Vitamin E acetate found in all lung fluid samples tested from injured vapers



All 29 samples of lung fluids tested from vaping device users with severe lung injuries contained the oily additive vitamin E acetate, according to data published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Friday.

“These new findings are significant,” Anne Schuchat, CDC principal deputy director, told reporters in a press conference. It is the first time that a potentially toxic substance has been found directly at the site of injury in the lungs of vaping device users.

Further Reading
Probe into vaping-linked illnesses turns up form of vitamin E from skin creams [Updated]
The severe lung injuries have puzzled health officials for months as a nationwide outbreak of the vaping-related illnesses erupted. Health officials now refer to the condition as EVALI, or “e-cigarette, or vaping, product use–associated lung injury.”

As of November 5, the CDC has tallied 2,051 confirmed and probable EVALI cases in 49 states, the District of Columbia, and the US Virgin Islands. Of those cases, 39 were fatal from 24 states and the District of Columbia.

Despite ongoing federal and state investigations into the cases, the cause or causes of the injuries have been elusive. So far, investigators have determined that most cases appear to be associated with the use of vaping products containing tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the primary psychoactive ingredient in marijuana. Many of the injured also reported using counterfeit or black-market products containing THC, notably those marketed as "Dank Vapes."

After breakfast one morning in August, the mathematician Terence Tao opened an email from three physicists he didn’t know. The trio explained that they’d stumbled across a simple formula that, if true, established an unexpected relationship between some of the most basic and important objects in linear algebra.

The formula “looked too good to be true,” said Tao, who is a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, a Fields medalist, and one of the world’s leading mathematicians. “Something this short and simple — it should have been in textbooks already,” he said. “So my first thought was, no, this can’t be true.”

Then he thought about it some more.

The physicists — Stephen Parke of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, Xining Zhang of the University of Chicago and Peter Denton of Brookhaven National Laboratory — had arrived at the mathematical identity about two months earlier while grappling with the strange behavior of particles called neutrinos.

They’d noticed that hard-to-compute terms called “eigenvectors,” describing, in this case, the ways that neutrinos propagate through matter, were equal to combinations of terms called “eigenvalues,” which are far easier to compute. Moreover, they realized that the relationship between eigenvectors and eigenvalues — ubiquitous objects in math, physics and engineering that have been studied since the 18th century — seemed to hold more generally.

Although the physicists could hardly believe they’d discovered a new fact about such bedrock math, they couldn’t find the relationship in any books or papers. So they took a chance and contacted Tao, despite a note on his website warning against such entreaties.

“To our surprise, he replied in under two hours saying he’d never seen this before,” Parke said. Tao’s reply also included three independent proofs of the identity.

Ghost ships, crop circles, and soft gold: A GPS mystery in Shanghai

A sophisticated new electronic warfare system is being used at the world’s busiest port. But is it sand thieves or the Chinese state behind it?

On a sultry summer night in July 2018, the MV Manukai was arriving at the port of Shanghai, near the mouth of the Huangpu River. This busy tributary of the Yangtze winds through the city and includes the Bund, a historic waterfront area and tourist hot spot. Shanghai would be the American container ship’s last stop in China before making its long homeward journey to Long Beach, California.

As the crew carefully maneuvered the 700-foot ship through the world’s busiest port, its captain watched his navigation screens closely. By international law, all but the smallest commercial ships have to install automatic identification system (AIS) transponders. Every few seconds, these devices broadcast their identity, position, course, and speed and display AIS data from other ships in the area, helping to keep crowded waterways safe. The position data for those transponders comes from GPS satellites.



According to the Manukai’s screens, another ship was steaming up the same channel at about seven knots (eight miles per hour). Suddenly, the other ship disappeared from the AIS display. A few minutes later, the screen showed the other ship back at the dock. Then it was in the channel and moving again, then back at the dock, then gone once more.

Eventually, mystified, the captain picked up his binoculars and scanned the dockside. The other ship had been stationary at the dock the entire time.

When it came time for the Manukai to head for its own berth, the bridge began echoing to multiple alarms. Both of the ship’s GPS units—it carried two for redundancy—had lost their signals, and its AIS transponder had failed. Even a last-ditch emergency distress system that also relied on GPS could not get a fix.

Now, new research and previously unseen data show that the Manukai, and thousands of other vessels in Shanghai over the last year, are falling victim to a mysterious new weapon that is able to spoof GPS systems in a way never seen before.

What America Lost When It Lost the Bison



Chris Geremia was surprised. After considerable effort, and substantial risk to life and limb, he and his colleagues finally had the results from their decade-long experiment, and those results were both clear and unexpected: Bison do not surf.

Specifically, bison (or buffalo) don’t follow the waves of new shoots that burst from the ground every spring. This phenomenon, known as surfing the green wave, allows animals to eat plants at their most nutritious, when they’re full of nitrogen and proteins and low in indigestible matter. Such freshness is fleeting, and so grazers undertake large migrations to track the new greenery as it crests across the landscape. Over the past decade, scientists have shown that mule deer, barnacle geese, elk, elephants, Mongolian gazelles, and a dozen other species all do this. Geremia wanted to see whether bison, which once formed the largest grazing herds in North America, follow the same pattern.

. . .

Their actions change the landscape. In areas where bison graze, plants contain 50 to 90 percent more nutrients by the end of the summer. This not only provides extra nourishment for other grazers, but prolongs the growing season of the plants themselves. And by trimming back the plant cover in one year, bison allow more sunlight to fall on the next year’s greenery, accelerating its growth. When Geremia’s team looked at parts of Yellowstone where bison numbers have fluctuated, it found that the green wave grew in intensity and crested over a longer period as the herds grew larger. The bison engineer and intensify the spring. And astonishingly, they had a stronger influence on the timing of plant growth than weather and other environmental variables. They’re equivalent to a force of nature.

. . .

When we lose animals, we also lose everything those animals do. When insects decline, plants go unpollinated and predators go unfed. When birds disappear, pests go uncontrolled and seeds stay put. When herds of bighorn sheep and moose are shot, their generational knowledge disappears and migration routes go extinct, as Kauffman showed last year. And when bison are exterminated, springtime changes in ways that we still don’t fully understand.

Ayahuasca alters brain waves to produce waking dream-like state, study finds




People under the influence of a psychedelic brew known as ayahuasca frequently experience vivid visual and aural hallucinations and also report feeling as if they are in a dream. Now a new study published in Scientific Reports has shown that the drug alters the user's waking brain-wave patterns to produce a mental state that the researchers describe as "dreaming while awake."

Ayahuasca is a bitter tea made from the Brazilian vine banisteriopsis caapi, colloquially known as the "spirit vine," used in shaman-led spiritual ceremonies among native people in the Amazon basin. Its primary active ingredient is dimethyltryptamine (DMT). That's the secret to ayahuasca's powerful psychedelic effects, which can also produce feelings of elation and fear or a sense of epiphany or psychological breakthrough. Those mind-altering properties come at a price, however. Participants in the ceremonies are often advised to bring a bucket, since nausea and vomiting (and sometimes diarrhea) are common reactions to the tea.

The brain controls perception and communication throughout the body via chemical neurotransmitters. Each neurotransmitter attaches to matching areas on nerve cells known as receptors. LSD, for example, targets the brain's serotonin receptors. Ayahuasca contains a compound (banisterine) that latches onto dopamine receptors in the brain. (That's why banisterine holds potential as a treatment for Parkinson's disease, which destroys dopamine receptors.)




Several prior brain-imaging studies involving humans have shown that psychedelics disrupt normal brain activity and boost the random firing of neurons in the visual cortex. For instance, a 2012 study by David Nutt and colleagues at the Imperial College London's Center for Psychedelic Research (CPR) scanned the brains of 30 subjects (all experienced users of psychedelics) while under the influence of psilocybin—aka magic mushrooms. The lab then compared those scans to scans taken after the subjects ingested a saltwater placebo. The overall brain activity dropped in the so-called "default mode," a collection of highly interconnected neuronal networks that typically fire together when the brain is at rest. Psilocybin disrupted that synchronization, which could cause the dissociative aspects—the oft-reported disintegrating sense of self or ego—of hallucinogenic drugs.

Humans placed in suspended animation for the first time

Doctors have placed humans in suspended animation for the first time, as part of a trial in the US that aims to make it possible to fix traumatic injuries that would otherwise cause death.

Samuel Tisherman, at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, told New Scientist that his team of medics had placed at least one patient in suspended animation, calling it “a little surreal” when they first did it. He wouldn’t reveal how many people had survived as a result.

The technique, officially called emergency preservation and resuscitation (EPR), is being carried out on people who arrive at the University of Maryland Medical Centre in Baltimore with an acute trauma – such as a gunshot or stab wound – and have had a cardiac arrest. Their heart will have stopped beating and they will have lost more than half their blood. There are only minutes to operate, with a less than 5 per cent chance that they would normally survive.

EPR involves rapidly cooling a person to around 10 to 15°C by replacing all of their blood with ice-cold saline. The patient’s brain activity almost completely stops. They are then disconnected from the cooling system and their body – which would otherwise be classified as dead – is moved to the operating theatre.

A surgical team then has 2 hours to fix the person’s injuries before they are warmed up and their heart restarted. Tisherman says he hopes to be able to announce the full results of the trial by the end of 2020.

Why 536 was ‘the worst year to be alive’




Ask medieval historian Michael McCormick what year was the worst to be alive, and he's got an answer: "536." Not 1349, when the Black Death wiped out half of Europe. Not 1918, when the flu killed 50 million to 100 million people, mostly young adults. But 536. In Europe, "It was the beginning of one of the worst periods to be alive, if not the worst year," says McCormick, a historian and archaeologist who chairs the Harvard University Initiative for the Science of the Human Past.

A mysterious fog plunged Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Asia into darkness, day and night—for 18 months. "For the sun gave forth its light without brightness, like the moon, during the whole year," wrote Byzantine historian Procopius. Temperatures in the summer of 536 fell 1.5°C to 2.5°C, initiating the coldest decade in the past 2300 years. Snow fell that summer in China; crops failed; people starved. The Irish chronicles record "a failure of bread from the years 536–539." Then, in 541, bubonic plague struck the Roman port of Pelusium, in Egypt. What came to be called the Plague of Justinian spread rapidly, wiping out one-third to one-half of the population of the eastern Roman Empire and hastening its collapse, McCormick says.

Historians have long known that the middle of the sixth century was a dark hour in what used to be called the Dark Ages, but the source of the mysterious clouds has long been a puzzle. Now, an ultraprecise analysis of ice from a Swiss glacier by a team led by McCormick and glaciologist Paul Mayewski at the Climate Change Institute of The University of Maine (UM) in Orono has fingered a culprit. At a workshop at Harvard this week, the team reported that a cataclysmic volcanic eruption in Iceland spewed ash across the Northern Hemisphere early in 536. Two other massive eruptions followed, in 540 and 547. The repeated blows, followed by plague, plunged Europe into economic stagnation that lasted until 640, when another signal in the ice—a spike in airborne lead—marks a resurgence of silver mining, as the team reports in Antiquity this week.

Mathematicians Catch a Pattern by Figuring Out How to Avoid It



Some mathematical patterns are so subtle you could search for a lifetime and never find them. Others are so common that they seem impossible to avoid.

A new proof by Sarah Peluse of the University of Oxford establishes that one particularly important type of numerical sequence is, ultimately, unavoidable: It’s guaranteed to show up in every single sufficiently large collection of numbers, regardless of how the numbers are chosen.

“There’s a sort of indestructibility to these patterns,” said Terence Tao of the University of California, Los Angeles.

Peluse’s proof concerns sequences of numbers called “polynomial progressions.” They are easy to generate — you could create one yourself in short order — and they touch on the interplay between addition and multiplication among the numbers.

For several decades, mathematicians have known that when a collection, or set, of numbers is small (meaning it contains relatively few numbers), the set might not contain any polynomial progressions. They also knew that as a set grows it eventually crosses a threshold, after which it has so many numbers that one of these patterns has to be there, somewhere. It’s like a bowl of alphabet soup — the more letters you have, the more likely it is that the bowl will contain words.

But prior to Peluse’s work, mathematicians didn’t know what that critical threshold was. Her proof provides an answer — a precise formula for determining how big a set needs to be in order to guarantee that it contains certain polynomial progressions.

Previously, mathematicians had only a vague understanding that polynomial progressions are embedded among the whole numbers (1, 2, 3 and so on). Now they know exactly how to find them.

Student solves a 100-year-old physics enigma



An EPFL Bachelor's student has solved a mystery that has puzzled scientists for 100 years. He discovered why gas bubbles in narrow vertical tubes seem to remain stuck instead of rising upward. According to his research and observations, an ultra-thin film of liquid forms around the bubble, preventing it from rising freely. And he found that, in fact, the bubbles are not stuck at all—they are just moving very, very slowly.

Air bubbles in a glass of water float freely up to the surface, and the mechanisms behind this are easily explained by the basic laws of science. However, the same laws of science cannot explain why air bubbles in a tube a few millimeters thick don't rise the same way.

. . .

While a Bachelor's student at the Engineering Mechanics of Soft Interfaces laboratory (EMSI) within EPFL's School of Engineering, Wassim Dhaouadi was able to not only view the thin film of liquid, but also measure it and describe its properties—something that had never been done before. His findings showed that the bubbles weren't stuck, as scientists previously thought, but actually moving upwards extremely slowly. Dhaouadi's research, which was published recently in Physical Review Fluids, marked the first time that experimental evidence was provided to test earlier theories.

Dhaouadi and EMSI lab head, John Kolinski, used an optical interference method to measure the film, which they found to be only a few dozen nanometers (1 x 10-9 meters) thick. The method involved directing light onto an air bubble inside a narrow tube and analyzing the reflected light intensity. Using the interference of the light reflected from the tube's inner wall and from the bubble's surface, they precisely measured the film's thickness.

Dhaouadi also discovered that the film changes shape if heat is applied to the bubble and returns to its original shape once the heat is removed. "This discovery disproves the most recent theories that the film would drain to zero thickness," says John Kolinski.

These measurements also show that the bubbles are actually moving, albeit too slowly to be seen by the human eye.

A new way to make quadratic equations easy

Many former algebra students have painful memories of struggling to memorize the quadratic formula. A new way to derive it, overlooked for 4,000 years, is so simple it eliminates the need.

The ancient Babylonians were a remarkable bunch. Among many extraordinary achievements, they found a now-famous mathematical solution to an unpleasant challenge: paying tax.

The particular problem for the ordinary working Babylonian was this: Given a tax bill that has to be paid in crops, by how much should I increase the size of my field to pay it?

This problem can be written down as a quadratic equation of the form Ax2+Bx+C=0. And it is solved with this formula:



Today, over 4,000 years later, millions of people have the quadratic formula etched into their minds thanks to the way mathematics is taught across the planet.

But far fewer people can derive this expression. That’s also due to the way mathematics is taught—the usual derivation relies on a mathematical trick, called “completing the square,” that is far from intuitive. Indeed, after the Babylonians, it took mathematicians many centuries to stumble across this proof.

Before and since, mathematicians have found a wide range of other ways to derive the formula. But all of them are also tricky and non-intuitive.

So it’s easy to imagine that mathematicians must have exhausted the problem. There just can’t be a better way to derive the quadratic formula.

Enter Po-Shen Loh, a mathematician at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, who has found a simpler way—one that appears to have gone unnoticed these 4,000 years.

Loh’s approach does not rely on completing the square or any other difficult mathematical tricks. Indeed, it is simple enough to work as a general method itself, meaning students need not remember the formula at all. “The derivation has the potential to demystify the quadratic formula for students worldwide,” he says.

The new approach is straightforward. It starts with the assumption that a quadratic equation has two solutions, or roots. If we call them R and S, we can write: