On Wednesday, opening the first inter-committee meeting between the European Parliament and the Ukrainian Verkhovna Rada. Leading MEPs reaffirm their strong support for Ukraine’s path to the EU
MEPs and Ukrainian MPs met to exchange views on the nature and challenges of Ukraine’s EU accession process, European Parliament President Roberta Metsola said: “Today’s meeting marks the launch of an in-depth, comprehensive and concrete sectorial cooperation between our two institutions. Cooperation that is crucial in view of Ukraine’s European path. This is something that Speaker Ruslan Stefanchuk and I have discussed and converged over on several occasions… because there is no question that Ukraine’s future is as a Member of the European Union. Rest assured that Ukraine will always find a friend and ally in the European Parliament. My hope is that accession negotiations will be able to start already this year.”
At the meeting, where committee chairs of the European Parliament and the Verkhovna Rada debated the nature and challenges of the EU accession process, MEPs stated their firm condemnation of the illegal and unjustified Russian war of aggression. The EU as well as the European Parliament, they said, are strong allies of Ukraine and will continue to stand with the country and its people in their fight for freedom.
Looking at future cooperation between both parliaments, MEPs expressed their willingness to deepen institutional ties and offer more support and expertise to their Ukrainian colleagues for the country’s path towards EU membership, including in the areas of alignment with EU laws and in post-war recovery. When it comes to the reconstruction of Ukraine, MEPs stressed it is essential to “build back better” and link reconstruction efforts to a reform process that secures Ukraine’s European integration.
MEPs highlighted the need to establish an adequate governance architecture for reconstruction efforts that “ensures Ukrainian ownership”, and is transparent, accountable and inclusive, with the proper involvement of both the European Parliament and the Verkovna Rada.
After losing the market for gas and oil in the West, Russia may also lose buyers for uranium fuel for nuclear power plants, experts say.
In one of its latest publications, Bloomberg mentioned that Western countries have found a new way to slow the Russian economy: through uranium fuel trade.
Despite the fact that most of the earlier buyers have shifted away from the Russian oil and gas industry, nuclear fuel provided by this country remained a resource that is hard to replace. Compared to oil, there is a very limited number of suppliers on the global market that can provide uranium for the American and European nuclear power plants.
Uranium is still being bought from Russia and this trade remains one of the major sources of revenue used to finance the war in Ukraine. But the world is actively looking for alternative suppliers.
According to Bloomberg, Kazakhstan’s state-owned company Kazatomprom could become one of the new providers of nuclear fuel. Yerzhan Mukanov, general director of Kazatomprom, said that his company is preparing to increase uranium fuel production to meet demand from new buyers, with the first contracts expected to be signed no later that in 2025.
The United States is among the countries seeking to reduce their dependence on uranium supplied by Russia. After the invasion of Ukraine, exports of Russian nuclear fuel were not reduced and even increased substantially, which sustained the Kremlin’s income and strengthened its influence with buyers around the world.
In this regard, Kazakhstan has a very real potential to take over this market segment. Currently, it produces about 40% of the world’s uranium, and all of it is exported. The World Nuclear Association predicts that by 2030, the global demand for uranium will increase by about a third.
For comparison, approximately 35% of the world’s enriched uranium is produced by Rosatom.
Kazatomprom’s CEO said geopolitical uncertainty is affecting uranium supply routes, and Kazakhstan is preparing its capacity in response to growing demand.
The company plans to open a new uranium supply route bypassing Russia, possibly through one of China’s seaports. Y. Mukanov noted that Beijing is also looking for new long-term sources of nuclear fuel. The first 30-ton shipment of low-enriched uranium fuel assemblies was delivered to the Chinese General Nuclear Power Corporation back in December 2022.
Until now, Rosatom has not yet been included in the European lists of sanctioned Russian companies. Several countries including France and Hungary are still heavily dependent on Russian nuclear fuel.
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This is a translation of the article originally published in Spanish by Carlos Berbell, from the specialized legal portal CONFILEGAL, the most renowned and read legal newspaper in Spain.
Freedom of expression, provided that it serves the general interest and does not use manifestly injurious, vexatious or unnecessary expressions, includes criticism of the conduct of the person against whom it is directed, even if such criticism is unsavoury and may annoy, disturb or disgust.
The rights to freedom of expression and information are essential as a guarantee for the formation of free public opinion. This is a requirement for pluralism, tolerance and a spirit of openness, without which there can be no democratic society.
This is the conclusion reached by the court of the Fourteenth Section of the Provincial Court of Madrid in its appeal ruling, which overturned the lower court’s decision, acquitting the associations Citizens Commission on Human Rights International (CCHR) – registered in California, USA – and the Citizens Commission on Human Rights of Spain (CCDH) – registered in Spain (both of the Church of Scientology) of the accusation of unlawful interference with the honour of Spanish psychiatrists.
“Church whose axis revolves around Dianetics, which is considered to be a true science of mental health distinct from psychiatry, against which it has fought, and by the psychiatrist Thomas Szasz who was professor emeritus of psychiatry at Syracuse University in New York; recognised critic of the moral and scientific foundations of psychiatry and one of the leading figures of anti-psychiatry“, says the court ruling, dated 10 February, to which Confilegal has had access.
According to the magistrates (judges) María del Rosario Campesino Temprano, Juan Uceda Ojeda -rapporteur- and Jesús Alemany Eguidazu, the Spanish Society of Psychiatry (SEP), the plaintiff, is obliged to bear the criticisms made against it, however harsh they may be.
“We do not believe that we can accept that the right to honour should prevail when confronted with the right to freedom of expression in the field of health,” the court states in its ruling.
There has been, therefore, neither an illegitimate intrusion nor an injury to the honour of all psychiatrists who are members of the SEP, says the ruling of the Provincial Court of Madrid, as the SEP claimed.
Therefore, Article 20 of the Spanish Constitution must prevail over Article 18.
And it refers to the jurisprudence of the Spanish Constitutional Court contained in judgments 216/2013, of 19 December, and judgments of the Civil Chamber of the Spain Supreme Court 375/2013, of 5 June, 5/2014, of 14 January, and 423/2014, of 30 July.
The American association was represented by Professor of Procedural Law at the Carlos III University, Víctor Moreno Catena. The Spanish association was represented by lawyers Isabel Ayuso Puente and Gregorio Arroyo Hernánsanz. And the SEP by Carles Vendrell Cervantes, of Uría Menéndez.
Both associations had previously been condemned by the head of the 59th Court of First Instance of Madrid on 19 November 2021, who had ordered the banning of publications on the websites www.cchr.org and www.ccdh.es in which they harshly criticise psychiatrists.
The tribunal of the Madrid Provincial Court analyses the six articles which, according to the SEP, would support the alleged unlawful interference with the right to honour of all its members.
The first says that psychiatrists are psychopaths because their treatments damage the body and mind and degrade the person. They also claim that psychiatry is a pseudo-science that does not cure mental illness and that its treatments, often imposed without the consent of those concerned, seriously harm people.
“We consider that, in the context of the anti-psychiatric theories followed by the defendant entities, which we must assume is well known to all psychiatrists, the phrase referred to by the plaintiff association cannot harm the honour of the professionals and that, in any case, it would be protected by the right to freedom of expression,” says the ruling.
“Pharmaceutical companies rely on the authority of the experts of the mind. An authority that is false because an authority or expert solves problems of their profession, while these only cover up with their treatments the manifested symptoms. They put the consciousness of the person to sleep; either they depress it or excite it with powerful harmful drugs that force, like poisons, the body and the mind into deterioration.”.
The court seems to be very clear in its assessment: “Some of the phrases or expressions that are pointed out as offensive could imply that in the conduct of psychiatrists economic profit takes precedence over the curative and therapeutic purpose, but we do not believe that we can accept that the right to honour should prevail when confronted with the right to freedom of expression in the field of health“.
The third says of psychiatry that it is the story of a failure. “Psychiatrists continue to have a rather unfavourable reputation among medical colleagues; they are labelled as bumbling and second-rate” and “psychiatry is probably the most destructive force that has affected society in the last 60 years,” according to Edward Shorter and Dr Thomas Szasz.
The alleged offence, says the court, “stems from an undeniable assertion that forced and involuntary institutionalisation and treatment without the consent of the patients is still practised, and from statements made, as stated in the article itself, by the medical historian Edward Shorter in his book “A History of Psychiatry“, and by Thomas Szasz, one of the founders, as we have already said, of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights“.
“We find no reason to consider that this publication is an unlawful interference with the right to honour of SEP members,” he adds.
“We believe that the statements contained in the article are mere consequences or deductions of principles already defended by the various anti-psychiatry currents that exist and which we believe are well known to the members of the plaintiff association”.
Fourth article. “Our world caught up in drugs“. In the plaintiff’s opinion, the plaintiff’s honour is damaged when it is claimed that psychiatrists’ diagnoses are fraudulent and that they are intentionally used to ‘deceive’ people who are in perfectly good mental health, in order to be able to prescribe them psychiatric drugs“.
In this piece, as in the second of the publications dealt with by the three magistrates, “the work of psychiatrists is again criticised by denying them authority and the efficacy of their treatments and by the use of drugs to treat all kinds of so-called mental disorders which are on the increase and which have allowed an unacceptable extension of pharmaceutical products to different spheres and people“.
“If we can find words that could be considered offensive to some doctors by accusing them of a clear abandonment of the curative purpose, but from a reading of the whole article it can easily be seen that, perhaps using harsh and acid terms, it is all part of the criticism of the social disorders in all fields of life that, in the opinion of the author of the publication, are produced by the drugs. Again, we believe that the collision between fundamental rights should be tilted towards freedom of expression“, they stress.
The article again stresses the same theme, that the treatments with psychotropic drugs, which have been extended to general practitioners, cause serious addictive effects and the annihilation of the mental health, addictive effects and mental holocaust, with no appreciable results.
But the judges underline that it is addressed to primary care doctors, not psychiatrists, “so that no attack on the honour of SEP members can be seen“.
PSYCHIATRISTS CRITICISED FOR NOT COMPLYING WITH THE HIPPOCRATIC OATH
In the open letter to the students, it is pointed out that psychiatrists are also accused of not complying with the Hippocratic oath.
The medical doctor author of the article, a member of the Citizens’ Commission on Human Rights, explains the reasons why he considers that the speciality of psychiatry should not be chosen, as he considers that it lacks a scientific basis; the biological tests to prove a mental illness are merely collaborative, the diagnoses are fundamentally theoretical, they are not rigorously validated and have definitions that are too broad.
In this letter, the court refers, “we only observe a new criticism of psychiatry and the use of pills in its treatments, which should not surprise the plaintiff, knowing its origin, and we do not observe sentences or expressions that involve an obvious attack or illegitimate intrusion into the honour of psychiatrists, an attack that if it had existed would be duly protected by freedom of expression, as we have been referring to when analysing previous publications“.
The latest text, entitled “Psiquiatría, pseudociencia y sanidad púbica” (Psychiatry, pseudoscience and public health), authored by lawyer Luis de Miguel Ortega, is said to contain a set of insults and disqualifications directed against psychiatrists that should be considered “inadmissible”.
“The assertions contained in the article are mere consequences or deductions of principles already defended by the various anti-psychiatry currents that exist and which we believe are perfectly well known to the members of the plaintiff association”.
Sentences such as “Psychiatry serves as a social control machine that sometimes becomes an agent of social and political revenge“; “The psychiatrist is the one who, in an absolutely illegal way, sends a fax to the Court to request an involuntary commitment, for false reasons, without the necessary urgency, in the face of less restrictive measures and even for ego reasons such as ‘he has not come to my surgery for months‘”; or “There is an undetermined number of coercive abortions in Spain in the hands of psychiatrists who do not want citizens to see the catastrophe that happens to a child when it is born after having been suffering from the psychiatric medication taken by the mother“.
On what the court concludes: “We continue to believe that we are faced with a conflict in which freedom of expression must prevail, we think that the statements contained in the article are mere consequences or inferences of principles already defended by the various anti-psychiatry currents that exist and which we believe are perfectly well known to the members of the plaintiff association. Likewise, the most acidic and vexatious expressions are directly linked to the legitimate objective, which could be protected by freedom of expression“.
The costs are to be borne by the SEP, which can still appeal to the Supreme Court.
“Somalia faces many challenges, but in the spirit of Ramadan, I also bring a message of hope and renewal – the United Nations stands in solidarity with the Somali people.
“Let us come together to advance peace and security, sustainable development and human rights – and build a better future for all Somalis,” the UN chief said.
He was addressing a news conference in the Somali capital, Mogadishu, on the second and last day of his visit to Somalia.
On Tuesday, the Secretary-General met with Somalia’s President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud and members of his cabinet and advisors, visited internally displaced families in South West State on a trip to Baidoa, and met separately with civil society organisations and the heads of UN agencies, funds and programmes working in support of Somalis.
In his remarks at the news conference, the UN chief noted that despite severe challenges, the people of Somalia continued to demonstrate enormous strength and resilience.
“During the six years since my last visit, we have seen progress on peace, security and sustainable development. In my talks with President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud and the Government yesterday, we discussed how the United Nations system can continue to support Somalia in building on this positive momentum,” Mr. Guterres said.
“I commended the President’s efforts to advance peace and security, and highlighted the importance of strong collaboration with Federal [Member] States to address the threats posed by Al-Shabaab,” he added. “The United Nations is committed to supporting national and regional efforts to protect human rights and combat terrorism and violent extremism.”
The UN chief highlighted the support of the African Union Transition Mission in Somalia (ATMIS), a multidimensional mission that includes military, police and civilian components, and which is mandated by the UN Security Council to assist Somali security forces in their fight against the Al-Shabaab terrorist group.
Civil society’s vision
While in Mogadishu, the Secretary-General also met with representatives of Somali civil society organisations working in women’s affairs and empowerment, climate change, persons with disabilities, youth and marginalised groups.
He told media representatives he was “deeply inspired by their vision and energy.”
“A safe and inclusive civic space is essential to good governance and can help prevent and reduce violence. The full participation of Somalia’s women and young people in political life – including the constitutional review – is critical,” Mr. Guterres said.
“I welcome the Government’s commitment to women’s rights and representation and call for the full implementation and codification of the 30 per cent quota for women in elections.”
During Somalia’s last electoral process, completed in 2022, there had been a goal of achieving a minimum of 30 per cent women’s representation in the federal parliament.
In the end, women took up just 21 per cent of parliamentary seats, down from 24 per cent of parliamentary seats in the 2016/17 electoral processes. The United Nations has previously said that meeting the 30 per cent quota is an important first step to full representation and an inclusive society in Somalia.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres meets with representatives of Somali civil society organisations in Mogadishu.
Humanitarian crisis
The Secretary-General’s last visit to Somalia, in 2017, was during a large-scale humanitarian operation to prevent famine. His visit this year came as Somalia grapples with a devastating drought which led to the deaths of 43,000 people in 2022 alone.
Urgent assistance is needed for some 8.3 million Somalis, according to the UN humanitarian affairs coordination office (OCHA). The drought has displaced 1.4 million Somalis – with women and children making up 80 per cent of these people. Food prices are rising and aggravating hunger and malnutrition.
“Today, the situation is once again alarming. Climate change is causing chaos. Somalia has experienced five consecutive poor rainy seasons, and this is unprecedented… Poor and vulnerable communities are pushed by the drought to the brink of starvation, and the situation can get worse,” Mr. Guterres said.
Between now and June, some 6.5 million Somalis are expected to face high levels of acute food insecurity, and the risk of famine is looming.
‘We must act now’
“We must act now to prevent a catastrophe. Yesterday, I visited Baidoa, and spoke to families who have lost their livelihoods to drought and insecurity – I am deeply moved by their struggles. I was also impressed by their resilience, their courage and their determination to rebuild their lives, but they cannot do it alone,” Mr. Guterres said.
“I strongly appeal to donors to stand with Somalis in their time of need,” he continued. “The international community has the responsibility and the interest to support Somalia with the resources needed to defeat Al-Shabaab, to build resilience and to [stabilise] the areas liberated and to provide much needed humanitarian assistance.”
Underfunded response
Somalia’s 2023 Humanitarian Response Plan, put together by OCHA and its humanitarian partners, identifies the most critical humanitarian needs in the country, proposes a response plan and determines the budget needed to address them.
This year’s Plan seeks $2.6 billion. So far, its funding levels stand at around 15 per cent, or $347 million.
“When famine looms, this is totally unacceptable. The international community must step up and dramatically increase the volume of funds to support Somalia in this moment of difficulty,” Mr. Guterres said.
“It is unconscionable that Somalis, who have done almost nothing to create the climate crisis, are suffering its terrible impact – just as they are beginning to emerge from years of conflict and insecurity.”
The UN chief’s two-day visit to Somalia was part of his annual tradition of paying solidarity visits to Muslim countries during the Holy Month of Ramadan, during which he joins in observing the related fast, and sharing an Iftar meal.
Residents of the ADC camp for internally displaced people in Baidoa, Somalia, where Secretary-General António Guterres made a solidarity visit to Muslim countries during the Holy Month of Ramadan.
Until now, Serbia was the only European country refusing to support sanctions imposed on the Russian Federation due to its invasion of Ukraine. But classified documents revealed through an intelligence information leak tell a new story.
Serbian T-72 main battle tank with modernization pack – illustrative photo. Image credit: Srđan Popović via Wikimedia, CC BY-SA 3.0
This information has been revealed when a large number of U.S. official documents have been posted online in a couple of last weeks. The leak is already classified as one of the most serious U.S. security breaches in recent history.
Serbia did not confirm these statements. The country’s Defense Minister Milos Vucevic said today that the intelligence information is not true.
“Serbia did not, nor will it be selling weapons to the Ukrainian nor the Russian side, nor to countries surrounding that conflict,” Milos Vucevic commented on the current situation.
The Pentagon document titled “Europe|Response to Ongoing Russia-Ukraine Conflict” presents the “assessed positions” of 38 European governments depicting their response to Ukraine’s requests for military assistance. Information is presented in a chart form.
The document dated March 2 says that Serbia committed to sending military assistance to Ukraine and is willing to continue providing weapons to Ukraine in the future. The country, however, did not agree to provide training to Ukrainian forces.
Serbia had repeatedly condemned the war and the Russian aggression, but this may be the first time this country decided to unequivocally support Ukraine.
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Researchers have completed the most advanced brain map to date, that of an insect, a landmark achievement in neuroscience that brings scientists closer to true understanding of the mechanism of thought.
A diagram depicting brain connectivity, where neurons are represented as points. Image credit: Johns Hopkins University/University of Cambridge
The team, led by researchers at Johns Hopkins University and the University of Cambridge, produced a detailed diagram, or connectome, tracing every neural connection in the brain of a larval fruit fly, an archetypal scientific model with brains comparable to humans.
The U.S. National Science Foundation-supported work, likely to underpin future brain research and to inspire new machine learning architectures, appears in the journal Science.
Mapping fruit fly brain
“If we want to understand who we are and how we think, part of that is understanding the mechanism of thought,” said senior author Joshua Vogelstein of Johns Hopkins. “And the key to that is knowing how neurons connect with each other.”
The team’s connectome of a fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, is the most complete as well as the most expansive map of an entire insect brain ever completed. It includes 3,016 neurons and every connection between them: 548,000. Vogelstein said that “everything has been working up to this.”
Even with the best modern technology, mapping whole brains is difficult and extremely time-consuming. Getting a complete cellular-level picture of a brain requires slicing the brain into hundreds or thousands of individual tissue samples, all of which have to be imaged with electron microscopes before the painstaking process of reconstructing all those pieces, neuron by neuron, into a full, accurate portrait of a brain.
The researchers chose the fruit fly larva because, for an insect, the species shares much of its fundamental biology with humans, including a comparable genetic foundation. It also has rich learning and decision-making behaviors, making it a useful model organism in neuroscience. And for practical purposes, its relatively compact brain can be imaged and its circuits reconstructed in a reasonable timeframe.
The team charted every neuron and every connection, and categorized each neuron by the role it plays in the brain. They found that the brain’s busiest circuits were those that led to and away from neurons of the learning center.
The methods developed are applicable to any brain connectome project, and their code is available to whomever attempts to map an even larger animal brain, Vogelstein said, adding that despite the challenges, scientists are expected to take on the mouse, possibly within the next decade.
“Having connectomes, such as the fly brain connectome developed here, for diverse organisms will open the brain up to everyone — schoolchildren, citizen scientists, researchers and others curious about the inner workings of the brain,” said Edda Thiels, a program director in NSF’s Division of Biological Infrastructure.
When mice are exposed to chronically low levels of oxygen, their metabolism is altered.
Compared to those who live at sea level, the 2 million people worldwide who live above an elevation of 4,500 meters (14,764 feet) — about the height of Mount Rainier, Mount Whitney, and many Colorado and Alaska peaks — have lower rates of metabolic diseases, such as diabetes, coronary artery disease, hypercholesterolemia, and obesity.
A team of scientists in Isha Jain’s lab showed how chronically low oxygen levels, such as those experienced at 4,500 meters of elevation, rewire how mice burn sugars and fats.
The work of U.S. National Science Foundation-supported researchers at Gladstone Institutes has shed new light on this phenomenon.
The scientists showed that exposure to chronically low oxygen levels, such as those experienced at high elevations, rewired how mice burn sugars and fats. The results, published in the journal Cell Metabolism, help explain the metabolic differences of people who live at high altitudes and could lead to new treatments for metabolic disease.
“When an organism is exposed to chronically low levels of oxygen, different organs reshuffle their fuel sources and their energy-producing pathways,” says Isha Jain, senior author of the new study. “We hope these findings will help us identify metabolic switches that might benefit metabolism even outside of low-oxygen environments.”
At sea level, where a third of the world’s population lives, oxygen makes up about 21% of our air. But people who live above 4,500 meters, where oxygen makes up just 11% of the air, can adapt to the shortage of oxygen — known as hypoxia — and thrive.
Researchers studying the impact of hypoxia have usually carried out their research in isolated cells or in cancerous tumors, which often lack oxygen. Jain’s group wanted a better look at how long-term hypoxia impacts organs throughout the body.
Jain and colleagues at Gladstone and the University of California, San Francisco, housed adult mice in pressure chambers containing 21%, 11% or 8% oxygen — all levels humans and mice can survive. Over three weeks, the researchers observed the animals’ behavior, monitored their temperature, carbon dioxide levels and blood glucose, and used positron emission tomography (PET) scans to study how different organs consumed nutrients and what is the level of their metabolism.
In the first days of hypoxia, the mice living in 11% or 8% oxygen moved around less, spending hours completely still. However, by the end of the third week, their movement patterns had returned to normal.
Similarly, carbon dioxide levels in their blood — which usually decrease when mice or humans breathe faster to try to get more oxygen — initially decreased but returned to normal levels by the end of the three weeks.
The animals’ metabolism, however, seemed more permanently altered by the hypoxia. For animals housed in the hypoxic cages, blood glucose levels and body weight both dropped, and neither returned to pre-hypoxic levels.
These metabolism changes mirror those in humans who live at high altitudes, and are associated with a lower risk of diseases, including cardiovascular disease. Understanding how hypoxia contributes could lead to new drugs that mimic these beneficial effects.
Simulating solar flares on a scale the size of a banana, researchers at Caltech have parsed out the process by which these massive explosions blast potentially harmful energetic particles and X-rays into the cosmos.
NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory captured this image of a solar flare on Oct. 2, 2014. The solar flare is the bright flash of light at top. A burst of solar material erupting out into space can be seen just to the right of it. Image Credit: NASA/SDO
Corona loops are arches of plasma that protrude from the surface of the sun, aligned along magnetic field lines. The magnetic field lines act like highways for charged particles, guiding the motion of the electrons and ions that comprise plasma.
The loops, which may project 100,000 kilometers above the sun’s surface, can persist for minutes to hours. The loops usually grow and evolve slowly but sometimes can abruptly blast a tremendous amount of energy—billions of times stronger than the most powerful nuclear explosion on Earth—into space. This sudden blast of energy is called a solar flare.
A simulated corona loop in the Bellan Lab.
Some of the energy in the flare takes the form of charged particles and “hard X-rays,” which are high-energy electromagnetic waves like those used to image bones in a doctor’s office.
The Earth’s own magnetic field and atmosphere act as a shield that protects life on the surface from getting cooked by these torrents of energy, but they have been known to disrupt communications and power grids. They also pose an ongoing threat to spacecraft and astronauts in space.
While the fact that solar flares generate energetic particles and X-ray bursts has long been known, scientists are only starting to piece together the mechanism by which they do so.
Structural similarities between an actual solar flare (top) and one simulated in the Bellan lab (below). Credit: Bellan Lab
Researchers have two options for deciphering how and why the loops form and change. The first is to observe the sun and hope to capture the phenomenon in sufficiently fine detail to yield relevant information. The second is to simulate the loops in a lab. Caltech’s Paul Bellan, professor of applied physics, chose the latter.
In a lab on the first floor of the Thomas J. Watson, Sr., Laboratories of Applied Physics on Caltech’s campus, Bellan built a vacuum chamber with twin electrodes inside. To simulate the phenomenon, he charged a capacitor with enough energy to run the City of Pasadena for a few microseconds, then discharged it through the electrodes to create a miniature solar corona loop.
Each loop lasts about 10 microseconds, and has a length of about 20 centimeters (cm) and a diameter of about 1 cm. But structurally, Bellan’s loops are identical to the real thing, offering he and his colleagues the opportunity to simulate and study them at will.
“Each experiment consumes about as much energy as it takes to run a 100-watt lightbulb for about a minute, and it takes just a couple minutes to charge the capacitor up,” says Bellan, the senior author of a new paper on solar flares that published in Nature Astronomy.
Bellan captures each loop with a camera capable of taking 10 million frames per second, and he then studies the resulting images.
Among the recent discoveries are that solar corona loops do not appear to be a single structure, but rather are composed of fractally braided strands akin to a large rope.
“If you dissect a piece of rope, you see that it’s made up of braids of individual strands,” says Yang Zhang, graduate student and lead author of the Nature Astronomy paper.
“Pull those individual strands apart, and you’ll see that they’re braids of even smaller strands, and so on. Plasma loops appear to work the same way.”
That structure, it turns out, is important to the generation of energetic particles and X-ray bursts associated with solar flares. Plasma is a strong electrical conductor—think of neon signs, which are filled with plasma and light up when electricity passes through.
However, when too much current tries to pass through a solar corona loop, the structure is compromised. The loop develops a kink—a corkscrew-shaped instability—and individual strands start to break. Each new broken strand then dumps strain onto the remaining ones.
“Like an elastic band stretched too tight, the loop gets longer and skinnier until the strands just snap,” says Seth Pree, postdoctoral scholar research associate in applied physics and materials science, and co-author of the Nature Astronomy paper.
Studying the process microsecond by microsecond, the team noted a negative voltage spike associated with an X-ray burst at the exact instant a strand broke. This voltage spike is akin to the pressure drop that builds up at the point of constriction in a water pipe. The electric field from this voltage spike accelerates charged particles to extreme energy, then X-rays are emitted when the energetic particles decelerate.
In addition, Zhang combed through pictures of solar flares and was able to document a kink instability similar to the one created in the lab that was associated with a subsequent X-ray burst.
Next, the team plans to explore how separate plasma loops can merge and reorganize into different configurations. They are interested to learn if there are also energy burst events during this type of interaction.
Doctor performing a surgery – illustrative photo. Image credit: Jafar Ahmed via Unsplash, free license
Lymphomatoid granulomatosis is a rare precancerous condition triggered by Epstein-Barr virus infection. Left untreated, the disease can progress to a high-grade form, which has a poorer prognosis and can quickly turn into an aggressive and fatal B-cell lymphoma.
Treatment with interferon alfa-2b led to the disappearance of a large lesion (top image) in the lungs of a patient with lymphomatoid granulomatosis, as shown in this computed tomography chest scan. Image credit: Center for Cancer Research
In the phase 2 trial, led by researchers in the Center for Cancer Research at the National Cancer Institute (NCI), part of NIH, patients treated with interferon alfa-2b lived for a median of about 20 years.
By contrast, past studies reported a median survival of less than two years for people with lymphomatoid granulomatosis.
The findings suggest that immunotherapy can prevent the progression of low-grade disease to high-grade disease. The results were published in Lancet Haematology.
“We have shown in this rare disorder that using a novel immunotherapy-based approach for low-grade disease is effective and improves survival compared with historical treatments such as chemotherapy and corticosteroids,” said Christopher J. Melani, M.D., of NCI’s Center for Cancer Research, who co-led the study.
“I think the results of this study represent a significant contribution to determining the standard-of-care treatment for this rare disease.”
Lymphomatoid granulomatosis causes an overproduction of white blood cells known as B lymphocytes. Patients typically have lesions in the lungs, central nervous system, skin, liver, and kidneys.
Symptoms can include cough, shortness of breath, fever, weight loss, and fatigue. Chemotherapy is currently the standard treatment for people with high-grade disease, but there is no standard treatment for low-grade disease.
“Although lymphomatoid granulomatosis is uncommon, the effects of high-grade disease can be debilitating,” said Jeffrey Cohen, M.D., chief of the Laboratory of Infectious Diseases at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a co-leader of the study.
“We need better ways to prevent the disease from progressing to this more severe state, such as interferon alfa-2b.”
NIH researchers have been studying lymphomatoid granulomatosis since the 1980s. In the early 1990s, Wyndham Wilson, M.D., Ph.D., also of NCI’s Center for Cancer Research, hypothesized that low-grade disease results from a defective immune response to the Epstein-Barr virus and could therefore be treated with immunotherapy, whereas high-grade disease requires chemotherapy to curb uncontrolled cell growth.
He and his colleagues treated four people with low-grade lymphomatoid granulomatosis with interferon alfa-2b over a 5-year period, and the treatment eradicated all signs of the disease in three of those patients, known as a complete remission.
That study laid the foundation for the phase 2 trial of interferon alfa-2b in lymphomatoid granulomatosis, which has taken 30 years to complete because of the rarity of the disease and the challenges of recruiting enough patients for the study.
“This really illustrates the unique ability of NIH to do a study like this that nobody else could do and no one else ever has done for this particular disease,” said Dr. Wilson, who co-led the study.
The trial included 67 people with lymphomatoid granulomatosis, 37 with low-grade disease and 30 with high-grade disease. In all cases, the participants had not yet been treated for the disease or their disease had not responded to or had returned after other treatments.
During their initial treatment, most of the patients with low-grade disease received subcutaneous injections of interferon alfa-2b three times a week in increasing doses for about one year. Most of the patients with high-grade disease were given six cycles of intravenous chemotherapy every three weeks.
Both groups improved, with the disease disappearing in 27 of 44 patients (61%) treated with interferon alfa-2b, and 8 of 17 patients (47%) treated with chemotherapy.
After their initial treatment, some patients subsequently received the other therapy, called crossover treatment.
Patients with low-grade disease that worsened after immunotherapy were given chemotherapy, whereas patients with high-grade disease that came back after chemotherapy were given interferon alfa-2b. Previous work showed that after high-grade disease is eliminated with chemotherapy, low-grade disease can re-emerge.
The crossover treatments were also effective, with the disease disappearing in 4 of 8 patients (50%) treated with interferon alfa-2b after chemotherapy and 7 of 15 patients (47%) treated with chemotherapy after interferon alfa-2b.
Median overall survival was 20.6 years for patients treated initially with interferon alfa-2b and 19.8 years for patients who crossed over to receive interferon alfa-2b. Median overall survival was 12.1 years for patients treated initially with chemotherapy and not reached for those who crossed over to receive chemotherapy.
The most common side effect of interferon alfa-2b treatment was low white blood cell count, and the most common side effects with chemotherapy were low white blood cell count and infection. Serious side effects occurred in only a quarter of the patients treated with interferon alfa-2b, compared with nearly two-thirds of patients treated with chemotherapy.
Many newer immunotherapies, such as nivolumab, could potentially be used to treat low-grade lymphomatoid granulomatosis and other Epstein-Barr virus–associated disorders and may have fewer side effects.
“The trial of interferon alfa-2b established that immunotherapy improves survival in patients with low-grade lymphomatoid granulomatosis,” Dr. Melani said. “Now we can look into more novel immunotherapies that are easier to tolerate to see if they can improve on the efficacy of our current treatment.”
To understand how to get artificial intelligence right, we need to know how it can go wrong, says researcher.
Artificial intelligence – artistic concept. Image credit: Icons8 Team via Unsplash, free license
Artificial intelligence is touted as a panacea for almost every computational problem these days, from medical diagnostics to driverless cars to fraud prevention.
Glaser cites Microsoft’s Tay as one example of bad outcomes. When the chatbot was introduced on Twitter in 2016, it was revoked within 24 hours after trolls taught it to spew racist language.
Then there was the “robodebt” scandal of 2015, when the Australian government used AI to identify overpayments of unemployment and disability benefits. But the algorithm presumed every discrepancy reflected an overpayment and automatically sent notification letters demanding repayment. The case was forwarded to a debt collector if someone didn’t respond.
By 2019, the program identified over 734,000 overpayments worth two billion Australian dollars (C$1.8 billion).
“The idea was that by eliminating human judgment, which is shaped by biases and personal values, the automated program would make better, fairer and more rational decisions at much lower cost,” says Glaser.
But the human consequences were dire, he says. Parliamentary reviews found “a fundamental lack of procedural fairness” and called the program “incredibly disempowering to those people who had been affected, causing significant emotional trauma, stress and shame,” including at least two suicides.
While AI promises to bring enormous benefits to society, we are now also beginning to see its dark underbelly, says Glaser. In a recent Globe and Mail column, Lawrence Martin points out AI’s dystopian possibilities, including autonomous weapons that can fire without human supervision, cyberattacks, deepfakes and disinformation campaigns. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt has warned that AI could quite easily be used to construct killer biological weapons.
Glaser roots his analysis in French philosopher Jacques Ellul’s notion of “technique,” offered in his 1954 book The Technological Society, by which the imperatives of efficiency and productivity determine every field of human activity.
“Ellul was very prescient,” says Glaser. “His argument is that when you’re going through this process of technique, you are inherently stripping away values and creating this mechanistic world where your values essentially get reduced to efficiency.
“It doesn’t matter whether it’s AI or not. AI in many ways is perhaps only the ultimate example of it.”
A principled approach to AI
Glaser suggests adherence to three principles to guard against the “tyranny of technique” in AI. First, recognize that because algorithms are mathematical, they rely on “proxies,” or digital representations of real phenomena.
One way Facebook gauges friendship, for example, is by how many friends a user has, or by the number of likes received on posts from friends.
“Is that really a measure of friendship? It’s a measure of something, but whether it’s actually friendship is another matter,” says Glaser, adding that the intensity, nature, nuance and complexity of human relationships can easily be overlooked.
“When you’re digitizing phenomena, you’re essentially representing something as a number. And when you get this kind of operationalization, it’s easy to forget it’s a stripped-down version of whatever the broader concept is.”
For AI designers, Glaser recommends strategically inserting human interventions into algorithmic decision-making, and creating evaluative systems that account for multiple values.
“There’s a tendency when people implement algorithmic decision-making to do it once and then let it go,” he says, but AI that embodies human values requires vigilant and continuous oversight to prevent its ugly potential from emerging.
In other words, AI simply reflects who we are — at our best and worst. The latter could take over without a good, hard look in the mirror.
“We want to make sure we understand what’s going on, so the AI doesn’t manage us,” he says. “It’s important to keep the dark side in mind. If we can do that, it can be a force for social good.”
