Are we ready? Understanding just how big solar flares can get

Recasting the iconic Carrington Event as just one of many superstorms in Earth’s past, scientists reveal the potential for even more massive, and potentially destructive, eruptions from the sun

By Christopher Crockett

On May 1, 2019, the star next door erupted.

In a matter of seconds, Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to our sun, got thousands of times brighter than usual — up to 14,000 times brighter in the ultraviolet range of the spectrum. The radiation burst was strong enough to split any water molecules that might exist on the temperate, Earth-sized planet orbiting that star; repeated blasts of that magnitude might have stripped the planet of any atmosphere.

It would be bad news if the Earth’s sun ever got so angry.

But the sun does have its moments — most famously, in the predawn hours of September 2, 1859. At that time, a brilliant aurora lit up the planet, appearing as far south as Havana. Folks in Missouri could read by its light, while miners sleeping outdoors in the Rocky Mountains woke up and, thinking it was dawn, started making breakfast. “The whole of the northern hemisphere was as light as though the sun had set an hour before,” the Times of London reported a few days later.

Meanwhile, telegraph networks went haywire. Sparks flew from equipment — some of which caught on fire — and operators in Boston and Portland, Maine, yanked telegraph cables from batteries but kept transmitting, powered by the electrical energy surging through the Earth.

The events of that Friday evoked biblical descriptions. “The hands of angels shifted the glorious scenery of the heavens,” reported the Cincinnati Daily Commercial. The actual impetus was a bit more prosaic: The skies had been set ablaze by an enormous blob of electrically charged gas, shot out from the sun following a flash of light known as a solar flare.

Such a blob — a tangle of plasma and magnetic fields — is known as a coronal mass ejection. Upon arrival at Earth, such an ejection can trigger the most ferocious of geomagnetic storms. The 1859 storm, named the Carrington Event for the scientist who witnessed the flare that preceded it, has long been upheld as the most powerful wallop that the sun has ever delivered.

But in recent years, research has indicated that the Carrington Event was just a taste of what the sun can throw at us. Tree rings and ice cores encode echoes of dramatically stronger solar storms in the distant past. And other stars, such as Proxima Centauri, show that even the most energetic documented solar outbursts pale in comparison with what is possible.

Nevertheless, the Carrington Event offers important clues to what the sun might have in store for Earth in the future, solar physicist Hugh Hudson writes in the 2021 Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics. “Danger lurks for humanity’s technological assets, especially those in space,” writes Hudson, of the University of Glasgow. In the wake of a Carrington-like event today, entire power grids could shut down and GPS satellites could be knocked offline.

Understanding just how severe solar storms can be provides insights into what the universe may sling our way — and maybe how to foretell the next one so that we’re better prepared when it happens.

Anatomy of a flare

Roughly 18 hours before the 1859 event brightened Earth’s skies, an English astronomer noticed something strange on the surface of the sun.

While working in his observatory, Richard Carrington saw two brilliant points of light emerge from among a clutch of dark sunspots and vanish within five minutes. Another English astronomer, Richard Hodgson, saw the same thing, noting that it was as if the brilliant star Vega had appeared on the sun. At the same time, compass-like needles at England’s Kew Observatory twitched, a hint of the magnetic storm about to ensue.

Before then, no one knew about solar flares — mostly because no one was tracking sunspots every clear day the way Carrington was. Decades would pass before astronomers and physicists could unravel the physics of solar flares and their impact on Earth.

A solar flare is an eruption on the sun, a sudden flash of light — usually near a sunspot — that can release as much energy as roughly 10 billion 1-megaton nuclear bombs. The trigger is a sudden, localized release of pent-up magnetic energy that blasts out radiation across the entire electromagnetic spectrum, from radio waves to gamma rays.

Many solar flares, though not all, are accompanied by a coronal mass ejection, a massive chunk of the sun’s hot gas blown into space along with a tangle of magnetic fields. Billions of tons of sun stuff can billow out into the solar system, crossing the 150 million kilometers to Earth’s orbit in anywhere from about 14 hours to a few days. 

Most solar eruptions miss our planet by a wide margin. But occasionally, one gets aimed right at Earth. And that’s when things can get interesting.

About eight minutes after a solar flare, its light reaches Earth in a flash of visible light. That’s also when a spike in ultraviolet light and X-rays sprays the upper atmosphere, causing a slight magnetic disturbance at the surface. That was the twitch the magnetic instruments at the Kew sensed in 1859.

The coronal mass ejection can trigger a geomagnetic storm when it encounters the magnetic field that envelops Earth. The disturbance to the magnetic field induces electrical currents to course through conductors, including wires and even the planet itself. At the same time, high-speed charged particles spewed by the sun crash into atoms in the upper atmosphere, lighting up the aurora.

The 1859 flare has long been, and remains, a standout in its energy and effects on Earth. Comparably powerful solar eruptions are often referred to as “Carrington events.” But it does not stand alone.

“It’s oftentimes described as the most intense storm ever recorded,” says Jeffrey Love, a geophysicist at the US Geological Survey in Denver. “That’s possibly not exactly true, but it certainly is one of the two most intense storms.” Or three or four.

In May 1921, the sun dealt our planet a geomagnetic storm on par with the Carrington Event. As in 1859, a brilliant aurora appeared well beyond the polar regions. Telegraph and telephone systems broke down, with some sparking destructive fires.

And just 13 years after Carrington spied his eponymous flare, another solar storm came along that by some measures may have topped it. “It looks now, based on aurora and sparse magnetometer measurements, that an event in 1872 was probably larger than the Carrington Event,” says Ed Cliver, a solar physicist retired from the US Air Force.

These storms show that the Carrington Event wasn’t a “black swan,” Hudson says. If anything, the sun has been holding back in the modern era. Evidence from the more distant past points to a few solar storms that make the Carrington Event seem almost puny by comparison.

Forgotten flares

Trees have long memories. Each year of growth chronicles tidbits about environmental conditions at the time in concentric annual rings. From those rings researchers can reconstruct scenes from Earth’s past.

Some cedar trees in Japan recall a tsunami of atomic particles hurled from the sun around the year 775. Those trees recorded a significant uptick in carbon-14, a radioactive variant of carbon that trees absorb from the atmosphere. Carbon-14 emerges from run-ins between atmospheric nitrogen and cosmic rays — high-speed particles from space that pummel our planet daily. Some solar flares shower Earth with an excess of cosmic rays, which ramps up production of carbon-14. The change in carbon-14 levels recorded in 775 was about 20 times larger than the normal ebb and flow from the sun, researchers reported in 2012.

“The clear suggestion there was that super events could happen, because this was a factor of 10 — if it was a solar flare — a factor of 10 or 20 or more greater than the Carrington Event,” Hudson says.

A carbon-14 boost in tree rings showed signs of another sizable solar event in 994. Ice cores from Antarctica showed a corresponding increase, in both 994 and 775, of beryllium-10, another product of cosmic rays — adding more certainty to the tree ring findings.

Looking farther back in time, a study of ice cores suggests a third similar event around 660 BCE. And in August (in a paper still undergoing peer review), researchers reported two more  carbon-14 spikes in tree rings from around 7176 BCE and 5259 BCE, possibly on par with the 775 event.

It’s hard to directly compare these past storms with the Carrington Event, says Ilya Usoskin, a space physicist at the University of Oulu in Finland and a coauthor of the August study. The 1859 flare did not produce a particle downpour on Earth, so there are no carbon-14 counts to compare. But the 775 event appears to be one of the strongest solar particle storms recorded in the last 12,000 years, Usoskin says.

There is a catch, Hudson notes. Tree rings are laid down annually, so a few smaller flares within the span of several months might appear as one big event in the tree ring record.

But even then, any one of these smaller flares may still have been impressive. “Every one of those events would be at least on the order of three times as big as the Carrington Event in terms of its energy,” Cliver says.

That, however, is still modest compared with some other stars in our galaxy.

Super flares

If life does exist on the planet orbiting Proxima Centauri, it probably has a rough go of it.

“You really are looking at having something like a Carrington Event happening daily,” says Meredith MacGregor, an astrophysicist at the University of Colorado Boulder. Even stronger “super flares,” like the one she and colleagues spotted in 2019, may go off roughly every other day. Her team spotted that flare, possibly 100 times as powerful as the Carrington Event, after watching the star next door for just 40 hours.

With a near-constant barrage of flares, any atmosphere clinging to the rocky planet snuggled up close to the star would never have time to recover. “Yes, a Carrington Event [on Earth] would fry some electronics and would ruin GPS signals,” MacGregor says, “but it’s not going to destroy the habitability of our planet.”

To be clear, Proxima Centauri is not like the sun. It’s an M dwarf, a diminutive orb that glows red. And these tiny stars are famous for their oversized flares. But some sunlike stars can send up super flares as well.

This realization has come from telescopes in space designed to look for planets around other stars. NASA’s now-defunct Kepler telescope did this by looking for subtle dips in starlight as planets crossed in front of their suns.

Over four years, Kepler recorded 26 super flares — up to about 100 times as energetic as the Carrington Event — on 15 sunlike stars, researchers reported in January. NASA’s ongoing TESS mission, another space-based telescope hunting for exoplanets,  found a similar frequency of superflares on sunlike stars in its first year of operation.

The Kepler data imply that sunlike stars experience the most powerful of these flares roughly once every 6,000 years. Our sun’s most powerful eruption in that time span is an order of magnitude weaker — but could a super flare be in our future?

“I don’t think any theory has sufficient predictive capability to mean anything,” Hudson says. “The leading theory basically says that the bigger the sunspot, the greater the flare.” Sunspots mark where the sun’s magnetic field punches through its surface, preventing hot gas from bubbling up from below. The spot looks dark because it’s cooler than everything around it.

And that is one difference between the sun and its eruptive neighbors. Super flares seem to happen on stars with cool, dark spots far larger than ever appear on the sun. “Based on known spot areas, there would therefore be a limit,” Hudson says.

The intricacies of any star’s magnetic machinations — spots, flares, etc. — are still poorly understood, so tying all these observations into one cohesive story will take time. But the quest to understand all this might improve predictions about what to expect from the sun in the future.

Flares that are powerful enough to disrupt our power grid probably occur, on average, a few times a century, Love says. “Looking at 1859 kind of helps put it in perspective, because what’s happened in the space-age era, since 1957, has been more modest.” The sun hasn’t aimed a Carrington-like flare at us in quite a while. A repeat of 1859 in the 21st century could be disastrous.

Humanity is far more technologically dependent than it was in 1859. A Carrington-like event today could wreak havoc on power grids, satellites and wireless communication. In 1972, a solar flare knocked out long-distance telephone lines in Illinois, for example. In 1989, a flare blacked out most of Quebec province, cutting power to roughly 6 million people for up to nine hours. In 2005, a solar storm disrupted GPS satellites for 10 minutes.

The best prevention is prediction. Knowing that a coronal mass ejection is on its way could give operators time to safely reconfigure or shut down equipment to prevent it from being destroyed.

Building in extra resiliency could help as well. For the power grid, that could include adding in redundancy or devices that can drain off excess charge. Federal agencies could have a stock of mobile power transformers standing by, ready to deploy to areas where existing transformers — which have been known to melt in previous solar storms — have been knocked out. In space, satellites could be put into a safe mode while they wait out the storm.

The Carrington Event was not a one-off. It was just a sample of what the sun can do. If research into past solar flares has taught us anything, it’s that humanity shouldn’t be wondering if a similar solar storm could happen again. All we can wonder is when.

Lea en español

10.1146/knowable-091721-1

Christopher Crockett is a staff researcher for Knowable and a freelance science writer living in Arlington, Virginia. He is thankful for the sun but wouldn’t want to see it when it’s angry.

This article originally appeared in Knowable Magazine, an independent journalistic endeavor from Annual Reviews.

Secession is here: States, cities and the wealthy are already withdrawing from America

Acts of secession are happening across the U.S. Vector Illustration/Getty Images

Michael J. Lee, College of Charleston

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican from Georgia, wants a “national divorce.” In her view, another Civil War is inevitable unless red and blue states form separate countries.

She has plenty of company on the right, where a host of others – 52% of Trump voters, Donald Trump himself and prominent Texas Republicans – have endorsed various forms of secession in recent years. Roughly 40% of Biden voters have fantasized about a national divorce as well. Some on the left urge a domestic breakup so that a new egalitarian nation might be, as Lincoln said at Gettysburg, “brought forth on this continent.”

The American Civil War was a national trauma precipitated by the secession of 11 Southern states over slavery. It is, therefore, understandable that many pundits and commentators would weigh in about the legality, feasibility and wisdom of secession when others clamor for divorce.

But all this secession talk misses a key point that every troubled couple knows. Just as there are ways to withdraw from a marriage before any formal divorce, there are also ways to exit a nation before officially seceding.

I have studied secession for 20 years, and I think that it is not just a “what if?” scenario anymore. In “We Are Not One People: Secession and Separatism in American Politics Since 1776,” my co-author and I go beyond narrow discussions of secession and the Civil War to frame secession as an extreme end point on a scale that includes various acts of exit that have already taken place across the U.S.

GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene wants red and blue states to separate. Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

Scaled secession

This scale begins with smaller, targeted exits, like a person getting out of jury duty, and progresses to include the larger ways that communities refuse to comply with state and federal authorities.

Such refusals could involve legal maneuvers like interposition, in which a community delays or constrains the enforcement of a law it opposes, or nullification, in which a community explicitly declares a law to be null and void within its borders. At the end of the scale, there’s secession.

From this wider perspective, it is clear that many acts of departure – call them secession lite, de facto secession or soft separatism – are occurring right now. Americans have responded to increasing polarization by exploring the gradations between soft separatism and hard secession.

These escalating exits make sense in a polarized nation whose citizens are sorting themselves into like-minded neighbhorhoods. When compromise is elusive and coexistence is unpleasant, citizens have three options to get their way: Defeat the other side, eliminate the other side or get away from the other side.

Imagine a national law; it could be a mandate that citizens brush their teeth twice a day or a statute criminalizing texting while driving. Then imagine that a special group of people did not have to obey that law.

This quasi-secession can be achieved in several ways. Maybe this special group moves “off the grid” into the boondocks where they could text and drive without fear of oversight. Maybe this special group wields political power and can buy, bribe or lawyer their way out of any legal jam. Maybe this special group has persuaded a powerful authority, say Congress or the Supreme Court, to grant them unique legal exemptions.

These are hypothetical scenarios, but not imaginary ones. When groups exit public life and its civic duties and burdens, when they live under their own sets of rules, when they do not have to live with fellow citizens they have not chosen or listen to authorities they do not like, they have already seceded.

Schools to taxes

Present-day America offers numerous hard examples of soft separatism.

Over the past two decades, scores of wealthy white communities have separated from more diverse school districts. Advocates cite local control to justify these acts of school secession. But the result is the creation of parallel school districts, both relatively homogeneous but vastly different in racial makeup and economic background.

Several prominent district exits have occurred in the South – places like St. George, Louisiana – but instances from northern Maine to Southern California show that school splintering is happening nationwide.

As one reporter wrote, “If you didn’t want to attend school with certain people in your district, you just needed to find a way to put a district line between you and them.”

Many other examples of legalized separatism revolve around taxes. Disney World, for example, was classified as a “special tax district” in Florida in 1967. These special districts are functionally separate local governments and can provide public services and build and maintain their own infrastructure.

The company has saved millions by avoiding typical zoning, permitting and inspection processes for decades, although Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has recently challenged Disney’s special designation. Disney was only one of 1,800 special tax districts in Florida; there are over 35,000 in the nation.

Jeff Bezos paid no federal income taxes in 2011. Elon Musk paid almost none in 2018. Tales of wealthy individuals avoiding taxes are as common as stories of rich Americans buying their way out of jail. “Wealthier Americans,” Robert Reich lamented as far back as the early 1990s, “have been withdrawing into their own neighborhoods and clubs for generations.” Reich worried that a “new secession” allowed the rich to “inhabit a different economy from other Americans.”

Some of the nation’s wealthiest citizens pay an effective tax rate close to zero. As one investigative reporter put it, the ultrawealthy “sidestep the system in an entirely legal way.”

Spectators applaud after the Buckingham County Board of Supervisors unanimously votes to pass a Second Amendment sanctuary resolution at a meeting in Buckingham, Va., Dec. 9, 2019. AP Photo/Steve Helber

One nation, divisible

Schools and taxes are just a start.

Eleven states dub themselves “Second Amendment sanctuaries” and refuse to enforce federal gun restrictions. Movements aiming to carve off rural, more politically conservative portions of blue states are growing; 11 counties in Eastern Oregon support seceding and reclassifying themselves as “Greater Idaho,” a move that Idaho’s state government supports.

Hoping to become a separate state independent of Chicago’s political influence, over two dozen rural Illinois counties have passed pro-secession referendums. Some Texas Republicans back “Texit,” where the state becomes an independent nation.

Separatist ideas come from the Left, too.

“Cal-exit,” a plan for California to leave the union after 2016, was the most acute recent attempt at secession.

And separatist acts have reshaped life and law in many states. Since 2012, 21 states have legalized marijuana, which is federally illegal. Sanctuary cities and states have emerged since 2016 to combat aggressive federal immigration laws and policies. Some prosecutors and judges refuse to prosecute women and medical providers for newly illegal abortions in some states.

Estimates vary, but some Americans are increasingly opting out of hypermodern, hyperpolarized life entirely. “Intentional communities,” rural, sustainable, cooperative communes like East Wind in the Ozarks, are, as The New York Times reported in 2020, proliferating “across the country.”

In many ways, America is already broken apart. When secession is portrayed in its strictest sense, as a group of people declaring independence and taking a portion of a nation as they depart, the discussion is myopic, and current acts of exit hide in plain sight. When it comes to secession, the question is not just “What if?” but “What now?”

Michael J. Lee, Professor of Communication, College of Charleston

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

A Fresh, Flavorful Take on Family Dinner

(Culinary.net) If your family ever gets stuck in a dinner routine rut, it can feel like you’re eating the same recipes over and over again.

However, this fresh and unique recipe for Cuban Chicken with Salsa Fresca might inspire you to think outside the culinary box and give your family members the satisfactory flavor they desire at dinnertime. With fresh ingredients and a wholesome flavor, this meal is perfect to add to your dinner menu rotation.

The chicken is full of flavor and baked using multiple seasonings to create a Cuban-like taste. The salsa fresca, which is added on top of the chicken, is a tad sweet with grapefruit segments and juice, but also satisfying with jicama, onion, cilantro and jalapeno. It adds so much color to your plate, and all these flavors mash together for something unique and special.

To start, create the marinade for your chicken and let it rest to allow all those wonderful spices to do their jobs. Set it in the fridge for 30 minutes or more.

Next, it’s time to make the salsa fresca. Start by chopping red onion and jicama then add grapefruit and jalapeno to the mix. Add grapefruit juice, olive oil and, finally, cilantro. Stir well with a large spoon until everything is combined.

Once the chicken is baked, cut it and assemble. The final result is a juicy chicken breast with a sweet yet crisp salsa topping. The flavors in this dish harmonize together to bring you a bite you have likely never experienced before.  

This meal is also nutritious with fresh fruit and lean chicken, so it’s a meal almost anyone can enjoy, even if you’re on a healthy eating kick.

Find more recipes and family dinner ideas at Culinary.net.

Watch video to see how to make this recipe!

 

Cuban Chicken with Salsa Fresca

Servings: 5

• 1          cup grapefruit juice
• 2          tablespoons olive oil
• 2          teaspoons garlic powder
• 2          teaspoons cumin
• 2          teaspoons paprika
• 1          teaspoon crushed red pepper
• 1 1/4    pounds boneless, skinless chicken breasts

Salsa Fresca:

• 1          cup grapefruit segments
• 1/2       jicama, cubed
• 1/2       red onion, chopped
• 3/4       cup grapefruit juice
• 4          tablespoons olive oil
• 1/2       cup fresh cilantro, chopped
• 1          jalapeno pepper, chopped

1. Heat oven to 400 F.
2. In large bowl, mix grapefruit juice, oil, garlic powder, cumin, paprika and red pepper until combined. Add chicken to bowl and turn to coat. Refrigerate 30 minutes or longer.
3. To make salsa fresca: In medium bowl, mix grapefruit segments, jicama, red onion, grapefruit juice, olive oil, cilantro and jalapeno pepper until combined. Refrigerate until ready to serve.
4. Remove chicken from marinade. Place chicken in baking dish. Bake 25-30 minutes until chicken is cooked through.
5. Serve chicken with salsa fresca.

SOURCE:
Culinary.net

A new history for the tropical forests of the Americas

Fossilized leaves and pollen are revealing the evolutionary past of New World tropical forests. The findings are helping to reshape predictions of what might happen to these ecosystems as the climate changes.

By Pablo Correa

In northern Colombia, in a semi-desert region that juts into the Caribbean Sea, its dusty roads traveled by the Wayúu people with their blankets and colorful backpacks, is Cerrejón — one of the largest open-pit coal mines in the world. Excavated for more than 30 years, its huge craters and twisted paths down which the trucks descend give the impression of a tropical hell.

But for the trained eyes of Carlos Jaramillo, that hell is a paradise he always dreamed of finding. There, while working for the Colombian Petroleum Institute more than 20 years ago, Jaramillo, a paleontologist and pollen expert, began with other colleagues to unearth the lost history of the Neotropical forests of the Americas — and to challenge some of the paradigms of paleontology.

Fossil after fossil, these scientists have been reconstructing a history that was thought to be impossible to discover. “For many years, it was believed that almost no fossils had been preserved in the tropics because of the high rates of weathering — the decomposition of minerals and rocks — and, if they did exist, it would be very difficult to find them because of the current forest cover,” says Jaramillo, now a researcher at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama.

While the geology textbooks that Jaramillo and his colleagues learned from said that tropical forests, just like temperate forests, had remained more or less stable in their plant composition for at least 120 million years, recent palaeobotanical findings suggest a very different story.

For the entire Cenozoic, the current geological era that began some 66 million years ago with the meteorite impact that wiped out dinosaurs and many of the planet’s other species, “the climate and geology of the Neotropics have been far from stable,” note ecologist Christopher W. Dick and botanist R. Toby Pennington in a review of the history and geography of Neotropical tree diversity in the 2019 Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics. In addition to the meteorite impact, which marked a before and after in this ecosystem, the rise of the Isthmus of Panama, the formation of the Amazon River and the uplift of the northern Andes, for example, have profoundly influenced the region’s climate, species formation and migration.

But the precise association between these events is unclear. The pieces of that story are what a new generation of scientists has set out to find.

Messages within the pollen

A key piece in reconstructing the history of tropical forests has to do with pollen grains, which contain the male sex cells of most plants and trees; these function like nature’s clock. They are so tiny that, to study them under the microscope, some paleobotanists like to use cat’s whiskers to manipulate them. The wall that covers a pollen grain is quite resistant to temperature changes, helping its preservation for millions of years inside the rocks. And the pollen is so abundant that, although most of it is destroyed, some remains in the geological layers, waiting for a palynologist to set eyes on it. Its virtues do not end there. The shape of pollen is so diverse — circular, triangular, hexagonal, with tiny spikes or warts — that it is equivalent to a fingerprint for plants.

The first fossil signs of the evolution of tropical flora came from the work of palynologists who, in the second half of the 20th century, traveled the Neotropics alongside oil explorers. Their pollen samples and classifications, which helped them to identify potential oil exploration sites, remained far from the gaze of other scientists due to commercial interests.

One of Jaramillo’s studies, together with paleobotanist Paula Mejía Velásquez, now with Leeward Community College in Hawaii, consisted of reviewing two such cores. Drilled by ExxonMobil in the region of Los Mangos, the samples remained ignored for decades in the National Rock Library of the Colombian Petroleum Institute. The cores, some 600 to 700 meters long, contained a pollen chronology that spanned the early Cretaceous, some 120 million years ago, to the present. And within them, the scientists found a powerful reason to continue their research into that remote past: The flowering plants, or angiosperms, which today comprise more than 96 percent of the Neotropical forest, were less than 7 percent at the beginning of the Cretaceous.

“There, I had a logical place to start,” Jaramillo says. “The story I wanted to study is how we went from an ecosystem where there were almost no angiosperms to a forest with 96 percent angiosperms. That is the story of a fundamental change in an ecosystem.”

It is easy to forget how crucial flowering plants are to the survival of so many animal species, including us, wrote paleobotanist Peter Crane, former director of the Field Museum in Chicago and the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in London, in 2010: “Angiosperms provide the energy on which most of the rest of biological diversity depends. The evolution of flowers and flowering plants is therefore both of fundamental significance and of contemporary relevance.”

Charles Darwin himself, in a very famous letter to his friend Joseph Hooker, described the relatively late and apparently sudden appearance of flowering plants as “an abominable mystery.” This abrupt arrival was contrary to his postulates on evolution, according to which changes occurred gradually. In the letter written in July 1879, three years before his death, he commented that he would “like to see this whole problem solved.”

Around 2002, when Jaramillo was working for the Colombian Petroleum Institute, a pair of fossil-loving geology students, Fabiany Herrera and Edwin Cadena — more enthusiastic than well-trained in paleontology — joined the fossil hunt to help unravel the whole story of the Neotropical forests’ past.

Herrera, now assistant curator of paleobotany at the Field Museum, followed Jaramillo’s advice and traveled to Cerrejón to look for a ghost: fossil leaves from the early Cenozoic. In pits up to 2 kilometers in diameter that had been abandoned by the miners, with a geological hammer in hand, smashing one rock after another, Herrera unearthed a palaeobotanical treasure trove: more than 2,000 fossil plants.

Cadena, the other student who had joined the adventure, turned his attention to other residents of those archaic forests. Cerrejón held many hidden surprises: fossils of turtles, crocodiles and giant snakes. In 2009, for example, the remains of a snake measuring 12.8 meters and weighing approximately 1,135 kilograms were discovered there. Named Titanoboa cerrejonensis, it crawled through these ecosystems some 58 million to 60 million years ago, according to the report on the discovery published in Nature. Fossils of these and other animals offer clues about the conditions in these past habitats.

“My role has been to understand how animals, particularly reptiles, relate to these ecosystems and to validate the conditions of temperature, precipitation and other characteristics that we deduce,” explains Cadena, a paleontologist at the Rosario University in Bogota. For example, in the case of a snake like the Titanoboa, its size would require a minimum average annual temperature of 30 to 34 degrees Celsius to survive.

“That feeling of hopelessness, that in the Tropics nothing is preserved, that we would not find the fossils we needed, began to disappear with the visits to Cerrejón,” says Jaramillo.

In the decades that followed, other researchers joined the effort to rewrite the history of Neotropical forests. The exploration sites also expanded: Magdalena River Valley, the Ecuadorian and Colombian Amazon, central Peru, and parts of Argentina and Chile. In 2009, when the Panama Canal expansion began, the researchers took advantage of this new window into the geological depths to continue gathering clues to the past of the forests.

The great impact

The fossil evidence that Jaramillo and his colleagues have collected over three decades, at some 50 sites in the Tropics, is providing a better understanding of how and when these cathedrals of biodiversity — the most species-diverse ecological communities in the world — were formed. It has also made it possible to outline how the varieties of plant and animal species has changed; and how they transformed and reacted to the great extinction caused 66 million years ago by the impact of a meteorite in the Yucatan Peninsula that left the Chicxulub crater. With the power of close to a billion bombs of the size dropped on Hiroshima, it led to the extinction of about 76 percent of all marine species and 40 percent of the genera present on the planet at that time.

What were the forests like before and after that impact, a chapter of history known to geologists as the K/Pg boundary, the boundary between the Cretaceous and the Paleogene?

Analysis of 6,000 fossil leaves and 50,000 pollen grains collected from 46 sites — including, of course, Cerrejón, as well as coal mines in central Colombia and the Amazon — have revealed a snapshot of forests 66 million years ago.

In those forests where dinosaurs roamed, a more equitable community of plants lived together. The space was distributed among ferns (50 percent), flowering plants (40 percent) and trees such as araucarias and conifers. The flora did not form the tangled, layered structure of the Neotropical forests today. Light filtered down to the ground, unblocked by the jungle canopy we see today, explains Mónica Carvalho, a paleobotanist and curator at the Museum of Paleontology at the University of Michigan, who with Jaramillo led a study, published in 2021 in the journal Science, that summarizes these findings.

Another difference that these fossils tell us of was a lower contribution, to the atmosphere, of water released by plants. For a paleobotanist like Carvalho, this can be deduced from the length, thickness and patterns of the veins stamped on a fossil leaf, since they provide clues about the metabolism of these plants. And the bites imprinted on these fossil leaves reveal other forest inhabitants — insects — and their ecological interactions. While the insect communities that inhabited these forests before the great extinction were more specialist — one type of insect feeding on one specific type of plant — the post-extinction insects are more generalist: You see the same kinds of damage or bites on almost every plant.

Only after the meteorite did legumes, capable of capturing — or fixing — nitrogen from the air, become as abundant as they are today, which would explain profound changes in soil fertility. However, all this radical change in plant composition was a slow process. After the meteorite, it took at least 7 million years for the forests to recover and surpass the degree of plant diversity present before the impact.

“Thanks to this, we now know that, although flowers diversified in the dinosaur era, they took longer to come to dominate the forest, and that evolutionary opportunity arose for them, thanks to the ecological catastrophe unleashed by the asteroid,” says Carvalho.

Why were those pre-impact forests different from today's forests? In the Science article, Carvalho and colleagues pose three possible answers to that question. A first hypothesis suggests that herbivorous dinosaurs exerted control over the forest; with their disappearance, the ecosystem balance was broken. The second hypothesis refers to the nutrient composition of the soil, which is suspected to have been less fertile before the cataclysm. The ashfall after the Chicxulub impact changed the balance of minerals, providing, for example, more phosphorus. A third hypothesis raises the possibility of a selective extinction that affected conifer lineages — which inhabited smaller ecological ranges — more than angiosperm lineages, which found an opportunity to expand.

“The whole story that this data tells us is incredible,” Jaramillo says. “To know that the forest of today is the product of a precise instant, millions of years ago, of a particular minute, is fantastic.”

Forests and climate change

Beyond understanding the dramatic changes these forests underwent after the Chicxulub meteorite impact, the study of their past is also allowing scientists to decipher how the Neotropical forests have reacted to changes in temperature and higher CO₂ levels, data that may provide clues about what may happen to these ecosystems in the face of global warming.

One answer lies in the Eocene, which began 56.3 million years ago when a phenomenon known as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) occurred. This short-lived global warming event, the fastest in the last 140 million years, involved a global temperature increase of 5 to 7 degrees Celsius over 10,000 to 50,000 years, Jaramillo describes in one of the chapters of the book The Geology of Colombia. This is the best analog to modern human-induced warming, except that the PETM developed slower than today’s warming, allowing many species to adapt. It occurred because of volcanism in the North Sea, which led to the addition of some 1,300 ppm of CO ₂ to an atmosphere that previously had averaged 500 ppm of CO ₂.

“Although plants can migrate to higher latitudes to escape warming, extinctions in the Tropics would be expected, as the temperature would stress plants beyond their survival limit,” says Jaramillo. But what Jaramillo and his colleagues found when they analyzed the fossil record from three sites in northeastern Colombia and northwestern Venezuela was quite different. As mean annual temperature increased (by between 3.5 and 5 degrees Celsius) during the PETM, in the northern lowlands of the Neotropics, “the rate of origin of new species doubled, while extinction rates remained unchanged.” This increase in temperature resulted in 30 percent more diverse vegetation. Epiphytic ferns, typical of Neotropical forests, and orchids and leaf-cutter ants also took advantage of the energetic bonanza of more CO₂, and greater diversity was observed among them.

Jaramillo believes that these results contradict global paleoclimatic models that predict a collapse of Neotropical vegetation due to heat stress. In an article he coauthored in the 2013 Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences, he noted that in a compilation of 5,998 empirical estimates of temperature over the past 120 million years, “the Tropical Rain Forest did not collapse during past warmings; on the contrary, its diversity increased. The increase in temperature seems to be a major driver in promoting diversity.”

Does this mean that, contrary to apocalyptic forecasts, Neotropical forests could experience a biological bonanza during today’s global warming? Not necessarily. The speed at which humans are causing the accumulation of greenhouse gases is different from that of the PETM, which developed more slowly. Jaramillo says it is not possible to know whether plants under the current scenario would be able to adapt given the sheer speed of change.

However, for Jaramillo, there are signs for optimism — at least regarding the fate of plants. “The genes that regulate photosynthesis are deeply rooted in plant phylogeny and we would expect the physiological function to be similar in Eocene and present-day plants,” he says. In other words, modern plants carry in their DNA the genetic variability to cope with increases in temperature and CO ₂, he notes, “as long as there is enough water in the soil. Water, then, is the key factor to consider in the tropical biomes of the future.”

“Of course, as all good research does, it also begs some further questions,” says Crane, now president of the Oak Spring Garden Foundation, of the work of Jaramillo and his colleagues. Many of these questions, Crane adds, are related to the evolution of flowering plants: What was happening in the late Cretaceous before the meteorite? What was the vegetation like? How did angiosperms evolve before the meteorite impact, before they dominated the forest? Which groups were involved and what kind of ecological communities did they create? And how did those communities take the forest from having essentially no flowering plant trees to having a great variety of flowering plant trees?

But the most urgent and dramatic of the questions on Crane’s list is how forests will react to the unusual changes in global climate that we humans are causing. No one has a definitive answer. What we do know is that plants conquered this planet 470 million to 500 million years ago. We know that 430 million years ago, they caused an explosion of diversity and shaped the biosphere by reducing atmospheric CO ₂ by eight to 20 times. We know that they have survived five mass extinctions, including the one caused by the meteorite.

Plants have always found a way to survive, as Jaramillo explains. On this planet, the inexperienced and new ones are we humans, who appeared less than 300,000 years ago, on one of the smaller branches of the tree of life.

Article translated by Debbie Ponchner

Lea en español

Pablo Correa is a Colombian science journalist and former science, environment and health editor of the Colombian newspaper El Espectador. He was a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT in 2012-2013. He is the author of the book Rodolfo Llinás, la pregunta difícil. Follow him on Twitter @pcorrea78.

This article originally appeared in Knowable Magazine, an independent journalistic endeavor from Annual Reviews.

How to deal with work stress — and actually recover from burnout

Mindfulness, detachment, selecting off-time activities with care: Here are evidence-based strategies to achieve healthy work-life balance

By Chris Woolston

There’s job stress, and then there’s the crushing pressure paramedics went through during the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic. The uncertainty, the dread, the constantly changing protocols, the shortages of personal protective equipment, the multiple calls to the same nursing home — it was almost too much for Kate Bergen of Manahawkin, New Jersey.

“It felt like everything was closing in around us,” Bergen says. “At some point I knew that I couldn’t take any more. Was I headed for a meltdown? Was I going to just walk off the job one day? I was getting very close to that point.”

Instead of quitting, Bergen found a calling. One day while waiting for the next emergency call, she took a picture of herself in her full PPE. The image inspired her to paint a self-portrait poster in the style of World War II icon Rosie the Riveter. The message: “We need you to stay home.”

It was the first in a series of “Rosie” posters of women first responders, an ongoing project that has helped Bergen calm her mind during her downtime. Ultimately, she says, the Rosies helped her withstand the stress of her job and allowed her to show up to work each day with new energy and focus. “They made it possible for me to keep going.”

While workers like Bergen are responding to emergency calls and saving lives, many of us are doing things like responding to emails and saving receipts from business trips. But even for people with jobs in offices, restaurants and factories, there’s an art and a science to making the most of downtime, says Sabine Sonnentag, a psychologist at the University of Mannheim in Germany. The right approach to non-work time can help prevent burnout, improve health and generally make life more livable. “When a job is stressful, recovery is needed,” says Sonnentag, who cowrote an article exploring the psychology of downtime in the 2021 issue of the  Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior.

Workers everywhere are feeling frazzled, overwhelmed and ready for the weekend. With that backdrop, researchers are doing work of their own to better understand the potential benefits of recovery and the best ways to unwind. “Work recovery has become part of the national conversation on well-being,” says Andrew Bennett, a social scientist at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. “There’s a growing awareness that we can’t just keep working ourselves to death.”

At a time when many people are rethinking their jobs (if they haven’t already quit), they should also be thinking about their quality of life away from work, Sonnentag says. “People should ask themselves, how much free time do I have and how much energy do I have for my free time? How do I want to continue my life?”

A weekend paradox

We can all use a chance to unplug and unwind, but here’s the rub: Recovery from work tends to be the most difficult and elusive for those who need it most. “We call it the ‘recovery paradox,’” Sonnentag says. “The odds are high that when a job is stressful, it’s difficult to have an excellent recovery.”

That paradox was underscored in a 2021 analysis that combined results from 198 separate studies of employees at work and at home. Workers with the most mentally and emotionally draining jobs were also the least likely to feel rested and rejuvenated during their off time. Interestingly, people with physically demanding jobs — construction workers, furniture movers and the like — had much less trouble winding down. The surest way to feel lousy after hours, it appears, is to think too hard at work.

Sonnentag authored a 2018 study published in Research in Organization Behavior that helped to explain why  the paradox is so hard to escape. People who were more stressed out at work tended to get less exercise and worse sleep, an ideal scenario for feeling less than great. In other words, stressful work can disrupt the very fundamentals of healthy living.

To help workers break out of that destructive loop, researchers are pondering both sides of the work/life cycle. As Sonnentag explains, certain tasks, obligations and workplace cultures make it especially hard to unwind when work is done. Time pressure, the feeling that one is constantly under the gun, is especially disruptive. Jobs in health care, where that time pressure often combines with life-and-death stakes, tend to be especially taxing. Working with customers can be exhausting too, Sonnentag says, partly because it takes a lot of focus and effort to act cheerful and friendly when you don’t always feel that way deep down, a task known as emotional labor.

The demands of work vary widely from one person to the next, and so do approaches to downtime. Recovery is highly individual, and different people will have different strategies. “We don’t have a single prescription,” Bennett says. Researchers have grouped approaches into broad categories, including “relaxation” and “mastery.” Relaxation, a concept that’s easier to grasp than it is to achieve, includes any activity that calms the body and mind, whether it’s walking through a park, reading a good book or watching a zombie hunter movie on Netflix. (Note: The latter may not be an ideal choice if your actual job involves hunting zombies.)

Mastery, meanwhile, can be achieved through any activity that challenges a person to be good (or at least passable) at a new skill. Just as painting helped Bergen cope with stress, workers can find relief in their accomplishments. “Anything associated with learning can be helpful,” Sonnentag says. “It could be some kind of sport or exercise. It can be something like learning a new language or trying new cuisines when cooking.” A 2019 study that followed 183 employees over 10 workdays found that people who achieved some sort of mastery during their off time were more energetic and enthusiastic the next morning.

For people who need a break, the “why” behind a particular activity can be as important as the “what.” A 2013 study that followed 74 workers for five days found that people who spent their off time with activities and tasks that they actually wanted to do — whatever they were — were more lively and energetic the next day than those who felt obligated or forced to do something.

Whether they’re relaxing or creating during their time away from the office, Bennett says stressed-out workers should strive to think about something other than their jobs, a process that psychologists call detachment. (The TV show Severance takes this concept to extremes.) It’s OK to have great ideas in the shower and regale your partner with office anecdotes, but research shows people with stressful jobs tend to be happier and healthier if they can achieve some mental and emotional distance from work.

The benefits of tuning out became clear in a 2018 report involving more than 26,000 employees in various lines of work, including judges, teachers, nurses and office workers. The analysis, coauthored by Bennett, found that detachment was a powerful buffer against work-related fatigue. Workers who said they were able to think about things other than work while at home were less worn out than their colleagues. On the other hand, workers who carried on-the-job thoughts throughout the day were more likely to feel exhausted.

Vacations can also help erase work stress and prevent burnout, to a point. Sonnentag coauthored a 2011 study that used questionnaires to track 131 teachers before and after vacations. The teachers returned to work feeling refreshed and engaged, but those benefits tended to fade after only a month. The post-vacation high was more fleeting for teachers with especially demanding jobs, but it lingered a bit longer for those who managed to fit relaxing leisure activities into their regular routine.

How much vacation is enough? That question is hard to answer, Sonnentag says. While many European workers expect and demand four- or five-week breaks, she says there’s no evidence that such long vacations offer any more chance for recovery than a vacation of one or two weeks. She does feel confident saying that most workers will need at least occasional breaks that are longer than just a weekend, especially if that weekend is largely eaten up by household chores and other non-work obligations.

Perhaps an extra day off each week would make a big difference. That’s the premise driving an ongoing four-day-workweek experiment involving 70 companies in the UK. The businesses, including banks, robotics manufacturers, and a fish and chips restaurant, are all expecting employees to maintain their productivity despite working one day less each week. The full results won’t be available until 2023, but early data suggest that the four-day workweek has decreased signs of burnout and stress while improving life satisfaction and feelings of work-life balance, reports Wen Fan, a sociologist at Boston College who is helping to conduct the experiment. “The results are very encouraging,” she says.

Fan says it’s too early to know if the employees and companies were able to stay as productive as ever during the experiment, but she notes that most jobs could be done more efficiently with a little extra planning and streamlining. “A lot of time is wasted on distractions and meetings that go on too long,” she says.

No matter how many days a week a person has to work, minibreaks during the day can help, too. A 2020 survey-based study involving 172 workers in the US found that subjects tended to be in better moods and were less emotionally exhausted toward the end of the workday if they had breaks that allowed them to briefly detach from work. The study also tracked  mindfulness, the degree to which people are conscious of their present emotions and circumstances. They did this by asking the participants how much they agreed with statements such as “Today at work I was aware of different emotions that rose within me.” Employees who were the most mindful were also the most likely to truly check out and relax during their breaks from work.

A 2021 study of college students took a closer look at relaxation and exercise during work breaks. Those who tried progressive muscle relaxation, a low-stress activity that involves tensing and releasing muscles, reported more detachment during the break, while students who got their blood pumping on an exercise bike had more energy for the rest of their day. Study coauthor Jennifer Ragsdale, now a research psychologist at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health in Cincinnati, says that a better appreciation for the nuance of work breaks can help people choose the right approach for a given day. “If you need some sort of pick-me-up, you can walk round the building to get your energy going,” she says. “If you’re feeling overwhelmed, you can relax.”

As many people have discovered during the pandemic years, it can be challenging to fully check out from work when your living room is also your office. Speaking with at-home workers, Bennett has collected tips for separating work life and life life. Something as simple as wearing a collared shirt or other office attire during work hours and changing into casual wear at the end of the day can help establish boundaries, he says. Using a dedicated laptop for work and putting any work-related materials out of sight at the end of the day can also create much-needed distance.

Ragsdale says that technology can be both an escape and a tether. The same devices that help us play games, listen to podcasts or struggle with online word puzzles also make it possible to receive work emails and other reminders of life outside of the home. Ragsdale cowrote a 2021 commentary calling for more research into  the impacts of cell phones on work recovery. “When you’re continuing to be exposed to work through your cell phone, it’s harder for that recovery process to unfold,” she says. The very sight of a work email can trigger thoughts that are just as stressful as the actual job, she adds.

Not many people can completely let go of their phones when they’re at home, but they can take steps to protect themselves from intrusive work pings. “You can adjust your settings in a way that make your phone less appealing,” she says, including turning off notifications for things like email and Twitter.

Bergen can’t be away from her phone when she’s on call, but she can still feel like she’s in her own world when she’s working on a new “Rosie” painting. Psychologists may call it mastery, but for her it’s a validation and an escape. She has recently started painting women first responders who were on duty for both 9/11 and Covid. “I started out painting one thing for myself and it blossomed,” she says. “It’s turned into something beautiful.”

Chris Woolston is a freelance science writer who lives (and works) in Billings, Montana.

This article originally appeared in Knowable Magazine, an independent journalistic endeavor from Annual Reviews.

Rising unemployment: economists sometimes say it’s good for the economy, but are they right?

‘What’ll I tell my wife and kids?’ guitarfoto

Daragh O'Leary, University College Cork

Signs of a global economic downturn are growing by the day. Inflation is still going up, debt is up and interest rates are up, which means that projections for growth are down. Put simply, the proverbial something is close to hitting the fan.

Business closures and job losses are likely to become another hurdle for the global economy – and that points to rising unemployment. Yet, while most people would think of rising unemployment as a bad thing, some economists don’t entirely agree.

Economists have long pointed to a counterintuitive positive relationship between unemployment and entrepreneurship, born of the fact that people who lose their job often start businesses. This is often referred to within economic literature as necessity-based or push-factor entrepreneurship.

Where it gets tricky

There is certainly good evidence for the existence of this contradictory relationship. The graph below shows the rates of UK business creation in blue and unemployment in red. As you can see, unemployment started to increase during the global financial crisis of 2007-09 and business creation followed not long after.

UK new business creation and unemployment, 2006-2020

This relationship between business creation and unemployment has previously been used by some as a justification for cold social policies towards the unemployed on the rationale that “the market fixes itself” in the long run. They see business closures and job losses not as human miseries that require government help, but necessary evils that are needed to reallocate the money, people and other resources back into the economy in more efficient ways .

But my latest research has found that rising unemployment is not quite the silver bullet for reigniting the economic engine that it’s cracked up to be. I looked at 148 regions across Europe from 2008 to 2017. Although I did find evidence that unemployment can stimulate business creation over time, this only seems to happen in higher performing regions within higher performing economies such as the Netherlands, Finland and Austria.

In lower performing regions within lower performing economies such as Bulgaria, Romania and Hungary, the relationship between unemployment and business creation actually appears to be negative. In other words, rather than inducing business creation, unemployment simply seems to lead to more unemployment.

The reason why higher performing regions in wealthier areas have a positive relationship between job losses and business creation is that they enjoy what are known as “urbanisation economies”. These are positive benefits derived from the scale and density of economic activity occurring within that area, including wider arrays of services, greater pools of customers and greater numbers of transactions relative to other areas of the economy.

For example, a firm located in a capital city like London will benefit from more abundant access to consumers, suppliers and lenders as well as larger labour pools. The higher population density in these areas also makes it more likely that firms and workers will learn faster as they observe the activities of their many neighbours. In more peripheral areas with fewer of these characteristics, the opposite is true. This is why unemployment affects different places differently.

What it means

One consequence is that economists need to stop explaining how economies perform differently based solely on national factors. And it’s not just unemployment where this becomes apparent. For example, Ireland’s longstanding low rate of corporation tax (12.5%) has been cited as a reason for its high foreign direct investment, which accounts for roughly 20% of private sector employment.

Yet while just over 43% of all Irish enterprises in 2020 were located in either Dublin or Cork, counties like Leitrim in the north accounted for fewer than 1% of enterprises. So while national measures can help induce entrepreneurship and increase the overall size of the pie, the pie is shared very unequally. Just as rising unemployment can benefit some areas while hindering others, the same is true of government interventions.

We therefore need to stop viewing the free market and government intervention as either wrong or right. In some contexts one is going to be more helpful, while in other contexts it will be the opposite. Recognising this reality would improve on much of the polarised debate in politics and economics, in which those on the right can come across as cold and ignorant, while those on the left can seem self-righteous and sanctimonious, viewing capitalism and markets as dirty words.

How does this apply to today’s gathering downturn? It would make sense for governments to prioritise supporting businesses in more peripheral regions, while leaving those in wealthier urban areas to fend for themselves.

The famous economist John Kenneth Galbraith gave what I believe to be one of the best pieces of commentary on this topic, saying:

Where the market works, I’m for that. Where government is necessary, I’m for that … I’m in favour of whatever works in the particular case.

If we are to survive this upcoming recession and get things going again, we are going to need to acknowledge that centralised “one-size-fits-all” policies won’t be useful everywhere. The solutions to economic recovery are in some cases government intervention and in others the free market, but not always one or the other.

Daragh O'Leary, PhD Researcher in Economics, University College Cork

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

River Cruises Offer Exploration, Comfort

Travel for pure enjoyment is on the rise, so this may be your year to plan the ultimate dream vacation.

According to Sports and Leisure Research, 80% of people surveyed believe a vacation does wonders for mental health and travel is a top spending priority in the coming year. The survey indicated travelers want to immerse themselves in unique experiences, including new cultures, foods and people.

For those who delight in exploring entire regions, one downfall can be the burden of packing and unpacking at each new destination. Taking your accommodations with you is a practical alternative for curious travelers.

River voyages, for example, allow travelers to unpack once and visit multiple destinations in one seamless journey, from major European cities to quaint towns and villages. These destination-focused journeys offer experienced travelers the opportunity to explore science, history and cuisine with culturally enriching itineraries on the world’s great waterways.

If an intimate, relaxed journey is your ideal getaway, you may want to consider the revolutionary Viking Longships. These state-of-the-art river ships are engineered with guests’ comfort and exploration in mind.

Sailing Europe’s storied rivers, the award-winning fleet of identical longships showcase innovative engineering, streamlined Scandinavian design and understated elegance. River ships are also small enough – hosting 190 guests – to dock in the heart of popular destinations, making it easy to explore.

The voyages range from 8-23 days with itineraries featuring Europe’s Rhine, Main, Danube, Seine, Rhône, Douro, Moselle, Elbe, Dordogne, Garonne and Gironde Rivers.

Known as travel experiences for “The Thinking Person,” each Viking journey includes a shore excursion in every port and an onboard and onshore enrichment program that provides deep immersion in the destination through performances of music and art, cooking demonstrations, informative port talks and carefully selected guest lecturers. Enjoy shore excursions that provide historical tours and visits to unique haunts where you can experience some of the local culture, regional foods and everyday life.

On a Viking Longship, you can expect to relax in spacious public areas, including wide-open sun decks with ever-changing views. The ships feature spacious staterooms in a variety of categories, including true two-room suites with full-size verandas.

Additional ship highlights include al fresco dining on an indoor-outdoor terrace and onboard amenities including a restaurant, bar, lounge and library. Inclusive fares that cover your port taxes and fees also mean you can enjoy beer, wine and soft drinks with onboard lunch and dinner; specialty coffees, teas; bottled water; ground transfers; and more.

Chart your next adventure at viking.com.
SOURCE:
Viking River Cruises

Unplugging asthmatic airways

New therapies that involve the removal of mucus in the lungs might be the best strategy to beat asthma

By Patience Asanga

Blessing Azeke wrapped her cardigan around her body as another asthma attack set in. Provoked by cold air from an overhead fan in her law school classroom in Enugu, Nigeria, her lungs refused to let her breathe. The attack made Azeke so weak that she could hardly move on her own. She was rushed to the school’s clinic yet again.

For Azeke and more than 260 million other people with asthma worldwide, such attacks are a constant threat. Cold air, allergens and other triggers cause inflammation in their lungs, narrowing the air passages and increasing mucus production. Often, plugs of mucus block smaller airways completely, and this obstruction is a major cause of the nearly half-million deaths caused by asthma each year.

Coping with severe asthma like Azeke’s can be tricky because existing therapies don’t treat all facets of the disease. Anti-inflammatories such as corticosteroids reduce inflammation and swelling in the airways, but they don’t prevent excessive mucus secretion or clear existing mucus plugs from the lungs. And therapies targeted at clearing airway mucus do not reduce inflammation and barely reduce the overactive secretion of mucus or dissolve plugs in the airways.

Today, researchers are working on several promising new treatments to prevent or clear mucus plugs that may leave people with asthma breathing easier.

At the heart of the problem is mucus itself, a viscous mixture of water, cellular debris, salt, lipids and proteins that performs the crucial job of trapping foreign particles and ferrying them out of the lungs. The primary component of this fluid is a family of proteins known as mucins, which give mucus its gel-like thickness. In people with asthma, genetic changes in mucin proteins make the mucus thicker and harder to clear from the lungs.

When that happens, allergens, pollutants and pathogens can accumulate in the lungs, triggering inflammation that leads to further mucus secretion as the body works to rid itself of the threats. The result is the accumulation of airway-blocking mucus plugs.

Currently, doctors treat mucus plugs with inhalable medications such as bronchodilators to widen airways, corticosteroids to reduce inflammation to enable the easier flow of mucus, and drugs called mucolytics that break down the mucins themselves.

However, the only available mucolytic, known as N-Acetylcysteine (NAC), is not very effective at breaking the bonds in mucin. And at high doses, it can cause cough and raise the risk for bacterial pneumonia and other adverse side effects. “It’s very rarely used because its activity is very, very weak and people have to take very high doses of it to get effects,” says Christopher Evans, a pulmonary scientist at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus who studies how airway mucins regulate respiratory health and diseases.

To address this shortcoming, Evans and others are trying to discover more effective mucolytics to dissolve mucus plugs. He and his team recently tested a different bond-breaking agent, similar to NAC but much more potent and effective at breaking up mucus plugs.

In their studies, the researchers exposed mice to a fungal allergen once a week for four weeks. This stimulated inflammation and mucus overproduction, mimicking a full-blown asthma attack. Then they treated the mice with a mucolytic agent known as tris (2-carboxyethyl) phosphine. The treatment improved mucus flow, the team found, allowing the asthmatic mice to clear mucus just as well as mice that had not been exposed to the allergen, with higher doses yielding better results.

Evans cautions that the bonds that hold mucins together are also found in other proteins, so the risk of side effects is high. Finding a drug that will break bonds only in mucins, he says, “is still pretty far from reality at this point.”

Clearing crystals

In a different approach to the problem, immunologist Helena Aegerter of Ghent University in Belgium and her colleagues are focusing on what they believe drives mucus overproduction in asthma: protein crystals called Charcot-Leyden crystals (CLCs) that form as byproducts of dead white blood cells called eosinophils. The presence of these crystals in mucus makes it thicker and more challenging to clear from airways.

Other researchers had already shown that these crystals induce inflammation in the lungs by recruiting immune cells. And earlier work by Aegerter and colleagues showed that the crystals enhance mucus production in mice with chronic asthma. Perhaps, she thought, dealing with the crystals could be the best way to avoid the formation of mucus plugs. “You can target mucus and you can target inflammation, but while you still have these crystals in the airways, they are always going to drive a vicious cycle of mucus production and inflammation,” says Aegerter, who coauthored an article on the pathology of asthma in the 2023 Annual Review of Pathology.

To address the crystals directly, Aegerter and her colleagues developed antibodies in llamas, then engineered them to more effectively attack the proteins in the crystals. They then tested them on mucus samples collected from people with asthma. The antibodies successfully dissolved the crystals by attaching to specific regions of the CLC proteins that hold the crystals together, the team reported in 2022. The antibodies also neutralized inflammatory reactions in mice. Based on these findings, the scientists are working on a drug that would have the same effect on people.

“Our strategy, now, is really to target the crystals at the heart of the mucus plug. And by getting rid of the crystals, hopefully, that will put a stop to all the mucus production and inflammation that happens around these airways,” says Aegerter. The approach could work not just for asthma, she says, but also for a variety of other inflammatory diseases involving mucus oversecretion, such as inflammation of the sinuses and some allergic reactions to fungal pathogens.

Taming the flow

In a third approach, pulmonologist Burton Dickey of the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center is working to avert mucus plugs by preventing excess secretion of mucus. After 20 years of work on airway mucin secretions, Dickey’s team published a paper in 2022 identifying a protein, synaptotagmin 2 (Syt2), that is involved in the excessive mucus secretion experienced by people with asthma and other conditions.

Dickey and his team induced mucus overproduction in mice by exposing their airways to an inflammatory molecule called interleukin-13. In mice lacking the gene for Syt2, they found, the IL-13 caused only normal mucus production in the mice’s lungs. In other words, it looked as if Syt2 was central to excess mucus production but had no role in normal mucus production, which is regulated by a different mechanism. That was promising: It suggested that a drug could be made to block excessive production only.

With this win under their belt, Dickey’s team next designed a molecule, which they called PEN-SP9-Cy3, that would block the action of Syt2 in inflamed lungs. When they tested this molecule on mice and on human cells in culture, they found that it significantly reduced the amount of mucins secreted.

One day, says Dickey, “we hope that when someone with a severe asthma attack comes to the emergency room they can breathe in our drug and it will prevent any further mucus plugging.”

In just six months during law school, Blessing Azeke had 10 emergency room visits. If any of these new approaches for treating asthma pan out, people like her can look forward to a future with fewer medical crises.

Editor’s note: The article was amended on February 16, 2023, to clarify that Christopher Evans works at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus.

Lea en español

Patience Asanga is a Nigeria-based freelance science journalist. Find her on Twitter @pat_asanga.

This article originally appeared in Knowable Magazine, an independent journalistic endeavor from Annual Reviews.

Celebrate Easter with Family-Friendly Fun

Gathering for Easter means bright decor and flavorful food with those you hold nearest and adding some extra “egg-citement” to the holiday can come easy. Let your inner kid shine through with games and activities everyone can enjoy whether it’s at the kitchen table, in the backyard or gathered around for story time.

Hunt for Easter Eggs
Likely the most popular Easter activity of all, hiding plastic eggs full of candy and goodies for kiddos to “hunt” brings plenty of smiles and giddiness. Whether your gatherings typically take place in a family member’s backyard or a local park, it’s an exciting way to get youngsters outdoors for a friendly (yet probably competitive) game.

Bake Desserts
Every holiday comes with its own flavorful traditions and Easter is no exception. From sweet, fresh, fruity desserts to chocolatey delights, baking your family’s favorites is a fun way to bring everyone together in the kitchen. Assigning specialized roles in an easy solution for ensuring all feel involved. Little ones can gather and organize ingredients while older kids measure cups, tablespoons and teaspoons to show off their math skills. Finally, adults can handle cutting and cooking so safety comes first.

Decorate Eggs
Keep the fun in the kitchen by using eggs (real or plastic) as the canvas for creativity. Dyes are a popular choice, but you can also paint or simply use markers to decorate to your heart’s desire. Add final touches with glitter, fabric or ribbons to truly make your creation your own.

Enjoy the Outdoors
Depending on where you live, Easter often presents opportunities to celebrate outdoors. Turn back the clock with kid-friendly classics like tag, hide and seek, backyard sports and more. The best part: These beloved games are meant for all ages, meaning everyone in the family can get in on the fun.

Pass Down Family Stories and Traditions
Whether your loved ones live down the street or across the country, holidays bring people together. These moments spent sharing meals, playing games and looking back on the past are a perfect opportunity for passing down stories and traditions, from studying the family tree to sharing the secrets to favorite recipes. Encouraging elders to share their experiences helps ensure traditions are passed from generation to generation and connects the past to the present and future.

Find more Easter “egg-tivities” to share with your loved ones at eLivingtoday.com.