Artificial intelligence is on a par with human experts when it comes to making medical diagnoses based on images, a review has found. From a report: The potential for artificial intelligence in healthcare has caused excitement, with advocates saying it will ease the strain on resources, free up time for doctor-patient interactions and even aid the development of tailored treatment. Last month the government announced $305 million of funding for a new NHS artificial intelligence laboratory. However, experts have warned the latest findings are based on a small number of studies, since the field is littered with poor-quality research. One burgeoning application is the use of AI in interpreting medical images -- a field that relies on deep learning, a sophisticated form of machine learning in which a series of labelled images are fed into algorithms that pick out features within them and learn how to classify similar images. This approach has shown promise in diagnosis of diseases from cancers to eye conditions.

However questions remain about how such deep learning systems measure up to human skills. Now researchers say they have conducted the first comprehensive review of published studies on the issue, and found humans and machines are on a par. Prof Alastair Denniston, at the University Hospitals Birmingham NHS foundation trust and a co-author of the study, said the results were encouraging but the study was a reality check for some of the hype about AI. Dr Xiaoxuan Liu, the lead author of the study and from the same NHS trust, agreed. "There are a lot of headlines about AI outperforming humans, but our message is that it can at best be equivalent," she said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Kevin Buzzard, a number theorist and professor of pure mathematics at Imperial College London, believes that it is time to create a new area of mathematics dedicated to the computerization of proofs. The greatest proofs have become so complex that practically no human on earth can understand all of their details, let alone verify them. He fears that many proofs widely considered to be true are wrong. Help is needed. What is a proof? A proof is a demonstration of the truth of a mathematical statement. By proving things and learning new techniques of proof, people gain an understanding of math, which then filters out into other fields.

To create a proof, begin with some definitions. For example, define a set of numbers such as the integers, all the whole numbers from minus infinity to positive infinity. Write this set as: ... , -2, -1, 0, 1, 2, ... Next, state a theorem, for example, that there is no largest integer. The proof then consists in the logical reasoning that shows the theorem to be true or false, in this case, true. The logical steps in the proof rely on other, prior truths, which have already been accepted and proven. For example, that the number 1 is less than 2. New proofs by professional mathematicians tend to rely on a whole host of prior results that have already been published and understood. But Buzzard says there are many cases where the prior proofs used to build new proofs are clearly not understood. For example, there are notable papers that openly cite unpublished work. This worries Buzzard. "I'm suddenly concerned that all of published math is wrong because mathematicians are not checking the details, and I've seen them wrong before," Buzzard told Motherboard while he was attending the 10th Interactive Theorem Proving conference in Portland, Oregon, where he gave the opening talk.

"I think there is a non-zero chance that some of our great castles are built on sand," Buzzard wrote in a slide presentation. "But I think it's small."

The world's largest single-dish radio observatory is preparing to open to astronomers around the world, ushering in an era of exquisitely sensitive observations that could help in the hunt for gravitational waves and probe the mysterious fleeting blasts of radiation known as fast radio bursts. From a report: The Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope (FAST) in southern China has just passed a series of technical and performance assessments, and the Chinese government is expected to give the observatory the final green light to begin full operations at a review meeting scheduled for next month. "We do not see any roadblocks for the remaining transition," says Di Li, the chief scientist of FAST. "I feel both excited and relieved." The complex project has not been without challenges â" it has a radical design and initially struggled to attract staff, in part because of its remote location. But the pay-off for science will be immense. FAST will collect radio waves from an area twice the size of the next-largest single-dish telescope, the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico.

The Chinese observatory's massive size means that it can detect extremely faint radio-wave whispers from an array of sources across the Universe, such as the spinning cores of dead stars, known as pulsars, and hydrogen in distant galaxies. It will also explore a frontier in radioastronomy -- using radio waves to locate exoplanets, which may harbour extraterrestrial life. Since testing began in 2016, only Chinese scientists have been able to lead projects studying the telescope's preliminary data. But now, observation time will be accessible to researchers from around the world, says Zhiqiang Shen, director of the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory and co-chair of the Chinese Academy of Sciences' FAST supervisory committee. From two years ago, China Built the World's Largest Telescope, But Has No One To Run It.

According to a new report by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, ocean warming is accelerating and sea levels are rising more quickly. "The report is a synthesis of the most up-to-date climate science on oceans and ice, and it lays out a stark reality: Ocean surface temperatures have been warming steadily since 1970, and for the past 25 years or so, they've been warming twice as fast," reports NPR. From the report: Sea levels are also rising increasingly quickly "due to increasing rates of ice loss from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets," the report states. The report also discusses a relatively new phenomenon in the oceans: marine heat waves. That's a big deal for coastal communities whose economies rely on fish and other seafood. Marine heat waves in recent years drove a cascade of changes in marine life off the coast of the Pacific Northwest, which in turn led to disastrous seasons for commercial fishermen.

Rising water temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico have also affected weather in that region. When sea surface temperatures are unusually high, it helps fuel larger, wetter tropical storms. For example, Hurricane Harvey and Tropical Depression Imelda came inland and dropped incredible amounts of rain on Texas in the past two years. The U.N. panel's report suggests multiple actions that local, state and national leaders can take to slow ocean warming and rising, and to adapt to its impacts. First and foremost, the authors reinforce what has been known for decades: Greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels are the main driver of changes in the world's oceans, and the global economy must undergo a dramatic transformation to reduce those emissions. [T]he report also notes that if greenhouse gas emissions are immediately and dramatically curtailed, some impacts of ocean acidification could be avoided this century.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Scientist: Tea drinkers have been urged to avoid plastic tea bags after tests found that a single bag sheds billions of particles of microplastic into each cup. A Canadian team found that steeping a plastic tea bag at a brewing temperature of 95C releases around 11.6 billion microplastics -- tiny pieces of plastic between 100 nanometers and 5 millimeters in size – into a single cup. That is several orders of magnitude higher than other foods and drinks.

"We think that it is a lot when compared to other foods that contain microplastics," says Nathalie Tufenkji at McGill University. "Table salt, which has a relatively high microplastic content, has been reported to contain approximately 0.005 micrograms plastic per gram salt. A cup of tea contains thousands of times greater mass of plastic, at 16 micrograms per cup." Tufenkji's team bought four different tea bags from shops and cafes in Montreal, cut them open and washed them, steeped them in 95C water and analyzed the water with electron microscopes and spectroscopy. A control of uncut tea bags was used to check it wasn't the cutting that was causing the leaching of microplastics. The study has been published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology.

omfglearntoplay shares a report from ScienceDaily: What determines global patterns of biodiversity has been a puzzle for scientists since the days of von Humboldt, Darwin, and Wallace. Yet, despite two centuries of research, this question remains unanswered. The global pattern of mountain biodiversity, and the extraordinarily high richness in tropical mountains in particular, is documented in two companion Science review papers this week [1, 2]. The papers focus on the fact that the high level of biodiversity found on mountains is far beyond what would be expected from prevailing hypotheses.

To confront the question of why mountains are so biologically diverse, scientists at the Center for Macroecology, Evolution and Climate (CMEC) at the GLOBE Institute of the University of Copenhagen work to synthesize understanding and data from the disparate fields of macroecology, evolutionary biology, earth sciences, and geology. Part of the answer, these studies find, lies in understanding that the climate of rugged tropical mountain regions is fundamentally different in complexity and diversity compared to adjacent lowland regions. Uniquely heterogeneous mountain climates likely play a key role in generating and maintaining high diversity. Another part of the explanation of the high biodiversity of certain mountains is linked to the geological dynamics of mountain building. These geological processes, interacting with complex climate changes through time, provide ample opportunities for evolutionary processes to act.

Another explanation of mountain richness, says the study, may lie in the interaction between geology and biology. The scientists report a novel and surprising finding: the high diversity is in most tropical mountains tightly linked to bedrock geology -- especially mountain regions with obducted, ancient oceanic crust. To explain this relationship between geology and biodiversity, the scientists propose, as a working hypothesis, that mountains in the tropics with soil originating from oceanic bedrock provide exceptional environmental conditions that drive localized adaptive change in plants. Special adaptations that allow plants to tolerate these unusual soils, in turn, may drive speciation cascades (the speciation of one group leading to speciation in other groups), all the way to animals, and ultimately contribute to the shape of global patterns of biodiversity.

Freshly Exhumed writes: Adam Frank, professor of astrophysics at the University of Rochester and consultant on numerous movie scripts, was excited to watch "Ad Astra," the new Brad Pitt space thriller. The film was promoted with the promise of scientific realism in depicting a solar system well on its way to being settled by humanity. Unfortunately, Professor Frank finds that despite very good intentions, "Ad Astra" strikes the wrong balance between story and fact, art and artifice. While the plot ventures out to the farthest planet Neptune, the demands of the film's theme cramp its science fiction imagination. Instead of letting us explore a vision of our common future in space, "Ad Astra" delivers a solar system stripped down to fit a very particular story.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Wall Street Journal: Many parents of both boys and girls have witnessed striking differences in the way their kids use technology, with their sons generally gravitating to video games and their daughters often spending more of their screen time scrolling through social media. Emerging research indicates that brain differences between males and females help account for the split. According to a 2017 survey conducted by Pew Research Center, 41% of teenage boys said they spend too much time playing video games while only 11% of girls said they do. Marc Potenza, a psychiatry professor at Yale University, teamed up with researchers at universities in China to find out why. Using functional MRIs, which measure brain activity by detecting changes in blood flow, the team studied neural responses in young male and female gamers, particularly in the parts of the brain associated with reward processing and craving -- a motivating factor in addiction. When the men and women were shown photos of people playing video games, those parts of the men's brains showed higher levels of activation than those parts of the women's brains. Brain regions that have been implicated in drug-addiction studies also were shown to be more highly activated in the men after gaming. The researchers said the results suggest men could be more biologically prone than women to developing internet gaming disorder.

But girls and women aren't free from problems when it comes to digital media. Data from Pew shows that, in general, women use social platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest far more than men. Many girls and women are drawn to those photo-sharing sites because they like to form bonds and find similarities, says Rosanna Guadagno, a social psychologist at Stanford University. Even if women only use those sites more than men because that is where their friends are, many experts and parents say they have found that girls appear to have a greater fear of missing out, which compels them to keep up with what their friends are posting. Some recent studies show that girls feel the ill effects of too much social media use, such as depression and anxiety, more than boys do.

As world leaders gather in New York City for the United Nations Climate Action Summit Monday, a UN report warns climate change is accelerating -- with the Earth on track for the warmest 5-year period on record. From a report: "Climate change causes and impacts are increasing rather than slowing down. Sea level rise has accelerated and we are concerned that an abrupt decline in the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets, which will exacerbate future rise. As we have seen this year with tragic effect in the Bahamas and Mozambique, sea level rise and intense tropical storms led to humanitarian and economic catastrophes," said World Meteorological Organization Secretary-General Petteri Taalas in a statement.

Data compiled by the World Meteorological Organisation for the report, to be presented to the UN summit, shows the average global temperature for 2015-2019 is on course to be the warmest of any equivalent period on record. "It is currently estimated to be 1.1Celsius (+- 0.1C) [about 2F] above pre-industrial (1850-1900) times," the UN said in a statement accompanying the "United in Science" report. To stop a global temperature rise of more than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and meet the goals of the 2015 Paris climate agreement, countries must triple climate emission cut targets, the report warns.

Slashdot reader dryriver writes: Most "solutions" to climate change center on reducing greenhouse gas emissions on Earth and using renewable energy where possible. What if you could work a bit closer to the root of the problem, by thinking about the problem as an excess number of photons traveling from the Sun to the Earth?

Would it be completely physically impossible to place or project some kind of electrical or other field into space that alters the flight paths of photons -- which are energy packets -- that pass through it? What if you could make say 2% of photons that would normally hit the Earth miss the Earth, or at the very least enter Earth's atmosphere at an altered angle?

Given that the fight against climate change will likely swallow hundreds of billions of dollars over the next years, is it completely unfeasible to spend a few billion dollars on figuring out how to manipulate the flight paths of photons out in Space?
Here's a recent news report along those lines: A group of Swedish researchers believe that a cataclysmic asteroid collision from hundreds of millions of years ago could have the answers to solving climate change... Researchers have been discussing different artificial methods of recreating post-collision asteroid dust, such as placing asteroids in orbits around Earth like satellites and having them "liberate fine dust" to block warming sunlight, thus hypothetically cooling our warming planet. "Our results show for the first time that such dust at times has cooled Earth dramatically," said Birger Schmitz, professor of geology at Lund University and the leader of the study. "Our studies can give a more detailed, empirical based understanding of how this works, and this in turn can be used to evaluate if model simulations are realistic."

The research is still a ways out from practical use, however. Scientists are understandably wary about recreating a prehistoric dust storm. Speaking to Science Magazine, Seth Finnegan, a paleontologist at the University of California, Berkeley said that the results of the study "shows that the consequences of messing around in that way could be pretty severe."
The university's press release does say their research "could be relevant for tackling global warming if we fail to reduce carbon dioxide emissions." But what do Slashdot's readers think of these ideas?

Leave your own thoughts in the comments. Could climate change be solved by manipulating photons in space?

"A Spokane man is saying that an Apple Watch helped save his dad's life following a bicycle crash at Doomsday Hill," reports a local TV station: According to a Facebook post, Gabe Burdett was on his way to meet up with his father Bob last weekend at Riverside State Park, but Bob wasn't at their meet up spot. Burdett received a text from his father's Apple Watch, which read, "Emergency SOS Bob Burdett called emergency services from this approximate location after Apple Watch detected a hard fall." Not only had the watch texted Burdett, it also called 911 with his father's location, he said.

Bob had flipped his bike at the bottom of Doomsday Hill and hit his head, knocking him unconscious, Burdett said. Thanks to the watch, Bob was able to be picked up by emergency services and transported to the hospital within 30 minutes of the fall occurring.
Gabe's Facebook post includes a picture of the now-damaged Apple Watch on his father's wrist in the hospital. The Apple Watch even texted a map showing the son his father's new location at the hospital.

And now "Dad is doing great, clear X-Rays and CT scan, but a little sore for sure!"

Applehu Akbar writes: CNN reports this week on a paper describing a hypothesis that the breakup of a large asteroid 466 million years ago generated enough dust in Earth's orbit to substantially change the terrestrial climate for an extended period. This would have triggered an 'Ordovician icehouse' climate event, with major effects on biology.
"The 93-mile-wide asteroid was in the asteroid belt located between Mars and Jupiter when it collided with something else and broke apart, creating a wealth of dust that flooded the inner solar system..." CNN reports. "To understand how this process unfolded, the researchers found evidence of space dust locked in 466-million-year-old rocks that were once on the sea floor."

The paper argues that to this day, that collision "still delivers almost a third of all meteorites falling on Earth."

Remember concerns about possible "sonic attacks" in Cuba? Long-time Slashdot reader kbahey shares an update: In the wake of the health problems experienced over the past three years by US and Canadian staff in Havana, Cuba embassies, Global Affairs Canada commissioned a clinical study by a team of multidisciplinary researchers.

Now, the working hypothesis is that the cause could instead be neurotoxic agents used in pesticide fumigation.

The BBC has more coverage on this, saying it may have been merely mosquito gas.
"The researchers found that since 2016, Cuba launched an aggressive campaign against mosquitoes to stop the spread of the Zika virus," reports the CBC: The embassies actively sprayed in offices, as well as inside and outside diplomatic residences -- sometimes five times more frequently than usual. Many times, spraying operations were carried out every two weeks, according to embassy records...

The researchers are now looking to collaborate with Cuban officials to determine whether any Cubans suffered similar brain injuries...

SpaceX "built its experimental spaceport in and around Boca Chica Village, a decades-old community of about 20 elderly residents," reports Business Insider.

But now "SpaceX is trying to buy as much of Boca Chica Village as it can and move people out...following an accidental brush fire, public-safety notices warning of the possibility for explosions, and a push to have the Federal Aviation Administration approve orbital-class launches with larger rockets." "When SpaceX first identified Cameron County as a potential spaceport location, we did not anticipate that local residents would experience significant disruption from our presence," the letter said. "However, it has become clear that expansion of spaceflight activities as well as compliance with Federal Aviation Administration and other public safety regulations will make it increasingly more challenging to minimize disruption to residents of the Village... SpaceX is offering you three times the independently appraised fair market value of your property," the letter said. "The offer is good through two weeks from the date of this letter...."

For those who commit to a sale, SpaceX said it would cover closing and other real-estate costs. It also comes packaged with an additional perk. "SpaceX recognizes that your close proximity to its operations has offered a unique opportunity to experience at close-hand the development of what will be the world's most advanced rocket. In appreciation of your support, we will offer all residents of the Village who accept the purchase offer the opportunity to continue their connection with the development of Starship by extending an invitation to attend future private VIP launch viewing events that are unavailable to the public."
Homeowner Cheryl Stevens complained to CBS News that the company has encroached on their neighborhood. "They're behaving as if this is Cape Canaveral. And it's not. It's not a military base. It's just a regular neighborhood, and a public beach, and a state highway. And suddenly, because they're here, stop the presses. Everything has to change for SpaceX."

SpaceX issued the following statement to CBS News: "We are entering a new and exciting era in space exploration and Texas is playing an increasingly important role in our efforts to help make humanity multi-planetary.

"As we develop Starship -- the world's most advanced launch system ever -- we are listening and responding to our neighbors' concerns and are striving to minimize disruptions as much as possible. We are working closely with Cameron County to facilitate public safety and provide regular road and beach closure updates to the public through a telephone hotline and on Cameron County's website."

"An electric patch makes hairless mice grow fur and may reverse balding in men when fitted inside a specially designed baseball cap," reports New Scientist: At the moment, men who don't want to go bald can treat hair loss using minoxidil lotion, finasteride pills or hair transplant surgery. But minoxidil doesn't work for everyone, finasteride can reduce sex drive and fertility, and surgery is painful and expensive. Stimulating the scalp with electric pulses has also been shown to restore hair growth. However, it isn't a very practical treatment because it involves being hooked up to a machine or battery pack for several hours a day.

To overcome this hurdle, Xudong Wang at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and his colleagues have developed a wireless patch that sticks to the scalp and generates electric pulses by harnessing energy from random body movements. The 1-millimetre-thick plastic patch contains layers of differently-charged materials that produce electricity when they come into contact and separate again -- a phenomenon known as the triboelectric effect. When the flexible patch was attached to the backs of rats, their movements caused it to bend and stretch, activating the triboelectric effect. The resulting electric pulses stimulated faster hair re-growth in shaved rats compared with minoxidil lotion and inert saline solution...

Wang also tested the patch on his father, who has been going bald for the past few years. "It helped him to grow a lot of new hairs after one month," Wang says. His team has now designed a baseball cap that encases the whole scalp in the triboelectric materials to stimulate hair growth, and is seeking approval to test it in men in a clinical trial... However, the hat will only work in men who are currently losing their hair or have recently become bald, because the skin loses its ability to generate new hair follicles after many years of baldness, Wang says.

Last week NBC News ran an opinion piece by a certified nutritionist arguing that plant-based/meat-free alternatives at major fast food chains "aren't actually any healthier."

Bloomberg got a response from two of the major meat-substitute companies: According to Impossible, the attacks are all part of a "smear campaign to sow fear and doubt about plant-based meat." The company said its burgers and other offerings are better for people than animal products, delivering as much protein and bioavailable iron as beef without the associated downsides. And "processed" criticism doesn't fly, it said in a statement, given that all food involves some kind of processing. Beyond makes similar claims about its foods. "We know that consumers are increasingly pulling away from red and processed meat because of the levels of cholesterol and associated health baggage," said Will Schafer, vice president of marketing. The company also touts what it calls a simple production process that's more humane and sustainable than livestock production.

There's a lot of competition out there and on its way for Beyond and Impossible, including from Kellogg Co. and Tyson Foods Inc., which sold its stake in Beyond before that company went public. The Native Foods vegan chain and Ted's Montana Grill, co-founded by Ted Turner, are making their own veggie burgers, emphasizing what they call "whole" ingredients. "It just seems to go against the grain to me if you want to eat healthier that you would choose manufactured, chemically-produced products," said George McKerrow, Ted's chief executive officer and co-founder... Gene Grabowski, a partner at the communications firm kglobal, predicted a long fight between the real-meat and fake-meat forces. Much is at stake. A Barclays reports estimates the plant-based sector could reach $140 billion in sales globally in the next decade.
The director of nutrition at the nonprofit consumer advocacy group the Center for Science in the Public Interest, told Bloomberg that it's not any healthier to order an Impossible or Beyond burger when eating out.

"The bottom line is that all burgers at restaurants are too high in calories, saturated fat, and sodium, whether beef or plant-based..."

Initial results from NASA's InSight lander suggest that Mars' magnetic field wobbles in inexplicable ways at night, hinting that the red planet may host a global reservoir of liquid water deep below the surface. National Geographic reports: In addition to the odd magnetic pulsations, the lander's data show that the Martian crust is far more powerfully magnetic than scientists expected. What's more, the lander has picked up on a very peculiar electrically conductive layer, about 2.5 miles thick, deep beneath the planet's surface. It's far too early to say with any certainty, but there is a chance that this layer could represent a global reservoir of liquid water.

On Earth, groundwater is a hidden sea locked up in sand, soil, and rocks. If something similar is found on Mars, then "we shouldn't be surprised," says Jani Radebaugh, a planetary scientist at Brigham Young University who was not involved with the work. But if these results bear out, a liquid region at this scale on modern Mars has enormous implications for the potential for life, past or present. So far, none of these data have been through peer review, and details about the initial findings and interpretations will undoubtedly be tweaked over time. Still, the revelations provide a stunning showcase for InSight, a robot that has the potential to revolutionize our comprehension of Mars and other rocky worlds across the galaxy.

After successfully predicting laboratory earthquakes, a team of geophysicists has applied a machine learning algorithm to quakes in the Pacific Northwest. From a report: In May of last year, after a 13-month slumber, the ground beneath Washington's Puget Sound rumbled to life. The quake began more than 20 miles below the Olympic mountains and, over the course of a few weeks, drifted northwest, reaching Canada's Vancouver Island. It then briefly reversed course, migrating back across the U.S. border before going silent again. All told, the monthlong earthquake likely released enough energy to register as a magnitude 6. By the time it was done, the southern tip of Vancouver Island had been thrust a centimeter or so closer to the Pacific Ocean. Because the quake was so spread out in time and space, however, it's likely that no one felt it. These kinds of phantom earthquakes, which occur deeper underground than conventional, fast earthquakes, are known as "slow slips." They occur roughly once a year in the Pacific Northwest, along a stretch of fault where the Juan de Fuca plate is slowly wedging itself beneath the North American plate.

More than a dozen slow slips have been detected by the region's sprawling network of seismic stations since 2003. And for the past year and a half, these events have been the focus of a new effort at earthquake prediction by the geophysicist Paul Johnson. Johnson's team is among a handful of groups that are using machine learning to try to demystify earthquake physics and tease out the warning signs of impending quakes. Two years ago, using pattern-finding algorithms similar to those behind recent advances in image and speech recognition and other forms of artificial intelligence, he and his collaborators successfully predicted temblors in a model laboratory system -- a feat that has since been duplicated by researchers in Europe. Now, in a paper posted this week on the scientific preprint site arxiv.org, Johnson and his team report that they've tested their algorithm on slow slip quakes in the Pacific Northwest. The paper has yet to undergo peer review, but outside experts say the results are tantalizing. According to Johnson, they indicate that the algorithm can predict the start of a slow slip earthquake to "within a few days -- and possibly better."

The US spends more per capita on medication than anywhere else in the world. It's a key electoral issue. From a report on Financial Times (paywalled): All over the world, drugmakers are granted time-limited monopolies -- in the form of patents -- to encourage innovation. But America is one of the only countries that does not combine this carrot with the stick of price controls. The US government's refusal to negotiate prices has contributed to spiralling healthcare costs which, said billionaire investor Warren Buffett last year, act "as a hungry tapeworm on the American economy." Medical bills are the primary reason why Americans go bankrupt. Employers foot much of the bill for the majority of health-insurance plans for working-age adults, creating a huge cost for business.

In February, Congress called in executives from seven of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies and asked them: why do drugs here cost so much? The drugmakers' answer is that America is carrying the cost of research and development for the rest of the world. They argue that if Americans stopped paying such high prices for drugs, investment in innovative treatments would fall. President Trump agrees with this argument, in line with his "America first" narrative, which sees other countries as guilty of freeloading. For the patients on the trip, the notion is galling: insulin was discovered 100 years ago, by scientists in Canada who sold the patent to the University of Toronto for just $1. The medication has been improved since then but there seems to have been no major innovation to justify tripling the list price for insulin, as happened in the US between 2002 and 2013.

Prominent international experts are warning that a virulent flu pandemic capable of spreading across the world in 36 hours, killing up to 80 million people, is entirely plausible and efforts by governments to prepare for it are "grossly insufficient." The Guardian reports: The first annual report by the Global Preparedness Monitoring Board, an independent group of 15 experts convened by the World Bank and WHO after the first Ebola crisis, describes the threat of a pandemic spreading around the world, potentially killing tens of millions of people, as "a real one." There are "increasingly dire risks" of epidemics, yet the world remained unprepared, the report said. It warned epidemic-prone diseases such as Ebola, influenza and Sars are increasingly difficult to manage in the face of increasing conflict, fragile states and rising migration. The climate crisis, urbanization and a lack of adequate sanitation and water are breeding grounds for fast-spreading, catastrophic outbreaks.

The report acknowledges governments and international institutions have taken steps to increase preparedness for outbreaks in the five years since the Ebola crisis in west Africa, but concludes current preparedness is "grossly insufficient." A growing lack of public trust in institutions in some countries, exacerbated by misinformation, hinders disease control, said the study. The report outlined seven steps to ensure the world's health system is better prepared for the next health emergency, calling on heads of states to increase funding and for international organizations to build preparedness into funding mechanisms. "Poverty and fragility exacerbate outbreaks of infectious disease and help create the conditions for pandemics to take hold," said Axel van Trotsenburg, acting CEO of the World Bank. "Investing in stronger institutions and health systems will promote resilience, economic stability and global health security."