Voting opens in key UAW test to organize U.S. battery plants

UNION BUSTERS SIGN

UAW Dispute in Ohio© Thomson Reuters

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Workers begin two days of voting on Wednesday to decide whether to unionize at a General Motors-LG Energy battery cell manufacturing joint venture in Ohio.

Workers at an Ultium Cells plant near Cleveland are voting on Wednesday and Thursday after the United Auto Workers (UAW) union petitioned to represent about 900 workers. Results of the election overseen by the National Labor Relations Board are expected on Friday.

UNION BUSTERS SIGN

UAW Dispute in Ohio© Thomson Reuters

The vote is a crucial test of the UAW's ability to organize workers in the growing electric vehicle supply chain.

The UAW petition sought the election after a majority of employees signed cards authorizing the union to represent them.

UAW President Ray Curry said in October that "by refusing to recognize their majority will" Ultium "has decided to ignore democracy and delay the recognition process."

An Ultium spokesperson said the venture "respects workers’ right to choose union representation and the efforts of the UAW to organize battery cell manufacturing workers at our Ohio manufacturing site."

Last week, GM CEO Mary Barra told Bloomberg TV the company is "very supportive of the plant being unionized ... The employees are going to be voting, but we’re very supportive."

In a trip to South Korea in May, President Joe Biden expressed support for workers seeking to unionize JV battery plants. The Detroit Three automakers all have battery plants in the works with South Korean partners.

In August, the Ohio plant began production, the first of at least four planned Ultium U.S. battery factories.

GM and LG Energy are considering an Indiana site for a fourth U.S. battery plant. They are building a $2.6 billion plant in Michigan, set to open in 2024. Last week, Ultium said it would boost its planned investment in a $2.3 billion Tennessee plant by another $275 million.

In July, the U.S. Energy Department said it intends to loan Ultium $2.5 billion to help finance new manufacturing facilities including the Ohio plant. Sources told Reuters the loan could be finalized as soon as next week.

(Reporting by David Shepardson; Editing by Robert Birsel)

New interactive map lets you drop asteroids on any place in the world
Another option shows the intense earthquakes that would be triggered following the impact© Provided by Daily Mail

Asteroid Launcher details all the events, destruction and deaths that would potentially occur in the event of an actual asteroid impact.

For example, if the same size asteroid that hit Manhattan hits London while traveling at the same speed of 152,000 miles per hour, it would also create a 34-mile-wide crater that would vaporize more than 7.7 million people in the surrounding area.

In Time Square, the fireball would cover an area of 74 miles would vaporize 30,561,023 people.

A new interactive map brings the 1998 film Deep Impact to life, allowing users to drop a space rock anywhere globally to watch the devastation unfold.

Called Asteroid Launcher, the system lets you choose a location of impact, the diameter of the asteroid, the speed at which it hits the ground and the collision angle - and hit 'launch' to see the destructions it causes and the number of people killed.

If an asteroid measuring one mile in diameter smashes into Time Square at 152,000 miles per hour, it would create a 34-mile-wide crater and vaporize 9,486,287 people with the impact equivalent to 6,403 Gigatons of TNT.

The system also shares other catastrophic events that follow, including shock waves, fireball size and wind speed.

Asteroid Launcher is the brainchild of creative coder Neal Agarwal who told DailyMail.com he was inspired by his favorite movie Deep Impact and wanted to create a website that simulated disasters.



Asteroid Launcher lets users choose a location to drop an asteroid. This simulation released a one-mile-wide asteroid on Time Square in New York City, creating a 34-mile-wide crater© Provided by Daily Mail

'I love disaster movies and playing out different end-of-the-world scenarios in my head,' Agarwal told DailyMail.com.

'This project took about two months to complete, one month of research and one month for the coding and animations.'

He explained the equations behind Asteroid Launcher from research papers by Dr. Gareth Collins and Dr. Clemens Rumpf, who study the effects of an asteroid impact.

'I chose those research papers because they have detailed equations and models of all the various effects of an asteroid impact (thermal radiation, wind, shock waves, earthquakes, ect),' Agarwal said.

'They also do a great job of summarizing the current knowledge of the field.'



The website also shows destructive events that would follow the initial impact, such as this 74-mile-wide fireball that would give more than four million people third-degree burns and kill over nine million© Provided by Daily Mail

 

Related video: Asteroid danger looms! Colossal 170-foot space rock heading for Earth today, says NASA | DNA India (DNA)

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And in London, the same fireball would be released during the impact, killing 56,082,822 people.

'This tool is more for helping the general public learn more about asteroid impacts,' said Agarwal.



Another simulation using London and with the same size asteroid that hit New York would also release a fireball 74 miles wide © Provided by Daily Mail


Asteroid Launcher also formulates wind speeds after the asteroid hits. In the case of London, wind within 150 miles of the crater would be faster than storms on Jupiter© Provided by Daily Mail


Asteroid Launcher is the brainchild of creative coder Neal Agarwal who told DailyMail.com he was inspired by his favorite movie Deep Impact and wanted to create a website that simulated disasters© Provided by Daily Mail

'Scientists have even more precise models of asteroid impacts that they run on supercomputers - this simulation is a more simplified version.'

Asteroid Launcher uses Apple Maps to pull satellite footage of the Earth into its simulation and layer visualizations over the selected area to show users how far the destruction travels.

It also provides different options for what the asteroid is made of.

Users can drop a 2,400-foot-wide gold asteroid on Los Angeles at 247,000 miles per hour, leaving a 34-mile-wide crater in the ground and killing 5,210,549 people.

The simulated events in New York and London only happen once every 22 million years, but Earth is predicted to have a close call when one the size of three football fields is expected to come within 19,600 miles from our planet's surface in 2029.

Asteroid Apophis, named for the serpentine Egyptian god of chaos (also known as Apep), will whizz past Earth on April 13, 2029.

While researchers have ruled out the possibility of the 1,115-foot object slamming into Earth, the close shave will present a unique opportunity to study an asteroid in detail; most others that come this close are much smaller.

'The Apophis close approach in 2029 will be an incredible opportunity for science,’ said Marina Brozović, a radar scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, who works on radar observations of near-Earth objects (NEOs).

‘We’ll observe the asteroids with both optical and radar telescopes. With radar observations, we might be able to see surface details that are only a few meters in size.’


The simulated events in New York and London only happen once every 22 million years, but one the size of three football fields is expected to come within 19,600 miles from our planet's surface in 2029. Pictured is a simulation of how close it will get© Provided by Daily Mail

It’s expected to make its closest approach before 6 pm ET, when it will be over the Atlantic Ocean.

According to NASA, however, it will be visible in the sky hours before this point.

Apophis will first appear in the night sky over the southern hemisphere, making itself known to viewers on the east coast of Australia.

It will then travel westward to reach the equator by early afternoon before crossing over the United States by around 7 p.m.

The massive space rock will be traveling so fast it will traverse the entire width of the moon in less than a minute, NASA said in a 2019 statement.

While 19,000 miles might sound far away, the space agency says it’s rare for an object of this size to come so closeRead more

US Lawmakers face closing window to pass landmark bipartisan marijuana bill

Story by Aris Folley • Yesterday - The Hill

Lawmakers are facing a rapidly closing window to get key marijuana legislation across the finish line in the lame-duck session.



Despite fetching broad bipartisan support in the House and Senate, opposition from GOP leadership and a tightening timeline is chipping away at the bill’s chances of passage.

The measure, called the SAFE Banking Act, would undo federal restrictions that discourage banks and other financial institutions from offering services to legally operating cannabis businesses.

Supporters say the bill is desperately needed to crack down on persistent robberies of cannabis businesses, which are forced to carry huge amounts of cash, as well as make it easier for those companies to secure loans at reasonable rates.

But with little legislative time left on the calendar, supporters of the bill, which has passed the House seven times, are divided over how to pass it before January. And they fear it’s even less likely to pass in a divided Congress.

“We still got amendments on the floor. We still got a continuing resolution,” Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), who has also been leading efforts pushing the bill in the upper chamber, told The Hill on Wednesday. “We may have an omnibus. Not giving up on this Congress.”

Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.), a lead negotiator for the bill, told The Hill on Tuesday that he’s hopeful the measure will be attached to a potential government funding omnibus that members on both sides want to see pass before year’s end.

“We’ve got nine [GOP] co-sponsors and probably some other Republicans who support it that aren’t on the bill. So, there’s some support for it,” Daines said.

But Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) opposed efforts to link the bill to the must-pass National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) – which many Republicans, including the banking bill’s cosponsors, agreed with.

“We get a lot of bad legislation when we do that, and the bad outweighs the good,” Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.), one of the co-sponsors for the marijuana banking bill, told The Hill. “So, I don’t want it on the omnibus, and I don’t want non-defense items hooked to the NDAA.”

Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D), another co-sponsor, told The Hill that he’s hopeful to see the bill finally pass in the coming weeks, but added it’s “hard for me to see a path this year.”

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“We’re gonna have to spend some time, I think, just talking to people, and some people don’t have to come around. You know, you don’t need unanimity,” Cramer said, acknowledging “just the subject matter itself” makes some members “very uncomfortable.”

Though the bill has Republican backers even outside those co-sponsoring the measure, there is still pushback within the caucus, party members say. Among the loudest has been McConnell, who this week knocked the bill as a measure that aims to make “our financial system more sympathetic to illegal drugs.”

“I’m for the SAFE Banking Act, but there’s a lot of resistance in our conference and it’s come up in two different meetings this week,” Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), who is retiring at the end of the year, told The Hill, “and, I’m not sure how close to evenly divided we are, but we’re pretty divided.”

Blunt, who serves on the Senate Appropriations Committee, also cast doubt on the chances of the bill being attached to any omnibus this month, saying it’s up to the “final negotiators to decide if it costs votes on the package are not.”

Pressed about how McConnell’s support impacts his push for the marijuana banking bill to pass in the current congressional session, Daines said he thinks McConnell is “listening and we’re gonna see where it all goes here in the next couple of weeks.”

The Department of Justice created another hurdle for the SAFE Banking Act when it released a memo Friday saying the bill might need to undergo technical changes so that it doesn’t complicate investigations into drug crimes.

Some Republicans have punted blame to the other side of the aisle for not bringing up the bill sooner.

The bill was included in last year’s House-passed NDAA, but Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) stripped it out because it didn’t include any measures to address damage done to minority communities by the war on drugs.

President Biden in October pardoned those with simple marijuana convictions, but the order will only apply to a few thousand people who were convicted with federal charges.

As the vast majority of marijuana convictions come at the state level, Democrats want to combine SAFE Banking with the HOPE Act, a bipartisan proposal that would incentivize states to expunge cannabis convictions.

Meanwhile, Republicans want to include the GRAM Act, which would allow individuals with a cannabis conviction in weed-legal states to purchase firearms.

The cannabis industry is urging Congress to pass SAFE Banking in the lame duck session, arguing that while it enjoys substantial GOP support, Republican leaders would not prioritize its passage after the House flips to Republican control.

“We remain optimistic that we’ll see cannabis reforms appear in another legislative vehicle in the coming weeks,” U.S. Cannabis Council CEO Khadijah Tribble said in a statement.

The banking industry is also lobbying for the bill. The Independent Community Bankers of America commissioned a Morning Consult poll showing that nearly two-thirds of voters support allowing cannabis businesses to access banking services in weed-legal states.

“This legislation enjoys strong, bipartisan support, would resolve a conflict between state and federal law, and addresses a critical public safety concern. We urge its enactment without further delay,” read a recent letter to Senate leaders from the community bankers’ group and 44 state banking associations.

For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to The Hill.

ChatGPT Is Astonishing, But Human Jobs Are Safe (For Now)

Story by Jackson Ryan •


If you've spent any time browsing social media feeds over the last week (who hasn't), you've probably heard about ChatGPT. The mesmerizing and mindblowing chatbot, developed by OpenAI and released last week, is a nifty little AI that can spit out highly convincing, human-sounding text in response to user-generated prompts.


Should you worry about ChatGPT coming for your job? Getty Images© Provided by CNET

You might, for example, ask it to write a plot summary for Knives Out, except Benoit Blanc is actually Foghorn Leghorn (just me?) and it will spit out something relatively coherent. It can also help fix broken code and write essays so convincing some academics claim they'd score an A on college exams.

Its responses have astounded to such a degree some have even proclaimed "Google is dead." Then there are those that think it goes beyond Google: Human jobs are in trouble, too.

The Guardian, for instance, proclaimed "professors, programmers and journalists could all be out of a job in just a few years." Another take, from the Australian Computer Society's flagship publication Information Age, suggested the same. The Telegraph announced the bot could "do your job better than you.


I'd say hold your digital horses. ChatGPT is not going to put you out of a job.

A great example of why is provided by the story published in Information Age. The publication utilized ChatGPT to write an entire story about ChatGPT and posted the finished product with a short introduction. The piece is about as simple as you can ask for — ChatGPT provides a basic recounting of the facts of its existence — but in "writing" the piece, ChatGPT also generated fake quotes and attributed them to an OpenAI researcher, John Smith (who is real, apparently).

This underscores the key failing of a large language model like ChatGPT: It does not know how to separate fact from fiction. It cannot be trained to do so. It is a word organizer, an AI programmed in such a way that it can write coherent sentences.

That's an important distinction. It essentially prevents ChatGPT (or the underlying large language model it's built on, OpenAI's GPT 3.5) from writing news or speaking on current affairs (It also isn't trained on up to the minute data, but that's another thing). It definitely can't do the job of a journalist. To say so diminishes the act of journalism itself.

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ChatGPT will not be heading out into the world to talk to Ukrainians about the Russian invasion. It will not be able to read the emotion on Kylian Mbappe's face when he wins the World Cup. It certainly isn't jumping on a ship to Antarctica to write about its experiences. It can't be surprised by a quote, completely out of character, that unwittingly reveals a secret about a CEO's business. Hell, it would have no hope of covering Musk's takeover of Twitter — it is no arbiter of truth and it just can't read the room.

It's interesting to see how positive the response to ChatGPT has been. It's absolutely worthy of praise and the documented improvements OpenAI have made over its last product, GPT-3, are interesting in their own right. But the major reason it's really captured attention is because it's so readily accessible.

GPT-3 didn't have a slick and easy-to-use online framework and, while publications like the Guardian used it to generate articles, it only made a brief splash online. Developing a chatbot you can interact with, and share screenshots from, completely changes the way the product is used and talked about. That's also contributed to the bot being a little overhyped.

Strangely enough, this is the second AI to cause a stir in recent weeks.

On Nov. 15, Meta AI released its own artificial intelligence, dubbed "Galactica." Like ChatGPT, it's a large language model and was hyped as a way to "organize science." Essentially, it could generate answers to questions like "what is quantum gravity?" or explain math equations. Much like ChatGPT, you drop in a question and it provides an answer.

Galactica was trained on over 48 million scientific papers and abstracts and provided convincing-sounding answers. The development team hyped the bot as a way to organize knowledge, noting it could generate Wikipedia articles and scientific papers.

Problem was, it was mostly pumping out garbage — nonsensical text that sounded official and even included references to scientific literature, though those were made up. The sheer volume of misinformation it was producing in response to simple prompts, and how insidious that misinformation was, bugged academics and AI researchers, who let their thoughts fly on Twitter. The backlash saw the project shut down by the Meta AI team after two days.

ChatGPT doesn't seem like it's headed in the same direction. It feels like a "smarter" version of Galactica with a much stronger filter. Where Galactica was offering up ways to build a bomb, for instance, ChatGPT weeds out requests that are discriminatory, offensive or inappropriate. ChatGPT has also been trained to be conversational and admit to its mistakes.

And yet, ChatGPT is still limited the same way all large language models are. Its purpose is to construct sentences or songs or paragraphs or essays by studying billions (trillions?) of words that exist across the web. It then puts those words together, predicting the best way to configure them.

In doing so, it writes some pretty convincing essay answers, sure. It also writes garbage, just like Galactica. How can you learn from an AI that might not be providing a truthful answer? And how can you know the AI is not truthful, especially if it sounds convincing? The OpenAI team acknowledges the bot's shortcomings but these are outstanding questions that limit the capabilities of an AI like this.

So, even though the tiny chatbot is entertaining, as evidenced by this wonderful exchange about a guy who brags about pumpkins, it's hard to see how this AI would put professors, programmers or journalists out of a job. Instead, in the short term, ChatGPT and its underlying model will likely complement what journalists, professors and programmers do. It's a tool, not a replacement. Just like journalists use AI to transcribe long interviews, they might use a ChatGPT-style AI to, let's say generate a headline idea.

Because that's exactly what we did with this piece. The headline you see on this article was, in part, suggested by ChatGPT. But it's suggestions weren't perfect. It suggested using terms like "Human Employment" and "Humans Workers." Those felt too official, too… robotic. Emotionless. So, we tweaked its suggestions until we got what you see above.

Does that mean a future iteration of ChatGPT or its underlying AI model (which may release as early as next year) won't come along and make us irrelevant?

Maybe! For now, I'm feeling like my job as a journalist is pretty secure.

Radioactive space rocks could have seeded life on Earth, new research suggests

Story by Ben Turner • 

A special type of radioactive meteorite could have seeded life on Earth, a new study found.

The meteors contain radioactive elements energetic enough to synthesize amino acids.© University of Glasgow

Carbonaceous chondrites, a type of radioactive meteorite chock full of water and organic compounds, produce energetic gamma rays that can drive the chemical reactions to synthesize amino acids — the building blocks of life — researchers discovered.

Meteorites are leftovers from the formation of the young solar system’s rocky inner planets, which first clotted from the hot clouds of gas and dust billowing near the sun roughly 4.6 billion years ago. At the time, the planets were too close to the sun to form oceans and so couldn’t harbor life, leaving scientists puzzling over how Earth transformed into an oasis of life from its initial barren state. A previous study suggested that water could have been brought to Earth by carbonaceous chondrite meteorites. Now a new study, published Dec. 7 in the journal ACS Central Science, shows that the same meteorites might have brought life’s building blocks too.

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To see if this was possible, the researchers mixed ammonia, methanol and formaldehyde into water in quantities similar to those found inside meteorites. Then, to see if the radioactive, gamma-ray producing elements such as aluminum-26 inside the meteorites could generate the heat needed for amino acid synthesis, the researchers irradiated their mixture with gamma rays from an analog isotope called cobalt-60.

Sure enough, the scientists found that the gamma-ray bombardment caused a spike in the production of amino acids inside the solution. Higher gamma-ray production increased the rate of amino acid synthesis. Additionally, the researchers discovered that the proportions of lab-produced amino acids matched those found in the Murchison meteorite — a 2205-pound (100 kilograms) space rock that landed in Australia in 1969. Further analysis revealed that it would have taken anywhere from 1,000 to 100,000 years to produce the amino acid quantities found inside the Murchison meteorite.

It should be noted that amino acids can be made by many different processes, so while the mechanism the researchers have discovered is a possible candidate for how Earth was seeded by amino acids, it is not the only one. Future research will need to compare this mechanism with others to establish which one likely predominated during Earth’s earliest years.

Surprising loss of sea ice after record-breaking Arctic storm is a mystery to scientists

Story by JoAnna Wendel • 


Early in 2022, the Arctic experienced its strongest cyclone on record, with wind speeds reaching 62 mph (100 km/h). Although storms aren't rare in the Arctic, this one led to an extensive loss of sea ice that surprised Arctic researchers.


A research vessel travels through the Arctic Ocean in October 2015.

© Ed Blanchard-Wrigglesworth/University of Washington

In the Arctic, sea ice — frozen seawater that floats over the ocean in the polar regions — reaches its largest coverage in March and what is thought to be its thickest maximum in April, researchers told Live Science. But as sea ice was building up this year, it hit a major setback. Between Jan. 20 and Jan. 28, the storm developed over Greenland and traveled northeast into the Barents Sea, where massive waves reached 26 feet (8 meters) high. Like a wild bronco, those waves bucked sea ice at the edge of an icy pack 6 feet (2 m) up and down, while even larger waves swept 60 miles (100 km) toward the center of the pack. Although weather models accurately predicted the evolution of the storm, sea ice models did not predict just how much the storm would affect ice thickness.

Six days after the storm dissipated, the sea ice in the affected waters north of Norway and Russia had thinned 1.5 feet (0.5 m) — twice as much as what sea ice models had predicted. Researchers analyzed the storm in a study published Oct. 26 in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres.

Related: The Arctic's most stable sea ice is vanishing alarmingly fast

"The loss of sea ice in six days was the biggest change we could find in the historical observations since 1979, and the area of ice lost was 30% greater than the previous record," lead author Ed Blanchard-Wrigglesworth, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Washington in Seattle, said in a statement. "The ice models did predict some loss, but only about half of what we saw in the real world."

The study found that atmospheric heat from the storm affected the area minimally, so something else must have been going on.

The paper authors offered a few ideas for why the sea ice thinned so much, so fast. It could have been that their models had wrongly estimated the sea ice thickness before the storm. Or perhaps the storm's violent waves broke up the sea ice more than anticipated. It could also be that the waves churned up deeper, warmer water, which then rose to melt the sea ice pack from the bottom.

Sea ice thickness is notoriously hard to study and model. Interactions between the ice, ocean and atmosphere affect sea ice thickness in ways that scientists don't fully understand. And some of these interactions happen on too small of a scale to model. For instance, scientists know that pools of melted water that appear on the top of sea ice in the Arctic summer do influence sea ice thickness, but that effect is hard to model. Melt pools also can throw off satellites, which may measure those pools as "ocean" rather than water on top of sea ice.

And as the climate warms, it's more important than ever to understand Arctic storms and their effect on sea ice. In a paper published in the journal Nature Communications in November, a team of NASA scientists found that sea ice loss and warmer temperatures will lead to stronger Arctic storms by the end of the century. Those more intense storms could bring rainfall that could melt sea ice, cause warmer temperatures and churn up warmer water from deep below.

"Going into the future, this is something to keep in mind, that these extreme events might produce these episodes of huge sea ice loss," Blanchard-Wrigglesworth said.

Cuba accuses United States of blocking participation in World Baseball Classic

Story by By Dave Sherwood and Nelson Acosta • Yesterday

Carlos Fernandez de Cossio speaks with Reuters in an interview in Havana© Thomson Reuters

HAVANA (Reuters) - The United States is blocking some of Cuba´s top players from participating in the upcoming World Baseball Classic, Cuba´s vice foreign minister said on Wednesday, the latest in a series of spats over a sport beloved by fans in both nations.

Cuba last month asked several players who in recent years had defected from the Caribbean island - long famed for its baseball talent - to represent their home country in the World Baseball Classic in March 2023. Others volunteered on their own.

Vice Foreign Minister Carlos Fernandez de Cossio said that development was a "positive step," marking a change in tone in a country that has long branded defectors as traitors who abandoned their homeland.

But he said the United States, despite authorizing Cuba´s participation in the Classic, had yet to approve U.S.-based Cuban players competing in the event with their home country team.

"In the U.S. everything to do with Cuba is prohibited," de Cossio told Reuters in an interview in Havana. "Doing business, travel, having a drink in Cuba, even playing baseball if you live in the United States."

"That is the situation faced by ballplayers trained in Cuba that today play for the big leagues in the United States and who say they are willing to play with their home country team."

The U.S. State Department did not immediately provide answers to Reuters’ questions.

A U.S. Cold War-era embargo and more recent sanctions prohibit or complicate business and financial transactions with Cuba. Those rules make it impossible for a Cuban ballplayer to sign with a U.S. team without defecting from their home country.

As a result, Cuba´s baseball talent has fled the country in unprecedented numbers in the past decade, emptying dugouts and denting national pride.

More than 650 Cuban ballplayers have defected to the United States and elsewhere over the past six years alone, according to state-run media reports.

Cuba´s talented ballplayers led the country to gold medals in the Olympic Games in Barcelona in 1992, Atlanta in 1996 and Athens in 2004, but the country failed to qualify for the first time for the games in Tokyo in 2020.

Cuba is expected to play its first match in the classic in Taiwan on March 8.

(Reporting by Dave Sherwood and Nelson Acosta in Havana; Additional reporting by Matt Spetalnick in Washington; Editing by Andrea Ricci)

DECRIMINALIZE DRUGS

MDMA Use at Start of Pandemic Rose Almost 300 Percent in New England Town

Story by Jess Thomson • Yesterday 

Use of MDMA in a small town in New England rose by almost 300 percent at the start of the COVID pandemic, along with huge spikes in cocaine, fentanyl and methadone.

Sheree Pagsuyoin, an expert on wastewater monitoring for drugs and COVID-19 at the University of Massachusetts-Lowell, and her research team had been collecting samples from the town's wastewater twice each month between September 2018 to August 2020, to look for trends in drug use. Samples were tested for morphine, codeine, hydrocodone, methadone, fentanyl, cocaine, methamphetamine, amphetamine (MDMA), and methyldiethanolamine (MDEA).

There are high rates of consumption and deaths from prescription drugs such as fentanyl, oxycodone, hydrocodone, methadone, codeine and morphine in New England, with the area being one of the hotspots of the opioid crisis in the U.S., according to one 2019 study in the journal Preventive Medicine.

Delaware had the second highest age-adjusted death rate from opioid overdose of all U.S. states in 2020 at 47.3 per 100,000 people, CDC data shows, with Maryland, Pennsylvania, Maine and Connecticut all falling into the top 10 worst-affected states. The highest death rate was found in Kentucky, where there were 49.2 deaths per 100,000 people.

Opioids are responsible for a large number of deaths across the country, with the U.S. considered to be in the grips of an opioid crisis. CDC data shows that opioids were involved in 68,630 overdose deaths in 2020, a number that amounts to 74.8 percent of all drug overdose deaths that year.

Understanding when and where drugs are being used can help inform public health authorities about issues facing communities.

Presenting their findings at the Society for Risk Analysis on December 6, Pagsuyoin and colleagues said they found that a variety of drugs spiked in use during the first few months of the pandemic, with MDMA use increasing by 286 percent. Drug use was also seen to increase during exam periods.

They also found that more fentanyl was used in the research town during this period than in other rural and university settings in the U.S. that had been analyzed previously.

Drugs find their way into the wastewater via the urine of people taking them. "When people take drugs of any kind (medicinal or illicit) only a portion of it is metabolized," Dan Aberg, a wastewater pharmaceutical compounds researcher at Bangor University in the U.K. who was not involved in the Society for Risk Analysis study, told Newsweek. "A percentage of the drug is then released unchanged in the urine. Various intermediate metabolites are also released, some of which are environmentally damaging at certain concentrations."



Drugs can enter the water system via urine.

 iStock / Getty Images Plus© iStock / Getty Images Plus

Prescribed and over-the-counter pharmaceuticals can also be detected in the wastewater, as they are also not entirely metabolized by the body.

This latest wastewater research shows that communities may be facing a similar drug usage and overdose issue with stimulant drugs as well. "Our findings reflect the region-wide problem with opioid-related overdoses and increasing stimulant prescription rates," Pagsuyoin said in a statement.

Increased drug use during the pandemic has been documented previously. The CDC found that as of 2020, 13 percent of Americans said that they began taking drugs—or increased their usage— to deal with the emotional impact of the pandemic. Overdosages also increased after the start of the COVID-19 lockdown, with there being an 18 percent increase in overdoses countrywide compared to the same month in 2019.

Similar results were found in a June 2022 study of several Belgian cities published in the International Journal of Drug Policy. This study found that amphetamine use increased in three of the four cities during lockdown, as well as increased cocaine and MDMA use.

Drugs in the water system may also impact other wildlife. When in wastewater, the water is processed before it re-enters circulation via filtration and disinfection, which removes some—but not all—of the drugs dissolved. However, at locations where people may urinate directly onto the ground, such as music festivals, the drugs may directly enter the freshwater system.

A paper published by Aberg and his colleagues in the journal Environmental Research earlier this year revealed that at the site of Glastonbury Festival in the U.K., MDMA was found at concentrations 104 times greater downstream from the festival in comparison to upstream sites, while cocaine and benzoylecgonine were found at 40 times higher concentrations downstream.

The presence of drugs in the natural water system, both from wastewater and freshwater drainage, can result in strange and destructive impacts on the local wildlife.

Platypuses in Australia's contaminated streams ingest over half a daily adult dose of antidepressants. Other serotonin-altering drugs also impact the learning and memory of cuttlefish, cause shore crabs to behave in more "risky" manners, and cause shrimp to be more likely to swim toward a light source.


Stock image of a duck-billed platypus, which can be impacted by drugs in the water system. iStock / Getty Images Plus© iStock / Getty Images Plus

Additionally, the presence of cocaine in waterways has been found to impact European eels in a variety of ways. One study published in the journal Science of the Total Environment found that cocaine accumulates in the brain, muscles, gills, skin, and other tissues of the eels.

"All the main functions of these animals could be altered," Anna Capaldo, a research biologist at the University of Naples Federico II and the lead author of the eel study, told National Geographic in 2018.

More research is required to determine whether illegal drugs are more harmful to wildlife than pharmaceuticals like antidepressants.

"Illicit drugs tend to be more psychoactive than other pharmaceuticals so often require lower concentrations to cause noticeable effects, however due to their legal status research on them is not wide enough to paint an accurate enough picture," Aberg said.

One way to combat the pipeline of drugs from human urine to wildlife would be to increase the purification ability of wastewater treatment. Standard water treatment plants clean wastewater via removing larger clumps of material, filtering and disinfecting the water. If the pores of the filtration system are not small enough to remove the miniscule particles of drugs in the water, they are passed through the system.

"Pharmaceuticals are found in all freshwater ecosystems, as many wastewater treatment plants have poor removal rates for them due to their complexity," Aberg said.

Using a more sophisticated filtration system would enable pharmaceuticals to be completely removed. However, this would likely be very expensive.

Is there a health issue that's worrying you? Do you have a question about drugs or wastewater? Let us know via health@newsweek.com. We can ask experts for advice, and your story could be featured on Newsweek.

References

Pagsuyoin, S., et al. Analysis of wastewater in a New England college town reveals high usage of stimulants and a rise in drug use during the pandemic. Society for Risk Analysis. 2022.

Aberg, D., et al. The environmental release and ecosystem risks of illicit drugs during Glastonbury Festival. Environmental Research, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envres.2021.112061

Stopka, T. J., et al. The opioid epidemic in rural northern New England: An approach to epidemiologic, policy, and legal surveillance. Preventative Medicine. 2019. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ypmed.2019.05.028

Boogaerts, T., et al. Temporal monitoring of stimulants during the COVID-19 pandemic in Belgium through the analysis of influent wastewater. International Journal of Drug Policy. DOI: 10.1016/j.drugpo.2022.103679

Capaldo A., et al. Effects of environmental cocaine concentrations on the skeletal muscle of the European eel (Anguilla anguilla). Science of the Total Environment, 2018. doi: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2018.05.357.

Zucatto, E., et al. Illicit drugs, a novel group of environmental contaminants. Water Research, 2008. DOI:10.1016/j.watres.2007.09.010

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Trump hosts event featuring QAnon, 'Pizzagate' conspiracy theorist at Mar-a-Lago

A prominent adherent of the QAnon and "Pizzagate" conspiracy theories posed for photos with former President Donald Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort Tuesday night after speaking at an event hosted at the club, according to photos and videos posted to social media.

The event came two weeks after Trump had dinner at Mar-a Lago with rapper Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, who recently spoke positively about Hitler, and far-right YouTuber Nick Fuentes, who the Department of Justice has labeled a white supremacist. The meeting sparked outrage despite Trump's claim he did not know who Fuentes was.

Videos and photos posted to social media appear to show Liz Crokin, a prominent promoter of QAnon and pro-Trump conspiracy theories, speaking at an event at Mar-a-Lago and later posing for photos with Trump. In one photo, the duo make a "thumbs up" sign together.MORE: Texas Gov. Greg Abbott bans TikTok on state devices

According to social media posts, the event was billed as a fundraiser in support of a "documentary" on sex trafficking -- one of the pillars of the QAnon conspiracy theory. The website for the film, which includes multiple falsehoods and claims of mass sex-trafficking in Hollywood, boasts that it is "Banned by YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and PayPal."

Mar-a-Lago often hosts events for outside groups.

"You are incredible people, you are doing unbelievable work, and we just appreciate you being here and we hope you're going to be back," Trump said in remarks to the crowd, according to a video of his speech.

A representative for the Trump campaign did not respond to ABC News' request for comment.

"Tonight I had the privilege and honor to speak at America's Future fundraiser to combat child trafficking at Mar-A-Lago," Crokin wrote in a social media post, claiming that while she was at Trump's club she discussed "Pizzagate" -- a viral conspiracy theory that falsely claims prominent Democrats were running a child-sex trafficking ring out of a pizza shop in Washington, D.C.

Crokin has expressed her belief in the conspiracy theory as recently as 2020. In an interview with Salon, she said the theory had not been debunked, according to the outlet.MORE: Trump hosts Kanye West, Nick Fuentes at Mar-a-Lago dinner

Darlene Swaffar, a former Republican congressional candidate who attended the event, told ABC News she was happy to see the former president address attendees. She also said that other prominent conservatives who were in attendance included former national security adviser and retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, and Seth Keshel, a retired U.S. Army captain who has worked to challenge the results of the 2020 presidential election. Swaffar posted photos with both Flynn and Palin taken at the event.

Swaffar told ABC News the fundraiser had different events based on how much attendees gave. "For attendees there was a reception portion, and for those that contributed a little bit more there was the dinner portion," she said.

When asked about the event hosting a QAnon conspiracy theorist, Swaffar told ABC News she did not hear anything about QAnon or conspiracy theories at the event, saying she didn't see "any communication on that."MORE: Pence, some other Republicans rebuke Trump for dinner with white nationalist

Crokin was featured in the HBO Docuseries "Q: Into the Storm." In a video, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene said she first was introduced to the conspiracy theory by Crokin.

According to a report on an another interview she gave, Crokin said of Trump that as president, Trump was "dismantling the deep state and one of his top priorities is to end sex trafficking."

Crokin did not respond to ABC News' request for comment on the event or whether she still believes in the QAnon and "Pizzagate" conspiracy theories.

In recent weeks, Trump's newly announced 2024 campaign has been playing defense on multiple fronts. On Wednesday, Trump's namesake real estate company was found guilty by a jury in New York of tax fraud. Last week, Trump on social media called for "termination" of "of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution" over false claims of election fraud.

Researchers Find the Remains of 5 WWII-Era U.S. Bombers in the Adriatic Sea

Story by Kyle Mizokami • 



Researchers from the University of Delaware and the U.S. military have discovered 5 B-24 Liberator bombers in the Adriatic Sea.

The bombers were lost while returning from missions, plunging into the ocean.

The planes are linked to at least 23 airmen declared missing in action.

A joint research team from the University of Delaware and the Pentagon has discovered five B-24 Liberator bombers in the Adriatic Sea. The planes, which went down in the ocean between Italy and Croatia, likely had received battle damage and crashed short of a safe landing. The planes will help resolve the fate of nearly two dozen aircrew listed as MIA for nearly 80 years.

Researchers from the University of Delaware and the U.S. Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) found the bombers during a two-week mission in August. The team also included Croatian archaeologists, scientists, divers, and military personnel assisting in the search. DPAA, which travels the globe to resolve the fate of those declared prisoners of war or missing in action, sponsored the search.


An autonomous underwater vehicle similar to this one used in 2014 to search for the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, was used to find the five B-24 bombers.© Handout - Getty Images

Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs)—torpedo-shaped robots that combed the bottom of the Adriatic with sonar for possible aircraft wrecks—located the five bombers. The AUVs, using side-scan sonar, generated “massive” amounts of sonar data for analysis. According to Stars and Stripes, the AUVs covered a 24-square-mile area. The search team also used magnetometers to detect buried metals and a high-resolution video camera.

Once a promising lead was discovered, human divers went in to investigate further and verify the existence of the wreck.

Of the five bombers located, three were positively identified from service records. The three planes were collectively associated with 23 aircrew listed as missing in action. The identification of the wrecks likely closes the book on the status of the crew members, allowing them to be re-designated from missing in action to killed in action.

The Consolidated B-24 Liberator was a heavy bomber used during World War II by the U.S. Army Air Forces, the predecessor of the U.S. Air Force. The Liberator was a four-engine bomber with a crew of up to ten, a top speed of 297 miles per hour, and the ability to carry up to 5,000 pounds of bombs on long-range missions. The bombers were likely assigned to the 15th Air Force, based in Foggia, Italy, which carried out bombing missions across southern Europe.