Sleep

Zoe Häggkvist fyller femton i början av maj och Mamma Carola är redan i full gång med att planera födelsedagsfirandet. – Vi planerar en sleep over med bara tjejerna och så blir det kalas där killarna får vara med dagen efter, säger hon.

Göteborg, 8 April, 2024. Sleep Cycle AB (publ), en global ledare inom AI-driven sömnanalys, tillkännager idag utnämningen av Petter Höglund till Chief Product Officer (CPO), med startdatum 15 april. Som tidigare meddelats tillträder Peter Alsterberg som Chief Commercial Officer (CCO) i Q2, startdatum nu satt till 8 april.

Sömnanalysföretaget Sleep Cycle presenterar i dag uppdaterade finansiella mål i samband med sin kapitalmarknadsdag. Siktet är inställt på att fördubbla intäkterna på medellång sikt och ha en årlig rörelsemarginal om cirka 25 procent.

Göteborg 20 mars 2024 - Sleep Cycle offentliggör idag uppdaterade finansiella mål vid en kapitalmarknadspresentation. Sleep Cycles VD och medlemmar ur ledningsgruppen kommer att presentera de uppdaterade finansiella målen och företagets nya affärsstrategi.

För nästan 1,5 år sedan skrev Börsposten att Learning to Sleep drar i nödbromsen, vilket man sjukt nog gjorde två månader efter noteringen. Nu har bolaget meddelat att de går i konkurs, tillsammans med sitt helt nyinköpta dotterbolag Bonzun Evolve. ”Vi har verkligen gjort allt i vår makt för att rädda verksamheten, säger tf VD […]

Klonade husdjur erbjuder en kontroversiell väg att hantera sorgen över att förlora en älskad följeslagare. Tekniken har blivit tillgänglig för allmänheten i USA relativt nyligen och lockar husdjursägare som söker tröst en möjlighet att ”lura döden”. Många hoppas att deras klonade husdjur kommer att vara en identisk ersättning för det förlorade, vilket gör kloning till en kostsam, men lockande lösning. The Atlantics reporter har pratat med flera djurägare som har valt att klona. Även om åsikterna varierar tycks den allmänna uppfattningen vara att det är svårt att få samma band som man hade med det ursprungliga husdjuret. You can replicate an animal’s DNA, but you can’t re-create its relationship with a human. By Chiara Dello Joio 26 october, 2023 I met Princess Ariel and Princess Jasmine on a sunny afternoon at a park in Garden City, New York. The two dogs—both creamy-colored shih tzu mutts with spots on their backs—were lying next to each other on the grass, front legs extended, tongues hanging out. Every so often, they’d both look off to the side at the same moment—then turn their heads back again simultaneously. When two excited little girls came over to pet them, the dogs’ owner—John Mendola, a retired police officer—made pleasant small talk with the girls’ parents. Eventually, though, he shared something that made them raise their eyebrows in surprise: The dogs were not only twins but twin clones, spawned from the DNA of his late dog, Princess. In 2016, right before Princess died, Mendola had ordered a genetic-preservation kit from ViaGen—a pet-cloning facility based in Cedar Park, Texas—and sent off a sample of her skin to its lab. The company, which opened in 2015, clones dogs and cats for $50,000 and horses for $85,000. Mendola spent several years saving (and sold his car) to afford it, but now here he is with two new versions of his beloved pup. At least, that’s one way to think of it. A cloned pet is easy enough to define physically: It’s a genetically identical animal, like a twin born on a different date. But its meaning is harder to pinpoint. Is it a continuation of the original pet? An homage to the old one, like a living gravestone? A unique animal that might share some of its predecessor’s best qualities? I talked with several pet-clone owners to find out what they’d wanted—and whether they’d gotten it. For many people, it seems, a clone is essentially an attempt to cheat death, to somehow mitigate the pain of losing a companion. But grief isn’t easily evaded. The first cloned mammal, Dolly the sheep, was born in 1996—but cloning technology has become publicly available to pet owners only more recently. ViaGen, the U.S.’s most popular facility, started cloning livestock and horses in 2002, then expanded to dogs and cats in 2015; since then, it’s cloned close to 1,000 pets, and its customer count is rising. The process (formally known as “somatic cell nuclear transfer”), requires a pet’s tissue sample to be cultured to produce millions of cells, the nucleus of a donor egg to be removed and replaced with one of those cells, and the embryo to be implanted into a surrogate animal, which will give birth to an identical twin of the original pet. Because surrogates are implanted with several embryos, there’s about a 30 percent chance that multiple clones—like Princess Ariel and Princess Jasmine—will be born (though owners can take them all home for the same price). Pet cloning is ethically fraught. Surrogate animals, for example, have to endure surgery when the embryo is implanted, and sometimes need a cesarean section or experience stillbirths as well. Snuppy, the first cloned dog, born in 2005, was the result of more than 1,000 embryos implanted into 123 surrogate dogs, resulting in three pregnancies that ultimately yielded just one healthy puppy. In 2008, 20 dogs had to be implanted to create one clone of a toy poodle. Surrogates are leased from a breeder; Melain Rodriguez, ViaGen’s client-service manager, told me that all of the company’s customers used to have the option of adopting their clone’s surrogate, but after too many clients complained that their cloned dogs were bonded more tightly with their surrogate than with them, ViaGen stopped offering canine clients the option. Ethicists and animal-welfare activists have argued, too, that cloning is particularly pernicious when millions of animals are languishing in shelters. And yet, cloning—essentially a very expensive bereavement-coping tool—can be tempting for owners who don’t feel ready to let go of their pet. In a promotional video on ViaGen’s site, Rodriguez claims that clients “don’t ever have to know what it’s like to have them gone.” And plenty of customers take that promise quite seriously: They don’t just want a new pet that reminds them of their previous one. Rodriguez told me that “a lot of our clients will go into it hoping that it’s the same pet all over again.” There’s no guarantee, though, that a cloned pet’s personality will be the same as the original’s. As with human identical twins, the two virtually always look similar. But the clone will also experience its own unique conditions—maybe a new home, or different family members or other pets around, or even just a different diet. Those factors can shape the individual it becomes. In fact, Brock Bastian, a psychology professor at the University of Melbourne, in Australia, who studies ethical decision making, told me he wonders whether people might be better off saving $50,000 and just buying the same breed again. Rodriguez said that clients are warned not to expect a reincarnation. Still, they’re likely to keep comparing their new and old pets, forever on the lookout for similarities and departures. Unsurprisingly for some owners, the attachment they’d had to their initial pet is impossible to re-create. Kelly Anderson, a dog trainer in Austin, Texas, told me that her late ragdoll cat, Chai, first came home with a lot of diseases, so Anderson spent months nursing her back to health, which she felt strengthened their tie. Chai was not a particularly affectionate cat, but in moments when Anderson was depressed, she said Chai would snuggle up to her, somehow seeming to sense her turmoil. She believes that Chai saved her life on numerous occasions. When Chai died unexpectedly at 5 years old, Anderson decided to clone her and named the new kitten Belle. Belle looks just like Chai—long-haired white fur and bright-blue eyes—but her demeanor is entirely different. Though Chai was always reserved, Belle is outgoing; whereas Anderson nurtured Chai through near-fatal illness, Belle has always been perfectly healthy. Anderson loves Belle enormously and doesn’t regret her choice to clone. But she’d forged a bond with Chai based on very specific experiences: coaxing her out from under the bed when she was scared, gently getting her to swallow her medicine, gaining her trust. With Belle, Anderson told me, she doesn’t feel the same connection. She doesn’t just miss the combination of DNA that was Chai; she misses their relationship, which was built on unreplicable memories and experiences. Other owners feel like their clone is so similar to their original pet that they hardly need to start over at all. West Westmoreland, who owns a construction company in Jacksonville, Florida, told me that Peanut II, his cloned miniature dachshund, is essentially a perfect continuation of his predecessor, Peanut. Peanut I had been deeply attached to Westmoreland, who’s quadriplegic and uses a wheelchair, and had quickly become his service dog—spending most of her time in his lap and accompanying him to his doctor appointments. When she died after 13 years, Westmoreland was devastated. Several months later, when he brought Peanut II home, the clone took on the same caregiving role as her predecessor. As soon as she could reach his foot pedals and clamber up his legs, she started spending most of her time in his wheelchair, not wanting to let him out of her sight. “It’s like having the same dog,” he told me. “It’s unreal.” One possible explanation for this perceived similarity, Rodriguez told me, is “cellular memory,” a theory that memories from the brain can actually be stored at a cellular level, and that those memories are heritable. But it’s also likely that genetically identical animals who are raised by the same owner, in the same environment, could end up displaying familiar behaviors—or at least that owners would interpret their behaviors as similar. Pets are, after all, the perfect object for this kind of projection: They can’t challenge their owners’ assumptions about who they are, what they remember, or how connected they feel to their two-legged family. However familiar a clone might seem, though, a pet owner’s initial loss isn’t so neatly resolved. Mendola told me he feels that Princess Ariel and Princess Jasmine are like the original Princess “in a new shell.” But still, he misses Princess terribly. Since she died, he hasn’t been able to sleep in the bed he shared with her; he, Ariel, and Jasmine use a different room. Westmoreland does feel like he has his treasured Peanut—or “P1” as he now refers to her—back in the form of Peanut II. But he also has two new dachshunds, Cleo and Zoe; he adopted them right after Peanut died, but they were nothing like her and, he felt, didn’t fill the void she’d left. I asked Westmoreland if it was possible that he might have bonded with Cleo and Zoe more had he not been so focused on re-creating a specific relationship with Peanut II. Perhaps, he told me, he would have connected especially with Cleo, hoping she could eventually turn into a good service dog—but now he’ll never know, because he decided Peanut II was right for the position. In fact, Westmoreland is so pleased that he’d consider getting a Peanut III. But if he keeps replacing Peanut with clones, I wonder whether he might be postponing his grief, rather than coping with it. For some pet owners, having the option of that postponement—of going around their loss, rather than through it—is a comfort in itself, even if they never actually buy a clone. Rodriguez told me that the bulk of ViaGen’s customers have a genetic-preservation sample stored in the freezer (for a fee of $1,600) but haven’t gone through with cloning yet, and may choose never to do so. Rodriguez even has cells from two of her deceased dogs preserved in case she decides to clone them in the future. And the company has cloned animals from cells that were nearly 20 years old—so owners might keep the possibility in the back of their mind for a long, long time. When I met Mendola, he showed me a video from the day he received Ariel and Jasmine. He’s sitting at a restaurant in LaGuardia Airport—visibly nervous, his hands clasped in prayer—anticipating the arrival of Princess’s clones. They’re brought to him in a carrying case, and as he’s handed the two tiny wriggling puppies, he holds them close while they start burrowing their faces into his chest; he beams down at them, sniffling tears of joy. Mendola remembers asking them, “Do you remember me?” He interpreted their kisses and wagging tails to mean they did. © 2023 The Atlantic Media Co., as first published in The Atlantic. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency.

Open AI:s vd Sam Altman räds inte konsekvenserna på arbetsmarknaden som AI-revolutionen leder till. Det sa han på Wall Street Journals årliga konferens Tech Live i veckan: – Varje teknologisk revolution får följder för arbetsmarknaden. Jag är inte det minsta rädd för det. Under mötet samlades världens techledare – från bland annat Meta och Arm – för att diskutera de snabba förändringar som AI medför för näringslivet och politiken. Tidningen listar här några höjdpunkter från samtalen. OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Meta’s Chris Cox and others spoke at WSJ’s annual event. By WSJ Staff

The Wall Street Journal, 18 October 2023 Tech leaders convened on The Wall Street Journal’s annual Tech Live conference this week, where discussions focused on the fast-paced changes wrought by artificial intelligence across business, technology and policy-making. Here are some highlights from interviews. AI has been a central topic this year, as its impact on business and society is hotly debated. Sam Altman, chief executive of OpenAI, said the two things that will matter the most over the next few decades are abundant and inexpensive intelligence, and abundant and cheap energy. OpenAI is working to make ChatGPT cheaper and faster, so that it can be more broadly accessible. “If we can get these two things done in the world then it’s almost, like, difficult to imagine how much else we could do,” he said. Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Inflection AI, said the race to build AI chatbots is reminiscent of the rush to build websites at the dawn of the internet or apps after the advent of smartphones. “This is really just the beginning of a complete transformation in the way we interact with computers,” said Suleyman, whose company makes a ChatGPT rival called Pi, short for personal intelligence. Meta is also optimistic about the impact of AI. “One of the most profoundly impactful applications in the near term for AI is helping businesses be more effective,” said Meta Platforms Chief Product Officer Chis Cox. Meta last month unveiled its own AI chatbots based on celebrities such as Naomi Osaka and Snoop Dogg. Cox said Meta is making it clear these characters aren’t the real people. “Having products that experiment with what is possible is great, but having anything that doesn’t make clear to people what is going on is a problem,” he said. Consumers are going to gravitate to TikTok, ChatGPT and other applications powered by generative artificial intelligence, instead of using traditional search engines, said Michael Wolf, co-founder and CEO of consulting firm Activate. He predicts that domination within the $100 billion search industry is “up for grabs,” adding that the rise of open-source AI models is paving a pathway for smaller entrants to meaningfully compete with large, established companies. Professionals from physicians to writers have been fearing that AI will entirely replace some jobs. “Every technological revolution affects the job market. I’m not afraid of that at all,” said OpenAI’s Altman. “That’s the way of progress. And we’ll find new and better jobs.” Still, it’s not going to be a seamless process. “The thing that I think we do need to confront as a society is the speed at which this is going to happen,” he added. Adam Wenchel, chief executive of AI company Arthur, took a more sanguine view of the job impact from AI than some other panelists at Tech Live. “These systems are going to roll out over time, very gradually, people are going to adapt to them and it’s going to be OK,” he said. Indeed, companies are still determining how to implement new AI technology. “Even at the highest levels, we’re still trying to figure out what does all of this mean to our business model,” said Vince Marin, chief information officer of law firm Sidley Austin. Charles Sims, chief technology officer at United Talent Agency, said AI makes it more important for people to have generalized skill sets that enable them to adapt as technology replaces specific specialties. “If you’re talking to a college student today, it’s about generalization, it’s about trying to learn as many things as you can,” he said. Elise Smith, CEO of Praxis Labs, said it is critical to involve the next generation of workers in discussions about how to use technology: “They want to be brought in and brought along on the journey,” she said. “They want to be doing the innovation day, the hackathon, where they’re getting to give ideas around how AI can transform their business.” Adobe’s president of digital media business, David Wadhwani, said that despite fears, he sees artificial intelligence as a tool that will boost employment rather than put people out of jobs. Tools like Adobe’s Firefly, which can generate images and logos, allow more people to become creative professionals, he said. “We will have creative professionals being more productive than ever before and more creative professionals in the world,” he said. Arm CEO Rene Haas said the chip company is using artificial intelligence to help in some of the areas where they struggle to hire enough talent, such as with debugging and testing chips. But he said the semiconductor industry faces some challenges in its role powering artificial intelligence. He described a future when energy shortages could constrain AI advancement, and a shortage of talent could limit production of semiconductors. “The kind of people we are looking to hire are hard to find. We are looking for really expert engineers,” Haas said. Investors are weighing whether it’s too late to get into AI. “Most investments in AI today—venture investments—will lose money,” said venture capitalist Vinod Khosla. Khosla, who founded Khosla Ventures almost two decades ago, said AI investing had entered a hype cycle, and only highly disciplined investors will reap the benefits of the transformative technology. The buzzy new technology has generated significant concerns, though. “We’ve got a fierce task ahead of us to figure out what are these downsides and discover, understand them, and build the tools to mitigate them,” said OpenAI Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati. For instance, sometimes chatbots confidently espouse information that doesn’t seem to be justified by its training data. “We’ve made a ton of progress on the hallucination issue with GPT-4, but we’re not where we need to be. We’re sort of on the right track.” Murati said. OpenAI is continuing to use techniques including reinforcement learning with human feedback to reduce the number of times that its model makes up information. It is also working on technology that can help detect the provenance of an image, Murati said. Suleyman, CEO of the company behind Pi, said another problem is that Pi and other AI chatbots aren’t designed to doubt themselves, which makes it hard to know when they’re wrong. He suggested that a possible safeguard for users would be to have responses ranked by their accuracy. “This skill of uncertainty estimation is a critical part of intelligence and actually key to making them reliable,” he said. Suleyman said he and his peers are also discussing the potential risk of AI interfering with next year’s U.S. presidential elections, and he hopes to build parameters that will prevent Pi from recommending political candidates. One of the leading risks to the development of the nation’s AI sector is the imbalance between public and private sector investment in what will soon be a technology as ubiquitous as electricity, said Fei-Fei Li, co-director of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence and a former vice president at Google. U.S. government investment and incentives should at least match the U.S.’s investment in space exploration decades ago with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. “This technology is as big or even bigger than the space technology,” Li said. “We cannot just leave it to the private sector.” Li said the Food and Drug Administration, Environmental Protection Agency and other government agencies should urgently take a role in regulating AI. “It is very hard to imagine one ring that rules them all,” Li said. Roblox CEO David Baszucki said the gaming company is treading carefully when it comes to training artificial intelligence models, and isn’t harvesting anyone’s code without permission. “That’s a big societal discussion right now,” he said. The energy costs associated with powering artificial-intelligence programs have also been a concern for climate advocates. But former Meta Chief Technology Officer Mike Schroepfer, whose new firm Gigascale Capital invests in climate-focused companies, said AI will save energy in other ways. “It will be a large consumption of power, but you also have to think of the replacement costs,” he said, referring to efficiencies that AI is expected to provide. Cryptocurrency is another area in tech rife with pitfalls. Anthony Scaramucci, founder of SkyBridge Capital, said he should have been more wary of Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of collapsed cryptocurrency exchange FTX, who is on trial in New York facing fraud and conspiracy charges. “I took the aura of all of that too seriously, and I probably should’ve been more of a skeptic,” Scaramucci said. “He committed a crime and I believe he has to go to jail for a very long time.” Executives and advocates also highlighted the risks of social media, especially for young people. Larissa May, founder and executive director, of nonprofit #HalfTheStory, said kids are spending an average of eight hours a day on their devices. “We better be looking at the place where they’re spending more time than anywhere else in their life, including sleep,” May said. Social-media companies should think about more than how much time young people are spending on social media app—they should find ways to measure whether apps are supporting or hurting them. “It’s so much bigger than just a dollar sign,” May said. Comedian and creator Elsa Majimbo said social media can be too negative. She called X, the social-media platform formerly known as Twitter, “a soft dark web” that should have a minimum age requirement of 18. Award-winning musician John Legend, who is launching his first-ever tech startup, agreed that AI has its limits. He said computer-generated music won’t replace songwriters, in part because audiences like the artists’ stories behind their music. “There’s just something that’s still so human about music, songwriting and that interaction we have with our audience,” he said. Arnold Schwarzenegger said he is aware of AI use in Hollywood and has heard a fake version of his voice. Whether or not his likeness will be used by AI in the future is a point his children will have to negotiate, the 76-year-old actor said. “I will not be around, even though I want to live forever,” he said. Even venture capitalist Khosla has tried his hand at it. When his daughter got married earlier this year, he asked ChatGPT to turn a speech he wrote into rap lyrics and then turned those lyrics into a song through an AI startup called Splash. He blared the song over speakers. “It extended my capabilities,” he said. “It meant a lot to me.” In addition to the uncertainties of AI, technology leaders are also now dealing with critical questions regarding the impact of geopolitics on the sector. Venture capitalist Khosla said that winning the race to develop advanced AI would give the U.S. an economic and political advantage over China. “I think the world’s political system—what influences Southeast Asia, Africa, Latin America—is at stake,” he said. “Western values are at stake in this technology battle, so we should do whatever we can to win this battle and beat China at it.” Khosla also warned against making the code behind advanced AI models available to the public, which some technologists have championed as a way to bolster the technology’s development. “You don’t open-source the Manhattan Project,” he said, referencing America’s clandestine efforts to build an atomic bomb during World War II. The war between Hamas and Israel, which has been a tech hub for years, was also a focal point of TechLive this year. Palmer Luckey, founder of defense technology company Anduril Industries, said U.S. corporate chiefs should be more vocal in their support for Israel. “It reflects very poorly on our billionaire class that you aren’t seeing a whole-of-country effort to become involved and to speak up about these issues. That you are seeing hedging on the condemnation of Hamas for fear of saying the wrong thing either in the court of public opinion or because it hurts their business interests,” Luckey said. Charlie Shrem, general partner of Druid Ventures, was asked about the use of cryptocurrency by Hamas to fund its attacks in Israel. He said it is “a really sad thing to see something that we were all involved in creating early on become used in these negative ways.” When it came to domestic politics, Schwarzenegger said aging leaders of the Republican and Democratic parties should step aside and make room for a new generation. The former California governor alluded to recent instances of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell freezing and falling silent, and said people in that position should “start thinking about stepping aside and letting a newer generation step in and fill the vacuum.” Sarah E. Needleman, Annie Gasparro, Berber Jin, Mengqi Sun, Georgia Wells, Sarah Krouse, Heather Somerville, Tom Dotan and Deepa Seetharaman contributed to this article.

Det är forskaren Tina Sundelin vid Stockholm universitet som gått till botten med hur snoozandet påverkar resten av dagen.

Hon är själv inbiten snoozare och har alltid fått höra att det är dåligt, både av kollegor och sömnexperter.

— Men när jag kollade hittade jag inte en enda vetenskaplig studie som undersökt just snoozande. Så jag bestämde för att undersöka det, säger hon.

Fick sova på labbet

I en första studie fick 1 700 personer svara på frågor om sina morgon­vanor, hur mycket de sov, hur trötta de var och hur ofta de snoozar. Omkring 70 procent av de tillfrågade svarade att de brukar snooza.

Av dessa fick 31 personer komma till ett sömnlabb vid två tillfällen. Vid det ena tillfället fick de gå upp direkt när klockan ringde, vid andra tillfället fick de snooza var nionde minut i 30 minuter.

När de vaknat fick de göra olika tester som att lösa mattetal och försöka minnas olika färgrutor. De fick också svara på frågor om hur sömniga, optimistiska eller arga de kände sig. Testerna upprepades efter 40 minuter och ytterligare två gånger under dagen.

Bara positivt

Resultaten, som publicerats i den vetenskapliga tidskriften Journal of Sleep Research, är lugnande för dem som snoozar. Deltagarna presterade till och med något bättre på det kognitiva testet just när de vaknat efter snoozandet.

Att somna om några gånger påverkade inte heller sömnighet eller humör. I snitt kortades sömnen med sex minuter efter snoozmorgonen.

— Sover man runt sju till åtta timmar gör inte sex minuter någon skillnad, säger Tina Sundelin.

Sedan hon inledde studien har det publicerats två andra som pekar på samma sak – snoozandet tycks inte ha några negativa effekter. Men hon påpekar att resultaten inte innebär att det är något för alla.

— I den här studien undersöktes de som redan snoozar regelbundet och för dem verkar det vara helt okej att fortsätta.

De så kallade megabränderna, som får vanliga skogsbränder att blekna i jämförelse, har blivit allt vanligare på jorden. Bränderna har omedelbara ekologiska effekter – de dödar växter och djur som kanske hade överlevt mindre omfattande bränder. Men de får också mer långsiktiga konsekvenser. De jättelika bränderna kan utrota hela arter, förändra landskap och omforma hela ekosystem, skriver The New York Times. Bränderna har blivit så pass vanliga att forskare nyligen har döpt tiden vi lever i till pyrocen, eldens tidsålder. In our Pyrocene age, enormous wildfires aren’t merely damaging ecosystems but transforming them. By Emily Anthes October 15, 2023 On Aug. 15, a small wildfire was detected in the hills above West Kelowna, in British Columbia. The landscape was parched and the wind was fierce, and over the next few days the modest blaze exploded into a raging conflagration. It raced down into the valley and toward Okanagan Lake. Wind blew red-hot embers across the water, sparking new fires around the city of Kelowna. “I didn’t sleep much the night that the West Kelowna fires crossed the lake,” said Karen Hodges, who lives in Kelowna. “I could see the fires from my window. And so I was thinking about people I know in the valley and where their houses were.” Hodges, a conservation ecologist at the University of British Columbia Okanagan, also found herself worried about wildlife. She had been studying some Western screech owls that had been nesting in the heart of the fast-moving inferno. “That speed of fire would be difficult for animals to evacuate in front of,” she said. Had the owls escaped in time? And after Canada’s worst wildfire season on record, what would be left for the survivors? Fire is a natural phenomenon; some species actually benefit from its effects and even those that don’t can be remarkably resilient in the face of flames. But as fires intensify, they are beginning to outstrip nature’s ability to bounce back. “Not all fires have the same impact,” said Morgan Tingley, an ecologist at UCLA. “These megafires are not good for ecosystems.” Megafires, which dwarf typical wildfires in size, have an immediate ecological toll, killing individual plants and animals that might have survived more contained blazes. In the longer term, changing fire patterns could drive some species out of existence, transform landscapes and utterly remake ecosystems. This incendiary age, which some scientists have called the Pyrocene, could lead to “a wholesale conversion of what habitats are where on the planet,” Hodges said. “Right now, everybody is talking about fires and smoke and who dies, because of the immediacy of this fire year. But really, truly, the long-term consequences are much more severe and sustained.” Fire has been a planetary phenomenon for hundreds of millions of years, and plants and animals that evolved in fire-prone regions have adapted to periodic conflagrations. Some trees have roots that can re-sprout even if the trunk burns, while the mere smell of smoke will rouse some animals from torpor, a form of light hibernation. But in many regions and ecosystems, fires are becoming larger and more severe. In the United States, wildfires burn far more land today than they did three decades ago, especially in Western states. Globally, the risk of catastrophic fires could increase by more than 50% by the end of the century, the United Nations reported. Climate change is partly to blame, scientists said, but so are other factors, such as the expansion of highly flammable invasive grasses, which helped the deadly fires in Maui spread so quickly. More than a century of fire suppression has also left some forests thick with trees, giving flames more fuel. “When fires burn, they burn with so much intensity,” said Chris French, a deputy chief of the National Forest System in the United States. Even fire-savvy organisms may find themselves outmatched. In northern Australia, frilled lizards can survive low-severity fires by hiding in the tree canopy. But during severe fires, when flames leap higher, lizards that employ this strategy may perish. Fires are also spreading into ecosystems where flames are an unfamiliar threat. The megafires that erupted in Australia in 2019 and 2020 scorched the country’s rainforests, which contained many plants that cannot regenerate after burning. The animals in those ecosystems might be “fire naive,” said Dale Nimmo, an ecologist at Charles Sturt University in Australia. “They may not have been under any natural selection to detect the subtle cues of fire in the air, or through sound. And so they may not recognize the threat as it approaches.” The Algerian sand racer, a Mediterranean lizard, lives in a variety of habitats, only some of which experience frequent fires. In a 2021 study, researchers found that lizards collected from fire-prone sites reacted quickly to the smell of smoke, flicking their tongues and running around their terrariums. “In places where fire is not a common threat, lizards did nothing,” said Lola Álvarez-Ruiz, a biologist at the Desertification Research Center in Spain, who conducted the study. Fires that consume more fuel may also produce more smoke per unit of area burned, threatening animals far from the flames. “All air-breathing animals are going to be impacted by smoke exposure, because the chemicals in smoke are toxic,” said Olivia Sanderfoot, an ecologist at UCLA. Smoke inhalation can do more than cause respiratory problems. For months after severe peatland fires produced record air pollution in Indonesia in 2015, Bornean orangutans vocalized less frequently and their voices became harsher. The orangutans also moved less and ate more than they had before the smoke descended, but they still burned stored body fat, suggesting that their bodies were working overtime. That could be a sign of inflammation or stress, said Wendy Erb, an ecologist at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, who conducted the research. The long-term consequences are unclear, but fires have become common on Borneo, which is the only home for the critically endangered apes. “We’re talking about all of the remaining living orangutans essentially being exposed to the smoke on a regular basis,” Erb said. Animals that survive the inferno must then find food, water and shelter on hot, dry, denuded landscapes where the risk of predation is high. (Surrounded by weakened prey, some predators thrive after fires.) Fortunately, fires tend to burn unevenly, ravaging some stands of trees while grazing or sparing others. These unburned islands can be a lifeline for fire-sensitive species such as caribou, which eat highly flammable lichen, as well as thin-barked fir trees. But some of today’s fires are leaving fewer of these oases. “You could walk half a mile, and you wouldn’t see a single living tree,” said Andrew Stillman, an ecologist at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. “Increasingly, these fires seem to create habitat conditions that are outside of the norms that these species are adapted to.” That may be true even for fire-loving animals, such as the black-backed woodpecker. The birds nest in scorched trees and feed on the beetle larvae that colonize the charred trunks. But they prefer patches of burned trees that are near stands of leafy, living ones, which protect their fledglings from being picked off by predators, Stillman and Tingley found. After the enormous Rim fire in California in 2013, scientists searched for the woodpeckers at nearly 500 sites across the expansive burn scar. They found just six birds. “Even though it had created all this great burned habitat, it wasn’t the right kind of burned habitat,” Tingley said. Fewer clusters of living trees can also reduce regrowth. “In many places, we’re not getting regeneration because the seed source is lost,” said French, of the National Forest System. “It honestly looks like someone went in and just set off a bomb.” Scorched, vegetation-less soil, which does not absorb rain well, can also hamper regeneration. Flash flooding after fires can wash ash and sediment into rivers and streams, polluting the water, killing fish and reshaping waterways. After the Rodeo-Chediski fire in Arizona in 2002, repeated flooding washed away fertile soils that had taken more than 8,000 years to develop. “That has cascading impacts on the kind of plants that can grow,” said Jonathan Long, an ecologist at the U.S. Forest Service, who conducted the research. In the Northwest Territories of Canada, repeated fires have utterly transformed some forests. At one site, towering jack pines have given way to grasses and a smattering of “scrubby, stunted” aspens, which have light seeds that can be carried on the wind, said Ellen Whitman, a forest fire research scientist at Natural Resources Canada. “It is a very different place,” she added. Change is not necessarily bad. Fires can prompt overdue regeneration in places where flames have been artificially suppressed, and forests are not inherently superior to other ecosystems. Old-growth grasslands, which are biodiversity hot spots, are also under threat; in some places, grasslands have turned into forests, partly because of fire suppression. “So maybe in some ways, a bit of a balance is being restored,” Whitman said. But it could take a long time for new grasslands to build up biodiversity, and landscape transformations have ripple effects. In the Amazon, forest plots subjected to frequent fires began to resemble savannas; at these sites, ants and butterflies that favored forests declined, while species preferring open habitats moved in, scientists found. In North America, the loss of large, old-growth trees could reduce the ranks of forest specialists, such as martens and fishers, members of the weasel family that den inside tree hollows. Although the idea remains speculative, changes in fire activity could ultimately produce ecological communities that are more homogeneous, dominated by “generalist” species, such as coyotes and deer mice, which are flexible in their diets and habitats, scientists said. Today, increased fire activity could push more than 1,000 threatened plant and animal species closer to extinction, scientists calculated. And many plants and animals are already facing multiple stressors. In Canada, Western screech owls are threatened by land clearing and the expansion of invasive barred owls. “Then you throw fire on top of that as an additional thing that kills some of them, stresses others and changes habitat out from under them — you know, suddenly you’ve got too much to handle,” Hodges said. The West Kelowna fire burned some of the owls’ nest trees, she said, and the outlook is grim for a young, GPS-tagged bird that one of her students was tracking. “Its last known location was right in the middle of the fire that blew up so quickly,” Hodges said. “And we haven’t detected the signal since.” © 2023 The New York Times Company. Read the original article at The New York Times.

I söder sker stora komplexa manövrar och längs med hela fronten dundrar artillerielden. Men i skuggan av det så genomför Ukraina små nålsticksattacker. De små teamen är framgångsrika längs östfronten. Men riskerna är också större när de på nära håll slåss mot fienden. Det skriver The Washington Post som följt några av soldaterna och sjukvårdarna i närheten av Bachmut. Sjuksköterskan Khrystyna beskriver det som en liten familj där man lever nära och knyter an till varandra. – Man äter och dricker från samma tallrikar och muggar. Och man ställs inför situationer som gör att man kommer väldigt väldigt nära varandra snabbt. (Svensk översättning av Omni). Ukrainian soldiers conducting daring missions in small groups are making gains on the eastern front but face higher risks of fighting the enemy at close range. By Alex Horton and Serhiy Morgunov October 12, 2023 DONETSK REGION, Ukraine - The Ukrainian soldier was alone on the road when he approached the hornet's nest under his feet: a group of about 10 Russians in a drainage pipe turned into a makeshift bunker. As a few of his comrades nearby covered him, the soldier inched forward along the road in Andriivka, a small but strategic village in eastern Ukraine. The soldier hurled an explosive charge inside the pipe and sprinted away. The explosion killed the Russians inside, Ukrainian soldiers from the unit said, and was a key moment in the mission to rip the occupied village from Russian hands. While big, complex maneuvers unfold in Ukraine's southern counteroffensive, and long-range artillery duels thunder along the front lines, such small-team tactics are less visible. But these stealthy assaults of a handful of soldiers storming enemy positions have been quietly instrumental in recent gains in the eastern Donetsk region outside Bakhmut, Ukrainian fighters and commanders said. Outnumbered and outgunned, Ukrainian teams numbering four to a dozen can attack on foot far less conspicuously than with vehicles, surprising complacent enemies and triggering chaos along the front. The strategy, soldiers said, helped Ukrainian forces retake Andriivka and another village, Klishchiivka - important steps to increase pressure on Russians resupplying forces in and around Bakhmut. This intense fighting has come with steep costs, troops and medical personnel said. Russian forces are dug in and protected by mines, artillery and endless drone sorties. Ukrainian soldiers must push through all this, sometimes close enough to read name tags on an enemy's body armor. In the event that soldiers are wounded or killed, that proximity means evacuation is a dangerous and long endeavor. "The enemy bites, fight back, they have a big advantage, one against five," said an assault platoon commander with the call sign Percent. Like other soldiers, Percent is being identified by his call sign in keeping with Ukrainian military protocol. Percent's unit, the 3rd Separate Assault Brigade, participated in the liberation of Andriivka in mid-September. Some wounded have returned to the battlefield, but many others have not. "We've suffered big losses," he said. The concept of mobilizing small assault groups to knock a larger enemy off-balance is not new, but it is tailor-made for the circumstances in the Bakhmut area. Soldiers there must move fast and hard toward the enemy, dig into the earth to repel them, then move forward again in a fast, exhausting tempo. Using smaller teams, soldiers said, reduces exposure to drones, attack helicopters and artillery crews hunting for larger groups of troops. Much of that movement is dictated by the terrain - mostly grassland steppe. The few tree lines and structures that would offer cover have been obliterated by shelling, leaving a moonscape. Sometimes enemy trenches are the only places to take cover. Other times, soldiers find safety in an artillery crater or the basement of a destroyed home. The enemy could be anywhere and even move through intricate holes and pop out for attacks. Soldiers describe it as whack-a-mole with rifles. "They see you from the sky constantly," Percent said. "It's been very difficult to fight in those circumstances because enemy mortars, artillery and grenades are constantly being thrown at you." The final push to retake Andriivka started at night, said Rollo, the commander of the brigade's 1st Battalion. An assault battalion and armored units drove wedges into enemy territory and took heavy losses fighting over a strategic road, Rollo said. Russian resistance was fierce. Enemy radio intercepts indicated that the Russians would be shot by their own side if they retreated. Russian commanders used a mix of counterattacks, he said - sometimes small groups and other times trying to overpower the Ukrainians with far more soldiers, in what Ukrainians call "meat assaults." Russian soldiers learn quickly, and Ukrainian commanders don't underestimate them, Ukrainian soldiers said. Yet the tactics sometimes sent the enemy into disarray. Russian commanders and aviation units grew confused about who was where, Rollo said, prompting an unusual tactic later described by enemy soldiers taken captive. Drone pilots dropped grenades near unidentified soldiers, then watched if they ran toward Russian or Ukrainian lines, revealing their allegiance, Rollo said. The enemy waves kept coming, Rollo said, and at one point, his soldiers were at risk of being overrun. Ukrainian troops were on one side of a road, in fighting positions, and on the other side were about 30 enemy soldiers in a field, separated by a few yards and drawing closer. Rollo made a mind-bending decision. He called for a barrage of cluster munitions, he said, using the coordinates for his own soldiers. "We covered the entire area, but because we'd jumped into the holes we didn't have any losses," he said. It was a key moment in breaking Russian lines. There were numerous other acts of valor, big and small, during the two-day campaign to liberate Andriivka, including the soldier who blew up the drainpipe position. But that also reflects a problem, Percent said. Such actions must be taken because there aren't enough modern Western weapons, he said. If they had more of some weapons, like long-range rocket artillery, "we wouldn't need this heroism of soldiers and such losses," he said. "Instead, we are doing this with the enthusiasm of the military, their strength of spirit and the enormous work of the commanders, who must carefully think through every step," Percent said. "Every fighter counts, every projectile counts, every bullet counts." Other leaders in assault units echoed that sentiment, describing Western military assistance as one of the most crucial variables in accomplishing their objectives. On a recent afternoon, soldiers of the 80th Separate Air Assault Brigade, which helped liberate Klishchiivka last month, lined up at a training range to hone their marksmanship. One officer pointed to a U.S.-made M16. It's a good rifle, he explained, but they don't have enough weapons and ammunition to press as hard as they want. The M16 is also not a modern weapon. Its long stock and barrel make it unwieldy in trenches and vehicles. It is obsolete for most American military units and has been replaced by the M4. The outdated design of some M16s makes it impossible to attach most optics and infrared lasers. The slow and incremental deliveries of older equipment, the officer said, feels like the West has designed a video game, in which power-ups have to be earned. "Every successful mission allows us to receive a bit more and opens new skills," he said. "It's difficult for us. Our citizens are dying every day." The officer spoke on the condition of anonymity to offer a frank assessment of foreign support. Outside Bakhmut, the inevitable consequences of these violent assault missions burst through the doors of a no-frills medical facility, where doctors and nurses work at all hours to treat the wounded. Inside, chaplains offer prayers and spiritual healing, and in many cases, a set of hands to help move people and supplies. Drivers buzz through the hallways after daring missions to extract soldiers from the front. The facility, known as a stabilization point, is meant to treat soldiers before moving them to an actual hospital. Sometimes, that means revitalizing flatlining patients. Evacuating soldiers so close to the fight is often precarious. Russian drones lurk along roads used to transport the wounded, which often delays evacuations until after dark. Medics often carry wounded soldiers up to three miles, said Dmytro, a doctor and stabilization point supervisor for the 5th Separate Assault Brigade. Those delays in care result in more amputations, he said, because tourniquets secured too long can kill limbs. The flow of injuries has slowed since February and March, medical personnel said, when casualties soared during the battle for Bakhmut. But the wounded still keep the place busy as the fight rages up and down the lines. A soldier with a head wound was tended by Khrystyna, a nurse who put off a PhD in sociology to join the war. She works long, arduous hours under fire. "It's a small family. You live and connect so closely together," she said. "You eat and sleep by each other's side. You eat and drink from the same plates and cups. You also face situations that make you very close, very fast." © 2023 The Washington Post. Sign up for the Today's Worldview newsletter here.