Month: August 2021

YAKUTSK, Russia, Aug 13 (Reuters) – Scientists have said that an astonishingly well-preserved cave lion cub found in Siberia’s permafrost lived 28,000 years ago and may even still have traces of its mother’s milk in it.

The female cub, named Sparta, was found at the Semyuelyakh River in Russia’s Yakutia region in 2018 and a second lion cub called Boris was found the year before, according to a study published in the Quaternary journal. https://www.mdpi.com/2571-550X/4/3/24/htm

The cubs were found 15 metres apart but are not only from different litters but were also born thousands of years apart. Boris, a male cub, lived around 43,448 years ago, the study said.

The two cubs aged 1-2 months were found by mammoth tusk collectors. Two other lion cubs named Uyan and Dina have also been found in the region in recent years.

Cave lions have been extinct for thousands of years.

Valery Plotnikov, one of the study’s authors, told Reuters in the regional capital Yakutsk that Sparta was so well preserved that it still had its fur, internal organs and skeleton.

“The find itself is unique; there was no any other such find in Yakutia,” he said.

“Maybe, we hope, some disintegrated parts of the mother’s milk (remain intact). Because if we have that, we can understand what its mother’s diet was,” he said.

Similar finds in Russia’s vast Siberian region have happened with increasing regularity. Climate change is warming the Arctic at a faster pace than the rest of the world and has thawed the ground in some areas long locked in permafrost.

Reporting by Roman Kutukov; writing by Tom Balmforth; editing by Angus MacSwan

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

We might not be able to study a walking, breathing woolly mammoth in real life, but what if we could track its movements and get a sense of where it traveled, from its birth to its death? For the first time ever, scientists have done just that.

An international team of researchers published a paper this week in the journal Science that reveals the 28-year movement history of a male woolly mammoth. With exciting detail about where it roamed throughout northern Alaska, its seemingly favorite locations—as it returned time and time—and where it eventually died, this paper offers unparalleled insight into an animal that lived approximately 17,000 years ago.

His movement, for the first two years of his life, was restricted to an area within the interior of northern Alaska. Between 2 and 16 years of age, when he was considered a juvenile, he started to move over a larger expanse of land. The authors believe this might reflect the movement of a herd, if mammoths had a similar social structure as today’s elephants. He began to travel considerable distances, however, when he matured at age 16 or so, and throughout his life, he often returned to specific areas within Alaska.

With an in-depth discovery such as this, it might be tempting to think these scientists had access to a complete woolly mammoth skeleton—lots of fossil material to help them form their hypotheses. But in truth, they had mere fragments: two complete tusks, parts of its skull, and some of its jaw with intact teeth.

But those scattered parts were enough. The team used a variety of scientific analyses to shed light on the travels of this ancient beast. Ancient DNA revealed its sex and its clade, a term meaning organisms with a common ancestor. The team sliced one entire tusk down the middle to both sample and examine it. To learn more about the mammoth’s migration, they used a neat trick called isotopic analysis.

Isotopes are like chemical footprints, and they are in everything around us. Being able to read those chemical footprints in their various forms can help us understand more about diet, for example, or where an animal roamed. Some isotopes reflect the geology of specific environments; some reflect the type of precipitation and season within an environment. All of us—animals and plants—ingest them and incorporate them into our bodies. Scientists, if they have the appropriate samples and tools, can “read” them. It’s a highly complex type of science, but one that is growing in popularity across paleontology and archaeology because it can reveal so many fascinating details.

The bulk of the work centered around one of the tusks. Proboscideans—mammoths, mastodons, elephants, and their relatives—are one of the rare types of animal uniquely suited for understanding an entire life history. Those histories are stored in their tusks, where daily growth increments, information about diet, seasons, and even pregnancy, can be read from the moment they are born to their death. It is therefore no surprise that the authors chose this as their starting point. What is surprising is how they went about doing it.

Matthew Wooller, co-lead and senior author of the new paper, is a professor at the College of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences and Institute of Northern Engineering at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. He is also director of the Alaska Stable Isotope Facility, which has a relatively new, high-tech instrument crucial to this study (its full name: a Laser Ablation Multi-Collector Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometer).

It’s not enough to have the technology. Understanding both how to set up the equipment and then knowing how to use it will impact the results. Co-authors Johanna Irrgeher and Thomas Prohaska are experts in isotope ratio analysis, and they helped Wooller and his team in the initial set-up. Obtaining accurate isotope ratio measurements, said Irrgeher, research scientist at Montanuniversität Leoben in Austria, is “still an art.”

Irrgeher reflected on the type of research typically done with this kind of technology: the study of ear bones in fish. Consider, for a moment, an ear bone in a fish versus a woolly mammoth tusk. “We took that same high-resolution micro-technology and applied it on a macro scale,” said Wooller.

Prohaska said he believes “you need to be crazy to be a good scientist,” and he means it in the best possible way: having the courage to think differently and to try things others might not even consider possible. He described the enormous size of this mammoth’s tusk—1.7 meters—and compared it to the very tiny space within the instrument they would be using to analyze it. He remembers thinking of his Alaskan colleagues, “You want to put samples of this tusk into a laser cell of this size?? You people are really crazy!”

“Mat [Wooller] really brought this research to a very high level,” Irrgeher said.

To help them understand where the mammoth traveled, the authors turned to strontium isotope geochemistry. Strontium isotopes, said Joshua Miller, paleoecologist and assistant professor at the University of Cincinnati who was not involved in the research, are “a geographically informative chemical marker sourced from the animal’s environment and local geology, and acquired by an animal as it eats and drinks.” In a nutshell, it’s almost like a tracking device. Strontium is in the ground; it is ingested by plants through their roots; herbivores eat the plants and therefore unknowingly ingest the strontium; the strontium is stored in the animal’s teeth (or, in this case, the tusk—which is actually a really long tooth); and then, thousands of years later, scientists can tell where the animal has been throughout its life.

To create the history of the mammoth’s life, they used something called isoscapes, which map the type of strontium found across a specific landscape. Two of today’s co-authors and others mapped the various kinds of strontium across Alaska by using the teeth of rodent specimens housed at the University of Alaska Museum Mammal Collection.

They began where the mammoth died, an area they suspect was close to where the fossils were found in 2010, and worked backward, tracing its route from death back to the moment of birth. They applied certain logical inferences when mapping the mammoth’s movement to the isotopic data. For example, they assumed “that this mammoth couldn’t fly,” Wooller mentioned in a video interview, smiling, and therefore couldn’t travel over impossible terrain such as cliffs or other “extreme topography.”

“This animal,” he continued, “was alive 17,000 years ago, pretty much at the height of the last Ice Age. A lot of people outside of Alaska assume that we were covered by ice during the Ice Age, but that’s not true. The majority of it was NOT covered by ice.”

“We never really knew what we were going to see as each tusk section came off the mass spectrometer,” Wooller recalled. “We were plotting it up in real time to say, ‘ah, look! It stopped for a while!’ And ‘oh, look! It’s headed up north again!’”

Remarkably, some of the mammoth’s most oft-traveled routes are used today by herds of caribou. Perhaps more interesting, some of these routes are not only close to locations where numerous other mammoth fossils have been found but to known sites of ancient humans. If all or even most mammoths in Alaska traveled as much as the one in this study, Wooller mentioned, this would have implications for potential contact with ancient humans when they later migrated to the area.

“The general areas regularly used by this mammoth are also used by the earliest Beringian hunters,” wrote co-author and archaeologist Ben Potter in an email, “focused on the Yukon river basin and northwest Alaska, with relatively few occupations in the southwest, south-central, and far eastern unglaciated regions. In other words, the habitat likely favored both species, mammoths and humans.”

But, for now, he wrote, “the exact nature of human-mammoth interactions remains tantalizingly ambiguous.”

Katy Smith, associate professor of geology and curator of paleontology at Georgia Southern University who was not involved in the study, is a tusk specialist. She wrote in an email, “I think this is an amazing level of insight—it’s certainly something I would like to know about every tusk on every proboscidean.”

Smith noted that paleontologists “can all do a lot of different things with the resources that we have,” whether that involves high-tech equipment or relying on more basic tools such as taking measurements and observing growth patterns in tusks, much like tree rings. It is, she said, “why science is a community. We all can bring our different skills and strengths to it.”

“I’m fascinated to see that mammoths act like modern caribou!” she wrote. “Seeing patterns of behavior in extinct animals repeated in extant animals really puts life back into the extinct forms. This study infers that mammoths were successful until the environment changed, something that we see time and time again for extinct—and extant—animals.”

“We often make these assumptions that these extinct animals behaved much like their living cousins do today,” Advait Jukar, Yale paleontologist who was not involved in the research, said in a video interview, “but there is no good way to test this unless we have direct evidence from the fossil record. And this [paper] is a great test of that.”

One of the more poignant aspects of the paper was the description of the mammoth’s death. According to nitrogen isotopes in the tusk, evidence suggests that he died of starvation in late winter or spring. The authors wonder whether a harsh winter, which may have frozen the snow, would have prevented access to the vegetation underneath.

“You can almost see the animal dying,” Miller expressed in a video interview. “You can really feel it. I mean, that kind of nitrogen excursion is really dramatic. To me, this suggests he may have even been suffering during the end of his life.”

Jukar, noting the relatively young age of 28 when this mammoth died, said that he would like to see more research on other mammoths to see “if there are periods in the geological past when these animals were dying younger in a particular part of Alaska, as it can add more nuance to our understanding of how the environment is affecting their population dynamics.”

Related: One of the Last Mammoths on Earth Was So Mutated, It Lost the Ability to Smell Flowers

“For the first time, we’ve learned something specific about the behavior of an extinct animal!” Beth Shapiro, co-author and paleogeneticist, wrote in an email. “With more data like this from other individuals, we will begin to tease out how behavioral patterns like movement changed as the environment changed and habitats shifted, or even as people became increasingly present on the landscape. These sorts of data sets bring us closer to really understanding how shifting climates and habitats impacted species and, perhaps, drove them to extinction.”

It took a multidisciplinary, international team over a year to interpret the migration of this one mammoth. One individual animal alone cannot offer insight into the eventual extinction of an entire species, but they hope this is a starting point. More than one author involved in this study mentioned the haunting connection of mammoth extinction to today’s troubling climate change.

“In Alaska, we are very, very aware of the impact and changes associated with climate change right now,” Wooller said. “We are already seeing the impacts on the movement and behavior of existing megafauna such as polar bears and caribou. I think our work can help inform how things may or may not change in the future in response to some of the big changes the Arctic is facing today.”

Jeanne Timmons (@mostlymammoths) is a freelance writer based in New Hampshire who blogs about paleontology and archaeology at mostlymammoths.wordpress.com.

She, too, battled severe headaches when she quit, along with “hilariously PMS crankiness,” she said. She also had an extremely strong thirst that nothing seemed to quench, but the upside was that forced her to drink more water.

Coca-Cola has a different take on what people refer to as an addiction. “Food and beverages, like chocolate, for example, can trigger what scientists call ‘reward centers’ in the brain, but so can other things like music or laughter,” said Daphne Dickerson, a spokeswoman for Coca-Cola. “Regularly consuming food and beverages that taste good and that you enjoy is not the same as being addicted to them.”

The American Health Association advised against long-term consumption of diet drinks, and studies have linked diet sodas to strokes and dementia, diabetes and metabolic syndrome, tooth decay, as well as abdominal cramps, diarrhea, hallucinations, headaches, joint pain and nausea.

But doctors aren’t able to say for certain whether it’s the aspartame or saccharin or something else. Maybe these drinkers simply lead unhealthy lives? Addicts, like me, glom onto that ambiguity, along with the fact that the Food and Drug Administration has given artificial sweetener the thumbs up.

Just say no.

So how have some people finally managed to cut the cord?

In September 2020, Ms. Beller was diagnosed with breast cancer. She didn’t quit Diet Coke until after surgery, when doctors found more cancer and she realized she’d have to undergo chemotherapy. (Although diet soda hasn’t been conclusively linked to cancer, she decided to avoid unhealthy foods.) She used the Quitzilla app, a habit breaker and sobriety counter, which tracked her progress. “Every time I had a craving, just looking at the app did something good in my brain,” she said. She didn’t have a lot of physical side effects, but she did long for the drink. She credits the app with helping her stay on track.

Ms. Medina weaned herself in June 2019 after her sister-in-law, with whom she had a long-running bet, stopped smoking. Ms. Medina felt guilty that she hadn’t lived up to her end of the bargain, so when she went to the McDonalds drive-through and asked them to fill her Diet Coke cup all the way up to the top with ice, thus diluting the soda. Gradually she grew to like the watered-down version, which helped her cut back entirely. Since quitting for good, she said she no longer craves sugar or alcohol, and her fibromyalgia is better.

As of this writing, I’m on Day 41. I stopped suddenly, but I would hardly call myself an overnight success; the first few days were rough. My head pounded from caffeine withdrawal and I lived on Tylenol. I always used to have a can of soda when I worked, and I couldn’t concentrate without one.

A depressing new report finds that kids and teens are eating even more ultra-processed foods than they were 20 years ago, with those foods now constituting over two-thirds of their diets.

Ultra-processed foods are heavily altered, with numerous added ingredients like fats, starches, sugars, food dyes, and stabilizers. These added components can make the food look different, taste different, or extend its shelf life in comparison with minimally processed foods that are pretty much consumed as they occur naturally. (In other words, no doughnut is a minimally processed food.) Consumed in excess, these foods are linked to obesity, heart disease, and ultimately, mortality. But in the United States, we have a dependency on the stuff.

There are various definitions of what constitutes ultra-processed food, but the United Nations’ Food and Agricultural Organization has a helpful classification system. Ultra-processed foods are not created equally; some of that processing fortifies the food with additional nutrients, though many of processes strip the foods of fibers and proteins and replace them with sugar and salt. The new research on youth consumption of ultra-processed foods is published today in the journal JAMA.

The researchers looked at the dietary habits of American children between 2 and 19 years old, using 10 cycles of data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. This survey is a CDC-organized program of health studies that take stock of numerous diseases and health indicators, including nutrition, in about 5,000 American adults and children each year. They found that by 2018, 67% of total caloric intake among children and young adults was from ultra-processed foods, compared to 61% in 1999. (That earlier number was also not good; apparently dietary habits are backsliding from bad to worse.) That caloric spike was broken down further by the research team: The largest increase in caloric intake from ultra-processed foods was from ready-to-eat and frozen foods, which sprung from 2.2% to 11.2% of the total calorie consumption. The next largest jump was in packaged snacks and desserts, which increased from 10.6% to 12.9% of total consumption. Calories from minimally processed foods fell from 28.8% to 23.5% of total diet.

On the bright side, calories from sweetened beverages halved, from 10.8% to 5.3% of overall calories.

The team saw no significant differences in ultra-processed food consumption across economic groups or parents’ education levels. “The lack of disparities based on parental education and family income indicates that ultra-processed foods are pervasive in children’s diets,” said Fang Fang Zhang, a nutrition epidemiologist at Tufts University and a co-author of the study, in a university press release. “This finding supports the need for researchers to track trends in food consumption more fully, taking into account consumption of ultra-processed foods.”

More: A New Diet Study Confirms Your Worst Suspicions About Ultra-Processed Foods

Butternut Box, a London-based fresh dog food business with a tech-driven platform that delivers HelloFresh-style, catered dogfood, has raised $55.4 million (€47.2 million) in a funding round led by L Catterton, the consumer-focused private equity firm, and included participation from White Star Capital, Five Seasons Ventures and Passion Capital. We covered their early funding round back in 2017.

Founded in 2016, Butternut Box bills itself as a “human-grade, fresh dog food company” with a “personalized dietary offering” driven by its own tech platform.

Jean-Philippe Barade, Partner, L Catterton Europe, and head of the firm’s London office, commented; “We have long been impressed by how Butternut Box has established itself as the trusted brand of choice in the UK among a loyal base of pet owners… Butternut Box continues to leverage its innovative digital platform to raise the bar in the growing pet food market.”

Led by Goldman Sachs alumni Kevin Glynn and David Nolan, the company says its proprietary algorithm identifies how many calories each individual dog needs based on age, weight, breed, activity levels, and body condition and then pre-portions this amount into daily servings.

It also makes its own “natural” dog food, because studies show that dogs fed a natural diet have a longer life capacity than those fed on industrial canned products – up to 3 years, a long time in dog years. Since British dog owners spend over £200 million in vet’s fees, overfeeding, and unhealthy food is a key issue for owners.

However, Butternut Box is not alone, since they competing with Lily’s Kitchen, Tails.com and Natural Instinct for this lucrative new market.

Recovering from trauma is hard no matter when it happens. However, if adversity happens during childhood, it can be especially hard to overcome. Unlike adults, children have very little control over their environment. If a child is living in an abusive home, their ability to remove themselves from that environment is extremely limited, whereas an adult will usually have more emotional and financial resources with which to escape.

Meanwhile, children are still learning what healthy relationships look like, as well as how to cope with difficult situations. If a child is growing up in a household where abusive behavior is the norm, this can skew their understanding of what is and is not acceptable within a relationship. Even when the trauma is unavoidable, such as a death in the family or a major illness of a family member, children are still developing their coping skills, which makes it that much harder for them to process what has happened.

So how can adults who experienced adversity in childhood process and deal with that trauma now that they’re grown?

How to measure your childhood trauma

The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) quiz, is a measure of childhood trauma. The test itself is short—only ten questions—and asks about family adversity growing up, including physical or sexual abuse, neglect, and about family members with mental health struggles or substance abuse.

The higher the score, the more likely a person is to develop chronic health issues during adulthood, such as anxiety, depression, diabetes, asthma, cancer, obesity, coronary heart disease, and substance abuse. People who score a 4 or higher have a significantly higher risk than those who didn’t experience childhood adversity.

If you do have a high ACE score, knowing that these early experiences can have a negative impact on your health and well-being as an adult can be quite discouraging. However, it’s really important to remember that your ACE score is only an indicator of what you went through, not a guarantee of what your future will look like.

“Just because a person has experienced several ACEs, that doesn’t necessarily mean later problems are inevitable, that just makes them predisposed,” said Genevieve Rivera, executive director of the American SPCC, a nonprofit organization dedicated to educating parents and preventing child abuse. “We do have strategies, practices, tools, and routines that can help us to rewire our brains and our bodies.”

Start by seeking out professional help

“If you have a trauma history, if you have experienced childhood adversity, what you can do is get connected with support ahead of time,” said Melissa Goldberg-Mintz, a clinical psychologist and founder of Secure Base Psychology, PLLC. “That’s something you can do preventively.”

For people with high ACE scores, there is a strong probability they will develop issues such as PTSD, anxiety, depression, substance abuse, anger, and suicidal impulses. That is why it is essential to be proactive about seeking the mental healthcare you need. “It’s really important to have a professional in your corner to help guide you through,” Rivera said.

Seeking help is often the first, most essential step for working through the lingering effects of childhood adversity, and it can serve as a foundation for establishing a healthy, functional life.

Learn to recognize and develop healthy relationships

“Connection is the best medicine we have,” Goldberg-Mintz said. If a child going through adversity also experiences a warm, loving relationship—whether it’s a parent, grandparent, or caregiver—this will often provide a protective buffer against developing issues later in life. “The single best way we know how to deal with emotional pain is through connecting with people we feel securely attached to,” she said.

Adults who didn’t experience a loving relationship as children, however, can still work on developing healthy relationships later in life, which can help stave off some of these outcomes. Humans are social creatures. We crave connection, and if we don’t get it, our mental and physical health can suffer. Developing an understanding of what healthy relationships look like, and what the boundaries and expectations in those relationships should be, is key.

Make your physical and emotional well-being a priority

Given that childhood adversity can result in a number of chronic health issues later in life, whether physical or mental, it’s important to focus on caring for your physical and emotional well-being.

“You want to make sure your basic needs are being met,” Goldberg-Mintz said. This includes getting enough sleep, exercising regularly, maintaining a healthy diet, and connecting with others. “If you’re not getting your basic needs met, you are going to be more vulnerable to these bad outcomes.”

This can be challenging, especially because conditions like depression and anxiety make getting enough sleep or exercise especially difficult, the more you can focus on your own physical and mental well-being, the better.

Strengthen your resiliency

Resilience is the capacity to recover from adversity quickly. Some children who experience adversity are able to develop resilience, while others have a harder time. “Research shows that even just one supportive parental figure in a child’s life goes a long way toward helping them build this resilience,” Rivera said.

However, for those who struggled to build resilience during childhood, it’s still possible to develop these skills as an adult—and that goes back to seeking professional help and focusing on building those healthy relationships. Resiliency has a way of developing naturally when we do those things.

“We all have resiliency inside us, but we have to work on building it,” Rivera said. “Research has actually shown that our bodies experience a positive biological response when we’re surrounded by healthy relationships.”

NASA is preparing to run long-duration, ground-based simulations that will closely approximate an actual mission to the Red Planet. The space agency is now accepting applications for participation—but have you got the right stuff?

The upcoming Artemis lunar program is a stepping stone for the more ambitious goal of sending people to Mars. The current plan could see American boots on the Red Planet in just 12 years, and preparations for this wildly historic mission have already begun.

Humans have never made the journey to Mars, of course, making it difficult to predict some of the challenges that might arise during a mission. Simulations, while not perfect, can help in this regard. To that end, NASA will be running the Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog, or CHAPEA, in order to “develop methods and technologies to prevent and resolve potential problems on future human spaceflight missions to the Moon and Mars,” as the space agency noted in a press release.

NASA is now accepting applications for participation, and its press release very much reads like a conventional job ad. But this position would be far from ordinary. The space agency is looking for “highly motivated individuals” to participate in one of three long-duration, ground-based simulations planned in the coming years, the first of which could start in late 2022.

Four crew members will participate in each simulation, and they’ll work in an isolated habitat called Mars Dune Alpha. Based at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Texas, the 3D-printed, 1,700-square-foot habitat will feature private rooms, a kitchen, two bathrooms, a medical area, and dedicated spaces for working (including a place to grow crops), exercising, and just hanging out.

But this won’t be a year-long vacation, as the crew will have to fend for themselves under some stressful conditions. To simulate the business of journeying to and working on Mars, the crew will have to deal with limited access to resources, busted equipment, a communications lag with Earth, intense workloads, and environmental stressors meant to mimic life on Mars. They’ll also be put to work, performing routine tasks, doing simulated spacewalks, running scientific experiments, testing out virtual reality equipment, and remotely controlling robotic devices.

As this is happening, the crew will be monitored for their performance and also their physical and behavioral health. By going through these motions, NASA hopes to spot unforeseen gaps and challenges and then find the requisite solutions. That said, a simulation won’t capture all the details and risks of an actual mission. The crew won’t be exposed to excessive radiation, nor will they have to endure low-gravity conditions, among other dangers, both predicted and unforeseen.

Needless to say, NASA’s going to be picky about who it selects for the CHAPEA simulations, as it will adhere to its standard criteria for choosing astronauts. The space agency is seeking “healthy, motivated U.S. citizens or permanent residents who are non-smokers, age 30 to 55 years old, and proficient in English for effective communication between crew and mission control.”

Sorry smokers, you don’t get to go to fake Mars, but as NASA writes at the CHAPEA application page, the selection process is stringent:

Finalists will undergo medical evaluations, psychological testing, and psychiatric screening to determine suitability for a physically and mentally demanding long-duration isolation mission. All exams and their associated expenses will be arranged and paid for through NASA. Candidates will not be selected if they have any food allergies, avoidances, or gastrointestinal disorders, as these cannot be accommodated on a long-duration mission. Candidates must be willing to provide requested biological samples on required days and must eat the spaceflight-like diet provided during the mission. Candidates must not be prone to motion sickness with virtual reality equipment. Candidates on specific medications will be disqualified: Examples- blood pressure medications, blood thinners, seizure medications, daily allergy medications, diabetic insulin daily, sleeping aids, ADHD/ADD medications, antidepressants, anxiety medications. Food supplements will not be permitted during the mission. Vitamin D is provided during the missions. All other vitamins are available in the spaceflight food system and added vitamins are not permitted. Candidates will be required to have a COVID-19 vaccine and show proof of full vaccination. Candidates will be required to get their own COVID-19 PCR test and show proof of a negative test. Participants will be required to follow COVID-19 Risk mitigation protocols current to the JSC campus upon visiting.

Participants also need to have a master’s degree in a STEM field and two years worth of professional STEM experience, or 1,000 hours piloting experience.

These faux-astronauts will be compensated for their efforts, but specifics were not provided. The application process opened on August 6, 2021 and will close September 17, 2021. You can apply here, where you’ll find the rest of the job requirements.

To those applying, best of luck! As for those of you hoping to be among the first colonists to permanently settle on Mars, that’ll probably never happen unless you agree to some serious bodily modifications and augmentations. Simply put, humans are not built for the Red Planet.

“Hello” “Hello! Wow!” “What’s going on?” “How are you?” “I’m very conceptual, so I’ll say to Jack, ‘I want to make this kind of record.’” “She basically called me and had a vision about the sun.” “And more often than not, we can go back to that original statement, and it’s pretty much what we end up making.” Singing: “Solar power.” “You have this reputation as a songwriter of being broody, and heart-wrenching, and people like to say that you’re goth in certain ways.” “I mean, look, the truth of it is, like, I was 15 when I wrote ‘Royals.’ Singing: “And we’ll never be royals —” “I was shy. I was protective of my body. I didn’t want people to be able to comment on my body, so I would sort of dress in a certain way. Now I’m 24. Singing: “I hate the winter. Can’t stand the cold.” “Try to take me back to when you first created it.” “I was in New York working out of Jack’s home studio, and I went to Martha’s Vineyard for the weekend to stay with my friend Cazzie —” “When you say Cazzie’s house, do you mean Larry David’s house?” “[laughter] I guess it is, in fact, Larry’s house, yeah. We had a big day of swimming out on the pond all day, and we sort of had, like, the little rest before dinner. And I took this little Yamaha DX, and just started playing with this kind of descending —” Singing: My cheeks in high color, overripe peaches. You can kind of hear me working it out, actually, from July 24, 2019. Singing: My boy behind me, he’s taking pictures. Can you hear that? I came back to the city, played it to Jack, and we started to build it.” “Ella first started telling me the ideas for it. It was so far out.” “I knew that I wanted to kind of incorporate the music of my youth, this kind of early 2000s, sun-soaked thing. I was like, it has to sound like skateboarding. [laughter] “Wow.” “Jack was like, ‘What am I supposed to do with that?’” “I was like, “I don’t know, like — ‘Steal My Sunshine’ by Len.’” Singing: “If you steal my sunshine.” “Or like —” Singing “S Club. There ain’t no party like an S Club party!” “S Club 7, but also like —” Rapping: “Can I kick it?” Singing: “Can I kick it?” “Yes, I can. A Tribe Called Quest.” “But also, ‘Rock DJ,’ by Robbie Williams.” Singing: “Can I kick it?” “Yes, you can!” “But it was a real kind of push and pull that Jack and I had. He was like, ‘So wait, you like this?’ And I was like, ‘Yes, I do.’ [laughter] “She had all these parts she had written on the keyboard. And then she was sort of sending stuff back and forth. And then when we got in the room —” “The song happened super fast. But what took us a minute was the chorus. And I’ll play it to you. So that’s a terrible chorus. So then we tried this. Still, like, a bit of a clanger. No one’s getting excited about that.” “Did she show you that one?” “I was like, uh-oh! Uh — this might be, you know, six to eight months of trying things, trying things. And we’ll get there, but, like, uh —” “Well, I knew everything else rolled. I was very confident in everything else rolling. Jack came to New Zealand in January of 2020. The studio that we were working in belongs to a New Zealand musician called Neil Finn.” Singing: “Hey now. Hey now! Don’t dream —” “He left us this cool guitar. It was a 1965 Fender Jaguar in Lake Placid blue. And we picked it up, and —” “Whoa! That sounds like sunshine.” “It became a massive part of the album.” “You know, I’ve historically hated guitars. And Jack thinks it’s very funny that we played a guitar album. And we managed to crack this chorus, which was so exciting to me.” “One day, I think she was like, ‘I found it.’” Singing: “Forget all of the tears that you’ve cried. It’s over. Over. Over. Over.” “So that chorus worked so well because it’s, like, really floaty and catchy, and there’s all these things. But it doesn’t fight the part before it, which is a really satisfying part.” Singing: “Lead the boys and girls onto the beaches. Come one, come all. I’ll tell you my secrets. I’m kind of like a prettier Jesus. [singing] “‘Solar Power’ is all New Zealand to me. It really sounds like a New Zealand summer.” “Most of what I love comes from a landscape, comes from Atlanta. It comes from New Jersey. I don’t know New Zealand, but I know what it feels like when you hear something that is from someone’s place.” “The sound of a New Zealand summer is the cicadas.” “And those are kind of all over the album. But you can hear waves in the second verse.” [waves crashing] “Those are just recordings of waves that I took on my phone.” “A big part of the secret is this thing, going through this thing. It gets bounced to the big tape machine. There’s very little happening in the song. There’s a tic, there’s the acoustics —” [guitar strums] “At some point, they’re doubled, which actually makes a huge difference.” [double guitar strums] “The backups are a massive landscape.” Singing: “ Solar power.” “Lorde backup vocals is a genre at this point.” Singing: “I can’t stand to be alone.” “I mean, usually, it’s just you. What was the decision like to get Phoebe and Clairo involved?” Singing: “And I want to know what would happen.” “When someone’s the kind of harmony nut that you are —” “Those girls have it. They’re masters of the kind of singing that I think of myself as a master of.” “But it was a bit of a weird pandemic thing. I still, to this day, have not met either them in person. Singing: “Solar —” “The reference I keep seeing for the video is Midsommar.” “Midsommar was definitely a reference. But also, like, ’60s Coke commercials.” Singing: “I’d like to buy the world a Coke —” “End of ‘Mad Men,’ ‘Days of Heaven,’ ‘Zabriskie Point’ — the references are so deep, conjuring that slight kind of cult leader, take a drag, I’m about to put it on your tongue sort of world.” Singing: “Solar, solar, solar.” “I say, ‘Let the bliss begin.’ Singing: “Come on and let the bliss begin.“ [laughter] “Like, I’m a maniac.” Singing: “Blink three times when you feel it kicking in.” “Is that not about LSD?” “[laughter] Well, I thought I was going to make this big acid record, but I don’t think it was an acid album. I had one bad acid experience in this album. And I was like, ‘Man, it’s a weed album.’ It’s one of my great weed albums. Singing: “Solar power.” “The feeling of writing that, it’s like drugs to me. It’s the reason I make music. There’s no better feeling than pop alchemy building in real time.” Singing: “Solar power.” “I’ve grown a lot, done a lot. I’m happy. I work out a ton. My body’s hot. [laughter] I’m feeling good.” “Life is good.” “And — life is good, you know? And I’m bringing you in on where I’m at right now. And I hope people get that. [laughter] Singing: “Solar power.” “Do you remember when I ran into you at the mart?” “I was just going to say —” “We’re almost 99 percent sure that the day we ran into you at the bodega buying your Cool Ranch Doritos, we were upstairs working on ‘Solar Power’ [laughter].” “Chips and candy is my — the two main food groups of my diet.” “Yeah. So you’re a child.” [crunch] [singing] “I just had this idea that I wanted it to bounce.” Singing: “I got the horses in the back —” [singing] Rapping: “Man, what’s the deal? Man, I’m coming through. This your girl, Lizzo. Ah! [laughter]”

AKSHYMYRAU, Kazakhstan, Aug 6 (Reuters) – Dead horses lie scattered across the arid steppe of Kazakhstan’s Mangistau peninsula where severe drought has left the animals without food or water, threatening the livelihoods of hundreds of farmers.

Unusually high temperatures, in some cases the highest on record, have been reported throughout the former Soviet region of Central Asia this summer, prompting Kazakhstan to ban exports of animal feed and seek extra water from its neighbours.

In Mangistau, this has meant that horses have nothing to graze on and prices of hay and barley have skyrocketed. Some farmers tear wet cardboard into pieces to mix with feed for extra volume.

Horse meat and fermented mare’s milk are staples of the Kazakh diet and breeding horses, along with camels, is a traditional occupation in Mangistau.

Gabidolla Kalynbayuly, 70, worked as a sheep herder before retiring in 2002 and setting up a horse farm in Akshymyrau, a village of about 1,300 people.

But 20 of Kalynbayuly’s horses have already died this summer, reducing the herd to 150, and many have been weakened by malnutrition, making them vulnerable to parasites and illness.

“When they die out there in the field, we cannot even bring them back to the village to report the death,” he said.

Grazing in the area had been poor for the last three years, he said, but until this year’s extreme heat, there was still enough grass for horses to feed on.

A Reuters reporter saw dozens of dead horses during a trip through the area. The ribs of emaciated horses still alive are clearly visible.

Mangistau province as a whole has reported more than 1,000 horse, cattle and sheep deaths and the government has said it is sending barley to the area.

In addition to rising global temperatures, Mangistau is becoming more susceptible to drought because the Caspian Sea, by which it is almost surrounded, is becoming shallower, says environmental scientist Orynbasar Togzhanov, based in provincial capital Aktau on the coast.

“There is ebb and flow, but the sea has not reached its old maximum water level for the last 100 years,” he said.

Svetlana Dolgikh, the head of climate studies at state weather forecaster Kazgidromet, said average temperatures in Kazakhstan were rising by 0.3 degrees Celsius every decade.

There might be some temporary positives, she said, such as more rain and winter snow in Kazakhstan’s northern grain-growing regions predicted by all current models, but agriculture as a whole is considered at risk from climate change.

Additional reporting by Mariya Gordeyeva in Almaty
Writing by Olzhas Auyezov
Editing by Nick Macfie

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