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Are you a news avoider? Do you turn off the six o’clock TV news, scroll past headlines, skip radio bulletins – or just ignore news entirely?

If you do some or all of these things, you are not alone. A new survey shows New Zealand has some of the highest rates of news avoidance in the world.

With news media already struggling with declining revenues and audiences, this adds to the immense challenges the sector faces in a competitive and politically polarised environment.

Previous research has found news avoidance is increasing around the world. But New Zealanders have also shown something of a love-hate relationship with the news: avoidance rates are high, but so too is general interest in the news. At the same time, trust in the media has been steadily declining.

To make sense of this, we surveyed 1,204 people in New Zealand in February 2023. We asked about news avoidance and the motivation for it, and recorded demographic details such as age, gender and political belief.

We found 60% of survey participants reported they sometimes, often, or almost always avoid the news. This combined total is higher than any other national figure reported in other studies, with Greece and Bulgaria the next highest at 57%.

Women reported higher rates of news avoidance than men. This could be due to a legacy of unequal access to the news, and a perceived lack of diverse voices in New Zealand’s news production, causing some to feel the news just isn’t for them.

We also found people with far-left or far-right political beliefs were more likely to avoid the news than those with centrist views. Those nearer the ends of the political spectrum are less likely to find their views represented in major news outlets and therefore seek alternative news sources that support their worldview.

Avoiding depressing and untrustworthy news

The major reason given for news avoidance is the negative effect news has on mood (32.7%).

Most immediately, New Zealand had been hit by severe floods in Auckland and Cyclone Gabrielle in the North Island only a month before our survey. But more generally, there has been increased concern about the impact of news consumption on personal wellbeing since the pandemic.

Similarly, many New Zealanders are experiencing news fatigue, with nearly 20% of respondents saying they were worn out by the sheer quantity of news these days.

The second most popular reason given was a perception the news was untrustworthy or biased (30.1%). People with right-wing political beliefs were more likely to cite this.

This suggests the decline in trust might be more about right-wing audiences perceiving a left-wing bias in the media, rather than a general distrust of New Zealand media overall.

Roughly a quarter of respondents said the news is too sensationalist (25.3%). Ironically, the use of clickbait and alarming headlines to engage audiences may be driving them away in the competitive attention economy.

In contrast, younger people (18–24) were more likely to cite not having enough time as a reason for avoiding the news.

Does news avoidance matter?

Our high rates of news avoidance say several things about audiences. On one hand, skipping the news occasionally can help manage stress and keep people interested in the long run.

This might explain why New Zealanders show high rates of both news avoidance and interest in the news: avoiding the news some of the time might help people manage their overall ability to engage and care.

Furthermore, despite high news avoidance rates, voter turnout at the 2023 general election was 78%. News avoidance may not affect civic participation.

However, we also found New Zealanders have high rates of very low or no news consumption at all. Just over 13% of participants reported they avoid the news “almost always”, more than in any other survey internationally.

Instead of consuming traditional news, many are likely turning to YouTube, social media and blogs, which often lack the more rigorous journalistic standards applied by mainstream media.

Scapegoating the news media

It might be easy to conclude New Zealand’s high rates of news avoidance are an implicit criticism of the media themselves. But this is to overlook the nature of their work and the immense challenges they face.

Holding governments to account and covering crises or divisive issues can be an unpopular and thankless task. Blaming the messenger is perhaps an understandable response.

But we also expect the news media to compete with information giants such as Facebook and Google, which do not employ journalists or recognise any real responsibility in disseminating news.

This feeds a commercial environment where traditional media must compete for attention and revenue against platforms that operate without the same ethical and professional standards.

Our findings also highlight the difficulty of satisfying an increasingly polarised news audience. With diverse groups perceiving bias and untrustworthiness differently, it’s nearly impossible to keep everyone happy.

With Google recently threatening to remove local news from its search engine due to its opposition to the Fair Digital News Bargaining Bill (which would require digital platforms to pay for news content), these issues are not going away soon.

Rather than scapegoat the media for high news avoidance rates, we see our survey results as part of a broader argument for supporting and strengthening what is an essential service in a functioning democracy. Läs mer…

Atmospheric rivers – those long, narrow bands of water vapor in the sky that bring heavy rain and storms to the U.S. West Coast and many other regions – are shifting toward higher latitudes, and that’s changing weather patterns around the world.

The shift is worsening droughts in some regions, intensifying flooding in others, and putting water resources that many communities rely on at risk. When atmospheric rivers reach far northward into the Arctic, they can also melt sea ice, affecting the global climate.

In a new study published in Science Advances, University of California, Santa Barbara, climate scientist Qinghua Ding and I show that atmospheric rivers have shifted about 6 to 10 degrees toward the two poles over the past four decades.

Atmospheric rivers on the move

Atmospheric rivers aren’t just a U.S West Coast thing. They form in many parts of the world and provide over half of the mean annual runoff in these regions, including the U.S. Southeast coasts and West Coast, Southeast Asia, New Zealand, northern Spain, Portugal, the United Kingdom and south-central Chile.

California relies on atmospheric rivers for up to 50% of its yearly rainfall. A series of winter atmospheric rivers there can bring enough rain and snow to end a drought, as parts of the region saw in 2023.

Atmospheric rivers occur all over the world, as this animation of global satellite data from February 2017 shows. NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio

While atmospheric rivers share a similar origin – moisture supply from the tropics – atmospheric instability of the jet stream allows them to curve poleward in different ways. No two atmospheric rivers are exactly alike.

What particularly interests climate scientists, including us, is the collective behavior of atmospheric rivers. Atmospheric rivers are commonly seen in the extratropics, a region between the latitudes of 30 and 50 degrees in both hemispheres that includes most of the continental U.S., southern Australia and Chile.

Our study shows that atmospheric rivers have been shifting poleward over the past four decades. In both hemispheres, activity has increased along 50 degrees north and 50 degrees south, while it has decreased along 30 degrees north and 30 degrees south since 1979. In North America, that means more atmospheric rivers drenching British Columbia and Alaska.

A global chain reaction

One main reason for this shift is changes in sea surface temperatures in the eastern tropical Pacific. Since 2000, waters in the eastern tropical Pacific have had a cooling tendency, which affects atmospheric circulation worldwide. This cooling, often associated with La Niña conditions, pushes atmospheric rivers toward the poles.

The poleward movement of atmospheric rivers can be explained as a chain of interconnected processes.

During La Niña conditions, when sea surface temperatures cool in the eastern tropical Pacific, the Walker circulation – giant loops of air that affect precipitation as they rise and fall over different parts of the tropics – strengthens over the western Pacific. This stronger circulation causes the tropical rainfall belt to expand. The expanded tropical rainfall, combined with changes in atmospheric eddy patterns, results in high-pressure anomalies and wind patterns that steer atmospheric rivers farther poleward.

La Niña, with cooler water in the eastern Pacific, fades, and El Niño, with warmer water, starts to form in the tropical Pacific Ocean in 2023.
NOAA Climate.gov

Conversely, during El Niño conditions, with warmer sea surface temperatures, the mechanism operates in the opposite direction, shifting atmospheric rivers so they don’t travel as far from the equator.

The shifts raise important questions about how climate models predict future changes in atmospheric rivers. Current models might underestimate natural variability, such as changes in the tropical Pacific, which can significantly affect atmospheric rivers. Understanding this connection can help forecasters make better predictions about future rainfall patterns and water availability.

Why does this poleward shift matter?

A shift in atmospheric rivers can have big effects on local climates.

In the subtropics, where atmospheric rivers are becoming less common, the result could be longer droughts and less water. Many areas, such as California and southern Brazil, depend on atmospheric rivers for rainfall to fill reservoirs and support farming. Without this moisture, these areas could face more water shortages, putting stress on communities, farms and ecosystems.

In higher latitudes, atmospheric rivers moving poleward could lead to more extreme rainfall, flooding and landslides in places such as the U.S. Pacific Northwest, Europe, and even in polar regions.

A satellite image on Feb. 20, 2017, shows an atmospheric river stretching from Hawaii to California, where it brought drenching rain.
NASA/Earth Observatory/Jesse Allen

In the Arctic, more atmospheric rivers could speed up sea ice melting, adding to global warming and affecting animals that rely on the ice. An earlier study I was involved in found that the trend in summertime atmospheric river activity may contribute 36% of the increasing trend in summer moisture over the entire Arctic since 1979.

What it means for the future

So far, the shifts we have seen still mainly reflect changes due to natural processes, but human-induced global warming also plays a role. Global warming is expected to increase the overall frequency and intensity of atmospheric rivers because a warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture.

How that might change as the planet continues to warm is less clear. Predicting future changes remains uncertain due largely to the difficulty in predicting the natural swings between El Niño and La Niña, which play an important role in atmospheric river shifts.

As the world gets warmer, atmospheric rivers – and the critical rains they bring – will keep changing course. We need to understand and adapt to these changes so communities can keep thriving in a changing climate. Läs mer…

The human mind may find it difficult to conceptualize: a cosmic cloud so colossal it surrounds the Sun and eight planets as it extends trillions of miles into deep space.

The spherical shell known as the Oort Cloud is, for all practical purposes, invisible. Its constituent particles are spread so thinly, and so far from the light of any star, including the Sun, that astronomers simply cannot see the cloud, even though it envelops us like a blanket.

It is also theoretical. Astronomers infer the Oort Cloud is there because it’s the only logical explanation for the arrival of a certain class of comets that sporadically visit our solar system. The cloud, it turns out, is basically a gigantic reservoir that may hold billions of icy celestial bodies.

Two of those bodies will pass by Earth in the days leading up to Halloween. Tsuchinshan-ATLAS, also known as Comet C/2023 A3, will be at its brightest, and likely visible to the naked eye, for a week or two after Oct. 12, the day it’s closest to Earth – just look to the western sky shortly after sunset. As the days pass, the comet will get fainter and move to a higher part of the sky.

A view of comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS from the International Space Station.

The second comet, C/2024 S1 (ATLAS), just discovered on Sept. 27, should be visible around the end of October. The comet will pass closest to Earth on Oct. 24 – look low in the eastern sky just before sunrise. Then, after swinging around the Sun, the comet may reappear in the western night sky right around Halloween. It’s possible, however, that it could disintegrate, in part or in whole, as sometimes happens when comets pass by the Sun – and this one will come within 1 million miles (1.6 million kilometers) of our star.

As a planetary astronomer, I’m particularly curious about the Oort Cloud and the icy bodies inhabiting it. The Cloud’s residents may be a reason why life ignited on Earth; crashing on our planet eons ago, these ice bodies may have supplied at least some of the water that all life requires. At the same time, these same objects pose an ever-present threat to Earth’s continuation – and our survival.

Billions of comets

If an Oort Cloud object finds its way to the inner solar system, its ices vaporize. That process produces a tail of debris that becomes visible as a comet.

Some of these bodies, known as long-period comets, have orbits of hundreds, thousands or even millions of years, like Tsuchinshan-ATLAS. This is unlike the so-called short-period comets, which do not visit the Oort Cloud and have comparatively quick orbits. Halley’s comet, which cuts a path through the solar system and orbits the Sun every 76 years or so, is one of them.

The 20th-century Dutch astronomer Jan Oort, intrigued by the long-period comets, wrote a paper on them in 1950. He noted about 20 of the comets had an average distance from the Sun that was more than 10,000 astronomical units. This was astounding; just one AU is the distance of the Earth from the Sun, which is about 93 million miles. Multiply 93 million by 10,000, and you’ll find these comets come from over a trillion miles away. What’s more, Oort suggested, they were not necessarily the cloud’s outermost objects.

Nearly 75 years after Oort’s paper, astronomers still can’t directly image this part of space. But they do estimate the Oort Cloud spans up to 10 trillion miles from the Sun, which is almost halfway to Proxima Centauri, the next closest star.

The long-period comets spend most of their time at those vast distances, making only brief and rapid visits close to the Sun as they come in from all directions. Oort speculated the cloud contained 100 billion of these icy objects. That may be as numerous as the number of stars in our galaxy.

How did they get there? Oort suggested, and modern simulations have confirmed, that these icy bodies could have initially formed near Jupiter, the solar system’s largest planet. Perhaps these objects had their orbits around the Sun disturbed by Jupiter – similar to how NASA spacecraft bound for destinations from Saturn to Pluto have typically swung by the giant planet to accelerate their journeys outward.

Some of these objects would have escaped the solar system permanently, becoming interstellar objects. But others would have ended up with orbits like those of the long-period comets.

An illustration of the solar system and the Oort Cloud. The numbers on the graph depict AUs, or astronomical units. Note the location of Voyager 2, which will take another 30,000 years to fly out of the Cloud.
NASA

Threats to Earth

Long-period comets present a particular potential danger to Earth. Because they are so far from our Sun, their orbits are readily altered by the gravity of other stars. That means scientists have no idea when or where one will appear, until it does, suddenly. By then, it’s typically closer than Jupiter and moving rapidly, at tens of thousands of miles per hour. Indeed, the fictional comet that doomed Earth in the film “Don’t Look Up” came from the Oort Cloud.

New Oort Cloud comets are discovered all the time, a dozen or so per year in recent years. The odds of any of them colliding with Earth are extremely low. But it is possible. The recent success of NASA’s DART mission, which altered the orbit of a small asteroid, demonstrates one plausible approach to fending off these small bodies. But that mission was developed after years of studying its target. A comet from the Oort Cloud may not offer that much time – maybe just months, weeks or even days.

Or no time at all. ’Oumuamua, the odd little object that visited our solar system in 2017, was discovered not before but after its closest approach to Earth. Although ’Oumuamua is an interstellar object, and not from the Oort Cloud, the proposition still applies; one of these objects could sneak up on us, and the Earth would be defenseless.

One way to prepare for these objects is to better understand their basic properties, including their size and composition. Toward this end, my colleagues and I work to characterize new long-period comets. The largest known one, Bernardinelli–Bernstein, discovered just three years ago, is roughly 75 miles (120 kilometers) across. Most known comets are much smaller, from one to a few miles, and some smaller ones are too faint for us to see. But newer telescopes are helping. In particular, the Rubin Observatory’s decade-long Legacy Survey of Space and Time, starting up in 2025, may double the list of known Oort Cloud comets, which now stands at about 4,500.

The unpredictability of these objects makes them a challenging target for spacecraft, but the European Space Agency is preparing a mission to do just that: Comet Interceptor. With a launch planned for 2029, the probe will park in space until a suitable target from the Oort Cloud appears. Studying one of these ancient and pristine objects could offer scientists clues about the origins of the solar system.

As for the comets now in Earth’s vicinity, it’s OK to look up. Unlike the comet in the DiCaprio movie, these two will not crash into the Earth. The nearest Tsuchinshan-ATLAS will get to us is about 44 million miles (70 million kilometers); C/2024 S1 (ATLAS), about 80 million miles (130 million kilometers). Sounds like a long way, but in space, that’s a near miss. Läs mer…

You probably missed it, but a few months ago a report was published that inspected how the UK government prepared for major emergencies. What it found has profound implications for the whole country.

The report was written by the UK’s public inquiry into the COVID-19 pandemic and explained how the pandemic was an example of what’s called a “non-malicious threat”. These are major threats to our collective security that arise not from hostile intent – like terrorism or war – but as a result of human error, structural failure, or natural disasters. In this instance it was a novel virus that jumped from animals to humans and then rapidly spread.

The pandemic affected everything. Its impact was so severe that it created what the government calls a “whole-system civil emergency”, a rapidly escalating crisis that significantly affected multiple dimensions of the UK’s security, from the health system, through economic stability, to public trust. This was the UK’s greatest security crisis since the second world war. Yet it had nothing to do with armed conflict.

The inquiry found that successive governments grossly underestimated pandemic threats. They were not given the same priority as security threats coming from hostile action, like Russian aggression or terrorism. The subsequent tragedy proved how much of a mistake this was. When it came to planning and responding to whole-system civil emergencies, the UK government “failed their citizens”, the inquiry said, before concluding that “fundamental reform” was needed.

We have worked on a new report that finds worrying similarities to another, even greater “non-malicious threat” to security: climate change.

Compounding climate risks

Two weeks ago Hurricane Helene crashed into Florida and proceeded to cut a chaotic swathe north. By the time it dissipated over Tennessee two days later, over 200 people were dead and losses amounted to tens of billions of dollars.

Now Florida has been battered by Hurricane Milton too, which may prove to be more destructive in part because it came in the wake of Helene. Much of the region’s road, rail, and power infrastructure was still damaged. Many of the buildings still standing had been seriously weakened. Piles of debris from the clean up quickly became dangerous projectiles in Milton’s powerful winds. Hurricanes such as Helene and Milton are now twice as likely given climate change.

Treasure Island, Florida, after Helene and before Milton.
M Julian Photography / shutterstock

From hurricanes to deadly heatwaves, crippling droughts to crop failures – the consequences of climate change are potentially catastrophic. And while we have improved our resilience to individual extreme weather events, increasing climate change makes it more likely that impacts will pile up with the sum of loss and damages being much higher than the parts. It is these cascading and compounding impacts that not only threaten local communities, but add up to destabilise the security of entire countries and the globalised systems that connect them.

Yet many governments do not routinely consider extreme climate scenarios in their security plans, and instead continue to assume that climate risks will gradually evolve over the long term.

This approach is proving to be grossly insufficient. Take food security for example. Cascading climate effects are estimated to have caused a third of UK food price inflation in recent years, an impact compounded by rising energy prices. Spiking energy prices were the result of our reliance on fossil fuels, which became far more expensive after Russia invaded Ukraine.

These episodes show us how the causes and consequences of climate change supercharge the world’s security problems.

Tipping towards catastrophe

These climate risks create the potential for further “whole-system civil emergencies”. One example is tipping points. For instance, one of the Earth’s key ocean current systems is the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (Amoc), which transports vast amounts of heat from the tropics to the northern hemisphere. Yet climate change is weakening the Amoc, a process that could lead it to pass a tipping point and collapse at some point this century, though there is still much debate among climate scientists over exact dates and probabilities.

Collapse would effectively wipe out crop growing in the UK, and devastate food production over much of Europe and North America, while disrupting key weather patterns across the globe. This would be a planetary-scale cataclysm with unmanageable security outcomes. A collapse this century cannot be ruled out without urgent international action to reduce emissions.

Atlantic circulation collapse would create worldwide chaos.
Gertjan Hooijer / shutterstock

Meanwhile, the collapse of a northern section of the Amoc – in the North Atlantic subpolar gyre – could happen much sooner. While less severe, a collapse would upend weather in the UK, destabilising food production, public health, and infrastructure. Evidence suggests that the likelihood of this collapse is alarmingly high – up to a 45% chance of occurring this century – and that it could happen as early as 2040, if not before.

Inadequate assessment

Yet these risks do not appear in the UK government’s national register of security threats. In fact, there isn’t even a dedicated security risk assessment of climate change. The government’s existing climate change risk assessment is not set up to assess broader security threats in the round and is not intended for high level security decision-makers.

There are also important analytical flaws, such as inadequate consideration of cascading and interacting risks like successive hurricanes or a flood that also spreads diseases or disrupts food supplies months later. Individually, these risks might be bearable; together, they could prove unbearable.

Meanwhile, responsibility for climate risks is currently siloed away in non-security departments, marginalising climate change from the top table of decision-making on security.

Thankfully, the new UK government is undertaking a review of its national resilience and security policies. Climate change should be at the heart of its plans. The pandemic inquiry’s findings could represent a warning from a future in which the threat posed by climate change is still not taken seriously in key parts of government.

We face a choice. We can wait until climate impacts spiral out of control, and panicked governments resort to false solutions like more border walls and militarisation. Worryingly, the chances of this are growing as governments continue to effectively fly blind into an increasingly dangerous future. Alternatively, the institutions of government that are intended to protect us against major emergencies can finally act and begin to turn us away from the gathering storm. Läs mer…

A groundbreaking discovery has recently brought hope to millions of people living with type 1 diabetes around the world. In a world first, scientists have successfully used stem cell therapy to reverse type 1 diabetes in a woman.

This achievement is being hailed as a major medical breakthrough, as it offers a potential cure for a disease that, until now, could only be managed but not cured.

Type 1 diabetes is a serious condition that usually starts in childhood or early adulthood. In people with the condition, the body’s immune system mistakenly attacks the cells in the pancreas that produce insulin.

Insulin is a hormone that helps regulate blood sugar levels. Without it, blood sugar can spike to dangerously high levels. Over time, this can lead to severe health complications, such as heart disease, nerve damage, kidney failure and blindness.

People with type 1 diabetes need to take insulin injections or use insulin pumps every day to manage their blood sugar levels. Despite these treatments, managing the disease can be difficult, and patients often face lifelong difficulties. That’s why this new stem cell therapy has generated so much excitement — it could offer a real solution.

The average human body is composed of about 37.2 trillion cells, which is 300 times the number of stars in our galaxy. All our adult cells come from a single cell, called the fertilised egg (or zygote) which during our development will divide and differentiate into specialised cells and adult stem cells. The zygote is the initial stem cell capable of generating a new person.

Adults stem cells are special cells in the body that can turn into a limited number of cell types. Scientists have been studying stem cells for years and trying to re-program specialised cells into stem cells, hoping to use them to treat various diseases.

One of the most exciting aspects of stem cells is that they can replace damaged or missing cells in the body. At the University of Central Lancashire, my research team is using induced-pluripotent brain stem cells which were reprogrammed from skin cells of patients with Alzheimer’s disease. We aim to learn more about the degenerative brain disease and its development in a petri dish without further invasive techniques.

Type 1 diabetes explained.

In the case of type 1 diabetes, scientists wondered if stem cells could be used to replace the insulin-producing cells that the body had destroyed. It is extremely difficult to get stem cells to behave like the specific insulin-producing cells needed in the pancreas.

In a recent trial, scientists at Peking University in Beijing took cells from a donor and modified them in the lab to become insulin-producing cells. These newly developed cells were then implanted into patients with type 1 diabetes.

Remarkably, the cells began producing insulin on their own, allowing the patients to regulate their blood sugar levels after two and a half months without requiring daily insulin injections.

This is why the therapy is being referred to as a potential “cure” for type 1 diabetes. While it’s still early days, the results are incredibly promising, and the therapy could become widely available in the near future if further large trials are successful.

Hurdles still to overcome

One issue is the body’s immune system, which could attack the newly transplanted cells as part of diabetes type 1 conditions. Scientists are working on ways to prevent this and ensure that the transplanted cells are behaving over several years similarly compared to the initial phase in a petri dish.

Making the therapy accessible to more people will be another big challenge. If approved, stem cell treatments are expensive and complicated, so researchers are looking for ways to make the process more scalable while using the patient’s own cells to prevent rejection of the transplanted cells.

Despite these hurdles, the recent discovery has created a wave of hope and optimism for patients suffering from type 1 diabetes. Stem cell therapy is showing us that it might be possible to truly cure diseases that have long been considered only manageable and incurable. Läs mer…

The deep learning machine AlphaFold, which was created by Google’s AI research lab DeepMind, is already transforming our understanding of the molecular biology that underpins health and disease.

One half of the 2024 Nobel prize in chemistry went to David Baker from the University of Washington in the US, with the other half jointly awarded to Demis Hassabis and John M. Jumper, both from London-based Google DeepMind.

If you haven’t heard of AlphaFold, it may be difficult to appreciate how important it is becoming to researchers. But as a beta tester for the software, I got to see first-hand how this technology can reveal the molecular structures of different proteins in minutes. It would take researchers months or even years to unpick these structures in laboratory experiments.

Read more:
Google Deepmind founder shares Nobel prize in chemistry for AI that unlocks the shape of proteins

This technology could pave the way for revolutionary new treatments and drugs. But first, it’s important to understand what AlphaFold does.

Proteins are produced by series of molecular “beads”, created from a selection of the human body’s 20 different amino acids. These beads form a long chain that folds up into a mechanical shape that is crucial for the protein’s function.

Their sequence is determined by DNA. And while DNA research means we know the order of the beads that build most proteins, it’s always been a challenge to predict how the chain folds up into each “3D machine”.

Nobel prize laureates David Baker, Demis Hassabis and John M. Jumper.
Illustrations: Niklas Elmehed © Nobel Prize Outreach, CC BY-NC-SA

These protein structures underpin all of biology. Scientists study them in the same way you might take a clock apart to understand how it works. Comprehend the parts and put together the whole: it’s the same with the human body.

Proteins are tiny, with a huge number located inside each of our 30 trillion cells. This meant for decades, the only way to find out their shape was through laborious experimental methods – studies that could take years.

Throughout my career I, along with many other scientists, have been engaged in such pursuits. Every time we solve a protein structure, we deposit it in a global database called the Protein Data Bank, which is free for anyone to use.

AlphaFold was trained on these structures, the majority of which were found using X-ray crystallography. For this technique, proteins are tested under thousands of different chemical states, with variations in temperature, density and pH. Researchers use a microscope to identify the conditions under which each protein lines up in a particular formation. These are then shot with X-rays to work out the spatial arrangement of all the atoms in that protein.

Having been trained on these structures, AlphaFold can now predict protein structure at speeds that were previously impossible.

I started out early in my career, from the late 90s, working out protein structures using magnetic properties of their nuclei. I did this with technology called nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy, which uses a huge magnet like an MRI scanner. This method had begun to fall out of favour because of certain technical limitations, but is now having a resurgence thanks to AlphaFold.

NMR is one of the few techniques that can probe molecules in motion, instead of keeping them still inside a crystal or on an electron microscope grid.

The author, Rivka Isaacson, holding an atomically accurate, 3D-printed ribosome.
Rivka Isaacson, Author provided (no reuse)

Addictive experience

In March 2024, researchers at DeepMind approached me to beta test AlphaFold3, the latest incarnation of the software, which was close to release at the time.

I’ve never been a gamer but I got a taste of the addictive experience as, once I got access, all I wanted to do was spend hours trying out molecular combinations. As well as lightning speed, this new version introduced the option to include bigger and more varied molecules, including DNA and metals, and the opportunity to modify amino acids to mimic chemical signalling in cells.

Our lab at King’s College London used X-ray crystallography to predict a structure formed by two bacterial proteins that are loosely involved in hospital superbugs when they interact. Previous incarnations of AlphaFold predicted the individual components but could never get the complex right – yet this new version solved it at the first attempt.

Understanding the moving parts and dynamics of proteins is the next frontier, now that we can predict static protein shapes with AlphaFold. Proteins come in a huge variety of shapes and sizes. They can be rigid or flexible, or made of neatly structured units connected by bendy loops.

Dynamics are essential for protein function. As another Nobel laureate, Richard Feynman, said: “Everything that living things do can be understood in terms of the jiggling and wiggling of atoms.”

Another great feature of magnetic resonance techniques is they can measure precise distances between atoms. So, with a few carefully designed experiments, the AlphaFold outputs can be verified in a lab.

In other cases, the results are still ambiguous. It’s a work in progress between experimental structural biologists, like my team, and computational scientists.

The recognition that comes with a Nobel prize will only galvanise the quest to understand all molecular machinery – and hopefully, change the game when it comes to medicines, vaccines and human health. Läs mer…

Sarah was in a comfortable job, working for an archaeology business before being diagnosed with cancer. Much of her 20-year career had left her with reliable employment rights in the civil service.

But having made a career change and moved to a small business, she was now reliant on statutory sick pay, just over £100 a week at the time. To avoid a catastrophic loss of income, she had to work from her hospital bed in between sessions of chemotherapy, before being forced to return to work just weeks after a bone marrow transplant.

This is a stark reminder of how anyone can have the fundamental dignity of life stripped away.

Many of the lowest-income families continue to face unacceptable levels of hardship. But these pressures have spilled into higher earners, too. Those out of work continue to face the greatest risk of being in poverty, but rising costs and largely stagnant incomes have meant that many more people are living on inadequate wages.

The government has rightly recognised the current settlement stores up huge problems. The Employment Rights Bill, laying out the details of the government’s “make work pay” policies, has been presented to parliament and has been described by Labour as “the biggest shake up-in workers’ rights in 30 years”.

But is it really a gamechanger? While the package undoubtedly contains reforms that will improve the working lives of millions, it’s worth considering how far these go in raising living standards.

Affording a decent life

Using the minimum income standard benchmark developed by the Centre for Research in Social Policy, two measures can be assessed: baseline hourly pay and reforms to statutory sick pay.

The work we do at the centre, where I am co-director, sets out what the public thinks everyone needs for a minimum standard of living in the UK today. Through hours of discussions and deliberations, groups decide what households need to live in dignity.

This is not just about being able to afford the basics – it is about being part of society, feeling included, connecting with others, and thriving rather than just surviving. We’ve updated this minimum income standard research every year since 2008, tracking what the UK public thinks is important to live a dignified life, and in September we published our latest update.

This research highlighted the strains on public services and what this can mean for the costs faced by households. For the first time, groups included £200 a year per adult to spend on private health services like counselling or physiotherapy. Accessing these services can be critical in avoiding long periods of time off work.

But costs like this potentially add to the financial pressures already facing millions of workers. Our analysis of household incomes shows that 64% of households without the income they need for a dignified life include at least one adult in work – that’s around 3.3 million working households.

The bill is intended to support low-paid workers, and while the proposed changes are a welcome and long-overdue step, the measures focused on income do not go as far as they could.

There are two key components. First, the current national living wage (NLW), payable to employees over 21, and what the prospective increase might look like in the next year. We know from our latest research that even where both parents are working full time on the NLW, a family with two children still fall around £140 a week short of the income they need for a minimum standard of living.

Read more:
How much income is needed to live well in the UK in 2023? At least £29,500 – much more than many households bring in

The Low Pay Commission, which advises the government on the NLW, estimates that it could increase from £11.44 to £12.10 in 2025 – while this increase would be welcome, it would still leave a significant shortfall for many working households.

The proposed reforms to statutory sick pay are another area needing proper scrutiny.

Earlier this year, I worked with cancer charities and the Centre for Progressive Change to look at the financial effect of the rate of statutory sick pay on workers. For a worker with a serious illness, this doesn’t do much to tackle their financial predicament. A person on an average salary taking two months off for cancer treatment, for example, would face a loss of around £3,500, plus any extra costs of travelling for treatment.

Nothing is less dignified than struggling back to work after a serious illness, because of money worries. The new deal should place more emphasis on helping millions of low-income workers at risk of losing even more money – and falling deeper into poverty as a result.

Statutory sick pay will be a right from the first day of employment.
Mr. Ashi. Sae Yang/Shutterstock

The new deal promises sick pay from day one of employment, a very welcome change, and also removes the previous lower earnings limit. But based on average illness periods and the current rate of £116.75 a week, this might only increase the incomes of sick workers by an average of £60-£120 in a given year.

That’s just a fraction of the income they would lose from not being able to work and still leaves the UK at the bottom of OECD league tables.

So, while it offers important reforms, what has been announced so far may not offer transformative change in terms of living standards.

There is a real opportunity to introduce changes that genuinely improve living standards for all. But to achieve this, we would need to see several things that are not properly laid out as yet.

First, the government should now move quickly to make sure that all workers aged over 18 are paid the same rate of NLW. Second, the Low Pay Commission should give real consideration to the cost of living in recommending the NLW rate in future years, building this into every annual increase.

Lastly, the government must detail how it will improve sick pay. It needs to lay out a transparent and evidence-based process to set this at a level that avoids creating further hardship for some of the most vulnerable workers in the UK. Läs mer…

The 2024 Nobel peace prize has been awarded to Nihon Hidankyo, a Japanese grassroots organisation created by survivors of the two US atomic bombs that were dropped on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.

The Norwegian Nobel committee recognised the organisation “for its efforts to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons and for demonstrating through witness testimony that nuclear weapons must never be used again”.

Discussion of the bombings, which killed more than 100,000 Japanese people, was largely a taboo in the immediate post-war period. This was, in part, thanks to American press censorship in occupied Japan.

But, in 1954, an American nuclear weapons test at Bikini Atoll in the Pacific Ocean produced such extensive radioactive fallout that it affected a Japanese fishing boat, the Lucky Dragon, causing one death from radiation poisoning.

The Lucky Dragon incident prompted many of the atomic bomb survivors, who are known as the hibakusha, to speak out about their experiences. And it was within this context that Nihon Hidankyo was created in 1956.

Since then, the hibakusha have played an immeasurable role in activism against nuclear weapons worldwide. Their testimony, the Nobel committee said, has “helped to generate and consolidate widespread opposition to nuclear weapons around the world”.

The US detonated an atomic bomb over the Japanese city of Hiroshima on August 6.
Shutterstock

In 1975, for example, a group of hibakusha that included Setsuko Thurlow, a member of Nihon Hidankyo and a globally renowned campaigner against nuclear weapons, organised an exhibition on the atomic bombings at the Toronto public library.

This helped trigger the development of a significant anti-nuclear movement in Canada. By the early 1980s, tens of thousands of Canadians regularly demonstrated against their government’s support for US nuclear weapons.

Then, in 1984, another survivor of the Hiroshima bombing called Takashi Morita co-founded a hibakusha organisation based in São Paulo to share their stories and raise awareness in Brazil of the devastating consequences of nuclear weapons.

Growing awareness of the experiences of the hibakusha throughout the 1980s inspired Europeans to protest against the deployment of new nuclear missiles in their countries. The phrase “no Euroshima!” became a popular slogan for the European peace movement.

Nihon Hidankyo’s efforts have focused not only on sharing the experiences of hibakusha, but also using them to gain support for the abolition of nuclear weapons worldwide.

The organisation has been a key supporter of the UN treaty on the prohibition of nuclear weapons. This treaty, which entered in force in 2017 and has been signed by 94 countries, prohibits states from participating in any nuclear weapon activities.

The International Campaign for the Abolition of Nuclear Weapons – in which Setsuko Thurlow is a leading figure – was awarded the Nobel peace prize in 2017 for its efforts to achieve this legally binding prohibition of such weapons.

Still work to do

Within Japan, Nihon Hidankyo has worked to challenge the government’s position on nuclear weapons. The Japanese government is supportive of American nuclear weapons, despite the horrors witnessed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and depends on them as a deterrent against its several nuclear-armed neighbours.

Successive Japanese governments have insisted on the importance of nuclear weapons for the country’s national security. But it remains a controversial stance for many in Japan. Every Japanese school child typically visits Hiroshima or Nagasaki to learn about the nightmarish consequences of nuclear weapons.

The decision to award the Nobel peace prize to Nihon Hidankyo is particularly timely. In 2023, the world’s nine nuclear powers spent over US$91 billion (£69.5 billion) on nuclear weapons. And since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Russian president Vladimir Putin has repeatedly threatened to use his nuclear arsenal.

These concerning developments were acknowledged by the Nobel committee. When awarding Nihon Hidankyo with the prize, the committee said it was “alarming that today this taboo against the use of nuclear weapons is under pressure.”

The world’s nuclear powers – especially China and the US – are expanding and modernising their arsenals. North Korea is continuing to develop its nuclear weapons programme. And tensions are fast escalating between nuclear-armed Israel and near-nuclear Iran.

The threats posed by nuclear weapons are more apparent now than they have been at any time since the cold war. With barely 100,000 hibakusha alive today, it is imperative that we listen to their voices and their warnings. Läs mer…

Scientists and engineers are developing new ways to destroy per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) efficiently and sustainably. This class of chemicals is known as “forever chemicals” because PFAS persist and accumulate in the environment, animals and our bodies.

PFAS have been used for decades to make everything from firefighting foam, packaging, waterproof clothes and non-stick frying pan coatings. The chemistry that makes these compounds so useful makes them extremely difficult to destroy or fully remove from the environment.

PFAS are associated with numerous illnesses including cancers and infertility. The annual cost of inaction on resultant health issues is around €84 billion (£70 billion) for European countries.

Getting rid of the more than 14,000 different PFAS poses a huge and costly challenge. In England alone, remediation costs are predicted at up to £121 billion. There are many ways to remove PFAS from contaminated soil, groundwater or drinking water, but the key challenge is to destroy PFAS without contributing to pollution elsewhere.

Existing removal tech

Recommendations for safe PFAS concentrations in drinking water are in the range of nanograms per litre or parts per trillion – this is like counting grains of sand in an Olympic-sized swimming pool.

To treat contaminated water, PFAS need to be removed, usually by some kind of separation or concentration technique, before then being destroyed.

Separation techniques traditionally use tiny solid particles of porous activated carbon – this is like small grains of charcoal with tiny holes. The carbon is packed into a column that the PFAS-contaminated water flows through.

PFAS stick to the particles in the column and when no more PFAS can be collected the carbon solid is treated at high temperatures (900°C-950˚C) to remove the PFAS. Any PFAS not destroyed in this process must be exposed to even higher temperatures for complete destruction. Then the activated carbon can be reused to collect more PFAS.

Activated carbon is used to filter contaminated water and filter out some PFAS.
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Another way to collect PFAS could involve 3D-printed materials. Some researchers have added catalysts to activated carbon to collect and degrade PFAS simultaneously.

PFAS contamination can be separated from water using techniques such as filtration to create a PFAS concentrate or foam fractionation which bubbles air through contaminated water. Since PFAS act like soap (or a surfactant), they are attracted and stick to the surfaces of those bubbles which then rise to the top of the tank and can be removed.

Read more:
Here’s how to remove some persistent pollutants from your drinking water at home

Strong bonds, high heat

PFAS are fluorinated chemicals, which means the carbon atoms within their structure are bonded to fluorine atoms – those strong chemical bonds are hard to break, hence needing very high incineration temperatures.

Most PFAS destruction occurs via creation (and slower destruction) of smaller PFAS. The carbon-fluorine bonds in shorter chain PFAS are the most difficult to break down, so the creation of smaller, more persistent PFAS should be avoided.

Unsurprisingly, PFAS are resistant to methods that destroy other pollutants such as exposure to ozone (a powerful oxidising agent), bacteria or high temperatures.

Only temperatures above 1,400˚C will completely destroy PFAS but the UK only has four high-temperature incinerators, not all of which will accept PFAS-contaminated waste.

New solutions

More widely available, cost-effective and sustainable technologies to degrade PFAS are urgently needed. Many new solutions aim to work in ambient conditions (at room temperatures and pressures) to save energy. Innovations include microbial degradation whereby bacteria feed on PFAS pollution and degrade it. Energy input is low but microbial processes tend to produce different PFAS.

Our team uses high-frequency sound waves to destroy PFAS through what’s known as “ultrasonic degradation” or “sonolysis”. This completely degrades PFAS at room temperature so high energy inputs and pressures are not needed. Sonolysis can break down a range of contaminated materials, including used firefighting foam and liquid leachate from landfills.

When a contaminated liquid is treated with high-pitched sound waves (ultrasound), gas bubbles compress and expand rapidly, up to millions of times per second. The bubbles grow and then violently collapse in these pressure cycles, momentarily reaching temperatures hotter than the Sun and pressures around a thousand times higher than our atmosphere, breaking down PFAS.

Another method called “hydrodynamic cavitation” uses fast-moving water to create bubble cavities that works in a similar way.

Three other chemical destruction techniques that don’t use extreme heat or high pressures include electrolysis, photolysis and plasmas. Electrolysis can destroy PFAS using an electric current that travels via specialist electrodes.

Photolysis uses a catalyst that is powered by sunlight or other light sources, but the contaminated liquid has to be clear for the light to activate the catalyst.

Plasmas are like a soup of charged particles that drive difficult-to-achieve reactions such as PFAS destruction. Plasmas on or just beneath the surface of contaminated water are formed using high voltage electricity or electromagnetic energy. However, this technology is largely limited to laboratory research.

Whatever technology is used for the destruction of PFAS, the challenge is to ensure effective treatment for all PFAS types. Ideally, PFAS pollution should be prevented altogether. But even if PFAS production was stopped now, the legacy of more than 70 years of PFAS manufacturing and release has created a long-lasting challenge. Läs mer…

There was tension hanging in the air as I walked through Tunisia’s capital city, Tunis, in July, just months before the country’s latest presidential election. The conversations I had in cafes and markets confirmed people’s uncertainty and apprehension about the state of their country.

Tunisia was the location of an uprising against corruption, poverty and political repression in 2011 that ousted longtime autocrat Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali. The uprising, which came to be known as the Jasmine Revolution, inspired a wave of pro-democracy protests throughout the Middle East and North Africa called the Arab spring.

But some Tunisian journalists, lawyers and members of non-governmental organisations have argued that the country has slowly returned to a dictatorship. Tunisia’s current president, Kais Saied, was elected democratically in 2019. However, since then he has suspended parliament and backed a referendum on a new constitution that has allowed him to rule by decree.

Shortly after the polls closed on Sunday, October 6, it became clear that Saied had again emerged victorious, securing a second term with more than 90% of the vote. His victory had been widely expected. Saied’s closest challenger, Ayachi Zammel, won 7% of the vote, but had been sentenced to 12 years in prison five days before the poll for allegedly falsifying documents.

Saied’s presidency has been controversial, and the slide back towards centralised control is a sharp contrast to the pluralistic democracy Tunisians had hoped for following the Arab spring. Yet for Saied’s supporters – of which there are many – this has been necessary in a country that has for years wrestled with political gridlock and economic stagnation.

The Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia forced out the country’s longtime dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in 2011.
Idealink Photography / Alamy Stock Photo

The Jasmine Revolution ultimately failed to deliver a stronger economy and a government free from corruption. Tunisia’s 2019 score of 43 out of 100 on Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index is, in fact, slightly higher than it scored in 2012.

Corruption remains a problem that affects every part of Tunisian society and is impeding economic growth and stability. Many Tunisians have expressed frustration over the past decade with widespread nepotism and favouritism, which have hurt efforts to address high unemployment and soaring public debt.

So, Saied’s move to control power and implement economic reforms, accompanied by promises to crack down on corrupt political elites, has given him some support among a population tired of the slow rate of change.

As one Tunisian told me during my visit: “We didn’t need more debates in parliament. We needed someone to act. And Saied acted.”

This is a view shared by others. In an interview with Al Monitor, a news website focusing on the Middle East, a server working in a cafe in the northern suburbs of Tunis described Saied as “modest and kind”, and said “he has put the country back on track”.

Falling support

However, in general, Saied’s support has waned since 2021. Living standards have fallen due to high inflation and the youth unemployment rate is on the rise.

Critics, both in Tunisia and elsewhere, have voiced concerns about Saied’s concentration of power. Amnesty International has denounced the “worrying decline in fundamental rights” under his government. And Saied’s main opponents in Sunday’s election, as well as many other hopefuls, were either imprisoned or left off the ballot.

Indeed, the election saw the lowest turnout in Tunisia since 2011. Tunisia’s election authority reported that only 27% of registered voters cast their vote, a significant drop from the 55% that turned out in 2019.

A Tunisian man holds a ballot at a polling station during the presidential election in Tunis, Tunisia, on October 6.
Mohamed Messara / EPA

The current economic challenges facing Tunisia also require immediate action. In 2022, Saied’s administration negotiated a US$1.9 billion (£1.45 billion) bailout loan with the International Monetary Fund as Tunisia’s economy grappled with severe inflation, rising public debt and a lack of essential goods.

However, the deal now hangs in the balance. The loan was contingent on Tunisia implementing punitive reforms aimed at stabilising the country’s economy. Saied has expressed reservations about these conditions, saying that such measures would increase poverty, fuel social unrest and compromise Tunisia’s sovereignty.

While celebrating his victory, Saied told state television that his reelection was “a continuation of the revolution”. “We will build and will cleanse the country of the corrupt, traitors and conspirators,” he said. During his victory speech, he then pleaded with his fellow Tunisians to work together for the common good.

As I left Tunisia in the summer, I couldn’t help but feel the country was standing at the edge of a precipice. Saied will need to honour the promises he has made to restore the country’s economy and political systems, or else his presidency could come to a premature end. Läs mer…