An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: It took less than six hours for drug-developing AI to invent 40,000 potentially lethal molecules. Researchers put AI normally used to search for helpful drugs into a kind of "bad actor" mode to show how easily it could be abused at a biological arms control conference. All the researchers had to do was tweak their methodology to seek out, rather than weed out toxicity. The AI came up with tens of thousands of new substances, some of which are similar to VX, the most potent nerve agent ever developed. Shaken, they published their findings this month in the journal Nature Machine Intelligence. The Verge spoke with Fabio Urbina, lead author of the paper, to learn more about the AI. When asked how easy it is for someone to replicate, Urbina said it would be "fairly easy."

"If you were to Google generative models, you could find a number of put-together one-liner generative models that people have released for free," says Urbina. "And then, if you were to search for toxicity datasets, there's a large number of open-source tox datasets. So if you just combine those two things, and then you know how to code and build machine learning models -- all that requires really is an internet connection and a computer -- then, you could easily replicate what we did. And not just for VX, but for pretty much whatever other open-source toxicity datasets exist."

He added: "Of course, it does require some expertise. [...] Finding a potential drug or potential new toxic molecule is one thing; the next step of synthesis -- actually creating a new molecule in the real world -- would be another barrier."

As for what can be done to prevent this kind of misuse of AI, Urbina noted OpenAI's GPT-3 language model. People can use it for free but need a special access token to do so, which can be revoked at any time to cut off access to the model. "We were thinking something like that could be a useful starting point for potentially sensitive models, such as toxicity models," says Urbina.

"Science is all about open communication, open access, open data sharing. Restrictions are antithetical to that notion. But a step going forward could be to at least responsibly account for who's using your resources."

Taking long naps could be a precursor of Alzheimer's disease, according to a study that tracked the daytime sleeping habits of elderly people. The Guardian reports: The scientists think it is more likely that excessive napping could be an early warning sign, rather than it causing mental decline. The scientists tracked more than 1,000 people, with an average age of 81, over several years. Each year, the participants wore a watch-like device to track mobility for up to 14 days. Each prolonged period of non-activity from 9am to 7pm was interpreted as a nap. The participants also underwent tests to evaluate cognition each year. At the start of the study 76% of participants had no cognitive impairment, 20% had mild cognitive impairment and 4% had Alzheimer's disease.

For participants who did not develop cognitive impairment, daily daytime napping increased by an average 11 minutes a year. The rate of increase doubled after a diagnosis of mild cognitive impairment to a total of 24 minutes and nearly tripled to a total of 68 minutes after a diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease, according to the research published in the journal Alzheimer's and dementia. Overall, participants who napped more than an hour a day had a 40% higher risk of developing Alzheimer's than those who napped less than an hour a day; and participants who napped at least once a day had a 40% higher risk of developing Alzheimer's than those who napped less than once a day.

A dentist in Wisconsin has been found guilty of deliberately breaking his patients' teeth with a drill so he could collect millions of dollars to repair the damage with dental crowns. ArsTechnica reports: The alleged scheme by licensed Grafton dentist Scott Charmoli, 61, appears to have begun in 2015, when the number of crowns he installed abruptly increased. In 2015, Charmoli installed 1,036 crowns, well over the 434 crowns he did in 2014. Amid the royal boom, his income increased by more than a million dollars, going from $1.4 million in 2014 to $2.5 million in 2015, according to court documents. From 2016 to 2019, Charmoli billed insurers and patients over $4.2 million for crown procedures, according to federal prosecutors. Charmoli ranked at or above the 95th percentile for the number of crowns installed by dentists in the state in each of those years, the report added.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Today, the European Space Agency leadership took steps toward suspending the ExoMars mission, a joint project with Russian space agency Roscosmos. It's the latest scientific fallout from the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which has forced institutions collaborating with Russian entities to reevaluate their positions.

ExoMars a two-part mission: an orbiter, launched in 2016, that studies the chemistry of the Red Planet's atmosphere, and a Mars rover, named for scientist Rosalind Franklin and set to launch this year -- or at least, it was. The mission has been a long time coming; funding was granted 10 years ago this week, but technical delays and the covid-19 pandemic pushed the rover launch date back to fall 2022. That target was looking viable until the Russian invasion of Ukraine last month.

From the off, it was clear that ExoMars was in doubt. In a statement shortly after the invasion, the ESA said it was "fully implementing sanctions imposed on Russia by our Member States" and that "the sanctions and the wider context make a launch in 2022 very unlikely." The agency's most recent move codifies that unlikeliness. Meeting in Paris this week, the agency's ruling council unanimously mandated that the ESA Director General take steps to suspend cooperation with Roscosmos and authorized a study of how to get ExoMars off the ground without Roscosmos involvement. [...] In its newest statement, ESA announced that its director general would convene a meeting of the agency council in several weeks to submit proposals for how to proceed with ExoMars without Russian involvement.

Stephen Hawking's black hole information paradox has bedevilled scientists for half a century and led some to question the fundamental laws of physics. Now scientists say they may have resolved the infamous problem by showing that black holes have a property known as "quantum hair." From a report: If correct, this would mark a momentous advance in theoretical physics. Prof Xavier Calmet, of the University of Sussex, who led the work, said that after working on the mathematics behind the problem for a decade, his team made a rapid advance last year that gave them confidence that they had finally cracked it. "It was generally assumed within the scientific community that resolving this paradox would require a huge paradigm shift in physics, forcing the potential reformulation of either quantum mechanics or general relativity," said Calmet. "What we found -- and I think is particularly exciting -- is that this isn't necessary."

Hawking's paradox boils down to the following: the rules of quantum physics state that information is conserved. Black holes pose a challenge to this law because once an object enters a black hole, it is essentially gone for good -- along with any information encoded in it. Hawking identified this paradox and for decades it has continued to confound scientists. There have been innumerable proposed solutions, including a "firewall theory" in which information was assumed to burn up before entering the black hole, the "fuzzball theory" in which black holes were thought to have indistinct boundaries, and various exotic branches of string theory. But most of these proposals required rewriting of the laws of quantum mechanics or Einstein's theory of gravity, the two pillars of modern physics.

BeerFartMoron shares a report from CBS News: After weeks of microscopic adjustments, NASA unveiled the first fully focused image from the James Webb Space Telescope Wednesday, a razor-sharp engineering photo of a nondescript star in a field of more distant galaxies that shows the observatory's optical system is working in near-flawless fashion. The goal was to demonstrate Webb can now bring starlight to a near-perfect focus, proving the $10 billion telescope doesn't suffer from any subtle optical defects like the aberration that initially hobbled the Hubble Space Telescope. The galaxies in the image were a bonus, whetting astronomers' appetites for discoveries to come. "This is one of the most magnificent days in my whole career at NASA, frankly, and for many of us astronomers, one of the most important days that we've had," said NASA science chief Thomas Zurbuchen. "Today we can announce that the optics will perform to specifications or even better. It's an amazing achievement."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: A new study in the journal Earth's Future led by the University of Massachusetts Amherst shows that, since Euro-American settlement approximately 160 years ago, agricultural fields in the midwestern U.S. have lost, on average, two millimeters of soil per year. This is nearly double the rate of erosion that the USDA considers sustainable. Furthermore, USDA estimates of erosion are between three and eight times lower than the figures reported in the study. Finally, the study's authors conclude that plowing, rather than the work of wind and water, is the major culprit.

Using an extraordinarily sensitive GPS unit that looks more like a floor lamp than a hand-held device, the team walked dozens of transects, or perpendicular routes across the escarpment, from the untouched prairie to the eroded farm field, stopping every few inches to measure the change in altitude. They did this hundreds of times throughout the summers of 2017, 2018 and 2019. Once they had their raw data, the team used historical land-use records and cutting-edge computer models to reconstruct erosion rates throughout the Midwest. What they discovered is that Midwestern topsoil is eroding at an average rate of 1.9 millimeters per year. Put another way, the authors estimate that the Midwest has lost approximately 57.6 trillion metric tons of topsoil since farmers began tilling the soil, 160 years ago. And this is despite conservation practices put in place in the wake of the Dust Bowl in the 1930s. As noted above, much of the erosion was due to tillage, or plowing. "The modeling that I do shows that tilling has a 'diffusive' effect," says Jeffrey Kwang, a postdoctoral researcher at UMass Amhers. "It melts the landscape away, flattening higher points in a field and filling in the hollows."

Furthermore, the USDA doesn't include "tillage erosion" in its own analysis, meaning it's drastically underestimated the rate of erosion that's occurred in the area. The team suggests that more sustainable practice, such as no-till farming and soil regeneration, "will likely be required to reduce soil erosion rates in the Midwest to levels that can sustain soil productivity, ecosystem services, and long-term prosperity."

For two decades, researchers have used brain-imaging technology to try to identify how the structure and function of a person's brain connects to a range of mental-health ailments, from anxiety and depression to suicidal tendencies. But a new paper, published Wednesday in Nature, calls into question whether much of this research is actually yielding valid findings. The New York Times reports: Many such studies, the paper's authors found, tend to include fewer than two dozen participants, far shy of the number needed to generate reliable results. "You need thousands of individuals," said Scott Marek, a psychiatric researcher at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and an author of the paper. He described the finding as a "gut punch" for the typical studies that use imaging to try to better understand mental health.

Studies that use magnetic-resonance imaging technology commonly temper their conclusions with a cautionary statement noting the small sample size. But enlisting participants can be time-consuming and expensive, ranging from $600 to $2,000 an hour, said Dr. Nico Dosenbach, a neurologist at Washington University School of Medicine and another author on the paper. The median number of subjects in mental-health-related studies that use brain imaging is around 23, he added. But the Nature paper demonstrates that the data drawn from just two dozen subjects is generally insufficient to be reliable and can in fact yield 'massively inflated' findings," Dr. Dosenbach said. The findings from the Nature paper can "absolutely" be applied to other fields beyond mental health, said Marek. "My hunch this is much more about population science than it is about any one of those fields," he said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard in collaboration with The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, an independent not-for-profit news organization based in London: Campylobacter is America's biggest cause of foodborne illness, just ahead of salmonella. Both are potentially fatal. Yet between 2015 and 2020, U.S. companies sold tens of thousands of meat products contaminated with campylobacter and salmonella, according to government sampling records obtained by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. More than half of these were contaminated with antibiotic-resistant strains, a rapidly escalating issue that can be exacerbated by poor hygiene conditions. The poultry companies supply major grocery stores and fast-food chains. Tyson has supplied chicken to McDonald's, Perdue has sold to Whole Foods, and both have supplied Walmart.

Although the USDA deems a certain level of salmonella and campylobacter within poultry acceptable, 12 major U.S. poultry companies -- including poultry giants Perdue, Pilgrim's Pride, Tyson, Foster Farms, and Koch Foods -- have exceeded USDA standards for acceptable levels of salmonella multiple times since 2018, when the government began reporting contamination rates at individual plants, according to the department's records. The USDA still runs tests for campylobacter in processing plants but does not currently track whether plants exceed the contamination thresholds. Batches of poultry products with contamination rates above the limit don't have to be recalled, although plants that repeatedly exceed the thresholds can be temporarily shut down. Separate government records also show that between January 2015 and August 2019, the same 12 major U.S. poultry companies broke food safety rules on at least 145,000 occasions -- or on average more than 80 times a day. Poultry plant workers also claimed they have sometimes been asked to process rotten-smelling meat, have witnessed chicken tossed into grinders with dead insects, and found government safety inspectors apparently asleep on the job.

Campylobacter causes more than 100 deaths every year in America as well as 1.5 million infections. It also accounts for up to 40 percent of the country's cases of Guillain-Barré Syndrome [...]. Yet the sale of poultry products found to be contaminated with either that or salmonella bacteria remains perfectly legal. The level of salmonella and campylobacter that the USDA deems acceptable differs depending on the product. A maximum of 15.4 percent of chicken parts leaving a processing plant, for instance, can test positive for salmonella and the plant can still meet acceptable standards. The threshold for campylobacter is 7.7 percent. Many experts argue these levels are too lax. The report also notes the concerning increase in antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria. "The number of drug-resistant salmonella infections in the U.S. rose from around 159,000 in 2004 to around 222,000 in 2016," reports Motherboard, citing the CDC. "Campylobacter has become more resistant too: Ciprofloxacin, an antibiotic commonly used to treat it, is increasingly ineffective."

"The rise of superbugs is having increasingly serious human consequences. In order to treat these illnesses, doctors are turning more frequently to last-resort drugs, which often have more side effects. And if these fail, there's no choice but to let the disease take its course."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: In Wednesday's issue of Nature, a new paper describes a potentially useful way of measuring the interactions between normal matter and exotic particles, like antiprotons and unstable items like kaons or elements containing a strange quark. The work is likely to be useful, as we still don't understand the asymmetry that has allowed matter to be the dominant form in our Universe. But the study is probably most notable for the surprising way that it collected measurements. A small research team managed to put an antiproton in orbit around the nucleus of a helium atom that was part of some liquid helium chilled down to where it acted as a superfluid. The researchers then measured the light emitted by the antiproton's orbital transitions.
[...]
At temperatures above the point at which liquid helium becomes a superfluid, the transition created a broad peak instead of a sharp one. The peak narrowed as the temperature dropped, and it eventually separated into two distinct peaks at the transition temperature. This separation -- called the hyperfine split -- is caused by interactions between the antiproton and the helium nucleus. The fact that it can be detected with this level of precision indicates that an experimental system can be used to tell us about both the antimatter and the fundamental physics behind these interactions. Why did this experiment work when previous attempts to measure the properties of molecules in liquid helium failed? The researchers suggest their success is mostly due to the fact that they were essentially measuring an odd form of helium in a pool of helium. In the other cases, researchers measured a molecule that was dissolved in the helium, producing very different behavior. (One suggestion is that the helium forms a cage around any molecules dissolved in it, and the cage is large enough to allow the molecule to move around freely.)

The researchers are excited about the idea that this process could be used more generally to get these sorts of measurements. Technically, any moderately sized, negatively charged particle could be put in orbit around a helium nucleus, provided it can be slowed down enough -- the researchers specifically mention "negatively charged mesons and hyperons that include strange quarks." The authors suggest that helium with an unusual nuclear composition would also work.

Former astronaut Scott Kelly said he is ending his feud with the head of Russia's space program after the National Aeronautics and Space Administration asked former astronauts to dial down criticism of their Russian counterparts. From a report: The dustup began when Roscosmos Director General Dmitry Rogozin and other Russian government entities published a series of social-media posts, including one video showing Russian cosmonauts abandoning the International Space Station and leaving behind U.S. astronaut Mark Vande Hei. Mr. Kelly, who spent nearly a year in 2015 and 2016 aboard the ISS, got into a heated exchange on Twitter last week with the Russian space chief over the series of posts. Now Mr. Kelly said he is ending the spat with Mr. Rogozin after NASA sent an email to former astronauts asking them to stop criticizing their Russian partners because it was hurting the mission aboard the ISS, an orbiting lab where American astronauts and Russian cosmonauts work side by side. "I respect their position. They have a tough job. I believe in NASA and what they do. I want to help them. I respect the person that sent it greatly," Mr. Kelly said in an interview. "I would say that if I was in their position, I would have done the same exact thing."

Long-term exposure to air pollution can increase the risk of autoimmune disease, research has found. From a report: Exposure to particulates has already been linked to strokes, brain cancer, miscarriage and mental health problems. A global review, published in 2019, concluded that almost every cell in the body could be affected by dirty air. Now researchers at the University of Verona have found that long-term exposure to high levels of air pollution was associated with an approximately 40% higher risk of rheumatoid arthritis, a 20% higher risk of inflammatory bowel disease such as Crohn's and ulcerative colitis, and a 15% higher risk of connective tissue diseases, such as lupus. The study, published in the journal RMD Open, took comprehensive medical information about 81,363 men and women on an Italian database monitoring risk of fractures between June 2016 and November 2020. About 12% were diagnosed with an autoimmune disease during this period.

Pamela Burdman, the executive director of Just Equations, a policy institute focused on the role of math in education equity, writes in an op-ed for Scientific American: All routes to STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) degrees run through calculus classes. Each year, hundreds of thousands of college students take introductory calculus. But only a fraction ultimately complete a STEM degree, and research about why students abandon such degrees suggests that traditional calculus courses are one of the reasons. With scientific understanding and innovation increasingly central to solving 21st-century problems, this loss of talent is something society can ill afford. Math departments alone are unlikely to solve this dilemma. Several of the promising calculus reforms highlighted in our report Charting a New Course: Investigating Barriers on the Calculus Pathway to STEM , published with the California Education Learning Lab, were spearheaded by professors outside of math departments. It's time for STEM faculty to prioritize collaboration across disciplines to transform math classes from weed-out mechanisms to fertile terrain for cultivating a diverse generation of STEM researchers and professionals. This is not uncharted territory.

In 2013, life sciences faculty at the University of California, Los Angeles, developed a two-course sequence that covers classic calculus topics such as the derivative and the integral, but emphasizes their application in a biological context. The professors used modeling of complex systems such as biological and physiological processes as a framework for teaching linear algebra and a starting point for teaching the basics of computer programming to support students' use of systems of differential equations. Creating this course, Mathematics for Life Scientists, wasn't easy. The life sciences faculty involved, none of whom had a joint appointment with the math department, said they resorted to designing the course themselves after math faculty rebuffed their overture. The math faculty feared creating a "watered-down" course with no textbook (though after the course was developed, one math instructor taught some sections of the class).

Besides math, the life sciences faculty said they experienced "significant pushback" from the chemistry and physics departments over concerns that the course wouldn't adequately prepare students for required courses in those disciplines. But the UCLA course seems to be successful, and a textbook based on it now exists. According to recently published research led by UCLA education researchers, students in the new classes ended up with "significantly higher grades" in subsequent physics, chemistry and life sciences courses than students in the traditional calculus course, even when controlling for factors such as demographics, prior preparation and math grades. Students' interest in the subject doubled, according to surveys.

Several tombs and a leaden sarcophagus likely dating from the 14th century have been uncovered by archaeologists at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris as work continues on the building's reconstruction after its devastating 2019 fire. From a report: The burial sites "of remarkable scientific quality" were unearthed during preparatory work for rebuilding the ancient church's spire at the central spot where the transept crosses the nave, France's culture ministry announced late Monday. Among the tombs was a "completely preserved, human-shaped sarcophagus made of lead." It is thought the coffin was made for a senior dignitary in the 1300s -- the century after the cathedral's construction. As well as the tombs, elements of painted sculptures were found just beneath the current floor level of the cathedral, identified as parts of the original 13th-century rood screen -- an architectural element separating the altar area from the nave.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Our universe is connected by a cosmic web made of giant threads of dark matter and gas that stretch across millions of light years and intersect at "nodes" populated by dense clusters of galaxies. This vast network shapes the distribution and evolution of galaxies in fundamental ways that scientists are trying to unravel with ever-sharper observations and advanced simulations. Now, a team led by Callum Donnan, a postgraduate student in astronomy at the University of Edinburgh, have identified a key correlation between the chemical makeup of galaxies and their location within the cosmic web. Using both real-life observations and computer simulations, the team found that "galaxies closer to nodes [display] higher chemical enrichment than those farther away," a discovery that reveals some of the mysterious dynamics that link the universe, according to a study published on Monday in Nature Astronomy.

To home in on this question, Donnan and his colleagues examined galaxies within about a billion light years of the Milky Way observed by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey in New Mexico, which covers a huge area of the sky. The team studied the elemental makeup of gasses in the interstellar spaces within these real-life galaxies, a property that is known as gas-phase metallicity. The results revealed that galaxies close to the nodes of the cosmic web were richer in "metals," which in astronomy refers to any element heavier than helium. A weaker correlation was also observed with proximity to the web's filaments, which are the threads that stretch across the universe and link nodes together. The team ran sophisticated cosmological simulations using the IllustrisTNG platform, which supported the observational findings. Significantly, the approach revealed that a galaxy's position in the cosmic web modulates its chemical content even when other factors, such as the density of a particular region in the universe, are taken into account.

Naturally, that raises the question of why galaxies located near nodes are enriched with more metals compared to those distributed along filaments or in empty "voids" within the cosmic web. Donnan's team isolated two major drivers of this relationship: The absorption of gas from outside of galaxies and the evolution of stars and dark matter inside of them. Galaxies feed on gasses that are strewn across space in the intergalactic medium, but those that are further from nodes consume much more of this outside material than those close to nodes. Since intergalactic gas is metal-poor, it dilutes the enriched gas of far-flung galaxies, lowering their overall gas-phase metallicities. Galaxies near nodes don't consume as much of this metal-poor material, which helps to keep them chemically enriched with higher concentrations of heavier elements. In addition, galaxies close to nodes seem to have matured earlier than those located at a distance. These galaxies had a head-start in birthing new stars and collecting dark matter, which is a mysterious substance that makes up most of the matter in the universe.

Two hours. That's about how much time elapsed between the discovery of asteroid 2022 EB5 and when it reached Earth's atmosphere. The asteroid is only the fifth one to have been detected before impact. CNET reports: Astronomer Krisztian Sarneczky first spotted the asteroid on March 11 with a telescope at the Piszkesteto observatory in Hungary. He reported the sighting to the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center, which tracks near-Earth objects and comets. News of the asteroid spread from there, and calculations showed the space rock had a 100% chance of impact north of Iceland. Fortunately, the asteroid was very small, roughly 1 meter (3.3 feet) in diameter -- that's half the height of basketball superstar Michael Jordan. An asteroid that small will safely burn up in our planet's atmosphere, but the dainty size also makes it hard to spot.

The thought of an asteroid discovery mere hours before reaching us might make you think "yikes," but the European Space Agency described the news as "rather positive." Researchers have done an excellent job tracking bigger asteroids, so it's impressive they're now finding some of the smaller, sneakier ones. "All five asteroids, spotted before impact, were found since 2008, illustrating how much asteroid observation technologies have improved in the last years," ESA said in a statement. While 2022 EB5 was relatively tiny, infrasound detectors picked up on the likely impact, which ESA said suggested an energy release equivalent to a magnitude 4.0 earthquake. As detection systems get more sophisticated, it might be possible to warn communities when a small asteroid is inbound.

An anonymous reader shares a report: While US health experts closely monitor upticks of COVID-19 cases in Europe as well as the global rise of the omicron subvariant BA.2, Pfizer is renewing calls for fourth doses of COVID-19 vaccine. In an interview Sunday on CBS' Face the Nation, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla said that a fourth dose -- aka a second booster -- is "necessary."

"The protection what we are getting from the third [doses], it is good enough -- actually, quite good for hospitalizations and deaths," Dr. Bourla said. But, "it's not that good against infections" with omicron, and "it doesn't last very long." He reported that Pfizer is "working very diligently" to come up with a new dose that will protect against all variants and provide longer-lasting protection.

The US astronaut Mark Vande Hei has made it through nearly a year in space, but now faces what could be his trickiest assignment: riding a Russian capsule back to Earth in the midst of deepening tension between the two countries. From a report: Nasa insists Vande Hei's homecoming at the end of the month remains unchanged, even as Russia's invasion of Ukraine has resulted in canceled launches, broken contracts and an escalating war of words from the leader of the Russian Space Agency. Many worry Dmitry Rogozin is putting decades of peaceful partnership at risk, most notably at the International Space Station (ISS). Vande Hei, who on Tuesday will break the US single spaceflight record of 340 days, is due to leave with two Russians aboard a Soyuz capsule for touchdown in Kazakhstan on 30 March. He will have logged 355 days in space. The world record of 438 days belongs to Russia.

The retired Nasa astronaut Scott Kelly, America's record-holder until Tuesday, is among those sparring with Rogozin, a longtime ally of Vladimir Putin. Kelly has returned a medal to the Russian embassy in Washington but believes the two sides "can hold it together" in space. "We need an example set that two countries that historically have not been on the most friendly of terms, can still work somewhere peacefully. And that somewhere is the International Space Station. That's why we need to fight to keep it," Kelly said. Nasa wants to keep the space station running until 2030, as do the European, Japanese and Canadian space agencies. The Russians have not committed beyond the original end date of 2024 or so.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Time: Pfizer said it would no longer start new clinical trials in Russia and that it would donate all profits from its subsidiary in the country to Ukraine relief causes. At the same time, the drugmaker said in a statement that it will continue to supply medicines to Russia, out of fear that vulnerable patients such as children and elderly people who rely on its therapies could be harmed by any halt. The company "concluded that a voluntary pause in the flow of our medicines to Russia would be in direct violation of our foundational principle of putting patients first," according to the statement. Pfizer said it doesn't own or operate any manufacturing sites in Russia and plans to cease planned investments with local suppliers. Pfizer said it would work with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and other regulators to move current clinical trials to alternative locations outside of Russia. Patients already enrolled in studies will continue to receive medications, the company said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Sleeping in the dark may reduce your risk of heart disease and diabetes, a new study suggests. Exposure to overhead lighting during sleep at night, compared to sleeping in a dimly lit room, harms heart function during sleep and affects how well the body responds to insulin the next morning, researchers found. They suggest it is important for people to avoid or minimize the amount of light exposure during sleep, and that if people are able to see things well, it is probably too light. The study found that, when exposed to more light during sleep, the body went into a state of alert, with the heart rate rising and the body not being able to rest properly.

According to the scientists, people should not turn lights on, but if they do need to have some light -- for example, in the interests of safety for older adults -- it should be a dim light that is closer to the floor. The color is also important, with amber or a red/orange light less stimulating for the brain. White or blue light should be kept far away, the experts suggest. Blackout curtains or eye masks are a good option if outdoor light cannot be controlled. The study of 20 people found that insulin resistance occurred the morning after people slept in a light room. This is when cells in muscles, fat and the liver do not respond well to insulin and cannot use glucose from the blood for energy. To make up for it, the pancreas makes more insulin and, over time, blood sugar goes up. Senior study author Dr Phyllis Zee, chief of sleep medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in America, said: "The results from this study demonstrate that just a single night of exposure to moderate room lighting during sleep can impair glucose and cardiovascular regulation, which are risk factors for heart disease, diabetes and metabolic syndrome." Dr Daniela Grimaldi, a co-first author and research assistant professor of neurology at Northwestern, added: "We showed your heart rate increases when you sleep in a moderately lit room. "Even though you are asleep, your autonomic nervous system is activated. That's bad. Usually, your heart rate together with other cardiovascular parameters are lower at night and higher during the day."

The study has been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.