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Tag: Scientists

  • Climate change gave significant boost to Milton’s destructive rain, winds, scientists say

    Climate change gave significant boost to Milton’s destructive rain, winds, scientists say

    Human-caused climate change intensified deadly Hurricane Milton ‘s rainfall by 20 to 30% and strengthened its winds by about 10%, scientists said in a new flash study. The analysis comes just two weeks after Hurricane Helene devastated the southeastern United States, a storm also fueled by climate change.

    World Weather Attribution researchers said Friday that without climate change, a hurricane like Milton would make landfall as a weaker Category 2, not considered a “major” storm, instead of a Category 3.

    WWA’s rapid studies aren’t peer-reviewed but use peer-reviewed methods. The WWA compares a weather event with what might have been expected in a world that hasn’t warmed about 1.3 degree Celsius since pre-industrial times.

    The team of scientists test the influence of climate change on storms by analyzing weather data and climate models, but in the case of Milton — which followed so shortly after Helene — the researchers used only weather observations data. WWA said despite using different approaches, the results are compatible with studies of other hurricanes in the area that show a similar hurricane intensity increase of between 10 and 50% due to climate change, and about a doubling in likelihood.

    “We are therefore confident that such changes in heavy rainfall are attributable to human-caused climate change,” said WWA, an international scientist collaborative that launched in 2015 and conducts rapid climate attribution studies.

    At least eight people died in Milton, which spread damage far and wide even though it didn’t directly strike Tampa as feared. Roadways flooded and dozens of tornadoes tore through coastal areas. At one point power was out to some 3.4 million customers, and more than 2.4 million remained without power Friday morning.

    Milton made landfall Wednesday evening as a Category 3 hurricane on the west coast of Florida near Siesta Key, about 70 miles (112 kilometers) south of the Tampa Bay area, driven by warmer waters near record levels.

    Climate scientist Michael Mann said he agrees with the thrust of the analysis that climate change substantially worsened the hurricane. But if anything, Mann said, the study might “vastly understate the impact that it actually had” with what he called “the fairly simple approach” of its estimates.

    He cited other attribution studies after Helene that calculated significantly larger rainfall due to warming.

    “It’s the difference between a modest effect and a major effect,” Mann, of the University of Pennsylvania, told The Associated Press. “I would argue that the catastrophic flooding we saw over large parts of the southeastern U.S. with Helene was indeed a major effect of human-caused warming.”

    Another analysis, done by research organization Climate Central, said earlier this week that climate change made possible the warmed water temperatures that amplified Milton. Andrew Pershing, the group’s vice president for science, said those waters were made up to 200 times more likely with climate change. The group said waters were more than 1.8 degrees F (1 degrees C) warmer than the 1991 to 2020 average.

    Together with Helene, which hit six states, the two storms made an otherwise unusually quiet hurricane season roar to life.

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    Read more of AP’s climate coverage at http://www.apnews.com/climate-and-environment

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    The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

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  • AI is having its Nobel moment. Do scientists need the tech industry to sustain it?

    AI is having its Nobel moment. Do scientists need the tech industry to sustain it?

    Hours after the artificial intelligence pioneer Geoffrey Hinton won a Nobel Prize in physics, he drove a rented car to Google’s California headquarters to celebrate.

    Hinton doesn’t work at Google anymore. Nor did the longtime professor at the University of Toronto do his pioneering research at the tech giant.

    But his impromptu party reflected AI’s moment as a commercial blockbuster that has also reached the pinnacles of scientific recognition.

    That was Tuesday. Then, early Wednesday, two employees of Google’s AI division won a Nobel Prize in chemistry for using AI to predict and design novel proteins.

    “This is really a testament to the power of computer science and artificial intelligence,” said Jeanette Wing, a professor of computer science at Columbia University.

    Asked about the historic back-to-back science awards for AI work in an email Wednesday, Hinton said only: “Neural networks are the future.”

    It didn’t always seem that way for researchers who decades ago experimented with interconnected computer nodes inspired by neurons in the human brain. Hinton shares this year’s physics Nobel with another scientist, John Hopfield, for helping develop those building blocks of machine learning.

    Neural network advances came from “basic, curiosity-driven research,” Hinton said at a press conference after his win. “Not out of throwing money at applied problems, but actually letting scientists follow their curiosity to try and understand things.”

    Such work started well before Google existed. But a bountiful tech industry has now made it easier for AI scientists to pursue their ideas even as it has challenged them with new ethical questions about the societal impacts of their work.

    One reason why the current wave of AI research is so closely tied to the tech industry is that only a handful of corporations have the resources to build the most powerful AI systems.

    “These discoveries and this capability could not happen without humongous computational power and humongous amounts of digital data,” Wing said. “There are very few companies — tech companies — that have that kind of computational power. Google is one. Microsoft is another.”

    The chemistry Nobel Prize awarded Wednesday went to Demis Hassabis and John Jumper of Google’s London-based DeepMind laboratory along with researcher David Baker at the University of Washington for work that could help discover new medicines.

    Hassabis, the CEO and co-founder of DeepMind, which Google acquired in 2014, told the AP in an interview Wednesday his dream was to model his research laboratory on the “incredible storied history” of Bell Labs. Started in 1925, the New Jersey-based industrial lab was the workplace of multiple Nobel-winning scientists over several decades who helped develop modern computing and telecommunications.

    “I wanted to recreate a modern day industrial research lab that really did cutting-edge research,” Hassabis said. “But of course, that needs a lot of patience and a lot of support. We’ve had that from Google and it’s been amazing.”

    Hinton joined Google late in his career and quit last year so he could talk more freely about his concerns about AI’s dangers, particularly what happens if humans lose control of machines that become smarter than us. But he stops short of criticizing his former employer.

    Hinton, 76, said he was staying in a cheap hotel in Palo Alto, California when the Nobel committee woke him up with a phone call early Tuesday morning, leading him to cancel a medical appointment scheduled for later that day.

    By the time the sleep-deprived scientist reached the Google campus in nearby Mountain View, he “seemed pretty lively and not very tired at all” as colleagues popped bottles of champagne, said computer scientist Richard Zemel, a former doctoral student of Hinton’s who joined him at the Google party Tuesday.

    “Obviously there are these big companies now that are trying to cash in on all the commercial success and that is exciting,” said Zemel, now a Columbia professor.

    But Zemel said what’s more important to Hinton and his closest colleagues has been what the Nobel recognition means to the fundamental research they spent decades trying to advance.

    Guests included Google executives and another former Hinton student, Ilya Sutskever, a co-founder and former chief scientist and board member at ChatGPT maker OpenAI. Sutskever helped lead a group of board members who briefly ousted OpenAI CEO Sam Altman last year in turmoil that has symbolized the industry’s conflicts.

    An hour before the party, Hinton used his Nobel bully pulpit to throw shade at OpenAI during opening remarks at a virtual press conference organized by the University of Toronto in which he thanked former mentors and students.

    “I’m particularly proud of the fact that one of my students fired Sam Altman,” Hinton said.

    Asked to elaborate, Hinton said OpenAI started with a primary objective to develop better-than-human artificial general intelligence “and ensure that it was safe.”

    “And over time, it turned out that Sam Altman was much less concerned with safety than with profits. And I think that’s unfortunate,” Hinton said.

    In response, OpenAI said in a statement that it is “proud of delivering the most capable and safest AI systems” and that they “safely serve hundreds of millions of people each week.”

    Conflicts are likely to persist in a field where building even a relatively modest AI system requires resources “well beyond those of your typical research university,” said Michael Kearns, a professor of computer science at the University of Pennsylvania.

    But Kearns, who sits on the committee that picks the winners of computer science’s top prize — the Turing Award — said this week marks a “great victory for interdisciplinary research” that was decades in the making.

    Hinton is only the second person to win both a Nobel and Turing. The first, Turing-winning political scientist Herbert Simon, started working on what he called “computer simulation of human cognition” in the 1950s and won the Nobel economics prize in 1978 for his study of organizational decision-making.

    Wing, who met Simon in her early career, said scientists are still just at the tip of finding ways to apply computing’s most powerful capabilities to other fields.

    “We’re just at the beginning in terms of scientific discovery using AI,” she said.

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    AP Business Writer Kelvin Chan contributed to this report.

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  • Scientists recreate the head of this ancient 9-foot-long bug

    Scientists recreate the head of this ancient 9-foot-long bug

    WASHINGTON — As if the largest bug to ever live – a monster nearly 9 feet long with several dozen legs – wasn’t terrifying enough, scientists could only just imagine what the extinct beast’s head looked like.

    That’s because many of the fossils of these creatures are headless shells that were left behind when they molted, squirming out of their exoskeletons through the head opening as they grew ever bigger — up to 8 to 9 feet (2.6 meters) and more than 100 pounds (50 kilograms).

    Now, scientists have produced a mug shot after studying fossils of juveniles that were complete and very well preserved, if not quite cute.

    The giant bug’s topper was a round bulb with two short bell-shaped antennae, two protruding eyes like a crab, and a rather small mouth adapted for grinding leaves and bark, according to new research published Wednesday in Science Advances.

    Called Arthropleura, these were arthropods — the group that includes crabs, spiders and insects – with features of modern-day centipedes and millipedes. But some of them were much, much bigger, and this one was a surprising mix.

    “We discovered that it had the body of a millipede, but head of a centipede,” said study co-author and paleobiologist Mickael Lheritier at the University Claude Bernard Lyon in Villeurbanne, France.

    The largest Arthropleura may have been the biggest bugs to ever live, although there is still a debate. They may be a close second to an extinct giant sea scorpion.

    Researchers in Europe and North America have been collecting fragments and footprints of the huge bugs since the late 1800s.

    “We have been wanting to see what the head of this animal looked like for a really long time,” said James Lamsdell, a paleobiologist at West Virginia University, who was not involved in the study.

    To produce a model of the head, researchers first used CT scans to study fossil specimens of fully intact juveniles embedded in rocks found in a French coal field in the 1980s.

    This technique allowed the researchers to scrutinize “hidden details like bits of the head that are still embedded in the rock” without marring the fossil, Lamsdell said.

    “When you chip away at rock, you don’t know what part of a delicate fossil may have been lost or damaged,” he said.

    The juvenile fossil specimens only measured about 2 inches (6 centimeters) and it’s possible they were a type of Arthropleura that didn’t grow to enormous sizes. But even if so, the researchers said they are close enough kin to provide a glimpse of what adults looked like – whether giant or of a less nightmarish size — when they were alive 300 million years ago.

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    The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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  • Climate change boosted Helene’s deadly rain and wind and scientists say same is likely for Milton

    Climate change boosted Helene’s deadly rain and wind and scientists say same is likely for Milton

    Human-caused climate change boosted a devastating Hurricane Helene ‘s rainfall by about 10% and intensified its winds by about 11%, scientists said in a new flash study released just as a strengthening Hurricane Milton threatens the Florida coast less than two weeks later.

    The warming climate boosted Helene’s wind speeds by about 13 miles per hour (20.92 kilometers per hour), and made the high sea temperatures that fueled the storm 200 to 500 times more likely, World Weather Attribution calculated Wednesday from Europe. Ocean temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico were about 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius) above average, WWA said.

    “Hurricane Helene and the storms that were happening in the region anyway have all been amplified by the fact that the air is warmer and can hold more moisture, which meant that the rainfall totals — which, even without climate change, would have been incredibly high given the circumstances — were even higher,” Ben Clarke, a study co-author and a climate researcher at Imperial College London, said in an interview.

    Milton will likely be similarly juiced, the authors said.

    The scientists warned that continued burning of fossil fuels will lead to more hurricanes like Helene, with “unimaginable” floods well inland, not just on coasts. Many of those who died in Helene fell victim to massive inland flooding, rather than high winds.

    Helene made landfall in Florida with record storm surge 15 feet (4.57 meters) high and catastrophic sustained winds reaching 140 miles per hour (225.31 kilometers per hour), pummeling Georgia, the Carolinas, Tennessee and Virginia. It decimated remote towns throughout the Appalachians, left millions without power, cellular service and supplies and killed over 230 people. Search crews in the days following continued to look for bodies. Helene was the deadliest hurricane to hit the mainland U.S. since Katrina in 2005.

    Helene dumped more than 40 trillion gallons of rain — an unprecedented amount of water — onto the region, meteorologists estimated. That rainfall would have been much less intense if humans hadn’t warmed the climate, according to WWA, an international scientist collaborative that runs rapid climate attribution studies.

    “When you start talking about the volumes involved, when you add even just a few percent on top of that, it makes it even much more destructive,” Clarke said.

    Hurricanes as intense as Helene were once expected every 130 years on average, but today are about 2.5 times more likely in the region, the scientists calculated.

    The WWA launched in 2015 to assess the extent which extreme weather events could be attributed to climate change. The organization’s rapid studies aren’t peer-reviewed but use peer-reviewed methods. The team of scientists tested the influence of climate change on Helene by analyzing weather data and climate models including the Imperial College Storm Model, the Climate Shift Index for oceans and the standard WWA approach, which compares an actual event with what might have been expected in a world that hasn’t warmed about 1.3 degrees Celsius since pre-industrial times.

    A separate analysis of Helene last week by Department of Energy Lawrence Berkeley National Lab scientists determined that climate change caused 50% more rainfall in some parts of Georgia and the Carolinas, and that observed rainfall was “made up to 20 times more likely in these areas because of global warming.” That study was also not peer-reviewed but used a method published in a study about Hurricane Harvey.

    Kim Cobb, director of the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society, wasn’t involved in either study. She said there are uncertainties in exactly how much climate change is supercharging storms like Helene, but “we know that it’s increasing the power and devastation of these storms.”

    She said Helene and Milton should serve “as a wake up call” for emergency preparedness, resilience planning and the increased use of fossil fuels.

    “Going forward, additional warming that we know will occur over the next 10 or 20 years will even worsen the statistics of hurricanes,” she said, “and we will break new records.”

    Analysis is already indicating climate change made possible the warmed sea temperatures that also rapidly intensified Milton. Clarke said the two massive storms in quick succession illustrates the potential future of climate change if humans don’t stop it.

    “As we go into the future and our results show this as well, we still have control over what trajectory this goes in as to what risks we face in the future, what costs we pay in the future,” he said. “That just hinges on how we change our energy systems and how many more fossil fuels we burn.”

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    Read more of AP’s climate coverage at http://www.apnews.com/climate-and-environment

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    Alexa St. John is an Associated Press climate solutions reporter. Follow her on X: @alexa_stjohn. Reach her at ast.john@ap.org.

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    The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.



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  • Control the path and power of hurricanes like Helene? Forget it, scientists say

    Control the path and power of hurricanes like Helene? Forget it, scientists say

    Hurricanes are humanity’s reminder of the uncontrollable, chaotic power of Earth’s weather.

    Milton’s powerful push toward Florida just days after Helene devastated large parts of the Southeast likely has some in the region wondering if they are being targeted. In some corners of the Internet, Helene has already sparked conspiracy theories and disinformation suggesting the government somehow aimed the hurricane at Republican voters.

    Besides discounting common sense, such theories disregard weather history that shows the hurricanes are hitting many of the same areas they have for centuries. They also presume an ability for humans to quickly reshape the weather far beyond relatively puny efforts such as cloud seeding.

    “If meteorologists could stop hurricanes, we would stop hurricanes,” Kristen Corbosiero, a professor of atmospheric and environmental sciences at the University at Albany. “If we could control the weather, we would not want the kind of death and destruction that’s happened.”

    Here’s a look at what humans can and can’t do when it comes to weather:

    A fully developed hurricane releases heat energy that is the equivalent of a 10-megaton nuclear bomb every 20 minutes — more than all the energy used at a given time by humanity, according to National Hurricane Center tropical analysis chief Chris Landsea.

    And scientists are now finding many ways climate change is making hurricanes worse, with warmer oceans that add energy and more water in the warming atmosphere to fall as rain, said Chris Field, director of the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment.

    “The amount of energy a hurricane generates is insane,” said Colorado State University hurricane researcher Phil Klotzbach. It’s the height of human arrogance to think people have the power to change them, he said.

    But that hasn’t stopped people from trying, or at least thinking about trying.

    Jim Fleming of Colby College has studied historical efforts to control the weather and thinks humans have nowhere near the practical technology to get there. He described an attempt in 1947 in which General Electric partnered with the U.S. military to drop dry ice from Air Force jets into the path of a hurricane in an attempt to weaken it. It didn’t work.

    “The typical science goes like understanding, prediction and then possibly control,” Fleming said, noting that the atmosphere is far more powerful and complex than most proposals to control it. “It goes back into Greek mythology to think you can control the powers of the heavens, but also it’s a failed idea.”

    In the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, the federal government briefly tried Project STORMFURY. The idea was to seed a hurricane to replace its eyewall with a larger one that would make the storm bigger in size but weaker in intensity. Tests were inconclusive and researchers realized if they made the storm larger, people who wouldn’t have been hurt by the storm would now be in danger, which is an ethical and liability problem, the project director once said.

    For decades, the National Hurricane Center and its parent agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, have been asked about nuclear-bombing a hurricane. But the bombs aren’t powerful enough, and it would add the problem of radioactive fallout, Corbosiero said.

    Bringing cooling icebergs or seeding or adding water-absorbing substances also are ideas that just don’t work, NOAA scientists said.

    Failed historical attempts to control hurricanes differ somewhat from some scientists’ futuristic ideas to combat climate change and extreme weather. That’s because instead of targeting individual weather events, modern geoengineers would operate on a larger scale — thinking about how to reverse the broad-scale damage humans have already done to the global climate by emitting greenhouse gases.

    Scientists in the field say one of the most promising ideas they see based on computer models is solar geoengineering. The method would involve lofting aerosol particles into the upper atmosphere to bounce a tiny bit of sunlight back into space, cooling the planet slightly.

    Supporters acknowledge the risks and challenges. But it also “might have quite large benefits, especially for the world’s poorest,” said David Keith, a professor at the University of Chicago and founding faculty director of the Climate Systems Engineering initiative.

    Two years ago, the largest society of scientists who work on climate issues, the American Geophysical Union, announced it was forming an ethics framework for “climate intervention.”

    Some scientists warn that tinkering with Earth’s atmosphere to fix climate change is likely to create cascading new problems. Pennsylvania State University climate scientist Michael Mann expressed worries on the ethics framework that just talking about guidelines will make the tinkering more likely to occur in the real world, something that could have harmful side effects.

    Field, of Stanford, agreed that the modeling strongly encourages that geoengineering could be effective, including at mitigating the worst threats of hurricanes, even if that’s decades away. But he emphasized that it’s just one piece of the best solution, which is to stop climate change by cutting greenhouse gas emissions.

    “Whatever else we do, that needs to be the core set of activities,” he said.

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    Follow Melina Walling on X: @MelinaWalling.

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    The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

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  • Scientists in South Africa say they have identified the first known outbreak of rabies in seals

    Scientists in South Africa say they have identified the first known outbreak of rabies in seals

    CAPE TOWN, South Africa — Scientists in South Africa say they have identified an outbreak of rabies in seals that is believed to be the first time the virus has spread in sea mammals.

    At least 24 Cape fur seals that were found dead or euthanized in various locations on South Africa’s west and south coast had rabies, state veterinarian Dr. Lesley van Helden said.

    Rabies, which affects mammals and can be passed to people, is almost always fatal once symptoms appear. Rabies spreads via saliva, usually through bites but also sometimes when animals lick and groom each other.

    The virus has long been seen in wild animals such as raccoons, coyotes, foxes, jackals and in domestic dogs. But it had never been recorded spreading among marine mammals, van Helden and other experts said this week.

    The only other known case of rabies in a sea mammal was in a ringed seal in Norway’s Svalbard islands in the early 1980s. That seal had likely been infected by a rabid arctic fox, researchers said, and there was no evidence of rabies spreading among seals there.

    Authorities in South Africa first discovered rabies in Cape fur seals in June after a dog was bitten by a seal on a Cape Town beach. The dog became infected with rabies, prompting rabies tests on brain samples from 135 seal carcasses that researchers had already collected since 2021. Around 20 new samples also were collected and more positives have come back on subsequent tests.

    Scientists are trying to work out how rabies was passed to the seals, whether it is spreading widely among their large colonies and what can be done to contain it.

    “It’s all very, very new,” said Greg Hofmeyr, a marine biologist who studies seals in South Africa. “A lot of research is required … there are a lot of unknowns here.”

    There are approximately 2 million seals migrating back and forth between South Africa, Namibia and Angola along Africa’s south and west coast. The most likely possibility, van Helden said, is that rabies was first passed onto seals by jackals in Namibia, where the wolf-like animals hunt seal pups on the coastline.

    The genes of the rabies virus found in the seals matched the rabies in black-backed jackals in Namibia. It also showed rabies was being transmitted between seals, because most of the virus sequences were closely related, she said.

    “So, it’s basically established itself in the seal population and it’s being maintained by them biting each other,” van Helden said.

    The seals live in close proximity to people in places in South Africa, especially on beaches around the city of Cape Town. The city has issued warnings to locals, said Gregg Oelofse, Cape Town’s head of coastal and environmental management.

    Authorities had been mystified for the past three years by reports of excessively aggressive seals and an increase in seal attacks on people, some of whom had been bitten. No human cases of rabies have been recorded as a result.

    Oelofse said that city authorities had started vaccinating the small numbers of seals at two popular Cape Town harbors, where they are considered an attraction.

    One of the positive rabies tests was on a seal carcass collected in August 2022, meaning rabies had been in the seal population for at least two years, Oelofse said.

    “It’s been here for a while longer than we’ve known about it,” he said.

    Experts said there were still many unknowns.

    It’s hard to predict long-term transmission dynamics, U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention spokesman Dave Daigle said. He noted previous instances of rabies viruses winding up in new hosts and then dying out. In 2021 in the U.S., for example, gray foxes were spreading the raccoon rabies virus variant for two years, and then transmission stopped.

    The U.S. public health agency is watching the situation in South Africa, but has yet to see “clear evidence that this is going to be a long-term issue,” Daigle said.

    Another unknown is if the vaccine will be effective in seals. It’s never been tested, but experts think it should work.

    There’s also a logistical question, van Helden said: How do you vaccinate a significant number of seals that live largely in the ocean and migrate back and forth along a coastline that is more than 3,500 kilometers (2,170 miles) long. Land animals can be vaccinated by dropping bait that releases oral vaccines when eaten, but seals generally will only eat live fish, she noted.

    South African officials have been collaborating with international experts.

    Seal researcher Hofmeyr said that some other seal species come into contact with Cape fur seals and then travel to other parts of the world and that was a concern for further spread.

    “The chances of that happening are very low, but the implications of that if it does happen are very important,” he said.

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    AP Africa news: https://apnews.com/hub/africa

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  • Scientists show how pregnancy changes the brain in innumerable ways

    Scientists show how pregnancy changes the brain in innumerable ways

    Neuroscientist Liz Chrastil got the unique chance to see how her brain changed while she was pregnant and share what she learned in a new study that offers the first detailed map of a woman’s brain throughout gestation.

    The transition to motherhood, researchers discovered, affects nearly every part of the brain.

    Although the study looks at only one person, it kicks off a large, international research project that aims to scan the brains of hundreds of women and could one day provide clues about disorders like postpartum depression.

    “It’s been a very long journey,” said Chrastil, co-author of the paper published Monday in Nature Neuroscience. “We did 26 scans before, during and after pregnancy” and found “some really remarkable things.”

    More than 80% of the regions studied had reductions in the volume of gray matter, where thinking takes place. This is an average of about 4% of the brain — nearly identical to a reduction that happens during puberty. While less gray matter may sound bad, researchers said it probably isn’t; it likely reflects the fine-tuning of networks of interconnected nerve cells called “neural circuits” to prepare for a new phase of life.

    The team began following Chrastil — who works at the University of California, Irvine, and was 38 years old at the time — shortly before she became pregnant through in vitro fertilization.

    During the pregnancy and for two years after she gave birth, they continued doing MRI brain scans and drawing blood to observe how her brain changed as sex hormones like estrogen ebbed and flowed. Some of the changes continued past pregnancy.

    “Previous studies had taken snapshots of the brain before and after pregnancy, but we’ve never witnessed the brain in the midst of this metamorphosis,” said co-author Emily Jacobs of the University of California, Santa Barbara.

    Unlike past studies, this one focused on many inner regions of the brain as well as the cerebral cortex, the outermost layer, said Joseph Lonstein, a professor of neuroscience and psychology at Michigan State University who was not involved in the research. It’s “a good first step to understanding much more about whole-brain changes that could be possible in a woman across pregnancy and postpartum,” he said.

    Research in animals has linked some brain changes with qualities that could be helpful when caring for an infant. While the new study doesn’t address what the changes mean in terms of human behavior, Lonstein pointed out that it describes changes in brain areas involved in social cognition, or how people interact with others and understand their thoughts and feelings, for example.

    The researchers have partners in Spain and are moving forward with the larger Maternal Brain Project, which is supported by the Ann S. Bowers Women’s Brain Health Initiative and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.

    Eventually, they hope scientists can use data from a large number of women for things like predicting postpartum depression before it happens.

    “There is so much about the neurobiology of pregnancy that we don’t understand yet, and it’s not because women are too complicated. It’s not because pregnancy is some Gordian knot,” Jacobs said. “It’s a byproduct of the fact that biomedical sciences have historically ignored women’s health.”

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    The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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  • A mural honoring scientists hung in Pfizer’s NYC lobby for 60 years. Now it’s up for grabs

    A mural honoring scientists hung in Pfizer’s NYC lobby for 60 years. Now it’s up for grabs

    NEW YORK — A mural honoring ancient and modern figures in medicine that has hung in the lobby of Pfizer’s original New York City headquarters for more than 60 years could soon end up in pieces if conservationists can’t find a new home for it in the next few weeks.

    “Medical Research Through the Ages,” a massive metal and tile mosaic depicting scientists and lab equipment, has been visible through the high glass-windowed lobby of the pharmaceutical giant’s midtown Manhattan office since the 1960s.

    But the building is being gutted and converted into residential apartments, and the new owners have given the mural a move-out date of as soon as Sept. 10.

    Art conservationists and the late artist’s daughters are now scrambling to find a patron who is able to cover the tens of thousands of dollars they estimate it will take to move and remount it, as well as an institution that can display it.

    “I would ideally like to see it as part of an educational future, whether it’s on a hospital campus as part of a school or a college. Or part of a larger public art program for the citizens of New York City,” said art historian and urban planner Andrew Cronson, one of the people trying to find a new home for the piece.

    The 40-foot-wide and 18-foot-high (12 meters by 5.5 meters) mural by Greek American artist Nikos Bel-Jon was the main showpiece of Pfizer’s world headquarters when the building opened a few blocks from Grand Central Terminal in 1961, at a time when flashy buildings and grand corporate art projects were a symbol of business success. He died in 1966, leaving behind dozens of large brushed-metal works commissioned by companies and private institutions, many of which have now been lost or destroyed.

    In recent years, Pfizer sold the building — and last year moved its headquarters to a shared office space in a newer property. The company said in an emailed statement that it decided the money needed to deconstruct, relocate and reinstall the mural elsewhere would be better spent on “patient-related priorities.”

    The developer now turning the building into apartments, Metro Loft, doesn’t want to keep the artwork either, though it has been working with those trying to save the piece with help like letting art appraisers in. The company declined to comment further, but Jack Berman, its director of operations, confirmed in an email that it needs to get the mural out.

    Bel-Jon’s youngest daughter, Rhea Bel-Jon Calkins, said they’ve gotten some interest from universities who could take the piece, and a Greek cultural organization that could help fundraise for the move. But the removal alone could cost between $20,00 and $50,000, according to estimates cited by Cronson.

    If they can’t immediately find a taker, the mural won’t end up in landfill, Bel-Jon Calkins said. But it would have to be broken up into pieces — nine metal sections and eight mosaic sections — and moved into storage, likely with some of her relatives.

    Time is ticking away. Workers gutting the building have been carrying out ripped-up carpeting, drab office chairs and piles of scrap wood and loading them into garbage trucks.

    For the past few decades, the artwork’s metal — brushed tin and aluminum panels in the shape of laboratory beakers, funnels and flasks, surrounded by symbols, alchemists and scientists — has been a dull gray and white. But Bel-Jon Calkins remembers its original, multicolored lighting scheme.

    “As you moved, the color moved with you and changed. So there was a constant dynamic to the mural that no one really has ever been able to achieve,” she said.

    Richard McCoy, director of the Indiana nonprofit Landmark Columbus Foundation, which cares for local buildings and landscapes, said the piece might lack commercial value, describing Bel-Jon as “extraordinary, but not super well-known.”

    “But then you realize 20 or 30 years from then how great it was,” he said, adding that it might merit preservation for its historical value.

    Bel-Jon Calkins tracks her father’s 42 large-scale metal murals in a spreadsheet and on the artist’s website. She said only about a dozen are confirmed to exist.

    A 12-foot (3.6-meter) metal mosaic depicting saints and commissioned by a Greek Orthodox church in San Francisco was destroyed in the Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989. General Motors commissioned a hubcap-shaped metal mural that was larger than a car for a trade show, but she confirmed it was later melted down into scrap.

    “It’s the corporations that have lost them,” she said in a phone conversation from her home in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. “They valued them enough to commission them but not enough to preserve them.”

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  • Just how rare is a rare-colored lobster? Scientists say answer could be under the shell

    Just how rare is a rare-colored lobster? Scientists say answer could be under the shell

    BIDDEFORD, Maine — Orange, blue, calico, two-toned and … cotton-candy colored?

    Those are all the hues of lobsters that have showed up in fishers’ traps, supermarket seafood tanks and scientists’ laboratories over the last year. The funky-colored crustaceans inspire headlines that trumpet their rarity, with particularly uncommon baby blue-tinted critters described by some as “cotton-candy colored” often estimated at 1 in 100 million.

    A recent wave of these curious colored lobsters in Maine, New York, Colorado and beyond has scientists asking just how atypical the discolored arthropods really are. As is often the case in science, it’s complicated.

    Lobsters’ color can vary due to genetic and dietary differences, and estimates about how rare certain colors are should be taken with a grain of salt, said Andrew Goode, lead administrative scientist for the American Lobster Settlement Index at the University of Maine. There is also no definitive source on the occurrence of lobster coloration abnormalities, scientists said.

    “Anecdotally, they don’t taste any different either,” Goode said.

    In the wild, lobsters typically have a mottled brown appearance, and they turn an orange-red color after they are boiled for eating. Lobsters can have color abnormalities due to mutation of genes that affect the proteins that bind to their shell pigments, Goode said.

    The best available estimates about lobster coloration abnormalities are based on data from fisheries sources, said marine sciences professor Markus Frederich of the University of New England in Maine. However, he said, “no one really tracks them.”

    Frederich and other scientists said that commonly cited estimates such as 1 in 1 million for blue lobsters and 1 in 30 million for orange lobsters should not be treated as rock-solid figures. However, he and his students are working to change that.

    Frederich is working on noninvasive ways to extract genetic samples from lobsters to try to better understand the molecular basis for rare shell coloration. Frederich maintains a collection of strange-colored lobsters at the university’s labs and has been documenting the progress of the offspring of an orange lobster named Peaches who is housed at the university.

    Peaches had thousands of offspring this year, which is typical for lobsters. About half were orange, which is not, Frederich said. Of the baby lobsters that survived, a slight majority were regular colored ones, Frederich said.

    Studying the DNA of atypically colored lobsters will give scientists a better understanding of their underlying genetics, Frederich said.

    “Lobsters are those iconic animals here in Maine, and I find them beautiful. Especially when you see those rare ones, which are just looking spectacular. And then the scientist in me simply says I want to know how that works. What’s the mechanism?” Frederich said.

    He does eat lobster but “never any of those colorful ones,” he said.

    One of Frederich’s lobsters, Tamarind, is the typical color on one side and orange on the other. That is because two lobster eggs fused and grew as one animal, Frederich said. He said that’s thought to be as rare as 1 in 50 million.

    Rare lobsters have been in the news lately, with an orange lobster turning up in a Long Island, New York, Stop & Shop last month, and another appearing in a shipment being delivered to a Red Lobster in Colorado in July.

    The odd-looking lobsters will likely continue to come to shore because of the size of the U.S. lobster fishery, said Richard Wahle, a longtime University of Maine lobster researcher who is now retired. U.S. fishers have brought more than 90 million pounds (40,820 metric tons) of lobster to the docks in every year since 2009 after only previously reaching that volume twice, according to federal records that go back to 1950.

    “In an annual catch consisting of hundreds of millions of lobster, it shouldn’t be surprising that we see a few of the weird ones every year, even if they are 1 in a million or 1 in 30 million,” Wahle said.

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