Algeroth

A decade of research suggests traumatic brain injury, whether from accidents or high-contact sports, is a standout risk factor for Alzheimer’s and other forms of neurodegenerative decline. Some estimates suggest that up to 10 percent of cases could be attributed to at least one prior head injury, but why is not fully understood. Separately, a growing body of research proposes that viral infection, including a common virus known as herpes simplex one, can also increase susceptibility to these diseases. But all three things—head trauma, viral infection, and dementia—have not been directly connected in experimental research, until now.

In lab-grown brain organoids, scientists have been able to model some of the same hallmarks of neurodegenerative disease found in the autopsied brains of humans who suffered these diseases while they were alive. These include accumulations of beta amyloid protein, a metabolic waste product, into structures known as plaques, which disrupt signaling between nerve cells.

For the new lab study, a team of researchers grew a series of brain organoids. Some of the organoids had a dormant form of herpes simplex virus—which exists in 80 percent of people by age 60—while others were virus-free. Then they jolted all of the brain organoids with two different kinds of tiny metal pistons, a model that has been used by other scientists to mimic head trauma in brain organoids.

“We think what we found in the 3-D model applies in the living brain,” says Ruth Itzhaki, a visiting professorial fellow at the University of Oxford and co-author on the new study, which was published this month in the journal Science Signaling. “You get a reactivation of the virus after each blow, and each time damage is done. It all accumulates until, eventually, you get Alzheimer’s.”

In the model organoids that were infected with the virus, after repeated blows to the brain tissue, the dormant viruses woke up and started replicating again. Later, some of the signatures of Alzheimer’s and other dementias began to appear: in particular proliferation of beta-amyloid protein and neuroinflammation. The more blows these tiny organoids took, the more inflammation and beta amyloid the scientists found.

Master mfaume, who heads the biggest kung fu temple in Tanzania, has become a social-media pin-up, with short films of himself and his students showing off their lightning moves. TikTok videos that display them whizzing along walls or fighting bullies in the suburbs of Dar es Salaam, the country’s biggest city, have won 184,000 likes. Master Mfaume says more and more Tanzanians want to study the sport. “People are starting to learn kung fu eagerly—and the number of students is going up a lot.”

Kung fu was brought to Africa in the 1970s by a shadowy Taiwanese figure known as Mr Ming. He popularised Bruce Lee’s martial arts, screening films in shabby township cinemas in South Africa, where audiences loved his message of opposition to white supremacy, cheering as he smashed a sign by a park in Shanghai that read “No Dogs and Chinese Allowed”.

Audiences and film-makers across the continent have since been turning kung fu into an African film genre. Nollywood has churned out many a low-budget kung fu title. Mayor Uguseba, also known as Mr Fantastic, a Nigerian who produced, directed and acted in “A Very Kung Fu Nollywood Movie: The Revenge of Sobei”,said he made the entire film for less than 50,000 naira ($34).

In a survey published in 2017 of Cameroonian cinephiles, 79% said they were interested in kung fu and 85% said films had drawn them to the sport. Kung fu clubs are opening across the continent, from Cape Town’s Shaolin Kung Fu Institute of South Africa to the Ten Tigers of Nile Chinese Wushu Kung-fu Training Club in Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa. Zambia recently hosted the first African Shaolin Kung Fu Games, with more than 150 fighters from 23 countries. And last November 107 fighters from Africa signed up for the World Wushu Championship in Texas, but few were granted visas.

“Are we alone in the universe? That’s the core question we’re trying to answer here,” Meenakshi Wadhwa, a planetary scientist with ties to nasa, tells her spellbound class. As she explains that to answer this “we need to go back to Mars to collect rocks”, one student scribbles notes while another holds up an iPhone to take a snap of the slides. In many ways this lecture hall at Arizona State University (asu) is like any other. A group of keen women sit attentively in the front row; the men are spread out in the back. But the hearing aids hint at how unusual this class is.

Mirabella, a 20-storey “university retirement community” on asu’s campus, is home to over 300 pensioners. When it opened its doors in 2020, the senior-living facility was nearly fully subscribed, despite the pandemic. Most residents are having a ball. They get a university pass, which allows them to attend the same classes and cultural events as students, but with the distinct benefit of not having to take exams. Golf buggies can drive them around the sprawling campus, though many are still fit enough to mountain bike.

In their dorms, four restaurants serve better food than college grub and amenities include an art studio, a pool and gym, and a games room. Only the second floor feels institutional, with a memory-care centre and rooms for residents who need round-the-clock attention. Sometimes one half of a couple moves to this floor, says Lindsey Beagley, head of lifelong university engagement.

This is part of a wider trend. An estimated 85 colleges in America are affiliated with some form of senior living. The idea sprang from two college presidents who wanted to retire on campus in the 1980s. Today, universities from Central Florida to Iowa State to Stanford offer senior-living arrangements. Andrew Carle, at Georgetown University, estimates that as many as 20,000 older Americans live like this.

The problem was, Walnut didn’t like other cranes. She liked people. At the foundation in Baraboo, she’d imprinted, or socially bonded, with her keepers, which can happen when a human is the first living thing a baby crane sees, Rich Beilfuss, the president and CEO of the ICF, told me. “The bird, in essence, sees what it thinks it looks like.” Which means that Walnut may have seen herself as a human being—or, at least, as something other than a crane. Whenever keepers at the ICF brought a male crane around, Walnut would flare her wings and charge at her suitor, threatening his life. So, in 2004, Walnut was sent to live at the Smithsonian, where experts had more experience with assisted-reproduction techniques, including artificial insemination.

Crowe started working at the Virginia center a few months after Walnut arrived, and he knew right away that she was special. Walnut wasn’t wary of keepers the way that other cranes were. Instead of retreating, “she’d come right up to people, making threats,” he said. She’d toss her head and peck at unfamiliar humans. Sometimes she’d even utter a deep growl. But Walnut didn’t treat Crowe that way. She seemed to like him.

“I think it helped that I’m kind of quiet,” Crowe told me. He kept his distance and moved slowly when he entered her exhibit to clean or bring food. He offered small mice, mealworms, and peanuts, which Walnut particularly loved. After a few months, the crane would stand close enough to Crowe that he could stroke her feathers, and eventually, she began to nod her head and flutter her wings in his direction, which Crowe recognized as the standard crane courtship dance. He wasn’t sure what to do, so he followed her lead. “She’d bob her head, so I’d do that too. She’d flap, I’d flap,” he said. When Walnut would pick up a blade of grass or a flower and toss it his way, he’d find a flower and toss it right back. She’d make herself big and sprint around the exhibit, flapping wildly, and Crowe would try to keep up. Eventually, Crowe was able to artificially inseminate Walnut, using a syringe and a semen sample from a male white-naped crane. As a reward, he’d give her a mouse and some verbal praise, and they’d move along with their day. Sure, the whole thing was weird, “but it was kind of the job,” Crowe said. He knew how precious her genes were. His plan, he said, “was to try to work with this behavior,” rather than treat it as something unnatural. (Cranes, like other animals, can be restrained for artificial insemination, but it’s safer, and certainly more pleasant, for the bird if they aren’t.)

The relationship was also educational: Getting so close to Walnut meant that Crowe could observe all of her behaviors minutely. He could watch her preen, and learn all of her subtle behavioral cues and territorial warnings. He watched her catch crayfish in the stream running through her exhibit and snap their pincers off before swallowing them.

Over the next two decades, Crowe spent practically every day with Walnut, observing her, feeding her treats, and bringing her toys to play with. “I’d visit with her, and we’d walk around, dancing if she wanted to dance,” he said. Whenever he’d mow the grass in her exhibit, Walnut would follow close behind, gobbling up the scuttling insects. In the winter, while other birds waded through piles of snow, Walnut would insist that Crowe shovel her a path. Every spring, the pair would repeat the courtship dance and the artificial-insemination process. Over the course of her long life, Walnut laid eight fertile eggs, seven of which hatched new white-naped babies of her species; her first chick, now an 18-year-old female named Brenda, still lives at the Front Royal institute.

Growing up, I fantasized about escaping the chaos of my family for the peace of a grassy quad. Both my parents had mental health issues. My adolescence was its own mess. Over two years I took a dozen psychiatric drugs while attending four different high school programs. At 14, I was sent to a locked facility where my education consisted of work sheets and reading aloud in an on-site classroom. In a life skills class, we learned how to get our G.E.D.s. My college dreams began to seem like delusions. Then one afternoon a staff member handed me a library copy of “Barron’s Guide to the ACT.” I leafed through the onionskin pages and felt a thunderclap of possibility. I couldn’t go to the bathroom without permission, let alone take Advanced Placement Latin or play water polo or do something else that would impress elite colleges. But I could teach myself the years of math I’d missed while switching schools and improve my life in this one specific way.

After nine months in the institution, I entered foster care. I started my sophomore year at yet another high school, only to have my foster parents shuffle my course load at midyear, when they decided Advanced Placement classes were bad for me. In part because of academic instability like this, only 3 to 4 percent of former foster youth get a four-year college degree.

Later I bounced between friends’ sofas and the back seat of my rusty Corolla, using my new-to-me SAT prep book as a pillow. I had no idea when I’d next shower, but I could crack open practice problems and dip into a meditative trance. For those moments, everything was still, the terror of my daily life softened by the fantasy that my efforts might land me in a dorm room of my own, with endless hot water and an extra-long twin bed.

Standardized tests allowed me to look forward, even as every other part of college applications focused on the past. The song and dance of personal statements required me to demonstrate all the obstacles I’d overcome while I was still in the middle of them. When shilling my trauma left me gutted and raw, researching answer elimination strategies was a balm. I could focus on equations and readings, like the scholar I wanted to be, rather than the desperate teenager that I was.

Surgeons in Boston have transplanted a kidney from a genetically engineered pig into an ailing 62-year-old man, the first procedure of its kind. If successful, the breakthrough offers hope to hundreds of thousands of Americans whose kidneys have failed.

A new source of kidneys “could solve an intractable problem in the field — the inadequate access of minority patients to kidney transplants,” said Dr. Winfred Williams, associate chief of the nephrology division at Mass General and the patient’s primary kidney doctor.

If kidneys from genetically modified animals can be transplanted on a large scale, dialysis “will become obsolete,” said Dr. Leonardo V. Riella, medical director for kidney transplantation at Mass General. The hospital’s parent organization, Mass General Brigham, developed the transplant program.

While dialysis keeps people alive, the gold-standard treatment is an organ transplant. Thousands of patients die annually while waiting for a kidney, however, because there is an acute shortage of organs. Just 25,000 kidney transplants are performed each year.

Xenotransplantation — the implantation of an animal’s organ into a human — has for decades been proposed as a potential solution that could make kidneys much more widely available. But the human immune system rejects foreign tissue, causing life-threatening complications, and experts note that long-term rejection can occur even when donors are well matched.

In recent years, scientific advances including gene editing and cloning have edged xenotransplants closer to reality, making it possible to modify animal genes to make the organs more compatible and less likely to be rejected by the immune system.

Take the housing market. Home sale prices have come off of their 2022 peak, but they're still 47% higher than they were in 2019, according to the S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller National Home Price Index. Even if you manage to find a deal, getting a loan is going to be costly. Thanks to the Federal Reserve's interest-rate hikes, mortgage rates are much higher than they were just a couple of years ago: somewhere around 7%, compared with just about 2.5% in 2021. Not only do these high rates weigh on prospective buyers, but anyone thinking of selling their home — hello, boomers — is likely to be turned off because their current mortgage rate is probably lower than a new one. With both buyers and sellers feeling the squeeze from higher mortgage rates, and with homebuilders unable to keep up, the inventory of available homes has collapsed. And as much as a lot of people would like to see a housing-market bubble burst, that's probably not in the cards.

The car market is in a similar situation. Vehicles are expensive. Loans are getting tougher to come by, and even if you manage to get credit, elevated interest rates are making financing costly. Car insurance is much more than it used to be, too. The Bureau of Labor Statistics' most recent consumer price index indicates the cost of car insurance is up by more than 20% over the past year.

When it comes to work, the vibe is static, too. Yes, the labor market is strong, but it's not a great time to go looking for a new job. Companies aren't laying people off en masse, but they're also not bringing employees on board quickly. Hiring has slowed significantly from where it was in 2021 and 2022. And, it's much lower than one would expect with the current unemployment rate.

"Employers are hiring as if there's a relatively weak labor market, not a strong one," said Matt Darling, a senior employment-policy analyst at the Niskanen Center, a center-right think tank.

The downshift in hiring has also tipped the balance of power back toward employers. While wages are still on the upswing, switching jobs may not come with as much of a pay bump as it did during the Great Resignation of 2021 and 2022. That may be fine for those who are happy in their jobs, which many people are, but it's not so great for those who are feeling a little antsy or underappreciated. And for those Americans who find themselves out of work and looking for a new gig, it's going to take a minute. Darling told me that for the unemployed, it takes about twice as long to get a job as it did before 2008. A job search that used to take 10 weeks at a similar unemployment rate now takes 20.

"That's obviously a huge source of dissatisfaction, because 20 weeks is a long time," Darling said. "What's that, five months to be looking for a job?"

In 1961, the government-commissioned Parker Morris Committee published its first report into the ideal standards for state-funded housebuilding. This report set out an ambitious new agenda for how the British population should be housed. It recommended that in outdoor temperatures as low as -1C, houses should be able to maintain temperatures of 18C in living areas, and 13C in the kitchen and circulation space.

This was a radical proposal, which aimed to make more of the home usable for longer — bedrooms, for instance, were too cold for much of the year and were used for little else than sleeping in. The Parker Morris Committee proposed that there should be space “in every home for activities demanding privacy and quiet”.

“Gas central heating, although offering only insipid warmth in its early days, ‘opened up’ the house and encouraged the use of upstairs spaces beyond the basic routine of washing, dressing and sleeping,” says Kathy Davies, a researcher on Just Heat, an international project that investigates historical heating transitions, at Sheffield Hallam University. “It gave individuals the opportunity for privacy and more choice in where they spent their time.”

Central heating was the cornerstone of a wider transformation in British quality of life. Starting in the late 1960s, government funding in the form of “home improvement grants” also helped with bringing toilets indoors, installing hot water and, in more extreme cases of disrepair, refitting entire properties. Our appetite for heat kept growing: in 1970, the average internal temperature in Britain was 12C, according to UK government statistics; by 2010, it had reached 16.9C.

This was more than a change in temperature — it was a wholesale redesign of the cultural and social life of the interior. Central heating, alongside insulation and double glazing, made it more practical to knock through walls and create open living areas. It made the kitchen the main social space, and meant that we could spend more time in bedrooms.

Inhorn, who studied more than 100 women who chose to freeze their eggs for non-medical reasons, found that — contrary to the belief of some feminist scholars — the decision to do so was usually not driven by a desire to focus on their careers. Instead, she says, straight women are finding it increasingly difficult to find suitable partners, owing to “massive discrepancies” in educational attainment between men and women in the US.

But if egg-freezing seemingly offers a possible solution to this demographic problem, it does so only for the lucky few. “I don’t think it’s ever going to be a revolution like the [contraceptive] pill because it is so exclusionary,” Inhorn says. “It’s way too expensive.”

As time has gone on, a minor industry of academic detractors has emerged to argue that MBAs are generally less useful than their hefty price tags suggest, and might even be a cause for concern.

An early blow was delivered more than 20 years ago by Canadian management thinker, professor Henry Mintzberg, who has called MBA graduates “a menace to society”.

When he and a colleague tracked 19 Harvard Business School graduates to see how they had fared since being dubbed US business superstars in 1990, they found 10 had suffered serious setbacks, such as bankruptcy or the boot, and the records of another four were “questionable”. 

More troubling results emerged in bigger studies, such as a 2015 paper by Danny Miller of HEC Montreal business school and the University of Rhode Island’s Xiaowei Xu.

Xu and Miller, who has an MBA himself, had initially planned to study the effects of hubris on 444 US chief executives who had scored an admiring cover story in a top US business magazine between 1970 and 2008. But they discovered something far more interesting: the cover story CEOs with an MBA were noticeably worse at sustaining superior performance than the MBA-free ones.

MBA graduates were also more likely to expand their companies with acquisitions rather than organic growth, sacrificing earnings and cash flow in the process, yet their own pay rose at a faster rate than that of their counterparts who had outperformed them.

When the two researchers then did an even larger study of 5,000 CEOs, they confirmed that those with an MBA degree operated quite differently to the non-MBA bosses, spending less on R&D, say, and using accounting techniques to flatter their firm’s earnings. 

These ploys prompted a swift jump in profits, followed by a decline that led to a bigger fall in their company’s market value compared with outfits run by CEOs without an MBA — whose pay was again less impressive.

As the academics repeatedly cautioned, none of this proves an MBA causes these results. Self-serving short-termists might be more drawn to MBAs, and boards seeking quick profits might be keener to hire them. It’s also worth remembering Harvard MBA grads range from disgraced Enron boss, Jeffrey Skilling, to Wall Street superstar, Jamie Dimon.

Still, as Danny Miller said when I spoke to him last week, the research suggested chief executives with MBAs were often more short-term-oriented individuals whose companies “didn’t do quite as well as they did themselves”.

Rambo started coming in 1991, when he was 8-10 years old. He was bold and aggressive and would come to the national park entrance, where jeep drivers gave him water in buckets. He would mock charge them. In the early 1990s, there were only a couple jeeps taking tourists into the park to see wildlife. The tourists came from Colombo — they were from the elite class.

Rambo would hang out with other boys, and the boys didn’t like the jeeps. They would charge the vehicles. One out of 10 times when driving a jeep, a driver would face an elephant charging the vehicle. But the drivers continued to give Rambo water. He started tolerating people and would move two miles up the road, patrolling the area.

Then the fruit stalls came. Out of love, people started feeding him. The fruit and vegetable vendors, they started feeding elephants so they would stay there, which helped their businesses. They trained Rambo to stay by the road. By 2000, he moved toward the dam and a few boys followed him.

By 2010, there were around 40 elephants lined up on the road just south of the national park, begging by the fruit stalls. Rambo is like a leader of the males. His followers stayed by the fruit stalls but Rambo patrolled back and forth. He knew local people. He was like the ambassador to humans. The other males don’t have the same privileges.

In 2016, someone with money intervened and transported Rambo to another location, but he came back to the dam after a month. The team had used harnesses to translocate him and it damaged his groin area. He had issues with swelling — his penis got swollen and infected. He was treated by the local doctor and his treatment was long-term. His metabolism is upside down from eating rubbish, like too many sweet fruits.

Imran Khan, Pakistan’s former prime minister, has spent the duration of the country’s electoral campaign in jail, disqualified from running in what experts have described as one of the least credible general elections in the country’s 76-year history.

But from behind bars, he has been rallying his supporters in recent months with speeches that use artificial intelligence to replicate his voice, part of a tech-savvy strategy his party deployed to circumvent a crackdown by the military.

And on Saturday, as official counts showed candidates aligned with his party, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, or P.T.I., winning the most seats in a surprise result that threw the country’s political system into chaos, it was Mr. Khan’s A.I. voice that declared victory.

“I had full confidence that you would all come out to vote. You fulfilled my faith in you, and your massive turnout has stunned everybody,” the mellow, slightly robotic voice said in the minute-long video, which used historical images and footage of Mr. Khan and bore a disclaimer about its A.I. origins. The speech rejected the victory claim of Mr. Khan’s rival, Nawaz Sharif, and urged supporters to defend the win.

This is not the first time political parties have used artificial intelligence.

In South Korea, the then-opposition People Power Party created an A.I. powered avatar of its presidential candidate, Yoon Suk Yeol, which interacted virtually with voters and spoke in slang and quips to appeal to a younger demographic ahead of the 2022 vote. (He won.)

For generations, America waged a war against the wolf; now with the animals repopulating the Mountain West, the wolf war has taken on a new shape: pitting neighbors against neighbors as they fight over how to manage wolves.

Environmentalists believe that wolves not only deserve a place in the environment but also can help repair it, while livestock producers often feel they shoulder too many costs of living alongside an animal that city dwellers simply want to gawk at. These disagreements have boiled over into fraught political battles, most recently in Colorado, where conservative ranching interests fought a narrowly passed ballot measure to reintroduce wolves to the Rockies right up until mid-December, when 10 wolves were released into the wilderness.

The rise in sexually transmitted infections in the United States has taken a particularly tragic turn: More than 3,700 cases of congenital syphilis were reported in 2022, roughly 11 times the number recorded a decade ago, according to data released on Tuesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Syphilis was nearly eliminated in the United States about 20 years ago, but rose by 74 percent, to 177,000 cases, between 2017 and 2021. Other S.T.I.s are also on the rise: In 2021, there were 1.6 million cases of chlamydia and more than 700,000 cases of gonorrhea.

The numbers were rising even before the pandemic, but in the past few years, a drop in routine preventive care, a shift to more telehealth appointments for prenatal care, and reduced clinic hours may have exacerbated the situation.

Nationwide, about one in five pregnant women who were diagnosed with syphilis did not receive any prenatal care, suggesting that they were tested in another setting, such as an emergency room, prison or needle-exchange program.

Syphilis was resurging primarily among men who have sex with men, but in recent years it has crept into heterosexual networks. Among women of reproductive age, syphilis diagnoses rose by 17.2 percent between 2021 and 2022, according to the new report.

While many other types of jellyfish can only detect light—sensing the direction it is coming from and following it—T. cystophora can also discern the contrast between dark and light, which means it can form images. “Two of their eye-structures are camera-type eyes which are basically built like yours and mine,” says senior author Anders Lydik Garm, associate professor of marine biology of the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. 

Garm and study co-author Jan Bielecki, who studies neurobiology at the Kiel University, Germany wanted to know whether the jellies’ behavior—swerving between dark and light—was hardwired, or whether the jellies could learn new behavior. In their natural habitat, the jellies use their visual sense of contrast to distinguish the dark tree roots from the brighter water to avoid bumping into the tangles of protruding roots. “They use the contrast, because contrast is the difference between how dark the root is and how bright the water is,” explains Garm. “That contrast is how they evaluate distance.” But could they learn to avoid obstacles that look different from the ones in their natural environment? 

Garm and Bielecki set up an experiment. They outfitted a fish tank with a bunch of gray and white plastic strips, which were meant to mimic the tree roots and light streaming through. The trick was that to the jellyfish, the light gray color looked like a root that was simply far away. “In reality it wasn’t far away. It just seemed far away because we painted it gray,” Garm explains. Initially, the jellies perceived the gray “roots” as being remote—and bumped into them. But after a few bumps, they would learn to avoid the gray strips. “They get the mechanical sensory input telling them, OK, this root was much closer than it originally appeared,” says Garm—and they start changing their behavior.

Less than 10 minutes into the experiment, the jellies quadrupled the number of successful pivots to avoid collision, scientists found. “They learned that in this condition, low contrast still means that the ‘root’ is close by and then within three to five errors of bumping into the root they learn to turn earlier and not bump into it,” Garm says. “We were surprised at how quickly they learned.” This form of learning is called associative learning: The jellies learn to associate sensory stimuli—such as images of the gray strips—with bumps, to remember this association and then adapt future behavior.