Cheshire Police begins a corporate manslaughter inquiry at a hospital after the conviction of Lucy Letby.
Lucy Letby: Corporate manslaughter probe at Chester hospital
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Smoking age should rise from 18, by one year every year – Rishi Sunak
Measure aims to ensure children of today would not be able to buy cigarettes in future.
Encounters Is The New Netflix Show Everyone’s Talking About – Here’s Why
Released on Netflix at the end of last month, Encounters has quickly climbed its way up the streaming giant’s most watched list, becoming the latest non-fiction show viewers can’t stop talking about.
The docuseries details extraterrestrial – what’s the word – encounters over the last 50 years, and uses eyewitness accounts, interviews with experts and new evidence to uncover the world of what happens when life beyond the stars comes to live in your backyard.
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And be warned; not all of them come in peace.
Here’s what you need to know…
What is Encounters actually about?
A non-fiction docuseries, Encounters takes a case-per-episode approach to claims and reports of extraterrestrial occurrences, here on Earth.
The incidents in the series range from reports of submersible spacecraft off the coast of a small Welsh fishing village, to an encounter in rural Zimbabwe witnessed by an entire class of children and their teacher in 1994.
Another episode moves to the States to focus on a strange set of lights in the Texan sky in 2008, and the final instalment follows a similar claim in Fukushima, 2011.
Each episode interviews eye-witness accounts and experts to try and get to the bottom of what happened from these ‘true’ stories.
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Courtesy of Netflix
Who appears in Encounters?
Because the series is a documentary, the cast doesn’t boast any of your favourite A-Listers. What it does boast, however, is a host of experts and fanatics dedicated to the incidents reported on.
Via Netflix’s TUDUM, here are the notable cast members:
- Dr. Kevin Knuth, astrophysicist and former NASA research scientist
- David Clarke, journalist
- Tony Cowan, former RAF officer
- Eric MacLeish, attorney
- Matthew Roberts, naval intelligence cryptologist
- Sara Vanden Berge, managing editor, Stephenville Empire-Tribune
- Lee Roy Gaitan, a constable in Erath County, Texas
- Robert Powell, nanotechnology engineer and co-founder of the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies
Who made Encounters?
Encounters was directed by Yon Motksin, who has had a severe shakeup in the way he thinks about aliens since helming the doc.
“UFOs, UAPs, nonhuman intelligence, whatever we might call it… I didn’t before, but now I think it exists,” he told Netflix.
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“It’s out there. People are just now starting to accept it as something that’s acceptable to talk about.”
The four-episode series was executive produced by the Steven Spielberg-owned Amblin Television, Emmy-winning Boardwalk Pictures and Vice Studios.
Where can I watch Encounters?
The four part series Encounters is out now on Netflix.
What are viewers saying about Encounters?
While critics and viewers seem fairly split on the docuseries, the documentary has generated a lot of chatter.
Decider wrote that the series is “a relatively dull docuseries that won’t persuade you to change your mind about the source of the unexplained phenomena featured in the series, no matter what you believe about them.”
Chicago Times reviewer Richard Roeper added that the programme “won’t sway any skeptics.”
Som viewers, however, had been far more favourable towards Encounters.
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Are aliens real?
Maaaaaaybe. We’re not sure. Watch Encounters and make your own mind up.
Rishi Sunak Announces Plan To Gradually Ban Smoking
Rishi Sunak has announced plans to eventually ban smoking by raising the legal age people can buy cigarettes by one year, every year.
It would mean someone who is currently 14 years old will never be legally be sold a cigarette.
The prime minister said the change would “save more lives than any other decision we could take”.
Sunak told the Conservative Party conference in Manchester on Wednesday that his MPs would be given a free vote on the new law.
It means Tory MPs will not be ordered to back his plan if they do not want to.
The proposal mirrors the law in New Zealand, where tobacco cannot ever be sold to anybody born on or after January 1, 2009.
HS2 U-Turn: Rishi Sunak Confirms Manchester Line Is Scrapped
Rishi Sunak has confirmed that he is scrapping HS2 to Manchester.
The prime minister made the long-awaited announcement at the Tory conference being held in the city.
He also revealed that phase one of the multi-billion pound line will start at Euston station in central London.
And he said the £36 billion saved on scrapping the Birmingham to Manchester stretch would be used to fund major new transport projects in the north of England.
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The decision is likely to spark a furious backlash from opposition politicians, business leaders and senior Tories including West Midlands mayor Andy Street, who this week appealed to the PM not to axe to next phase of the HS2 project.
Sunak said: “I say to those who backed the project in the first place, the facts have changed and the right thing to do when the facts change is to have the courage to change direction.
“And so I am ending this long-running saga. I am cancelling the rest of the HS2 project and in its place we will re-invest every single penny – £36bn in hundreds of new transport projects in the north and the Midlands across the country.”
The PM said a new “network north” project would boost transport links and slash travel times to towns and cities across the country.
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He said: “You will be able to get from Manchester to the new station in Bradford in 30 minutes, Sheffield in 42 minutes and to Hull in 84 minutes on a fully, electrified line.
“We’ll protect the £12bn pounds to link up Manchester and Liverpool as planned and we will engage with local leaders on how best to deliver the scheme.
“We’ll build the Midlands Rail Hub, connecting 50 stations. We’ll help Andy Street extend the West Midlands Metro, build the Leeds tram, electrify the North Wales main line, upgrade the A1, the A2, the A5, the M6 and we’ll connect our Union with the A75 boosting links between Scotland and Northern Ireland.
“We’ll fund the Shipley bypass, the Blyth relief road and deliver 70 other road schemes. We’ll resurface roads across the country. We’ll bring back the Don Valley line. We’ll upgrade the energy coast line between Carlisle, Workington and Barrow, build hundreds of other schemes and keep the £2 bus fare across the whole country.”
New pipeline makes valuable organic acid from plants — saving money and emissions
In a breakthrough for environmentally friendly chemical production, researchers at the Center for Advanced Bioenergy and Bioproducts Innovation (CABBI) have developed an economical way to make succinic acid, an important industrial chemical, from sugarcane.
The team of University of Illinois and Princeton University researchers created a cost-effective, end-to-end pipeline for this valuable organic acid by engineering a tough, acid-tolerant yeast as the fermenting agent, avoiding costly steps in downstream processing. Succinic acid is a widely used additive for food and beverages and has diverse applications in agricultural and pharmaceutical products.
This same pipeline can be used to produce other industrially important organic acids targeted by CABBI in its work to develop sustainable biofuels and biochemicals from crops, said co-author Huimin Zhao, CABBI’s Conversion Theme Leader and Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering (ChBE) at Illinois. To reduce reliance on fossil fuels, Conversion researchers are deploying microbes to convert plant biomass into chemicals used in everyday products as an alternative to conventional petroleum-based production.
“This will serve as a blueprint for all the other metabolic engineering products in CABBI,” said Zhao, one of several CABBI principal investigators on the project. Other PIs included Vijay Singh, CABBI’s Deputy Director for Science & Technology, Distinguished and Founder Professor of Agricultural and Biological Engineering (ABE), and Executive Director of the Integrated Bioprocessing Research Laboratory (IBRL) at Illinois; Jeremy Guest, Associate Professor of Civil & Environmental Engineering (CEE) at Illinois and part of CABBI’s Sustainability Theme; and Conversion Deputy Theme Leader Joshua Rabinowitz, Professor of Chemistry and the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics at Princeton.
The study, published in Nature Communications, is led by CABBI — a U.S. Department of Energy Bioenergy Research Center — and funded by BioMADE, a Manufacturing Innovation Institute with more than 230 member organizations around the country, including companies, universities, and nonprofit organizations. BioMADE was catalyzed by the U.S. Department of Defense and works to secure America’s future through bioindustrial manufacturing innovation, education, and collaboration.
The work builds on years of research on succinic acid production by Zhao and his colleagues using Issatchenkia orientalis, an unconventional yeast ideal for making organic acids.
I. orientalis has the unique ability to thrive in low-pH, or acidic, conditions. Most organisms require a neutral pH environment to survive, including Saccharomyces cerevisiae, a more conventional yeast, or Escherichia coli bacteria. Both have been used by companies and labs to produce succinic acid but proved to be too costly, so efforts to scale up production have failed, Zhao said.
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Those microorganisms require the addition of a base to neutralize the toxic acidic conditions so they can continue making succinic acid. But that generates side products, such as gypsum or calcium sulfate, which have to be separated out at the end of the pipeline to purify the product, driving up downstream processing costs.
“One of the bottlenecks in the production of organic acids is the separation cost,” Zhao said. “We have to add a lot of base to keep the pH near neutral, between 6 to 7.”
With I. orientalis, however, “the organism lives happily at a pH of 3 to 4,” so the additives are not required, Zhao said. “In the end, that significantly reduces costs.”
The CABBI researchers also did extensive metabolic engineering to rewire I. orientalis to produce robust levels of succinic acid — higher than either S. cerevisiae or E. coli, he said. Using metabolic flux analysis from Rabinowitz’s lab, they identified the steps in the yeast’s metabolism that limited the production of succinic acid. One key roadblock: Native I. orientalis can’t utilize the sucrose from sugarcane. So an enzyme was added that could break down sucrose from the sugarcane juice into glucose and fructose to make succinic acid. Other genes were introduced to overproduce succinic acid.
Working with Singh’s group at IBRL, the team then scaled up succinic acid production using industrially relevant equipment to conduct an end-to-end integration of the process. The pilot-scale work showed the new strains could produce up to 110 g/L of succinic acid and, after batch fermentation and downstream processing, an overall yield of 64% — impressive results having commercial significance, Singh said.
The combination of higher production levels through genetic engineering and lower costs from the elimination of downstream separation makes the process “very attractive,” Zhao said. “That’s why the pipeline is so economical, at least at this pilot scale.”
The final step was working with Guest to simulate a full end-to-end, low-pH succinic acid production pipeline, using the open-source software platform BioSTEAM developed by his group. The techno-economic analysis (TEA) and life cycle assessment showed the process was financially viable and could reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 34% to 90% relative to fossil fuel-based production processes.
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“These advancements in metabolic engineering could have large-scale benefits, simultaneously driving down costs and environmental impacts in support of a circular bioeconomy,” Guest said.
The process emits less carbon dioxide (CO2) than conventional petroleum-based chemical processing. Plants like sugarcane also soak up carbon, and CO2 can be used as a substrate for the process, further reducing its carbon footprint.
“It’s definitely more environmentally friendly. That’s the premise for all the research in CABBI: using renewable resources to make chemicals and fuels,” Zhao said.
Researchers plan further scale-up studies soon to support commercialization of the succinic acid production process.
The work will also be a template for production of other CABBI products using I. orientalis, including 3-hydroxypropionic acid (3-HP). The market for 3-HP, used in components of disposable diapers and sealants, exceeds $1 billion, and research to date shows huge promise, Zhao said.
“We expect I. orientalis can serve as a general industrial platform for the production of a wide variety of organic acids,” said Vinh Tran, primary author on the paper and a Ph.D. student in ChBE.
The project involved several lab groups and contributions from all three themes of CABBI’s research — using sugarcane juice from the Feedstock Production research team, metabolic research and bioprocessing facilities from the Conversion team, and economic and environmental analysis from the Sustainability team.
Co-authors included CABBI researchers Sarang Bhagwat of CEE and Yihui Shen of the Department of Chemistry at Princeton; Somesh Mishra of ABE; Saman Shafaei, Shih-I Tan, Zia Fatma, and Benjamin Crosly of ChBE; and Jayne Allen of CEE.
A prehistoric cosmic airburst preceded the advent of agriculture in the Levant
Agriculture in Syria started with a bang 12,800 years ago as a fragmented comet slammed into the Earth’s atmosphere. The explosion and subsequent environmental changes forced hunter-gatherers in the prehistoric settlement of Abu Hureyra to adopt agricultural practices to boost their chances for survival.
That’s the assertion made by an international group of scientists in one of four related research papers, all appearing in the journal Science Open: Airbursts and Cratering Impacts. The papers are the latest results in the investigation of the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis, the idea that an anomalous cooling of the Earth almost 13 millennia ago was the result of a cosmic impact.
“In this general region, there was a change from more humid conditions that were forested and with diverse sources of food for hunter-gatherers, to drier, cooler conditions when they could no longer subsist only as hunter-gatherers,” said Earth scientist James Kennett, a professor emeritus of UC Santa Barbara . The settlement at Abu Hureyra is famous among archaeologists for its evidence of the earliest known transition from foraging to farming. “The villagers started to cultivate barley, wheat and legumes,” he noted. “This is what the evidence clearly shows.”
These days, Abu Hureyra and its rich archaeological record lie under Lake Assad, a reservoir created by construction of the Taqba Dam on the Euphrates River in the 1970s. But before this flood, archaeologists managed to extract loads of material to study. “The village occupants,” the researchers state in the paper, “left an abundant and continuous record of seeds, legumes and other foods.” By studying these layers of remains, the scientists were able to discern the types of plants that were being collected in the warmer, humid days before the climate changed and in the cooler, drier days after the onset of what we know now as the Younger Dryas cool period.
Before the impact, the researchers found, the inhabitants’ prehistoric diet involved wild legumes and wild-type grains, and “small but significant amounts of wild fruits and berries.” In the layers corresponding to the time after cooling, fruits and berries disappeared and their diet shifted toward more domestic-type grains and lentils, as the people experimented with early cultivation methods. By about 1,000 years later, all of the Neolithic “founder crops” — emmer wheat, einkorn wheat, hulled barley, rye, peas, lentils, bitter vetch, chickpeas and flax — were being cultivated in what is now called the Fertile Crescent. Drought-resistant plants, both edible and inedible, become more prominent in the record as well, reflecting a drier climate that followed the sudden impact winter at the onset of the Younger Dryas.
The evidence also indicates a significant drop in the area’s population, and changes in the settlement’s architecture to reflect a more agrarian lifestyle, including the initial penning of livestock and other markers of animal domestication.
To be clear, Kennett said, agriculture eventually arose in several places on Earth in the Neolithic Era, but it arose first in the Levant (present-day Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, Israel and parts of Turkey) initiated by the severe climate conditions that followed the impact.
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And what an impact it must have been.
In the 12,800-year-old layers corresponding to the shift between hunting and gathering and agriculture, the record at Abu Hureyra shows evidence of massive burning. The evidence includes a carbon-rich “black mat” layer with high concentrations of platinum, nanodiamonds and tiny metallic spherules that could only have been formed under extremely high temperatures — higher than any that could have been produced by man’s technology at the time. The airburst flattened trees and straw huts, splashing meltglass onto cereals and grains, as well as on the early buildings, tools and animal bones found in the mound — and most likely on people, too.
This event is not the only such evidence of a cosmic airburst on a human settlement. The authors previously reported a smaller but similar event which destroyed the biblical city at Tall el-Hammam in the Jordan Valley about 1600 BCE.
The black mat layer, nanodiamonds and melted minerals have also been found at about 50 other sites across North and South America and Europe, the collection of which has been called the Younger Dryas strewnfield. According to the researchers, it’s evidence of a widespread simultaneous destructive event, consistent with a fragmented comet that slammed into the Earth’s atmosphere. The explosions, fires and subsequent impact winter, they say, caused the extinction of most large animals, including the mammoths, saber-toothed cats, American horses, and American camels, as well as the collapse of the North American Clovis culture.
Because the impact appears to have produced an aerial explosion there is no evidence of craters in the ground. “But a crater is not required,” Kennett said. “Many accepted impacts have no visible crater.” The scientists continue to compile evidence of relatively lower-pressure cosmic explosions — the kind that occur when the shockwave originates in the air and travels downward to the Earth’s surface.
“Shocked quartz is well known and is probably the most robust proxy for a cosmic impact,” he continued. Only forces on par with cosmic-level explosions could have produced the microscopic deformations within quartz sand grains at the time of the impacts, and these deformations have been found in abundance in the minerals gathered from impact craters.
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This “crème de la crème” of cosmic impact evidence has also been identified at Abu Hureyra and at other Younger Dryas Boundary (YDB) sites, despite an absence of craters. However, it has been argued that the kind of shock-fractured quartz found in the YDB sites is not equivalent to that found in the large crater-forming sites, so the researchers worked to link these deformations to lower-pressure cosmic events.
To do so, they turned to humanmade explosions of the magnitude of cosmic airbursts: nuclear tests conducted at the Alamogordo Bombing Range in New Mexico in 1945 and in Kazakhstan, in 1949 and 1953. Similar to cosmic airbursts, the nuclear explosions occurred above ground, sending shockwaves toward Earth.
“In the papers, we characterize what the morphologies are of these shock fractures in these lower-pressure events,” Kennett said. “And we did this because we wanted to compare it with what we have in the shock-fractured quartz in the Younger Dryas Boundary, to see if there was any comparison or similarities between what we see at the Trinity atomic test site and other atomic bomb explosions.” Between the shocked quartz at the nuclear test sites and the quartz found at Abu Hureyra, the scientists found close associations in their characteristics, namely glass-filled shock fractures, indicative of temperatures greater than 2,000 degrees Celsius, above the melting point of quartz.
“For the first time, we propose that shock metamorphism in quartz grains exposed to an atomic detonation is essentially the same as during a low-altitude, lower-pressure cosmic airburst,” Kennett said. However, the so-called “lower pressure” is still very high — probably greater than 3 GPa or about 400,000 pounds per square inch, equivalent to about five 737 airplanes stacked on a small coin. The novel protocol the researchers developed for identifying shock fractures in quartz grains will be useful in identifying previously unknown airbursts that are estimated to recur every few centuries to millennia.
Taken together, the evidence presented by these papers, according to the scientists, “implies a novel causative link among extraterrestrial impacts, hemispheric environmental and climatic change, and transformative shifts in human societies and culture, including agricultural development.”
Power of rhythm as a design element in evolution and robotics
As the internet quickly fills with viral videos of futuristic robots darting and racing around like the animals they’re built to mimic, Duke researchers say that there’s an element of their movement’s programming that should not be overlooked: rhythm.
When analyzing legs, wings and fins for moving robots or animals in the real world, the mathematics looks fairly straightforward. Limbs with multiple sections of various lengths create different ratios for leverage, bodies with alternate shapes and sizes create drag coefficients and centers of mass, and feet, wings or fins of various shapes and sizes push on the world around them.
All of these options create more degrees of freedom in the final design. But until now, say the researchers, nobody was paying much attention to the timing of how they’re all working together.
“Minimizing the amount of work being done by varying the speed over the mover is an idea that’s been around a long time,” said Adrian Bejan, the J.A. Jones Distinguished Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Duke. “But varying the rhythm of that movement — the music of how the pieces move together over time — is a design aspect that has been overlooked, even though it can improve performance.”
The reasoning and mathematics exploring this thesis was published in a paper online August 28 in the journal Scientific Reports.
To illustrate his point in the paper, Bejan points to natural swimmers such as frogs or humans doing the breaststroke. Their swim gate is characterized by three time-intervals: a slow period of reaching forward, a fast period of pushing backward and a static period of coasting. For optimum performance, the lengths of time for those intervals typically go long, fast, long. But in certain situations — outracing or outmaneuvering a predator, for example — the ratios of those periods change drastically.
In the design of robots built to emulate dogs, fish or birds, incorporating different rhythms into their standard cruising movements can make their normal operations more efficient. And those optimal rhythms will, in turn, affect the choices made for all of the other pieces of the overall design.
The work builds on research Bejan published nearly 20 years ago, where he demonstrated that size and speed go hand-in-hand across the entire animal kingdom whether on land, in the air or under water. The physics underlying that work dealt with weight falling forward from a given animal’s height over and over again. In this paper, Bejan shows that his previous work was incomplete, and that all animals, robots and other moving things can further optimize their mechanics by adding an element of rhythm.
“You can — and indeed you should — teach rhythms of movements to competitive swimmers and runners looking for an edge,” Bejan said. “Rhythm increases the number of knobs you can turn when trying to move through the world. It is yet another example of how good design — whether made by humans or through natural evolution — is truly a form of art.”
Bedbug panic sweeps Paris as infestations soar before 2024 Olympics
France is alarmed as “les punaises”, as they’re known in French, spread fear and loathing.
Trans women may be banned from women’s NHS wards
Health Secretary promises consultation on NHS constitution, calling for a “common-sense” approach.
