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Americans Are Moving Into Danger Zones

Americans Are Moving Into Danger Zones

Clark also found that Americans are moving away from places prone to fleeting heat waves, like the Midwest, yet are flocking to areas with consistently higher summer heat, like the Southwest. In the map above, red is where people have been moving away from places with relatively cool summers or toward areas with relatively hot summers, while blue is the opposite. 

These changes could be due to a number of overlapping economic and social factors. “People move away from high unemployment areas—you find those tend to be kind of rural areas with a long history of being economically depressed,” says Clark. “So we have people moving out of areas along the Mississippi River and across the Great Plains and parts of the Midwest and South.” As a result, Americans are generally migrating away from hurricane risk along the Gulf Coast (save for Florida and Texas), and toward the economically booming Northwest, where wildfire risk is high. 

And while it’s true that some of the more affluent Americans may be seeking out the beauty of forested areas—especially as the pandemic has allowed more people to work remotely, untethered to a specific city—economic pressure may be forcing others there, too. Skyrocketing housing prices and cost of living are pushing people toward places where homes are cheaper, especially on the expensive West Coast. 

“As temperatures increase—as things get drier and hotter and prices for housing get more unaffordable—it’s definitely going to push people into these rural areas,” says Kaitlyn Trudeau, a data analyst at the nonprofit Climate Central who studies wildfires but wasn’t involved in the new study. “Some people don’t have a choice.”

Increases in the number of people living in wildfire zones come at a cost: 2018’s deadly Camp Fire in California alone led to $16.5 billion in losses. And that’s to say nothing of the expense of fighting fires, or preventing them through methods like controlled burns. 

There are hidden costs, too, like the health effects of wildfire smoke—even if your house doesn’t burn down, you’re still inhaling nasty particulates and fungi. “I think we’re just starting to quantify and realize how big the smoke effect is,” says University of Wisconsin-Madison forest ecologist Volker Radeloff, who studies the wildland-urban interface but wasn’t involved in the new study. “That makes controlled burns hard, though, because even if the fire is controlled, the smoke can’t be. That’s a real threat to people, especially if they have asthma or other lung illnesses.”

Altogether, the new study shows that Americans are literally moving in the wrong direction. “It’s really hard to see these population booms in these areas,” says Trudeau. “You just can’t help but feel like your stomach sinks a little bit.”

The Next Great Overdose-Reversing Drug Might Already Exist

The Next Great Overdose-Reversing Drug Might Already Exist

Critics say the Schedule I classification is heavy-handed, based on fear rather than evidence. “It bypasses science,” says Maritza Perez, a director at the Drug Policy Alliance, a nonprofit focused on drug policy reform. Frustrated by this blanket ban and eager to develop new overdose treatments, a growing number of scientists, doctors, and other researchers are pushing back. 

“A classwide ban based on chemical structure alone would preclude a lot of research that could lead to life-saving medications,” says Gregory Dudley, a chemistry professor at West Virginia University and one of the co-authors of the open letter to Biden. In that letter, Dudley and other scientists argue that permanent Schedule I status could “inadvertently criminalize” important tools to fight the overdose crisis.

Dudley supports a bill introduced last week by US senator Cory Booker (D-New Jersey) called the Temporary Emergency Scheduling and Testing (TEST) Act, which would temporarily extend Schedule I classification again but also require the government to evaluate individual fentalogs, descheduling those with therapeutic uses or without risk of abuse. Booker is hopeful he can pitch his bill as a common-sense approach to the issue. “This bill strikes a middle ground to ensure that we are doing all we can to save lives,” he told WIRED by email. 

Even some experts who support permanent scheduling recognize that the status quo doesn’t work. “I believe that the fentanyl-related substances should be permanently put into Schedule I. But I also very strongly believe that the research on Schedule I drugs—and this is more than just the fentanyl-related substances—should be made easier,” says Victor Weedn, a forensic pathologist and professor at George Washington University. In addition to fentalogs, drugs like cannabis and psilocybin are also classified as Schedule I, which has impeded research on those substances as well.

The discovery of a new overdose-reversal medication would be a major victory for public health. Naloxone—often referred to by its brand name, Narcan—is currently the only drug widely available for reversing opioid overdoses. Molecularly similar to the opioid oxymorphone, naloxone works by binding to opioid receptors, blocking the effects of other opioids. It isn’t a silver bullet, but it has become an important tool for keeping people alive. It is often in short supply, though—and can be expensive.

“Anything we can do that would increase the variability of products on the market could potentially help overcome supply chain issues and hopefully drive down prices,” says Stacy McKenna, a harm reduction fellow at the libertarian-leaning think tank the R Street Institute. “And there might be something that works better to help reverse fentanyl overdoses.”

While naloxone can reverse fentanyl overdoses, it’s not always as effective as it is with less-powerful opioids. “One problem is re-narcotization,” Traynor says. A dose of naloxone that would revive someone who took too much heroin might wear off for someone who took fentanyl, causing their overdose symptoms to return. This means multiple doses of naloxone can be necessary to stop fentanyl overdoses—bad news for people who might have just a single dose at hand. If there’s another option out there more efficient at specifically reversing fentanyl overdoses, it could have a seismic lifesaving effect.

All the Actually Important Stuff Neuralink Just Announced

All the Actually Important Stuff Neuralink Just Announced

The most widely tested brain implant is the Utah array—a hard silicon square with 100 tiny protruding needles. Each about a millimeter long, the needles have electrodes on their tips that capture brain signals. But these rigid devices can cause scarring to nearby tissue, which over time can interfere with their recording ability. By contrast, one of Neuralink’s innovations are the flexible threads attached to its implant that are dotted with more than 1,000 electrodes. 

Neuralink is also trying to improve on existing BCIs that require clunky setups and invasive brain surgery; instead, the company’s sewing machine-like robot could install electrodes by punching them into the brain through a small hole in the skull. Plus, the device transmits brain signals wirelessly, unlike most current BCIs, which rely on external cables that connect to a computer from the top of a person’s head.

Neuralink has been testing its prototype in pigs and monkeys, and in April 2021, the company posted a video of a macaque playing the video game Pong hands-free thanks to two brain implants the company installed in her brain. (The feat had already been achieved by a person with a BCI 15 years before.) 

In a company update in 2020, pigs implanted with the coin-sized Neuralink device trotted onto a stage so Musk could demonstrate the safety of the implant, as well as its ability to record neural activity from the pigs’ brains. (He described the device as “a Fitbit for your skull with tiny wires.”) One pig had an implant in its brain at the time of the demonstration, and another previously had one but had it removed beforehand. Meanwhile, the brain signals from the pig were broadcast on a screen. 

The company’s current implant, which is the size of a quarter, contains 1,000 channels capable of recording and stimulating nearby neurons. But on Wednesday, Neuralink staff said they were working on a next generation chip with 4,098 channels in a chip of the same size.

Although Neuralink may be the most recognizable, a handful of other companies are also working on brain implants and grappling with common problems such as safety, longevity, and what they can get the implant to do.

Two ex-Neuralink employees have started their own BCI ventures. Last year saw the launch of Science Corp, headed by former Neuralink president Max Hodax, and Precision Neuroscience, established by Benjamin Rapoport, another original member of Musk’s team. In a November 21 blog post on the company’s website, Science Corp staffers revealed their concept for a neural interface targeted at restoring eyesight in people with retinitis pigmentosa and dry age-related macular degeneration, two forms of serious blindness that don’t have good treatment options. The company is working on demonstrating safety data in animals, according to the blog post.

Meanwhile, Precision Neuroscience is developing a thin, flexible brain implant for paralysis that lays on top of the brain and could be installed through a small slit in the head, rather than drilling a hole into the skull. According to Rapoport, the company has tested its device in pigs and is hoping to get a greenlight from the Food and Drug Administration in 2023 to implant it in a human patient.

NASA Will Not Change the James Webb Telescope’s Name

NASA Will Not Change the James Webb Telescope’s Name

James Webb led NASA in the 1950s and 60s, during the Cold War–era “Lavender Scare,” when government agencies often enforced policies that discriminated against gay and lesbian federal workers. For that reason, astronomers and others have long called for NASA to change the name of the James Webb Space Telescope. Earlier this year, the space agency agreed to complete a full investigation into Webb’s suspected role in the treatment and firing of LGBTQ employees.

This afternoon, NASA released that long-awaited report by the agency’s chief historian Brian Odom. In an accompanying press release, NASA officials made clear that the agency will not change the telescope’s name, writing: “Based on the available evidence, the agency does not plan to change the name of the James Webb Space Telescope. However, the report illuminates that this period in federal policy—and in American history more broadly—was a dark chapter that does not reflect the agency’s values today.”

Odom was tasked with finding what proof, if any, links Webb to homophobic policies and decisions. Tracking down evidence of contentious 60-year-old events made for a difficult subject of study, Odom says, but he was able to draw on plenty of material from the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, and the Truman Library. “I took this investigation very seriously,” he says.

These allegations include those made by NASA employee Clifford Norton, who filed a lawsuit claiming that he had been fired in 1963 after he was seen in a car with another man. He was taken into police custody, his lawsuit states, and NASA security subsequently brought him to the agency’s headquarters and interrogated him throughout the night. He was later terminated from his job.

Such treatment of federal employees suspected to be gay or lesbian was commonplace at the time, following a 1953 executive order by President Dwight Eisenhower, which listed “sexual perversion” among the kinds of behaviors considered suspicious. Still, the NASA report states, “No evidence has been located showing Webb knew of Norton’s firing at the time. Because it was accepted policy across the government, the firing was, highly likely—though, sadly—considered unexceptional.”

The report and NASA’s announcement frustrate critics who for years have been making a case to change JWST’s name. “Webb has at best a complicated legacy, including his participation in the promotion of psychological warfare. His activities did not earn him a $10 billion monument,” wrote Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, an astrophysicist at the University of New Hampshire, and three other astronomers and astrophysicists in a statement on Substack today. They question the interpretation that a lack of explicit evidence implies that Webb had no knowledge of, or hand in, firings within his own agency, writing: “In such a scenario, we have to assume he was relatively incompetent as a leader: the administrator of NASA should know if his chief of security is extrajudicially interrogating people.”

Prescod-Weinstein believes the timing of this release—on the Friday afternoon before the Thanksgiving holiday—isn’t a coincidence, a way to make the report less widely read. “The fact that they did it even though it’s LGBT STEM Day tells you about the administration’s priorities,” she wrote in an email to WIRED.

NASA usually names telescopes after prominent astronomers, like the Hubble, Spitzer, Chandra, and Compton telescopes. Webb is an exception. He led the agency while it advanced the space program toward the moon landing and promoted astronomy research, but he was a bureaucrat, not an astronomer.

Even though agency officials made the call to keep Webb’s name, Odom says, “We should still use this history as an example of a past that was traumatic for a lot of people. This past, whatever Webb’s role in it was, is important to us going forward.”

That NASA is choosing not to rename the telescope is “not surprising, but disappointing,” says Ralf Danner, a Jet Propulsion Laboratory astronomer and cochair of the American Astronommical Society’s committee for sexual orientation and gender minorities in astronomy. Whether Webb knew of Norton’s treatment, or whether evidence of that exists, is not really relevant, Danner argues, since Webb stood for those policies as NASA administrator. “He’s just the wrong name to show the future of astronomy.”

A Lab-Grown Meat Startup Gets the FDA’s Stamp of Approval

A Lab-Grown Meat Startup Gets the FDA’s Stamp of Approval

Cultivated meat has been greenlit in the United States for the first time. The decision by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) means that a company called Upside Foods will soon be able to sell chicken made from real animal cells grown in bioreactors instead of requiring the slaughter of live animals.

A positive response from the FDA has long been seen as the next major milestone for the cultivated meat industry. In the past few years, startups in the space have built small-scale production facilities and raised billions of dollars in venture capital funding, but haven’t been able to sell their products to the public. Up until now, the small number of people invited to try cultivated meat have had to sign waivers acknowledging that the products are still experimental.

There are just two smaller regulatory steps remaining until cultivated meat can be made available to the public. Upside’s production facilities still require a grant of inspection from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the food itself will need a mark of inspection before it can enter the US market. These two steps are likely to be completed much more quickly than the long FDA premarket consultation process that resulted in the approval.

“It’s the moment we’ve been working toward for the past, almost seven years now,” says Uma Valeti, Upside’s CEO. “Opening up the US market is what every company in the world is trying to do.”

Different startups are focusing on a range of cultivated meats, including beef, chicken, salmon, and tuna. This announcement applies only to Upside Foods and its cultured chicken, although it’s likely that other declarations will follow soon. The products have been greenit through an FDA process called Generally Recognized as Safe (GRAS). Through this process, food manufacturers provide the FDA with details of their production process and the product it creates, and once the FDA is satisfied that the process is safe, it then issues a “no further questions” letter.

The FDA decision means that cultivated meat products may soon be available to the public to try, although it’s likely that tastings will be limited to a very small number of exclusive restaurants. Michelin-starred chef Dominique Crenn has already announced that she will serve Upside Foods’ cultivated chicken at her restaurant Atelier Crenn in San Francisco.

Valeti says that he wants the public to have their first taste of Upside chicken through selected restaurants before they can buy and cook it at home. “We would want to bring this to people through chefs in the initial stage,” says Valeti. “Getting chefs excited about this is a really big deal for us. We want to work with the best partners who know how to cook well, and also give us feedback on what we could do better.”

Atelier Crenn won’t be the first restaurant to serve cultivated meat, however. In December 2020, Singaporean regulators gave the green light to cultivated chicken from the San Francisco–based startup Eat Just. The chicken nuggets were sold at a members-only restaurant called 1880 and later made available for delivery.