Good News

Not that it's going to get BKjr to budget on his "position", but maybe more people will get the word, and stop being quite so silly.

Of course, news of the positive effects on the human brain probably won't mean much to people who are already pretty demented by their conspiracy fantasies.

Hope a little. Pray a little.

Shingles vaccine may actually slow down dementia, study finds

If these findings are confirmed, “then this would be groundbreaking for dementia,” an expert said.

A common vaccine meant to ward off shingles may be doing something even more extraordinary: protecting the brain.

Earlier this year, researchers reported that the shingles vaccine cuts the risk of developing dementia by 20 percent over a seven-year period.

A large follow-up study has found that shingles vaccination may protect against risks at different stages of dementia — including for people already diagnosed.

The research, published Tuesday in the journal Cell, found that cognitively healthy people who received the vaccine were less likely to develop mild cognitive impairment, an early symptomatic phase before dementia.AI Icon

Crucially, the study suggests that the shingles vaccine — two doses of which are recommended for adults 50 and older or those 19 and older with a weakened immune system — may help people who already have dementia. Those who got the vaccine were almost 30 percent less likely to die of dementia over nine years, suggesting the vaccine may be slowing the progression of the neurodegenerative syndrome.

“It appears to be protective along the spectrum or the trajectory of the disease,” said Anupam Jena, a professor of health care policy at Harvard Medical School and a physician at Massachusetts General Hospital who reviewed the paper.

There are few effective treatments for dementia and no preventive measures outside lifestyle changes.

“These findings are promising because they suggest that something can be done,” said Alberto Ascherio, a professor of epidemiology and nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health and a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. “Obviously, the vaccine was not designed or optimized to prevent dementia, so this is sort of an incidental finding. In some ways, we are being lucky.”

The results have led to cautious excitement among researchers.

If these findings are confirmed, “then this would be groundbreaking for dementia,” said Maxime Taquet, an associate professor at the University of Oxford who has conducted research into shingles vaccination and dementia risk. “I think there’s no other word for it.”

Protection across the dementia spectrum

Research has linked common vaccines, including for shingles, to lower dementia risk.

For these observational studies, there is a “healthy vaccine bias,” said Ascherio, who wasn’t involved in the study. “People who get vaccines tend to be healthier in general than people who don’t” because they may have different health-related behaviors.

Because randomized controlled trials — the gold standard in medical research — aren’t often feasible in the real world, scientists who conducted the research published Tuesday took advantage of a historical quirk in how Wales rolled out its shingles vaccination program in 2013.

Only Welsh adults born on or after Sept. 2, 1933, were eligible for the vaccine. Those born right before were ineligible, meaning the public health policy effectively set up a “natural experiment” comparing two near-identical groups of people who either met the vaccine eligibility cutoff or missed it.

“The question then is: Where do you start with this vaccine during the disease course? And does it have benefits for those who already have the condition?” said Pascal Geldsetzer, an assistant professor of medicine at the Stanford University School of Medicine and a senior author of the research.

The vaccine was not only associated with a 20 percent reduction of dementia diagnoses, but also a 3.1 percent reduction in diagnoses of mild cognitive impairment over nine years.

“It suggests that from a clinical public health perspective, we should be providing this potentially at early stages, maybe on a regular basis,” Geldsetzer said.

There doesn’t seem to be a time when it’s too late in the disease progression to derive benefits, he added.

Dementia, in its final stages, can lead to death.

During the nine-year follow-up period, almost half of the 14,350 individuals who had dementia in the study sample died of dementia, meaning it was recorded as the underlying cause on their death certificate.

“Bad dementia can lead you to aspirate and have respiratory arrest,” said Jena, who wasn’t involved in the study. “Bad dementia can lead you to be unable to care for yourself.”

The shingles vaccine decreased deaths due to dementia by 29.5 percent. Even when looking at all-cause mortality, the shingles vaccine was associated with a 22.7 percent reduction.

These results “suggest that there is a slowing of this degenerative process,” which seems to be “striking good luck that the vaccine designed for something else would slow a degenerative process,” Ascherio said.

The magnitude of the effects is “almost too good to be true,” said Taquet, who wasn’t involved in the study.

“If those effect sizes really pan out in randomized control trials, then this would be perhaps one of the best treatments we’ve had for dementia in a while, which is the reason why we need to be quite cautious with interpretation,” he said. “That’s why we need the randomized control trials, but I think they really provide the strongest possible push for randomized control trials.”

Shingles vaccines today, research tomorrow

There are study limitations that need to be worked out.

For one, the study looked at the older shingles vaccine using a weakened version of the live varicella-zoster herpes virus. That vaccine has been discontinued in the United States, as well as in the European Union and Australia, and has been replaced with the Shingrix vaccine, which is more effective at preventing shingles and may also be associated with a lower risk of dementia.

However, it’s unknown whether the newer vaccine is also associated with a reduced risk for mild cognitive impairment or death due to dementia, researchers said. Despite its strengths, and its being as close to a randomized controlled trial without being one, the study is still correlational and cannot get at causation.

Still, experts unanimously encourage eligible people to get the vaccine, which reduces the reactivation of the varicella-zoster virus. The virus causes chicken pox in childhood and remains dormant in neuron clusters within the spinal cord. When reactivated in adulthood, the varicella-zoster virus manifests as shingles, which is characterized by a burning, painful rash and can sometimes cause lifelong chronic pain conditions or serious complications in a subset of people.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends two doses of a shingles vaccine for adults 50 and older or those 19 and older with a weakened immune system. But uptake has been relatively low: In 2022, 34.4 percent of eligible Americans, including those with weakened immune systems, had received at least one dose of a shingles vaccine in their lifetime.

In the meantime, researchers are pushing for randomized controlled trials as well as studies to understand why the vaccine is protective, which can teach us something fundamental about dementia and help develop better treatments.

“It’s very important that we understand what it is that we’re targeting, because it might allow us to design even more precise therapies,” said Taquet, who is considering running these studies.

Geldsetzer is working to raise money for a randomized controlled trial to directly test the older shingles vaccine on dementia risk, which he said should require less investment because it’s known to be safe and have other benefits.

There’s a lot of excitement to work on this from other researchers, he said, but he’s had no luck getting the money.

“They’d be thrilled to do this if there’s the funding to do so,” Geldsetzer said. “Just excitement unfortunately is not enough.”

Today's Nerdy Thing

This is like the opening sequence of a sci-fi movie.

Jane's Self-Obit

It's shouldn't strike us as amazing that we learned a lot about ourselves because of her studies of chimpanzees. That's how it's supposed to work.

Thank you, Dr Jane.

Quote

I am far less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than I am in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.

--Stephen Jay Gould

Nature Is Metal

Calling Dr Kennedy

Quick - somebody get hold of BKjr and tell him those evil science nerds are trying to inject heavy metals directly into our brains!

Research on reversing Alzheimer’s reveals lithium as potential key

Years of investigation by scientists at Harvard has revealed that lithium is deeply involved in Alzheimer’s disease, a finding that could lead to new treatments.

Seven years of investigation by scientists at Harvard Medical School has revealed that the loss of the metal lithium plays a powerful role in Alzheimer’s disease, a finding that could lead to earlier detection, new treatments and a broader understanding of how the brain ages.

Researchers led by Bruce A. Yankner, a professor of genetics and neurology at Harvard Medical School, reported that they were able to reverse the disease in mice and restore brain function with small amounts of the compound lithium orotate, enough to mimic the metal’s natural level in the brain. Their study appeared Wednesday in the journal Nature.

“The obvious impact is that because lithium orotate is dirt cheap, hopefully we will get rigorous, randomized trials testing this very, very quickly,” said Matt Kaeberlein, former director of the Healthy Aging and Longevity Research Institute at the University of Washington, who did not participate in the study. “And I would say that it will be an embarrassment to the Alzheimer’s clinical community if that doesn’t happen right away.”

Cue the private equity assholes to buy up all the lithium rights - can't have affordable healthcare now can we.

Yankner, who is also the co-director of the Paul F. Glenn Center for Biology of Aging Research at Harvard, said: “I do not recommend that people take lithium at this point, because it has not been validated as a treatment in humans. We always have to be cautious because things can change as you go from mice to humans.” He added that the findings still need to be validated by other labs.

Although there have been recent breakthroughs in the treatment of Alzheimer’s, no medication has succeeded in stopping or reversing the disease that afflicts more than 7 million Americans, a number projected to reach almost 13 million by 2050, according to the Alzheimer’s Association.

Pathology images from the brain of an Alzheimer's mouse model. The images show that when the mice are treated with a very low dose of lithium orotate, it almost completely eradicates the amyloid plaques and the tau tangle-like structures. (Harvard)

Lithium is widely prescribed for patients with bipolar disorder, and previous research indicated that it held potential as an Alzheimer’s treatment and an antiaging medication. A 2017 study in Denmark suggested the presence of lithium in drinking water might be associated with a lower incidence of dementia.

However, the new work is the first to describe the specific roles that lithium plays in the brain, its influence on all of the brain’s major cell types and the effect that its deficiency later in life has on aging.

Results of the study by Yankner’s lab and researchers at Boston Children’s Hospital and the Rush Alzheimer’s Disease Center in Chicago also suggest that measuring lithium levels might help doctors screen people for signs of Alzheimer’s years before the first symptoms begin to appear. Yankner said doctors might be able to measure lithium levels in the cerebrospinal fluid or blood, or through brain imaging.

How our brains use lithium

In a healthy brain, lithium maintains the connections and communication lines that allow neurons to talk with one another. The metal also helps form the myelin that coats and insulates the communication lines and helps microglial cells clear cellular debris that can impede brain function.

“In normal aging mice,” Yankner said, “lithium promotes good memory function. In normal aging humans,” higher lithium levels also correspond to better memory function.

The depletion of lithium in the brain plays a role in most of the deterioration in several mouse models of Alzheimer’s disease.

Loss of lithium accelerates the development of harmful clumps of the protein amyloid beta and tangles of the protein tau that resemble the structures found in people with Alzheimer’s. Amyloid plaques and tau tangles disrupt communication between nerve cells.

The plaques in turn undermine lithium by trapping it, weakening its ability to help the brain function.

Lithium depletion is involved in other destructive processes of Alzheimer’s: decay of brain synapses, damage to the myelin that protects nerve fibers and reduced capacity of microglial cells to break down amyloid plaques.

Lithium’s pervasive role comes despite the fact that our brains contain only a small amount of it. After examining more than 500 human brains from Rush and other brain banks, Yankner’s team discovered the naturally occurring lithium in the brain is 1,000 times less than the lithium provided in medications to treat bipolar disorder.

Li-Huei Tsai, director of the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and who was not involved in the study, called it “very exciting,” especially when many in the field, including her own lab, have focused on genetic risk factors for Alzheimer’s.

“But clearly genetic risk factors are not the only things,” said Tsai, who is also Picower professor of neuroscience. “There are a lot of people walking around carrying these risk genes, but they are not affected by Alzheimer’s disease. I feel this study provides a very important piece of the puzzle.”

Pathways for treatment

Alzheimer’s treatments mostly help to manage symptoms and slow the decline it causes in thinking and functioning. Aducanumab, lecanemab, and donanemab, all lab-made antibodies, bind to the harmful amyloid plaques and help remove them.

Donepezil, rivastigmine and galantamine ― all in the class of medications known as cholinesterase inhibitors ― work by replenishing a chemical messenger called acetylcholine, which is diminished in Alzheimer’s. Acetylcholine plays an important role in memory, muscle movement and attention.

Yankner and his team found that when they gave otherwise healthy mice a reduced-lithium diet, the mice lost brain synapses and began to lose memory. “We found that when we administered lithium orotate to aging mice [that had] started losing their memory, the lithium orotate actually reverted their memory to the young adult, six-month level,” he said.

Lithium orotate helped the mice reduce production of the amyloid plaques and tau tangles, and allowed the microglial cells to remove the plaques much more effectively.

Yankner said one factor that might help lithium orotate reach clinical trials sooner is the small amount of the treatment needed, which could greatly reduce the risk of harmful side effects, such as kidney dysfunction and thyroid toxicity.

Aside from its potential in treating Alzheimer’s, Yankner said lithium orotate might also have implications for the treatment of Parkinson’s disease, an area his lab is investigating.

“That needs to be rigorously examined,” he said. “But we’re looking at a whole slew of disorders.”

Get Ready To Be Amazed

The nerds have spent millennia doing impressive things by taking small steps to get better analogous/mechanical fixes.

Now they're about to take a giant leap forward by going digital.

This could be truly outstanding.

We can only hope we don't let the politicians and the rubes fuck things up to the point where we foreclose on a future that promises real greatness, instead of settling for some phony sloganeering shit that fits on a hat.

Go get 'em, nerds.

Today's Nerds

Elizabeth Lee Hazen                Rachel Fuller Brown

In 1948, two women changed the course of medicine… by mailing each other dirt.

They weren’t famous professors.

They didn’t work in fancy labs.

In fact, Rachel Fuller Brown, a chemist in Albany, and Elizabeth Lee Hazen, a microbiologist in New York City, never even worked in the same room.

But what they did share was persistence, trust, and a common mission — to find a cure hidden in the most overlooked places: the soil beneath our feet.

Elizabeth would collect microbes from dirt samples across the country and mail them to Rachel. Rachel would test them — one by one — for any antifungal properties. Over time, hundreds of tiny vials traveled through the U.S. postal system in what became a groundbreaking long-distance collaboration.

Then, one humble sample from Virginia changed everything.

They discovered nystatin — the first safe and effective antifungal drug for humans.
It treated infections like candidiasis, athlete’s foot, and life-threatening fungal diseases that had no cure until then.

But nystatin did more than heal people.

It also protected ancient manuscripts, paintings, trees, and priceless works of art from fungal decay. It became a silent guardian not just in hospitals — but in museums and libraries too.
And the fortune they could’ve made?

They donated all of it.

With the royalties from their discovery, Brown and Hazen created a fund to support future scientists — especially young ones, just starting out. No headlines. No awards. Just a lasting legacy.

Quackery Update

There's no such thing as "Alternative Medicine".

If a claim or a remedy or a therapy or a product has been thoroughly tested, studied, debated, peer-reviewed, published, and approved, then it's not alternative medicine anymore. It's just medicine.

Everything else is either hypothesis or flat-out quackery.

From a year ago:

5 months ago:

Entering A Dark Time

Two cities stopped adding fluoride to water. Science reveals what happened

Calgary, Canada, and Juneau, Alaska, show how ending fluoridation can affect health

Warren Loeppky has been a pediatric dentist in the Canadian city of Calgary for 20 years. Over the last decade, he says, tooth decay in children he’s seen has become more common, more aggressive and more severe. Many of his young patients have so much damage that he has to work with them under general anesthesia.

“It’s always sad seeing a young child in pain,” Loeppky says. “Dental decay is very preventable. It breaks your heart to see these young kids that aren’t able to eat.”

Loeppky notes that many factors can contribute to tooth decay in children, including their diet and genetics. Still, he believes part of the problem is linked to a decision made in the halls of local government: In 2011, Calgary stopped adding fluoride to its drinking water.

“This decision of city councilors was surprising to the general public, but shocking and alarming to dentists, to pediatricians, to anesthesiologists and others in the health care field, who knew what it would mean,” says Juliet Guichon, a legal and ethics scholar at the University of Calgary who formed a group that advocated for adding fluoride back to drinking water in the city.

Several studies have shown that fluoride is a safe and effective way to prevent tooth decay. It recruits other minerals, such as calcium and phosphate, to strengthen tooth enamel and fend off acid made by bacteria. Oral health can also affect a person’s overall health.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that communities across the country add 0.7 milligrams of fluoride for every liter of water. It’s up to state and local governments to decide if they want to follow that recommendation. In 2022, the CDC reported that 63 percent of Americans received fluoridated water.

But that practice now is coming under new scrutiny. In March, Utah became the first state to ban fluoridation; many local governments across the country are also debating the issue. And on April 7, Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told news reporters that he planned to tell the CDC to stop its recommendation.

Adding fluoride to water has been contested in the United States since the practice became widespread in the mid-20th century. Opponents have historically voiced health concerns, including about tooth staining and disproven worries that fluoridated water could cause bone cancer, as well as claims that fluoridation amounts to mass medication and violates individual freedoms. More recently, people have pointed to research showing an association between fluoride and lowered IQ in children. But those findings, which have been heavily criticized, looked at fluoride concentrations much higher than those found in most Americans’ drinking water.

What happened in Calgary, as well as in Juneau, Alaska, which stopped water fluoridation in 2007, may be a cautionary tale for other municipalities. Science News spoke with researchers and other experts in both cities to understand what can happen when local governments opt to stop adding fluoride to drinking water.

Looking into the mouths of second-graders in Calgary

Lindsay McLaren says she never anticipated becoming a self-described fluoridation researcher. As a quantitative social scientist at the University of Calgary, she studies how public policies can affect the health of a population. She hadn’t given much thought to fluoridation until 2011, when the Calgary City Council decided to remove fluoride from the city’s water.

The move prompted McLaren to design a study looking at how the dental health of the city’s children fared once fluoride was removed. She recruited dental hygienists to go to schools and inspect the mouths of second-grade students. Some went to schools in Calgary and others went to schools in Edmonton, a similar city in the same province that still fluoridated its water.

In Calgary, the team surveyed 2,649 second-graders around seven years after fluoridation ended, meaning they had likely never been exposed to fluoride in their drinking water. Of those, 65 percent had tooth decay. In Edmonton, 55 percent of surveyed children had tooth decay. While those percentages may seem close, they mark a statistically significant difference that McLaren calls “quite large” on the population level.

“Compared to Edmonton kids, Calgary kids were now considerably worse as far as dental health goes,” McLaren says. Other factors, including diet and socioeconomic status, did not explain the differences between children in Edmonton and Calgary, she says.

In 2024, another study found a higher rate of tooth decay-related treatments for which a child was placed under general anesthesia in Calgary than in Edmonton. From 2018 to 2019, 32 out of every 10,000 children in Calgary were put under general anesthesia to treat tooth decay, compared with 17 for every 10,000 children in Edmonton.

The findings didn’t surprise local dentists, says Bruce Yaholnitsky, a periodontist in Calgary. “This is just obvious to us. But you need to have proper science to prove, in some cases, the obvious.”

Analyzing Medicaid claims in Juneau

Years before Calgary’s city council opted to remove fluoride from its water, members of the local government in Juneau made a similar decision.

Jennifer Meyer says she first became interested in studying the effects of lack of fluoridation in Juneau after moving there in 2015. At the time, she had two young children; a third was born in Juneau. She was surprised at how much dental work, including fillings, she noticed among many other preschool and elementary school children.

“I thought ‘Wow, what’s going on here?’ Because I could see a lot of the decay and the repairs,” Meyer says.

Juneau had stopped adding fluoride to its drinking water in 2007 after asking a six-member commission to review the evidence around fluoridation. A copy of the commission’s report obtained from Meyer, a public health researcher at the University of Alaska Anchorage, shows that two commission members opposed to fluoridation made claims about the health effects that Meyer says are “false” and “not grounded in quality investigations.”

The commission’s chair criticized anti-fluoride positions, at one point writing that part of the literature was based on “junk science.” But he ultimately recommended that the city stop fluoridation, claiming that the evidence about its safety at low concentrations was inconclusive. With the commission’s members split at 3–3, the Juneau Assembly voted to end fluoridation.

Meyer and her colleagues analyzed Medicaid dental claims records made before and after the city stopped fluoridation. They found that the average number of procedures to treat tooth decay rose in children under age 6, from 1.5 treatments per child in 2003 to 2.5 treatments per child in 2012.

The cost of these treatments in children under 6 years old, when adjusted for inflation, jumped by an average of $303 dollars per child from 2003 to 2012.

Meyer says that increased Medicaid costs for dental treatments ultimately end up being paid by taxpayers.

“When politicians decide to withhold a safe and effective public health intervention like fluoridation, they are imposing a hidden health care tax on everyone in their state or community,” Meyer says.

Continued calls to end fluoridation

Today, many opponents to fluoride in water cite a controversial systematic review released last year by the National Toxicology Program, which is nestled in HHS and evaluates the health effects of substances. That August 2024 review concluded with “moderate confidence” that water with more than 1.5 mg of fluoride per liter was associated with lowered IQ in children.

But that dose is more than double the CDC’s recommended amount. And the review authors couldn’t determine if low fluoride concentrations like those found in treated drinking water in the United States had a negative effect on children’s IQ. In addition, merely finding an association does not prove that higher levels of fluoride caused lowered IQ, the NTP notes on its website.

More broadly, Meyer says, “ending fluoridation … based on weak or misrepresented evidence is not a precaution, it’s negligence.”

Juneau remains without fluoridated water. In Calgary, though, residents voted in 2021 to bring it back. With 62 percent of voters opting to reintroduce fluoride, the margin was higher than it was in the 1989 vote that brought fluoride to Calgary in the first place. Guichon says McLaren’s study, combined with “determined advocacy,” helped bring the electorate to the polls.

“More people voted to reinstate fluoride than voted for the mayor. So that’s a success,” Meyer says. “But in America, we are entering a dark time.”

Science News

Here's Rebeccah

... with further confirmation on the deliberate ignorance of conservatives.

Call It What You Want

... but it's prophecy, not science.

BKjr is doing what conspiracy fantasists always do. ie: He starts with his own pet conclusion, and then sets about fixing the "evidence" around it.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Dr. Noc, PhD (@dr.noc)

We're Blowin' it

Droughts will get worse, and there's a good probability we'll see a double/triple/fourple whammy of drought-then-flood-then-drought cycling in fairly quick succession.

We've fouled the nest, we may not be able to stop the worst of the consequences for having fouled the nest, which means that taking it all together, we're on track for the human species to go extinct sooner than we'd hoped.

Global soil moisture in ‘permanent’ decline due to climate change

A new study warns that global declines in soil moisture in the 21st century could mark a “permanent” shift in the world’s water cycle.

Combining data from satellites, sea level measurements and observations of “polar motion”, the research shows how soil moisture levels have decreased since the year 2000.

The findings, published in Science, suggest the decline is primarily driven by an increasingly thirsty atmosphere as global temperatures rise, as well as shifts in rainfall patterns.

Consequently, the researchers warn the observed changes are likely to be “permanent” if current warming trends continue.

An accompanying perspective article says the study provides “robust evidence” of an “irreversible shift” in terrestrial water sources under climate change.

The drying out of soil “increases the severity and frequency” of major droughts, with consequences for humans, ecosystems and agriculture, explains Dr Benjamin Cook, an interdisciplinary Earth system scientist working at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Columbia University, who was not involved in the research.

He tells Carbon Brief:

“Droughts are one of the most impactful, expensive natural hazards out there, because they are typically persistent and long lasting. Everything needs water – ecosystems need water, agriculture needs water. People need water. If you don’t have enough water – you’re in trouble.”

Drying soil

Every year, around 6tn tonnes of water cycles through Earth’s land surface. When rain falls on land it gets held up in soil, wetlands, groundwater, lakes and reservoirs on its journey back to the oceans.

Soil moisture forms a critical part of the Earth’s system, helping to irrigate soil, cycle nutrients and regulate the climate.

The amount of water contained in the soil is sensitive to a range of factors, including changes in rainfall, evaporation, vegetation and climate – as well as human activity, such as intensive agriculture.

The research points to a “gradual decline” in soil moisture levels in the 21st century, kickstarted by a period of “sharp depletion” in the three years over 2000-02.

Specifically, the researchers find the depletion of soil moisture resulted in a total loss of 1,614bn tonnes (gigatonnes, or Gt) of water over 2000-02 and then 1,009Gt between 2002 and 2016.

(For context, ice loss in Greenland resulted in 900Gt of water loss over 2002-06.)

Soil moisture has not recovered as of 2021, according to the research, and is unlikely to pick up under present climate conditions.

Joint-lead author Prof Dongryeol Ryu, professor of hydrology and remote sensing at the University of Melbourne, explains to Carbon Brief:

“We observed a stepwise decline [in soil moisture] twice in the past two decades, interspersed within a continuously declining trend in soil moisture. We haven’t seen this trend earlier, so that is why this is very concerning.”

Ryu explains the decision to analyse changes to soil moisture on a global scale meant the researchers could confirm trends difficult to see in smaller geographic datasets:

“The unique thing we found through analysing these larger-scale measures is that – even if we have seen widely fluctuating ups and downs in precipitation and increasing temperature – the total water contained in the soil, as soil moisture and groundwater, has been declining gradually from around the beginning of this century.“

The maps below illustrate soil moisture changes in 2003-07 and 2008-12 against a 1995-99 baseline, as estimated by the ERA5-Land reanalysis dataset. The areas marked on the map in brown saw a drop in soil moisture and the areas marked in blue an increase in soil moisture.

The top map shows soil moisture depletion across large regions in eastern and central Asia, central Africa and North and South America over 2003-07. The lower map shows that “replenishment” in the years that followed occurred in relatively small parts of South America, India, Australia and North America.

Climate change

Ryu says the researchers “suspect that increasing temperature played an important role” in the decline in terrestrial water storage and soil moisture in the 21st century.

The study points to two factors driving gradual depletion of soil moisture over the last quarter century: fluctuations to rainfall patterns and increasing “evaporative demand”.

Evaporative demand refers to the atmosphere’s “thirst” for water, or how much moisture it can take from the land, vegetation and surface water.

Studies have highlighted how global evaporative demand has been increasing over the last two decades globally, impacting water availability, hurting crops and causing drought.

The new study notes that “increasing evaporative demand driven by a warming climate” suggests a “more consistent and widespread trend toward drying as temperatures rise”.

Ryu says the “very unusual” drop in water moisture observed over 2000-02 could be attributed to low levels of rainfall globally, which coincided with the “period when evaporative demand started increasing”.

Another – less pronounced – period of rapid soil moisture decline seen over 2015-16 can be attributed to droughts triggered by the 2014-16 El Niño event, Ryu notes.

Ryu says the study findings indicate that soil moisture can no longer bounce back from a dry year, as it has in the past:

“It used to be that when precipitation goes up again, we recover water in the soil. But because of this increasing evaporative demand, once we have strong El Niño years – which lead to much less rainfall for a year or two – it seems that we are not recovering the water fully because of increasing evaporative demand. Because of that – even if we have a wet year following dry years – the water in the soil doesn’t seem to recover.”

Cross-validation

Measuring changes in global soil moisture has historically presented a challenge to scientists, given the lack of comprehensive and direct observations of water in soil.

The researchers attempt to reduce this uncertainty by corroborating the ERA5-Land reanalysis dataset from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) with three geophysical measurement datasets.

ERA5’s land surface modelling system uses meteorological and other input data to estimate water within the upper few metres of the soil.

These figures were compared with data collected by the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) mission – a joint satellite mission between NASA and the German Aerospace Center.

Running since 2002, the GRACE mission tracks changes to the Earth’s gravity by collecting data on groundwater depletion, ice sheet loss and sea level rise. These observations have revealed a persistent loss of water from land to the ocean.

The scientists also cross-reference the ERA5 reanalysis data with a century-old dataset that measures fluctuations in the rotation of the Earth as the distribution of mass on the planet changes.

(The redistribution of ice and water, such as melting ice sheets and depleting groundwater, causes the planet to wobble as it spins and its axis to shift slightly. This is known as “polar motion”.)

The third set of measurements the scientists use is global mean sea level height, which is collected by satellites.

To extract soil moisture changes from this set of data, the researchers subtracted other components of sea level rise from the overall total – including Greenland ice melt, Antarctica ice melt, the impact of increasing sea surface temperature (which expands water volume) and the contribution of groundwater.

This process of elimination left researchers with an estimate of the contribution of soil moisture to global sea level rise.

The study notes that both the sea surface height and polar motion observations “support the conclusion that the abrupt change in soil moisture is genuine”.

Ryu says using global average sea level rise and “Earth wobble” to track water redistribution on land is the “main innovation” applied in the paper.

He adds the value of “reverse engineering” the ERA5 dataset is to understand how to enhance land surface modelling in the future:

“By explaining all the contributing factors to this measurement, you can understand the process. And if you understand the process, you can actually predict what’s going to happen in the future if any of these factors change in a certain manner.”

NASA’s Dr Cook says the “corroborating evidence” supplied by the paper offers a “really strong case that there has been a large-scale decline in soil moisture in recent decades”.

However, he says the relatively short reference period of the study means that identifying the cause of the decline is less clear cut:

“Whether [the decline] is permanent or not is much more uncertain…On these timescales, internal natural variability can be really, really strong. Attributing this decline to something specific – either climate change or internal variability – is much much more difficult.”

Sea level rise

A notable finding in the study’s sea level rise analysis is that terrestrial water storage may have been the dominant driver of sea level rise in the early 21st century.

Specifically, the paper notes that the decline in terrestrial water storage over 2000-02 – when soil moisture plummeted – led to global average sea level rise of almost 2mm annually.

The researchers note this rate of sea level rise is “unprecedented” and “significantly higher” than the rate of sea level rise attributed to Greenland ice mass loss, which they note is approximately 0.8mm a year.

Prof Reed Maxwell, a professor at the High Meadows Environmental Institute at Princeton University, who was also not involved in the study, says the researchers’ efforts to compare soil moisture with other global water stores was “novel” and “opens the door to future study of a more holistic global water balance”.

‘Creeping disaster’

The paper notes that land surface and hydrological models require “substantial improvement” to accurately simulate changes in soil moisture in changing climate.

Current models do not factor the impacts of agricultural intensification, nor the ongoing “greening” of semi-arid regions – both of which “may contribute” to a further decline in soil moisture, it states.

Writing in a perspectives article published in Science, Prof Luis Samaniego from the department of computational hydrosystems at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research says that it is “essential” that next-generation models incorporate human-caused influences such as farming, large dams and irrigation systems.

The study posits that the “innovative methods” for estimating changes in global soil moisture presented in the study provide opportunities to “improve the present state of modelling at global and continental scales”.

More broadly, advances in scientific understanding of changes to soil moisture can help improve the world’s preparedness for drought.

Drought is often described as a “creeping disaster” – because by the time it is identified, it is usually already well under way,

Paper author Ryu explains:

“Unlike a flood and heatwaves, drought comes very very slowly – and has prolonged and delayed consequences. We better be prepared earlier than later, because once drought comes you can expect a long period of consequences.”

Dr Shou Wang, associate professor at the Hydroclimate Extremes Lab and the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, who was not involved in the study, says the research findings are “crucial” for advancing understanding of the “potential drivers and dynamics” of “unprecedented hydrological extremes in a warming climate”. He tells Carbon Brief:

“This is breakthrough work that uncovers the drivers of hydrological regime changes, which are leading to unprecedented hydrological extremes such as compound and consecutive drought-flood events.”

Tonight's Tonight

Nerds Rule

Tell me again - what's Elon for? What is he doing for us?

I mean, I realize we're taking a multi point approach - different companies doing different things - but other than some pretty impressive successes 15 years ago, they don't seem to be producing tangible results - just some splashy publicity stunts. So what're we getting for our money?

Just asking - Elon's running around playing Mr Efficiency Expert, looking under everybody else's skirt. We pay him billions every year, and I'd like to know: What exactly is he delivering?

Where are Elon's bullet points?

This is what I'm talking about:

Private Lunar Lander Blue Ghost Aces Moon Touchdown with a Special Delivery for NASA

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — A private lunar lander carrying a drill, vacuum and other experiments for NASA touched down on the moon Sunday, the latest in a string of companies looking to kickstart business on Earth's celestial neighbor ahead of astronaut missions.

Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost lander descended from lunar orbit on autopilot, aiming for the slopes of an ancient volcanic dome in an impact basin on the moon’s northeastern edge of the near side.

Confirmation of successful touchdown came from the company's Mission Control outside Austin, Texas, following the action some 225,000 miles (360,000 kilometers) away.

“You all stuck the landing. We’re on the moon,” Firefly’s Will Coogan, chief engineer for the lander, reported.

An upright and stable landing makes Firefly — a startup founded a decade ago — the first private outfit to put a spacecraft on the moon without crashing or falling over. Even countries have faltered, with only five claiming success: Russia, the U.S., China, India and Japan.

A half hour after landing, Blue Ghost started to send back pictures from the surface, the first one a selfie somewhat obscured by the sun's glare. The second shot included the home planet, a blue dot glimmering in the blackness of space.

Two other companies’ landers are hot on Blue Ghost’s heels, with the next one expected to join it on the moon later this week.

Blue Ghost — named after a rare U.S. species of fireflies — had its size and shape going for it. The squat four-legged lander stands 6-foot-6 (2 meters) tall and 11 feet (3.5 meters) wide, providing extra stability, according to the company.

Launched in mid-January from Florida, the lander carried 10 experiments to the moon for NASA. The space agency paid $101 million for the delivery, plus $44 million for the science and tech on board. It’s the third mission under NASA’s commercial lunar delivery program, intended to ignite a lunar economy of competing private businesses while scouting around before astronauts show up later this decade.

Firefly’s Ray Allensworth said the lander skipped over hazards including boulders to land safely. Allensworth said the team continued to analyze the data to figure out the lander's exact position, but all indications suggest it landed within the 328-foot (100-meter) target zone in Mare Crisium.

The demos should get two weeks of run time, before lunar daytime ends and the lander shuts down.

It carried a vacuum to suck up moon dirt for analysis and a drill to measure temperature as deep as 10 feet (3 meters) below the surface. Also on board: a device for eliminating abrasive lunar dust — a scourge for NASA’s long-ago Apollo moonwalkers, who got it caked all over their spacesuits and equipment.

On its way to the moon, Blue Ghost beamed back exquisite pictures of the home planet. The lander continued to stun once in orbit around the moon, with detailed shots of the moon's gray pockmarked surface. At the same time, an on-board receiver tracked and acquired signals from the U.S. GPS and European Galileo constellations, an encouraging step forward in navigation for future explorers.

The landing set the stage for a fresh crush of visitors angling for a piece of lunar business.

Another lander — a tall and skinny 15-footer (4 meters tall) built and operated by Houston-based Intuitive Machines — is due to land on the moon Thursday. It’s aiming for the bottom of the moon, just 100 miles (160 kilometers) from the south pole. That’s closer to the pole than the company got last year with its first lander, which broke a leg and tipped over.

Despite the tumble, Intuitive Machines' lander put the U.S. back on the moon for the first time since NASA astronauts closed out the Apollo program in 1972.

A third lander from the Japanese company ispace is still three months from landing. It shared a rocket ride with Blue Ghost from Cape Canaveral on Jan. 15, taking a longer, windier route. Like Intuitive Machines, ispace is also attempting to land on the moon for the second time. Its first lander crashed in 2023.

The moon is littered with wreckage not only from ispace, but dozens of other failed attempts over the decades.

NASA wants to keep up a pace of two private lunar landers a year, realizing some missions will fail, said the space agency's top science officer Nicky Fox.

“It really does open up a whole new way for us to get more science to space and to the moon," Fox said.

Unlike NASA’s successful Apollo moon landings that had billions of dollars behind them and ace astronauts at the helm, private companies operate on a limited budget with robotic craft that must land on their own, said Firefly CEO Jason Kim.

Kim said everything went like clockwork.

“We got some moon dust on our boots," Kim said.

Today's Nerdy Thing

The Ort Cloud

• We don't really know what it looks like
• It takes light from the sun 8 minutes to get to Earth
• It takes light from the sun about a month to get to Neptune
• It takes light from the sun about a year and a half to get outside the Ort Cloud

Biology

"It's a scientific fact that humans come in only two varieties,

and they are: XX for female, and XY for male."

except ...

• You can be born appearing female, but have a 5-alpha reductase deficiency which can cause you to grow a penis at about age 12
• You can be born legally male with an XY chromosome, but if your body is insensitive to androgens, you will appear female
• You can be born legally male, with an XY chromosome, and have a penis and testes - and a uterus and fallopian tubes
• You can be born legally male, with an XY chromosome, but if that chromosome is missing the SRY gene, you'll develop a female body
• You can be born legally female with an XX chromosome, but if one of those Xs has an SRY gene, you'll develop a male body
• You can be born legally female, with an XX chromosome plus a Y chromosome, and you'll develop a male body
• You can be born legally female, with an XX chromosome, but if your adrenal gland doesn't produce enough cortisol, you'll develop a male body
• You can be born with both XX and XY chromosomes - Chimerism - and watch Nancy Grace's head explode

So the next time you think about using biology to cover your ignorance and bigotry, remember that humans come in lots of different models with lots of different options, and maybe you could stop wasting everybody's time trying to smash-fit people into your little "M or F" checkboxes.

hat tip = Dr Janet Dean via FB

Today's Nerdy Thing

Sea Level

Sea level rise is accelerating.

In the last 30 years, we've seen sea levels rise about 4 inches.

In the next 30 years, it's likely to go up another 12 inches.

Science Is Pro-Kamala

Vote for Kamala Harris to Support Science, Health and the Environment

Kamala Harris has plans to improve health, boost the economy and mitigate climate change. Donald Trump has threats and a dangerous record

Opinion

In the November election, the U.S. faces two futures. In one, the new president offers the country better prospects, relying on science, solid evidence and the willingness to learn from experience. She pushes policies that boost good jobs nationwide by embracing technology and clean energy. She supports education, public health and reproductive rights. She treats the climate crisis as the emergency it is and seeks to mitigate its catastrophic storms, fires and droughts.

In the other future, the new president endangers public health and safety and rejects evidence, preferring instead nonsensical conspiracy fantasies. He ignores the climate crisis in favor of more pollution. He requires that federal officials show personal loyalty to him rather than upholding U.S. laws. He fills positions in federal science and other agencies with unqualified ideologues. He goads people into hate and division, and he inspires extremists at state and local levels to pass laws that disrupt education and make it harder to earn a living.

Only one of these futures will improve the fate of this country and the world. That is why, for only the second time in our magazine’s 179-year history, the editors of Scientific American are endorsing a candidate for president. That person is Kamala Harris.

Before making this endorsement, we evaluated Harris’s record as a U.S. senator and as vice president under Joe Biden, as well as policy proposals she’s made as a presidential candidate. Her opponent, Donald Trump, who was president from 2017 to 2021, also has a record—a disastrous one. Let’s compare.

Health Care

The Biden-Harris administration shored up the popular Affordable Care Act (ACA), giving more people access to health insurance through subsidies. During Harris’s September 10 debate with Trump, she said one of her goals as president would be to expand it. Scores of studies have shown that people with insurance stay healthier and live longer because they can afford to see doctors for preventive and acute care. Harris supports expansion of Medicaid, the U.S. health-care program for low-income people. States that have expanded this program have seen health gains in their populations, whereas states that continue to restrict eligibility have not. To pay for Medicare, the health insurance program primarily for older Americans, Harris supports a tax increase on people who earn $400,000 or more a year. And the Biden-Harris administration succeeded in passing the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which caps the costs of several expensive drugs, including insulin, for Medicare enrollees. Harris’s vice presidential pick, Tim Walz, signed into law a prohibition against excessive price hikes on generic drugs as governor of Minnesota.

When in office, Trump proposed cuts to Medicare and Medicaid (Congress, to its credit, refused to enact them.) He also pushed for a work requirement as a condition for Medicaid eligibility, making it harder for people to qualify for the program. As a candidate, both in 2016 and this year, he pledged to repeal the ACA, but it’s not clear what he would replace it with. When prodded during the September debate, he said, “I have concepts of a plan” but didn’t elaborate. Like Harris, however, he has voiced concern about drug prices, and in 2020 he signed an executive order designed to lower prices of drugs covered by Medicare.

The COVID pandemic has been the greatest test of the American health-care system in modern history. Harris was vice president of an administration that boosted widespread distribution of COVID vaccines and created a program for free mail-order COVID tests. Wastewater surveillance for viruses has improved, allowing public health officials to respond more quickly when levels are high. Bird flu now poses a new threat, highlighting the importance of the Biden-Harris administration’s Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy.

Trump touted his pandemic efforts during his first debate with Harris, but in 2020 he encouraged resistance to basic public health measures, spread misinformation about treatments and suggested injections of bleach could cure the disease. By the end of that year about 350,000 people in the U.S. had died of COVID; the current national total is well over a million. Trump and his staff had one great success: Operation Warp Speed, which developed effective COVID vaccines extremely quickly. Remarkably, however, Trump plans billion-dollar budget cuts to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health, which started the COVID-vaccine research program. These steps are in line with the guidance of Project 2025, an extreme conservative blueprint for the next presidency drawn up by many former Trump staffers. He’s also talked about ending the Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy, calling it a pork project.

Reproductive Rights

Harris is a staunch supporter of reproductive rights. During the September debate, she spoke plainly about her desire to reinstate “the protections of Roe v. Wade” and added, “I think the American people believe that certain freedoms, in particular the freedom to make decisions about one’s own body, should not be made by the government.” She has vowed to improve access to abortion. She has defended the right to order the abortion pill mifepristone through the mail under authorization by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, even as MAGA Republican state officials have tried—so far unsuccessfully—to revoke those rights. As a U.S. senator, she co-sponsored a package of bills to reduce rising rates of maternal mortality. In August, Trump said he would vote against a ballot measure expanding access to abortions in Florida, where he lives. The current Florida “heartbeat” law makes most abortions illegal after six weeks of pregnancy, before many people even know they are pregnant.

Trump appointed the conservative U.S. Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade, removing the constitutional right to a basic health-care procedure. He spreads misinformation about abortion—during the September debate, he said some states support abortion into the ninth month and beyond, calling it “execution after birth.” No state allows this. He also refused to answer the question of whether he would veto a federal abortion ban, saying Congress would never approve such a ban in the first place. He made no mention of an executive order and praised the Supreme Court, three justices of which he placed, for sending abortion back to states to decide. This ruling led to a patchwork of laws and entire sections of the country where abortion is dangerously limited.

Gun Safety

The Biden-Harris administration closed the gun-show loophole, which had allowed people to buy guns without a license. The evidence is clear that easy access to guns in the U.S. has increased the risk of suicides, murder and firearm accidents. Harris supports a program that temporarily removes guns from people deemed dangerous by a court.

Trump promised the National Rifle Association that he would get rid of all Biden-Harris gun measures. Even after Trump was injured and a supporter was killed in an attempted assassination, the former president remained silent on gun safety. His running mate, J. D. Vance, said the increased number of school shootings was an unhappy “fact of life” and the solution was stronger school security.

Environment and Climate

Harris said pointedly during the September debate that climate change was real. She would continue the responsible leadership shown by Biden, who has undertaken the most substantial climate action of any president. The Biden-Harris administration restored U.S. membership in the Paris Agreement on coping with climate change. Harris’s election would continue IRA tax credits for clean energy, as well as regulations to reduce power-plant emissions and coal use. This approach puts the country on course to spend the authorized billions of dollars for renewable energy that should cut U.S. carbon emissions in half by 2030. The IRA also includes a commitment to broadening electric vehicle technology.

Trump has said climate change is a hoax, and he dodged the question “What would you do to fight climate change?” during the September debate. He pulled the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement. Under his direction the Environmental Protection Agency and other federal agencies abandoned more than 100 environmental policies and rules, many designed to ensure clean air and water, restrict the dangers of toxic chemicals and protect wildlife. He has also tried to revoke funding for satellite-based climate-research projects.

Technology

The Biden-Harris administration’s 2023 Executive Order on Safe, Secure and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence requires that AI-based products be safe for consumers and national security. The CHIPS and Science Act invigorates the chipmaking industry and semiconductor research while growing the workforce. A new Trump administration would undo all of this work and quickly. Under the devious and divisive Project 2025 framework, technology safeguards on AI would be overturned. AI influences our criminal justice, labor and health-care systems. As is the rightful complaint now, there would be no knowing how these programs are developed, how they are tested or whether they even work.

The 2024 U.S. ballots are also about Congress and local officials—people who make decisions that affect our communities and families. Extremist state legislators in Ohio, for instance, have given politicians the right to revoke any rule from the state health department designed to limit the spread of contagious disease. Other states have passed similar measures. In education, many states now forbid lessons about racial bias. But research has shown such lessons reduce stereotypes and do not prompt schoolchildren to view one another negatively, regardless of their race. This is the kind of science MAGA politicians ignore, and such people do not deserve our votes.

At the top of the ballot, Harris does deserve our vote. She offers us a way forward lit by rationality and respect for all. Economically, the renewable-energy projects she supports will create new jobs in rural America. Her platform also increases tax deductions for new small businesses from $5,000 to $50,000, making it easier for them to turn a profit. Trump, a convicted felon who was also found liable of sexual abuse in a civil trial, offers a return to his dark fantasies and demagoguery, whether it’s denying the reality of climate change or the election results of 2020 that were confirmed by more than 60 court cases, including some that were overseen by judges whom he appointed.

One of two futures will materialize according to our choices in this election. Only one is a vote for reality and integrity. We urge you to vote for Kamala Harris.