A study published in Nature Neuroscience suggests that brain signals can be used to detect the severity of chronic pain, potentially leading to the development of personalized therapies for individuals suffering from severe pain conditions. MIT Technology Review reports: Researchers from the University of California, San Francisco, implanted electrodes in the brains of four people with chronic pain. The patients then answered surveys about the severity of their pain multiple times a day over a period of three to six months. After they finished filling out each survey, they sat quietly for 30 seconds so the electrodes could record their brain activity. This helped the researchers identify biomarkers of chronic pain in the brain signal patterns, which were as unique to the individual as a fingerprint. Next, the researchers used machine learning to model the results of the surveys. They found they could successfully predict how the patients would score the severity of their pain by examining their brain activity, says Prasad Shirvalkar, one of the study's authors.

"The hope is that now that we know where these signals live, and now that we know what type of signals to look for, we could actually try to track them noninvasively," he says. "As we recruit more patients, or better characterize how these signals vary between people, maybe we can use it for diagnosis." The researchers also found they were able to distinguish a patient's chronic pain from acute pain deliberately inflicted using a thermal probe. The chronic-pain signals came from a different part of the brain, suggesting that it's not just a prolonged version of acute pain, but something else entirely.

The head of the world's leading carbon credit certifier has announced he will step down as CEO next month. From a report: It comes amid concerns that Verra, a Washington-based nonprofit, approved tens of millions of worthless offsets that are used by major companies for climate and biodiversity commitments, according to a joint Guardian investigation earlier this year. In a statement on LinkedIn on Monday, Verra's CEO, David Antonioli, said he would leave his role after 15 years leading the organisation that dominates the $2bn voluntary carbon market, which has certified more than 1bn credits through its verified carbon standard (VCS).

Antonioli thanked current and former staff, and said he was immensely proud of what Verra had accomplished through the environmental standards it operates. He did not give a reason for his departure and said he would be taking a break once he left the role. Judith Simon, Verra's recently appointed president, will serve as interim CEO following Antonioli's departure on 16 June. "The trust you placed in Verra and myself in my role as CEO has meant a lot, and I leave knowing we have made tremendous strides together in addressing some of the world's most vexing environmental and social problems. Working with you on these important issues has been a great highlight of my career," he said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: SpaceX on Sunday evening launched a commercial mission to the International Space Station carrying four people, including former NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson. This "Axiom-2" mission was commanded by Whitson and carried a paying customer named John Shoffner, who served as pilot, as well as two Saudi Arabian mission specialists, Ali al-Qarni and Rayyanah Barnawi. Shoffner and the government of Saudi Arabia procured the seats on Crew Dragon from Axiom, a Houston-based spaceflight company that brokered the mission to the space station. Whitson is an employee of Axiom. The crew of four is flying the second fully private mission to the International Space Station and will spend about a week on board the orbiting laboratory before departing for Earth -- weather permitting -- on May 30.

The Axiom-2 crew members say they will conduct about 20 scientific experiments while on the station. It is not clear how much of this is legitimate science and how much of it is lip service, but certainly it is beneficial for NASA and other space agencies to gather human performance data from a wide variety of individuals like those on the Axiom-2 flight. Perhaps most significantly, the Axiom missions are expanding the envelope of human spaceflight. By purchasing such flights, these pioneering commercial astronauts are providing funding for the development of new technologies and habitats that should, over time, bring down the cost of access to space and living there.

For SpaceX, this was its 10th human space mission since the Demo-2 flight for NASA that launched in May 2020. In less than three years, the company has now put 38 people into orbit. Of these, 26 were professional astronauts from NASA and its international partners, including Russia; eight were on Axiom missions, and four on Jared Isaacman's Inspiration4 orbital free-flyer mission. Isaacman is due to make a second private flight on board Dragon, Polaris Dawn, later this year. [...] Also on Sunday, for the first time, SpaceX returned a Falcon 9 first stage to a ground-based landing pad near its launch site after a human spaceflight mission. The company was able to do this by squeezing a little bit more performance out of its workhorse rocket, which has now launched more than 230 times. You can watch a recording of the launch here.

Space experts convened in Washington DC for 2023's "Humans to Mars Summit," reports Vice, where one panel explored civil engineering and construction on the moon and Mars. Melodie Yasher, who serves as vice president of building design and performance at ICON, previewed her company's vision of lunar infrastructure based on 3D-printing and additive manufacturing technologies... "We're looking into how to create, first, horizontal construction elements such as landing pads and roadways, and then eventually thinking about how we can develop vertical construction elements" such as "unpressurized structures and eventually, habitats that are pressurized and certified for human occupancy," she added. ICON plans to use lunar dirt, known as regolith, as a resource to manufacture a wide range of infrastructure projects on the Moon with a single robotic 3D-printing system. In 2022, the company won a $57.2 million Small Business Innovation Research contract from NASA to develop its lunar construction techniques...

Later in the same panel, Sam Ximenes, founder and CEO of XArc Exploration Architecture Corporation, also offered a sneak peek of the lunar technologies in development at the XArc subsidiary Astroport. Ximenes and his colleagues at Astroport are focused on making Moon bricks out of lunar regolith that can be used to construct landing pads, as part of their "Lunatron" bricklayer vision... Astroport is working with researchers at the University of Texas, San Antonio, to invent an induction furnace nozzle that heats up lunar regolith so that it can melt, then solidify, into bricks. A number of specialized robots would then assemble the materials into landing pads that can accommodate robotic and crewed missions to the Moon's surface. In addition to the company's work on lunar technologies, it has also created concepts for future human missions to Mars.

New research reveals that New York City is sinking, primarily due to the weight of its tall buildings, exacerbating the threat of flooding from rising sea levels. The Guardian reports: The Big Apple may be the city that never sleeps but it is a city that certainly sinks, subsiding by approximately 1-2mm each year on average, with some areas of New York City plunging at double this rate, according to researchers. This sinking is exacerbating the impact of sea level rise which is accelerating at around twice the global average as the world's glaciers melt away and seawater expands due to global heating. The water that flanks New York City has risen by about 9in, or 22cm, since 1950 and major flooding events from storms could be up to four times more frequent than now by the end of the century due to the combination of sea level rise and hurricanes strengthened by climate change.

This trend is being magnified by the sheer bulk of New York City's built infrastructure. The researchers calculated that the city's structures, which include the famous Empire State Building and Chrysler Building, weigh a total of 1.68tn lbs, which is roughly equivalent to the weight of 140 million elephants. This enormous heft is pushing down on a jumble of different materials found in New York City's ground. While many of the largest buildings are placed upon solid bedrock, such as schist, there is a mixture of other sands and clays that have been build over, adding to a sinking effect that is naturally occurring anyway along much of the US east coast as the land reacts to the retreat of huge glaciers following the end of the last ice age. The research has been published in the journal Earth's Future.

NASA has selected Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin to create a lunar lander for an upcoming Artemis mission, with a $3.4 billion contract including an uncrewed "demonstration mission" followed by a human-crewed demo in 2029 for the Artemis V mission. The Verge reports: Currently, the plan for the Artemis V mission is for four astronauts to first fly to the Gateway space station on NASA's Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and the Orion spacecraft. Then, two astronauts will go to the Moon on Blue Origin's Blue Moon lander for "about a weeklong trip to the Moon's South Pole region," NASA said. Blue Origin is the second company to land a contract with NASA for a lunar lander for Artemis. SpaceX was the first, winning the sole contract in 2021, and Blue Origin lost a lawsuit against NASA over the decision later that year. However, NASA announced in 2022 that it would develop a second human lunar lander, inviting space companies to make proposals. "Adding another human landing system partner to NASA's Artemis program will increase competition, reduce costs to taxpayers, support a regular cadence of lunar landings, further invest in the lunar economy, and help NASA achieve its goals on and around the Moon in preparation for future astronaut missions to Mars," NASA said.

Researchers in the Hybrid Quantum Systems Group at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich have put a sapphire crystal weighing 16 micrograms in a quantum-mechanical superposition of two vibrational states. The researchers "excited the crystal into vibrations such that its atoms oscillated back and forth simultaneously and in two opposite directions -- putting the entire crystal in what is known as a state of quantum superposition," reports Scientific American. From the report: As the research group reports in Science, this condition is much like that of the cat in the famous thought experiment of physicist Erwin Schrodinger. In Schrodinger's quantum-mechanical scenario, a cat is simultaneously alive and dead, depending on the decay of an atom that releases a vial of poison. The sapphire crystal in the new experiment has been put in the macroscopic equivalent of that "cat state." Such states can help scientists fathom how and why the laws of the quantum world transition into the rules of classical physics for larger objects.

To get the sapphire, which consists of about 10^17 atoms, to behave like a quantum-mechanical object, the research group set it to oscillate and coupled it to a superconducting circuit. (In the terms of the original thought experiment, the sapphire was the cat, and the superconducting circuit was the decaying atom.) The circuit was used as a qubit, or bit of quantum information that is simultaneously in the states "0" and "1." The circuit's superposition was then transferred to the oscillation of the crystal. Thus, the atoms in the crystal could move in two directions at the same time -- for example, up and down -- just as Schrodinger's cat is dead and alive at the same time. Importantly, the distance between these two states (alive and dead or up and down) had to be greater than the distance ascribed to the quantum uncertainty principle, which the ETH Zurich scientists confirmed. Using the superconducting qubit, the researchers succeeded in determining the distance between the crystal's two vibrational states. At about two billionths of a nanometer, it's tiny -- but still large enough to distinguish those two states from each other beyond doubt.

These findings have "pushed the envelope on what can be considered quantum mechanical in an actual lab experiment," says Shlomi Kotler, a physicist who studies quantum mechanical circuits at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Kotler did not participate in the study. [...] Kotler notes that finding larger cat states is a way of "stretching the limit" of observed quantum-mechanical objects -- in this case, by demonstrating that something as massive as 16 micrograms can exist in this state. (Though, to be clear, 16 micrograms is still microscopic.)

A Phase 1 trail of a universal mRNA-based influenza vaccine is under way at Duke Unversity in Durham, North Carolina. It's being developed by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases' (NAID) Vaccine Research Center (VRC). New Atlas reports: Some 50 participants aged 18-49 will be split into three groups and given 10, 25 and 50 micrograms of the active drug, respectively. When optimal dosage is then determined, another 10 participants will get this measured jab. There will also be an additional group who will receive a current quadrivalent seasonal flu shot, so researchers have a comparative dataset that takes into account the immune response and safety of readily available influenza vaccines. Those in the trial will then be regularly evaluated over 12 months to see how the drug's immune response has fared and to assess its short-term and long-term safety.

This trial comes after the initial NIAID's Vaccine Research Center study on the safety and immune response of the H1ssF (H1 hemagglutinin stabilized stem ferritin) nanoparticle vaccine. The Phase 1 trial, from April 2019 to March 2020, delivered broad antibody responses in the 52 participants aged 18-70. The results of the trial were published last month in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

The H1ssF vaccine targets the flu protein hemagglutinin. One section of this protein -- the 'head' -- changes as the virus evolves into different strains, but the stem of the protein is much slower to be altered and remains fairly constant throughout influenza mutations. The researchers believe herein lies the key to a long-lasting, effective universal preventative vaccine. The new trial combines the H1ssF nanoparticle vaccine with messenger RNA (mRNA) as the platform, with the end goal that it'll deliver a more efficient, targeted immune response.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Monday, the journal Nature released a report from Nanjing University researchers that had attempted to replicate an earlier paper that described a compound that superconducted at room temperature and relatively moderate pressures. Despite persuasive evidence that they've produced the same chemical, the team indicates they see no sign of superconductivity, even down to extremely low temperatures. The failure will undoubtedly raise further questions about the original research, which came from a lab that had an earlier paper on superconductivity retracted.

In 2020, the lab run by Ranga Dias at the University of Rochester reported a carbon-hydrogen-sulfur compound formed at extreme pressures could superconduct at room temperature. But the results were controversial, partly because it wasn't clear that the paper included enough information for anyone else to produce the same conditions and because Dias was uncooperative when asked to share experiment data. Eventually, it became apparent that the team had used undocumented methods of obtaining some of the data underlying the paper, and it was retracted. But Dias continued to claim that the superconductivity was present. (There's a good overview of the controversy on the American Physical Society website.)

Despite Nature retracting one of Dias' papers, the journal published another paper on superconductivity from his group. In this case, a lutetium-hydrogen chemical doped with nitrogen was reported to superconduct at room temperature but at much lower pressures, which could allow it to be tested with somewhat less specialized equipment. Given the history, the claim was greeted with an even higher degree of skepticism than the earlier paper.

Marines and sailors who were exposed to toxic water at Camp Lejeune, N.C., are much more likely to suffer from Parkinson's disease than their counterparts who were stationed elsewhere, according to a study published Monday. From a report: Troops stationed at Camp Lejeune for even just a few months during the years 1975-85 are 70% more likely to suffer from Parkinson's disease than troops who were at Camp Pendleton, Calif., according to findings from researchers who accounted for other factors in making their determination. Their report was published by the Journal of the American Medical Association. The Department of Veterans Affairs-funded study was led by Dr. Samuel Goldman, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco Medical School and a staff physician at the San Francisco VA Medical Center.

The Departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs have acknowledged for years that troops based at Camp Lejeune and other North Carolina facilities from the early 1950s until the mid-1980s were exposed to a number of harmful chemicals in the drinking water, including the solvents benzene and trichloroethylene, which are linked to Parkinson's. Water processed for the base was contaminated by improper chemical-disposal procedures from an off-base dry cleaner, leaky underground storage tanks, industrial spills and other problems for decades, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A million veterans and family members have been potentially affected, according to the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: Is there something about dreaming that enhances our creativity? Or is it just sleep itself? Scientists say they're closer to an answer, thanks to an unusual study that used an electronic glove to guide people's dreams while they slumbered. To conduct the work, researchers invited 50 volunteers, mostly students and professors, to either stay awake or take a nap in a laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Those in the nap group laid down with an eye mask, while wearing a Dormio, a glovelike device with sensors that measure heart rate and muscle tone changes to track sleep stages. A computer linked to the device relayed audio cues to inspire the wearers to dream about specific subjects -- a process called "targeted dream incubation."

Overall, volunteers who dreamt about trees scored 78% higher on the creativity metrics than those who stayed awake just observing their thoughts and 63% higher than those who stayed awake thinking about trees. Participants who napped without hearing the prompt still got a creativity boost, but those who dreamed about trees still performed 48% better than them. The researchers also noticed that the volunteers used the content of their dreams to answer the tests. The person who dreamed that their limbs were made of old wood wrote a story about an oak king with a wood body, for example. The person who dreamed of becoming bigger than trees, meanwhile, listed "toothpick for a giant" as an alternative use for a tree. The research was published in Scientific Reports.

Researchers have discovered that a man with a gene mutation that causes early-onset Alzheimer's disease was protected from developing the disease until the age of 67 due to another mutation in a different gene that blocked the disease from affecting his entorhinal cortex, a brain region associated with memory and cognition. This finding could pave the way for new treatments that delay the onset of Alzheimer's and transform the approach to therapeutics for the disease. The New York Times reports: "This really holds the secret to the next generation of therapeutics," said Dr. Joseph F. Arboleda-Velasquez, a cell biologist at Massachusetts Eye and Ear in Boston and a member of the research team. Dr. Arboleda-Velasquez is a co-founder of a biotechnology company looking to produce drugs that could act on this research. A drug that delays the disease by two decades is not out of the question, said Dr. Diego Sepulveda-Falla, a neuropathologist at the University of Hamburg in Germany and a member of the research team. The mutation results in a potent version of a protein, Reelin, in the entorhinal cortex. That super-potent Reelin ultimately prevents tangled strands of tau proteins from sticking together and forming the structures that are a characteristic of Alzheimer's. The idea is to "go in with a syringe and treat only one area" of the brain, he said.

The man with what the researchers are calling "resilience" to Alzheimer's was part of a decades-long study of 6,000 people living in Colombia who have a gene mutation that causes Alzheimer's in middle age. Many have agreed to genetic testing, brain scans and, after they die, brain autopsies. A few years ago, the same research group in the current study identified a woman who also was protected from Alzheimer's. But in her case, resilience was caused by a mutation in a different gene, APOE. Instead of lacking clumps of tau in one small region of her brain, they were missing in her entire brain. But, the researchers say, they think the two patients are revealing a new pathway to treat Alzheimer's. The two genes that are mutated interrupt a molecular cascade of events needed for tau to aggregate in the brain. The findings were published in the journal Nature Medicine.

The World Health Organization (WHO) on Monday released guidance on non-sugar sweeteners (NSS), recommending against using them to control body weight. From the report: The recommendation is based on the findings of a systematic review of the available evidence which suggests that use of NSS does not confer any long-term benefit in reducing body fat in adults or children. Results of the review also suggest that there may be potential undesirable effects from long-term use of NSS, such as an increased risk of type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, and mortality in adults. The recommendation applies to all people except individuals with pre-existing diabetes and includes all synthetic and naturally occurring or modified non-nutritive sweeteners that are not classified as sugars found in manufactured foods and beverages, or sold on their own to be added to foods and beverages by consumers. Common NSS include acesulfame K, aspartame, advantame, cyclamates, neotame, saccharin, sucralose, stevia and stevia derivatives.

The recommendation does not apply to personal care and hygiene products containing NSS, such as toothpaste, skin cream, and medications, or to low-calorie sugars and sugar alcohols (polyols), which are sugars or sugar derivatives containing calories and are therefore not considered NSS. "Replacing free sugars with NSS does not help with weight control in the long term. People need to consider other ways to reduce free sugars intake, such as consuming food with naturally occurring sugars, like fruit, or unsweetened food and beverages," says Francesco Branca, WHO Director for Nutrition and Food Safety. "NSS are not essential dietary factors and have no nutritional value. People should reduce the sweetness of the diet altogether, starting early in life, to improve their health."

"Astronomers have spotted the largest cosmic explosion ever witnessed, and it's 10 times brighter than any known exploding star, or supernova," reports CNN: The brightness of the explosion, called AT2021lwx, has lasted for three years, while most supernovas are only bright for a few months. The event, still being detected by telescopes, occurred nearly 8 billion light-years away from Earth when the universe was about 6 billion years old. The luminosity of the explosion is also three times brighter than tidal disruption events, when stars fall into supermassive black holes.

But what triggered such a long-lived, massive cosmic explosion? Astronomers said they think a supermassive black hole disrupted a vast gas or dust cloud, potentially thousands of times larger than our sun. It's possible that the cloud was drawn off the course of its orbit and went flying into the black hole, the researchers said. As the black hole swallowed pieces of the hydrogen cloud, shock waves likely reverberated through the cloud's remnants and into the swirling mass of material that orbits around the black hole...

The research team determined that the incredibly luminous event was nearly 100 times brighter than all the 100 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy combined.
The New York Times calls its "one of the most violent and energetic acts of cosmic cannibalism ever witnessed, perhaps the biggest explosion seen yet in the history of the universe... [A] black hole perhaps a billion times as massive as the sun seems to be gorging on a humongous cloud of gas." "Most supernovae and tidal disruption events only last for a couple of months before fading away," said Philip Wiseman, an astrophysicist at the University of Southampton and the lead author of the new paper [published Thursday in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society]. "For something to be bright for two-plus years was immediately very unusual...."

He added that, with a total radiated energy equal to 100 supernovas, "it is one of the most luminous transients ever discovered." Jolt for jolt, that would put it in the company of colliding black holes. "Black holes colliding release energy in gravitational waves at an extreme luminosity — 10 billion times more 'powerful' than this explosion," Dr. Wiseman wrote. "But that power only lasts for 20 milliseconds," adding that this explosion has lasted years.

The Register reports: AI algorithms can screen for pancreatic cancer and predict whether patients will develop the disease up to three years before a human doctor can make the same diagnosis, according to research published in Nature on Monday.

Pancreatic cancer is deadly; the five-year survival rate averages 12 percent. Academics working in Denmark and the US believe AI could help clinicians by detecting pancreatic cancer at earlier stages, if the software can reliably predict which patients are at higher risk of developing the disease. The researchers trained AI algorithms on millions of medical records obtained in the Danish National Patient Registry and the US Veterans Affairs Corporate Data Warehouse... "Cancer gradually develops in the human body, often over many years and fairly slowly, until the disease takes hold," Chris Sander, the study's co-senior investigator and leader of a lab working at the Department of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School, told The Register. "The AI system attempts to learn from signs in the human body that may relate to such gradual changes..."

"AI on real-world clinical records has the potential to produce a scalable workflow for early detection of cancer in the community, to shift focus from treatment of late-stage to early-stage cancer, to improve the quality of life of patients and to increase the benefit/cost ratio of cancer care," the paper reads... The study is still in its early stages, and the software cannot yet be used to run screening programs. Improvements are needed before even a trial can be conducted... Still, the team believes that as the technology improves and operating costs decrease, AI could become a valuable screening tool in the future. "Many types of cancer, especially those hard to identify and treat early, exert a disproportionate toll on patients, families and the healthcare system as a whole," said Søren Brunak, professor of disease systems biology and director of research at the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Protein Research at the University of Copenhagen, a co-senior investigator of the study, said in a statement.

"AI-based screening is an opportunity to alter the trajectory of pancreatic cancer, an aggressive disease that is notoriously hard to diagnose early and treat promptly when the chances for success are highest," he concluded.
Thanks to Slashdot reader Tony Hu for sharing the article.