Satellite-to-phones service provider AST SpaceMobile announced a deal with Verizon to provide remote coverage across the United States. "Verizon's deal effectively includes a $100 million raise for AST, as well, in the form of $65 million in commercial service prepayments and $35 million in debt via convertible notes," reports CNBC. "The companies said that $45 million of the prepayments 'are subject to certain conditions' such as needed regulatory approvals and signing of a definitive commercial agreement." Shares of AST jumped 69% in trading to close at $9.02 a share -- the largest single day rise for the company's stock since it went public in 2021. From the report: AST SpaceMobile is building satellites to provide broadband service to unmodified smartphones, in the nascent "direct-to-device" communications market. [...] The Verizon partnership follows a similar pattern to AT&T's work with AST. Back in January, AT&T was a co-debt investor in the company alongside Google and Vodafone. The companies then established the commercial agreement earlier this month, which "lays out in much more detail how we will ultimately offer service together," AST's Chief Strategy Officer Scott Wisniewski said in a statement to CNBC. [...] AST expects to launch its first five commercial satellites later this year.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: A sophisticated joint European-Japanese satellite has launched to measure how clouds influence the climate. Some low-level clouds are known to cool the planet, others at high altitude will act as a blanket. The Earthcare mission will use a laser and a radar to probe the atmosphere to see precisely where the balance lies. It's one of the great uncertainties in the computer models used to forecast how the climate will respond to increasing levels of greenhouse gases. "Many of our models suggest cloud cover will go down in the future and that means that clouds will reflect less sunlight back to space, more will be absorbed at the surface and that will act as an amplifier to the warming we would get from carbon dioxide," Dr Robin Hogan, from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, told BBC News.

The 2.3-tonne satellite was sent up from California on a SpaceX rocket. The project is led by the European Space Agency (ESA), which has described it as the organization's most complex Earth observation venture to date. Certainly, the technical challenge in getting the instruments to work as intended has been immense. It's taken fully 20 years to go from mission approval to launch. Earthcare will circle the Earth at a height of about 400km (250 miles). It's actually got four instruments in total that will work in unison to get at the information sought by climate scientists.

The simplest is an imager -- a camera that will take pictures of the scene passing below the spacecraft to give context to the measurements made by the other three instruments. Earthcare's European ultraviolet laser will see the thin, high clouds and the tops of clouds lower down. It will also detect the small particles and droplets (aerosols) in the atmosphere that influence the formation and behavior of clouds. The Japanese radar will look into the clouds, to determine how much water they are carrying and how that's precipitating as rain, hail and snow. And a radiometer will sense how much of the energy falling on to Earth from the Sun is being reflected or radiated back into space.

Witnessing the blood-red fires of a volcanic eruption on Earth is memorable. But to see molten rock bleed out of a volcano on a different planet would be extraordinary. That is close to what scientists have spotted on Venus: two vast, sinuous lava flows oozing from two different corners of Earth's planetary neighbor. From a report: "After you see something like this, the first reaction is 'wow,'" said Davide Sulcanese, a doctoral student at the Universita d'Annunzio in Pescara, Italy, and an author of a study reporting the discovery in the journal Nature Astronomy, published on Monday. Earth and Venus were forged at the same time. Both are made of the same primeval matter, and both are the same age and size. So why is Earth a paradise overflowing with water and life, while Venus is a scorched hellscape with acidic skies?

Volcanic eruptions tinker with planetary atmospheres. One theory holds that, eons ago, several apocalyptic eruptions set off a runaway greenhouse effect on Venus, turning it from a temperate, waterlogged world into an arid desert of burned glass. To better understand its volcanism, scientists hoped to catch a Venusian eruption in the act. But although the planet is known to be smothered in volcanoes, an opaque atmosphere has prevented anyone from seeing an eruption the way spacecraft have spotted them on Io, the hypervolcanic moon of Jupiter. In the 1990s, NASA's spacecraft Magellan used cloud-penetrating radar to survey most of the planet. But back then, the relatively low-resolution images made spotting fresh molten rock a troublesome task.

Retailers are being urged to stop making everyday products such as drinks bottles, outdoor furniture and toys out of brightly coloured plastic after researchers found it degrades into microplastics faster than plainer colours. From a report: Red, blue and green plastic became "very brittle and fragmented," while black, white and silver samples were "largely unaffected" over a three-year period, according to the findings of the University of Leicester-led project. The scale of environmental pollution caused by plastic waste means that microplastics, or tiny plastic particles, are everywhere. Indeed, they were recently found in human testicles, with scientists suggesting a possible link to declining sperm counts in men.

In this case, scientists from the UK and the University of Cape Town in South Africa used complementary studies to show that plastics of the same composition degrade at different rates depending on the colour. The UK researchers put bottle lids of various colours on the roof of a university building to be exposed to the sun and the elements for three years. The South African study used plastic items found on a remote beach. "It's amazing that samples left to weather on a rooftop in Leicester and those collected on a windswept beach at the southern tip of the African continent show similar results," said Dr Sarah Key, who led the project. "What the experiments showed is that even in a relatively cool and cloudy environment for only three years, huge differences can be seen in the formation of microplastics." This field study, published in the journal Environmental Pollution, is the first such proof of this effect. It suggests that retailers and manufacturers should give more consideration to the colour of short-lived plastics.

A North Korean rocket carrying its second spy satellite exploded midair on Monday, state media reported, after its neighbors strongly rebuked its planned launch. From a report: The North's official Korean Central News Agency said it launched a spy satellite aboard a new rocket at its main northwestern space center. But KCNA said the rocket blew up during a first-stage flight soon after liftoff due to a suspected engine problem. Earlier Monday, North Korea had notified Japan's coast guard about its plans to launch "a satellite rocket," with a warning to exercise caution in the waters between the Korean Peninsula and China and east of the main Philippine island of Luzon during a launch window from Monday through June 3.

South Korea's Joint Chiefs of Staff later said it detected a launch trajectory believed to be of a spy satellite fired from the North's main space center at 10:44 p.m. on Monday. Four minutes later, many fragments were spotted in the waters, it said. Japanese Prime Minister's Office earlier issued a missile alert for the island of Okinawa following North Korea's launch. The alert was lifted soon after. Japan's NHK public television earlier reported that an image captured by a camera in northeastern China showed an orange light in the sky and then an apparent explosion a moment later.

Studies show ultraprocessed food "encourages overeating but may leave the eater undernourished," writes Ars Technica.

But the food industry's response has been "a ferocious campaign against regulation." In part it has used the same lobbying playbook as its fight against labeling and taxation of "junk food" high in calories: big spending to influence policymakers. FT analysis of US lobbying data from non-profit Open Secrets found that food and soft drinks-related companies spent $106 million on lobbying in 2023, almost twice as much as the tobacco and alcohol industries combined. Last year's spend was 21 percent higher than in 2020, with the increase driven largely by lobbying relating to food processing as well as sugar.

In an echo of tactics employed by cigarette companies, the food industry has also attempted to stave off regulation by casting doubt on the research of scientists like [Brazilian nutritional scientist Carlos] Monteiro. "The strategy I see the food industry using is deny, denounce, and delay," says Barry Smith, director of the Institute of Philosophy at the University of London and a consultant for companies on the multisensory experience of food and drink.

So far the strategy has proved successful. Just a handful of countries, including Belgium, Israel, and Brazil, currently refer to UPFs in their dietary guidelines. But as the weight of evidence about UPFs grows, public health experts say the only question now is how, if at all, it is translated into regulation. "There's scientific agreement on the science," says Jean Adams, professor of dietary public health at the MRC Epidemiology Unit at the University of Cambridge. "It's how to interpret that to make a policy that people aren't sure of."

[...] As researchers have learned more about the link between UPFs and poor health outcomes, companies have remained largely silent about these risks, leaving trade bodies that advocate on their behalf to argue loudly against the validity of the research.

"About 1 in 9 children in the U.S., between the ages of 3 and 17, have been diagnosed with ADHD," reports NPR: That's according to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that calls attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder an "expanding public health concern."

Researchers found that in 2022, 7.1 million kids and adolescents in the U.S. had received an ADHD diagnosis — a million more children than in 2016. That jump in diagnoses was not surprising, given that the data was collected during the pandemic, says Melissa Danielson, a statistician with the CDC's National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities and the study's lead author. She notes that other studies have found that many children experienced heightened stress, depression and anxiety during the pandemic. "A lot of those diagnoses... might have been the result of a child being assessed for a different diagnosis, something like anxiety or depression, and their clinician identifying that the child also had ADHD," Danielson says. The increase in diagnoses also comes amid growing awareness of ADHD — and the different ways that it can manifest in children...

The study, which appears in the Journal of Clinical Child & Adolescent Psychology, was based on data from the National Survey of Children's Health, which gathers detailed information from parents.

UPI reports that the British government covered up "a multi-decade tainted blood scandal, leading to thousands of related deaths, a report published Monday found." Britain's National Health Service allowed blood tainted with HIV and Hepatitis to be used on patients without their knowledge, leading to 3,000 deaths and more than 30,000 infections, according to the 2,527-page final report by Justice Brian Justice Langstaff, a former judge on the High Court of England and Wales. Langstaff oversaw a five-year investigation into the use of tainted blood and blood products in Britain's healthcare system between 1970 and 1991. The report blames multiple administrations over the time period for knowingly exposing victims to unacceptable risks...

In several cases, health officials lied about the risks to patients... The NHS also gave patients false reassurances, an attempt to "save face," failing victims "not once but repeatedly...." The situation could "largely, though not entirely, have been avoided," Langstaff found...

The British government on Monday began operating a support phone line for people and their families affected by the tainted blood scandal.
The article notes that Langstaff described the coverup as "subtle" but "pervasive" and "chilling in its implications...

"To save face and to save expense, there has been a hiding of much of the truth."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the article.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A team of physicists has discovered that it's possible to build a real, actual, physical warp drive and not break any known rules of physics. One caveat: the vessel doing the warping can't exceed the speed of light, so you're not going to get anywhere interesting any time soon. But this research still represents an important advance in our understanding of gravity. [...] In a paper accepted for publication in the journal Classical and Quantum Gravity, [an international team of physicists led by Jared Fuchs at the University of Alabama in Huntsville] dug deep into relativity to explore if any version of a warp drive could work. The equations of general relativity are notoriously difficult to solve, especially in complex cases such as a warp drive. So the team turned to software algorithms; instead of trying to solve the equations by hand, they explored their solutions numerically and verified that they conformed to the energy conditions.

The team did not actually attempt to construct a propulsion device. Instead, they explored various solutions to general relativity that would allow travel from point to point without a vessel undergoing any acceleration or experiencing any overwhelming gravitational tidal forces within the vessel, much to the comfort of any imagined passengers. They then checked whether these solutions adhered to the energy conditions that prevent the use of exotic matter. The researchers did indeed discover a warp drive solution: a method of manipulating space so that travelers can move without accelerating. There is no such thing as a free lunch, however, and the physicality of this warp drive does come with a major caveat: the vessel and passengers can never travel faster than light. Also disappointing: the fact that the researchers behind the new work don't seem to bother with figuring out what configurations of matter would allow the warping to happen. The findings have been published in the journal Classical and Quantum Gravity.

Countries around the globe have failed to reach consensus on the terms of a treaty that would unify the world in a strategy against the inevitable next pandemic, trumping the nationalist ethos that emerged during Covid-19. From a report: The deliberations, which were scheduled to be a central item at the weeklong meeting of the World Health Assembly beginning Monday in Geneva, aimed to correct the inequities in access to vaccines and treatments between wealthier nations and poorer ones that became glaringly apparent during the Covid pandemic. Although much of the urgency around Covid has faded since the treaty negotiations began two years ago, public health experts are still acutely aware of the pandemic potential of emerging pathogens, familiar threats like bird flu and mpox, and once-vanquished diseases like smallpox.

"Those of us in public health recognize that another pandemic really could be around the corner," said Loyce Pace, an assistant secretary at the Department of Health and Human Services, who oversees the negotiations in her role as the United States liaison to the World Health Organization. Negotiators had hoped to adopt the treaty next week. But canceled meetings and fractious debates -- sometimes over a single word -- stalled agreement on key sections, including equitable access to vaccines. The negotiating body plans to ask for more time to continue the discussions.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ScienceAlert: A team of scientists has shown that crows can 'count' out loud -- producing a specific and deliberate number of caws in response to visual and auditory cues. While other animals such as honeybees have shown an ability to understand numbers, this specific manifestation of numeric literacy has not yet been observed in any other non-human species. "Producing a specific number of vocalizations with purpose requires a sophisticated combination of numerical abilities and vocal control," writes the team of researchers led by neuroscientist Diana Liao of the University of Tubingen in Germany. "Whether this capacity exists in animals other than humans is yet unknown. We show that crows can flexibly produce variable numbers of one to four vocalizations in response to arbitrary cues associated with numerical values."

The ability to count aloud is distinct from understanding numbers. It requires not only that understanding, but purposeful vocal control with the aim of communication. Humans are known to use speech to count numbers and communicate quantities, an ability taught young. [...] "Our results demonstrate that crows can flexibly and deliberately produce an instructed number of vocalizations by using the 'approximate number system', a non-symbolic number estimation system shared by humans and animals," the researchers write in their paper. "This competency in crows also mirrors toddlers' enumeration skills before they learn to understand cardinal number words and may therefore constitute an evolutionary precursor of true counting where numbers are part of a combinatorial symbol system." The findings have been published in the journal Science.

Using the Euclid space telescope, astronomers have discovered dozens of rogue planets drifting without stars in the Orion nebula. The Guardian reports: The European Space Agency (Esa) launched the $1 billion observatory last summer on a six-year mission to create a 3D map of the cosmos. Armed with its images, scientists hope to understand more about the mysterious 95% of the universe that is unexplained. The first wave of scientific results come from only 24 hours of observations, which revealed 11m objects in visible light and 5m in infrared. Along with the rogue planets, the researchers describe new star clusters, dwarf galaxies and very distant, bright galaxies from the first billion years of the universe.

A flurry of new images from the same observations are the largest ever taken in space and demonstrate the stunning wide-field views that astronomers can expect from Euclid in the coming years. Among those released on Thursday is a breathtaking image of Messier 78, a vibrant star nursery shrouded in interstellar dust, that reveals complex filaments of gas and dust in unprecedented detail. One of the newly released images shows Abell 2390, a giant conglomeration of more than 50,000 Milky Way-like galaxies. Such galaxy clusters contain up to 10 trillion times as much mass as the sun, much of which is believed to be elusive dark matter. Another image of the Abell 2764 galaxy cluster reveals hundreds of galaxies orbiting within a halo of dark matter.

Other images capture NGC 6744, one of the largest spiral galaxies in the nearby universe, and the Dorado group of galaxies, where evolving and merging galaxies produce shell-like structures and vast, curving tidal tails. The rogue planets spotted by Euclid are about 3m years old, making them youngsters on the cosmic scale. They are at least four times as big as Jupiter and were detected thanks to the warmth they emit. Astronomers know they are free-floating because they are so far away from the nearest stars. The celestial strays are destined to drift through the galaxy unless they encounter a star that pulls them into orbit.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: Hospital staff are forced to write notes by hand and deliver orders for tests and prescriptions in person in the ongoing fallout from a recent ransomware attack at the national health system Ascension. Ascension is one of the largest health systems in the United States, with some 140 hospitals located across 19 states and D.C. A spokesperson said in a statement that "unusual activity" was first detected on multiple technology network systems Ascension uses on Wednesday, May 8. Later, representatives confirmed that some of Ascension's electronic health records systems had been affected, along with systems used "to order certain tests, procedures and medications."

Some phone capabilities have also been offline, and patients have been unable to access portals used to view medical records and get in touch with their doctors. Due to these interruptions, hospital staff had to shift to "manual and paper based" processes. "Our care teams are trained for these kinds of disruptions and have initiated procedures to ensure patient care delivery continues to be safe and as minimally impacted as possible," an Ascension spokesperson said in a May 8 statement. Kris Fuentes, who works in the neonatal intensive care unit at Ascension Seton Medical Center in Austin, said she remembers when paper charting was the norm. But after so many years of relying on digital systems, she said her hospital wasn't ready to make such an abrupt shift. "It's kind of like we went back 20 years, but not even with the tools we had then," Fuentes said. "Our workflow has just been really unorganized, chaotic and at times, scary."

Fuentes said orders for medication, labs and imaging are being handwritten and then distributed by hand to various departments, whereas typically these requests are quickly accessed via computer. A lack of safety checks with these backup methods has introduced errors, she said, and every task is taking longer to complete. "Medications are taking longer to get to patients, lab results are taking longer to get back," she said. "Doctors need the lab results, often, to decide the next treatment plan, but if there's a delay in access to the labs, there's a delay in access to the care that they order." As of Tuesday, Ascension still had no timeline for when the issues might be resolved, and reported that it continued to work with "industry-leading cybersecurity experts" to investigate the ransomware attack and restore affected systems. The FBI and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency are also involved in the investigation. "While Ascension facilities remain open, a health system representative said on May 9 that in some cases, emergency patients were being triaged to different hospitals, and some non-emergent appointments and procedures were postponed," reports NPR. "Certain Ascension pharmacies are not operational, and patients are being asked to bring in prescription bottles or numbers."

"Individuals who are enrolled in Ascension health insurance plans are being directed to mail in monthly payments while the electronic payment system is down."

Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from Ars Technica: The first crewed test flight of Boeing's long-delayed Starliner spacecraft won't take off as planned Saturday and could face a longer postponement as engineers evaluate a stubborn leak of helium from the capsule's propulsion system. NASA announced the latest delay of the Starliner test flight late Tuesday. Officials will take more time to consider their options for how to proceed with the mission after discovering the small helium leak on the spacecraft's service module.

The space agency did not describe what options are on the table, but sources said they range from flying the spacecraft "as is" with a thorough understanding of the leak and confidence it won't become more significant in flight, to removing the capsule from its Atlas V rocket and taking it back to a hangar for repairs. Theoretically, the former option could permit a launch attempt as soon as next week. The latter alternative could delay the launch until at least late summer.

"The team has been in meetings for two consecutive days, assessing flight rationale, system performance, and redundancy," NASA said in a statement Tuesday night. "There is still forward work in these areas, and the next possible launch opportunity is still being discussed. NASA will share more details once we have a clearer path forward."

The United States has assessed that Russia launched what is likely a counter space weapon last week that's now in the same orbit as a U.S. government satellite, Pentagon spokesman Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder confirmed Tuesday. From a report: "What I'm tracking here is on May 16, as you highlighted, Russia launched a satellite into low Earth orbit that we that we assess is likely a counter space weapon presumably capable of attacking other satellites in low Earth orbit," Ryder said when questioned by ABC News about the information, which was made public earlier Tuesday by Robert Wood, deputy U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

"Russia deployed this new counter space weapon into the same orbit as a U.S. government satellite," Ryder continued. "And so assessments further indicate characteristics resembling previously deployed counter space payloads from 2019 and 2022." Ryder added: "Obviously, that's something that we'll continue to monitor. Certainly, we would say that we have a responsibility to be ready to protect and defend the space domain and ensure continuous and uninterrupted support to the joint and combined force. And we'll continue to balance the need to protect our interests in space with our desire to preserve a stable and sustainable space environment." When asked if the Russian counter space weapon posed a threat to the U.S. satellite, Ryder responded: "Well, it's a counter space weapon in the same orbit as a U.S. government satellite."

Borrowing the idea of "bug bounties" from the technology industry could provide a systematic way to detect and correct the errors that litter the scientific literature. Malte Elson, writing at Nature: Just as many industries devote hefty funding to incentivizing people to find and report bugs and glitches, so the science community should reward the detection and correction of errors in the scientific literature. In our industry, too, the costs of undetected errors are staggering. That's why I have joined with meta-scientist Ian Hussey at the University of Bern and psychologist Ruben Arslan at Leipzig University in Germany to pilot a bug-bounty programme for science, funded by the University of Bern. Our project, Estimating the Reliability and Robustness of Research (ERROR), pays specialists to check highly cited published papers, starting with the social and behavioural sciences (see go.nature.com/4bmlvkj). Our reviewers are paid a base rate of up to 1,000 Swiss francs (around US$1,100) for each paper they check, and a bonus for any errors they find. The bigger the error, the greater the reward -- up to a maximum of 2,500 francs.

Authors who let us scrutinize their papers are compensated, too: 250 francs to cover the work needed to prepare files or answer reviewer queries, and a bonus 250 francs if no errors (or only minor ones) are found in their work. ERROR launched in February and will run for at least four years. So far, we have sent out almost 60 invitations, and 13 sets of authors have agreed to have their papers assessed. One review has been completed, revealing minor errors. I hope that the project will demonstrate the value of systematic processes to detect errors in published research. I am convinced that such systems are needed, because current checks are insufficient. Unpaid peer reviewers are overburdened, and have little incentive to painstakingly examine survey responses, comb through lists of DNA sequences or cell lines, or go through computer code line by line. Mistakes frequently slip through. And researchers have little to gain personally from sifting through published papers looking for errors. There is no financial compensation for highlighting errors, and doing so can see people marked out as troublemakers.

The FDA has approved Neuralink to implant its brain chip in a second patient. According to the Wall Street Journal, the company also outlined fixes to an electrode problem that caused its chip to detach from the first patient's brain. They were unharmed and could still control a computer mouse using their thoughts. Axios reports: Neuralink, which is owned by Elon Musk, said it is seeking applications for another patient with quadriplegia to test if the device can allow a person to do tasks like control a phone and computer. It outlined fixes that included embedding some of the device's wiring deeper into the brain, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing a document and a person familiar with the company.

Neuralink rival Synchron is preparing a large-scale clinical trial with an eye toward seeking commercial approval of its implant. Mass General Brigham has also launched a collaborative effort with stakeholders and the FDA to accelerate the development of the implanted devices.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Medical Xpress: A team of medical researchers at the National Children's Medical Center, Children's Hospital, Fudan University, in China, has developed a technique to freeze and thaw brain tissue without causing damage. In their study, published in the journal Cell Reports Methods, the group tested bathing brain organoid tissue in candidate chemicals before freezing them using liquid nitrogen. [...] The work involved dipping or soaking brain organoids (brain tissue grown from stem cells) in candidate compounds and then freezing and thawing them to see how they fared. After many attempts, they found one combination of solutions that worked best -- a mix of ethylene glycol, methylcellulose DMSO and Y27632. They named the solution mix MEDY.

The research team then tested MEDY under a variety of conditions to see how well it prevented damage from freezing. The conditions involved changing variables, such as the age of the organoids prior to freezing and how long they were soaked in a MEDY solution. They then allowed the organoids to resume growing after they were thawed for up to 150 days. The researchers found little difference between organoids that had been frozen and those that had not -- even those that had been frozen for as long as 18 months. As a final test, the research team used their technique on a sample of brain tissue obtained from a live human patient and found that it worked just as well.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Hims & Hers Health, one of the online pharmacies that got its start prescribing dick pills, is now offering knockoff versions of GLP-1 weight loss drugs. Hims & Hers says it will offer drugs that mimic Ozempic and Wegovy, the active ingredient of which is semaglutide. The copycat versions are made by compounding pharmacies. The formulations aren't the same as the FDA-approved versions of the drug and haven't been directly evaluated by the FDA, either. But they're cheaper than the real thing: $199 a month, compared to the branded version, which can cost more than $1,000 a month without insurance.

Compounding pharmacies can make knockoff versions of branded drugs when they are in shortage, as the GLP-1 drugs -- prescribed for diabetes and weight loss -- currently are. The FDA has already received reports of adverse events for compounded versions of semaglutide. Hims & Hers says it "conducted extensive research for over a year" into finding a supplier, but does not name the one it chose to partner with. "Over the last year, we have grown in our conviction -- based on our medical experts' evaluation and the strength of our infrastructure -- that if done properly, compounded GLP-1s are safe and effective," the company said in its statement.

Microplastics have been found in human testicles, with researchers saying the discovery might be linked to declining sperm counts in men. From a report: The scientists tested 23 human testes, as well as 47 testes from pet dogs. They found microplastic pollution in every sample. The human testicles had been preserved and so their sperm count could not be measured. However, the sperm count in the dogs' testes could be assessed and was lower in samples with higher contamination with PVC. The study demonstrates a correlation but further research is needed to prove microplastics cause sperm counts to fall.

Sperm counts in men have been falling for decades, with chemical pollution such as pesticides implicated by many studies. Microplastics have also recently been discovered in human blood, placentas and breast milk, indicating widespread contamination of people's bodies. The impact on health is as yet unknown but microplastics have been shown to cause damage to human cells in the laboratory. Vast amounts of plastic waste are dumped in the environment and microplastics have polluted the entire planet, from the summit of Mount Everest to the deepest oceans. People are known to consume the tiny particles via food and water as well as breathing them in. The particles could lodge in tissue and cause inflammation, as air pollution particles do, or chemicals in the plastics could cause harm. In March, doctors warned of potentially life-threatening effects after finding a substantially raised risk of stroke, heart attack and earlier death in people whose blood vessels were contaminated with microscopic plastics.