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A delicate, three-year analysis confirms the ‘Ganzhou Mini Egg’ is the tiniest dinosaur egg ever known.

At just 30 millimeters in length (about 1.18 inches), this is much smaller than the previous record holder, the 45.5-millimeter-long Jinguo Micro Ellipsoid Egg.

This adorable discovery lay within a clutch of six almost completely intact eggs found in 2021 at a construction site near Ganzhou City in China.

Researchers used electron microscopy and electron backscatter diffraction to gently peer at the approximately 80 million-year-old eggs’ contents without harming them.

Within them, geoscientist Rui Wu from the China University of Geosciences and colleagues found enough tiny clues to confirm what they were looking at was not a direct bird relative but a non-avian theropod dinosaur instead.

This included details of the eggs’ microstructures as well as what are likely limb bones within, allowing Wu and team to place the newly identified species, Minioolithus ganzhouensis, in its family tree.

“Minioolithus ganzhouensis is the smallest known dinosaur egg clutch till now and is significant for understanding the diversity of theropods in the Late Cretaceous,” the researchers write in their paper.

While the eggs are shaped like familiar bird eggs, all known bird eggs from the Cretaceous through to today have three shell layers. The Ganzhou mini eggshell has two layers, like other non-avian dinosaurs.

The shell’s thinness, type of pore system, and subtle worm-segment-like pattern on the eggs suggest M. ganzhouensis is related to the Ovaloolithus group.

However, the shell’s abundance of tiny fluid sacs makes the Ganzhou Mini Eggs distinct from other known ovaloolithus eggs, revealing the newly analyzed clutch belongs to another species within the group.

Ovaloolithus eggs are tentatively thought to belong to herbivorous triceratops ancestors based on the limb anatomy of other finds. These protoceratopsids had the characteristic head frill of triceratops, but were relatively small dinosaurs, only 1-2.5 meters long from snout to tail.

Their remains have only been found in Asia.

Wu and team hope a new analysis of the discovery site will provide more clues on what laid these eggs and how these dinosaurs built their nests.

This research was published in Historical Biology.

You had a great night out, but the next morning, anxiety hits: your heart races, and you replay every conversation from the night before in your head.

This feeling, known as hangover anxiety or “hangxiety“, affects around 22 percent of social drinkers.

While for some people, it’s mild nerves, for others, it’s a wave of anxiety that feels impossible to ride out. The “Sunday scaries” may make you feel panicked, filled with dread and unable to relax.

Hangover anxiety can make even simple tasks feel overwhelming. Here’s why it happens, and what you can do about it.

What does alcohol do to our brains?

A hangover is the body’s way of recovering after drinking alcohol, bringing with it a range of symptoms.

Dehydration and disrupted sleep play a large part in the pounding headaches and nausea many of us know too well after a big night out. But hangovers aren’t just physical – there’s a strong mental side too.

Alcohol is a nervous system depressant, meaning it alters how certain chemical messengers (or neurotransmitters) behave in the brain.

Alcohol relaxes you by increasing gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA), the neurotransmitter that makes you feel calm and lowers inhibitions. It decreases glutamate and this also slows down your thoughts and helps ease you into a more relaxed state.

Together, this interaction affects your mood, emotions and alertness. This is why when we drink, we often feel more sociable, carefree and willing to let our guard down.

As the effects of the alcohol wear off, your brain works to rebalance these chemicals by reducing GABA and increasing glutamate. This shift has the opposite effect of the night before, causing your brain to become more excitable and overstimulated, which can lead to feelings of anxiety.

So why do some people get hangxiety, while others don’t? There isn’t one clear answer to this question, as several factors can play a role in whether someone experiences hangover-related anxiety.

Genes play a role

For some, a hangover is simply a matter of how much they drank or how hydrated they are. But genetics may also play a significant role. Research shows your genes can explain almost half the reason why you wake up feeling hungover, while your friend might not.

Because genes influence how your body processes alcohol, some people may experience more intense hangover symptoms, such as headaches or dehydration. These stronger physical effects can, in turn, trigger anxiety during a hangover, making you more susceptible to “hangxiety.”

Do you remember what you said last night?

But one of the most common culprits for feeling anxious the next day is often what you do while drinking.

Let’s say you’ve had a big night out and you can’t quite recall a conversation you had or something you did. Maybe you acted in ways that you now regret or feel embarrassed about. You might fixate on these thoughts and get trapped in a cycle of worrying and rumination. This cycle can be hard to break and can make you feel more anxious.

Research suggests people who already struggle with feelings of anxiety in their day-to-day lives are especially vulnerable to hangxiety.

Some people drink alcohol to unwind after a stressful day or to make themselves feel more comfortable at social events. This often leads to heavier consumption, which can make hangover symptoms more severe. It can also begin a cycle of drinking to feel better, making hangxiety even harder to escape.

Preventing hangover anxiety

The best way to prevent hangxiety is to limit your alcohol consumption. The Australian guidelines recommend having no more than ten standard drinks per week and no more than four standard drinks on any one day.

Generally, the more you drink, the more intense your hangover symptoms might be, and the worse you are likely to feel.

Mixing other drugs with alcohol can also increase the risk of hangxiety. This is especially true for party drugs, such as ecstasy or MDMA, that give you a temporary high but can lead to anxiety as they wear off and you are coming down.

If you do wake up feeling anxious:

• focus on the physical recovery to help ease the mental strain
• drink plenty of water, eat a light meal and allow yourself time to rest
• try mindfulness meditation or deep breathing exercises, especially if anxiety keeps you awake or your mind races
• consider journalling. This can help re-frame anxious thoughts, put your feelings into perspective and encourage self-compassion
• talk to a close friend. This can provide a safe space to express concerns and feel less isolated.

Hangxiety is an unwelcome guest after a night out. Understanding why hangxiety happens – and how you can manage it – can make the morning after a little less daunting, and help keep those anxious thoughts at bay.

Blair Aitken, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Psychopharmacology, Swinburne University of Technology and Rebecca Rothman, PhD Candidate in Clinical Psychology, School of Health Sciences, Swinburne University of Technology

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Research on the gut microbiome has triggered a ‘revolution‘ in nutritional science, and in the last few years, dietary fiber has become the “new protein” – added to foods in abundance to feed our gut and boost our health.

A recent study on mice, however, suggests not all fiber supplements are equally beneficial.

A form that is readily found in oats and barley, called beta-glucan, can control blood sugar and assist in weight loss among mice fed a high-fat diet.

Researchers at the University of Arizona (UA) and the University of Vienna say it is the only type of fiber supplement they tested that decreased a mouse’s fat content and body weight within 18 weeks.

The other fibers considered, including wheat dextrin, pectin, resistant starch, and cellulose, had no such effect, despite shifting the makeup of the mouse microbiome significantly compared to mice fed no fiber supplements.

“We know that fiber is important and beneficial; the problem is that there are so many different types of fiber,” explained biomedical scientist Frank Duca from UA in July.

“We wanted to know what kind of fiber would be most beneficial for weight loss and improvements in glucose homeostasis so that we can inform the community, the consumer, and then also inform the agricultural industry.”

Dietary fibers are the main source of energy for bacteria living in our guts, and yet less than 5 percent of people in the US consume the recommended 25–30 grams (0.9–1 ounce) of fiber a day.

To make up for this, fiber supplements and ‘invisible fiber’-infused foods are growing in popularity. But fibers are extremely diverse, so which do we choose?

Some fibers, like oat beta-glucans and wheat dextrin, are water-soluble, meaning they are easily fermented by gut bacteria. Others, like cellulose and resistant starch, are less soluble or insoluble, meaning they stick to other materials to form stool.

Until now, writes biomedical scientist Elizabeth Howard from UA and her colleagues, “there is no study that has investigated the role of various fibers in one cohort.”

To make up for this, the current study tested several forms of fiber in one cohort of mice. Only beta-glucan was found to increase the number of Ileibacterium found in the mouse intestine. Other studies on mice have linked this bacterium to weight loss.

Sure enough, long before the 10-week marker, mice fed beta-glucan showed reduced body weight and body fat content compared to mice fed other forms of fiber.

The findings align with another recent study by Duca, which fed barley flour, rich in beta-glucan, to rodents. Even though the rats continued eating just as much of their high-fat diet as before, their energy expenditure increased and they lost weight anyway.

A similar outcome was observed in mice fed beta-glucan in the new study. These animals also showed increased concentrations of butyrate in their guts, which is a metabolite made when microbes break down fiber.

Butyrate induces the release of glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1), which is the natural protein that synthetic drugs like Ozempic mimic to stimulate insulin release.

“Part of the benefits of consuming dietary fiber is through the release of GLP-1 and other gut peptides that regulate appetite and body weight,” said Duca.

“However, we don’t think that’s all of the effect. We think that there are other beneficial things that butyrate could be doing that are not gut peptide related, such as improving gut barrier health and targeting peripheral organs like the liver.”

Far more research is needed before these results can be extended to humans, but the findings suggest that some fibers may be better suited to weight loss and insulin control than others.

The study was published in the Journal of Nutrition.

An earlier version of this article was published in July 2024.

A relative newcomer to the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) has broken a six-year drought in the search for the next prime oasis in a desert of boring ol’ composite numbers.

At an insane 41,024,320 decimal digits in length, writing the entire number would take months to write in full. To keep things brief – if a little harder to appreciate – it is 1 fewer than the result of the number 2 raised to the power of 136,279,841. Or, to use its official title, it’s called M136279841.

Former NVIDIA employee, Luke Durant, only began contributing to the search in October last year, though had a little more going for him than beginner’s luck. Durant made use of thousands of graphics processing unit servers spanning 24 datacenter regions in 17 different countries to run the software on his behalf.

On October 11 this year, a server in Dublin landed on M136279841 as a contender. A day later, another server in Texas gave the digital thumbs-up, confirming its legendary status as the new mathematical Optimus Prime.

Primes are counting numbers greater than 1 that aren’t products of two smaller numbers. At first glance, they seem rather unassuming, with 2, 3, and 5 sharing space on the number line with integers like 4 and 6, which can be constructed through simple multiplication.

Yet as we count ever higher, numbers that can’t be divided so cleanly get harder to find, leading to the question of whether it’s possible they eventually run out.

To spare you the indignity of taking off your socks and starting the count yourself, the answer is no. Primes are an infinite resource. Not that it makes them any easier to locate.

Strip away the legion of fancy hardware employed by Durant and his peers, monster-prime hunting hasn’t changed a great deal since the 17th-century French friar Marin Mersenne turned his attention to these notable numbers and left his name imprinted on a method for finding primes of a particular flavor.

‘Mersenne primes‘ are those that take the form 2ⁿ – 1. Not all numbers in this format are primes, of course. For example, 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 = 16, with 1 fewer equalling 15 (a composite of 3 and 5). And not all primes are of the Mersenne variety.

But given this approach is efficient at finding numbers that are prime, and the fact it can be tested with relative ease, it’s become the method of choice by collaborations like the GIMPS, which since it was founded in 1996 has sifted 18 of the numerical gems from the vast sand dune of composites, bringing the total known to 52.

The previous record holder – discovered in 2018 by Patrick Laroche from Ocala, Florida, who removed 1 from 2 to the power of 82,589,933 to calculate it – is just shy of 25 million digits in length. Laroche ran the free prime-searching program on his own hardware, meaning Durant’s success using a network of GPUs represents a new era in the search for Mersenne primes.

So why go to the trouble of spotting such massive numbers in the first place? Fame, bragging rights, and a chance to win cash awards aside, not a great deal.

As co-founder of the GIMPS, George Woltman, told Ben Brasch at The Washington Post, “It’s entertainment for math nerds.”

Big primes are handy for a type of encryption, admittedly, though with the digital safe-cracking power of quantum computing on the horizon, those days might be – shall we say – numbered.

Considered as the atoms of all positive integers, primes have a beauty all of their own. No doubt a brand new Mersenne prime will soon emerge on expanding banks of ever-smarter technology around the world.

It will be number 53 on the list. A prime number.

Type 2 diabetes affects 1.2 million Australians and accounts for 85-90% of all diabetes cases. This chronic condition is characterised by high blood glucose (sugar) levels, which carry serious health risks. Complications include heart disease, kidney failure and vision problems.

Diet is an important way people living with type 2 diabetes manage blood glucose, alongside exercise and medication. But while we know individualised, professional dietary advice improves blood glucose, it can be complex and is not always accessible.

Our new study looked at the impact of time-restricted eating – focusing on when you eat, rather than what or how much – on blood glucose levels.

We found it had similar results to individualised advice from an accredited practising dietitian. But there were added benefits, because it was simple, achievable, easy to stick to – and motivated people to make other positive changes.

What is time-restricted eating?

Time-restricted eating, also known as the 16:8 diet, became popular for weight loss around 2015. Studies have since shown it is also an effective way for people with type 2 diabetes to manage blood glucose.

Time-restricted eating involves limiting when you eat each day, rather than focusing on what you eat. You restrict eating to a window during daylight hours, for example between 11 am and 7 pm, and then fast for the remaining hours. This can sometimes naturally lead to also eating less.

Giving your body a break from constantly digesting food in this way helps align eating with natural circadian rhythms. This can help regulate metabolism and improve overall health.

For people with type 2 diabetes, there may be specific benefits. They often have their highest blood glucose reading in the morning. Delaying breakfast to mid-morning means there is time for physical activity to occur to help reduce glucose levels and prepare the body for the first meal.

How we got here

We ran an initial study in 2018 to see whether following time-restricted eating was achievable for people with type 2 diabetes. We found participants could easily stick to this eating pattern over four weeks, for an average of five days a week.

Importantly, they also had improvements in blood glucose, spending less time with high levels. Our previous research suggests the reduced time between meals may play a role in how the hormone insulin is able to reduce glucose concentrations.

Other studies have confirmed these findings, which have also shown notable improvements in HbA1c. This is a marker in the blood that represents concentrations of blood glucose over an average of three months. It is the primary clinical tool used for diabetes.

However, these studies provided intensive support to participants through weekly or fortnightly meetings with researchers.

While we know this level of support increases how likely people are to stick to the plan and improves outcomes, it is not readily available to everyday Australians living with type 2 diabetes.

What we did

In our new study, we compared time-restricted eating directly with advice from an accredited practising dietitian, to test whether results were similar across six months.

We recruited 52 people with type 2 diabetes who were currently managing their diabetes with up to two oral medications. There were 22 women and 30 men, aged between 35 and 65.

Participants were randomly divided into two groups: diet and time-restricted eating. In both groups, participants received four consultations across the first four months. During the next two months they managed diet alone, without consultation, and we continued to measure the impact on blood glucose.

In the diet group, consultations focused on changing their diet to control blood glucose, including improving diet quality (for example, eating more vegetables and limiting alcohol).

In the time-restricted eating group, advice focused on how to limit eating to a nine-hour window between 10 am and 7 pm.

Over six months, we measured each participant’s blood glucose levels every two months using the HbA1c test. Each fortnight, we also asked participants about their experience of making dietary changes (to what or when they ate).

What we found

We found time-restricted eating was as effective as the diet intervention.

Both groups had reduced blood glucose levels, with the greatest improvements occurring after the first two months. Although it wasn’t an objective of the study, some participants in each group also lost weight (5-10kg).

When surveyed, participants in the time-restricted eating group said they had adjusted well and were able to follow the restricted eating window. Many told us they had family support and enjoyed earlier mealtimes together. Some also found they slept better.

After two months, people in the time-restricted group were looking for more dietary advice to further improve their health.

Those in the diet group were less likely to stick to their plan. Despite similar health outcomes, time-restricted eating seems to be a simpler initial approach than making complex dietary changes.

Is time-restricted eating achievable?

The main barriers to following time-restricted eating are social occasions, caring for others and work schedules. These factors may prevent people eating within the window.

However, there are many benefits. The message is simple, focusing on when to eat as the main diet change. This may make time-restricted eating more translatable to people from a wider variety of socio-cultural backgrounds, as the types of foods they eat don’t need to change, just the timing.

Many people don’t have access to more individualised support from a dietitian, and receive nutrition advice from their GP. This makes time-restricted eating an alternative – and equally effective – strategy for people with type 2 diabetes.

People should still try to stick to dietary guidelines and prioritise vegetables, fruit, wholegrains, lean meat and healthy fats.

But our study showed time-restricted eating may also serve as stepping stone for people with type 2 diabetes to take control of their health, as people became more interested in making diet and other positive changes.

Time-restricted eating might not be appropriate for everyone, especially people on medications which don’t recommend fasting. Before trying this dietary change, it’s best speak to the healthcare professional who helps you manage diabetes.

Evelyn Parr, Research Fellow in Exercise Metabolism and Nutrition, Mary MacKillop Institute for Health Research, Australian Catholic University and Brooke Devlin, Lecturer in Nutrition and Dietetics, School of Human Movement and Nutrition Sciences, The University of Queensland

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

A team led by researchers at MIT in the United States has discovered large molecules containing carbon in a distant interstellar cloud of gas and dust.

This is exciting for those of us who keep lists of known interstellar molecules in the hope that we might work out how life arose in the Universe.

But it’s more than just another molecule for the collection. The result, reported today in the journal Science, shows that complex organic molecules (with carbon and hydrogen) likely existed in the cold, dark gas cloud that gave rise to our Solar System.

Furthermore, the molecules held together until after the formation of Earth. This is important for our understanding of the early origins of life on our planet.

Difficult to destroy, hard to detect

The molecule in question is called pyrene, a polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon or PAH for short. The complicated-sounding name tells us these molecules are made of rings of carbon atoms.

Carbon chemistry is the backbone of life on Earth. PAHs have long been known to be abundant in the interstellar medium, so they feature prominently in theories of how carbon-based life on Earth came to be.

We know there are many large PAHs in space because astrophysicists have detected signs of them in visible and infrared light. But we didn’t know which PAHs they might be in particular.

Pyrene is now the largest PAH detected in space, although it’s what is known as a “small” or simple PAH, with 26 atoms. It was long thought such molecules could not survive the harsh environment of star formation when everything is bathed in radiation from the newborn suns, destroying complex molecules.

In fact, it was once thought molecules of more than two atoms could not exist in space for this reason, until they were actually found. Also, chemical models show pyrene is very difficult to destroy once formed.

Last year, scientists reported they found large amounts of pyrene in samples from the asteroid Ryugu in our own Solar System. They argued at least some of it must have come from the cold interstellar cloud that predated our Solar System.

So why not look at another cold interstellar cloud to find some? The problem for astrophysicists is that we don’t have the tools to detect pyrene directly – it’s invisible to radio telescopes.

Using a tracer

The molecule the team has detected is called 1-cyanopyrene, what we call a “tracer” for pyrene. It is formed from pyrene interacting with cyanide, which is common in interstellar space.

The researchers used the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia to look at the Taurus molecular cloud or TMC-1, in the Taurus constellation. Unlike pyrene itself, 1-cyanopyrene can be detected by radio telescopes. This is because 1-cyanopyrene molecules act as small radio-wave emitters – tiny versions of earthly radio stations.

As scientists know the proportions of 1-cyanopyrene compared to pyrene, they can then estimate the amount of pyrene in the interstellar cloud.

The amount of pyrene they found was significant. Importantly, this discovery in the Taurus molecular cloud suggests a lot of pyrene exists in the cold, dark molecular clouds that go on to form stars and solar systems.

The complex birth of life

We are gradually building a picture of how life on Earth evolved. This picture tells us that life came from space – well, at least the complex organic, pre-biological molecules needed to form life did.

That pyrene survives the harsh conditions associated with the birth of stars, as shown by the findings from Ryugu, is an important part of this story.

Simple life – consisting of a single cell – appeared in Earth’s fossil record almost immediately (in geological and astronomical terms) after the planet’s surface had cooled enough to not vaporise complex molecules. This happened more than 3.7 billion years ago in Earth’s approximately 4.5 billion history.

For simple organisms to then appear so quickly in the fossil record, there’s just not enough time for chemistry to start with mere simple molecules of two or three atoms.

The new discovery of 1-cyanopyrene in the Taurus molecular cloud shows complex molecules could indeed survive the harsh conditions of our Solar System’s formation. As a result, pyrene was available to form the backbone of carbon-based life when it emerged on the early Earth some 3.7 billion years ago.

This discovery also links to another important finding of the last decade – the first chiral molecule in the interstellar medium, propylene oxide. We need chiral molecules to make the evolution of simple lifeforms work on the surface of the early Earth.

So far, our theories that molecules for early life on Earth came from space are looking good.

Maria Cunningham, Honorary Senior Lecturer, School of Physics, UNSW Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

In the constellation of Cygnus, some 7,800 light-years from Earth, lurks a real space oddity. There, a black hole in a system named V404 Cygni repeatedly engages in behavior that has simultaneously baffled and delighted scientists.

Now it’s whipped a brand new trick out of its seemingly endless arsenal: an unseen binary companion, a star on a wide orbit of around 70,000 years.

Since V404 Cygni already has a companion – a star on a close, 6.5-day orbit, on which the central black hole is leisurely feasting – the newly discovered third object makes the system a trinary.

It’s the first time we’ve seen a system with this configuration, and it could offer some insights into how black holes form. This is because a supernova explosion, thought to be the mechanism by which stellar-mass black holes form, should have snapped the tenuous gravitational bond of a wide orbit.

“We think most black holes form from violent explosions of stars, but this discovery helps call that into question,” says physicist Kevin Burdge of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“This system is super exciting for black hole evolution, and it also raises questions of whether there are more triples out there.”

We’ve known about the second star, in fact, for decades; astronomers thought it was just a star close to V404 Cygni, which would be relatively unremarkable.

But data collected by the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission revealed that there’s definitely more going on there than we thought. Gaia is mapping the three-dimensional positions of the objects in the Milky Way galaxy; but it’s also mapping their direction and velocity as they move through space.

V404 Cygni and the seemingly unrelated star are moving through space in the same direction and at the same speed. That shows the objects are linked.

“It’s almost certainly not a coincidence or accident,” Burdge says. “We’re seeing two stars that are following each other because they’re attached by this weak string of gravity. So this has to be a triple system.”

There’s evidence out there for the supernova model of black hole formation. This is when a dying star erupts in a colossal explosion, ejecting its outer material, while the core of the star collapses under gravity to form a black hole, the densest object in the Universe.

Scientists have seen supernovae, and disentangled the light to gauge the mass of the object at the core to infer the production of a black hole. But that doesn’t mean that a supernova is the only formation mechanism. Another option is the direct collapse model. Here, the massive star simply implodes, completely, into a black hole, no mess, no fuss.

Here, the evidence is a little more difficult to come by. With no mess or fuss, there’s pretty much an absence of evidence.

This is where V404 Cygni suddenly becomes very interesting indeed – because when a supernova explosion is asymmetrical, which they often are, the imbalance in energy can give the nascent black hole a directional kick.

This is difficult to resolve with such a wide orbit as seen with the newly connected star. The black hole and the star are separated by a distance of 3,500 astronomical units, which makes their gravitational tether to each other relatively weak. The disruption introduced by a supernova should have broken that tether like a wisp of cobweb.

The wide orbital separation also makes gravitational capture between two passing objects challenging to explain. Burdge and his colleagues conducted tens of thousands of simulations, and found that the best explanation is that the three objects were already gravitationally bound when the black hole formed; and that the formation mechanism was direct collapse.

“The vast majority of simulations show that the easiest way to make this triple work is through direct collapse,” Burdge says.

It’s the best evidence yet for the direct collapse model of black hole formation, which bolsters the mechanism as a valid way to interpret black holes whose formation history is difficult to resolve with a supernova.

There may very well even be other wide black hole-inclusive trinaries out there that we have missed due to black holes’ stealthiness; finding them could help us better understand how these objects form, and why a black hole might collapse directly rather than exploding in a blaze of light.

“Either we got very lucky, or tertiaries are common,” says astronomer Kareem El-Badry of Caltech.

“If they are common, that might solve some of the long-standing questions about how black hole binaries form. Triples open up evolutionary pathways that are not possible for pure binaries.

“People have actually predicted before that black hole binaries might form mostly through triple evolution, but there was never any direct evidence until now.”

The research has been published in Nature.

A comet that was predicted to become bright enough to see with the naked eye at Halloween seems to be disintegrating right before our eyes.

It’s called C/2024 S1, discovered on September 27, a rare Kreutz sungrazer comet whose trajectory is due to bring it within just 1.2 million kilometers (750,000 miles) of the Sun on 28 October 2024.

Alas, it seems that C/2024 S1 has, after billions of years, disintegrated. Images of the object taken over the course of October show it brightening with outburst activity before dimming, its nucleus appearing to vanish, leaving behind a tail of dust and gas, and, maybe, a cloud of cometary debris.

It’s a bit disappointing – but not entirely unexpected, as comets of this kind often disintegrate as they draw near the Sun.

There have been signs of instability in the comet. It has undergone at least one outburst, which is what it sounds like: a sudden release of dust and gas, causing the comet to brighten significantly, taking several days to return to normal.

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This is not unusual behavior for a comet, but it can be a sign of nucleus fragmentation – where the main body, or nucleus, of a comet starts to break apart.

This probably happens because of what they are made of. Comets hail from the very cold outer reaches of the Solar System, and are laden with forms of ice.

Disintegration seems to happen very quickly, so the reasons why aren’t entirely clear, but one possible explanation is that the sublimation of ice and release of gas and dust can cause the spin of the comet to accelerate, resulting in it breaking apart under centrifugal force.

We got a rare glimpse of this process in 2020, when Comet C/2019 Y4 shattered to smithereens when it drew near the Sun under the watchful eye of the Hubble Space Telescope.

A notice posted to Astronomer’s Telegram on October 9 posits that changes in the appearance of the comet could be a sign of disintegration.

Since then, images taken on October 20 and 22 by amateur astronomer Martin Mašek of Czechia show that, sometime during that time frame, the cometary nucleus seems to have vanished from visibility, and has grown even dimmer still.

The visibility forecast for C/2024 S1 suggested that it may become brighter than Venus, and even be visible in the daytime sky. If the comet has undergone, or is undergoing fragmentation before perihelion, its closest approach to the Sun, it may not be quite that bright, but there may still be something to see.

A large fragment of the nucleus may survive the disintegration process and continue the comet’s journey towards the Sun. And the tail may continue to be visible even if the cometary nucleus disintegrates, at least for a short time.

Interestingly, C/2024 S1 is, itself, thought to be a fragment of a larger comet. All Kreutz sungrazers are thought to be what remains of the Great Comet of 1106 CE, which broke apart and formed many smaller comets as it looped around the Sun. Those smaller comets include Comet Ikeya-Seki of 1965, which lit up the sky nearly as brightly as the full Moon.

At the moment, the C/2024 S1 may be visible with binoculars or a small telescope in the Southern Hemisphere particularly. After perihelion, if the comet has survived, it should be visible in the Northern Hemisphere.

If the nucleus of C/2024 S1 disintegrates during perihelion, we could spot a long, curved tail, without a bright head. We’re going to have to wait and see. Honestly, though, what could be more apropos than a headless comet for Halloween?

If you have the right equipment, and want to see if you can spot C/2024 S1, you can look for where it is in the sky using The Sky Live. Happy hunting!

Suspended in the relic of an ancient sea beneath southern Arkansas, there may be enough lithium for nine times the expected global demand for the element in car batteries in 2030.

A collaborative national and state government research team trained a machine learning model to predict and map the lithium concentrations of salty water deep within the porous limestone aquifer beneath southern Arkansas, known as the Smackover Formation brines.

The model was trained on existing and new brine lithium data from the region, factoring in known variations in geology, geochemistry, and temperature.

The results suggest there is anywhere from 5.1 to 19 million tons of lithium in the brines, which could account for 35–136 percent of the current estimated lithium resources in the US.

And that could reduce dependence on lithium imports, something US Department of Energy officials have their sights set on.

The study also indicates that in 2022, brines brought to the surface by the oil, gas, and bromine industries contained 5,000 tons of dissolved lithium – a resource that is becoming increasingly critical as we turn away from internal combustion engines driven by fossil fuels, and towards battery-powered electric and hybrid vehicles.

Lithium is the material of choice for electric vehicle batteries, and demand for these is sharply rising. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), electric vehicle batteries accounted for about 85 percent of total lithium demand in 2023, an increase of 30 percent from 2022.

“Mining and refining will need to continue growing quickly to meet future demand,” the IEA reports.

But any mention of new mining and groundwater extraction can and probably should raise an eyebrow.

Other forms of lithium mining involve strip mines – which decimate everything above ground along with the deeper layers, and evaporation ponds – which produce only small amounts of lithium at a cost of enormous amounts of water, along with clouds of toxic dust.

In south Arkansas, on the other hand, the bromine industry already uses a process in which brine is pumped out of the aquifer, bromine is extracted, and then the resulting wastewater is pumped back down.

Lithium is, potentially, just an extra mineral to be salvaged in the process – and the researchers suspect this means lithium resources haven’t yet been depleted by existing mining, either.

But this process doesn’t guarantee zero environmental impact; rather, it’s a major unknown one. And a lot of companies are lining up to drill new wells.

Patrick Donnelly, a conservation biologist and the Great Basin director for the Center of Biological Diversity, told Jack Travis from Ozarks at Large:

“We are in favor of electric vehicles and battery storage as a part of the transition off of fossil fuels… [but] we are sort of actively searching for where is lithium production in the United States that is not going to harm communities and the environment.”

“There is no such thing as a free lunch. And there are impacts from [direct lithium extraction],” he says.

No doubt this will be a tricky balance to strike, but this new research could be used to help get it right.

“Lithium is a critical mineral for the energy transition, and the potential for increased US production to replace imports has implications for employment, manufacturing and supply-chain resilience,” US Geological Survey director David Applegate says.

“This study illustrates the value of science in addressing economically important issues.”

This research was published in Science Advances.

Since mindfulness is something you can practice at home for free, it often sounds like the perfect tonic for stress and mental health issues.

Mindfulness is a type of Buddhist-based meditation in which you focus on being aware of what you’re sensing, thinking, and feeling in the present moment.

The first recorded evidence for this, found in India, is over 1,500 years old. The Dharmatrāta Meditation Scripture, written by a community of Buddhists, describes various practices and includes reports of symptoms of depression and anxiety that can occur after meditation.

It also details cognitive anomalies associated with episodes of psychosis, dissociation, and depersonalisation (when people feel the world is “unreal”).

In the past eight years there has been a surge of scientific research in this area. These studies show that adverse effects are not rare.

A 2022 study, using a sample of 953 people in the US who meditated regularly, showed that over 10 percent of participants experienced adverse effects which had a significant negative impact on their everyday life and lasted for at least one month.

According to a review of over 40 years of research that was published in 2020, the most common adverse effects are anxiety and depression. These are followed by psychotic or delusional symptoms, dissociation or depersonalisation, and fear or terror.

Research also found that adverse effects can happen to people without previous mental health problems, to those who have only had a moderate exposure to meditation and they can lead to long-lasting symptoms.

The western world has also had evidence about these adverse effects for a long time.

In 1976, Arnold Lazarus, a key figure in the cognitive-behavioural science movement, said that meditation, when used indiscriminately, could induce “serious psychiatric problems such as depression, agitation, and even schizophrenic decompensation”.

There is evidence that mindfulness can benefit people’s wellbeing. The problem is that mindfulness coaches, videos, apps and books rarely warn people about the potential adverse effects.

Professor of management and ordained Buddhist teacher Ronald Purser wrote in his 2023 book McMindfulness that mindfulness has become a kind of “capitalist spirituality”.

In the US alone, meditation is worth US$2.2 billion (£1.7 billion). And the senior figures in the mindfulness industry should be aware of the problems with meditation.

Jon Kabat-Zinn, a key figure behind the mindfulness movement, admitted in a 2017 interview with the Guardian that “90 percent of the research [into the positive impacts] is subpar”.

In his foreword to the 2015 UK Mindfulness All-Party Parliamentary Report, Jon Kabat-Zinn suggests that mindfulness meditation can eventually transform “who we are as human beings and individual citizens, as communities and societies, as nations, and as a species”.

This religious-like enthusiasm for the power of mindfulness to change not only individual people but the course of humanity is common among advocates. Even many atheists and agnostics who practice mindfulness believe that this practice has the power to increase peace and compassion in the world.

Media discussion of mindfulness has also been somewhat imbalanced.

In 2015, my book with clinical psychologist Catherine Wikholm, Buddha Pill, included a chapter summarising the research on meditation adverse effects. It was widely disseminated by the media, including a New Scientist article, and a BBC Radio 4 documentary.

But there was little media coverage in 2022 of the most expensive study in the history of meditation science (over US$8 million funded by research charity the Wellcome Trust).

The study tested more than 8,000 children (aged 11-14) across 84 schools in the UK from 2016 to 2018. Its results showed that mindfulness failed to improve the mental wellbeing of children compared to a control group, and may even have had detrimental effects on those who were at risk of mental health problems.

Ethical implications

Is it ethical to sell mindfulness apps, teach people meditation classes, or even use mindfulness in clinical practice without mentioning its adverse effects? Given the evidence of how varied and common these effects are, the answer should be no.

However, many meditation and mindfulness instructors believe that these practices can only do good and don’t know about the potential for adverse effects.

The most common account I hear from people who have suffered adverse meditation effects is that the teachers don’t believe them. They’re usually told to just keep meditating and it will go away.

Research about how to safely practice meditation has only recently begun, which means there isn’t yet clear advice to give people. There is a wider problem in that meditation deals with unusual states of consciousness and we don’t have psychological theories of mind to help us understand these states.

But there are resources people can use to learn about these adverse effects. These include websites produced by meditators who experienced serious adverse effects and academic handbooks with dedicated sections to this topic.

In the US there is a clinical service dedicated to people who have experienced acute and long term problems, led by a mindfulness researcher.

For now, if meditation is to be used as a wellbeing or therapeutic tool, the public needs to be informed about its potential for harm.

Miguel Farias, Associate Professor in Experimental Psychology, Coventry University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

An earlier version of this article was published in July 2024.