Experiments reveal why human-like robots elicit uncanny feelings

New insights into the uncanny valley phenomenon

Experiments reveal a dynamic process that leads to the uncanny valley, with implications for both the design of robots and for understanding how we perceive one another as humans.

Date:September 10, 2020

Source:Emory Health Sciences

Androids, or robots with humanlike features, are often more appealing to people than those that resemble machines -- but only up to a certain point. Many people experience an uneasy feeling in response to robots that are nearly lifelike, and yet somehow not quite "right." The feeling of affinity can plunge into one of repulsion as a robot's human likeness increases, a zone known as "the uncanny valley."

The journal Perception published new insights into the cognitive mechanisms underlying this phenomenon made by psychologists at Emory University.

Since the uncanny valley was first described, a common hypothesis developed to explain it. Known as the mind-perception theory, it proposes that when people see a robot with human-like features, they automatically add a mind to it. A growing sense that a machine appears to have a mind leads to the creepy feeling, according to this theory.

"We found that the opposite is true," says Wang Shensheng, first author of the new study, who did the work as a graduate student at Emory and recently received his PhD in psychology. "It's not the first step of attributing a mind to an android but the next step of 'dehumanizing' it by subtracting the idea of it having a mind that leads to the uncanny valley. Instead of just a one-shot process, it's a dynamic one."

The findings have implications for both the design of robots and for understanding how we perceive one another as humans.

"Robots are increasingly entering the social domain for everything from education to healthcare," Wang says. "How we perceive them and relate to them is important both from the standpoint of engineers and psychologists."

"At the core of this research is the question of what we perceive when we look at a face," adds Philippe Rochat, Emory professor of psychology and senior author of the study. "It's probably one of the most important questions in psychology. The ability to perceive the minds of others is the foundation of human relationships. "

The research may help in unraveling the mechanisms involved in mind-blindness -- the inability to distinguish between humans and machines -- such as in cases of extreme autism or some psychotic disorders, Rochat says.

Co-authors of the study include Yuk Fai Cheong and Daniel Dilks, both associate professors of psychology at Emory.

Anthropomorphizing, or projecting human qualities onto objects, is common. "We often see faces in a cloud for instance," Wang says. "We also sometimes anthropomorphize machines that we're trying to understand, like our cars or a computer."

Naming one's car or imagining that a cloud is an animated being, however, is not normally associated with an uncanny feeling, Wang notes. That led him to hypothesize that something other than just anthropomorphizing may occur when viewing an android.

To tease apart the potential roles of mind-perception and dehumanization in the uncanny valley phenomenon the researchers conducted experiments focused on the temporal dynamics of the process. Participants were shown three types of images -- human faces, mechanical-looking robot faces and android faces that closely resembled humans -- and asked to rate each for perceived animacy or "aliveness." The exposure times of the images were systematically manipulated, within milliseconds, as the participants rated their animacy.

The results showed that perceived animacy decreased significantly as a function of exposure time for android faces but not for mechanical-looking robot or human faces. And in android faces, the perceived animacy drops at between 100 and 500 milliseconds of viewing time. That timing is consistent with previous research showing that people begin to distinguish between human and artificial faces around 400 milliseconds after stimulus onset.

A second set of experiments manipulated both the exposure time and the amount of detail in the images, ranging from a minimal sketch of the features to a fully blurred image. The results showed that removing details from the images of the android faces decreased the perceived animacy along with the perceived uncanniness.

"The whole process is complicated but it happens within the blink of an eye," Wang says. "Our results suggest that at first sight we anthropomorphize an android, but within milliseconds we detect deviations and dehumanize it. And that drop in perceived animacy likely contributes to the uncanny feeling."

Story Source:

Materials provided by Emory Health Sciences. Original written by Carol Clark. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.


Journal Reference:
Shensheng Wang, Yuk F. Cheong, Daniel D. Dilks, Philippe Rochat. The Uncanny Valley Phenomenon and the Temporal Dynamics of Face Animacy Perception. Perception, 2020; 030100662095261 DOI: 10.1177/0301006620952611

PROVING BAHAI RIGHT 

Unconscious learning underlies belief in God, study suggests

Individuals who can unconsciously predict complex patterns, an ability called implicit pattern learning, are likely to hold stronger beliefs that there is a god who creates patterns of events in the universe, according to neuroscientists.

INTELLIGENT DESIGN BY ALLA 

Date:September 9, 2020

Source:Georgetown University Medical Center

FULL STORY

Hands raised to sunset, prayer concept (stock image).
Credit: © ipopba / stock.adobe.com

Individuals who can unconsciously predict complex patterns, an ability called implicit pattern learning, are likely to hold stronger beliefs that there is a god who creates patterns of events in the universe, according to neuroscientists at Georgetown University.

Their research, reported in the journal Nature Communications, is the first to use implicit pattern learning to investigate religious belief. The study spanned two very different cultural and religious groups, one in the U.S. and one in Afghanistan.

The goal was to test whether implicit pattern learning is a basis of belief and, if so, whether that connection holds across different faiths and cultures. The researchers indeed found that implicit pattern learning appears to offer a key to understanding a variety of religions.

"Belief in a god or gods who intervene in the world to create order is a core element of global religions," says the study's senior investigator, Adam Green, an associate professor in the Department of Psychology and Interdisciplinary Program in Neuroscience at Georgetown, and director of the Georgetown Laboratory for Relational Cognition.

"This is not a study about whether God exists, this is a study about why and how brains come to believe in gods. Our hypothesis is that people whose brains are good at subconsciously discerning patterns in their environment may ascribe those patterns to the hand of a higher power," he adds.

"A really interesting observation was what happened between childhood and adulthood," explains Green. The data suggest that if children are unconsciously picking up on patterns in the environment, their belief is more likely to increase as they grow up, even if they are in a nonreligious household. Likewise, if they are not unconsciously picking up on patterns around them, their belief is more likely to decrease as they grow up, even in a religious household.

The study used a well-established cognitive test to measure implicit pattern learning. Participants watched as a sequence of dots appeared and disappeared on a computer screen. They pressed a button for each dot. The dots moved quickly, but some participants -- the ones with the strongest implicit learning ability -- began to subconsciously learn patterns hidden in the sequence, and even press the correct button for the next dot before that dot actually appeared. However, even the best implicit learners did not know that the dots formed patterns, showing that the learning was happening at an unconscious level.

The U.S. section of the study enrolled a predominantly Christian group of 199 participants from Washington, D.C. The Afghanistan section of the study enrolled a group of 149 Muslim participants in Kabul. The study's lead author was Adam Weinberger, a postdoctoral researcher in Green's lab at Georgetown and at the University of Pennsylvania. Co-authors Zachery Warren and Fathali Moghaddam led a team of local Afghan researchers who collected data in Kabul.

"The most interesting aspect of this study, for me, and also for the Afghan research team, was seeing patterns in cognitive processes and beliefs replicated across these two cultures," says Warren. "Afghans and Americans may be more alike than different, at least in certain cognitive processes involved in religious belief and making meaning of the world around us. Irrespective of one's faith, the findings suggest exciting insights into the nature of belief."

"A brain that is more predisposed to implicit pattern learning may be more inclined to believe in a god no matter where in the world that brain happens to find itself, or in which religious context," Green adds, though he cautions that further research is necessary.

"Optimistically," Green concludes, "this evidence might provide some neuro-cognitive common ground at a basic human level between believers of disparate faiths."

A scholar of the Middle East, Moghaddam is a professor in Georgetown's Department of Psychology. Warren, who received his doctorate in Psychology at Georgetown and also holds a masters of divinity, directs the Asia Foundation's Survey of Afghan People. Additional authors include Natalie Gallagher and Gwendolyn English.



Story Source:

Materials provided by Georgetown University Medical Center. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.


Journal Reference:
Adam B. Weinberger, Natalie M. Gallagher, Zachary J. Warren, Gwendolyn A. English, Fathali M. Moghaddam, Adam E. Green. Implicit pattern learning predicts individual differences in belief in God in the United States and Afghanistan. Nature Communications, 2020; 11: 4503 DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-18362-3

Humans' food consumption is wiping out nature at an unprecedented rate, WWF report says

How we produce and consume food is wiping out nature at an unprecedented rate, the WWF conservation group says.

Reuters 

Some populations of African elephants have declined by 86% since 1976

Katie Spencer, news correspondent Published 9th Sep 2020
In its Living Planet report, the charity finds population sizes of mammals, birds, fish, amphibians and reptiles have fallen by more than two-thirds (68%) globally in the last 50 years.
WWF's UK chief executive Tanya Steele said: "We are wrecking our planet and with it putting our own health and the health of the environment at risk."
The report calls for "urgent and ambitious global action" in both conservation and the food and agriculture system.
"What we are doing is using our planet's resources faster than it can recover them," Ms Steele said.
"We can conserve what we have… but we do have to tackle the heart of the problem, which is that we are producing and consuming food in a way that is destroying global habitats…and we really have to try to turn that around."
Little has changed in the two years since the last Living Planet Report came out and the latest assessment of the state of the world's wildlife is bleak.
The report finds 75% of the planet's ice-free-land has now been significantly altered by human activity.
Among the most dramatic decline in wildlife is Tanzania's African elephant population, which has fallen by 86% since 1976, primarily due to poaching.
Costa Rica's leatherback turtles on Tortuguero beach saw an 84% decline in the estimated number of nests laid between 1995 and 2011.
In the UK, it is thought the effects of agricultural intensification was behind an 85% decline in the grey partridge between 1970 and 2004.
Latin America and the Caribbean have seen the largest drop anywhere in the world - a 94% decline in monitored wildlife populations.
Ms Steele said the global coronavirus pandemic has "undoubtedly shone a light on the fragility of our planet".
"It's also shone a light on how exotic diseases can be transmitted - ultimately it's about nature being out of balance with humans," she explained.
"When we see species dropping so dramatically over a time period of the last 50 years, we know that the ecosystem itself, which is our life support system, is starting to fail.
"It's what we rely on for fresh water and clean air and the food we produce, so we have to take these warnings and these statistics very seriously."

© Sky News | Wild animals in dramatic decline - and human eating habits are to blame


World's wildlife populations plunge 68% in 46 years

Rebecca Falconer

A giant panda cub at a conservation and research center in the Sichuan Province of China in 2019. Photo: An Yuan/China News Service/Visual China Group via Getty Images

Wildlife populations have plummeted 68% in less than half a century and the "catastrophic" decline shows no sign of slowing down, a major conservation report published Wednesday warns.

Driving the news: The World Wildlife Fund for Nature (WWF) "Living Planet Report 2020" that monitored 4,392 species of mammals, birds, fish, reptiles and amphibians from 1970 to 2016 points to one underlying cause for the populations decline and deterioration of nature: humanity.

What they found: Deforestation undertaken to increase agricultural land space was the biggest contributor to the decline, according to the biennial, which was in collaboration with the Zoological Society of London.
Three quarters of all freshwater and a third of all land mass is dedicated to food production, the report notes.
Populations in Latin America and the Caribbean have seen the biggest fall, with an average decline of 94%. Global freshwater species have fallen 84%.
"Nowhere in the ocean is entirely unaffected by humans," notes the report, with overfishing and pollution exacerbated by climate change cited as major problems.

Of note: The findings concur with those of a 2019 United Nations report that warns 1 million animal and plant species are under threat from extinction — driven by changes in land and sea use; "direct exploitation of organisms," such as hunting, fishing and logging; climate change; pollution; and invasive species.

What they're saying: WWF-U.S. President and CEO Carter Roberts said in a statement, "As humanity’s footprint expands into once-wild places, we're devastating species populations. But we're also exacerbating climate change and increasing the risk of zoonotic diseases like COVID-19."

Between the lines: The spillover of pathogens from animals to humans — driven mainly by human behaviors like urbanization and the demand to eat meat — is increasing, Axios' Eileen Drage O'Reilly notes.
These Zoonotic diseases have "quadrupled in the last 50 years, mostly in tropical regions," a letter sent to Congress in March from more than 100 wildlife and environmental groups stated.

The bottom line: A study published in the journal Nature Thursday and co-authored by over 40 nonprofits and academics finds cutting food waste and opting for more nutritional diets would help prevent further losses to the ecosystem.
The WWF report also notes that the environmental crisis can be mitigated by such considerations and if world leaders take urgent action on consumption industries, including ending deforestation.

Read the full "Living Planet Report 2020," via DocumentCloud:

Nikola doubters should throw their skepticism 'out the window' after GM agreed to build the startup's Cybertruck rival, industry watchers say

GM SCREWS OSHAWA WORKERS PUTS THEM OUT OF WORK SO IT CAN INVEST IN HYDROGEN TRUCKS

Mark Matousek Sep 9, 2020

GM will produce Nikola's Badger pickup truck. Nikola

Nikola announced on Tuesday that General Motors will build its electric pickup truck and supply hydrogen fuel cells for its electric semi trucks.

The partnership gives Nikola a major credibility boost, Wedbush Securities analysts said in a research note.

"There have been many skeptics around Nikola and its founder Trevor Milton's ambitions over the coming years, which now get thrown out the window," the analysts said.

Nikola was at the forefront of the handful of electric-vehicle startups that have gone public this year before making their first deliveries. Though such a move creates upside for investors, it also carries uncertainty around whether those companies will be able to execute on their plans and find enough customers willing to take a chance on them.

Nikola's newly announced $2 billion partnership with General Motors eliminates much of that uncertainty, Wedbush Securities analysts Dan Ives, Strecker Backe, and Ahmad Khalil said in a research note published on Tuesday.

"This news is a huge shot in the arm for Nikola," the analysts said. "There have been many skeptics around Nikola and its founder Trevor Milton's ambitions over the coming years, which now get thrown out the window with stalwart GM making a major strategic bet on Nikola for the next decade."

Under the deal, GM will engineer and build Nikola's Badger electric pickup truck, supply future Nikola vehicles with its hydrogen fuel-cell system, and take an 11% stake (worth $2 billion) in the startup. Nikola, which designed the Badger, will handle sales and marketing. GM said it expects to net $4 billion from the deal, while Nikola estimated savings of over $5 billion.

Hydrogen-powered semi trucks are the core of Nikola's business, but founder and executive chairman Trevor Milton has said he envisions the Badger as a way to make the company more attractive to investors, since most won't drive a semi truck.

"The reason why people love Apple: Everyone touches their product. Why do they love Google? Everyone touches their product," Milton said during a July interview with the "This Week in Startups" podcast. While semi trucks will drive Nikola's profits, Milton said, "the pickup truck's for the consumer. And the consumer is the one who is part of the Robinhood portfolio, who's part of the family office or whatever. And that's where all the valuation of the company comes from."

Read more:
Nikola soars 35% after striking $2 billion manufacturing partnership with General Motors

Nikola and Fisker may have cut a year off the time Tesla and Uber spent going public by joining Wall Street's 'blank-check' IPO craze

Nikola's CEO reveals what Elon Musk rival Trevor Milton is really like as a boss

Tesla competitor Nikola quietly disclosed its only revenue source so far: building solar panels for its founder

A Facebook engineer just quit in protest, accusing the company of 'profiting off hate'
Aaron Holmes
Sep 8, 2020

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Erin Scott/Reuters

A Facebook software engineer quit the company on Tuesday and criticized its approach to handling misinformation, accusing the platform of "profiting off hate in the US and globally."

The engineer, Ashok Chandwaney, said Facebook should more strongly approach removing content that encourages violence, citing Facebook's decision not to take down a post from President Donald Trump that said "when the looting starts, the shooting starts," as well as its failure to remove an event that called for violence against protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin.

Facebook, long seen as one of the most sought-after workplaces in Silicon Valley, has faced mounting pushback from employees in recent years over its moderation policies. 

Software engineers are among the highest-paid Facebook employees.

A Facebook software engineer resigned and publicly criticized the company on Tuesday, accusing it of "profiting off hate."

In a letter detailing their decision to quit, Ashok Chandwaney described some of Facebook's recent actions as breaking points that led them to quit. Chandwaney called out Facebook's failure to remove a militia group's event inciting violence against protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin, as well as its choice not to remove a post by President Donald Trump that said "when the looting starts, the shooting starts."

Several Facebook employees have left the company in recent months after voicing similar concerns — at least three left in one week after CEO Mark Zuckerberg told employees the company would not remove Trump's post. Those grievances build on years of scandals at Facebook, including its role in enabling Russian election interference, Cambridge Analytica spying, and genocide in Myanmar.

Chandwaney, who is gender nonbinary, laid out their reasons for leaving the company in a public Facebook post on Tuesday. They also detailed their decision to quit in an interview with The Washington Post and published a copy of their resignation letter on Facebook's internal employee message board.


In a statement to Business Insider, Chandwaney said they quit because they felt their criticism of Facebook wasn't being heard.

"As far as I can tell, the company is approaching hate content and hate organizing as a PR issue rather than a substantive issue to take real action on," Chandwaney said. ""From where I was sitting, after years of frustration, I couldn't see a better path to push for that change than to speak out publicly."

A Facebook representative did not immediately respond to a request for comment. (The company typically doesn't comment on personnel matters.)

Facebook has taken steps in recent months to crack down on hate speech and content that glorifies violence — the company recently implemented a ban on militia groups and commissioned a civil-rights audit of its platform.

But in their resignation letter, Chandwaney said Facebook's recent moves appeared more motivated by public relations than a willingness to change. Chandwaney added that they had become disillusioned with Facebook's stated mission to "build social value."

"I've heard numerous, unsatisfying explanations for how the various things I've worked on here has been building social value," they wrote. "In all my roles across the company, at the end of the day, the decisions have actually come down to business value."

Software engineers are among the most sought-after and highest-paid Facebook employees, according to publicly available salary data.

Chandwaney wrote in their resignation letter that they were motivated in part by the work of Color of Change, an activist group that has pressured Facebook to take a harsher stance on content moderation and remove content like Trump's post.


Color of Change's president, Rashad Robinson, applauded Chandwaney's letter in a statement on Tuesday.

"Color Of Change is happy to support them," Robinson said, "but it's a shame Facebook employees feel the need to turn to civil rights organizations to protect communities of color, rather than their own employer."

NE

At least 37 million people have been displaced by America's 'war on terror' in less than 20 years

John Haltiwanger
Sep 8, 2020
Bush delivering a speech to crew aboard the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, as the carrier steamed toward San Diego, California on May 1, 2003. Larry Downing/Reuters

At least 37 million people have been displaced by America's "global war on terror," according to a new report from Brown University's Cost of War project.

The number of displaced people could be as high as 59 million, the report states.

Displacement has caused "incalculable harm to individuals, families, towns, cities, regions, and entire countries physically, socially, emotionally, and economically," the report states.

The federal government's price tag for the war on terror is over $6.4 trillion, and it's killed over 800,000 people in direct war violence

At least 37 million people, and possibly up to 59 million, have been displaced by America's "global war on terror" since it was launched by former President George W. Bush's administration nearly 20 years ago, according to a new report from Brown University's Cost of War project.

The report says that it offers the first comprehensive picture on how many people have been displaced by the conflicts waged by the US as part of the so-called "war on terror."

"The US post-9/11 wars have forcibly displaced at least 37 million people in and from Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, the Philippines, Libya, and Syria. This exceeds those displaced by every war since 1900, except World War II," the report states.

Millions of others have been displaced in smaller conflicts involving US forces in Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Mali, Niger, Saudi Arabia, and Tunisia, according to the report.


To put this into perspective, 37 million is nearly equivalent to the population of California — the most populous state in the US.

A little over 25 million of those who've been displaced have returned home, the report added, going on to say that "return does not erase the trauma of displacement or mean that those displaced have returned to their original homes or to a secure life."

Displacement has caused "incalculable harm to individuals, families, towns, cities, regions, and entire countries physically, socially, emotionally, and economically," the report states, emphasizing that the total number of displaced people does not fully capture the impact of losing one's home and more.

FILE PHOTO: U.S. President Donald Trump makes an unannounced visit to U.S. troops at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan Reuters

The report was issued just days before the 19th anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks, which fostered major changes across the globe and continue to have a reverberating impact on America's approach to foreign affairs. Overall, the war on terror is widely viewed as a massive failure that cost the US an exorbitant amount of money and resources, to say nothing of the loss of life.


According to the Cost of War project, the federal government's price tag for the war on terror is over $6.4 trillion, and it's killed over 800,000 people in direct war violence.

The US still has troops in Afghanistan, which it invaded in October 2001, and the Trump administration is engaged in ongoing, tenuous peace talks with the Taliban. Historians generally agree that the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 catalyzed the rise of ISIS, which fostered an entirely new conflict in Iraq and Syria, as well as terror attacks worldwide. Meanwhile, though Osama bin Laden was killed in 2011, Al Qaeda has not been totally defeated.

How coronavirus took hold in North America and in Europe

Early interventions were effective at stamping out coronavirus infections before they spread, according to a new study. 

Combining virus genomics with epidemiologic simulations and travel records, the research shows that in both the United States and in Europe, sustained transmission networks became established only after separate introductions of the virus that went undetected.

Date:September 10, 2020

Source:University of Arizona

FULL STORY

Global spread of coronavirus, concept illustration (stock image).
Credit: © solvod / stock.adobe.com

A new study combines evolutionary genomics from coronavirus samples with computer-simulated epidemics and detailed travel records to reconstruct the spread of coronavirus across the world in unprecedented detail.

Published in the journal Science, the results suggest an extended period of missed opportunity when intensive testing and contact tracing might have prevented SARS-CoV-2 from becoming established in North America and Europe.

The paper also challenges suggestions that linked the earliest known cases of COVID-19 on each continent in January to outbreaks detected weeks later, and provides valuable insights that could inform public health response and help with anticipating and preventing future outbreaks of COVID-19 and other zoonotic diseases.

"Our aspiration was to develop and apply powerful new technology to conduct a definitive analysis of how the pandemic unfolded in space and time, across the globe," said University of Arizona researcher Michael Worobey, who led an interdisciplinary team of scientists from 13 research institutions in the U.S., Belgium, Canada and the U.K. "Before, there were lots of possibilities floating around in a mish-mash of science, social media and an unprecedented number of preprint publications still awaiting peer review."

The team based their analysis on results from viral genome sequencing efforts, which began immediately after the virus was identified. These efforts quickly grew into a worldwide effort unprecedented in scale and pace and have yielded tens of thousands of genome sequences, publicly available in databases.

Contrary to widespread narratives, the first documented arrivals of infected individuals traveling from China to the U.S. and Europe did not snowball into continental outbreaks, the researchers found.

Instead, swift and decisive measures aimed at tracing and containing those initial incursions of the virus were successful and should serve as model responses directing future actions and policies by governments and public health agencies, the study's authors conclude.

How the Virus Arrived in the U.S. and Europe

A Chinese national flying into Seattle from Wuhan, China on Jan. 15 became the first patient in the U.S. shown to be infected with the novel coronavirus and the first to have a SARS-CoV-2 genome sequenced. This patient was designated 'WA1.' It was not until six weeks later that several additional cases were detected in Washington state.

"And while all that time goes past, everyone is in the dark and wondering, 'What's happening?'" Worobey said. "We hope we're OK, we hope there are no other cases, and then it becomes clear, from a remarkable community viral sampling program in Seattle, that there are more cases in Washington and they are genetically very similar to WA1's virus."

Worobey and his collaborators tested the prevailing hypothesis suggesting that patient WA1 had established a transmission cluster that went undetected for six weeks. Although the genomes sampled in February and March share similarities with WA1, they are different enough that the idea of WA1 establishing the ensuing outbreak is very unlikely, they determined. The researchers' findings indicate that the jump from China to the U.S. likely occurred on or around Feb. 1 instead.

The results also puts to rest speculation that this outbreak, the earliest substantial transmission cluster in the U.S., may have been initiated indirectly by dispersal of the virus from China to British Columbia, Canada, just north of Washington State, and then spread from Canada to the U.S. Multiple SARS-CoV-2 genomes published by the British Columbia Center for Disease Control appeared to be ancestral to the viral variants sampled in Washington State, strongly suggesting a Canadian origin of the U.S. epidemic. However, the present study revealed sequencing errors in those genomes, thus ruling out this scenario.

Instead, the new study implicates a direct-from-China source of the U.S. outbreak, right around the time the U.S. administration implemented a travel ban for travelers from China in early February. The nationality of the "index case" of the U.S. outbreak cannot be known for certain because tens of thousands of U.S. citizens and visa holders traveled from China to the U.S. even after the ban took effect.

A similar scenario marks the first known introduction of coronavirus into Europe. On Jan. 20, an employee of an automotive supply company in Bavaria, Germany, flew in for a business meeting from Shanghai, China, unknowingly carrying the virus, ultimately leading to infection of 16 co-workers. In that case, too, an impressive response of rapid testing and isolation prevented the outbreak from spreading any further, the study concludes. Contrary to speculation, this German outbreak was not the source of the outbreak in Northern Italy that eventually spread widely across Europe and eventually to New York City and the rest of the U.S.

The authors also show that this China-to-Italy-US dispersal route ignited transmission clusters on the East Coast slightly later in February than the China-to-US movement of the virus that established the Washington State outbreak. The Washington transmission cluster also predated small clusters of community transmission in February in California, making it the earliest anywhere in North America.

Early Containment Works

The authors say intensive interventions, involving testing, contact tracing, isolation measures and a high degree of compliance of infected individuals, who reported their symptoms to health authorities and self-isolated in a timely manner, helped Germany and the Seattle area contain those outbreaks in January.

"We believe that those measures resulted in a situation where the first sparks could successfully be stamped out, preventing further spread into the community," Worobey said. "What this tells us is that the measures taken in those cases are highly effective and should serve as a blueprint for future responses to emerging diseases that have the potential to escalate into worldwide pandemics."

To reconstruct the pandemic's unfolding, the scientists ran computer programs that carefully simulated the epidemiology and evolution of the virus, in other words, how SARS-CoV-2 spread and mutated over time.

"This allowed us to re-run the tape of how the epidemic unfolded, over and over again, and then check the scenarios that emerge in the simulations against the patterns we see in reality," Worobey said.

"In the Washington case, we can ask, 'What if that patient WA1 who arrived in the U.S. on Jan. 15 really did start that outbreak?' Well, if he did, and you re-run that epidemic over and over and over, and then sample infected patients from that epidemic and evolve the virus in that way, do you get a pattern that looks like what we see in reality? And the answer was no," he said.

"If you seed that early Italian outbreak with the one in Germany, do you see the pattern that you get in the evolutionary data? And the answer, again, is no," he said.

"By re-running the introduction of SARS-CoV-2 into the U.S. and Europe through simulations, we showed that it was very unlikely that the first documented viral introductions into these locales led to productive transmission clusters," said co-author Joel Wertheim of the University of California, San Diego. "Molecular epidemiological analyses are incredibly powerful for revealing transmissions patterns of SARS-CoV-2."

Other methods were then combined with the data from the virtual epidemics, yielding exceptionally detailed and quantitative results.

"Fundamental to this work stands our new tool combining detailed travel history information and phylogenetics, which produces a sort of 'family tree' of how the different genomes of virus sampled from infected individuals are related to each other," said co-author Marc Suchard of the University of California, Los Angeles. "The more accurate evolutionary reconstructions from these tools provide a critical step to understand how SARS-CoV-2 spread globally in such a short time."

"We have to keep in mind that we have studied only short-term evolution of this virus, so it hasn't had much time to accumulate many mutations," said co-author Philippe Lemey of the University of Leuven, Belgium. "Add to that the uneven sampling of genomes from different parts of the world, and it becomes clear that there are huge benefits to be gained from integrating various sources of information, combining genomic reconstructions with complementary approaches like flight records and the total number of COVID-19 cases in various global regions in January and February."

"Our research shows that when you do early intervention and detection well, it can have a massive impact, both on preventing pandemics and controlling them once they progress," Worobey said. "While the epidemic eventually slipped through, there were early victories that show us the way forward: Comprehensive testing and case identification are powerful weapons."

Funding sources for this study include the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the European Research Council, the Wellcome Trust and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research Coronavirus Rapid Response Programme.



Story Source:

Materials provided by University of Arizona. Original written by Daniel Stolte. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.


Journal Reference:
Michael Worobey, Jonathan Pekar, Brendan B. Larsen, Martha I. Nelson, Verity Hill, Jeffrey B. Joy, Andrew Rambaut, Marc A. Suchard, Joel O. Wertheim, Philippe Lemey. The emergence of SARS-CoV-2 in Europe and North America. Science, Sept. 10, 2020; DOI: 10.1126/science.abc8169

 

Climate change, infectious disease seen as major threats: survey

Credit: CC0 Public Domain

Climate change and the spread of infectious disease are seen as the top threats by the majority of people in 14 economically advanced nations surveyed by the Pew Research Center.

In similar surveys conducted by the Washington-based center in 2013, 2016, 2017 and 2018, the chief threats were seen as climate change and terrorism.

For the latest survey, published on Wednesday, Pew questioned 14,276 adults living in Australia, Belgium, Britain, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Spain, South Korea, Sweden and the United States between June 10 and August 3.

"In a year when the COVID-19 pandemic has dominated news headlines around the world, it is perhaps unsurprising to discover that majorities in 14 countries surveyed this past summer see the spread of infectious disease as a major threat to their countries," the authors of the survey said.

A median percentage of 70 percent cited climate change as a major threat to their countries, followed by the spread of infectious diseases with 69 percent, terrorism (66 percent), cyberattacks from other countries (65 percent) and the spread of nuclear weapons (61 percent).

Other major threats cited included the condition of the global economy and global poverty.

"In terms of relative rankings, climate change outpaces or ties infectious disease as the most frequently mentioned 'major threat' in eight of 14 countries polled," Pew said, including seven of the nine European countries surveyed.

In the European nations, "climate change remains the topmost perceived threat, even as people there also express grave concern about the risks posed by infectious disease."

In the United States, climate change was most commonly cited first as a major threat followed by cyberattacks from other countries, terrorism, the spread of nuclear weapons and climate change.

In two countries, Australia and Denmark, cyberattacks were most commonly cited as the major threat.

"With the global economy hard hit by COVID-19 related disruptions, concerns about the global economy have increased substantially in most of the countries since the question was last asked in 2018," Pew said.

"Majorities in 10 of the 14 countries polled describe the condition of the global economy as a major threat."

This view was particularly pronounced in Britain, where 65 percent cited the world's economic situation as a major threat, up from 41 percent two years ago, Japan (74 percent, up from 52 percent) and France (67 percent, up from 46 percent).

Post-COVID, more in West see China as major power: study

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© 2020 AFP

 

Survey finds no detectable alien radio signals across 10 million stars

8 September 2020 Astronomy Now

 

Dipole antennas making up the Murchison Widefield Array in Australia. Image: Dragonfly Media

THEY LOOK LIKE PHAGES

Astronomers using the Murchison Widefield Array radio telescope in Australia surveyed a patch of sky around the constellation Vela known to include at least 10 million stars, on the lookout for radio emissions that could indicate the presence of one or more technological civilisations.

The result?

“We found no technosignatures – no sign of intelligent life,” said Chenoa Tremblay, a researcher with Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, or CSIRO.

Tremblay and Steven Tingay, from the Curtin University node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research, or ICRAR, used the MWA to observe the sky around Vela for 17 hours, a survey they said was more than 100 times broader and deeper than any previous study.

The MWA’s wide field of view allowed the researchers to observe millions of stars at the same time, looking for powerful emissions at frequencies similar to FM radio.

Even though they did not find any such emissions, “the amount of space we looked at was the equivalent of trying to find something in the Earth’s oceans but only searching a volume of water equivalent to a large backyard swimming pool,” said Tingay.

“Since we can’t really assume how possible alien civilisations might utilise technology, we need to search in many different ways,” he said. “Although there is a long way to go in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, telescopes such as the MWA will continue to push the limits. We have to keep looking.”

The findings are reported in Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia

 

Previewing the Sun’s fate: a white dwarf blazing in the colourful shroud of a planetary nebula

10 September 2020 Astronomy Now

A star balances the inward pull of the gravity generated by its mass with the outward pressure generated by fusion reactions in its core. When all the available fuel is exhausted, fusion stops, gravity triumphs and the core collapses. What happens after that depends on how much mass the doomed star had in the first place. For stars with between about 10 and 25 solar masses, the end result is a neutron star with about 1.4 times the mass of the Sun crammed into am unimaginably dense city-size sphere. The cores of heavier stars can collapse past the neutron star stage, becoming black holes and effectively dropping out of the known universe. For stars like the Sun, the outer atmosphere is blown out into space while the core shrinks down to the size of a terrestrial planet. The result is a white dwarf. This image of NGC 2440, captured by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2007, shows a brilliant, extremely hot white dwarf shining in the centre of expanding clouds of gas from the doomed star’s blown-off outer atmosphere. Ultraviolet light from the white dwarf, one of the hottest known, makes the gas in the so-called planetary nebula glow.