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An international scientific team has built the first map of an adult insect’s brain, offering a potential breakthrough for our understanding of how the organ works and why it is harmed by neurological diseases.

The project plotted the full 149 metres of biological wiring that make up a fruit fly’s poppy seed-sized brain and govern the organism’s life. It promises to boost knowledge of the human brain since the two species’ organs share many common features, including genes linked to neurological conditions that afflict billions of people worldwide.

“One of the major questions we’re addressing is how the wiring of the brain, its neurons and connections can give rise to animal behaviour,” said Mala Murthy, co-lead of the FlyWire research consortium and a professor of neuroscience at Princeton University. “Flies are an important model system for neuroscience, since their brains solve many of the same problems we do.”

The venture, published in Nature on Wednesday, had parallels to the Human Genome Project, which was concluded in 2003, researchers said. That sequencing mission has helped power many discoveries about disease.  

FlyWire aimed to chart a “connectome” — a set of possible pathways for information to flow between the neuron cells that make up the brain and the synapses linking them. Researchers sliced up the brain of the Drosophila fruit fly into more than 7,000 sections, analysed them using powerful microscopes and rendered the results as a 3D image.  

The raw diagram was then annotated to identify thousands of different characteristic cell types, in what one scientist described as like adding features such as street names and business opening hours to a Google map. The project used crowdsourcing to assemble “citizen scientists” to ease a proof-reading burden that would have taken one person an estimated 33 years to complete.

The resulting Drosophila connectome of about 140,000 neurons and 50mn synaptic connections is available to researchers for free online. Scientists have already begun looking at how the parts of the brain structure might relate to functions such as walking, tasting and seeing.

“If we can truly understand how any brain functions, it’s bound to tell us something about all brains,” said Sebastian Seung, another co-author on the Nature papers and a Princeton professor. “It’s fair to say that this past decade has seen revolutionary progress in understanding the fly brain.”

The connectome offers a “ground truth” that could help power research into neurological diseases, said John Ngai, a co-author and director of the BRAIN initiative at the US National Institutes of Health.

More than 40 per cent of the global population suffered nervous system problems such as stroke, dementia and migraine in 2021, according to research published in March.

“Having this map in hand is necessary — but not sufficient,” Ngai said. “It will really allow us to ask better questions and more precise questions.”

A separate project has begun to map the brain of a mouse, estimated to be a million times larger than that of a baby fruit fly’s. The human brain represents an even tougher challenge: it contains more than 80bn neurons and 100tn connections.

The genome analogy suggests how future work on brain structures could overcome FlyWire’s limitations, such as its lack of data on non-synaptic ways neurons communicate, said Anita Devineni, an Emory University assistant professor. As with the genome work, development of better brain maps will drive progress in areas such as artificial intelligence algorithms.

In a commentary published in Nature, Devineni said FlyWire had “driven technological and conceptual advances that will facilitate the reconstruction and interpretation of future connectomes in Drosophila and other species”.

Illustration by Ian Bott

Insurance broker Reassured has partnered with owners of Confused.com, RVU, on life-insurance offering.

The partnership offers RVU consumers the ability to compare and switch across a range of utilities and financial services products.

It will see RVU brands using Reassured’s services to support customers in comparing life-insurance cover from a wide range of leading insurers, both on an advised and non-advised basis.

RVU owns several comparison site brands, including Money.co.uk and Uswitch, and plans to expand further in the life-insurance market.

Reassured is the UK’s largest life-insurance broker and specialises in arranging life insurance for people across the country. It has helped protect over 1.5 million families over the last 15 years.

Mark Townsend, Reassured chief executive, said: “The RVU brands are huge household names in our industry, and we are delighted that they have chosen Reassured to power its life-insurance offering.

“Now, customers of Confused.com, Money.co.uk and Uswitch can utilise our digital and offline expertise to get the life-insurance cover they need. This deal is a win-win for both RVU and Reassured, and we look forward to working alongside such an established and well-respected company for many years to come.”

Steve Dukes, Confused.com chief executive, added: “Reassured’s commitment to being a consumer-focused organisation was a big attraction for us, as well as their deep expertise in the sector.

“Giving our customers the best experience is at the very core of what we do. And with this partnership, we’re able to utilise Reassured’s expertise alongside our own experience in the industry to help our customers get the right cover for their needs.”

In 2006, Facebook launched its News Feed feature, sparking seemingly endless contentious public discourse on the power of the “social media algorithm” in shaping what people see online.

Nearly two decades and many recommendation algorithm tweaks later, this discourse continues, now laser-focused on whether social media recommendation algorithms are primarily responsible for exposure to online misinformation and extremist content.

Researchers at the Computational Social Science Lab (CSSLab) at the University of Pennsylvania led by Stevens University Professor Duncan Watts study Americans’ news consumption. In a new article in Nature, Watts, along with David Rothschild of Microsoft Research, Ceren Budak of the University of Michigan, Brendan Nyhan of Dartmouth College and Emily Thorson of Syracuse University, review years of behavioral science research on exposure to false and radical content online and find that exposure to harmful and false information on social media is minimal to all but the most extreme people, despite a media narrative that claims the opposite.

A broad claim like “it is well known that social media amplifies misinformation and other harmful content,” recently published in The New York Times, might catch people’s attention, but it isn’t supported by empirical evidence, the researchers say.

“The research shows that only a small fraction of people are exposed to false and radical content online,” says Rothschild, “and that it’s personal preferences, not algorithms that lead people to this content. The people who are exposed to false and radical content are those who seek it out.”

Misleading statistics

Articles debating the pros and cons of social media platforms often use eye-catching statistics to claim that these platforms expose Americans to extraordinary amounts of false and extremist content and subsequently cause societal harm, from polarization to political violence.

However, these statistics are usually presented without context, the researchers say.

For example, in 2017, Facebook reported that content made by Russian trolls from the Internet Research Agency reached as many as 126 million U.S. citizens on the platform before the 2016 presidential election. This number sounds substantial, but in reality, this content accounted for only about 0.004% of what U.S. citizens saw in their Facebook news feeds.

“It’s true that even if misinformation is rare, its impact is large,” Rothschild says. “But we don’t want people to jump to larger conclusions than what the data seems to indicate. Citing these absolute numbers may contribute to misunderstandings about how much of the content on social media is misinformation.”

Another popular narrative in discourse about social media is that platforms’ recommendation algorithms push harmful content onto users who wouldn’t otherwise seek out this type of content.

But researchers have found that recommendation algorithms tend to push users toward more moderate content and that exposure to problematic content is heavily concentrated among a small minority of people who already have extreme views.

“It’s easy to assume that algorithms are the key culprit in amplifying fake news or extremist content,” says Rothschild, “but when we looked at the research, we saw time and time again that algorithms reflect demand and that demand appears to be a bigger issue than algorithms. Algorithms are designed to keep things as simple and safe as possible.”

Social harms

There has been a recent trend of articles suggesting exposure to false content or extremist content on social media is the cause of major societal ills, from polarization to political violence.

“Social media is still relatively new and it’s easy to correlate social media usage levels with negative social trends of the past two decades,” Rothschild says, “but empirical evidence does not show that social media is to blame for political incivility or polarization.”

The researchers stress that social media is a complex, understudied communication tool and that there is still a lot to learn about its role in society.

“Social media use can be harmful and that is something that needs to be further studied,” Rothschild says. “If we want to understand the true impact of social media on everyday life, we need more data and cooperation from social media platforms.”

To encourage better discourse about social media, the researchers offer four recommendations:

1. Measure exposure and mobilization among extremist fringes.

Platforms and academic researchers should identify metrics that capture exposure to false and extremist content not just for the typical news consumer or social media user but also in the fringes of the distribution. Focusing on tail exposure metrics would help to hold platforms accountable for creating tools that allow providers of potentially harmful content to engage with and profit from their audience, including monetization, subscriptions and the ability to add members and group followers.

2. Reduce demand for false and extremist content and amplification of it by the media and political elites.

Audience demand, not algorithms, is the most important factor in exposure to false and extremist content. It is therefore essential to determine how to reduce, for instance, the negative gender- and race-related attitudes that are associated with the consumption of content from alternative and extremist YouTube channels. We likewise must consider how to discourage the mainstream press and political elites from amplifying misinformation about topics such as COVID-19 and voter fraud in the 2020 U.S. elections.

3. Increase transparency and conduct experiments to identify causal relationships and mitigate harms.

Social media platforms are increasingly limiting data access even as increased researcher data and API access is needed to enable researchers outside the platforms to more effectively detect and study problematic content. Platform-scale data are particularly necessary to study the small groups of extremists who are responsible for both the production and consumption of much of this content. When public data cannot be shared due to privacy concerns, the social media platforms could follow the ‘clean room’ model used to allow approved researchers to examine, for example, confidential U.S. Census microdata data in secure environments. These initiatives should be complemented by academic–industry collaborations on field experiments, which remain the best way to estimate the causal effects of social media, with protections including review by independent institutional review boards and preregistration to ensure that research is conducted ethically and transparently.

4. Fund and engage research around the world.

It is critical to measure exposure to potentially harmful content in the Global South and in authoritarian countries where content moderation may be more limited and exposure to false and extremist content on social media correspondingly more frequent. Until better data is available to outside researchers, we can only guess at how best to reduce the harms of social media outside the West. Such data can, in turn, be used to enrich fact-checking and content moderation resources and to design experiments testing platform interventions.

[Annenberg School of Communications first published this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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When stuck in traffic, it is best to avoid erratic stop-start driving. That is a lesson Stellantis is learning the hard way.

The European carmaker is suffering from the ills affecting the entire auto sector. Sluggish vehicle sales, competition from Chinese operators and the uncertain trajectory of the transition to electric vehicles have resulted in a slew of warnings, from the likes of Mercedes, BMW and Volkswagen. On top of that, Stellantis has managed to fall into a US pothole that is largely of its own making, which was behind this week’s massive profit warning.

Its problem is that, in the favourable post-Covid landscape — in which demand for vehicles outstripped supply — it pressed the accelerator much too hard. It raised prices and cut less profitable models, leading to record North American operating margins of more than 16 per cent in 2022, according to S&P Capital IQ, almost double General Motors’ in the same period.

That strategy crashed into a wall. Consumers cut its market share from 13 per cent to 8 per cent since Covid, according to Harald Hendrikse from Citigroup, resulting in a massive build-up in wholesaler inventories. Efforts to clear this, by cutting prices and lowering production, explain much of Stellantis’s profit warning. It will barely break even in North America, its biggest profit pool, in the second half of the year. Free cash flow, which was expected to be positive, will swing to a €5bn to €10bn loss.

That leaves Stellantis lacking any pitch to investors. Capital returns must now be under review. Worse still, it looks like the group’s sector-leading profitability — which briefly made it a market darling — was simply unsustainable. As many a consumer business has found, focusing on costs at the expense of sales is a recipe for fleeting success and lasting distress.

Stellantis’s road back will be long and winding. Rebuilding market share is a laborious process involving new models and brand investment. The alternative — cutting brands and capacity — is painful. Unsurprisingly, rumours about a merger with France’s Renault (which Stellantis denied in February) have resurfaced in the Italian press.

Investors may also be concerned about the size of the problem that the company managed to accumulate before it slammed on the brakes. Trust in the group’s highly regarded boss, Carlos Tavares, has been hit. With his contract expiring in 2026, Stellantis has begun its search for his successor.

With Stellantis, on about three times forward earnings, trading roughly in line with European rivals such as VW and Renault, it is not clear why anyone would climb aboard its recovery trip now.

camilla.palladino@ft.com

TENS of thousands of retirees are set to pay tax on their state pension for the first time next year.

It is expected that around 340,000 pensioners will be told that they need to pay tax when the state pension rises by £460 in 2025.

1

Letters from the taxman will land on doorsteps for the first time next April, when the new tax year starts.

This is due to the triple lock, which means the payment made to those aged 66 and over rises every April by the highest out of inflation, the average UK wage increase or 2.5%.

Wages rose by 4% between May and July this year and experts suggest this figure will be the deciding factor in how much the state pension will rise by next year.

With tax thresholds frozen until 2028, this increase will drag around 340,000 pensioners into paying tax for the first time, it has been warned.

This is because the total annual amount of income they receive will be more than their personal allowance.

The allowance is the amount of money you can earn before you have to pay tax on your income.

Under the current rules, this is up to £12,570 each tax year.

Over the next few weeks HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) is writing to 560,000 customers as part of its “simple assessment” process, which will calculate who needs to pay what tax.

It was previously expected that around 140,000 pensioners would receive a letter for the first time this year.

But because of the suspected increase in the state pension, 340,000 people are now likely to get one.

Sir Steve Webb, the former pensions minister, told The Sun: “Whilst pensioners benefit from an above inflation increase in 2025, some of the increase will be clawed back through taxation for more and more pensioners.

“This comes on top of the loss of winter fuel payments for most. Taking account of rising energy bills on top of all these changes, by next April, not many pensioners will feel better off overall.”

Previously all pensioners received a Winter Fuel Payment of up to £300 each year to help cover the cost of energy bills.

But in July the government said that the payment, which is not taxable, would only be made to those on low incomes who claim certain benefits.

These include Pension Credit, Universal Credit, income-related Employment and Support Allowance, income-based Jobseeker’s Allowance, Income Support, Child Tax Credit and Working Tax Credit.

To be eligible you needed to be receiving a benefit during the qualifying week of September 16-22.

Meanwhile, yesterday the energy price cap increased by 10%, adding £149 a year to the average household bill.

Between October 1 and December 31 the energy price cap is set at £1,717 for a typical household which has a dual fuel tariff and pays by direct debit.

The increase will pile further pressure onto pensioners who are struggling to make ends meet this winter.

How will the tax be paid?

HMRC has said that the letters it is sending to pensioners will include detailed calculations of any tax due on the income they receive in the 2023-24 tax year.

Pensioners will need to pay this tax through a Simple Assessment tax bill.

What is the Winter Fuel Payment?

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Consumer reporter Sam Walker explains all you need to know about the payment.

The Winter Fuel Payment is an annual tax-free benefit designed to help cover the cost of heating through the colder months.

Most who are eligible receive the payment automatically.

Those who qualify are usually told via a letter sent in October or November each year.

If you do meet the criteria but don’t automatically get the Winter Fuel Payment, you will have to apply on the government’s website.

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You’ll qualify for a Winter Fuel Payment this winter if:

• you were born on or before September 23, 1958
• you lived in the UK for at least one day during the week of September 16 to 22, 2024, known as the “qualifying week”
• you receive Pension Credit, Universal Credit, ESA, JSA, Income Support, Child Tax Credit or Working Tax Credit

If you did not live in the UK during the qualifying week, you might still get the payment if both the following apply:

• you live in Switzerland or a EEA country
• you have a “genuine and sufficient” link with the UK social security system, such as having lived or worked in the UK and having a family in the UK

But there are exclusions – you can’t get the payment if you live in Cyprus, France, Gibraltar, Greece, Malta, Portugal or Spain.

This is because the average winter temperature is higher than the warmest region of the UK.

You will also not qualify if you:

• are in hospital getting free treatment for more than a year
• need permission to enter the UK and your granted leave states that you can not claim public funds
• were in prison for the whole “qualifying week”
• lived in a care home for the whole time between 26 June to 24 September 2023, and got Pension Credit, Income Support, income-based Jobseeker’s Allowance or income-related Employment and Support Allowance

Payments are usually made between November and December, with some made up until the end of January the following year.

This can be paid online, by bank transfer or by cheque.

If you get a letter after October 31, 2024 for the last tax year you must pay it within three months of the date you received it.

There is also an option to pay in instalments, so long as you pay the full amount by the deadline.

There is an online guide to the Simple Assessment for pensioners which provides more information for those who receive a demand.

Do you have a money problem that needs sorting? Get in touch by emailing money-sm@news.co.uk.

Plus, you can join our Sun Money Chats and Tips Facebook group to share your tips and stories

In 2017, Dr. Barbi Phelps-Sandall, an obstetrician who has been practicing in the San Francisco Bay area for more than two decades, had just learned about a new blood test only available at select labs for predicting premature birth when the perfect case walked into her office.

At 40, she was pregnant with her third child. Her first was born full term, but during her second pregnancy, she went into labor at 32 weeks.

Because she had a history of premature labor, she was at higher risk of delivering her third baby early as well. But as the primary earner for her family, she could not afford to take time off on bed rest like she had for her second. Phelps-Sandall decided to give her the blood test to help inform any decision they made about her options.

The test, called PreTRM, tracks levels of two proteins in the blood that tend to rise during the second trimester in women who are at risk of delivering early. This patient’s test was negative. That helped Phelps-Sandall and her patient decide to schedule more regular vaginal exams and get more frequent fetal monitoring, but gave them a little more reassurance that she wouldn’t need bed rest.

The baby ended up sticking to its due date. “The blood test made life so much easier because it made us feel more secure,” says Phelps-Sandall.

She now offers the test to every patient she sees, regardless of their risk of delivering prematurely. “It gives us information we never really had before.” Now, women can order it whether or not their ob-gyn knows about it or offers it.

Who can get the test?

Developed by Sera Prognostics, the test is not yet approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration but is available for doctors to order as a laboratory-developed test, which means that doctors in any state can order the test but only designated certified labs can perform the analysis. (New York state requires its department of health to certify any laboratory-developed tests for any of its residents, and this approval happened in 2018.)

Doctors can order the prescription test and take a few drops of blood from a fingerprick. They then send the sample to the company’s labs in Salt Lake City for analysis. However, not many doctors are even aware of the relatively simple test for identifying women at highest risk of delivering early.

Read More: What to Expect at a Mammogram

Beginning Oct. 1, any woman can also order the test from the company’s website, either by getting a prescription from her physician or connecting with one of Sera’s telehealth providers. The test kit and instructions are sent to expectant mothers’ homes, where they can collect the blood sample and send it to Sera’s lab. Either their doctor or the telehealth doctor will receive and discuss the results with them.

Why is preterm birth dangerous?

Doctors consider any birth before 37 weeks gestation to be preterm, and it can lead to both short- and long-term health complications for newborns—including breathing and feeding problems, weaker immune systems, and lengthy stays in the neonatal intensive care unit. About one in 10 babies born in the U.S. is premature, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“This is a paradigm change,” says Dr. Matthew Hoffman, vice chairman of obstetrics and gynecology at Christiana Care Health System who was involved in the studies of PreTRM. “In obstetrics we are faced with two questions: when and how to deliver the baby. This [test] lets us have insights into who is at risk, and put in preventive services [to prevent preterm birth].”

How the test works

The blood test measures levels of two proteins: the sex-hormone binding globulin, or SHBG, and the insulin-like growth factor binding protein (IBP4). It’s not the absolute levels of each that’s important, says Zhenya Lindgardt, CEO of Sera Prognostics, but the ratio of the two between 18 and 21 weeks gestation. Women with higher ratios—as determined by the company’s studies looking at the levels of women giving birth at term and those giving birth prematurely—are at higher risk of going into labor early compared to those with lower ratios.

Because hormone and protein levels fluctuate constantly during pregnancy, the two proteins PreTRM tracks are carefully chosen and measured only when women are between 18 and 21 weeks of pregnancy. Any earlier or later might yield inaccurate results.

Read More: How to Start—And Stick to—A Breathwork Practice

If PreTRM indicates a higher risk of preterm delivery, then doctors can prescribe aspirin, vaginal progesterone, and more frequent vaginal and fetal checks to ensure the cervix remains closed. Currently about half of preterm births in the U.S. occur in women with known risk factors for early delivery, including a history of previous preterm birth or a shortened cervix. But the rest don’t expect, and their doctors can’t predict, that they will deliver early. “In the study, we identified about a third of women who were at higher risk. We were able to identify a much larger group of women, let them understand their risk, and give them tools to manage that risk,” says Hoffman. “This allows us to approach women who didn’t have a history of prior preterm birth, or didn’t have a shortened cervix.”

The promise of preventing more preterm births

With more widespread use of the test, doctors may gain better knowledge about the myriad factors that can contribute to early labor, and ultimately intervene much earlier than 18 weeks if they better understand other factors that are involved. “We should be thinking of this [test] as a population health component to improve the outcomes for both moms and babies long term,” Hoffman says.

The company is completing another study looking at health outcomes for babies whose mothers used PreTRM; the trial was stopped early last December because the initial results also showed benefit.

“PreTRM allows me to get ahead of things,” says Phelps-Sandall. “We don’t have good predictors for this condition. We know of a conglomerate of things that can explain why 50% of babies are born prematurely, but the other 50% are total surprises. This test allows you to catch a lot of those.”