How astronaut diversity changed for the better in a single NASA class recounted in 'The New Guys' book


two women astronauts in space shuttle holding hardware

A new book explores the astronaut class that permanently changed human spaceflight at NASA.

"The Thirty-Five New Guys," as the 1978 astronaut class called itself, brought unprecedented diversity to the previously all-white, all-male astronaut corps. That class included the first female astronauts, among them Sally Ride, who in 1983 became the first American woman in space. Also included were the first African-American astronauts, such as the first flyer of that group, Guion "Guy" Bluford, and Ellison Onizuka, who became the first Asian-American to reach space.

"It was a little bit like a mystery search. You have to find all these really cool pieces of information and put them together," author Meredith Bagby said of the five-year research process that resulted in the book "The New Guys: The Historic Class of Astronauts That Broke Barriers and Changed the Face of Space Travel", which will be published on Tuesday (Feb. 7) by William Morrow. You can check out Space.com's take on the best space books for more options ahead of the release.


Bagby's book shows that NASA undertook that diversity-boosting process only after facing immense pressure from Congress — and that the benefits to the astronaut corps were incalculable.

"The program was strengthened by hiring diverse people," Bagby said. "Diversity actually brings greater success on missions, and greater success of the organization. Having people with different points of view come together and democratize information and treat each other equally actually turns out to be a really good thing for success."

Related: Men, women and Mars: How gender diversity Is key for success on the Red Planet

The New Guys: The Historic Class of Astronauts That Broke Barriers and Changed the Face of Space Travel (Meredith Bagby, Feb. 7, 2023)

The 1978 NASA astronaut class included the first American women, the first African Americans, the first Asian-American, and the first LGBTQ+ individual. This behind-the-scenes look includes exclusive interviews with the astronauts and/or their family members.View Deal

Numerous studies have pointed to the value of diversity, such as a 2019 analysis by McKinsey across dozens of countries. It found that companies that prioritized gender diversity in management were 25% more likely to have better-than-average profitability. The public sector also benefits: Today, NASA identifies diversity as aligning with values of integrity, teamwork and excellence, which the agency deems "central to mission success."

But the conversation around diversity was different in the era of the 1978 astronaut class. Certainly, NASA had diversified somewhat from the late 1950s and early 1960s, when it sought experienced (white) male test pilots to join the astronaut corps.

But the agency was also famous for rebuffing more than a dozen highly qualified female pilots from early space missions; those women were later known as the Mercury 13, in a nod to the first set of NASA human spaceflights in the Mercury program. Many women in crucial ground roles were also put in the background, such as talented Black female mathematicians and engineers later known as "Hidden Figures" in tribute to their success in flying space missions safely.

Related: 'Hidden Figure' Katherine Johnson tells her own story in young readers' book

NASA hired male scientist-astronauts in 1965, although it didn't fly the first of them (Harrison Schmitt) until Apollo 17, the final mission of the Apollo program, in 1972. Schmitt was a trained geologist but was only reassigned from the canceled Apollo 18 flight after the scientific community lobbied NASA for his inclusion.

The astronaut recruitment for 1978 was the first in nearly a decade, in anticipation of frequent space shuttle missions. It came with celebrity flair, as Black "Star Trek" actress Nichelle Nichols ("Uhura" on The Original Series) stepped in to lead publicity for the campaign. The result was 35 new astronauts: six women (including Jewish-American Judith Resnik), three African-Americans and one Asian-American, Onizuka.

Some "New Guys" met with tragedy, however, including Onizuka, Resnik and fellow class members Dick Scobee and Ronald McNair. The four flew on mission STS-51L, the last flight of Challenger with seven astronauts on board. All seven lost their lives when the shuttle broke apart shortly after liftoff on Jan. 28, 1986. NASA made numerous technical and operational redesigns before resuming shuttle program launches in 1988.

That crew's legacy is remembered warmly in the book, which features exclusive interviews with family members and friends to recreate the astronauts' experiences and feelings while at NASA.

The book also shows the 1978 class in general as a turning point in NASA history, when the agency began to expand its astronaut corps to more types of people. Some diversity was unintentional; Ride's LGBTQ+ status was revealed only after her death in 2012, making her the first known in that community to ride to space as well.

Related: This Pride, be inspired by Sally Ride's legacy

A montage of individual images of the 1978 astronaut class at NASA.

The book includes a tapestry of reminiscences from the 35 "New Guys." For example: Black astronaut Ron McNair grew up in the segregated south, only the third generation of his family to live free of slavery; the book recounts the literal railroad tracks separating white and Black communities in his hometown of Lake City, South Carolina.

Anna Lee Tingle turned down a prestigious medical profession appointment even before she was called back for an astronaut interview, while Resnik snuck into Smithsonian Institution offices to ask advice of then National Air and Space Museum director Michael Collins, who flew on the historic Apollo 11 moon mission with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin.

Bagby found these accounts through talking with astronauts and their family members, reading diaries with family members' permission, and spending time with retired NASA personnel at places like Frenchies Italian Restaurant, a popular community hangout in Houston. (A big early help was George Abbey, the circumspect yet legendary director of flight crew selection during the era of "The New Guys.")

"It just takes time to get to really know the person ... what did they eat for breakfast? How did they feel in that moment?" Bagby said. "I felt very close to all the people I interviewed, and it was really just a wonderful process."

Elizabeth Howell is the co-author of "Why Am I Taller?" (ECW Press, 2022; with Canadian astronaut Dave Williams), a book about space medicine. Follow her on Twitter @howellspace. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.

Heartland Institute Sends 8,000 Teachers Climate Denial 'Textbook'

Blanca Begert, Grist
Mon, February 6, 2023

This story was originally published by Grist. 

After decades of intense public debate and misinformation campaigns, nearly three-quarters of Americans now accept that climate change is happening; not only that, more than half understand it is caused by human activity. This shift has forced fossil fuel companies — and the organizations they fund — to alter their tactics to avoid regulation. Where they once denied climate science outright, companies now engage in “discourses of delay,” publicly accepting the science but working to stall climate policy by redirecting blame, pushing non-transformative solutions, and emphasizing the downsides of taking action.

But the Heartland Institute, the infamous, free-market think tank that has operated at the center of climate misinformation for decades, is still hanging onto the old ways as it pushes on with its attempt to discredit established climate science.

This week, the organization sent copies of its book “Climate at a Glance” to 8,000 middle and high school teachers across the country, in order to provide them, it says, with “the data to show the earth is not experiencing a climate crisis.”

H. Sterling Burnett, who directs Climate and Environmental Policy for the Heartland Institute and edited “Climate at a Glance,” said he hoped the book would reach educators who are teaching climate change, “not to replace the material they have, but to supplement it.”

But science education advocates aren’t too worried about the impact of the materials.

“This is not Heartland’s first rodeo,” said Glenn Branch, deputy director of the non-profit National Center for Science Education, which promotes and defends accurate science education. “In previous campaigns, the bulk of teachers and students who received the materials threw them out or put them in the recycling bin.”

The institute’s last big mailout was in 2017 when it sent out 350,000 copies of its “Why Scientists Disagree About Global Warming.” According to Branch, while only a few picked up the information and taught from it, a number of educators used the materials in their classrooms to teach about propaganda techniques. Branch also thinks the fact that this year’s campaign is so scaled back from the 2017 mailout means even Heartland itself recognizes this as a failing strategy.

The new 80-page document, presented in the style of a slick and authoritative textbook, covers 30 climate topics often discussed in science classes. Many of the sections acknowledge modest planetary warming, but assert that it is either good for species and ecosystems, or doesn’t really have the impacts on extreme weather events that climate scientists say it does.

“They typically give a straightforward observation or statistic that’s not in dispute and add some commentary that’s wildly exaggerated or a completely false interpretation,” said Branch. A section on crop production, for example, notes how a longer growing season improves yields; it does not acknowledge the net-negative impact of a hotter, drier climate and extreme precipitation on agriculture in the long term. A page on sea-level rise says “levels have been rising at a fairly steady pace since at least the mid-1800s,” but the rate has actually more than doubled in the 2000s when compared to most of the 20th century.

“It’s a misleading interpretation of scientific facts and questionable inferences drawn from cherry picked data from unreliable sources,” said Robert Brulle, a visiting professor of sociology at Brown University who has researched the public relations strategies of the fossil fuel industry. “It almost seems quaint that they’re still running with this. It’s like ‘The 1990s called. They want their scientific misinformation back.’”

Burnett defends the institute’s new booklet. “People say ‘oh, you don’t have the proper context’,” he said, “but that’s their opinion on what the proper context should be.”

Founded in Chicago in 1984, the Heartland Institute received hundreds of thousands of dollars from fossil fuel companies and industrial billionaires the Koch brothers until association with outright science denial started to become more of a liability for the industry. The last of the big oil companies mostly gave up on funding extreme climate denial groups like Heartland around 2007, said Brulle. Any direct links that might still exist would be hard to find; climate misinformation has historically been funded and spread through a network of front groups, and Heartland no longer discloses its major supporters. While its revenue has declined over the years, it still receives millions from conservative foundations and philanthropies.

“What Heartland is hoping for is to catch those who haven’t been equipped to understand climate science well enough to realize the highly misleading nature of the materials,” said Branch. A survey from 2015 found that about 57 percent of high school and middle school science educators have not formally studied climate change. As states increasingly add climate change to their science standards, Branch hopes to see more states follow in the path of Washington, California, Maine, and New Jersey in appropriating funds for teacher professional development on the issue, which would equip them with the tools to identify misinformation.

Even if teachers today are unlikely to fall for Heartland’s claims, the organization’s messaging could still help the fossil fuel industry in a roundabout way. In social science there’s a theory called the radical flank effect, explained Brulle, where a position that is perceived as extreme can be made to look more moderate by a position that is even more extreme.

“If Exxon Mobil is saying ‘climate change is probably real and it can cause harm, but we can adapt,’ without Heartland, they’re the extremists,” said Brulle. “But if Heartland is out there saying ‘climate change is going to be good for us,’ it makes the major oil companies look moderate and reasonable.”

Gizmodo

Balloon Incident Reveals More Than Spying as Competition With China Intensifies


The suspected Chinese spy balloon drifts to the ocean after being shot down off the coast in Surfside Beach, South Carolina, U.S. February 4, 2023. 

REUTERS/Randall Hill 

David E. Sanger
Mon, February 6, 2023 

It may be months before U.S. intelligence agencies can compare the audacious flight of a Chinese surveillance balloon across the country to other intrusions on America’s national security systems, to determine how it ranks.

After all, there is plenty of competition.

There was the theft of the designs of the F-35 about 15 years ago, enabling the Chinese air force to develop its look-alike stealth fighter, with Chinese characteristics. There was the case of China’s premier hacking team lifting the security clearance files for 22 million Americans from the barely secured computers of the Office of Personnel Management in 2015. That, combined with stolen medical files from Anthem and travel records from Marriott hotels, has presumably helped the Chinese create a detailed blueprint of America’s national security infrastructure.

But for pure gall, there was something different about the balloon. It became the subject of public fascination as it floated over nuclear silos of Montana, then was spotted near Kansas City and met its cinematic end when a Sidewinder missile took it down over shallow waters off the coast of South Carolina. Not surprisingly, now it is coveted by military and intelligence officials who desperately want to reverse-engineer whatever remains the Coast Guard and the Navy can recover.

Yet beyond the made-for-cable-news spectacle, the entire incident also speaks volumes about how little Washington and Beijing communicate, almost 22 years after the collision of an American spy plane and a Chinese fighter about 70 miles off the coast of Hainan Island led both sides to vow that they would improve their crisis management.

“We don’t know what the intelligence yield was for the Chinese,” said Evan Medeiros, a Georgetown professor who advised President Barack Obama on China and Asia with the National Security Council. “But there is no doubt it was a gross violation of sovereignty,” something the Chinese object to vociferously when the United States flies over and sails through the islands China has built from sandbars in the South China Sea.

“And this made visceral the China challenge,” Medeiros said, “to look up when you are out walking your dog, and you see a Chinese spy balloon in the sky.”

As it turns out, it was hardly the first time. Hours before the giant balloon met its deflated end, the Pentagon said there was another one in flight, over South America. And it noted a long history of Chinese balloons flying over the United States (which the Pentagon, somehow, never wanted to talk about before, until this incident forced it to).

“Instances of this kind of balloon activity have been observed previously over the past several years,” Pentagon spokesperson Brig. Gen. Patrick S. Ryder said in a statement published Thursday. One senior official said many of those were in the Pacific, some near Hawaii, where the Indo-Pacific Command is based, along with much of the naval capability and surveillance gear of the Pacific Fleet.

Ryder’s admission raises the question of whether the United States failed to set a red line years ago about the balloon surveillance, essentially encouraging China to grow bolder and bolder. “The fact that they have come into airspace before is not comforting,” said Amy B. Zegart, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and author of “Spies, Lies and Algorithms,” a study of new technologies in ubiquitous surveillance. “We should have had a strategy earlier,” she said, and “we should have signaled our limits much earlier.”

Of course, there is nothing new about superpowers spying on one another, even from balloons. President Dwight D. Eisenhower authorized surveillance of the Soviet Union by lofting cameras on balloons in the mid-1950s, flying them “over Soviet bloc countries under the guise of meteorological research,” according to an article published by the National Archives in 2009. It “yielded more protests from the Kremlin than it did useful intelligence,” author David Haight, an archivist at the Eisenhower Library, reported.

With the advent of the first spy satellites, balloons appeared to become obsolete.

Now they are making a comeback, because while spy satellites can see almost everything, balloons equipped with high-tech sensors hover over a site far longer and can pick up radio, cellular and other transmissions that cannot be detected from space. That is why the Montana sighting of the balloon was critical; in recent years, the National Security Agency and United States Strategic Command, which oversees the American nuclear arsenal, have been remaking communications with nuclear weapons sites. That would be one, but only one, of the natural targets for China’s Ministry of State Security, which oversees many of its national security hacks.

The NSA also targets China, of course. From the revelations of Edward Snowden, the former contractor who revealed many of the agency’s operations a decade ago, the world learned that the United States broke into the networks of Huawei, the Chinese telecommunications firm, and also tracked the movements of Chinese leaders and soldiers responsible for moving Chinese nuclear weapons. That is only a small sliver of American surveillance in China.

Such activities add to China’s argument that everyone does it. Because they are largely hidden — save for the occasional revelation of a big hack — they have rarely become wrapped in national politics. That is changing.

The balloon incident came at a moment when Democrats and Republicans are competing to demonstrate who can be stronger on China. And that showed: The new chair of the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Michael R. Turner, R-Ohio, echoed the many Republicans who argued the balloon needed to come down sooner.

He called the shoot-down “sort of like tackling the quarterback after the game is over. The satellite had completed its mission. It should never have been allowed to enter the United States, and it never should have been allowed to complete its mission.”

It is not yet clear what that “mission” was, or whether the risk of letting it proceed truly outweighed the risk of taking the balloon down over land, as Turner seemed to imply. It is only a small part of the increasingly aggressive “Spy vs. Spy” moves of superpower competitors. That has only intensified as control of semiconductor production equipment, artificial intelligence tools, 5G telecommunications, quantum computing and biological sciences has become the source of new arms races. And both sides play.

Yet it was the obviousness of the balloon that made many in Washington wonder whether the intelligence community and the civilian leadership in Beijing are communicating with each other.

“Whatever the value of what the Chinese might have obtained,” said Gen. Michael Rogers, former director of the National Security Agency during the Obama and Trump administrations, “what was different here was the visibility. It just has a different feel when it is a physical intrusion on the country.” And once it was detected, China “handled it badly,’’ he said.

The balloon drifted over the continental United States just days before Secretary of State Antony Blinken was supposed to make the first visit of a top American diplomat to Beijing in many years. Chinese officials maintained that it was a weather balloon that had entered U.S. airspace by accident.

Blinken canceled his trip — a public slap that many U.S. officials believe President Xi Jinping cannot be happy about, at a moment the Chinese leader appears to be trying to stabilize the fast-descending relationship with Washington.

This was hardly a life-threatening crisis. But the fact that Chinese officials, realizing that the balloon had been spotted, did not call to work out a way to deal with it was revealing.

That kind of problem was supposed to be resolved after the 2001 collision of an EP-3 spy plane and a Chinese fighter that brought down both planes. For days after that incident, President George W. Bush could not get Chinese leaders on the phone. Efforts by the secretary of state at the time, Gen. Colin Powell, also failed. “It made you wonder what might happen in a deeper crisis,” Powell said later.

Afterward, hotlines were set up, and promises made about better communications. Clearly, those failed. When the balloon was shot down, China issued a statement saying “for the United States to insist on using armed forces is clearly an excessive reaction.”

Few experts doubt that had the situation been reversed, China would have used force — it has threatened to do that when it believed outsiders were entering disputed waters, much less established Chinese territory.

“It makes you wonder who was talking to whom in China,” Zegart said. “This is clearly the greatest unforced error the Chinese have made in some time.”

© 2023 The New York Times Company

India's wheat planting remains steady despite record high prices


Workers sift wheat before filling in sacks at a market yard on the outskirts of Ahmedabad

Rajendra Jadhav
Mon, February 6, 2023
By Rajendra Jadhav

MUMBAI (Reuters) - India's wheat plantings remained steady despite a rally in price of the staple to a record as farmers in a key producing central state shifted to rapeseed to take advantage of even higher prices for the oilseed, farm ministry data showed on Monday.

A lower-than-expected planting area in the world's second biggest wheat producer may cap an expected rise in production, after output fell last year because of a heatwave that forced New Delhi to ban exports amid limited supplies from Black Sea region because of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

A rise in rapeseed output could help the world's biggest edible oil importer reduce overseas purchases of palm oil, soyoil and sunflower oil.

The government and industry officials were expecting a substantial increase in wheat cultivation as the crop was offering better returns than competing crops.

Area under wheat rose to 34.32 million hectares (84.8 million acres) for the 2022/23 crop year, up 0.4% from last year's 34.18 million hectares, data released by the Ministry of Agriculture & Farmers' Welfare showed.

India grows only one wheat crop in a year, with planting in October and November, and harvests from March.

Domestic wheat prices hit an all-time high of 32,500 rupees ($393.36) per tonne in January, far above the government-fixed buying price of 21,250 rupees.

Farmers in central state of Madhya Pradesh, a leading producer of wheat, surprised forecasts by switching to oilseeds from wheat, said a Mumbai-based dealer with a global trading house.

"Wheat gave farmers good returns, but rapeseed offered even better returns," the dealer said.

Area under rapeseed, the main winter sown oilseed crop, jumped 7.4% from a year ago to a record 9.8 million hectares, the data showed.

The total area of winter-sown crops jumped to a record 72.07 million hectares, higher than last year's 69.8 million hectares, as rice sowing jumped by 32% to 4.63 million hectares.

Late rains in October raised soil moisture levels and helped farmers to increase the area under wheat, rapeseed and other crops, dealers said.

(Reporting by Rajendra Jadhav; Editing by Christian Schmollinger)

Fatal 'brain-eating' amoeba successfully treated with repurposed UTI drug

Nicoletta Lanese
Mon, February 6, 2023 

an illustration of the brain eating amoeba Balamuthia mandrillaris , depicted in pink against a white, speckled background

A decades-old drug for urinary tract infections may also work for "brain-eating" amoeba infections, which kill the vast majority of people who contract them, Science magazine reported.

The drug's promise was demonstrated in a recent case report, published in January in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases, which describes a 54-year-old man whose brain was infiltrated by the amoeba Balamuthia mandrillaris. The single-celled organism lives in dust, soil and water, and can enter the body through skin wounds and cuts or through the lungs, when it's inhaled, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The amoeba can then infiltrate the bloodstream and travel to the brain, triggering a very rare infection called "granulomatous amebic encephalitis" that kills around 90% of people affected.

"The disease might appear mild at first but can become more severe over weeks to several months," the CDC notes.

The man in the case report initially received treatment at a Northern California hospital for an unexplained seizure. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) revealed a mass on the left side of his brain, surrounded by swelling. At this point, the man was transferred to the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) Medical Center, where doctors took samples of the patient's brain tissue and the clear fluid surrounding the brain and spinal cord. This analysis revealed B. mandrillaris in the man's brain.

Related: Boy dies from rare 'brain-eating' amoeba found in splash pad at Texas park

After consulting the CDC, the patient's doctors prescribed an aggressive regimen of antiparasitic, antibacterial and antifungal drugs. "It's what's recommended because it was what happened to be used in patients who survived," Dr. Natasha Spottiswoode, an infectious disease physician-scientist at UCSF and first author of the case report, told Science. Unfortunately, the treatment triggered severe side effects, including kidney failure, and the patient wasn't yet amoeba-free.

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In search of another solution, Spottiswoode dug up a 2018 report, published in the journal mBio, in which UCSF scientists found evidence that an antibiotic called nitroxoline can kill B. mandrillaris in laboratory settings. The drug is approved in Europe, but not the U.S., so the medical team sought permission from the Food and Drug Administration to use it; they received approval, started the patient on nitroxoline and observed rapid improvement, within a week.

The patient was soon discharged from the hospital and he continued to take nitroxoline at home, along with other medications; his clinicians plan to eventually discontinue his use of the drugs. In the meantime, UCSF doctors are overseeing the case of a second B. mandrillaris-infected patient who's started receiving nitroxoline. They are seeing similar improvements, Science reported.

The science behind the zombie fungus from 'The Last of Us'

YOURI BENADJAOUD and DR. JOHN BROWNSTEIN
Sun, February 5, 2023 at 7:03 AM MST·4 min read

The hit HBO series "The Last Of Us" describes a post-pandemic world devastated by a mass outbreak of a "zombie fungus" that infects and takes over the mind of its hosts. Originally a video game, the popular show was recently renewed for a second season.

Although its premise is science fiction, the fungus in the show is actually based in scientific reality.
Is the 'zombie' fungus real?

Cordyceps – the so-called "zombie fungus" – is a real fungus and is sometimes used in treatments and therapeutics in Chinese herbal medicine.

MORE: Fungal disease on the rise in West possibly tied to changing climate patterns: Experts

Although cordyceps does not infect humans, it does infect a wide range of insects.

PHOTO: Scene from 'The Last of Us.' (Liane Hentscher/HBO)

In ants, cordyceps slowly infects its victims by mind-controlling the host to migrate to a humid climate where the conditions are perfect for its growth. Once a suitable environment has been found, the ant will dig its jaws into a plant and await death.

The fungus will then slowly consume the ant while eventually sending out its own spores – a sort of antenna to enthrall and trap future victims.
Could the 'zombie fungus' threaten human health?

There are thousands of species of cordyceps each designed to infect a particular species – luckily, humans aren't one of them. The human body's immune system is more advanced than that of an ant and has a higher internal temperature, which would protect it from cordyceps infection.

MORE: Review: 'The Last of Us' is a triumph of ferocity and feeling that grabs you and won't let go

However, other fungi have made their presence known throughout human history. Ergot poisoning, also dubbed "St. Anthony's Fire," is caused by the contamination of grain and has been attributed to mass hysteria events such as the Salem Witch trials in the 17th century, Matthew Fisher, Ph.D., a professor of fungal disease epidemiology at the Imperial College School of Public Health, said.

While some fungi have been known to cause hallucinations on very rare occasions, "a human manipulating cordyceps is vanishingly unlikely," Fisher said.

Scientists said that while there are approximately 150,000 species of fungi – with a few million yet to be discovered – only about 200 are known to infect humans.

PHOTO: Scene from 'The Last of Us.' (Liane Hentscher/HBO)

How do fungi currently affect human health?

Fungal infections are responsible for over 150 million severe cases and an estimated 1.7 million deaths per year worldwide, according to one study.

Researchers estimate that nearly a billion people have skin, nail and hair fungal infections annually. More serious fungal infections usually appear in people with other underlying health problems such as asthma, AIDS, cancer, organ transplant recipients and those on corticosteroid therapies.

MORE: More disease, more suicide: Study shows human cost of climate change

In a detailed report, the World Health Organization warned in October, 2022, of 19 fungal pathogens representing the greatest threat to public health.

Yet, fungal infections receive less than 1.5% of infectious disease funding while killing more people than tuberculosis – a leading infectious disease killer worldwide.

"It's really shocking that research on fungal pathogens is so underfunded. Biohazardous threats are much broader than just bacteria and viruses," Jessica Malaty Rivera, infectious disease epidemiologist and research fellow at Boston Children's Hospital and The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told ABC News.
Will there be a pandemic caused by fungal infections?

While some fungi can be transmitted from person to person, they generally do not spread as easily or quickly as viruses. Additionally, the human body's immune response and the availability of antifungal medications make it less likely that a fungus would be able to cause a global outbreak.

Stock photo of cordyceps mushroom in a laboratory.

It is unlikely that a single fungus would cause a global pandemic on the same scale that we've seen with COVID-19. Viruses typically spread through respiratory droplets whereas fungal infections spread through direct skin-to-skin contact or from sharing items.

Despite a low possibility of spurring a worldwide pandemic, the global burden of fungal infections remains high. "Many of these infections can be incredibly difficult to treat and have high mortality rates," Rivera said.
Is climate change making things worse?

While it is highly unlikely climate change would lead to a zombie-like apocalypse according to experts, the warming of the globe continues to pose a threat to global health.

Research has shown that global pandemics from infectious diseases may become more common as habitats continue to bleed into one another and animals are exposed to species they have never interacted with before, while the space between humans and the natural world shrinks.

MORE: Increasingly warming planet jeopardizes human health, major report warns

A new study also found that when scientists increased the temperature of a particular fungus was exposed to, the pathogen could adapt with certain genetic changes.

"These mobile elements are likely to contribute to adaptation in the environment and during an infection," postdoctoral researcher Asiya Gusa Ph.D. of Molecular Genetics and Microbiology in the Duke School of Medicine said in a press release accompanied with the study. The research may suggest that pathogenic fungi can adapt to the planet's warmer temperatures as well – highlighting the danger of global warming.

"It is clear that in a warmer wetter world, we are going to be exposed to more [fungi] than ever before – signs of this were seen during Hurricane Katrina – and this is going to pose an increased public health stress," Fisher said.

"If we are going to really tackle climate change, we have to get more specific about the impact it has on public health," Rivera said.

The science behind the zombie fungus from 'The Last of Us' originally appeared on abcnews.go.com

"The Colour out of Space" by H. P. Lovecraft

https://www.hplovecraft.com › writings › texts › fiction

Aug 20, 2009 — It was just a colour out of space—a frightful messenger from unformed realms of infinity beyond all Nature as we know it; from realms whose mere ...

Backlash over idea to use 'brain dead' women for surrogate pregnancies

Jennifer Savin
Mon, February 6, 2023 

Backlash at 'brain dead women' as surrogates ideaGetty Images

An idea put forward by a professor to help those struggling with fertility issues has been met with major backlash: Professor Anna Smajdor suggested that 'brain dead women' could have their bodies used to house surrogate pregnancies for those unable, or unwilling, to carry a baby of their own.

Some objecting raised concerns that, should the hypothetical proposal ever be put in place in the real world, that women could have their bodies used without consent, however this is not the case put forward by Smajdor in her study (which was published in the medical journal Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics). Due to some viral tweets on the matter, some of which appear to be ill-informed due to poorly worded tabloid stories, it's certainly sparked a wider conversation on the ethics around surrogacy and organ donation.

The associate professor floats the idea of a set-up similar to the organ donor register, in that a woman would need to consent to having her body used for pregnancy prior to such a thing taking place. Smajdor calls her idea "whole body gestational donation" or WBGD – and says it is one "deserves serious consideration". The idea was also shared by the Colombian Medical College, who later backtracked and apologised for doing so.

In her paper, Smajdor argues that "we already know pregnancies can be successfully carried to term in brain dead women" and suggests "there is no obvious medical reason why initiating such pregnancies would not be possible", referencing the question of ethics within the world of surrogacy as it exists today.

Getty Images

Continuing on, the professor said, "Since we are happy to accept that organ donors are dead enough to donate, we should have no objections to WBGD on these grounds. WBGD donors are as dead as other donors – no more, no less. Since we are happy to prolong the somatic survival of already pregnant brain-dead women, to initiate pregnancy among eligible brain-dead donors should not trouble us unduly.

"Of course, this proposal may seem shocking to some people. Nevertheless, as I have shown, if we accept that our current approach to organ donation and reproductive medicine are sound, WBGD donation seems to follow relatively smoothly from procedures that we are already undertaking separately."

The definition of brain dead (via the NHS) is "a person who is brain dead is legally confirmed as dead, they have no chance of recovery because their body is unable to survive without artificial life support".

Tweeting about the proposal from Smajdor, one person said, "Do we really live in a time where as a cis woman I have to state if I'm ever in a coma and ruled 'brain dead' I do not condone/consent/want my body to be used to grow babies as a surrogate? Denying my humanity and using me as a host? A strong no!"

Another, actor Nathalie Emmanuel, also commented on the proposal, tweeting, "Today, I saw a headline in the UK about whether women who are 'brain dead' could have their bodies used to grow babies in their bodies as surrogates without their consent. A second about prisoners in the US potentially being able to reduce their sentence by donating organs… We are done for. This is some dystopian… sci-fi… scary sh*t. This was too much for one day." [N.B: In Smajdor's proposal, consent would need to be obtained from women before any attempt at a surrogate pregnancy]

Colombian member of Congress, Jennifer Pedraza, described the argument as misogynistic, saying, "Women are not utensils to be thrown away after use, women have human rights, even if some people forget this."

Others raised concerns over how healthy a pregnancy via a surrogate in such poor health could really be.

The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution by ...

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In THE DIALECTIC OF SEX: THE CASE FOR FEMINIST. REVOLUTION, Shulamith Firestone cuts into the prejudice against women (and children)--amplified through the.

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The Dialectic of Sex, after the Post-1960s | Cultural Politics

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by M Lane-McKinley · 2019 · Cited by 3 — A key artifact of the political contradictions and utopian problematics of women's liberation and the tradition of radical feminism at the ...

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In 1970, at the age of 25, Firestone published her utopian manifesto The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution before disappearing forever from the ...

CRISPR CRITTER

Scientists are modifying catfish with alligator DNA to create hybrids for human consumption

Hannah Getahun
Sun, February 5, 2023 

Getty Images

Scientists at Auburn University injected alligator DNA into farm-raised catfish.

The scientists found that the fish were more resistant to disease and less likely to reproduce.

They hope the new and less disease-prone catfish will one day be sold for human consumption.

Life finds a way: Geneticists have created disease-resistant catfish using alligator DNA — and they may one day become a part of our diet.

A group of scientists at Auburn University published a paper in January detailing their efforts to genetically modify catfish with the cathelicidin gene of an alligator.

Cathelicidin, found in the intestines, is an antimicrobial peptide responsible for helping organisms fight diseases.

The gene, which was added using CRISPR, heightened disease resistance among the catfish in comparison to wild catfish. Researchers noted that the survival rates of the catfish were "two- and five-fold higher" in an interview with MIT Technology Review.

Because researchers added the cathelicidin to a gene for a reproductive hormone, it also reduced the catfish's ability to reproduce, which they said was important to prevent genetic contamination of the hybrid fish with wild catfish.

The authors noted some uncertainties in using CRISPR technology — primarily used and studied in mammals— on fish. The paper has not yet been peer-reviewed.

However, researchers hope that the alligator and catfish gene-editing can be used in tandem with other catfish breeding techniques to help farmers with their catfish yields.

In 2021, an estimated 307 million pounds of live catfish were produced in the US, primarily in the south. Catfish make up over 50% of US demand for farm-raised fish.

The process of farming them is resource-intensive. Diseases spread among catfish due to lack of space on the farms where they're raised. Around 45% of catfish fingerlings die as a result of infectious diseases. Fish in general are also becoming less resistant to antibiotics.

Although consumers may be uncomfortable with the idea of their catfish sharing DNA with an alligator, Rex Dunham and Baofeng Su, two of the lead researchers of the study, told MTR that the hybrid meat would be perfectly safe.

"I would eat it in a heartbeat," Dunham told MTR.

CRISPR CRITTER
Scientists Are Reincarnating The Woolly Mammoth To Return In 4 Years

Tim Newcomb
Sun, February 5, 2023

Scientists Reincarnating the Woolly Mammoth

TheCrimsonMonkey - Getty Images

Colossal recently added $60 million in funding to move toward a 2027 de-extinction of the woolly mammoth.

The Dallas-based company is now working to edit the genes for the reincarnation of the mammal.


Colossal planned to reintroduce the woolly mammoth into Russia, but that may shift.

The long-dead woolly mammoth will make its return from extinction by 2027, says Colossal, the biotech company actively working to reincarnate the ancient beast.

Last year, the Dallas-based firm scored an additional $60 million in funding to continue the, well, mammoth gene-editing work it started in 2021. If successful, not only will Colossal bring back an extinct species—one the company dubs a cold-resistant elephant—but it will also reintroduce the woolly mammoth to the same ecosystem in which it once lived in an effort to fight climate change, according to a recent Medium post.

Colossal calls the woolly mammoth’s vast migration patterns an active part of preserving the health of the Arctic, and so bringing the animal back to life can have a beneficial impact on the health of the world’s ecosystem. While Colossal originally hoped to reintroduce the woolly mammoth into Siberia, the company may explore other options based on the current political framework of the world.

The woolly mammoth’s DNA is a 99.6 percent match of the Asian elephant, which leads Colossal to believe it’s well on its way toward achieving its goal. “In the minds of many, this creature is gone forever,” the company says. “But not in the minds of our scientists, nor the labs of our company. We’re already in the process of the de-extinction of the Woolly Mammoth. Our teams have collected viable DNA samples and are editing the genes that will allow this wonderful megafauna to once again thunder through the Arctic.”

Through gene editing, Colossal scientists will eventually create an embryo of a woolly mammoth. They will place the embryo in an African elephant to take advantage of its size and allow it to give birth to the new woolly mammoth. The eventual goal is to then repopulate parts of the Arctic with the new woolly mammoth and strengthen local plant life with the migration patterns and dietary habits of the beast.

If Colossal proves successful on reincarnating the woolly mammoth—ditto the thylacine, also known as the Tasmanian tiger—expect a variety of new ethical questions to arise on how to handle the creature and potential reintroduction issues.

What is the lawsuit against CVS and Walmart? Chains targeted over homeopathic product sales

Bailey Schulz, USA TODAY
Mon, February 6, 2023

Looking for a cold remedy at your local pharmacy? Be careful what you choose: Experts warn that some options on the shelves may be no better than sugar pills.

CVS and Walmart are in the midst of a court battle for selling FDA-approved, over-the-counter medications alongside homeopathic products, a form of alternative medicine based on diluted ingredients.

The Center for Inquiry, the nonprofit that filed the lawsuits, argues that this sort of product placement is misleading and presents homeopathic products as equivalent alternatives to science-based medicines.

There is little evidence that shows homeopathic products are effective, according to the National Institutes of Health. And while experts say most are harmless, the Food and Drug Administration warns that it cannot ensure their safety or effectiveness.

“Over-the-counter medication has to have been proven safe and effective for the condition that it's purported to treat,” said Kelly Karpa, a former pharmacist and a professor in East Tennessee State University's department of medical education. “(Whereas homeopathic products) had their own set of conditions under which they can be marketed. They kind of bypassed all of that safety and efficacy.”

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What are homeopathic medicinal products?

Homeopathy is an alternative medical practice first developed in the late 1700s. Practitioners believe that a substance that causes symptoms in a healthy person can be used to treat symptoms and illnesses, according to the FDA.

For example: Since cutting onions can make eyes water, a homeopathic treatment for itching or watering eyes would be diluted red onion.

Unlike pharmacology, which follows the idea that a higher dosage usually leads to a greater response, homeopathy believes that the more diluted a substance, the more potent it is.

The concern some medical professionals have is that homeopathy products may contain toxic substances that are not diluted enough.

"The good thing about most of the products is that most of them are safe because they're so diluted," said Adriane Fugh-Berman, a professor in the department of pharmacology and physiology at Georgetown University Medical Center. But if it fails to weaken a toxic substance enough, "that could be an issue."

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Is homeopathic medicine effective?

A 2015 paper from Australia’s National Health and Medical Research Council based on 176 individual studies found “no health conditions for which there was reliable evidence that homeopathy was effective."

“Homeopathy had never had any hardcore data behind it that was consistent with what we currently recognize as a double-blind, placebo-controlled trial that clearly indicates efficacy,” Karpa said.

Fugh-Berman notes that most homeopathic products are harmless and may even provide a placebo effect, but she has issues with them being sold on store shelves alongside FDA-approved medications.

“Homeopathic preparations should be available for those who know what they are and want to use them, but no one should inadvertently buy sugar pills,” she said.

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Are homeopathic products FDA approved?

Homeopathic products are typically labeled as homeopathic and have ingredients listed in terms of dilution, such as 1x or 2c.

The FDA warns that there are currently no products labeled as homeopathic that are FDA-approved, and says the agency cannot ensure these drugs meet standards for safety, effectiveness, and quality. Nevertheless, sales have increased in recent years.

The agency in December said it intends to prioritize enforcement and regulatory actions for certain homeopathic products that "potentially pose a higher risk to public health."

There have been safety issues with homeopathic products in the past. In 2017, the FDA sent out a note that it had found elevated levels of the toxic substance belladonna in certain homeopathic teething tablets.

The following year, the agency alerted consumers to a recall of certain homeopathic products for humans and pets because of microbial contamination.

“I used to look at homeopathic products as: It probably won't hurt you. Even if it's just a placebo, it might help you,” Karpa said. But “there's also a risk of delaying appropriate treatment. And I think that in and of itself can be harmful.”

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What’s the status of CFI’s lawsuits?

Last month, the District of Columbia Court of Appeals denied requests for a rehearing from CVS and Walmart.

“We disagree with the ruling,” reads a statement from Marci Burks, director of corporate affairs for Walmart. “We take allegations like these seriously and look forward to defending this case in the Superior Court.”

CVS did not respond to a request for comment.

Nick Little, vice president and general counsel for the Center for Inquiry (CFI), says if the case does go to trial, that likely won't occur until late this year or early 2024.

"The individual stores are responsible for how they market (these products), how they represent them to customers," Little said. "We want to see all the major chains make this change."

You can follow USA TODAY reporter Bailey Schulz on Twitter @bailey_schulz and subscribe to our free Daily Money newsletter here for personal finance tips and business news every Monday through Friday.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: CVS, Walmart sued over homeopathic products. What are they?