeling it in strips.) I set the table, our cloth napkins over our placemats, the food all on the table to serve family style (Ellyn Satter insists!!!), and my family sat down. And of course, nobody ate. My husband muscled out a “Thanks for dinner” as my son slid down in his chair, horrified at the very sight of cooked vegetables. My daughter declared she didn’t eat meat. (She does.)
I did not flip the kitchen table, but only because our dog, Larry, would have immediately made off with the chicken bones, but I did suddenly understand Teresa Giudice in a way I never had before. What was I doing with my one wild and precious life? I loved cooking because it brought people together. And yet my cooking for my family was doing anything but that. We were miserable.
So, I decided I was done. I would no longer cook for my family.
Over the next few days, I came up with my new rule: I would prepare food for my family, but I would not cook. The fine details are such: There are no recipes allowed, whether from a cookbook or online (Bye, NYTimes Recipes! See ya, Smitten Kitchen!!) and food should be prepared in 30 minutes or less. Practically, it means a lot of quesadillas, frozen food (Trader Joe’s frozen aisle is our meal plan for weeks), and pizza. We eat the most basic of tacos (ground turkey, spice packet, pre-shredded cheese). Baked potatoes and bagged salads are go-tos. There are lots of repeat meals.
This doesn’t mean I don’t cook ever; I just no longer cook for my family. I save my cooking for other adults. In fact, the space this no-cooking thing opened up for me inspired me to institute something we call Sunday suppers: a regular time to cook for friends we invite over. At which, of course, my kids eat food that they would normally reject — maybe it’s because they’re surrounded by friends’ children who compliment my pulled pork?
But beyond that, our dinners have now become pleasant. No tables are flipped; no tears are shed onto the scrambled eggs and pancakes we are eating. (Breakfast for dinner is about as fancy as we get now.) My son makes jokes as my daughter tells us the “cuckoo banana pants” thing that happened at school each day. To be clear, we aren’t all eating the same thing. My husband often works late, and I batch cook a big soup or salad for me or us to eat all week alongside the kids. The mealtimes I dreamed of are happening, just over different kinds of food than the fantasy includes.
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The mealtimes I dreamed of are happening, just over different kinds of food than the fantasy includes.
When wildfire smoke is in the air, doctors urge people to stay indoors to avoid breathing in harmful particles and gases. But what happens to trees and other plants that can’t escape from the smoke?
They respond a bit like us, it turns out: Some trees essentially shut their windows and doors and hold their breath.
As atmospheric and chemical scientists, we study the air quality and ecological effects of wildfire smoke and other pollutants. In a study that started quite by accident when smoke overwhelmed our research site in Colorado, we were able to watch in real time how the leaves of living pine trees responded.
How plants breathe
Plants have pores on the surface of their leaves called stomata. These pores are much like our mouths, except that while we inhale oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide, plants inhale carbon dioxide and exhale oxygen.
Both humans and plants inhale other chemicals in the air around them and exhale chemicals produced inside them – coffee breath for some people, pine scents for some trees.
Unlike humans, however, leaves breathe in and out at the same time, constantly taking in and releasing atmospheric gases.
Clues from over a century of research
In the early 1900s, scientists studying trees in heavily polluted areas discovered that those chronically exposed to pollution from coal-burning had black granules clogging the leaf pores through which plants breathe. They suspected that the substance in these granules was partly created by the trees, but due to the lack of available instruments at the time, the chemistry of those granules was never explored, nor were the effects on the plants’ photosynthesis.
Most modern research into wildfire smoke’s effects has focused on crops, and the results have been conflicting.
For example, a study of multiple crop and wetland sites in California showed that smoke scatters light in a way that made plants more efficient at photosynthesis and growth. However, a lab study in which plants were exposed to artificial smoke found that plant productivity dropped during and after smoke exposure – though those plants did recover after a few hours.
There are other clues that wildfire smoke can impact plants in negative ways. You may have even tasted one: When grapes are exposed to smoke, their wine can be tainted.
What makes smoke toxic, even far from the fire
When wildfire smoke travels long distances, the smoke cooks in sunlight and chemically changes.
Mixing volatile organic compounds, nitrogen oxides and sunlight will make ground-level ozone, which can cause breathing problems in humans. It can also damage plants by degrading the leaf surface, oxidizing plant tissue, and slowing photosynthesis.
While scientists usually think about urban regions as being large sources of ozone that effect crops downwind, wildfire smoke is an emerging concern. Other compounds, including nitrogen oxides, can also harm plants and reduce photosynthesis.
Taken together, studies suggest that wildfire smoke interacts with plants, but in poorly understood ways. This lack of research is driven by the fact that studying smoke effects on the leaves of living plants in the wild is hard: Wildfires are hard to predict, and it can be unsafe to be in smoky conditions.
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Giant Sequoia trees are shrouded in a yellow tinge of smoke from a wildfire in the Sequoia National Forest in California, in on September 23, 2021. Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty Images
It’s hard to avoid giving your child a smartphone in this new digital age, but some parents around the world are looking to buck the trend and seek out guidance on how to protect their kids from the harms of smartphone use.
Smartphone Free Childhood, a recently founded U.K. organization, is aimed at uniting parents who are not giving their kids smartphones. It has since expanded internationally as research around the topic grows.
Young people who acquired a phone before the age of 10 reported worse mental health outcomes than those who acquired a phone over the age of 15, a Sapien Labs study of 27,969 18–24-year-olds from 41 countries last year found.
Meanwhile, at least 42% of children in the U.S. had a smartphone by the age of 10, according to a Common Sense report in 2021.
Some parents give their children smartphones for safety reasons, including being able to contact them and track their location when they’re outside the home, but this may lead to mental health harms.
“The analogy that I often have in mind with the cell phone and technologies today is the automobile and when the automobile was first invented people were thrown from their cars and the number of fatalities was dramatic,” Kathleen Pike, CEO of One Mind at Work and psychology professor at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, told CNBC Make It in an interview.
“There were no seatbelts, there were no airbags. The construction of the chassis made people vulnerable and in recognizing the vulnerabilities that came along with this tremendous technological innovation, we instituted regulations and better design and policies that protected the health and wellbeing of drivers and passengers. We’re in the earliest days with cell phones and technology broadly where we need to do the same,” she said.
Columbia’s Pike and Zach Rausch, a research scientist at New York University Stern School of Business and lead researcher for Jonathon Haidt’s number one New York Times bestseller “The Anxious Generation,” shared five tips on how to avoid giving your kids a smartphone.
Organize with other parents
Being the only parent refusing to give your child a smartphone can be isolating for both you and your kid, Rausch said.
“Before you act on your own, find a couple of your kid’s friends, three to five of them. Talk with their parents, and if you all together decide to delay smartphones till high school, then it’s going to be much easier because then you can say ’Well, Johnny is also not getting his smartphone till 14,” he said, adding that this will make the conversation “much more digestible” for the child.
Pike also advised working with other parents. She shared an anecdote about a parent whose child’s fifth grade class formed a parent-teacher association.
“The class parents, as a collective, agreed that they would postpone giving their kids cell phones until they entered middle school. So when nobody else in the classroom has a cell phone, it makes it a whole lot easier for your child not to have a cellphone,” Pike said.
“If your child is the only one without a smartphone, that may present a whole additional set of stressors for your child,” she added.
Phone-based childhood versus play-based childhood
Children who don’t have a smartphone will need to replace that behavior with other forms of entertainment, the experts said.
“As this new phone-based childhood has come in, we’ve taken away what we call the play-based childhood, where kids used to have much more time being independent outdoors, playing, taking risks, and that is really crucial for human development,” Rausch explained.
He said it’s not enough to just remove the technology, parents have to give your child a new outlet for creativity.
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siblings have fun on trampoline under blue sky Golero | E+ | Getty Images
Sharks swimming off the cost of Brazil have something a little startling coursing through their systems: cocaine.
The drug had never previously been found in wild sharks. But that doesn’t mean these fish are unique; scientists just hadn’t previously tested any shark for coke. The effort was a slam dunk, with the 13 sharks that were examined all testing positive for the drug in their muscles and liver, according to a new study in Science of the Total Environment.
What this means for the sharks is an open question, say the study co-authors Enrico Mendes Saggioro and Rachel Ann Hauser-Davis, an ecotoxicologist and a biologist, respectively, at Brazil’s Oswaldo Cruz Foundation. No one has ever studied the behavioral or physiological impacts of cocaine in sharks, Hauser-Davis says, but her ongoing research on environmental contamination in these apex predators suggests the notorious drug is only one of the animals’ worries.
“We detected high levels of metals and also detected ‘forever chemicals’ [perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFASs], pesticides and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, PCBs, and PBDEs in over 30 shark and ray species,” Hauser-Davis says. PCBs, or polychlorinated biphenyls, are carcinogenic chemicals banned by the U.S. in 1976 and by signatories of the United Nations’ Stockholm Convention in 2001. PBDEs, or polybrominated diphenyl ethers, are flame retardants that can disrupt brain development and hormones.
The researchers became interested in drug testing sharks after Mendes Saggioro detected cocaine while researching river water contaminants in Brazil’s state of Rio de Janeiro. Brazil has an estimated 1.5 million cocaine users, according to the World Drug Report 2020 And many areas in the country lack sewage treatment, meaning drug-contaminated urine goes right into waterways. Drug runners may also sometimes dump loads of cocaine into the ocean to avoid a bust. A Discovery Channel Shark Week special in 2023 explored the notion that sharks might take bites of floating cocaine bales, and it found that sharks did investigate dummy packages dropped near the Florida Keys. But researchers don’t think that’s the main way drugs enter sharks’ system. A 2007 study in Florida found that bull sharks have been contaminated with prescription medications via failed sewage systems. Other fish, which are a very common prey for sharks, have also been shown to be contaminated—so sharks may be exposed directly in the water or take on these compounds from their diet. Given the ubiquity of legal pharmaceuticals showing up in aquatic animals, “to think that you wouldn’t find cocaine or other illegal drugs in sharks is kind of crazy,” says Chris Lowe, a marine biologist and director of the Shark Lab at California State University,, Long Beach, who was not involved in the new study.
The researchers in this study tested Brazilian sharpnose sharks (Rhizoprionodon lalandii), a small species that lives near coastlines, from the waters off Rio de Janeiro. They found an average cocaine concentration of 23 micrograms per kilogram in the sharks’ tissue, as well as an average concentration of seven micrograms per kilogram of benzoylecgonine (the compound that cocaine breaks down into as it is metabolized). This is a fairly low level: studies on the impact of cocaine in humans tend to use doses of around 0.4 milligram per kilogram of body weight (one milligram equals 1,000 micrograms). Female sharks had higher concentrations of cocaine than males, however, and half of the females that were caught were pregnant. Previous research on stingrays, which are relatives of sharks, suggests they can pass on environmental contamination to developing fetuses.
“Adults may have better developed immune systems or enzyme systems to metabolize some of those things, but a developing fetus may not,” Lowe says. “We really don’t know what the developmental impacts could be.”
Mendes Saggioro plans to continue drug testing sharks in the area and to expand this to rays that live in the nearby estuary to see how far the contamination extends. He and his team also want to look at cocaine concentrations in migratory fish that spend less of their life near coastlines.
While researchers unravel the consequences of cocaine-contaminated sharks, there are two major takeaways. One comes from Mendes Saggioro and Hauser-Davis: don’t eat sharks because the animals are both overfished and full of compounds you don’t want in your body.
David Shiffman, a marine conservation biologist at Arizona State University, notes the other takeaway, which focuses on the health of the sharks themselves: “Please don’t dump your trash, including illegal drugs, into the water,” he says.
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Researchers found cocaine in sharpnose sharks off Brazil. These sharks are in the same genus as the Atlantic sharpnose shark, shown here with a student researcher near Cape Lookout in the Outer Banks of North Carolina. Tegan Johnston/Raleigh News & Observer/Tribune News Service via Getty Images
A large clinical trial in South Africa and Uganda has shown that a twice-yearly injection of a new pre-exposure prophylaxis drug gives young women total protection from HIV infection.
The trial tested whether the six-month injection of lenacapavir would provide better protection against HIV infection than two other drugs, both daily pills. All three medications are pre-exposure prophylaxis (or PrEP) drugs.
Physician-scientist Linda-Gail Bekker, principal investigator for the South African part of the study, tells Nadine Dreyer what makes this breakthrough so significant and what to expect next.
Tell us about the trial and what it set out to achieve
The Purpose 1 trial with 5,000 participants took place at three sites in Uganda and 25 sites in South Africa to test the efficacy of lenacapavir and two other drugs.
Lenacapavir (Len LA) is a fusion capside inhibitor. It interferes with the HIV capsid, a protein shell that protects HIV’s genetic material and enzymes needed for replication. It is administered just under the skin, once every six months.
The randomized controlled trial, sponsored by the drug developers Gilead Sciences, tested several things.
The first was whether a six-monthly injection of lenacapavir was safe and would provide better protection against HIV infection as PrEP for women between the ages of 16 and 25 years than Truvada F/TDF, a daily PrEP pill in wide use that has been available for more than a decade.
Secondly, the trial also tested whether Descovy F/TAF, a newer daily pill, was as effective as F/TDF. The newer F/TAF has superior pharmacokinetic properties to F/TDF. Pharmacokinetic refers to the movement of a drug into, through, and out of the body. F/TAF is a smaller pill and is in use among men and transgender women in high-income countries.
The trial had three arms. Young women were randomly assigned to one of the arms in a 2:2:1 ratio (Len LA: F/TAF oral: F/TDF oral) in a double blinded fashion. This means neither the participants nor the researchers knew which treatment participants were receiving until the clinical trial was over.
In eastern and southern Africa, young women are the population who bear the brunt of new HIV infections. They also find a daily PrEP regimen challenging to maintain, for a number of social and structural reasons.
During the randomized phase of the trial, none of the 2,134 women who received lenacapavir contracted HIV. There was 100 percent efficiency.
By comparison, 16 of the 1,068 women (or 1.5%) who took Truvada (F/TDF) and 39 of 2,136 (1.8%) who received Descovy (F/TAF) contracted the HIV virus.
The results at a recent independent data safety monitoring board review led to the recommendation that the trial’s “blinded” phase should be stopped, and all participants should be offered a choice of PrEP.
This board is an independent committee of experts who are put in place at the start of a clinical trial. They see the unblinded data at stipulated times during the trial to monitor progress and safety. They ensure that a trial does not continue if there is harm or a clear benefit in one arm over others.
What is the significance of these trials?
This breakthrough gives great hope that we have a proven, highly effective prevention tool to protect people from HIV.
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Computer illustration depicting destruction of HIV particle.(Kateryna Kon/Science Photo Library/Getty Images)
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.
Illustration by Matteo Giuseppe Pani. Source: Getty.
The mealtimes I dreamed of are happening, just over different kinds of food than the fantasy includes.
James' World 2 