Jan. 22, 2025 at 4:00 am Updated Jan. 22, 2025 at 4:00 am
1 of 2 | Bob Curtis, 88, a resident of an upscale continuing care retirement community in Port Washington, N.Y., that has declared bankruptcy. (James Estrin / The New York Times)
Three years ago, when Bob and Sandy Curtis moved into an upscale continuing care retirement community in Port Washington, N.Y., he thought they had found the best possible elder care solution.
In exchange for a steep entrance fee — about $840,000, funded by the sale of the Long Island house they had owned for nearly 50 years — they would have care for the rest of their lives at the Harborside. They selected a contract from several options that set stable monthly fees at about $6,000 for both of them and would refund half the entrance fee to their estate after their deaths.
“This was the final chapter,” Bob Curtis, 88, said. “That was the deal I made.”
CCRCs, or life plan communities, provide levels of increasing care on a single campus, from independent and assisted living to nursing homes and memory care. Unlike most senior living facilities, they’re predominantly nonprofit.
More than 1,900 CCRCs house about 900,000 Americans, according to LeadingAge, which represents nonprofit senior housing providers. Some communities offer lower and higher refunds, many avoid buy-in fees altogether and operate as rentals, and others are hybrids.
For the Curtises, the Harborside offered reassurance. Bob Curtis, an industrial engineer who works as a consultant, took a comfortable one-bedroom apartment in the independent living wing. “It was a vibrant community,” he said. “Meals. Amenities. A gym.”
Every day he spends time with Sandy, 84, who lives in the facility’s memory care unit, an elevator ride away. The staff members there “treat Sandy with love and care,” Bob Curtis said. “It would have been wonderful if it could have continued.”
But in 2023, the Harborside, for the third time since it opened in 2010, declared bankruptcy. Its services and activities have declined, residents and families say. A group of about 65 residents, most in their 90s, has hired a lawyer, but whether they will ever get the refunds their contracts supposedly guarantee remains uncertain.
“Everybody’s panicked,” said Ellen Zlotnick, whose parents also live separately in the Harborside’s independent living and memory care units. Their contract specifies a 75% refund. “A bunch of people are moving, and others refuse to move.”
Data tracking bankruptcies and closures in senior housing are scant. Dee Pekruhn, who directs life plan community policy at LeadingAge, said there had been “very, very few examples of actual bankruptcies,” though there were recent close calls.
But Lori Smetanka, the executive director of the National Consumer Voice for Quality Long-Term Care, said that state and local long-term care ombudsmen were increasingly reporting “problems with facilities that are financially troubled.”
Recent crises include the closure of Unisen Senior Living, a CCRC in Tampa, Florida. After it filed for bankruptcy for the second time last spring, more than 100 residents had to move out.
In Charlotte, North Carolina, in 2023, state officials stepped in to oversee a long-established CCRC called Aldersgate, which had floundered financially for years. The state approved a “corrective action plan,” and Aldersgate avoided bankruptcy. But it remains months behind on refund payments, and state supervision continues.
In Steamboat Springs, Colorado, a CCRC called Casey’s Pond entered court-ordered receivership last summer. Since sold to a nonprofit health care system, it will continue operations — but only after two municipalities, a local foundation and hundreds of community members raised $30 million to rescue it.
Other kinds of senior housing can shut down, too. About 1,550 nursing homes closed between 2015 and mid-2024, according to the American Health Care Association.
But when CCRCs fail, residents and families face not only the physical and psychological ordeal of relocating, but also the possible loss of their life savings.
In bankruptcy, residents entitled to refunds “are at the very bottom of the list” among creditors seeking payment, said Nathalie Martin, a University of New Mexico law professor who has written about insolvent CCRCs.
Secured lenders with collateral have the first crack at collecting what they’re owed, followed by lawyers, accountants and employees.
Because the people who live in a CCRC that has promised refunds are unsecured lenders, “residents are in a very vulnerable position, and they don’t know it,” Martin said. Without refunds, they may be unable to afford to pay for care elsewhere if forced to move.
The Harborside in Port Washington, N.Y., which in 2023, for the third time since it opened in 2010, declared bankruptcy. (James Estrin / The New York Times)
At the Harborside, an earlier proposed sale to a national chain would have kept the facility open and refunded fees to residents who had moved out or died. That deal fell through last fall when state regulators declined to approve it.
“It’s mind-boggling that the Department of Health allowed this to happen,” said Elizabeth Aboulafia, the lawyer representing some residents of the Harborside.
Now a Chicago investment firm, Focus Healthcare Partners, wants to buy the Harborside and shut down all but the independent living apartments, which would become rentals. (Focus has said it then intends to apply for state licenses for assisted living and memory care. Approvals could take several years.)
A skeptical federal bankruptcy judge questioned that offer last month and instead urged the parties to reach an agreement that protects residents.
“We deeply empathize with the residents,” Curt Schaller, a co-founder of Focus, said in a statement. He added that “we can’t undo money lost by others that led to this bankruptcy.”
The Harborside’s lawyer said she could not comment during pending litigation. The next bankruptcy hearing is scheduled for Feb. 12.
Though the federal government regulates the nursing homes within CCRCs, their other living arrangements and contracts are subject to a hodgepodge of state laws. Many require various disclosures to prospective residents or oversee contract terms.
But few mandate what Martin sees as crucial to protecting refunds: reserves. If they were compulsory, “when you pay these big fees, the facility would be required to set a certain amount of money aside for your future care,” she explained.
A handful of states, including California, Florida, New Mexico and — notably — New York, do require reserves, “but as we have seen, this does not preclude communities from failing to set aside such funds and filing for bankruptcy anyway,” Martin added in an email.
“We need our oversight agencies to pay more attention,” said Smetanka of The National Consumer Voice, referring to state regulators and to the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
“The licensing agencies should bring in forensic accountants to look at the books. There should be better auditing.”
Additional regulation doesn’t sit well with the senior housing industry. “The more we regulate and make it more expensive, the less we can house people,” said Robert Kramer, a co-founder of the National Investment Center for Seniors Housing & Care.
Requiring reserves, he said, would mean “far fewer CCRCs built — and the people who move in will have net worth in the millions.”
One solution for elder care shoppers: Selecting a CCRC that operates as a rental, without expensive buy-ins or refunds. That route makes potential financial failure less threatening, though it also means that monthly costs rise with increasing levels of care.
Industry sources urge prospective residents to carefully investigate a facility’s financial soundness and applicable state laws, and to have lawyers or financial advisers vet contracts.
“Harborside has been in the news for years — it wasn’t a secret,” Kramer said.
But Bob Curtis and his sons, both in finance, consulted accountants and even interviewed the chief financial officer of the Harborside’s parent company. Yet here they are.
Curtis attends every bankruptcy court proceeding via Zoom. If he loses his refund, “Where’s Sandy going to go?” he wonders. “How’s she going to manage? How am I going to pay for it?”
This story was originally published at nytimes.com. Read it here.
To celebrate, Rudiger Koch toasted with champagne and smoked a cigar before leaping into the Caribbean Sea
German aerospace engineer Rudiger Koch, 59, celebrates after breaking the Guinness world record for time living underwater without depressurisation off the coast of Panama. Photograph: Martin Bernetti/AFP/Getty Images
Agence France-Presse | Fri 24 Jan 2025 22.29
A German aerospace engineer has celebrated setting a world record for the longest time living under water without depressurisation – 120 days in a submerged capsule off the coast of Panama.
Rudiger Koch, 59, emerged from his 30 sq metre home under the sea on Friday in the presence of Guinness World Records adjudicator Susana Reyes.
She confirmed that Koch had beaten the record previously held by American Joseph Dituri, who spent 100 days living in an underwater lodge in a Florida lagoon.
“It was a great adventure and now it’s over there’s almost a sense of regret actually. I enjoyed my time here very much,” Koch said after leaving the capsule 11 metres under the sea.
“It is beautiful when things calm down and it gets dark and the sea is glowing,” he said of the view through the portholes.
“It is impossible to describe, you have to experience that yourself.”
To celebrate, Koch toasted with champagne and smoked a cigar before leaping into the Caribbean Sea, where a boat picked him up and took him to dry land for a celebratory party.
Koch’s capsule had most of the trappings of modern life: bed, toilet, TV, computer and internet – even an exercise bike.
Located 15 minutes by boat from the coast of northern Panama, it was attached to another chamber perched above the waves by a tube containing a narrow spiral staircase, providing a way down for food and visitors, including a doctor.
Solar panels on the surface provided electricity. There was a backup generator, but no shower.
Koch had told an AFP journalist who visited him halfway through his endeavour that he hoped it would change the way we think about human life – and where we can settle, even permanently.
“What we are trying to do here is prove that the seas are actually a viable environment for human expansion,” he said.
Four cameras filmed his moves in the capsule – capturing his daily life, monitoring his mental health and providing proof that he never came up to the surface.
“We needed witnesses who were monitoring and verifying 24/7 for more than 120 days,” Reyes said.
The record “is undoubtedly one of the most extravagant” and required “a lot of work”, she added.
An admirer of Captain Nemo in Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Koch kept a copy of the 19th-century sci-fi classic on his bedside table beneath the waves.
The soil, treasured for centuries, turns steep Yemini slopes into fertile and productive land. Coffee grown here was served at London’s first coffee house in 1652
Terraces on Jabal Sabir mountain near the city of Ta’izz in southern Yemen. Photograph: Arne Hodalic/Getty Images
You always know you are about to see something interesting when the driver of your vehicle removes his shoes and firmly grasps the foot pedals with a powerful set of calloused toes. I was new to Yemen and had no idea what to expect. All I could see was that we were on a stony mountain plateau rushing towards a cliff edge in a Toyota pickup truck that no one had remembered to service and MOT.
The twin parallel tyre marks on the dusty mountain top took a sharp left and the horizon fell away into a hazy, bluish void. Our descent had begun: a bone-jarring series of lurches and crashes.
We stopped to do a three-point turn around a vertiginous hairpin bend and I jumped out to admire the view. Then I got my first look at what is one of the world’s supreme human creations: the Yemeni terraces. Stacked from summit to valley bottom, curling around the contours, a staggering achievement of communal effort replicated throughout the mountain chain that runs from the Saudi border almost to the southern point of Arabia at Aden.
Mountains and farmland near the southern city of Ta’izz. Photograph: Independent Picture Service/Alamy
Each terrace wall is a testament to the stone-mason’s art, some of them standing as tall as a house to retain a couple of metres of soil. And that soil, carefully gathered and treasured for centuries, turns these steep slopes into fertile, productive land. Coffee grown here would have been served at London’s first coffee house in 1652, although at the time the true origin was so obscure it was known by the name of the Red Sea port where merchants bought it: Mokha.
Farmers hold conversations with friends who might be just 100 metres away on a terrace across the valley, but several hours walk apart
Everywhere you see the intricate workmanship and the care taken to control and retain not only soil but water. Some stone cisterns are barely bigger than a bathtub, others are Olympic swimming pool-size with complex systems of access via steps and ledges.
In spring on one mountain, Jabal Sabir near the southern city of Ta’izz, I walked through shady groves of coffee, almond and khat trees, listening to the farmers hold conversations with friends who might be just 100 metres away on a terrace across the valley, but several hours walk apart. Those terrace walls act as graveyard too. When folk die the entire village turns out to carry them at dawn and insert the shrouded body behind a stone. Everyone’s last act is to push up the daisies, and the coffee beans.
Many terraces were already ancient when the 10th-century Arab scholar Abu Hasan al-Hamdani described them as a marvel of the world. The fact is the terraces are the product of generations of human dedication, right up to the present day. Some have fallen into disrepair, it’s true, but others continue, and with their management of soil and water, they remain a potent symbol of sustainability, environmental care, and good sense.
Adrienne Murray, Business reporter, Reporting from Oslo
Like a third of Norwegian motorists, Ståle Fyen now drives an electric car
Norway is the world leader when it comes to the take up of electric cars, which last year accounted for nine out of 10 new vehicles sold in the country. Can other nations learn from it?
For more than 75 years Oslo-based car dealership Harald A Møller has been importing Volkswagens, but early in 2024 it bid farewell to fossil fuel cars.
Now all the passenger vehicles for sale in its showroom are electric (EV).
“We think it’s wrong to advise a customer coming in here today to buy an ICE [internal combustion engine] car, because the future is electric,” says chief executive Ulf Tore Hekneby, as he walks around the cars on display. “Long-range, high-charging speed. It’s hard to go back.”
On the streets of Norway’s capital, Oslo, battery-powered cars aren’t a novelty, they’re the norm. Take a look around and you’ll soon notice that almost every other car has an “E” for “electric” on its license plate.
The Nordic nation of 5.5 million people has adopted EVs faster than any other country, and is on the cusp of becoming the first to phase out the sale of new fossil fuel cars.
Last year, the number of electric cars on Norway’s roads outnumbered those powered by petrol for the first time. When diesel vehicles are included, electric cars account for almost a third of all on Norwegian roads.
And 88.9% of new cars sold in the country last year were EVs, up from 82.4% in 2023, data from the Norwegian Road Federation (OFV) showed.
In some months sales of fully electric cars were as high as 98%, as new petrol or diesel car purchases almost fizzled out.
By contrast, in the UK electric cars made up only 20% of new car registrations in 2024. Although this was a record high, and up from 16.5% in 2023.
In the US, the figure was just 8% last year, up from 7.6%.
Norway now has a large network of public charging stations across the country
Norway is undoubtedly an EV pioneer, but this electric revolution has been three decades in the making.
“It started already in the early 1990s,” says Christina Bu, the secretary general of the Norwegian EV Association, as she took me for a spin around Oslo in an electric minivan.
“Little by little taxing petrol and diesel engine cars more, so they have become a lot more expensive to purchase, whereas electric cars have been exempted from taxes.”
The support for electric vehicles was first introduced to help two Norwegian manufacturers of early EVs, the Buddy (previously Kewet) and TH!NK City. While they went out of business, the incentives for greener vehicles remained.
“It’s our goal to see that it’s always a good and viable choice, to choose zero emission,” says Norway’s Deputy Transport Minister, Cecilie Knibe Kroglund.
Even though it’s a major oil and gas producer, Norway aims for all new cars sold to be “zero emission”, starting at some point in 2025. A non-binding goal was set back in 2017, and that milestone now lies within reach.
“We are closing up on the target, and I think that we will reach that goal,” adds Kroglund. “I think we have already made the transition for passengers cars.”
Key to Norway’s success has been long-term and predictable policies, she explains.
Rather than banning combustion engine vehicles, the government has steered consumer choices. In addition to penalising fuel fossil vehicles with higher taxes and registration fees, VAT and import duties were scrapped for low-emission cars.
A string of perks, like free parking, discounted road tolls and access to bus lanes, then followed.
By comparison, the European Union plans to ban sales of new fossil-fuel cars by 2035, and the UK’s current government wants to prohibit their sale in 2030.
Petrol and diesel car sales are still permitted in Norway. But few are choosing to buy them.
Norway’s vast oil and gas exports means it can live without domestic tax revenues from petrol and diesel
For many locals, like Ståle Fyen, who bought his first EV 15 months ago, going electric made economic sense.
“With all the incentives we have in Norway, with no taxes on EVs, that was quite important to us money wise,” he says while plugging in his car at a charging station in the capital.
“In the cold, the range is maybe 20% shorter, but still, with the expansive charging network we have here in Norway, that isn’t a big issue really,” Mr Fyen adds. “You just have to change your mindset and charge when you can, not when you need to.”
Another driver, Merete Eggesbø, says that back in 2014 she was one of the first people in Norway to own a Tesla. “I really wanted a car that didn’t pollute. It gave me a better conscience driving.”
At Norwegian petrol stations many fuel pumps have been replaced by fast-charging points, and across Norway there are now more than 27,000 public chargers.
This compares with 73,699 in the UK – a country 12 times bigger in terms of population.
That means that, per 100,000 people, Norway has 447 chargers while the UK has just 89, according to a recent report.
Tesla, VW and Toyota, were Norway’s top-selling EV brands last year. Meanwhile, Chinese-owned marques – such as MG, BYD, Polestar and XPeng – now make up a combined 10% of the market, according to the Norwegian Road Federation.
Norway, unlike the US and EU, has not imposed tariffs on Chinese EV imports.
Christina Bu says that Norway’s EV revolution has been three decades in the making
Ms Bu says there’s “not really any reason why other countries can not copy Norway”. However, she adds that it is “all about doing it in a way that can work in each country or market”.
Norwegians aren’t more environmentally-minded than people elsewhere, she reckons. “I don’t think a green mindset has much to do with it. It has to do with strong policies, and people gradually understanding that driving an electric car is possible.”
Yet Norway is also a very wealthy nation, which thanks to its huge oil and gas exports, has a sovereign wealth fund worth more than $1.7tn (£1.3tn). This means it can more easily afford big infrastructure-build projects, and absorb the loss of tax revenue from the sale of petrol and diesel cars and their fuel.
“A third of cars are now electric, and it will pass 50% in a few years,” says Kjell Werner Johansen from the Norwegian Centre for Transport Research. “I think the government accepts that a few new petrol or hybrid cars will still be on the market, but I don’t know anybody who wants to buy a diesel car these days.”
Iraqi law currently sets 18 as the minimum age of marriage in most cases. The changes passed on Tuesday would let clerics rule according to their interpretation of Islamic law, which some interpret to allow marriage of girls in their early teens – or as young as nine under the Jaafari school of Islamic law followed by many Shia religious authorities in Iraq.
Proponents of the changes, which were advocated by primarily conservative Shia lawmakers, defend them as a means to align the law with Islamic principles and reduce western influence on Iraqi culture.
The parliament also passed a general amnesty law seen as benefiting Sunni detainees and that is also seen as giving a pass to people involved in corruption and embezzlement. The chamber also passed a land restitution law aimed at addressing Kurdish territorial claims.
Intisar al-Mayali, a human rights activist and a member of the Iraqi Women’s League, said passage of the civil status law amendments “will leave disastrous effects on the rights of women and girls, through the marriage of girls at an early age, which violates their right to life as children, and will disrupt the protection mechanisms for divorce, custody and inheritance for women”.
The session ended in chaos and accusations of procedural violations.
“Half of the lawmakers present in the session did not vote, which broke the legal quorum,” a parliamentary official said on condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to comment publicly. He said that some members protested loudly and others climbed on to the parliamentary podium.
After the session, a number of legislators complained about the voting process, under which all three controversial laws – each of which was supported by different blocs – were voted on together.
“Regarding the civil status law, we are strongly supporting it and there were no issues with that,” said Raed al-Maliki, an independent MP. “But it was combined with other laws to be voted on together … and this might lead to a legal appeal at the federal court.”
Parliament speaker Mahmoud al-Mashhadani in a statement praised the laws’ passage as “an important step in the process of enhancing justice and organising the daily lives of citizens”.
Jane Fonda‘s fitness routine has remained the same over the years — just at a different pace over time.
“I essentially do everything I used to do, just slower,” the actress, 87, tells PEOPLE in an exclusive interview.
“I used to be a runner, but now I love walking. I love being outdoors in the woods, especially up and down hills,” she continues.
For Fonda, mixing up how she stays in tip-top shape is important, so she doesn’t get used to the same routine.
“I work out every day, so it is important to mix up the way I move. I alternate days doing upper body and lower body work for strength. I also find some way to get cardio in. Walking outside is one of my favorite ways to do so,” she says.
Fonda has been a longtime fitness lover, dating back to the early 1980s, when she released her first exercise video, Jane Fonda’s Workout, which was inspired by her best-selling book, Jane Fonda’s Workout Book.
Looking back at the influence of her popular tapes, which spawned more exercise videos in the years to follow, Fonda tells PEOPLE, “I had no idea my videos were going to become such a phenomenon.”
“When I was starting out, there weren’t many rigorous forms of exercise available to women,” she continues. “I learned the basic workout from a charismatic teacher named Leni Kasden in the ’70s.”
“After the videos came out, I’d get amazing letters from around the world. One was from a young woman in the Peace Corps in Guatemala who did the exercises in her mud hut,” adds Fonda. “Another woman said she looked in the mirror as she was brushing her teeth and noticed new muscles in her arms. She wrote that it made her feel empowered, and that day she went to work and stood up to her handsy boss for the first time.”
Currently, Fonda is working with Supernatural, a virtual reality (VR) fitness and wellness platform available only on Meta Quest, for a four-part content series.
Each VR fitness class — Flow with Jane Fonda, Box with Jane Fonda & Ludacris, Jane Fonda: Stretching and Jane Fonda: Team Workout — is coached by Fonda herself and features a mix of Supernatural’s signature Boxing and Flow experiences.
“Going from VHS to VR, I was surprised by how easy Supernatural was to pick up,” Fonda tells PEOPLE. “We really bridged the past and future of fitness with this series. Aside from the technology, it felt as if no time had passed.”
One part of the content series that Fonda says she loves especially is the use of music. “Having the right music can make or break the workout, especially in cardio and aerobics,” she explains. “An upbeat playlist is essential. That, and a good attitude.”
“Fitness is such a big part of my life, so to get to do it with today’s technology is a full-circle moment,” adds the activist.
This article was written independently by PEOPLE’s editorial team and meets our editorial standards. Meta is a paid advertising partner with PEOPLE.
Donald Trump has moved to change the US government’s policies on gender and diversity, following through on promises he made on the campaign trail.
“As of today, it will henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders, male and female,” Trump said during his inaugural address.
The Trump administration indicated he would sign an executive order Monday that would recognise two sexes only – male and female – and declare that they cannot be changed.
The move is part of Trump’s wider promises about what conservatives decry as “woke” culture, gender and diversity, equality and inclusion (DEI) progammes.
An administration official said the executive order would “end DEI inside the federal government”, cutting funding to DEI programmes across all agencies and including a review of offices renamed because of DEI initiatives.
The administration did not say whether action would extend to the private sector, with an official saying businesses should “wait and see”.
Several large US companies have ended or scaled back their DEI programmes since Trump was elected, including McDonald’s, Walmart and Facebook parent company Meta.
Others, like Apple and retailers Target and Costco, publicly defended their existing programmes.
DEI supporters see the programmes as a way to correct lingering discrimination based on race, sexuality and other characteristics. The idea received renewed attention in the wake of racial justice protests after the murder of George Floyd in 2020.
New research published in Nature Aging by the University of Minnesota Medical School links social and psychological stress to accelerated aging through shared biological mechanisms.
A study from the University of Minnesota Medical School links social stress to accelerated aging, finding that stress damages DNA and induces cellular senescence in the brain. Future research will explore mechanisms behind these effects and potential protective strategies.
A study published in Nature Aging by researchers from the University of Minnesota Medical School explores the connection between stress and aging, focusing on shared biological mechanisms. The research investigates how exposure to social and psychological stressors may speed up aging and impact health, using preclinical models.
The team discovered that social stress triggers neurons in the hippocampus and cortex to exhibit signs of senescence and DNA damage—hallmarks of accelerated aging. This finding provides evidence that stress in social environments can directly contribute to the aging process.
The Inspiration Behind the Study
“This research was inspired by a significant amount of work proving that life stress, social determinants, and low socioeconomic status, in particular, adversely affect health and aging in humans. However, the causal mechanisms are almost impossible to identify in humans,” said Alessandro Bartolomucci, PhD, a professor at the U of M Medical School and senior author of the study. “Our study represents the first step in the quest to identify how life stress can impact aging. The observation that social stressors increase markers of cellular senescence in the brain and other organs, which appears to be driven by DNA damage, among other factors, was a major finding.”
Future research will focus on understanding how stress influences several interconnected biological mechanisms known as hallmarks of aging, and whether targeting these mechanisms could help protect against the adverse health impact of life stress on the aging process.
Reference: “Chronic social stress induces p16-mediated senescent cell accumulation in mice” by Carey E. Lyons, Jean Pierre Pallais, Seth McGonigle, Rachel P. Mansk, Charles W. Collinge, Matthew J. Yousefzadeh, Darren J. Baker, Patricia R. Schrank, Jesse W. Williams, Laura J. Niedernhofer, Jan M. van Deursen, Maria Razzoli and Alessandro Bartolomucci, 11 November 2024, Nature Aging. DOI: 10.1038/s43587-024-00743-8
Funding was provided primarily by the National Institute on Aging, and the MN Partnership for Biotechnology and Molecular Genomics.
Scientists from MIT have been blasting magnets with lasers, which is more scientific than it sounds. Researchers working with antiferromagnetic material have devised a way to control the magnetic states of atoms with a super-fast laser. With the precise control over atomic spin demonstrated in this work, it may be possible to develop a new generation of more durable and efficient magnetic data storage.
Everyone knows what a magnet is, but what about an antiferromagnet? Magnetic materials get their attractive properties from the orientation of atomic spin. In a magnet, the spin is aligned in the same way so the material can be influenced by an external magnetic field. However, an antiferromagnet is composed of atoms with alternating spin—one pointing up, then one down, then up, and so on. This averages out to net zero magnetization.
Researchers have long believed that antiferromagnets could serve as a next-generation alternative to traditional magnetic storage media. However, the problem has always been in how you write data by switching up its magnetic states. That’s where the laser comes in.
This work relies on terahertz lasers, which oscillate more than one trillion times per second. This high-frequency light can be adapted to the natural vibrations of atoms in antiferromagnetic material. Hitting atoms with this laser can nudge them into new magnetic states that persist after the laser is deactivated. The researchers say it’s possible to align atomic spins so precisely that you can “write” data to a specific domain. For example, a spin combination of up-down could be a “0” bit, and down-up can signify the classical bit “
According to the study, which has been published in the journal Nature, the team used a common antiferromagnetic material called Iron phosphorus trisulfide (FePS3). This material transitions to an antiferromagnet at a temperature of -247 degrees Fahrenheit (118 Kelvin). The team sought to influence this process by use of the high-frequency laser. Most solid materials have collective vibrations, called phonons, in the terahertz range. By exciting atoms in this range, the spin can be shifted to create what are essentially tiny magnets within the antiferromagnet that don’t go poof the instant the laser shuts off.
Study authors Tianchuang Luo, Nuh Gedik, and Alexander von Hoegen tinkering with terahertz lasers. Credit: MIT / Adam Glanzman
“The idea is that you can kill two birds with one stone: You excite the atoms’ terahertz vibrations, which also couples to the spins,” says study co-author Nuh Gedik. Researchers have done this before, but the difference with the new work at MIT is that these magnetic properties persist after the laser is deactivated. Previous light-induced transitions have only lasted a few picoseconds.
Showing that this is possible in the lab is an important first step, but we’re a long way from using antiferromagnetic materials for data storage. There’s plenty of reason to pursue this technology, though. Antiferromagnetic storage would not be vulnerable to external magnetic fields, making them much more durable. They would also be much smaller, with greater data density, and they would use very little power compared with traditional media.
Illustration of a cancer cell. (Science Photo Library/Canva Pro)
Scientists have discovered a remarkable way to destroy cancer cells. A study published last year found stimulating aminocyanine molecules with near-infrared light caused them to vibrate in sync, enough to break apart the membranes of cancer cells.
Aminocyanine molecules are already used in bioimaging as synthetic dyes. Commonly used in low doses to detect cancer, they stay stable in water and are very good at attaching themselves to the outside of cells.
The research team from Rice University, Texas A&M University, and the University of Texas, said their approach is a marked improvement over another kind of cancer-killing molecular machine previously developed, called Feringa-type motors, which could also break the structures of problematic cells.
“It is a whole new generation of molecular machines that we call molecular jackhammers,” said chemist James Tour from Rice University, when the results were published in December 2023.
“They are more than one million times faster in their mechanical motion than the former Feringa-type motors, and they can be activated with near-infrared light rather than visible light.”
The use of near-infrared light is important because it enables scientists to get deeper into the body. Cancer in bones and organs could potentially be treated without needing surgery to get to the cancer growth.
In tests on cultured, lab-grown cancer cells, the molecular jackhammer method scored a 99 percent hit rate at destroying the cells. The approach was also tested on mice with melanoma tumors, and half the animals became cancer-free.
The structure and chemical properties of aminocyanine molecules mean they stay in sync with the right stimulus – such as near-infrared light. When in motion, the electrons inside the molecules form what’s known as plasmons, collectively vibrating entities that drive movement across the whole of the molecule.
The structure of an aminocyanine molecule (a molecular jackhammer) overlaid on top of the calculated molecular plasmon. (Ciceron Ayala-Orozco/Rice University)
“What needs to be highlighted is that we’ve discovered another explanation for how these molecules can work,” said chemist Ciceron Ayala-Orozco from Rice University.
“This is the first time a molecular plasmon is utilized in this way to excite the whole molecule and to actually produce mechanical action used to achieve a particular goal – in this case, tearing apart cancer cells’ membrane.”
The plasmons have an arm on one side, helping to connect the molecules to the cancer cell membranes while the movements of the vibrations bash them apart. It’s still early days for the research, but these initial findings are very promising.
This is also the kind of straightforward, biomechanical technique that cancer cells would find it hard to evolve some sort of blockade against. Next, the researchers are looking at other types of molecules that can be used similarly
“This study is about a different way to treat cancer using mechanical forces at the molecular scale,” said Ayala-Orozco.
In a paper published in JAMA, health policy experts at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) report that patient care experience worsened after private equity (PE) acquisition of US hospitals, as did patient-reported staff responsiveness.
Rishi Wadhera, MD, MPP, Anjali Bhatla, MD, and colleagues demonstrated that patient care continued to worsen at PE-acquired hospitals with each additional year following acquisition relative to non-acquired hospitals, suggesting that profit-driven changes made by PE may have downstream effects that accumulate over time.
“Patients provide the most important perspective on whether a hospital is providing good or bad care, as they have a 360-degree view of the entire care experience,” said Wadhera, Associate Director of the Richard A. and Susan F. Smith Center for Outcomes Research at BIDMC.
“After private equity takes over a hospital, patient care experience significantly worsens. That’s very concerning, given the surge in PE acquisitions of health care facilities over the past decade.”
Wadhera, Bhatla and colleagues identified 73 US hospitals newly acquired by private equity firms and 293 matched control (non-acquired) US hospitals from 2008 to 2019.
Investigators analyzed whether patients’ overall rating of a hospital and willingness to recommend the hospital, as well as patient-reported staff responsiveness, doctor and nurse communication, and hospital environment changed in the three years after hospitals were acquired by PE compared with a control group of non-acquired hospitals.
The data revealed that global measures of patient care experience and staff responsiveness worsened after PE acquisition of hospitals.
“The relative decline in overall patient care experience scores after PE acquisition was large,” said Bhatla, a research fellow at the Smith Center. “Poor patient experiences are associated with slower recovery from illness, medication nonadherence, and greater health care utilization.”
“The evidence to date suggests that when private equity takes over a hospital, things generally get worse for patients,” said Wadhera, who is also an Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School.
“As private equity’s presence in health continues to grow, there’s a pressing need for greater transparency, monitoring, and regulatory oversight, to ensure that patients are protected.”
In 2021, PE investors spent more than $200 billion on health care acquisitions, and $1 trillion in the past decade, according to the Commonwealth Fund, a non-partisan health care policy think tank. Little evidence-based research has evaluated the impact of private equity acquisitions on the patient care experience, an important dimension of care quality.
In a previous study, Wadhera documented a dramatic rise in private equity firms acquiring outpatient cardiology practices in the United States. Wadhera and colleagues noted that PE firms’ disproportionately acquired cardiology practices located in wealthy communities, which may funnel capital and resources away from practices located in underserved communities.
Many PE-acquired cardiology clinic sites changed hands more than once over the 10-year study—a known strategy employed by private equity firms who favor short-term investments over three- to seven-year time periods. Shorter investment timelines incentivize changes in care delivery that maximize profits but could potentially worsen quality of care for patients.
TV software is getting loaded with ads, changing what it means to own a TV set.
Scharon Harding | Ars Technica | Aug 19, 2024 4:00 AM
Credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images
The TV business isn’t just about selling TVs anymore. Companies are increasingly seeing viewers, not TV sets, as their most lucrative asset.
Over the past few years, TV makers have seen rising financial success from TV operating systems that can show viewers ads and analyze their responses. Rather than selling as many TVs as possible, brands like LG, Samsung, Roku, and Vizio are increasingly, if not primarily, seeking recurring revenue from already-sold TVs via ad sales and tracking.
How did we get here? And what implications does an ad- and data-obsessed industry have for the future of TVs and the people watching them?
The value of software
Success in the TV industry used to mean selling as many TV sets as possible. But with smart TVs becoming mainstream and hardware margins falling, OEMs have sought new ways to make money. TV OS providers can access a more frequent revenue source at higher margins, which has led to a viewing experience loaded with ads. They can be served from the moment you pick up your remote, which may feature streaming service ads in the form of physical buttons.
Some TV brands already prioritize data collection and the ability to sell ads, and most are trying to boost their appeal to advertisers. Smart TV OSes have become the cash cow of the TV business, with providers generating revenue by licensing the software and through revenue sharing of in-app purchases and subscriptions.
A huge part of TV OS revenue comes from selling ads, including on the OS’s home screen and screensaver and through free, ad-supported streaming television channels. GroupM, the world’s largest media investment company, reported that smart TV ad revenue grew 20 percent from 2023 to 2024 and will grow another 20 percent to reach $46 billion next year. In September 2023, Patrick Horner, practice leader of consumer electronics at analyst Omdia, reported that “each new connected TV platform user generates around $5 per quarter in data and advertising revenue.”
Automatic content recognition (ACR) tech is at the heart of the smart TV ads business. Most TV brands say users can opt out of ACR, but we’ve already seen Vizio take advantage of the feature without user permission. ACR is also sometimes turned on by default, and the off switch is often buried in a settings menu. Including ACR on a TV at all says a lot about a TV maker’s priorities. Most users have almost nothing to gain from ACR and face privacy concerns by sharing information—sometimes in real time—about what they do with their TVs.
At this point, consumers have come to expect ads and tracking on budget TVs from names like Vizio or Roku. But the biggest companies in TV are working on turning their sets into data-prolific billboards, too.
When TVs watch you back, so do corporations
In recent years, we’ve seen companies like LG and Samsung increase their TVs’ ad capabilities as advertisers become more eager to access tracking data from TVs.
LG, for example, started sharing data gathered from its TVs with Nielsen, giving the data and market measurement firm “the largest ACR data footprint in the industry,” according to an October announcement. The deal gives Nielsen streaming and linear TV data from LG TVs and provides firms buying ads on LG TVs with “‘Always On’ streaming measurement and big data from LG Ad Solutions” via Nielsen’s ONE Ads dashboard.
LG, which recently unveiled a goal of evolving its hardware business into an ad-pushing “media and entertainment platform company,” expects there to be 300 million webOS TVs in homes by 2026. That represents a huge data-collection and recurring-revenue opportunity. In September, LG said it would invest 1 trillion KRW (about $737.7 million) through 2028 into its “webOS business,” or the business behind its smart TV OS. The company said updates will include improving webOS’s UI, AI-based recommendations, and search capabilities.
Similarly, Samsung recently updated its ACR tech to track exposure to ads viewed on its TVs via streaming services instead of just from linear TV. Samsung is also trying to make its ACR data more valuable for ad targeting, including through a deal signed in December with analytics firm Experian.
Representatives for LG and Samsung declined to comment to Ars Technica about how much of their respective company’s business is ad sales. But the deals they’ve made with data-collection firms signal big interest in turning their products into lucrative smart TVs. In this case, “smart” isn’t about Internet connectivity but rather how well the TV understands its viewer.
The true price of a cheap TV
Budget TVs are the leaders in this trend, often offsetting cheap hardware prices with ads and data collection. Some people seek out the latest display developments, but many consumers merely want the cheapest TV they can buy within a certain size range. Various brands lure budget shoppers with low prices but then force them to pay through heightened ad exposure—either immediately or after a future software update. In recent months, we’ve seen budget brands test users’ limits when it comes to ads, and this is all happening amid a global shift to streaming services that are also increasingly ad-driven.
Roku OS is constantly trying to fit more ads with stronger targeting into its UI, whether that’s on the menu, on screensavers, or delivered via Roku TV channels. Earlier this year, Roku OS introduced home-screen video ads.
Roku has also tested a feature that “would force viewers to sit through effectively a mid-roll ad when clicking from the Roku City screensaver to return to home screen,” Digiday reported in May. Additionally, Roku filed a patent for showing ads over anything you plug into your TV. It’s possible that neither capability will roll out, but interest in these sorts of developments illustrates the value Roku puts in advancing its ad services.
Moving off an Android fork, Amazon reportedly started deploying its own OS to run on its TVs in November. Amazon Fire TV users are subject to full-screen video ads, and OS ownership gives Amazon more control and greater potential for earnings from advertising services. Amazon’s advertising business was thought to be its most profitable in 2020, and Fire OS is becoming a bigger part of that.
With software updates easily forcing new ad capabilities into already-owned TVs, it’s likely that this strategy will intensify in the near term as OS providers try to find more ways to support new types of ads. In the long term, with price often cited as a top factor in TV purchasing decisions, pricier brands may potentially cave and adopt more ad-centric tactics. Such moves could help those brands offer prices that are more competitive with budget options.
TV or store?
Even before smart TVs, watching TV typically meant watching plenty of commercials and product placements. But Internet connectivity, advanced tracking techniques, and interest in TV data collection from megastores are pushing TVs to evolve from digital billboards to digital stores.
People usually only buy a new TV every few years or longer, which has driven OEMs to the ongoing revenue potential tied to data and ads. For users, this means that TV watching could become much more commercialized as the industry seeks new ways to use TVs for ad tracking. The current focus is on developing “shoppable ads,” or ads that let people make purchases while using their TV.
A depiction of a shoppable ad for Walmart on a Roku TV.Roku
Checking out on the Roku TV. Roku
Streaming services like Hulu already show shoppable ads, and TV OS operators are exploring ways to capitalize on the trend. Amazon and Roku TVs, for example, have shoppable ads on screensavers. Other brands, like Samsung, are building out their ability to deliver shoppable ads on TVs. Relevant players are exploring formats like QR codes, games, and ads you can navigate with your remote. And TV brands are increasingly working with big stores like Walgreens and Best Buy to more extensively target advertising.
Omdia’s Horner tells me that shoppable ads are the “next wave of smart TV advertising.” Amazon and Walmart are expected to lead the way as huge retailers that can incorporate the purchase histories they have from their stores with viewer data. According to trade publication Retail TouchPoints, Walgreens Senior Director of Client Success Katie Vogt explained the appeal at a June conference:
The beauty of reaching a specific Walgreens shopper is that [brands can] tie back the measurement and understand whether the shoppable [connected TV] ad actually drove those customers to go into a store or go online to make a purchase.
Walmart’s proposed Vizio acquisition is an obvious example of how eager retailers and advertisers are to access data collected from TVs. Through its Platform+ business unit, Vizio was one of the first OEMs to focus more business on ad sales and tracking than hardware.
In Q1 2024, Vizio reported $88.3 million gross profit for Platform+ and a $7.2 million loss for its devices business. Credit: Omdia
Walmart is willing to pay $2.3 billion for Vizio to help reach its dream of being a top-10 advertising business. Soon, using a Vizio TV could mean fueling Walmart’s ability to sell and track ads and make retail sales.
Stakeholders argue that shoppable ads provide a service to viewers, but the obvious winner is advertisers. As Tony Marlow, CMO of LG Ad Solutions, wrote earlier this year, without shoppable TV ads, “marketers have been unable to gain a truly holistic view of the entire purchase journey.”
Going even further, newcomer Displace is offering a peek at an aggressive TV-as-a-store future. The company says its sets, which will ship at the end of the year, will be able to use proprietary gesture tech to tell if someone is raising a hand. The TV will pause the content and use computer vision to look for stuff the viewer can buy. Viewers can place items they want in a shopping cart and pay for them using the TV’s integrated NFC reader.
As a 2-year-old startup offering a niche product, Displace likely won’t have the same impact on the industry as the likes of Amazon or Vizio. But Displace’s TVs are indicative of an industry desperate for new ways to make money and eager to be an integral part of e-commerce.
Telly’s free TVs
Another niche upcoming TV set is the Telly. The company’s TVs are free but allow the startup to track their owners, and they have a secondary screen for showing ads, including when the TV is off (the secondary screen can also display information like the weather or sports scores). Telly’s prospective owners must answer a long series of questions, like if they’re registered to vote and who their cell phone provider is, with the data used for ad targeting. Telly has discussed further potential ways to commercialize TV watching, such as letting people earn gift cards by filling out surveys (also to help targeted advertising) on the TV.
Telly’s 4K TV comes with a different kind of price. Credit: Telly
Telly takes tracking to a new level, especially since owners can’t opt out—blocking tracking may result in an owner being charged for the TV. The company’s viewing and activity data policy says its TVs can track a myriad of things, including settings, search queries, apps usage, and how many people are within 25 feet of the TV. Telly claims that advertisers won’t see personal information when viewing data accumulated from its TVs.
In theory, Telly could help get a new 55-inch 4K TV in the hands of people who wouldn’t be able to afford one otherwise. But at least in this early stage, the company isn’t primarily benefitting low-income households. According to a May Video Week report, Telly’s first 400,000 users have “higher incomes than the US average,” which seems like a draw for advertisers.
Telly’s business model is an outlier, but its CEO thinks the company is ahead of the curve, and advertisers are jumping aboard. Still, Omdia’s Horner believes Telly’s strategy won’t become mainstream. “Amazon and Walmart are the players to watch for trends in smart TV ads and e-commerce. Niche players giving away free TVs in exchange for extreme data collection will not move the market,” he said.
When dumb TVs seem smart
As the TV industry has grown its ad capabilities over the years, shoppers have nearly lost the option to buy a new TV that doesn’t connect to the Internet. Jacob Hoffman-Andrews, senior staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, described the trend of building surveillance into all new smart TVs as “incredibly invasive and little understood.”
In an email to Ars, he added, “Nobody wants a snooping and snitching television, but lately that’s all you can buy.”
Those who want a TV without an Internet connection have few options. You can try to prevent a smart TV from tracking you, but again, turning off ACR and other tracking techniques can be challenging. Some TVs remove basic features like Internet connectivity if you don’t let them track you.
Companies like Telly open a window for other brands to consider more intrusive tracking and ads. Consider a world in which you have to say a brand name at your TV to skip ads, as demonstrated by a Sony patent:
An image from Sony’s patent. Credit: Sony Interactive Entertainment LLC
It’s likely that Sony won’t make anything of this patent, as is typically the case with patents from research and development teams. But here again, we see how common it is for tech brands that sell TVs to experiment with ad formats and delivery.
Some things TVs already track would have sounded extreme before 2011, when ACR started taking off. For example, using ACR, TVs can reveal to OS providers—and therefore advertisers—the shows watched on the set and whether that content was streamed or watched via an antenna or cable. ACR can even identify DVDs watched on a TV. Per Ad Exchanger: “ACR ingests pixels on-screen to assign a value to each frame,” which is like an “unknown fingerprint.” The OS sends these fingerprints “to a database that logs content available on TV to find a known match and identify the content. Once ACR identifies the show, it can tie that viewing data to a specific household, such as a given household watching The Big Bang Theory at 9 pm.” Advertisers can combine this information with other tactics, like advertisement identification, which assigns a unique ID to ads, to further track TV usage.
But there are plenty who don’t know the extent to which their TVs are monitoring them. Complexity in understanding and controlling TV tracking is especially relevant as more sets incorporate microphones and cameras. Terms of service are often complex, wordy agreements buried in elusive TV settings or online, and companies have ways of strong-arming TV owners into accepting such agreements. Further complicating matters, it’s possible for consumers to disable tracking from the TV OS provider, such as Google, but still be tracked by the TV OEM, like TCL.
Tune in next time…
With TV sales declining and many shoppers prioritizing pricing, smart TV players will continue developing ads that are harder to avoid and better at targeting. Interestingly, Horner told Ars that smart TV advertising revenue exceeding smart TV hardware revenue (as well as ad sale margins surpassing those of hardware) is a US-only trend, albeit one that shows no signs of abating. OLED has become a mainstay in the TV marketplace, and until the next big display technology becomes readily available, OEMs are scrambling to make money in a saturated TV market filled with budget options. Selling ads is an obvious way to bridge the gap between today and The Next Big Thing in TVs.
Indeed, with companies like Samsung and LG making big deals with analytics firms and other brands building their businesses around ads, the industry’s obsession with ads will only intensify. As we’ve seen before with TV commercials, which have gotten more frequent over time, once the ad genie is out of the bottle, it tends to grow, not go back inside.
One side effect we’re already seeing, Horner notes, is “a proliferation of more TV operating systems.” While choice is often a good thing for consumers, it’s important to consider if new options from companies like Amazon, Comcast, and TiVo actually do anything to notably improve the smart TV experience for owners.
And OS operators’ financial success is tied to the number of hours users spend viewing something on the OS. Roku’s senior director of ad innovation, Peter Hamilton, told Digiday in May that his team works closely with Roku’s consumer team, “whose goal is to drive total viewing hours.” Many smart TV OS operators are therefore focused on making it easier for users to navigate content via AI.
With advertising, it’s not just the number of TVs shipped but rather the number of hours of content consumed that determines the winner. In this respect, the TV itself matters as well. Only the set in the main TV viewing room will get enough engagement to justify selling at close-to-manufacturing costs. The smaller sets in bedrooms and the kitchen, for example, will not get enough engagement to be profitable from advertising alone. We expect that in the US, TVs that are 50 inches and above and in the main viewing area of the house will be the primary targets for advertising engagement.
Vendors I spoke with all said that ad interests wouldn’t hinder R&D around more traditional features. Having TVs with desirable features like strong image or sound quality remains relevant for pushing ads. But it’s easy to imagine TV brands growing complacent about improving more traditional TV capabilities, too.
For most people who want fewer ads on their TVs, the only option is to vote with your dollar. There’s also a growing pool of technically savvy folks sharing hacks for disconnecting smart TVs from the web or even DIYing your own smart TV.
People who ask me for recommendations for cheap TVs used to receive lectures about factors like viewing angles and sound quality. Now, I talk about privacy, tracking concerns, and the software behind the hardware.
No matter how you slice it, though, the ad-ificaiton of TVs is here to stay.
Twenty-four brain samples collected in early 2024 measured on average about 0.5% plastic by weight
Douglas Main | the Guardian | Wed 21 Aug 2024 09.00 EDT
A growing body of scientific evidence shows that microplastics are accumulating in critical human organs, including the brain, leading researchers to call for more urgent actions to rein in plastic pollution.
Studies have detected tiny shards and specks of plastics in human lungs, placentas, reproductive organs, livers, kidneys, knee and elbow joints, blood vessels and bone marrow.
Given the research findings, “it is now imperative to declare a global emergency” to deal with plastic pollution, said Sedat Gündoğdu, who studies microplastics at Cukurova University in Turkey.
Humans are exposed to microplastics – defined as fragments smaller than 5mm in diameter – and the chemicals used to make plastics from widespread plastic pollution in air, water and even food.
There’s much more plastic in our brains than I ever would have imagined or been comfortable with
Matthew Campen, University of New Mexico
The health hazards of microplastics within the human body are not yet well-known. Recent studies are just beginning to suggest they could increase the risk of various conditions such as oxidative stress, which can lead to cell damage and inflammation, as well as cardiovascular disease.
There are currently no governmental standards for plastic particles in food or water in the United States. The Environmental Protection Agency is working on crafting guidelines for measuring them, and has been giving out grants since 2018 to develop new ways to quickly detect and quantify them.
Finding microplastics in more and more human organs “raises a lot of concerns”, given what we know about health effects in animals, studies of human cells in the lab, and emerging epidemiological studies, said Bethanie Carney Almroth, an ecotoxicologist at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. “It’s scary, I’d say.”
‘Pretty alarming’
In one of the latest studies to emerge – a pre-print paper still undergoing peer review that is posted online by the National Institutes of Health – researchers found a particularly concerning accumulation of microplastics in brain samples.
An examination of the livers, kidneys and brains of autopsied bodies found that all contained microplastics, but the 91 brain samples contained on average about 10 to 20 times more than the other organs. The results came as a shock, according to the study’s lead author Matthew Campen, a toxicologist and professor of pharmaceutical sciences at the University of New Mexico.
The researchers found that 24 of the brain samples, which were collected in early 2024, measured on average about 0.5% plastic by weight.
“It’s pretty alarming,” Campen said. “There’s much more plastic in our brains than I ever would have imagined or been comfortable with.”
The study describes the brain as “one of the most plastic-polluted tissues yet sampled”.
Microplastic particles in atmospheric dust. Photograph: Janice Brahney/Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
The pre-print brain study led by Campen also hinted at a concerning link. In the study, researchers looked at 12 brain samples from people who had died with dementia, including Alzheimer’s disease. These brains contained up to 10 times more plastic by weight than healthy samples. (The latest version of Campen’s study, which contains these findings, was not yet posted online when this story was published.)
“I don’t know how much more plastic our brain can stuff in without it causing some problems,” Campen said.
The paper also found the quantity of microplastics in brain samples from 2024 was about 50% higher from the total in samples that date to 2016, suggesting the concentration of microplastics found in human brains is rising at a similar rate to that found in the environment. Most of the organs came from the office of the medical investigator in Albuquerque, New Mexico, which investigates untimely or violent deaths.
“You can draw a line – it’s increasing over time. It’s consistent with what you’re seeing in the environment,” Campen said.
Many other papers have found microplastics in the brains of other animal species, so it’s not entirely surprising the same could be true for humans, said Almroth of the University of Gothenburg, who was not involved in the paper.
When it comes to these insidious particles, “the blood-brain barrier is not as protective as we’d like to think”, Almroth said, referring to the series of membranes that keep many chemicals and pathogens from reaching the central nervous system.
Explosion of research
Adding to the concerns about accumulation in the human body, the Journal of Hazardous Materials published a study last month that found microplastics in all 16 samples of bone marrow examined, the first paper of its kind. All the samples contained polystyrene, used to make packing for peanuts and electronics, and almost all contained polyethylene, used in clear food wrap, detergent bottles and other common household products.
Another recent paper looking at 45 patients undergoing hip or knee surgery in Beijing, China, found microplastics in the membranous lining of every single hip or knee joint examined.
A study published on 15 May in the journal Toxicological Sciences found microplastics in all 23 human and 47 canine testicles studied, finding that samples from people had a nearly threefold greater concentration than those from dogs. A higher quantity of certain types of plastic particles – including polyethylene, the main component of plastic water bottles – correlated with lower testicular weights in dogs.
‘There’s nowhere left untouched from the deep sea to the atmosphere to the human brain.’ Photograph: David Kelly/David Kelly/The University of Queensland
Another paper, which appeared on 19 June in the International Journal of Impotence Research, detected plastic particles in the penises of four out of five men getting penile implants to treat erectile dysfunction.
“The potential health effects are concerning, especially considering the unknown long-term consequences of microplastics accumulating in sensitive tissues like the reproductive organs,” said Ranjith Ramasamy, the study’s lead author and a medical researcher and urologist at the University of Miami.
Meanwhile, a Chinese group published a study in May showing small quantities of microplastics in the semen of all 40 participants. An Italian paper from a few months prior reported similar results.
A handful of studies have also now found contamination in human placentas. A study that appeared in the May issue of Toxicological Sciences reported finding micro- and nanoplastics in all 62 placental samples, though the concentration ranged widely.
In Italy, researchers followed 312 patients who had fatty deposits, or plaques, removed from their carotid artery. Almost six in 10 had microplastics, and these people fared worse than those who did not: Over the next 34 months, they were 2.1 times as likely to experience a heart attack or stroke, or die.
‘Nowhere left untouched’
The Food and Drug Administration says in a statement on its website that “current scientific evidence does not demonstrate that levels of microplastics or nanoplastics detected in foods pose a risk to human health.”
Still, researchers say that individuals should try to reduce their exposure by avoiding the use of plastic in preparing food, especially when microwaving; drinking tap water instead of bottled water; and trying to prevent the accumulation of dust, which is contaminated with plastics. Some researchers advise eating less meat, especially processed products.
Leonardo Trasande, a medical researcher at New York University, said much remains unknown about the impacts of microplastic accumulation in humans. The negative health impacts of chemicals used in plastics, such as phthalates, are better established, though, he said. A study he co-authored found exposure to phthalates had increased the risk of cardiovascular disease and death in the United States, causing $39bn or more in lost productivity per year.
Microplastic particles can be contaminated with and carry such chemicals into the body. “The micro- and nanoplastics may be effective delivery systems for toxic chemicals,” Trasande said.
The American Chemistry Council, which represents plastic and chemical manufacturers, did not directly respond to questions about the recent studies finding microplastics in human organs. Kimberly Wise White, a vice-president with the group, noted that “the global plastics industry is dedicated to advancing the scientific understanding of microplastics”.
The United Nations Environment Assembly agreed two years ago to begin working toward a global treaty to end plastic pollution, a process that is ongoing.
Several newsreports in the last week suggest that the Biden administration has signaled that the US delegation involved in the discussions will support measures to reduce global production of plastics, which researchers say is critical to getting a handle on the problem.
“There’s nowhere left untouched from the deep sea to the atmosphere to the human brain,” Almroth said.
This story is co-published with the New Lede, a journalism project of the Environmental Working Group
ICS/OTKansas Water Facility Switches to Manual Operations Following Cyberattack Ransomware possibly involved in a cybersecurity incident at Arkansas City’s water treatment facility.
ByIonut Arghire | Security Week | September 24, 2024
Arkansas City, a small city in Kansas, says its water treatment facility was forced to switch to manual operations while a cybersecurity incident is being resolved.
The incident, described by local media as a cyberattack, was discovered on the morning of September 22 and led to precautionary measures being taken “to ensure plant operations remained secure”, the city announced in an incident notice.
According to city manager Randy Frazer, the water supply has not been affected and the incident has not caused disruption to service.
“Despite the incident, the water supply remains completely safe, and there has been no disruption to service. Out of caution, the water treatment facility has switched to manual operations while the situation is being resolved,” Frazer said.
He also noted that the city has full control of the situation and reassured residents that the drinking water is safe.
Arkansas City says it has notified the relevant authorities of the incident and that they are working with cybersecurity experts to address the issue and return the facility’s operations to normal.
“Enhanced security measures are currently in place to protect the water supply, and no changes to water quality or service are expected for residents,” the city said.
While the city’s notification does not share further details on the incident, it appears that the water treatment plant might have fallen victim to a ransomware attack.
Switching to manual operations suggests that systems were shut down to contain the attack, which is the typical response to incidents involving ransomware.
SecurityWeek has emailed Arkansas City for additional information on the incident and will update this article as soon as a reply arrives.
Because it doesn’t need expensive energy storage for times without sunshine, the technology could provide communities with drinking water at low costs.
Jon Bessette sits atop a trailer housing the electrodialysis desalination system at the Brackish Groundwater National Desalination Research Facility (BGNDRF) in Alamogordo, New Mexico. The system is connected to real groundwater, water tanks, and solar panels.
Credits:
Photo: Shane Pratt
Caption:
(Left to right): Jon Bessette, Shane Pratt, and Muriel McWhinnie (UROP) stand in front of the electrodialysis desalination system during an installation in July.
Credits:
Photo: Shane Pratt
Caption:
In a direct-drive electrodialysis desalination system, using flow-commanded current control, solar panels take in energy from the sun and then optimally allocate energy (shown in yellow) to the pump and electrodialysis stack, without the need for energy storage, such as batteries. Saline feed water flows through the pump into the electrodialysis stack, where it is desalinated and split into a drinking water stream (light blue) and a concentrated brine stream (dark blue).
Credits:
Credit: Jonathan Bessette
MIT engineers have built a new desalination system that runs with the rhythms of the sun.
The solar-powered system removes salt from water at a pace that closely follows changes in solar energy. As sunlight increases through the day, the system ramps up its desalting process and automatically adjusts to any sudden variation in sunlight, for example by dialing down in response to a passing cloud or revving up as the skies clear.
Because the system can quickly react to subtle changes in sunlight, it maximizes the utility of solar energy, producing large quantities of clean water despite variations in sunlight throughout the day. In contrast to other solar-driven desalination designs, the MIT system requires no extra batteries for energy storage, nor a supplemental power supply, such as from the grid.
The engineers tested a community-scale prototype on groundwater wells in New Mexico over six months, working in variable weather conditions and water types. The system harnessed on average over 94 percent of the electrical energy generated from the system’s solar panels to produce up to 5,000 liters of water per day despite large swings in weather and available sunlight.
“Conventional desalination technologies require steady power and need battery storage to smooth out a variable power source like solar. By continually varying power consumption in sync with the sun, our technology directly and efficiently uses solar power to make water,” says Amos Winter, the Germeshausen Professor of Mechanical Engineering and director of the K. Lisa Yang Global Engineering and Research (GEAR) Center at MIT. “Being able to make drinking water with renewables, without requiring battery storage, is a massive grand challenge. And we’ve done it.”
The system is geared toward desalinating brackish groundwater — a salty source of water that is found in underground reservoirs and is more prevalent than fresh groundwater resources. The researchers see brackish groundwater as a huge untapped source of potential drinking water, particularly as reserves of fresh water are stressed in parts of the world. They envision that the new renewable, battery-free system could provide much-needed drinking water at low costs, especially for inland communities where access to seawater and grid power are limited.
“The majority of the population actually lives far enough from the coast, that seawater desalination could never reach them. They consequently rely heavily on groundwater, especially in remote, low-income regions. And unfortunately, this groundwater is becoming more and more saline due to climate change,” says Jonathan Bessette, MIT PhD student in mechanical engineering. “This technology could bring sustainable, affordable clean water to underreached places around the world.”
The researchers report details the new system in a paper appearing today in Nature Water. The study’s co-authors are Bessette, Winter, and staff engineer Shane Pratt.
Pump and flow
The new system builds on a previous design, which Winter and his colleagues, including former MIT postdoc Wei He, reported earlier this year. That system aimed to desalinate water through “flexible batch electrodialysis.”
Electrodialysis and reverse osmosis are two of the main methods used to desalinate brackish groundwater. With reverse osmosis, pressure is used to pump salty water through a membrane and filter out salts. Electrodialysis uses an electric field to draw out salt ions as water is pumped through a stack of ion-exchange membranes.
Scientists have looked to power both methods with renewable sources. But this has been especially challenging for reverse osmosis systems, which traditionally run at a steady power level that’s incompatible with naturally variable energy sources such as the sun.
Winter, He, and their colleagues focused on electrodialysis, seeking ways to make a more flexible, “time-variant” system that would be responsive to variations in renewable, solar power.
In their previous design, the team built an electrodialysis system consisting of water pumps, an ion-exchange membrane stack, and a solar panel array. The innovation in this system was a model-based control system that used sensor readings from every part of the system to predict the optimal rate at which to pump water through the stack and the voltage that should be applied to the stack to maximize the amount of salt drawn out of the water.
When the team tested this system in the field, it was able to vary its water production with the sun’s natural variations. On average, the system directly used 77 percent of the available electrical energy produced by the solar panels, which the team estimated was 91 percent more than traditionally designed solar-powered electrodialysis systems.
Still, the researchers felt they could do better.
“We could only calculate every three minutes, and in that time, a cloud could literally come by and block the sun,” Winter says. “The system could be saying, ‘I need to run at this high power.’ But some of that power has suddenly dropped because there’s now less sunlight. So, we had to make up that power with extra batteries.”
Solar commands
In their latest work, the researchers looked to eliminate the need for batteries, by shaving the system’s response time to a fraction of a second. The new system is able to update its desalination rate, three to five times per second. The faster response time enables the system to adjust to changes in sunlight throughout the day, without having to make up any lag in power with additional power supplies.
The key to the nimbler desalting is a simpler control strategy, devised by Bessette and Pratt. The new strategy is one of “flow-commanded current control,” in which the system first senses the amount of solar power that is being produced by the system’s solar panels. If the panels are generating more power than the system is using, the controller automatically “commands” the system to dial up its pumping, pushing more water through the electrodialysis stacks. Simultaneously, the system diverts some of the additional solar power by increasing the electrical current delivered to the stack, to drive more salt out of the faster-flowing water.
“Let’s say the sun is rising every few seconds,” Winter explains. “So, three times a second, we’re looking at the solar panels and saying, ‘Oh, we have more power — let’s bump up our flow rate and current a little bit.’ When we look again and see there’s still more excess power, we’ll up it again. As we do that, we’re able to closely match our consumed power with available solar power really accurately, throughout the day. And the quicker we loop this, the less battery buffering we need.”
The engineers incorporated the new control strategy into a fully automated system that they sized to desalinate brackish groundwater at a daily volume that would be enough to supply a small community of about 3,000 people. They operated the system for six months on several wells at the Brackish Groundwater National Desalination Research Facility in Alamogordo, New Mexico. Throughout the trial, the prototype operated under a wide range of solar conditions, harnessing over 94 percent of the solar panel’s electrical energy, on average, to directly power desalination.
“Compared to how you would traditionally design a solar desal system, we cut our required battery capacity by almost 100 percent,” Winter says.
The engineers plan to further test and scale up the system in hopes of supplying larger communities, and even whole municipalities, with low-cost, fully sun-driven drinking water.
“While this is a major step forward, we’re still working diligently to continue developing lower cost, more sustainable desalination methods,” Bessette says.
“Our focus now is on testing, maximizing reliability, and building out a product line that can provide desalinated water using renewables to multiple markets around the world,” Pratt adds.
The team will be launching a company based on their technology in the coming months.
This research was supported in part by the National Science Foundation, the Julia Burke Foundation, and the MIT Morningside Academy of Design. This work was additionally supported in-kind by Veolia Water Technologies and Solutions and Xylem Goulds.
The Feather River smart glass door starts at $800 and works with The Home Depot’s Hubspace smart home platform.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy | the Verge | Sep 30, 2024, 9:50 AM PDT
Glass front doors are great for letting light in during the day but not so great when you want privacy at night. The Home Depot has a smart solution for this problem — a glass front door that can switch from clear to opaque on a schedule, with a voice command, or by pressing a button.
The smart glass Feather River door is a prehung fiberglass front door with built-in smart glass. A button on the door lets you change the glass from clear to opaque, and it works with The Home Depot’s Hubspace smart home app to control it from your phone. You can also set the glass on a schedule and have it be clear during the day and opaque at night. The door costs $798 for a quarter lite, $899 for a half lite, and $998 for a full lite or three-quarter lite, which is similar pricing to a non-smart front door.
The smart glass door with the half lite glass. It doesn’t come with a door lock or handle; you need to supply your own.Image: The Home Depot
The door with one-quarter lite window. Image: The Home Depot
Hubspace is The Home Depot’s attempt at demystifying the smart home for its customers. Despite the name, the smart home platform doesn’t require a hub, just the Hubspace app. With it, you can connect and control a wide range of The Home Depot’s store brands, from smart lights and shades to bathroom fans and thermostats.
The smart glass door is the retail giant’s first Hubspace collaboration with a third party. It works with the Hubspace app and can connect to smart home systems like Amazon Alexa or Google Home to use a voice command to make your door clear or opaque.
The smart glass works over Bluetooth and Wi-Fi and requires power. The door has a battery built into the frame, which a USB cable can power if you have an outlet nearby. The battery is removable, and the door comes with a second battery and a charger.
The battery only powers the glass and the connectivity. Unlike The Home Depot’s first attempt at selling a smart door — the $4,000 M-PWR smart door from Masonite — the Feather River door doesn’t feature built-in power for a smart doorbell or door lock. It’s a standard door outside of the glass. You can add a battery-powered smart lock, and the door acts as a Bluetooth-to-Wi-Fi bridge for Hubspace-compatible Bluetooth locks.
The door is designed to fit a standard entryway and comes with a frame and weather stripping for easy installation. According to The Home Depot, the glass is exterior security strength, and a hurricane glass option is coming soon.
This smart fridge or freezer can send you alerts if its temperature changes.Image: The Home Depot
Along with the new door, The Home Depot is launching a number of other new connected products that work with its Hubspace app:
Vissani’s 8.8-cubic-foot smart chest freezer, $299, is available now. It can switch between fridge and freezer mode and send alerts if the temperature changes significantly or if the freezer goes offline.
Defiant Smart Home Alarm Kit, $99, is a DIY smart alarm kit with a keypad, two door / window sensors, a motion sensor, and a base station with a battery backup and a built-in siren. The contact sensors have a bypass button to temporarily disarm the system when you want to let the dog out at night.
Hampton Bay Permanent Mount String Lights are coming in October. They start at $99 for 50 feet and can be expanded up to 100 feet. The LED lights feature 50 lumens of individually controllable white light and full-color LEDs.
Update, September 30th: An earlier version of this story listed three sizes; the glass door comes in four. The correct list and prices are quarter lite for $789, half lite for $899, and $998 for a full lite or three-quarter lite.
Jackery’s new solar roof is almost indistinguishable from a regular roof. Is it better than solar panels?
Ajay Kumar | CNET | Article updated on January 10, 2025 at 1:22 PM PST
Solar shingles or solar roofs are an attractive option for many homeowners because they allow you to get solar power without the bulky and unsightly solar panels. Other models on the market include the Tesla Solar Roof, which CNET has reviewed, Luma, Timberline and others.
The latest addition to the market comes from Jackery. Unveiled at CES 2025, its new solar roof stands out (or rather, it doesn’t) because it’s almost indistinguishable from a regular roof. With curved roof tile panels that come with a dark obsidian and terra-cotta options (more to follow), the Jackery Solar Roof can be added on top of your existing roof tiles, blending into the rest of your architecture. Each roof tile weighs about 10 pounds (4.5 kilograms).
Jackery says its solar roof has a 25% cell conversion efficiency, putting it on the high end of solar panel efficiency. Lab testing on the Maxeon 7, the best currently on the market, shows 24.9% cell conversion efficiency and real-world efficiency at 24.1%. If the Jackery solar roof can actually hit 25% in real-world usage, that’s an impressive feat, and it would make it one of the most efficient solar cells on the market.
In terms of other specs, the rooftop system can generate 170 watts per square meter, with each tile 38W. The tiles come with a 30-year warranty and they’re designed to handle extreme weather conditions, including hail and high winds, along with temperatures ranging from -40 degrees to 185 degrees Fahrenheit. The Solar Roof is expected to cost $7,000 to $20,000 on average, with installation costs estimated at $5,000 to $7,000 in the US. Jackery hasn’t revealed when exactly the solar roof will be ready for sale yet, but expect it to be released sometime in 2025.
Jackery says the solar roof is compatible with smart energy management systems, Jackery’s own solar generators and battery systems like the Jackery 5000 Plus and the HomePower EnergySystem the company is launching later this year. The HomePower is particularly interesting because it’s a modular energy system that can be scaled up with stacks ranging from 7.7 kilowatt-hours to 15.4kWh. You can get a total system capacity of 123.2kWh per inverter. The setup consists of battery units, a hybrid inverter that can operate on or off-grid and a hub to manage loads.
Also revealed at CES, Jackery has the new Solar Generator 5000 Plus kit and Solar Generator 3000v2. The 5000 Plus is a larger LFP system that can deliver up to 14,400W of power with two units paired with the Jackery Smart Transfer Switch. With all the modular extensions, the full ecosystem can reach 60kWh.
Jackery says the 3000v2 is the smallest and lightest solar generator and power station, with a 3600W output and 0 millisecond UPS switchover functionality. It hooks up to solar panels to keep devices and appliances running during a blackout and it’s resistant to bumpy roads, dust and temperatures as low as -40 degrees Fahrenheit. It should be available later this year. It’s expected to cost $2,499.
Michael Crider , Staff Writer | PCWorld | Nov 12, 2024 8:00 am PST
Tech-savvy thieves are finding new ways to circumvent wireless networked security cameras like Ring and Nest.
A Wi-Fi-connected security camera is an easy and technologically simple way to watch your home and give yourself a little peace of mind… or maybe you just like knowing the moment your Amazon packages arrive. Honestly, it’s mostly the second thing.
But while Wi-Fi security cameras are meant to equip homeowners and apartment dwellers with burglar-deterring measures, thieves are now using tech to even the playing field.
According to a tweet sent out by the Los Angeles Police Department’s Wilshire division earlier this year (spotted by Tom’s Hardware), a small band of burglars is using Wi-Fi jamming devices to nullify wireless security cameras before breaking and entering.
The thieves seem to be well above the level of your typical smash-and-grab job. They have lookout teams, they enter through the second story, and they go for small, high-value items like jewelry and designer purses.
Wireless signal jammers are illegal in the United States. Wireless bands are tightly regulated and the FCC doesn’t allow any consumer device to intentionally disrupt radio waves from other devices. Similar laws are in place in most other countries.
But signal jammers are electronically simple and relatively easy to build or buy from less-than-scrupulous sources.
The police are suggesting the usual precautions: don’t tell anyone you’re going on vacation, look out for suspicious vehicles, etc. But they’re also suggesting that homeowners use old-fashioned, wired sets of security cameras that require more elaborate installations and extra hardware.
I think that’s overkill, especially if this group of thieves is specifically targeting people who are away from their homes. The point of the Wi-Fi jammer seems to be knocking out active surveillance, which can alert police within a few seconds of spotting a break-in. And if they’re smart enough to use Wi-Fi jammers, they’re smart enough to use alternate means of avoiding detection—like cutting power to the entire house, thus nullifying the advantages of a wired camera system.
The police also suggest adding a padlock to your electrical circuit box, but that’s not going to stop someone with $30 bolt cutters.
My point being that if someone wants to break into your home while you’re away, there’s not a lot you can do to stop them. But if you want extra peace of mind without the expense of a full wired camera system, get a camera with built-in storage and a battery, like Eufy’s solar-powered SoloCam series. As long as it isn’t within reach and easily accessible, it should provide you with a visual record of any break-in.
US company Source, which makes solar panels that produce drinking water from moisture in the air, plans to launch a canned water brand called Sky Wtr later this year
Canned water distilled from the air will be available to buy in the US later this year, in an effort to promote solar-powered “hydropanels” that provide an off-grid method of producing drinking water.
The panels, created by Arizona-based firm Source, use solar energy to power fans, which draw water vapour from the air. A water-absorbing substance, known as a desiccant, traps the moisture, before solar energy from the panel releases the moisture into a collection area within the panel.
Sandee LaMotte | CNN | Updated 8:38 PM EST, Wed February 28, 2024
Eating ultraprocessed foods raises the risk of developing or dying from dozens of adverse health conditions, according to a new review of 45 meta-analyses on almost 10 million people.
“We found consistent evidence linking higher intakes of ultra-processed foods with over 70% of the 45 different health outcomes we assessed,” said senior author Wolfgang Marx, a senior research fellow at the Food & Mood Centre at Deakin University in Geelong, Australia, in an email.
A higher intake was considered about one serving or about 10% more ultraprocessed foods per day, said Heinz Freisling, a scientist in the nutrition and metabolism branch of the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer, in an email.
“This proportion can be regarded as ‘baseline’ and for people consuming more than this baseline, the risk might increase,” said Freisling, who was not involved in the study.
Researchers graded each study as having credible or strong, highly suggestive, suggestive, weak or no evidence. All the studies in the review were published in the past three years, and none was funded by companies involved in the production of ultraprocessed foods, the authors said.
“Strong evidence shows that a higher intake of ultra-processed foods was associated with approximately 50% higher risk of cardiovascular disease-related death and common mental disorders,” said lead author Dr. Melissa Lane, a postdoctoral research fellow at Deakin, in an email. Cardiovascular disease encompasses heart attacks, stroke, clogged arteries and peripheral artery disease.
There was convincing evidence that a high versus low intake of ultraprocessed foods could increase the risk of anxiety by up to 53%, and the risk of an early death from any cause by 20%, according to the study published Wednesday in the journal The BMJ.
“It’s not surprising that there are a lot of studies that point to a positive association between ultraprocessed food consumption and the risk of various disease outcomes,” said cancer epidemiologist Fang Fang Zhang, associate professor and chair of the division of nutrition epidemiology and data science at Tufts University in Boston. She was not involved in the new research.
“Ultraprocessed foods are high in calories, added sugar, sodium, and low in fiber,” Zhang said. “All of these have already been known to contribute to cardiometabolic health outcomes, weight gain, obesity, type 2 diabetes and hypertension.”
However, Zhang questioned the findings on studies of anxiety and depression, which tend to be done only on those who have already been diagnosed with those conditions.
“People who are having depressive symptoms or anxiety may seek out ultraprocessed foods for various reasons such as self-comfort,” she said. “It may not be that eating ultraprocessed food puts you at high risk for depression — we cannot tell.”
Mixed impact on some health conditions Researchers found highly suggestive evidence that eating more ultraprocessed foods raised the risk of obesity by 55%, sleep disorders by 41%, development of type 2 diabetes by 40% and the risk of depression by 20%.
However, evidence was limited for an association between consuming ultraprocessed food and asthma, gastrointestinal health and cardiometabolic risk factors such as high blood fats and low levels of “good” high-density lipoprotein, or HDL, cholesterol, according to the analysis.
In addition, the study found only suggestive or no evidence for an association between ultraprocessed foods and cancer. That’s surprising, according to Zhang, who has researched the role of ultraprocessed foods and cancer.
“Obesity is a risk factor for 13 types of cancers. Ultraprocessed foods increase weight gain, and obesity increases cancer,” she said. In an August 2022 study she coauthored, Zhang found men who ate the most ultraprocessed foods of any type had a 29% higher risk of developing colorectal cancer.
One reason for the unexpected finding is that research on ultraprocessed foods is still in its infancy, said study coauthor Mathilde Touvier, research director at the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research, a public research organization.
“We definitely need more studies to be able to upgrade the weight of evidence for cancer, for instance,” said Touvier, also the principal investigator of the NutriNet-Santé cohort, a long-term study of the relationship between nutrition and health.
“So it’s not because there’s nothing there, it’s just because we need additional research,” she said.
The making of ultraprocessed foods Ultraprocessed foods are much more than simply “modified” foods, said nutrition researcher Dr. Carlos Monteiro, head of the Centre for Epidemiological Studies in Health and Nutrition at the University of São Paulo in Brazil. He was not involved in the new research.
“They are formulations of often chemically manipulated cheap ingredients such as modified starches, sugars, oils, fats, and protein isolates, with little if any whole food added,” said Monteiro, a professor of nutrition and public health, in an attached editorial.
Monteiro coined the term ultraprocessed food in 2009 when he developed NOVA, a system of classifying foods into four categories. Group one consists of unprocessed or minimally processed foods such as fruits, vegetables, eggs and milk. Group two includes culinary ingredients such as salt, herbs, oils and the like. Group three are processed foods that combine groups one and two — canned goods and frozen vegetables are examples.
Group four are ultraprocessed foods, which Monteiro said are made flavorful and enticing by using combinations of artificial flavors, colors, thickeners and other additives that have been “linked by experimental and epidemiological evidence to imbalances in gut microbiota and systemic inflammation.”
“No reason exists to believe that humans can fully adapt to these products,” Monteiro wrote in the editorial. “The body may react to them as useless or harmful, so its systems may become impaired or damaged, depending on their vulnerability and the amount of ultra-processed food consumed.”
Since Monteiro’s definition of ultraprocessed food appeared, nutritionists, researchers and public health officials have grown concerned about the increasing prevalence of such foods in the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom, Canada and many developing nations.
More than 70% of the US food supply is ultraprocessed foods, according to research. More than 70% of the US food supply is ultraprocessed foods, according to research. jenifoto/iStockphoto/Getty Images “Two-thirds of the calories children consume in the US are ultraprocessed, while about 60% of adult diets are ultraprocessed,” Zhang said.
“I think it’s like when we invented cars,” she added. “Yes, they bring us convenience, but if we use a car for everything and we don’t exercise we have problems. We need new strategies to bring down the consumption of ultraprocessed food to a healthier level.”
How to reduce the use of ultraprocessed foods There’s an easy solution — buy real food and cook it at home. It’s that simple, experts say. But experts also agree that in today’s fast-paced world, giving up the convenience of ready-to-heat and ready-to-eat foods is difficult. In addition, it’s nearly impossible to avoid temptation, as over 70% of the US food supply is made of ultraprocessed food.
Regulation by public health agencies and governments should be considered, Monteiro said, such as front-of-pack warning labels; restriction of advertising, especially to children; and the prohibition of sales of ultraprocessed foods in or near schools and hospitals, all while making minimally processed foods more affordable and accessible.
In the meantime, Marx and Lane offered the following advice:
1) Read and compare product labels and try to choose less processed alternatives. For example, swap flavored yogurt for plain yogurt with added fruit.
2) What you include is just as important as what you exclude. Focus on what you can add to your diet such as fresh, frozen or tinned fruits, vegetables, beans and legumes.
3) Be mindful of beverages. Sugar-sweetened beverages have no nutritional value. Swap them out for water.
4) When eating out, go to local restaurants and cafés instead of fast-food chains. Local eateries are less likely to make ultraprocessed foods.
A new study, jointly conducted by the University of Adelaide and University of Essex, has found that renting, rather than owning, a private-sector home leads to faster biological ageing.
The negative health impacts of renting were shown to be greater than those of experiencing unemployment or being a former smoker.
“Our findings demonstrate that housing circumstances have a significant impact on biological ageing, even more so than other important social determinants, such as unemployment, for example, and therefore health impacts should be an important consideration shaping housing policies,” said lead researcher Dr Amy Clair, from the University of Adelaide’s Australian Centre for Housing Research.
Biological ageing refers to cumulative damage to the body’s tissues and cells, irrespective of chronological age.
Some aspects of housing were linked with faster biological ageing regardless of whether a person rents or owns their home, including repeated payment arrears and pollution.
The researchers found it is likely that the insecurity and poor affordability of private rented homes is driving the link between renting and biological ageing.
“We hope to build on this work using data from different countries and exploring whether the association between housing tenure and biological ageing changes over time,” said Dr Clair.
The researchers also found the epigenetic impacts of renting are potentially reversible, making the implementation of health interventions for renters all the more necessary.
“Policies to reduce the stress and uncertainty associated with private renting, such as ending ‘no-grounds’ evictions, limiting rent increases, and improving conditions may go some way to reducing the negative impacts of private renting,” said the University of Adelaide’s Professor of Housing Research, Emma Baker, who also contributed to the study.
This study used data from surveys of 1420 adults in Great Britain and took into account elements of housing such as tenure, meaning whether a person rents or owns their home; building type; government financial support available to renters; the presence of central heating, as a proxy for adequate warmth; and whether the house was in an urban or rural area.
As this was an observational study on an all-white and European population, the researchers acknowledge there are limitations to their findings, but suggest they are likely to be relevant to housing and health elsewhere, particularly to countries with similar housing policies, such as Australia.
“There are many similarities between the housing policy approaches of the UK and Australia – private renters in both countries have very limited security of tenure and face high costs. It is therefore likely that private renters in Australia might also experience accelerated biological ageing,” said Dr Clair.
Nina Lakhani in New Orleans | the Guardian | Thu 16 Nov 2023 06.00 EST
After Hurricanes Katrina and Ida, a city initiative is building solar-driven disaster response hubs to increase its resilience
Like many community-based solutions, the community lighthouse network in New Orleans can be traced back to a crisis moment when people realised that something had to change and they – not elected officials – would have to make it happen.
“For [Hurricane] Ida we were ready with showers, mattresses, shelter and food, but once again the electricity was out so we couldn’t serve our community,” said Antoine Barriere, a 61-year-old pastor. “The power was the missing piece.
“We realised that we had to stop waiting for a fix and do it ourselves. We need to get off the grid and be self-sufficient, as with climate change we’re going to get more disasters.”
In late August 2021, several faith leaders were on a Zoom call during yet another citywide blackout which left vulnerable residents struggling to cope with extreme heat and humidity. The power lines had been knocked out by Hurricane Ida, a category 4 Atlantic storm that had made landfall on 29 August, exactly 16 years after Hurricane Katrina.
Ida left some parts of New Orleans in the dark for 10 days and overwhelmed the city’s emergency response efforts. But a couple of months earlier a new network had been launched called Together New Orleans (TNO), which included churches, mosques, synagogues, unions and environmental nonprofits whose leaders are working across historical racial and religious divides to build collective political power and challenge longstanding anti-sustainable pro-business policies.
The fix, they decided, would be the community lighthouse network, solar-powered disaster response hubs that could transform the city’s approach to resilience for climate and other natural disasters.
On a bright, balmy autumn morning a couple of weeks ago Barriere climbed a long, steep ladder to show me the 460 solar panels that now cover a third or so of his church’s flat roof.
The solar panels were generating more than enough energy to power Household of Faith, a non-denominational megachurch with 4,000 mostly Black parishioners in New Orleans East. Downstairs, a cabinet was stacked with backup batteries that were fully charged in case of a power outage – a frequent occurrence thanks to the low-lying city’s vulnerability to hurricanes, thunderstorms, high winds, extreme heat and flooding.
In a worst-case scenario – no sun, thundery dark skies and power outage – the backup batteries could power essential appliances for a couple of days including the water heater, five commercial fridge freezers storing perishables for the weekly food pantry, and air conditioning for the vast main hall which could be converted into a dormitory-style shelter.
But on this brilliant cloudless morning, most of the solar-generated energy was going into the city’s electric grid. New Orleans’ one-for-one net metering scheme allows the church to offset its excess clean energy against the utility’s dirty energy, and this should become a net zero facility within 12 months.
Household of Faith is among seven, and so far the largest, community lighthouse, but TNO has ambitions to build dozens more and is working with sister networks statewide.
The idea is that each community lighthouse should be an institution locals already know and trust – such as a place of worship, health clinic or community centre – that can be converted into a resilience hub where people can converge during a power outage to get cool, recharge phones, have a meal, connect to a medical device or store medication that requires refrigeration such as insulin.
In addition, community lighthouses will be able to keep the services running that people rely on such as the food pantry and religious sermons, while also adding capacity to the city’s wider emergency-response efforts as a distribution hub, shelter and possibly even house a makeshift clinic.
A couple of weeks before my visit, a run-of-the-mill storm took out some power lines, causing an outage during the church’s weekly bible study class.
“We just kept going, the power just switched to the batteries,” said Barriere. “The grid is going to keep going down while the sun will always come up. And even when it’s cloudy, we’re still generating some – and saving money.”
It was the first time the system was tested for real, outside a disaster simulation exercise, and while it was only a couple of hours, people were relieved to see that it worked.
At bible study that night was the 68-year-old parishioner Linda Thomas, who spends most of her day attached to an oxygen tank due to chronic lung damage caused by an autoimmune disease. She is mobile but frail, while her husband takes intravenous medication for congestive heart failure which must be kept refrigerated. They managed to stay at home after Ida, using a small generator and portable oxygen tanks until the power was restored on their street on the fourth day. But any longer, and they would have had to evacuate.
Thomas said: “Moving in an emergency is very stressful and hard physically, so it’s absolutely great that our church has solar because there is no place like home.”
Economically, it works too. Household of Faith’s electricity bill, after taking into account maintenance and insurance costs and the monthly solar service charge to pay TNO back for the upfront material and installation, is expected to drop by 20-30%, according to Pierre Moses, the project’s technical expert.
The city faces power outages that are not just triggered by storms such as Ida, and it’s much worse for low-income neighbourhoods where local people are mainly Black, Latin and Asian. On top of this, the climate crisis is exacerbating other extreme weather events such as record-breaking heat and humidity.
Residents agree that it is a matter of when the next major hurricane strikes, not if.
“We need to be up and running by the next hurricane season,” said Sonya Norsworthy, the Household of Faith community lighthouse coordinator.
The next step is to recruit and train volunteers and begin mapping the vulnerable residents within a mile-and-a-half radius of the lighthouse. Volunteers will contact them before an incoming storm or tornado, and then again within 24 hours of an outage, as part of the project’s post-disaster response plan.
The end goal is to build a lighthouse within 15 minutes walking distance of all 375,000 city residents – and hundreds more across the state. They are hopeful about the next wave after recently helping the state win a $259m (£208m) federal grant to improve grid resilience.
“After Ida hit, there was an overwhelming frustration and feeling powerless,” said Abel Thompson, a TNO organiser. “That’s when people switched from asking when will they [solve this] to why not us? And we can solve this.”
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Illustration of a cancer cell. (Science Photo Library/Canva Pro)
