NASA's Hubble finds that a black hole beam promotes stellar eruptions


In a surprise finding, astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have discovered that the blowtorch-like jet from a supermassive black hole at the core of a huge galaxy seems to cause stars to erupt along its trajectory. The stars, called novae, are not caught inside the jet, but apparently in a dangerous neighborhood nearby.


The finding is confounding researchers searching for an explanation. "We don't know what's going on, but it's just a very exciting finding," said lead author Alec Lessing of Stanford University. "This means there's something missing from our understanding of how black hole jets interact with their surroundings."A nova erupts in a double-star system where an aging, swelled-up, normal star spills hydrogen onto a burned-out white dwarf companion star. When the dwarf has tanked up a mile-deep surface layer of hydrogen that layer explodes like a giant nuclear bomb. The white dwarf isn't destroyed by the nova eruption, which ejects its surface layer and then goes back to siphoning fuel from its companion, and the nova-outburst cycle starts over again.

Hubble found twice as many novae going off near the jet as elsewhere in the giant galaxy during the surveyed time period. The jet is launched by a 6.5-billion-solar-mass central black hole surrounded by a disk of swirling matter. The black hole, engorged with infalling matter, launches a 3,000-light-year-long jet of plasma blazing through space at nearly the speed of light. Anything caught in the energetic beam would be sizzled. But being near its blistering outflow is apparently also risky, according to the new Hubble findings.

The finding of twice as many novae near the jet implies that there are twice as many nova-forming double-star systems near the jet or that these systems erupt twice as often as similar systems elsewhere in the galaxy.

"There's something that the jet is doing to the star systems that wander into the surrounding neighborhood. Maybe the jet somehow snowplows hydrogen fuel onto the white dwarfs, causing them to erupt more frequently," said Lessing. "But it's not clear that it's a physical pushing. It could be the effect of the pressure of the light emanating from the jet. When you deliver hydrogen faster, you get eruptions faster. Something might be doubling the mass transfer rate onto the white dwarfs near the jet." Another idea the researchers considered is that the jet is heating the dwarf's companion star, causing it to overflow further and dump more hydrogen onto the dwarf. However, the researchers calculated that this heating is not nearly large enough to have this effect.

"We're not the first people who've said that it looks like there's more activity going on around the M87 jet," said co-investigator Michael Shara of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. "But Hubble has shown this enhanced activity with far more examples and statistical significance than we ever had before."Shortly after Hubble's launch in 1990, astronomers used its first-generation Faint Object Camera (FOC) to peer into the center of M87 where the monster black hole lurks. They noted that unusual things were happening around the black hole. Almost every time Hubble looked, astronomers saw bluish "transient events" that could be evidence for novae popping off like camera flashes from nearby paparazzi. But the FOC's view was so narrow that Hubble astronomers couldn't look away from the jet to compare with the near-jet region. For over two decades, the results remained mysteriously tantalizing.


Compelling evidence for the jet's influence on the stars of the host galaxy was collected over a nine-month interval of Hubble observing with newer, wider-view cameras to count the erupting novae. This was a challenge for the telescope's observing schedule because it required revisiting M87 precisely every five days for another snapshot. Adding up all of the M87 images led to the deepest images of M87 that have ever been taken.

Hubble found 94 novae in the one-third of M87 that its camera can encompass. "The jet was not the only thing that we were looking at -- we were looking at the entire inner galaxy. Once you plotted all known novae on top of M87 you didn't need statistics to convince yourself that there is an excess of novae along the jet. This is not rocket science. We made the discovery simply by looking at the images. And while we were really surprised, our statistical analyses of the data confirmed what we clearly saw," said Shara.

This accomplishment is entirely due to Hubble's unique capabilities. Ground-based telescope images do not have the clarity to see novae deep inside M87. They cannot resolve stars or stellar eruptions close to the galaxy's core because the black hole's surroundings are far too bright. Only Hubble can detect novae against the bright M87 background.

Novae are remarkably common in the universe. One nova erupts somewhere in M87 every day. But since there are at least 100 billion galaxies throughout the visible universe, around 1 million novae erupt every second somewhere out there.

State bans on commercial food waste have been largely ineffective, study finds





In the U.S., more than a third of the food supply goes uneaten. The waste happens at multiple levels in the production and supply chain and is a big contributor to climate change.

Food that ends up decomposing in landfills produces methane — a potent greenhouse gas.

Some states have taken action to try to cut down on this food waste, but a new study finds that state bans on food waste in landfills have had little impact, with one exception.

The research, published in the journal Science on Thursday, looked at the first five states to enact food waste bans: California, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Vermont and Massachusetts. Between 2014 and 2024, nine states in total banned commercial food suppliers like Whole Foods and Applebee’s from disposing of food waste in landfills.

The laws require them to compost or donate food waste instead. Sending food scraps to compost facilities or specially designed digesters can better capture or reduce methane emissions.

But the new data found that these laws have done little to help.

“We can confidently say the laws didn’t work. They definitely didn’t achieve their intended goals,” said Robert Evan Sanders, an assistant professor of marketing at the Rady School of Management at the University of California San Diego and coauthor of the paper.

On average, the five state laws resulted in a 1.5% decrease in landfill waste between 2014 and 2018, Sanders told NPR. The researchers determined that regulators expected the laws to cut total waste going to landfills by 7-18% based on public documents and regulators’ statements to the press.

“The laws had no discernible effect on total landfill waste,” said coauthor Ioannis (Yannis) Stamatopoulos, an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business.

The researchers compared the five states in question to a combination of other similar states that did not implement a food waste ban. By comparing the states, they could predict how much total waste they would have created if the bans had not been implemented. They gathered data on waste from what environmental state agencies reported.

The researchers said they could not measure food waste directly, as that data doesn't exist. But because organic waste is such a large component of total landfill waste, they reasoned that states would expect to see a measurable reduction in total waste.

According to the study, Massachusetts stood out as the only state to achieve its goal of minimizing how much waste ended up in landfills, reaching a 7% reduction on average over five years, Stamatopoulos said.

The paper's authors said Massachusetts’ success may be partly due to certain steps the state took to make it easy for individuals and businesses to comply with the law.

Massachusetts had the most extensive network of food waste processing facilities, creating easy alternatives to landfills. Additionally, the law in Massachusetts had the fewest exemptions. “So that makes it easy for people to understand the laws,” Sanders said. The law was also enforced with inspections and fines, said Sanders. In contrast, the researchers wrote, “there is almost no enforcement in other states.”

Sanders notes that some states the study evaluated have improved their waste management programs since 2018, the year the study stopped collecting data. For example, in 2022, California started providing all residents and businesses with organic waste collection services. “They are trying to up enforcement and do the things that we know work,” said Sanders.

1,000-year-old seed used to grow ancient Biblical tree, scientists claim it may cure cancer
The seed, which was found during an archaeological excavation in the 1980s, is believed to have belonged to trees mentioned in the Bible



A mysterious ancient seed, dating back to a time between 993 AD and 1202, has grown into a 10 feet tall tree nearly 1,000 years after it came into existence. The seed, found in the Judean Desert between the West Bank and Israel, is likely to have belonged to a lineage of trees mentioned in the Bible, scientists say.

Named "Sheba", after a biblical queen, the ancient seed took 14 years to grow into a tree after it was discovered during an excavation in a cave in the late 1980s. Scientists believe the seed belongs to a now-extinct species of trees that existed in the region which is modern-day Israel, Palestine and Jordan. (Also Read: 10-year-old’s curiosity leads to discovery of ancient dinosaur footprints on a beach)
Does it have healing powers?

Scientists claim the fully-grown tree could be the source of "tsori" (meaning balm) - a resin mentioned in the Bible for its healing powers. They claim the revival of the tree can unravel the mystery behind the Biblical balm.

The tree is also related to the Commiphora species that produce fragrant resins which some believe to be the source of another Biblical perfume called "Balm of Gilead""Our initial hypothesis was that 'Sheba' might be a candidate for the historical 'Judean Balsam,'" the scientists, but added that they refuted the idea as the tree lacks aromatic properties.
Anti-cancer properties

Sheba has shown a range of medicinal properties. Chemical analysis of the ancient tree's leaves reveals that it contains active compounds with anti-inflammatory and anti-cancer properties."Our initial hypothesis was that 'Sheba' might be a candidate for the historical 'Judean Balsam,'" the scientists, but added that they refuted the idea as the tree lacks aromatic properties.
"We believe these findings support our second hypothesis, that 'Sheba' … may represent an extinct (or at least extirpated) [lineage] once native to this region, whose resin 'tsori' mentioned in Biblical texts was valuable, associated with healing but not described as fragrant," scientists said.

After performing DNA, chemical and radiocarbon analyses of the tree, scientists have found that it belongs to the family of myrrh and frankincense, two compounds also mentioned in the Bible and closely associated with Jesus.
Can more ancient trees be grown?

While it is associated with nearly 200 living plant species, scientists are unclear about the species of the Sheba plant. In 14 years, the tree has not flowered or produced 'reproductive material' that could be studied by scientists to understand its properties.

"If Judean Balsam survives today as an extant Commiphora species there remains the possibility that scientists have not yet recognised it," scientists said.
Can more ancient trees be grown?

While it is associated with nearly 200 living plant species, scientists are unclear about the species of the Sheba plant. In 14 years, the tree has not flowered or produced 'reproductive material' that could be studied by scientists to understand its properties.

"If Judean Balsam survives today as an extant Commiphora species there remains the possibility that scientists have not yet recognised it," scientists said.

Webb discovers 'weird' galaxy with gas outshining its stars
The discovery of a 'weird' and unprecedented galaxy in the early Universe could 'help us understand how the cosmic story began', astronomers say. GS-NDG-9422 (9422) was found approximately one billion years after the Big Bang and stood out because it has an odd, never-before-seen light signature -- indicating that its gas is outshining its stars. The 'totally new phenomena' is significant, researchers say, because it could be the missing-link phase of galactic evolution between the Universe's first stars and familiar, well-established galaxies.


The discovery of a "weird" and unprecedented galaxy in the early Universe could "help us understand how the cosmic story began," astronomers say.


The "totally new phenomena" is significant, researchers say, because it could be the missing-link phase of galactic evolution between the Universe's first stars and familiar, well-established galaxies.

This extreme class of galaxy was spotted by the $10billion (£7.6billion) James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), a joint endeavour of the US, European and Canadian space agencies, which has been designed to peer back in time to the beginning of the Universe.

Its discovery was made public today in a research paper published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

"My first thought in looking at the galaxy's spectrum was, 'that's weird,' which is exactly what the Webb telescope was designed to reveal: totally new phenomena in the early Universe that will help us understand how the cosmic story began," said lead researcher Dr Alex Cameron, of the University of Oxford.

Cameron reached out to colleague Dr Harley Katz, a theorist, to discuss the strange data. Working together, their team found that computer models of cosmic gas clouds heated by very hot, massive stars, to an extent that the gas shone brighter than the stars, was nearly a perfect match to Webb's observations.


"It looks like these stars must be much hotter and more massive than what we see in the local Universe, which makes sense because the early Universe was a very different environment," said Katz, of Oxford and the University of Chicago.

In the local Universe, typical hot, massive stars have a temperature ranging between 70,000 to 90,000 degrees Fahrenheit (40,000 to 50,000 degrees Celsius). According to the team, galaxy 9422 has stars hotter than 140,000 degrees Fahrenheit (80,000 degrees Celsius).

The researchers suspect that the galaxy is in the midst of a brief phase of intense star formation inside a cloud of dense gas that is producing a large number of massive, hot stars. The gas cloud is being hit with so many photons of light from the stars that it is shining extremely brightly.

In addition to its novelty, nebular gas outshining stars is intriguing because it is something predicted in the environments of the Universe's first generation of stars, which astronomers classify as Population III stars.

"We know that this galaxy does not have Population III stars, because the Webb data shows too much chemical complexity. However, its stars are different than what we are familiar with -- the exotic stars in this galaxy could be a guide for understanding how galaxies transitioned from primordial stars to the types of galaxies we already know," said Katz.

At this point, galaxy 9422 is one example of this phase of galaxy development, so there are still many questions to be answered. Are these conditions common in galaxies at this time period, or a rare occurrence? What more can they tell us about even earlier phases of galaxy evolution?

Cameron, Katz, and their research colleagues are now identifying more galaxies to add to this population to better understand what was happening in the Universe within the first billion years after the Big Bang.

"It's a very exciting time, to be able to use the Webb telescope to explore this time in the Universe that was once inaccessible," Cameron said.

"We are just at the beginning of new discoveries and understanding."

Extinct volcanoes a 'rich' source of rare earth elements


Fungal infections are evolving and becoming resistant to the medicines used to treat them, causing what some researchers are calling a "silent pandemic" that needs to be addressed urgently. According to molecular biologist Norman van Rhijn from the University of Manchester in the UK, the threat of fungal pathogens and antifungal resistance is being overlooked in global health discussions. Without urgent attention and action, some particularly nasty fungal infections, which already infect 6.5 million a year and claim 3.8 million lives annually, could become even more dangerous, he warned, as per Science Alert.

The biologist, along with an international group of scientists, is urging government, research communities and the pharmaceutical industry to "look beyond just bacteria". Fungal infections are left out of too many initiatives to tackle antimicrobial resistance, the researchers said, per Science Alert. Without urgent attention, fungal infections could become even more dangerous, they said.

"The disproportionate focus on bacteria is concerning because many drug resistance problems over the past decades were the result of invasive fungal diseases, which are largely under-recognized by the community and governments alike," Norman van Rhijn and his colleagues, who hail from institutions in China, the Netherlands, Austria, Australia, Spain, the UK, Brazil, the US, India, Turkiye, and Uganda, said.


Fungal diseases such as Aspergillus fumigatus, which affects the lungs, and Candida, which causes yeast infections, are considered the most dangerous. People with weakened immune systems and older adults are at the highest risk, per the outlet.

Scientists explained that compared to bacteria and viruses, fungi are more complicated organisms, which makes it harder and more expensive for scientists to develop a medicine that kills the cells of fungi without damaging other important cells in the body. Currently, there are only four classes of antifungal drugs, and resistance to them is increasing.

"To treat deep or invasive fungal infections, only four systemic antifungal classes are available and resistance is now the rule rather than the exception for those currently available classes," the researchers wrote.

Also Read | China's Gigantic Hydroelectric Dam Has Earth-Shifting Capabilities, Scientists Say

The team said that it is concerned that agricultural practices are contributing to the problem. They explained that fungicides used in farming can cause cross-resistance in the fungi that affect humans. They suggest that the world needs a balance between protecting crops and treating fungal infections.

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Antifungal protection is required for food security. The question is, how do we balance food security with the ability to treat current and future resistant fungal pathogens?" the researcher wrote.


The team recommends a global agreement to limit certain antifungal drugs to specific purposes, as well as collaborative regulations to balance food security with health.

Breakthrough study predicts catastrophic river shifts that threaten millions worldwide


Indiana University researchers have uncovered key insights into the dangerous phenomenon of "river avulsion," offering a way to predict when and where rivers may suddenly and dramatically change course. Published in Nature, this breakthrough study sheds light on a process that has shaped human history through devastating floods and continues to threaten millions of people worldwide.


Led by James "Jake" Gearon, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences (EAS) within the College of Arts and Sciences at Indiana University Bloomington, the research team has outlined for the first time the conditions that create river avulsions. Co-authors include Harrison Martin (Ph.D. EAS '23), a post-doctoral fellow now at CalTech, Clarke DeLisle (Ph.D. EAS '23) now at EVS, Inc, Eric Barefoot, a post-doctoral researcher at IU Bloomington and now a faculty member at UC-Riverside, and Professor Douglas Edmonds, the Malcolm and Sylvia Boyce Chair in Geological Sciences in the Earth and Atmospheric Sciences department.


Using advanced satellite technology, the team mapped how certain landscape features make avulsions more likely. "Measuring topography around a river is difficult and time-consuming because of the dense vegetation," said Gearon. "We took advantage of a new satellite that uses lasers to measure topography." This technology, called lidar, penetrates vegetation to find bare-earth elevations, allowing for accurate topographical measurements.

The study presents a novel framework for predicting when avulsions will occur, a problem humanity has dealt with for millennia. "Avulsions which are possibly the inspirations for ancient flood myths, have created the largest floods in human history, and continue to threaten millions of people today," explained Edmonds. "As climate change alters global water cycles and human expansion into flood-prone areas increases, understanding and predicting avulsions has never been more critical."

What Causes River Avulsions?

Avulsions occur when a river's water rises above the surrounding landscape, often due to the buildup of sediment in the riverbed. When this happens, the river may spill over its banks and carve a new path across the floodplain. This can lead to severe flooding, as the entire river rushes through areas not typically designed to handle such volume. For example, the 2008 avulsion of the Kosi River in Northern India directly affected over 30 million residents, killed hundreds of people, and caused over $1 billion dollars in damage.

Traditionally, scientists believed avulsions happened due to two main factors: either the riverbed became elevated above the floodplain, or the land on either side of the river offered a steeper, more appealing path for the water to follow. "We can now actually test these two 80-year-old ideas with the topography data we have collected from space" said Edmonds, "and we were surprised to find that both factors work together and play different roles depending on the river's location."




Predicting avulsion hazards -- A new way to map flood risks


Researchers analyzed data from 174 river avulsions around the world, using satellite imagery to track river movements over the past several decades. The study authors reveal that avulsions are much more common near mountain ranges and coastal areas than in the middle sections of rivers. They discovered that 74 percent of these avulsions occurred near mountain fronts or coastlines, areas where sediment tends to build up quickly.

Further, using topographic data, the researchers developed a new model to map what they term "avulsion corridors" -- paths that rivers might take if they break from their current course. This tool could help governments and planners identify areas at high risk for sudden flooding, especially in regions with limited flood management resource.

Implications for the Global South

The findings could be especially valuable in the Global South -- less developed parts of Africa, Latin America, and Asia -- where avulsions are more frequent and often more deadly. In many of these regions, a combination of geological factors and infrastructure challenges makes communities more vulnerable to sudden river changes. The 2010 avulsion-related flooding on the Indus River in Pakistan, for example, affected over 20 million people.

The new model, which relies on minimal data, could help countries prepare for avulsion-related disasters, potentially saving lives and reducing economic damage. By offering scientists, policy makers, and practitioners a new way to think about and plan for flood risks -- and as climate change continues to reshape weather patterns and increase flood hazards worldwide -- the study provides essential tools for understanding and mitigating the dangers posed by river avulsions.The study also highlights the importance of considering avulsions in flood hazard assessments, something that current flood models don't usually account for. "Traditional flood models focus on rising water levels from heavy rains, but avulsions can occur without warning, even in areas where rainfall isn't a major concern. This makes them particularly dangerous and difficult to predict, much like earthquakes" said Gearon

An ideas generator powered by artificial intelligence (AI) came up with more original research ideas than did 50 scientists working independently, according to a preprint posted on arXiv this month1.

The human and AI-generated ideas were evaluated by reviewers, who were not told who or what had created each idea. The reviewers scored AI-generated concepts as more exciting than those written by humans, although the AI’s suggestions scored slightly lower on feasibility.

But scientists note the study, which has not been peer-reviewed, has limitations. It focused on one area of research and required human participants to come up with ideas on the fly, which probably hindered their ability to produce their best concepts.
AI in science

There are burgeoning efforts to explore how LLMs can be used to automate research tasks, including writing papers, generating code and searching literature. But it’s been difficult to assess whether these AI tools can generate fresh research angles at a level similar to that of humans. That’s because evaluating ideas is highly subjective and requires gathering researchers who have the expertise to assess them carefully, says study co-author, Chenglei Si. “The best way for us to contextualise such capabilities is to have a head-to-head comparison,” says Si, a computer scientist at Stanford University in California.

The year-long project is one of the biggest efforts to assess whether large language models (LLMs) — the technology underlying tools such as ChatGPT — can produce innovative research ideas, says Tom Hope, a computer scientist at the Allen Institute for AI in Jerusalem. “More work like this needs to be done,” he says.
Human reviewers

Next, the researchers randomly assigned the human- and AI-generated ideas to 79 reviewers, who scored each idea on its novelty, excitement, feasibility and expected effectiveness. To ensure that the ideas’ creators remained unknown to the reviewers, the researchers used another LLM to edit both types of text to standardize the writing style and tone without changing the ideas themselves.

On average, the reviewers scored the AI-generated ideas as more original and exciting than those written by human participants. However, when the team took a closer look at the 4,000 LLM-produced ideas, they found only around 200 that were truly unique, suggesting that the AI became less original as it churned out ideas.

When Si surveyed the participants, most admitted that their submitted ideas were average compared with those they had produced in the past.

The results suggest that LLMs might be able to produce ideas that are slightly more original than those in the existing literature, says Cong Lu, a machine-learning researcher at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. But whether they can beat the most groundbreaking human ideas is an open question.

Another limitation is that the study compared written ideas that had been edited by an LLM, which altered the language and length of the submissions, says Jevin West, a computational social scientist at the University of Washington in Seattle. Such changes could have subtly influenced how reviewers perceived novelty, he says. West adds that pitting researchers against an LLM that can generate thousands of ideas in hours might not make for a totally fair comparison. “You have to compare apples to apples,” he says.


Si and his colleagues are planning to compare AI-generated ideas with leading conference papers to gain a better understanding of how LLMs stack up against human creativity. “We are trying to push the community to think harder about how the future should look when AI can take on a more active role in the research process,” he says.

New research strengthens the case for a zoonotic origin of COVID-19


A new international collaborative study provides a list of the wildlife species present at the market from which SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic, most likely arose in late 2019. The study is based on a new analysis of metatranscriptomic data released by the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The data come from more than 800 samples collected in and around the Huanan Seafood Wholesale market beginning on January 1, 2020, and from viral genomes reported from early COVID-19 patients. The research appears September 19 in the journal Cell.

"This is one of the most important datasets that exists on the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic," says co-corresponding author Florence Débarre of the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). "We're extremely grateful that the data exist and were shared."

"We have analyzed, in new and rigorous ways, the vitally important data that the Chinese CDC team collected," says co-corresponding author Michael Worobey of the University of Arizona. "This is an authoritative analysis of that data and how it fits in with the rest of the huge body of evidence we have about how the pandemic started."

On January 1, 2020, after the animals were removed and just hours after the market was closed, investigators from the Chinese CDC went to the market to collect samples. They swabbed the floors, walls, and other surfaces of the stalls; they came back days later to focus on surfaces in stalls selling wildlife, such as a cage and carts used to move animals, and then also collected samples from the drains and sewers.

They performed metatranscriptomic sequencing of the samples, a technique aiming to obtain all RNA sequences (and which can pick up DNA as well) from all organisms present in the samples-;viruses, bacteria, plants, animals, humans. The Chinese CDC team, led by Liu Jun, published their data and results in 2023 in the journal Nature. However, the article left unresolved the exact identities of the animal species found in the data that could represent plausible intermediate hosts. The Chinese CDC shared their sequencing data on public and open repositories.

According to the latest analysis of these data being published in Cell, SARS-CoV-2 was present in some of the same stalls as wildlife sold at the market-;including raccoon dogs (small fox-like animals with markings similar to raccoons) and civet cats (small carnivorous mammals related to mongooses and hyenas). In some cases, genetic material from the SARS-CoV-2 virus and these animals was even found on the same swabs. The exact animal species were identified by genotyping their mitochondrial genomes in the samples.

"Many of the key animal species had been cleared out before the Chinese CDC teams arrived, so we can't have direct proof that the animals were infected," Débarre says. "We are seeing the DNA and RNA ghosts of these animals in the environmental samples, and some are in stalls where SARS-CoV-2 was found too. This is what you would expect under a scenario in which there were infected animals in the market."

"These are the same sorts of animals that we know facilitated the original SARS coronavirus jumping into humans in 2002," Worobey adds. "This is the most risky thing we can do-;take wild animals that are teeming with viruses and then play with fire by bringing them into contact with humans living in the heart of big cities, whose population densities make it easy for these viruses to take hold."

The international team also performed evolutionary analysis of the earliest viral genomes reported in the pandemic, including these environmental sequences, and inferred the most likely progenitor genotypes of the virus that infected humans and led to the COVID-19 pandemic. The results imply that there were very few, if any, humans infected prior to the market outbreak. This is consistent with spillovers from animals to humans within the market. There may also have been spillovers of limited impact in the immediate upstream animal trade.

"In this paper, we show that the sequences linked to the market are consistent with a market emergence," Débarre says. "The main diversity of SARS-CoV-2 was in the market from the very beginning."

The new study landed on a short list of animal species in the wet market found co-occurring or close to viral samples that could represent the most likely intermediate hosts for SARS-CoV-2. The common raccoon dog, a species susceptible to SARS-CoV-2 and that carried SARS-CoV in 2003, was found to be the most genetically abundant animal in the samples from market wildlife stalls. Genetic material from masked palm civets, which were also associated with the earlier outbreak of SARS-CoV, was also found in a stall with SARS-CoV-2 RNA. Other species such as the Hoary bamboo rat and Malayan porcupines were also found to be present in SARS-CoV-2-positive samples, as well as a multitude of other species.

While the data cannot prove whether one or more of these animals may have been infected, the team's analyses provide a clear list of the species that most plausibly could have carried the virus and genetic information that could be used to help trace where they originated.

The investigators stress the importance of understanding the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, especially in light of other recent spillovers, such as the spread of avian flu viruses in cattle in the United States. "There has been a lot of disinformation and misinformation about where SARS-CoV-2 originated," Worobey says. "The reason it's so important to find out is that this affects national security and public health, not just in the United States but around the world. And the truth is, since the pandemic started more than four years ago, although there has been an increased focus on lab safety, not much has been done to decrease the chance of a zoonotic scenario like this happening again."

Infinite perimeter: How modern consolidated security protects the cloud

Despite the widespread adoption of cloud computing and remote work, and the steady rollout of zero-trust networking, the perimeter is far from dead. Rather, it has been redefined. Like the border of a mathematical fractal shape, the modern network perimeter now extends everywhere, infinitely.

Unfortunately, legacy tools don't work terribly well with the modern infinite perimeter. The modern perimeter needs modern security tools like a cloud access security broker (CASB) and decentralized network architectures like secure access service edge (SASE).

"Anywhere you can access data, anywhere you can send data to, anywhere you host data or save data, that's where you have to make sure that you have a way to reach or protect that particular asset," explains Aviv Abramovich, Head of Security Services Product Management at Check Point.

One way to efficiently get what you need to secure and manage the infinite perimeter is to implement a consolidated security platform. It bundles together modern networking and security technologies into a complete package, saving you the complicated and tedious task of aligning disparate tools from multiple vendors.



A decade or two ago, the perimeter was where the company network's wires and Wi-Fi signals ended. There were tunnels in via remote-access VPNs or database calls from web servers, but those were, at least in theory, well-guarded.

"All you needed was the edge perimeter firewall, and that was your network security because everything was just a flat network," says Julian Mihai, CISO at Penn Medicine in Philadelphia.

Then came cloud computing, followed by the explosion of remote work that accompanied the COVID-19 pandemic.

Now the old ways are not enough. Remote workers use their own personal computers to connect to the company network from anywhere in the world, bringing the risk of malware intrusions and data theft.

Security personnel must relinquish total control of assets that have been moved to the cloud, placing their trust in cloud service providers who promise robust protections as long as the assets fall into the CSPs' fuzzily defined areas of responsibility.

"Everything in the cloud is shared responsibility," said one security professional who responded to a recent CyberRisk Alliance survey. "We have to understand how the security works and what is our responsibility."
More and more complex

Meanwhile, the speed and ease of setting up new cloud instances lead to a morass of misconfigurations and poorly secured data buckets. When any IT staffer can spin up a cloud instance, it exacerbates the existing shadow-IT problem.

"The thing that really makes me lose sleep at night is the misconfiguration," said another respondent to a CRA survey. "We're not mature enough to be able to easily see what's not set up properly."

Cloud instances may be inherently easier to attack, and more difficult to defend, than on-prem networks. All an attacker needs is a stolen set of admin credentials, while defenders lose their home-field advantage when they move from defending the LAN to defending cloud assets on a CSP's infrastructure.

The network itself is no longer static, but dynamic. Endpoint devices log on and off around the clock and frequently change locations. Cloud instances pop in and out of existence, while others are never wound down and quietly stay online, forgotten. Data is scattered over an array of servers, few of which your organization may control.

Naturally, the complexity of cloud computing and remote work have made it much tougher to protect the network and the devices and staffers who use it.

"You're solving a problem that's 10 times more complicated than you were trying to solve only a few years ago," says Dave Gronner, Product Marketing Manager at Check Point.
How consolidated security platforms protect the infinite perimeter

Fortunately, network security and network architecture have caught up to these new demands, offering several ways that organizations can tackle the infinite perimeter.

A plethora of "cloud native" security tools has been developed. Cloud security posture management (CSPM) checks and monitors cloud instances and assets for misconfigurations and policy violations.

Cloud workload protection platforms (CWPP) do the same for malware, vulnerabilities and other threats, while the cloud access security broker (CASB) checks the behavior and controls the access of cloud users. A cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP) ties together many of these tools.

These tools not only work on the cloud, but they are also themselves in the cloud, matching the flexibility and, well, boundless perimeter of the assets they protect.

"A cloud environment is a lot more dynamic. You click a button, you have 10 new servers, so you need your security to also be very dynamic and adjust to it," says Check Point's Abramovich. "Network security can read information, if you will, from the cloud and automatically and dynamically adapt the policy and the access to the changes in the cloud."
Bringing the network to the people

But while routing data and network traffic to and from the cloud through on-premises access points may work well from the company offices, it's not such a smooth process if many employees are working remotely. It doesn't make sense to send data from those employees to the central office via VPN, then hairpin it back out to the cloud. That would just create congestion and delays.

Hence the secure access service edge (SASE) model, which brings the network closer to remote users through a software-defined wide access network (SD-WAN) and geographically distributed points of presence (PoPs), edge servers that provider user access, enforce security policies and securely deliver data.

Secure web gateways (SWGs) monitor and filter traffic, detect malware and thwart data loss; software-defined firewalls-as-a-service (FWaaS) protect the entire virtual network much as a hardware firewall would protect an on-prem network.

Tying together SASE and the cloud-native security tools is zero-trust network access (ZTNA), a software component of the larger zero-trust model that grants no user implicit access based on location or device but challenges each user to continually verify their identity.

"A modern unified platform needs to be built around the zero-trust concept," says Abramovich. "Fewer privileges, always verify, continuous verification and awareness and visibility — if you don't have these specific capabilities, your platform will be missing some really important components and capabilities."

ZTNA uses identity-defined policies to give each user or device access only to specific assets, network areas and applications, differing from a VPN that gives access to the entire local network.
Putting it all together

All of these networking and security tools can be acquired individually, and most organizations cobble together SASE and cloud-native protections using products from various vendors. But while you can obtain an off-the-shelf ZTNA tool, you'll have a hard time finding a vendor that offers a full off-the-shelf zero-trust implementation.

However, getting all these different tools to work together can be expensive, time-consuming and taxing on security staffers who must be trained in a dozen different interfaces and tools.

To save effort, time and money, many organizations are turning to consolidated security platforms that offer some or most of the cloud-native and SASE components.

These platforms may also offer basic cybersecurity features like endpoint protection, identity and access management (IAM), and network monitoring, as well as more sophisticated tools like extended detection and response (XDR) and security orchestration and response (SOAR) systems. Many include AI-powered functions to assist with configuration, detection and analysis.

While no consolidated security platform offers everything an organization might need to manage and protect the modern globally distributed network, the reduction in vendors should result in lower costs, less training time and fewer configuration and patching headaches.

"If it's from a single vendor, then you're actually improving your efficiency, because there are a lot fewer skills that you need in your security team to manage all these different [tools]," says Abramovich.

Through more efficient data sharing among tools, a consolidated security platform should also provide tighter security integration as well as greater visibility into your systems, whether in the cloud or on-prem, letting you see all the way out to the edge of the infinite perimeter.

Website: bestachievements.com

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