Slashdot reader sciencehabit shares news from Science magazine: When a giant space rock struck the waters near Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula 66 million years ago, it sent up a blanket of dust that blotted out the Sun for years, sending temperatures plummeting and killing off the dinosaurs. The impact also generated a tsunami in the Gulf of Mexico that some modelers believe sent an initial tidal wave up to 1500 meters (or nearly 1 mile) high crashing into North America, one that was followed by smaller pulses.

Now, for the first time, scientists have discovered fossilized megaripples from this tsunami buried in sediments in what is now central Louisiana.

"It's great to actually have evidence of something that has been theorized for a really long time," says Sean Gulick, a geophysicist at the University of Texas, Austin. Gulick was not involved in the work, but he co-led a campaign in 2016 to drill down to the remains of the impact crater, called Chicxulub... Cores from the 2016 drilling expedition helped explain how the impact crater was formed and charted the disappearance and recovery of Earth's life. In 2019, researchers reported the discovery of a fossil site in North Dakota, 3000 kilometers north of Chicxulub, that they say records the hours after the impact and includes debris swept inland from the tsunami.

"We have small pieces of the puzzle that keep getting added in," says Alfio Alessandro Chiarenza, a paleontologist at the University of Vigo who was not involved with the new study. "Now this research is another one, giving more evidence of a cataclysmic tsunami that probably inundated [everything] for thousands of miles."

"China conducted a clandestine first test flight of a reusable suborbital vehicle Friday as a part of development of a reusable space transportation system," reports Space News:

The vehicle launched from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center Friday and later landed at an airport just over 800 kilometers away at Alxa League in Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp. (CASC) announced. No images nor footage nor further information, such as altitude, flight duration or propulsion systems, were provided. The CASC release stated however that the vehicle uses integrated aviation and space technologies and indicates a vertical takeoff and horizontal landing profile.

The test follows a September 2020 test flight of a "reusable experimental spacecraft". The spacecraft orbited for days, releasing a small transmitting payload and later deorbited and landed horizontally. The spacecraft is widely believed to be a reusable spaceplane concept, though no images have emerged. Giant space and defense contractor CASC also developed that vehicle and stated that the new vehicle tested Friday can be used as a first stage of a reusable space transportation system. The implication is that the two vehicles will be combined for a fully reusable space transportation system. The developments have not come out of the blue. China stated in 2017 that it aimed to test a reusable spaceplane in 2020...

Chen Hongbo, from CASC's China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology (CALT), told Science and Technology Daily (Chinese) in 2017 that the reusable spacecraft would be capable of carrying both crew and payloads... Chen stated the aim was full reusability, moving beyond partial reusability of Falcon 9-like launchers. The spaceplane, the development and testing of which is to be completed by 2030, should be capable of being reused more than 20 times.

"The efficacy of a drug being promoted by rightwing figures worldwide for treating Covid-19 is in serious doubt," reports the Guardian, "after a major study suggesting the treatment is effective against the virus was withdrawn due to 'ethical concerns'." The preprint study on the efficacy and safety of ivermectin — a drug used against parasites such as worms and headlice — in treating Covid-19, led by Dr Ahmed Elgazzar from Benha University in Egypt, was published on the Research Square website in November. It claimed to be a randomised control trial, a type of study crucial in medicine because it is considered to provide the most reliable evidence on the effectiveness of interventions due to the minimal risk of confounding factors influencing the results...

A medical student in London, Jack Lawrence, was among the first to identify serious concerns about the paper, leading to the retraction... He found the introduction section of the paper appeared to have been almost entirely plagiarised. It appeared that the authors had run entire paragraphs from press releases and websites about ivermectin and Covid-19 through a thesaurus to change key words. "Humorously, this led to them changing 'severe acute respiratory syndrome' to 'extreme intense respiratory syndrome' on one occasion," Lawrence said.

The data also looked suspicious to Lawrence... "In their paper, the authors claim that four out of 100 patients died in their standard treatment group for mild and moderate Covid-19," Lawrence said. "According to the original data, the number was 0, the same as the ivermectin treatment group. In their ivermectin treatment group for severe Covid-19, the authors claim two patients died, but the number in their raw data is four..." Lawrence contacted an Australian chronic disease epidemiologist from the University of Wollongong, Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz, and a data analyst affiliated with Linnaeus University in Sweden who reviews scientific papers for errors, Nick Brown, for help analysing the data and study results more thoroughly... "The main error is that at least 79 of the patient records are obvious clones of other records," Brown told the Guardian. "It's certainly the hardest to explain away as innocent error, especially since the clones aren't even pure copies. There are signs that they have tried to change one or two fields to make them look more natural..."

Meyerowitz-Katz told the Guardian that "this is one of the biggest ivermectin studies out there", and it appeared to him the data was "just totally faked".
Meta-analyses incorporating the "just totally faked" data were then published in Oxford Academic's Open Forum Infectious Diseases and in the American Journal of Therapeutics.

Meanwhile, the Guardian also notes a new (and peer-reviewed) paper that was just published last month in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases. Its finding? Iermectin is "not a viable option to treat COVID-19 patients".

"Since Joe Biden took office [in January], about two dozen U.S. intelligence officers, diplomats, and other government officials in Vienna have reported experiencing mysterious afflictions similar to the Havana Syndrome," reports the New Yorker: U.S. officials say the number of possible new cases in the Austrian capital — long a nexus of U.S. and Russian espionage — is now greater than the number reported by officials in any city except for Havana itself, where the first cases were reported...

The exact cause of the ailments in Vienna, which U.S. government agencies formally refer to as "anomalous health incidents" or "unexplained health incidents," remains unknown, but in response to the surge the C.I.A., the State Department, and other agencies are redoubling their efforts to determine the cause, and to identify the culprit or culprits...

The Havana Syndrome derives its name from the Cuban capital, where C.I.A. officers and State Department employees first reported experiencing strange sensations of sound and pressure in their heads in 2016 and 2017. Some of the patients said the sensations seemed to follow them around their homes, apartments, and hotel rooms in the Cuban capital. Some of the patients described feeling as though they were standing in an invisible beam of energy. Many of them suffered debilitating symptoms, from headaches and vertigo to vision problems. Specialists at the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Brain Injury and Repair used advanced MRIs to study the brains of forty of the original patients from Havana. They found no signs of physical impact to the patients' skulls — it was as if they had "a concussion without a concussion," one specialist told me — and the team detected signs of damage to their brains.

Senior officials in the Trump and Biden Administrations suspect that the Russians are responsible for the syndrome. Their working hypothesis is that operatives working for the G.R.U., the Russian military-intelligence service, have been aiming microwave-radiation devices at U.S. officials, possibly to steal data from their computers or smartphones, which inflicted serious harm on the people they targeted. But American intelligence analysts and operatives have so far been unable to find concrete evidence that would allow them to declare that either microwave radiation or the Russians were to blame.
The article also points out that the CIA's director has privately called the incidents "attacks" rather than incidents or illnesses.

Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot shared some fascinating photos and a report from Live Science.

"This rarely seen glass octopus bared all recently — even a view of its innards — when an underwater robot filmed it gracefully soaring through the deep waters of the Central Pacific Ocean." Like other "glass" creatures, such as glass frogs and certain comb jellies, glass octopuses are almost completely transparent, with only their cylindrical eyes, optic nerve and digestive tract appearing opaque. The expedition crew reported two encounters with the glass octopus — an impressive count given that previously there was such limited footage of these clear cephalopods, scientists had to learn about them by studying chunks of them in the gut contents of their predators...

During the expedition, which ended July 8, a crew of marine scientists discovered a handful of what are likely newfound marine animals on nine previously unexplored submarine mountains known as seamounts. The team also completed high-resolution seafloor mapping of more than 11,500 square miles (30,000 square km) around the archipelago and video recordings of five additional seamounts filmed by the underwater robot SuBastian, according to a statement. SuBastian also snagged footage of a whale shark (the largest living fish in the world) and a long-legged crab stealing a fish from another crab.

The expedition sent SuBastian on 21 dives, enabling the robot to record more than 182 hours on the seafloor.
The expedition was run by the Schmidt Ocean Institute, a nonprofit operating foundation co-founded by Wendy and Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: Over the past 2 decades, researchers have found hundreds of radioactive atoms, trapped in seafloor minerals, that came from an ancient supernova explosion marking the death of a nearby star. Erupting from hundreds of light-years away, the flash of x-rays and gamma rays probably did no harm on Earth. But the expanding fireball also accelerated cosmic rays -- mostly nuclei of hydrogen and helium -- to close to the speed of light. These projectiles arrived stealthily, decades later, ramping up into an invisible fusillade that could have lasted for thousands of years and might have affected the atmosphere -- and life. In a flurry of studies and speculation, astronomers have sketched out their potential effects, including a depleted ozone layer, cancer-causing particles, wildfires, and a cooling of the climate that could have helped initiate the ice ages 2.5 million years ago. Most paleontologists are yet to be convinced, but astronomers argue that such supernovae could explain some extinction events that lack customary triggers like volcanic outbursts or asteroid impacts.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: Physicists at Google have taken an important step toward protecting delicate information in their nascent quantum computer from errors that can obliterate it. The researchers can't yet compensate for all types of errors -- a necessary step toward building a full-fledged quantum computer -- but others say they're poised to achieve that goal. Working with chains of up to 11 data qubits, Google researchers have now been able to preserve a logical qubit for a time that increases exponentially with the number of physical qubits, they report today in Nature. By spreading a single qubit's state over up to 11 data qubits, they reduced the chances of an error after 50 microseconds from 40% to 0.2%. Other groups have demonstrated similar error corrections schemes, but the new work is the first to demonstrate the exponential suppression of errors, says Julian Kelly, a physicist at Google and senior author on the paper. Such exponential suppression suggests developers may eventually be able to maintain a logical qubit indefinitely by spreading it over about 1000 physical qubits.

Covid cases are rising in all 50 US states as the Delta variant spreads coast to coast, news outlets reported on Friday , and with less than half the US population fully vaccinated, public health chiefs warned of an "extraordinary surge." Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), said at a White House briefing: "This is becoming a pandemic of the unvaccinated." The Guardian reports: Walensky said the US was seeing an average of 26,000 new coronavirus cases a day -- a seven-day average that is 70% higher than last week. Hospitalizations and deaths are also seeing increases -- about 36% and 26%, respectively, with Walensky noting this was another "critical moment" in the outbreak. "We are seeing outbreaks of cases in parts of the country that have low vaccination coverage because unvaccinated people are at risk. Communities that are fully vaccinated are generally faring well," she said.

Anthony Fauci, the nation's top infectious diseases official, said there had been an "extraordinary surge" in the Delta variant of Covid-19 -- which is more transmissible -- around the world, including in the US. Jeff Zients, the coordinator of the White House coronavirus team, confirmed that unvaccinated Americans "account for virtually all recent Covid-19 hospitalizations and deaths." Four states that are currently seeing high increases in Covid-19 cases have accounted for over 40% of the total Covid cases seen in the country this past week, Zients said. One in five cases occurred in Florida, in which about 50% of the state is fully vaccinated.

The Hubble Space Telescope has powered on once again. NASA was able to successfully switch to a backup computer on the observatory on Friday following weeks of computer problems. From a report: On June 13, Hubble shut down after a payload computer from the 1980s that handles the telescope's science instruments suffered a glitch. Now, over a month since Hubble ran into issues, which the Hubble team thinks were caused by the spacecraft's Power Control Unit (PCU), NASA switched to backup hardware and was able to switch the scope back on. With Hubble back online with this backup hardware, the Hubble team is keeping a close watch to make sure that everything works correctly, according to a statement from NASA.

The World Health Organization's chief scientist has advised individuals against mixing and matching Covid-19 vaccines from different manufacturers, saying such decisions should be left to public health authorities. From a report: "It's a little bit of a dangerous trend here," Soumya Swaminathan told an online briefing on Monday after a question about booster shots. "It will be a chaotic situation in countries if citizens start deciding when and who will be taking a second, a third and a fourth dose." Swaminathan had called mixing a âoedata-free zoneâ but later clarified her remarks in an overnight tweet. "Individuals should not decide for themselves, public health agencies can, based on available data," she said in the tweet. "Data from mix and match studies of different vaccines are awaited -- immunogenicity and safety both need to be evaluated."

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: A man unable to speak after a stroke has produced sentences through a system that reads electrical signals from speech production areas of his brain, researchers report this week. The approach has previously been used in non-disabled volunteers to reconstruct spoken or imagined sentences, but this is the first demonstration of its potential in the type of patient it's intended to help. The participant had a stroke more than 10 years ago that left him with anarthria -- an inability to control the muscles involved in speech. Researchers used a computational model known as a deep-learning algorithm to interpret patterns of brain activity in the sensorimotor cortex, a brain region involved in producing speech, and 'decoded' sentences he attempted to read aloud.

In the new study, [the researchers] temporarily removed a portion of the participant's skull and laid a thin sheet of electrodes smaller than a credit card directly over his sensorimotor cortex. To "train" a computer algorithm to associate brain activity patterns with the onset of speech and with particular words, the team needed reliable information about what the man intended to say and when. So the researchers repeatedly presented one of 50 words on a screen and asked the man to attempt to say it on cue. Once the algorithm was trained with data from the individual word task, the man tried to read sentences built from the same set of 50 words, such as "Bring my glasses, please." To improve the algorithm's guesses, the researchers added a processing component called a natural language model, which uses common word sequences to predict the likely next word in a sentence. With that approach, the system only got about 25% of the words in a sentence wrong, they report today in The New England Journal of Medicine. With the new approach, the man could produce sentences at a rate of up to 18 words per minute.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBS News: Every coast in the U.S. is facing rapidly increasing high tide floods. NASA says this is due to a "wobble" in the moon's orbit working in tandem with climate change-fueled rising sea levels. The new study from NASA and the University of Hawaii, published recently in the journal Nature Climate Change, warns that upcoming changes in the moon's orbit could lead to record flooding on Earth in the next decade. Through mapping the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) sea-level rise scenarios, flooding thresholds and astronomical cycles, researchers found flooding in American coastal cities could be several multiples worse in the 2030s, when the next moon "wobble" is expected to begin. They expect the flooding to significantly damage infrastructure and displace communities.

While the study highlights the dire situation facing coastal cities, the lunar wobble is actually a natural occurrence, first reported in 1728. The moon's orbit is responsible for periods of both higher and lower tides about every 18.6 years, and they aren't dangerous in their own right. "In half of the Moon's 18.6-year cycle, Earth's regular daily tides are suppressed: High tides are lower than normal, and low tides are higher than normal," NASA explains. "In the other half of the cycle, tides are amplified: High tides get higher, and low tides get lower. Global sea-level rise pushes high tides in only one direction -- higher. So half of the 18.6-year lunar cycle counteracts the effect of sea-level rise on high tides, and the other half increases the effect." But this time around, scientists are more concerned. With sea-level rise due to climate change, the next high tide floods are expected to be more intense and more frequent than ever before, exacerbating already grim predictions. The study says these floods will exceed flooding thresholds around the country more often, and can also occur in clusters lasting more than a month. "During curtain alignments, floods could happen as frequently as every day or every other day," the report adds. "Almost all U.S. mainland coastlines, Hawaii and Guam are expected to face these effects."

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: High on Greenland's ice sheet, particle astrophysicists are this week drilling boreholes in a search for the cosmic accelerators responsible for the universe's most energetic particles. By placing hundreds of radio antennas on and below the surface, they hope to trap elusive particles known as neutrinos at higher energies than ever before. Detectors elsewhere on Earth occasionally register the arrival of ultra-high-energy (UHE) cosmic rays, atomic nuclei that slam into the atmosphere at colossal speed. Researchers want to pinpoint their sources, but because the nuclei are charged, magnetic fields in space bend their paths, obscuring their origins. But theorists believe that as UHE cosmic rays set out from their sources, they spawn so-called cosmogenic neutrinos in collisions with photons and, because neutrinos are not charged, they travel to Earth as straight as an arrow. The hard part is catching them.

According to Politico, "Biden allied groups, including the Democratic National Committee, are [...] planning to engage fact-checkers more aggressively and work with SMS carriers to dispel misinformation about vaccines that is sent over social media and text messages." The White House is also planning to work with social media platforms and traditional media outlets to combat misinformation and ultimately improve vaccination rates. TmoNews reports: The White House could ask carriers like T-Mobile, Verizon, and AT&T to step in and stop the spread of these text messages. This is one way they hope they will be able to get their vaccination message across better and eliminate misinterpretation. There is no word yet on whether or not the White House has reached out to these carriers to help them screen anti-vax messages. But if it does, it will be interesting to see how this will be acted upon and which tools would be used. Then again, it could open a can of worms with potential issues that would violate customer privacy and an individual's right to free speech. "We are steadfastly committed to keeping politics out of the effort to get every American vaccinated so that we can save lives and help our economy further recover," White House spokesperson Kevin Munoz said. "When we see deliberate efforts to spread misinformation, we view that as an impediment to the country's public health and will not shy away from calling that out."

The molecules produced by stomach bacteria could give the human body a helping hand when it comes to the immune system, even going so far as to help fight tumors. ScienceAlert reports: "The results are an example of how metabolites of intestinal bacteria can change the metabolism and gene regulation of our cells and thus positively influence the efficiency of tumor therapies," says immunologist Maik Luu from University Hospital Wurzburg in Germany. Short chain fatty acids (SCFAs) are one of the helpful molecules produced when dietary fiber is fermented in the gut. Major SCFAs are acetate and butyrate, along with the less common pentanoate, found only in some bacteria. All of these SCFAs have a bunch of positive health effects in humans, such as the regulation of insulin resistance, cholesterol, and even appetite. Luu and colleagues have now found that butyrate and pentanoate also boost the anti-tumor activity of a type of killer T cell known as CD8, by reprogramming the way they work. For the first time, they have experimentally demonstrated this in mice.

Using lab mice, the team found that certain commensal bacteria produce pentanoate. For example, one relatively rare human gut bacterium, Megasphaera massiliensis, enhanced small proteins called cytokines in the killer T cells, leading to an increased ability to destroy tumor cells. As a control, the team experimented with other, non-pentanoate producing bacteria and found no effect on the cytokine levels. This finding could be particularly useful for therapies that leverage the immune system to fight cancer. Some tumor cells have proteins on their surfaces that can bind to proteins on T cells, resulting in an immune 'checkpoint' response which tells the killer cell to spare its target -- in this case, the cancer cell. Immune checkpoint inhibitor (ICI) therapy works by blocking these checkpoint proteins, allowing the T cells to do their job and destroy the tumor cells. [...] The team also looked at a genetically modified type of T cell called CAR-T cells which are used in immunotherapy, and found that the bacterial assistance worked the same way, particularly on solid tumors. The research has been published in Nature Communications.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Atlas: By making alterations to the plastic manufacturing process, scientists hope to produce forms of the ubiquitous material that can break down far more safely and quickly in the environment than current versions do. Researchers in China have now demonstrated a new example of this that degrades in just a week when exposed to sunlight and oxygen, which they believe could make for electronics that are easier to dispose of at the end of their lives. The new material came about when study author Liang Luo from China's Huazhong University of Science and Technology was working on an advanced type of chemical sensor, as reported by PNAS. The materials scientist was developing a novel polymer film that changed color in response to pH levels. This process was driven by the material's unique molecular structure, with the chains of monomers giving the film its deep red color, and taking it away when these bonds were broken.

Through his team's experiments, Luo found that the deep red color of the film quickly faded away and the material broke apart after several days in the sunlight. Breaking apart these bonds is a common objective in research efforts to better recycle plastics, and in doing so Luo may have inadvertently conjured up a promising, environmentally friendly version of the material. The molecular makeup of the plastic means it wouldn't be suited for use in soda bottles or shopping bags, as it is only stable as a functional material in the dark and without oxygen. But exposed to sunlight and air, it disintegrates rapidly and completely decomposes within a week, leaving no environmentally damaging microplastic fragments behind. A byproduct of the process is naturally occurring succinic acid, however, which could potentially be upcycled for commercial use in pharmaceuticals or food.

David Nield shares the findings of a new study via ScienceAlert: Researchers tasked 42 adult volunteers with learning the Arabic alphabet from scratch: some through writing it out on paper, some through typing it out on a keyboard, and some through watching and responding to video instructions. Those in the handwriting group not only learned the unfamiliar letters more quickly, but they were also better able to apply their new knowledge in other areas -- by using the letters to make new words and to recognize words they hadn't seen before, for example. While writing, typing, and visual learning were effective at teaching participants to recognize Arabic letters -- learners made very few mistakes after six exercise sessions -- on average, the writing group needed fewer sessions to get to a good standard.

Researchers then tested the groups to see how the learning could be generalized. In every follow-up test, using skills they hadn't been trained on, the writing group performed the best: naming letters, writing letters, spelling words, and reading words. The research shows that the benefits of teaching through handwriting go beyond better penmanship: There are also advantages in other areas of language learning. It seems as though the knowledge gets more firmly embedded through writing. The research has been published in Psychological Science.

Jupiter's moon Europa contains a voluminous ocean of liquid water under its icy crust that could potentially host extraterrestrial organisms. "But as evidence builds that Europa could be habitable under its crust, a problem remains: the intense radiation that Jupiter emits likely annihilates any signs of life, known as biosignatures, that upwell onto the moon's surface, presenting a challenge to future missions that aim to detect life with Europa landers," reports Motherboard. "Now, a team of researchers led by Emily Costello, a postdoctoral researcher at the Hawaii Institute of Geophysics and Planetology, have shed new light on this obstacle by examining the role of "impact gardening" in the search for life on Europa." From the report: Impact gardening occurs when rocks collide with a planetary body without an atmosphere, causing a mechanical churn that continually exposes new layers of the surface, known as the "gardened zone," to all the erosive effects of space, according to a study published on Monday in Nature Astronomy. "Knowing the depth of the gardened zone is critical for the exploration of Europa as a potentially habitable world," the researchers added. "We will need to sample material below the gardened zone if we wish to discover biomolecules that have never been exposed to hazardous radiation at the surface."

Of course, that raises the question: just how deep is Europa's gardened zone? To provide an answer, the team produced the first comprehensive models of impact gardening on Europa, with the help of Moon rocks returned from the Apollo program that also show a distinct gardened zone. This approach yielded good news and bad news. The bad news is that the models suggest that impact gardening exposes the top 30 centimeters (12 inches) of Europa's global surface to radiation, on average. Contrary to previous studies that proposed the possible presence of juicy biosignatures only a few centimeters under the moon's surface, the new study finds that signs of life would be embedded much deeper in the ice.

That said, the good news is that pristine material from Europa's ocean could be sampled at shallower depths in rare circumstances, such as in the fallout of recent landslides or fresh meteorite impacts. These natural processes can excavate layers of ice from below the gardened zone and position them within centimeters of the surface. Looking for recent examples of such disturbances could reveal samples that have not experienced the damaging long-term effects of radiation yet. Fortunately, scientists will soon benefit from close-up observations of Europa from ESA's Jupiter Icy Worlds Explorer (JUICE) and NASA's Europa Clipper, both scheduled to launch in the 2020s. These spacecraft will conduct intimate flybys of Europa, and they may be able to spot regions with freshly excavated material on the surface that would be prime destinations for future lander missions.

Foxconn and TSMC have agreed to buy 10 million COVID-19 vaccine doses for the island of Taiwan. "The two companies will be paying up to $35 a dose of the BioNTech vaccine and donating them to the government; each company has pledged to spend $175 million," reports The Verge. From the report: BioNTech is partnered with Shanghai Fosun Pharmaceutical Co. to distribute its mRNA-based vaccine, which was co-developed with Pfizer, within China. Taiwan claims that the Chinese government blocked an attempt to secure a supply of vaccines from BioNTech, and later refused an offer of vaccine donations from the mainland. With the new arrangement, however, BioNTech and Fosun are being allowed to deal with private companies rather than the Taiwanese government, which Beijing views as illegitimate.

"Since we proposed the vaccine donation and started negotiating for the purchase, there had been no guidance or interference from Beijing over the acquisition," Foxconn founder Terry Gou wrote on Facebook, in remarks translated by Nikkei. "We appreciate that the negotiation was allowed to go through as a business matter." [...] TSMC and Foxconn say the newly secured BioNTech doses will be shipped from its factories in Germany and should start to arrive in Taiwan from late September.

An unprecedented heat wave and ongoing drought in the U.S. Pacific Northwest is damaging white wheat coveted by Asian buyers and forcing fruit farm workers to harvest in the middle of the night to salvage crops and avoid deadly heat. From a report: The extreme weather is another blow to farmers who have struggled with labor shortages and higher transportation costs during the pandemic and may further fuel global food inflation. Cordell Kress, who farms in southeastern Idaho, expects his winter white wheat to produce about half as many bushels per acre as it does in a normal year when he begins to harvest next week, and he has already destroyed some of his withered canola and safflower oilseed crops.

The Pacific Northwest is the only part of the United States that grows soft white wheat used to make sponge cakes and noodles, and farmers were hoping to capitalize on high grain prices. Other countries including Australia and Canada grow white wheat, but the U.S. variety is especially prized by Asian buyers. "The general mood among farmers in my area is as dire as I've ever seen it," Kress said. "Something about a drought like this just wears on you. You see your blood, sweat and tears just slowly wither away and die."