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https://www.theguardian.com/football/2022/apr/28/west-ham-eintracht-frankfurt-europa-league-match-report

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In the end the only consolation for West Ham was that they are still alive. Nobody should mistake this for a hard-luck story, even if Jarrod Bowen was desperately unfortunate to hit the bar with an overhead kick in added time. The reality is that Eintracht Frankfurt were dominant for long spells and, when David Moyes picks through his side's messy performance, his overriding emotion will be relief that West Ham's hopes of reaching the Europa League final have not been consigned to dust.

Equally there is much for West Ham to improve before they travel to Germany next week. For a start they will have to take far more care in possession. At times West Ham simply seemed to be forcing the issue, almost as if the emotion of their first European semi-final in 46 years had dented their focus, and for all their endeavour it was difficult to remember much in the way of control as they strained to contain Eintracht, who will feel disappointed not to have departed with more than a 2-1 lead.

For West Ham, the signs had felt ominous from the moment the electrifying Ansgar Knauff put Eintracht ahead after 50 seconds. It was galling for Moyes. West Ham tend not to give goals away cheaply but they never looked comfortable dealing with Eintracht's counterattacks. There were plenty of openings for the Bundesliga side and while West Ham fought hard, levelling through Michail Antonio, it felt fitting that the winning goal came from Daichi Kamada, whose nifty footwork and eye for a pass marked him out as the game's outstanding player.

West Ham's creative players could not match Kamada. Pablo Fornals was disappointing and Manuel Lanzini's touch eluded him. Bowen was a pest but lacked composure at crucial moments. Even the set pieces, so often a source of strength for West Ham, were poor. "We didn't show enough quality," Moyes said. "Sometimes the opposition make it hard for you."

Eintracht certainly did that. They were not intimidated by a passionate home crowd after stunning Barcelona in the last round. Oliver Glasner's side are strong on their travels and it was not a surprise that Kamada was involved when they sucked the energy out of the stadium by scoring with their first attack.

It was a beautifully worked goal, Kamada carrying the ball down the left, Rafael Borré spinning on the edge of the area. West Ham, who had taken encouragement from Kurt Zouma returning from injury to partner Craig Dawson in central defence, did not even seem to realise they were in trouble. There was too much room for Borré to turn and when the striker sent a curling cross behind Fornals it was almost as if he knew Knauff would be arriving at the far post, hurtling in from right wing-back to head past Alphonse Areola.

West Ham looked shocked. Had Moyes rushed Zouma back too soon? The defence looked edgy and it took a while for West Ham to shake their heads clear. Even Declan Rice was struggling to assert himself in midfield and there were times when Frankfurt, who posed problems with their enterprising 3-4-2-1 system, threatened to extend their lead.

Yet West Ham fought. They soon imposed themselves and the equaliser should have arrived when Antonio combined with Tomas Soucek, who sent Bowen racing clear. The winger's low finish looked good enough, only for Kevin Trapp to guide the shot on to the left post.

Michail Antonio celebrates after scoring West Ham's equaliser. Photograph: Tom Jenkins/The Guardian

Back came West Ham, pushing again. The concern for Eintracht, who were missing the influential Kristijan Jakic and Evan Ndicka, was how they would fare physically. It was easy to see why when Lanzini lifted a free-kick to the far post in the 21st minute, Zouma headed across goal and Antonio volleyed West Ham level from close range.

Finally the tension was lifted, Antonio threatening to score again after an error from Almamy Touré, though Eintracht remained menacing on the break. At times West Ham's players did not know who to pick up and it was hard not to feel for Aaron Cresswell as the left-back strained to keep up with Knauff, who kept making the same angled run and almost restored Eintracht's lead just before half-time.

Eintracht were impressive. Their movement was too quick, the interplay too sharp. West Ham could not cope and they were behind again when Djibril Sow surged through midfield after 54 minutes, played a one-two with Jesper Lindstrøm and tried to place a low finish past Areola, who parried the ball into the path of Kamada and watched helplessly as the midfielder put the rebound away.

West Ham had it all to do. While Saïd Benrahma clipped the woodwork with a bending effort after replacing Lanzini, an equaliser rarely felt likely. More precision was required and there were howls from the crowd when Benrahma fired over with Antonio unmarked in the middle.

It summed up West Ham's night, though Eintracht will have doubts of their own. Will they regret Kamada's deflected shot hitting the woodwork at 2-1? It was a huge escape for West Ham and they will take confidence from Eintracht's average home form. This tie is not over yet.

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West Ham face uphill task after Kamada rewards Eintracht Frankfurt dominance

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In the end the only consolation for West Ham was that they are still alive. Nobody should mistake this for a hard-luck story, even if Jarrod Bowen was desperately unfortunate to hit the bar with an overhead kick in added time.

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https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/2FMBbslJ3bS8GLfqNXfSc4T/10-things-autistic-people-want-others-to-know-about-talking-to-them

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1. Every autistic person is different, but they may share similar challenges

Around one in 100 people in the UK has autism, a condition that affects the way they see, hear, feel and interact with the world around them. It can make it hard to talk to others or interpret social cues, and often causes anxiety.

Many autistic people find it hard to filter out background noise in busy environments.

Autism manifests differently in different people, and some are more affected by it than others. Just like in the wider population, some autistic people will be very loud and sociable, while others are more shy and withdrawn. Some may be unable to speak at all and prefer to communicate through gestures or symbols.

So, although all autistic people tend to face similar challenges, the ways in which they affect them and their lives can be very different.

2. An autistic person may find it hard to hear what someone's saying over other sounds

'Neurotypical' people (those who don't have autism) are able to focus on what other people are saying during a conversation because their brains automatically screen out other sounds.

But many autistic people find it hard to filter out background noise, so there may be several other things competing for their attention, such as traffic, music or other people talking. Simply hearing what someone is saying can be a huge, conscious effort; they may need to concentrate hard and ask the other person to repeat things.

3. They may miss hints, cues and nuances other people would pick up on

Autistic people may not recognise how things such as tone of voice and facial expressions can change the meaning of what someone is saying. As a result, they're more likely to take things literally, and may struggle to understand sarcasm, metaphors or unusual turns of phrase.

However, it's important not to automatically assume that an autistic person won't understand a nuanced conversation - some people with autism can learn to spot these cues, but it's not easy.

4. Putting things in context can really help

Understanding the meaning behind what people are saying can be a challenge for people with autism, so giving some context is crucial.

Alis Rowe gives this example: if you saw a robin at Brighton beach and shouted, 'Wow, look at that bird!' someone with autism might struggle to understand what was so remarkable about it. But by saying, 'How strange to see a robin at the seaside', they would more easily realise what you meant.

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BBC Radio 4 - Radio 4 in Four - 10 things autistic people want others to know about talking to them

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Around one in 100 people in the UK has autism, a condition that affects the way they see, hear, feel and interact with the world around them. It can make it hard to talk to others or interpret social cues, and often causes anxiety.

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The Olympic champion who turned his back on Putin

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Aleksander Lesun won Olympic gold for Russia at the 2016 Rio Games. In February he decided never to represent the country again.

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https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-60596449

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Elevated blood levels of a specific protein may help scientists predict who has a better chance of bouncing back from a traumatic brain injury.

The protein, called neurofilament light or NfL for short, lends structural support to axons, the tendrils that send messages between brain cells. Levels of NfL peak on average at 10 times the typical level 20 days after injury and stay above normal a year later, researchers report September 29 in Science Translational Medicine. The higher the peak NfL blood concentrations after injury, the tougher the recovery for people with TBI six and 12 months later, shows the study of 197 people treated at eight trauma centers across Europe for moderate to severe TBI.

Brain scans of 146 participants revealed that their peak NfL concentrations predicted the extent of brain shrinkage after six months, and axon damage at six and 12 months after injury, neurologist Neil Graham of Imperial College London and his colleagues found.

These researchers also had a unique opportunity to check that the blood biomarker, which gives indirect clues about the brain injury, actually measured what was happening in the brain. In 18 of the participants that needed brain surgery, researchers sampled the fluid surrounding injured neurons. NfL concentrations there correlated with NfL concentrations in the blood.

"The work shows that a new ultrasensitive blood test can be used to accurately diagnose traumatic brain injury," says Graham. "This blood test can predict quite precisely who's going to make a good recovery and who's going to have more difficulties."

Study participants were adults and mostly male, so more work needs to be done to determine if these findings apply to women, children and people with mild TBI.

Finding a reliable biomarker for the severity and outlook of TBI, a head injury that disrupts brain function, could improve millions of lives. Studies of U.S. football players have brought attention to the injury ( SN: 12/13/17), but it's a far more widespread problem. Around 55 million people globally were living with a TBI in 2016, and there's no one-size-fits-all treatment.

"No two traumatic brain injuries are alike," says David Okonkwo, director of the Neurotrauma Clinical Trials Center at the University of Pittsburgh. Scientists have been looking for biomarkers of TBI injury such as NfL to develop injury-specific interventions, and Okonkwo says these new findings are promising for patients whose injury has damaged their axons.

"We have not had the tools to measure a specific injury type of an individual patient," Okonkwo says. While this test probably is still a few years from use in U.S. clinics, other large research groups are looking for ways to use NfL and other blood-based biomarkers for diagnosing TBI and creating opportunities for intervention.

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A blood test may help predict recovery from traumatic brain injury

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Elevated blood levels of a specific protein may help scientists predict who has a better chance of bouncing back from a traumatic brain injury. The protein, called neurofilament light or NfL for short, lends structural support to axons, the tendrils that send messages between brain cells.

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Lia Thomas becomes first transgender woman to win NCAA swimming title

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Lia Thomas made history on Thursday as the first known transgender woman to win an NCAA swimming championship

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On first appearances, Bolzano in the far north of Italy is just like any other alpine town. Nestled in a valley lined by steep green hills peppered with castles, barns and churches, and terraced with vineyards, the city is a whimsical snow globe of winding streets, pastel-coloured houses and Baroque taverns.

But cross the Talfer river on the western edge of town, and suddenly it's a different story. The cosy streets are replaced by wide avenues and large, solemn squares overlooked by austere, grey buildings. The architecture is linear, monotonous and domineering, with porticoes of tall, rectangular columns and strange, looping arches that gallop across the avenues like viaducts to nowhere.
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Amidst this gloomy ensemble, two structures stand out. The first is the city's tax office, a hulking grey block adorned with a gigantic bas-relief depicting - across 57 sculpted panels - the unassailable rise of Italian Fascism, from the March on Rome to the colonial conquests in Africa. In its centre is a depiction of Mussolini on horseback, his right arm outstretched in a Roman salute. It's a remarkable piece of fascist agitprop architecture - awe-inspiring, odious and perplexing all at once.

The second is the Bolzano Victory Monument, a striking arch made of white marble, with columns sculpted to resemble fasces, the bundle of sticks that symbolised the fascist movement. It has an ethereal, almost ghostly presence, rising like a mirage out of the grey apartment buildings and green trees that surround it. Along its frieze, an inscription in Latin reads: "Here at the border of the fatherland set down the banner. From this point on we educated the others with language, law and culture."

Erected in 1928, it's currently surrounded by a high, metal fence. It has been a rallying point for far-right marches and the object of several attempts to blow it up. The historian Jeffrey Schnapp has described it as "the first truly fascist monument".

Yet today these two pieces of fascist architectural propaganda are the centrepiece of a bold artistic experiment in addressing the debate around contested monuments, one which offers a template for other communities divided over whether to tear down or keep up monuments with racist, imperialist or fascist connotations.

Prior to World War One, Bolzano (or Bozen as it's known in German - both names are official) was the largest city in South Tyrol, a mountainous province within the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Both city and province were overwhelmingly German speaking, but at the 1919 Peace Conference they were awarded to Italy on security grounds. South Tyrol would provide Italy with a natural northern border along the ridgeline of Alps, and grant it control of the strategic Brenner Pass.

As a border town with a mostly non-Italian population, it was subject to a policy of intense Italianisation under Mussolini. Place names were changed, Tyrolean cultural institutions were closed, and German - the native language of 90% of the province - was effectively banned.

A huge new city quarter and industrial zone were built across the river from Bolzano, and thousands of Italians were encouraged to settle. The new town was festooned with numerous monuments and buildings dedicated to the "glory" of fascism.

After the War, the Italian government attempted to atone for the fascist policies by granting the inhabitants of South Tyrol a high level of autonomy. Cultural and linguistic rights would be respected, public service jobs would be allocated proportionally based on language, and 90% of tax revenue would remain inside the region.

However, the landscape of fascist monuments remained a source of friction. "For German speakers, they were a symbol of the fascist Italianisation process which had tried to annihilate their culture and language. They wanted the monuments torn down," says Andrea Di Michele, professor of contemporary history at the University of Bolzano. "While Italians, now a majority in Bolzano but surrounded by a predominantly German-speaking province, latched on to the Victory Monument in particular as a symbol, not of fascism, but of their Italian identity in the region."

Persistent vandalism and attempted bombings saw a large metal gate erected around the Victory Monument, while the tax office had to be guarded around the clock by military police. The two buildings were used as a rallying point for rival marches between Italian- and German-speaking far-right groups. Frequent attempts to resolve the conflict ultimately collapsed into mutual incomprehension.

Italy is not the only country that has struggled with the architectural legacy of its fascist era. In Spain, a "pact of forgetting" meant that fascist monuments from the Franco era remained largely undisturbed until 2007, when the Historical Memory Law provided a legal framework for their removal. In 2010, an inscription glorifying Franco was removed from the frieze of the Spanish National Research Council, leaving a largely blank slate. Meanwhile the last public statue of Franco was taken down in February 2021, a move opposed by Vox, Spain's third largest political party.

Buildings that are too large to dismantle continue to pose a challenge. The University of Gijon is the largest building in Spain, built during the early years of the Franco regime in a Neo-Herrerian style, and described as having "exceptional architectural value". Yet the left-wing council in the region has repeatedly vetoed attempts to have it proposed for Unesco recognition, saying that "a building linked to Francoism cannot be a World Heritage Site".

Franco's most notorious architectural endowment is the Valley of the Fallen - a gigantic compound containing a basilica, a guest house, several monuments, a huge cross and a mausoleum containing the remains of more than 30,000 people. Franco intended it as a monument of national reconciliation and its crypt was consecrated by Pope John XXIII in 1960. But others consider it an exaltation of Francoism and have compared it to a Nazi concentration camp. In 2019, the remains of Franco were exhumed and removed, and in 2020 the government proposed turning the site into a civil cemetery. But the debate has remained largely a binary one - removal or preservation, with little in between. The contested legacy of the Spanish Civil War and Francoist rule is what makes the debate so polarised and complicated.

In Germany, meanwhile, you would struggle to find any architecture from the Nazi period. Most of it was destroyed during the War, or shortly afterwards as part of the country's denazification process. Surviving fascist buildings were simply repurposed by scrubbing away swastikas and other fascist symbols - most notably in the Berlin Olympic Stadium. Others, like the 1935 Congress Hall in Nuremberg, were chosen to house Nazi documentation centres, their monumentalism seen as symbolic of the hubris and megalomania of Hitler's architectural ambitions.

In Italy, the EUR district in Rome was conceived by Mussolini as an architectural celebration of fascism. Wandering its eerie landscape, you come across the Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana (also known as the Square Colosseum), whose façade is emblazoned with a quotation taken from Mussolini's speech announcing the invasion of Ethiopia. Just north of Rome's city centre lies the Foro Italico sports complex, whose entrance features a 17.5m-tall obelisk with the words MUSSOLINI DUX carved into it. Inside the Foro Italico hangs The Apotheosis of Fascism, a painting depicting Mussolini as a kind of God-Emperor. It was covered up by the Allies in 1944 for being too grotesque, and then uncovered by the Italian government in 1996.

"In Italy, which has allowed its fascist monuments to survive unquestioned, the risk is different," writes the historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat. "If monuments are treated merely as depoliticised aesthetic objects, then the far right can harness the ugly ideology while everyone else becomes inured."
Contested spaces
In 2014, a cross-communal group of historians and artists in Bolzano convened to discuss how to resolve what was becoming an increasingly fractious and emotionally charged dispute. The social dynamics of the city had turned the buildings into contested spaces, creating a necessity and a sense of urgency that a solution be found.

"The binary choice was either to destroy the monuments or leave them up," says Hannes Obermair, professor of contemporary history at the University of Innsbruck and one of the experts tasked with finding a solution to the Bolzano issue. "But if you remove the monuments, you remove the evidence, and avoid dealing with the complex layers of history and identity which drive this dispute. Alternatively, keeping the monuments up without challenging them simply normalises their fascist rhetoric."

The Palazzo della Civiltà - or "Square Colosseum" - in Rome was conceived by Mussolini as an architectural celebration of fascism (Credit: Getty Images)

In the end, a creative solution was found, one that managed to unite the city and defuse the tension between the two communities. The solution was to "recontextualise" the monuments, maintaining their artistic integrity and historical importance, while simultaneously neutralising and subverting their fascist rhetoric.

"This was an opportunity for the city to have an honest conversation about its history," says Obermair. "The disputes are less about the past than about the present. So what kind of society are we now? Are we a society riven by past ideologies or are we a democratic and pluralistic society that believes in the values of participation, tolerance and respect for humanity?"

First up the Victory Monument, which elicited strong emotions on both sides. It is explicitly fascist, extolling the conquest and colonisation of South Tyrol and the alleged superiority of the Latin civilisation. But through a complex palimpsest of ideologies and symbols, it is also seen as a celebration of Italian victory in World War One and a memorial to the fallen Italian soldiers of the war.

The monument also has significant historical value - as the first fascist monument anywhere in the world - and artistic merit, being an eminent example of Italian Rationalism, a movement now seen as important to the development of modern architecture as French Art Deco and German Bauhaus. Some of the most important Italian architects and artists of the time worked on the monument, including Marcello Piacentini and Adolfo Wildt.

The first intervention was to affix an LED ring around one of the columns, symbolically stifling the fascist rhetoric without damaging the artistic integrity of the monument. Next, a museum was built in a crypt beneath the building, which detailed the turbulent modern history of Bolzano, putting the monument's creation into context, and exploring the debate surrounding it.

Next came the bas-relief. The task fell to two local artists, Arnold Holzknecht and Michele Bernardi. Their idea was simple: to take a building with explicitly fascist rhetoric, and recontextualise it as an anti-fascist monument.

The artists decided to emblazon the Hannah Arendt quote "Nobody has the right to obey" across the frieze in German, Italian and Ladin - the region's three official languages. The quote is even more subversive when you remember that the building currently houses the city's tax office.

"Leaving the monuments in situ allows you to contemplate the context in which they were created," explains Di Michele, who was also a member of the cross-communal taskforce. "It creates a dialogue about them and about fascism in general, and allows us to better understand the strong urban impact of fascist architecture and the far-reaching dimensions of the artistic interventions. If you move them to a room in a museum you cannot understand what impact they were intended to have and have had on the city, on the urban and symbolic layout."

The artistic interventions were a huge success, praised by politicians and civil society members from both communities. There are still occasional communal tensions, but not about buildings. That chapter has been closed. They even managed to neutralise the extremist rallies that were blighting the city.

"The Italian far-right used to assemble every year in front of the bas-relief and perform the fascist salute," says Obermair. "But with the Arendt quote there, they feel humiliated. So they've stopped coming. Likewise, the far-right groups from the German-speaking community used to rally in front of the Victory Monument to say 'Look how Italy is oppressing us', but now they can no longer say that. We've destroyed their toys, so to speak."

Obermair is enthusiastic that the Bolzano model could be successfully replicated in other parts of Italy, as well as in other countries struggling with divisive and complex fascist legacies, such as Spain. The model also offers a solution to the debate over statues in the UK and US. "Of course the social context in Bolzano is important, and each community needs to imagine its own artistic intervention," says Obermair. "But the basic idea, that we shouldn't destroy monuments but radically transform them, is a powerful one. It provides people with the tools to reflect on history, question ideology and critically examine the built environment around them. No architecture is neutral. Ultimately it is we, not the monuments, who should have the final word."

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What happens to fascist architecture after fascism?

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On first appearances, Bolzano in the far north of Italy is just like any other alpine town. Nestled in a valley lined by steep green hills peppered with castles, barns and churches, and terraced with vineyards, the city is a whimsical snow globe of winding streets, pastel-coloured houses and Baroque taverns.

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he tundra of northern Norway is a long way from the Venice Biennale. Indeed, it is a long way from anywhere, at least viewed through western eyes. To reach the gentle herd of reindeer who are now feeding under the long pale glow of an Arctic sunset, I have ridden for three and a half hours across the snowy wastes, partly in a sled and partly on the back of a snowmobile, pausing halfway at a herders' hut (no electricity, no water, but nevertheless a cosy refuge). We are somewhere off the road that links the villages of Karasjok and Kautokeino. To the north of us is Hammerfest. North of that, the Barents Sea.

Artist Máret Ánne Sara is with her husband, brother and 18-month-old, the child cheerfully bundled up and goggled against the chill and the snow's bright glare. She is telling me about the yearly passage of these, her brother's reindeer, from the tundra up to the northern coastal summer lands, 250km away: how the biggest cow will start to move when she's heavily pregnant, and the whole herd will inexorably, mysteriously make its way north. "It's the animals who control everything," she says. "We just follow them and try to keep them safe."

Her brother Jovsset Ante Sara is scattering feed as the soft-haired animals prance and jitter across the snow. That's not a good sign: reindeer have always been able to eat lichen and moss through the Arctic winters, but the unstable climate is increasingly bringing snow that's too deep for them to find it, as it has this year. Or, as in 2019, periods of warmth that melt the snow, so that when temperatures drop again, impenetrable layers of ice form, keeping the animals from reaching food.

The tundra is changing in other ways, too: as winters get warmer, birchwoods are spreading north by as much as 50 metres a year. "When we have birch forests, the ground changes and the lichen gets pushed out," says Sara. "If the landscape keeps changing, they won't have any winter food." She looks around at the short but sturdy birches. "If you look up historical photos, there are no trees here."

Courthouse protest ... a sculpture made of 200 bloodied reindeer heads by Máret Ánne Sara. Photograph: Iris Egilsdatter

Reindeer herding is one of the traditional livelihoods for Sámi families such as the Saras. The Sámi are an Indigenous people scattered thinly through a vast tract of northern Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia's Kola peninsula. Their presence long predates the Nordic settlers of these boreal lands, who now outnumber them. Their homeland is called Sápmi in the Sámi languages, nine of which survive, some clinging on to life with just a few hundred speakers.

For this year's Venice Biennale, the Nordic Pavilion will be renamed the Sámi Pavilion, and a long colonised people, divided by borders and living at the sharp end of climate crisis, will take their place as a nation for the first time at the art world's most prominent global gathering - a gathering that, because of its exhibitions presented in national pavilions, can feel like a kind of art Olympics, always entangled in the geopolitics of the moment.

What do reindeer on the tundra have to do with Máret Anne Sara's art for the Venice Biennale? Everything. For her, reindeer are both the subject and the material of her work; indeed, they are central to life itself. For reindeer-herding families, the animals are not mere livestock. "There's a different way of thinking and being between an Indigenous perspective and a typical western orientation," she says. "For us, the reindeer is actually a very close relative. Humans, nature and animals are interdependent and equal. So destroying any part of this is like suicide from our perspective. What's happening to the reindeer is our story as well." The director of the Sámi Museum at Karasjok, Jelena Porsanger, had earlier told me how this proximity is even embedded in the northern Sámi language. "To live" - eallit - has the same derivation as the noun "herd" - eallu.

It is not a sentimental relationship, though. While I'm on the tundra, a couple of reindeer are quietly and efficiently slaughtered, "for domestic use", says Sara; and at the herders' hut, her brother Jovsset slices chunks of dried reindeer meat as a snack. Ande Somby, a Sámi activist, lawyer and artist whom I meet in the city of Alta a few days later, tells me that between the herder and the reindeer there is a kind of contract, "that the reindeer will be given a death of dignity and everything shall be used" - bones, hide, meat, antlers.

Somby is in his 60s, of the generation of Norwegian Sámi sent away to boarding school and chastised for speaking his mother tongue. Things are different now, with Sámi parliaments in the Nordic nations giving people a say in cultural, linguistic and educational matters. Somby is a yoiker: practitioner of a haunting, uncanny vocal technique in which the singer embodies, almost becomes, the subject of the yoik, which could be a person, a landscape, a wolf, or indeed a reindeer.

Some of Sara's most powerful art has been made as a means of protest. For years, Jovsset Ante Sara was locked in a legal battle over the government's policy of culling herds because - it was argued - of overgrazing. Sara denies that overgrazing is an issue, and anyway, she says, "it is very difficult for us to accept that argument, because the government is at the same time inviting big industries into the same area".

A long history of mineral exploitation in Sápmi now also extends to building windfarms on traditional reindeer-herding lands, which spooks the reindeer and affects their traditional migratory patterns. It is complicated: clearly, now more than ever, wind energy is needed to help replace fossil fuels. But the Sámi, as so often, find themselves paying a high price for the high-carbon lifestyles of others.

Ironic twist ... Sara and the curtain of 400 skulls that has now been acquired by the National Museum of Oslo. Photograph: Máret Ánne Sara

As Jovsset's case against the forcible slaughter of reindeer rose through the courts, Sara's confrontational art accompanied it. She erected a pile of 200 bloodied, frozen reindeer heads with the Norwegian flag atop it near the courthouse in Tana. In front of the Norwegian parliament building in Oslo, she made a huge sculpture, a kind of "curtain" of 400 reindeer skulls, each with a bullet hole - a work that formed part of a greater project of documents, talks and debates she called Pile O'Sapmi.

Jovsset won every case until, at the last, he was defeated in the Supreme Court in 2017. "It showed how fragile we are, and how our rights are owned, totally, by the state," says Sara. It was what happens, she says, "when an outside worldview criminalises your traditions and capitalises nature". It is an irony, perhaps, that the new National Museum of Oslo has acquired that "curtain" of skulls and, when it opens its doors in June, this howl of protest against internal colonialism will be the first thing visitors see.

Sara tells me how, some time after the legal defeat when she was at a loss to find a way forward, she was talking to another herder, describing her disappointment and exhaustion. "All of a sudden he said, 'But now the red calf is coming. And at the first sight of the red calf, everything is forgotten.'" It was a transformational moment. What he meant was that when the new reindeer are born - "the red calves" - they bring joy and a fresh beginning. Sara's new work takes its cue from this sense of renewal but, like everything in her art, it is shot through with darkness. The losses of calves to legally protected predators such as wolverines and eagles are huge, and her work, which often teeters on the edge of the macabre, will use their mutilated bodies as material.

Pauliina Feodoroff is another artist representing Sápmi at the Venice Biennale who has a strong need to find hope in the dark. She is one of the 1,000 or so-strong Skolt Sámi community from close to the Finnish-Russian border, of whom around 300 speak the Skolt Sámi language. Feodoroff learned it in adulthood, "taking back" the tongue, like a number of her generation in their 30s and 40s. Many Skolt Sámi ancestral lands were long ago lost to the hellish, polluting nickel mines of Murmansk. But, says Feodoroff - whose background is in performance and choreography as well as politics and land guardianship - "for myself I want to focus on what is healthy and our need to be kind and gentle to ourselves and others".

'The trees are our cathedrals, our libraries, our museums' ... artist Pauliina Feodoroff. Photograph: Michael Miller / OCA

Feodoroff is speaking on the edge of the river Näätämö - or Njâuddam in Skolt Sami - north of Finland's Lake Inari. She offers a greeting to the "grandmother" river and suggests that I introduce myself to the landscape by lying near the riverbank in the snow for a moment - which I do, staring into the heavy white sky and listening to the intense silence, broken only by the caw of a crow and the fussing of a couple of willow tits in the birches. The animistic, nature-based spirituality of the Sámi did not entirely die with the aggressive Christianising process of the 17th century, when Sámi noaidis, or shamans, were tried for witchcraft.

Later that day we cross the frozen lake Inari on sleds and enter the pristine, ancient pine forests that circle it - deep woods where the trees stand at a dignified, discreet distance from each other to take in as much of the precious Arctic light as possible. "This is our cultural monument," says Feodoroff of the forest. "It is our cathedrals, our libraries, our museums."

She has been fighting to preserve these forests, which are threatened by logging for the pulp industry, despite their antiquity, their biodiversity and their dark green, spreading beauty. Part of her work for Venice will be a conceptual project in which she will auction the right to see views of wilderness like this, and use the proceeds to buy and protect the land in a case of art and practical activism combining. When institutional or legal processes have ground to a halt, she says, "art is a space that can cause some kind of freedom of movement".

In the forest we sit round a campfire and listen to Feodoroff's friend, Anna Morottaja, one of the Inari Sámi, talking about her people's traditional singing style the livđe, an art that had virtually disappeared from her community's culture until she researched ethnomusicological collections in Berlin and elsewhere to find recordings of long-lost family members performing for the benefit of curious anthropologists. Like the yoik, the livđe can involve creating a kind of portrait of a person. Hearing an archive recording of her great-aunt's livđe for the first time was, then, like a personal encounter. She sings it now, in the dusk and the snow, before the campfire, and it's an unearthly thing with a rocking rhythm like a spell, but tinged with wit, telling of an energetic woman with "fire in her hemline".

A song sung in the forest seems an enchanting and simple thing, but none of this really is simple. The Sámi were long victims of racism and prejudice. Northern Sámi activist and film-maker Siljá Somby later tells me that it's still very much there. You can see plenty of hate speech directed at the Sámi on social media. The situation varies from country to country. Sweden has not signed the UN convention on Indigenous peoples, meaning the Swedish Sámi have fewer rights than those in Norway and Finland. For Venice, the Swedish side of Sápmi will be represented by painter Anders Sunna, another member of a reindeer-herding family that has been locked in legal battles for years with the state.

We never resist, we always bend. When it comes to nature, that's the right thing to do

Even in Norway and Finland, points out Siljá Somby, the parliaments stop short of giving them what she calls "hard rights" over land or water, only "soft rights" over culture and education. And there are plenty of divisions within the Sámi community itself. Some have little time for the sharpening, over the last 50 years or so, of Sámi political consciousness, and those elected to the Norwegian Sámi parliament have included members of the Progress party, who would see the institution itself abolished. Nor has resistance come naturally to the Sámi, who for centuries adapted themselves to circumstances.

Inari Sámi reindeer herder Osmo Seurujärvi, has, like Morottaja, immersed himself in a language and way of life that his own parents were becoming estranged from, realising that if he did not, the chain would end and his children would lose the culture for ever. "We never resist, we always bend," he says. "When it comes to nature, that's the right thing to do. But when it comes to social structures, it's not always the right thing. It's always expected that Sámi will give up and not resist. We are not a warrior nation. But we do need to have a say."

Everything is connected: this is what the Sámi tell us. The landscape, nature, the climate, politics, culture, society, the law, art - they are all entangled. Like Indigenous peoples from other parts of the world, the Sámi are at the front line of climate crisis but also the holders of knowledge; of alternative perspectives that could usefully challenge the consumerist, capitalist structures that have proved so destructive. And, as Feodoroff points out, we all rely on the Sámi and their breathtaking, expansive landscapes in more ways than we might at first think. "The forests here are storing carbon for you guys, too," she says. "If they cease to exist, the consequences will come to your back door."

The Sámi Pavilion at the Venice Biennale opens on 23 April.

This article was amended to correct the spelling of Morottaja.

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'Our traditions have been criminalised' - the Arctic artists bringing protest to the Venice Biennale

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he tundra of northern Norway is a long way from the Venice Biennale. Indeed, it is a long way from anywhere, at least viewed through western eyes.

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https://www.bbc.com/news/health-60903839

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Health and science correspondent

We have the technology to start a new era in medicine by precisely matching drugs to people's genetic code, a major report says.

Some drugs are completely ineffective or become deadly because of subtle differences in how our bodies function.

The British Pharmacological Society and the Royal College of Physicians say a genetic test can predict how well drugs work in your body.

The tests could be available on the NHS next year.

Your genetic code or DNA is an instruction manual for how your body operates. The field of matching drugs to your DNA is known as pharmacogenomics.

It would have helped Jane Burns, from Liverpool, who lost two-thirds of her skin when she reacted badly to a new epilepsy drug.

She was put on to carbamazepine when she was 19. Two weeks later, she developed a rash and her parents took her to A&E when she had a raging fever and began hallucinating.

The skin damage started the next morning. Jane told the BBC: "I remember waking up and I was just covered in blisters, it was like something out of a horror film, it was like I'd been on fire."

Her epilepsy medicine caused Stevens-Johnson syndrome, which affects the skin and is far more likely to happen in people who are born with specific mutations in their genetic code.

Mrs Burns says she was "extremely, extremely lucky" and said she supports pharmacogenomic tests.

"If it saves your life, then it's a fantastic thing."

Nearly everyone is affected

Jane's experience may sound rare, but Prof Mark Caulfield, the president-elect of the British Pharmacological Society, said "99.5% of us have at least one change in our genome that, if we come across the wrong medicine, it will either not work or it will actually cause harm."

More than five million people in the UK get no pain relief from codeine. Their genetic code does not contain the instructions for making the enzyme that breaks codeine down into morphine and without it, the drug's a dud.

The genetic code of one in 500 people puts them at higher risk of losing their hearing if they take antibiotic gentamicin

Pharmacogenomics is already used for some medicines. In the past, 5-7% of people would have a bad reaction to the HIV drug abacavir and some died. Testing people's DNA before prescribing the drug means the risk is now zero.

Scientists have looked at the 100 most prescribed drugs in the UK. Their report says we already have the technology to roll out genetic testing to guide the use of 40 of them.

The genetic analysis would cost about £100 and could be done using either a sample of blood or saliva.

Initially, the vision is to perform the test when one of the 40 drugs is prescribed. In the long term, the ambition is to test well ahead of time - possibly at birth if genetic testing of newborns goes ahead, or as part of a routine check-up in your 50s.

Precision

"We need to move away from 'one drug and one dose fits all' to a more personalised approach, where patients are given the right drug at the right dose to improve the effectiveness and safety of medicines," said Prof Sir Munir Pirmohamed, from the University of Liverpool.

"What we're doing is really going to a new era of medicine, because we're all individuals and we all vary in the way we respond to drugs."

He said that as we age and are prescribed more and more drugs, there's a 70% chance that by the age of 70 you will be on at least one drug that is influenced by your genetic make-up.

Lord David Prior, the chairman of NHS England, said: "This will revolutionise medicine."

He said pharmacogenomics "is the future" and "it can now help us to deliver a new, modern personalised healthcare system fit for 2022".

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Matching drugs to DNA is 'new era of medicine'

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Testing can predict if drugs will work, fail or become deadly, depending on differences in our make-up.

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https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2020/feb/15/lessons-from-the-ancient-philosophers-to-help-improve-our-lives-today

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5,000 exoplanets! NASA confirms big milestone for planetary science

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The exoplanet revolution is well underway.

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https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220322-why-dont-we-hear-about-cloning-anymore

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A woman posing with her cloned puppy (Credit: Alamy)

From duplicate dogs to modern mammoths, cloning has come a long way since Dolly the sheep took her first tentative steps.

On 5 July 1996, a sheep was born who would go on to inspire entire industries, provide scientists with a new way of helping endangered species, and change medical science in ways that were barely conceivable at the time.

But this was no ordinary sheep. Her very entry to the world was groundbreaking - she was cloned using cells taken from another sheep's mammary gland as part of an experiment conducted by the Roslin Institute in Midlothian, Scotland. They named her Dolly after the singer Dolly Parton.

At that point, scientists had been dabbling with cloning - the process of creating a genetically identical copy of another living being - since the 1950s, when British biologist John Gurdon found a way to clone African clawed frogs. Despite many attempts, repeating the feat in larger mammals had proven an elusive and near-impossible task.

But like many scientific breakthroughs, the experiment that produced Dolly was something of a fluke. The Roslin Institute scientists had been attempting to clone a sheep using a complex process called nuclear transfer. Using electricity, they transferred the mammary gland cell's nucleus into an egg cell from a second sheep. This egg cell now contained all of the DNA from Dolly's mother, and it grew and developed into an embryo in the lab.

Except, this was not supposed to happen. At the time, no one thought that the DNA from an adult cell could possibly give rise to a new embryo. The entire experiment had intended to be a test run for the technology, before the Roslin Institute team conducted it using embryonic cells.

"The cloning of Dolly the sheep showed the world that it was possible to essentially reprogramme all the DNA in the nucleus of an adult cell, so it started behaving like an embryonic cell again, giving rise to a new animal," says Robin Lovell-Badge, who heads the Stem Cell Biology and Developmental Genetics Laboratory at the Francis Crick Institute in London.

Having unexpectedly created an embryo, the Roslin Institute scientists placed it inside a third sheep, which ultimately gave birth to Dolly, to the surprise and bewilderment of the general public and much of the world's media.

Dolly spent her whole life at the Roslin Institute in Scotland. She died when she was just six and a half, after developing lung disease and arthritis (Credit: Getty Images).

Ominous predictions were already being made within days, mostly focused on the grim possibilities of human cloning. Some even suggested that cloning could provide a way of replacing lost children for bereaved parents, while TIME magazine greeted Dolly's arrival with a cover headline that mused provocatively, "Will There Ever Be Another You?"

But on the other side of the world, a Japanese stem cell biologist was observing the events in Scotland with keen interest.

The rise of regenerative medicine

In 1996, Shinyi Yamanaka felt his career was drifting. He had endured a hapless stint as a surgeon, where colleagues reportedly nicknamed him Jamanaka as a pun on the Japanese word for obstacle, because he took too long in the operating theatre.

Now Yamanaka had found himself in a tedious job at Osaka City University Medical School, spending most of his time looking after mice, when he read that scientists had managed to clone a sheep.

He was fascinated by the fact that an adult cell could be reprogrammed in this manner, and began wondering if adding transcription factors - proteins that bind to DNA and turn certain genes on or off - could reprogramme any adult cell back into an embryonic-like state.

After a decade of work, Yamanaka achieved his goal, first with mice and then in human cells. His technology allowed skin or blood cells to be reprogrammed to a pluripotent state - meaning that they could be turned into any cell type in the body - through adding a cocktail of four transcription factors. It was considered such a breakthrough that Yamanaka was later awarded the 2012 Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine.

The reason Yamanaka's feat garnered such attention is it allows scientists to take a blood sample from patients and create organoids - tiny pea-sized versions of organs - in the lab that behave identically to the cells within their own body. These can be used to test new drugs, vaccines, or to simply understand some of the basic processes involved in human development.

Scientists are also excited about the potential medical applications for patients with genetic diseases. "It potentially allows you to take cells from a patient, maybe correct a genetic defect, and then use those cells to repair damaged tissue in that patient," says Lovell-Badge. "So this was obviously a really important finding."

The Sooam Biotech Research Foundation, South Korea, clones dogs for pet owners, but also for organisations seeking replacements for their best working dogs (Credit: Getty Images).

The technology behind cloning has also had some more direct medical applications. Scientists at the Oregon Health and Science University Center for Embryonic Cell and Gene Therapy have used some of the steps involved in Dolly's cloning to help prevent women with rare mitochondrial diseases from passing the disorder onto their children. By transferring the nucleus of the mother's eggs into the healthy egg cell of another woman, most or all of the damaged mitochondria can be left behind. The technique has since been dubbed the " three-person baby".

For the scientists who created Dolly, the most immediate legacy of their work was the survival of their research centre. In 1996, the Roslin Institute was in a precarious financial position and facing government cuts.

Dolly proved to be a lifeline. The scientific and media furore that followed attracted the attention of the Texas-based company ViaGen, who purchased the intellectual property to cloning technology in 1998, providing enough money for the institute to survive until they could source new funding.

Initially the company's main aim was to use cloning to improve livestock breeding, a process that still takes place today, especially for high-value livestock such as bulls. Cloning is also used to bypass the genetic lottery of normal reproduction and transfer desirable genetic changes made in the lab from generation to generation. Some researchers are also looking at combining cloning and genome editing to create animals that are resistant to some common diseases such as the bacterial infections tuberculosis and salmonellosis.

However, over the last six years a new industry has emerged - pet cloning. In 2015, ViaGen began offering its services to pet owners looking to clone their beloved cat or dog. It does not come cheap - the company charges $35,000 (£22,800) to clone a cat, and $50,000 (£38,000) for a dog - but the demand is there. While ViaGen do not disclose the exact number of pets they have cloned so far, Melain Rodriguez, a client services manager at ViaGen said that the figure is in the hundreds.

"It has grown so much since we first started this, and we're cloning more and more pets every year," says Rodriguez. "We've got puppies being born every week. We don't do a lot of advertising, a lot of it is passed on by word of mouth."

Because of the financial outlays involved, Rodriguez explains that 90% of the company's clients simply opt to have their pet's cells preserved - which costs $1,600 (£1,200) - in case they can afford cloning at a later date. The high costs arise from the fact that cloning is still incredibly complex - for the dogs the entire process takes eight months and for cats it takes a year.

The woolly mammoth may not come back as an exact replica, but more of an "Arctic elephant" (Credit: Alamy)

"People ask me, 'Why is it so expensive?' and I tell them because there are so many complicated steps involved in the whole process," says Rodriguez. "It's definitely an emotional reason for pet clients. They want to be able to carry on that strong emotional bond that they have with the pet."

The industry has since expanded elsewhere in the globe. Sooam Biotech in South Korea offer dog cloning services, as well as Sinogene in China.

However, many scientists remain uncomfortable about the whole premise. Lovell-Badge argues that there is "no justification" for pet cloning as while the resulting animals will be genetically identical, they will not have the same behavioural characteristics and personalities as all creatures are a product of both genes and their environment.

"People really want their pet that knows them and knows certain tricks and so forth," says George Church, professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School. "In that sense, it's a little bit taking advantage of people's grief."

Reviving extinct species

In the years that followed Dolly's cloning, the central question was whether scientists would ever extend the technology to humans, and the many moral and ethical issues that would invoke.

But while a human embryo was successfully cloned in 2013, the process of creating an entire human being has never been attempted because of the likely public outcry. Chinese scientists did clone the first primates in January 2018, long-tailed macques Zhong Zhong and Hua Hua, but there are currently no suggestions that this work will continue into further primate species.

Instead, most funding is being devoted to using cloning to resurrect animals on the verge of extinction. Efforts are underway to clone both the giant panda and the northern white rhino - a species for which there are just two animals left on the planet - while in the last two years, ViaGen have cloned the black footed ferret and Przewalski's horse, both of which are endangered.

Church is leading the most ambitious project, a quest to revive the woolly mammoth, a species that last lived some 4,000 years ago. His de-extinction company Colossal has already raised £11m ($14.5m) in funding to support the idea, which will involve creating an elephant-mammoth hybrid through taking skin cells from Asian elephants and using cloning technology to reprogram them with mammoth DNA.

Induced pluripotent stem cells, ordinary cells that have been turned into stem cells, may have applications in human cloning (Credit: Alamy).

Church describes it as more of an "Arctic elephant", which could play a role in helping revitalise the tundra of the far north. "I could think of a very good reason why we would want to create an Arctic elephant, something that had some of the best features of modern elephants and mammoths," he says."And that would be to do with climate change and restoring the Arctic grasslands."

However there are a number of challenges. The project would involve editing Asian elephant skin cells so they can carry mammoth genes, as well as finding a surrogate elephant mother to carry and give birth to the resulting embryo."As a host, elephants and mammoths are really quite different," says Lovell-Badge. "What happens after birth? Is the female elephant going to think, 'What on Earth have I produced?' How is the mammoth baby going to interact with an elephant?"

Questions have also been asked about whether it is appropriate to revive an extinct animal, given the survival challenges faced by many existing species today - and that mammoths last existed on the planet at a time when Earth's climate and ecosystems were radically different to those of the 21st Century.

Lovell-Badge points out that creating an environment where mammoths could live, along with ensuring there are suitable dietary requirements, could be challenging."It sounds wonderful to say 'Wouldn't it be great to have mammoths back again?'" he argues. "Well would it? Would it be nice for the mammoths?"

But cloning may also have more sobering applications in the coming decades.

In January, surgeons at the University of Maryland School of Medicine transplanted a pig heart into a man with terminal heart disease. It had 10 human genetic modifications that the team hoped would reduce the chances of the organ being rejected.

While the patient sadly only survived for two more months, it captured the attention of doctors around the world who perceived it as a potential way of solving the world's organ transplant shortage.

In Germany - a country that has one of the lowest organ donation rates in Europe - Eckhard Wolf, head of the Center for Innovative Medical Models in Munich, is attempting to clone and breed a range of genetically identical pigs. The idea is to have a suitable population from which organs can be readily harvested and used for so-called xenotransplantation into humans. According to the Organ Transplantation Foundation, there are currently around 8,500 people in Germany diagnosed with organ failure, who have no other treatment options.

Cloning produces genetically identical animals that can be useful for scientific research - though some experts have raised ethical concerns about this (Credit: Getty Images)

Wolf says that there is a need for drastic measures. "The situation is very pressing," he says. "For instance, only about half of the patients who are on the active waiting list for a heart can receive a transplant. Pigs have a number of advantages as donors because the size and function of the organs is relatively fit for humans, genetic engineering is well established in pigs, and the use of pigs is more ethically accepted than non-human primates."

Wolf aims to use cloning to make a number of genetic tweaks on cells under lab conditions, to try to minimise the risk of organ rejection and infection, before creating a generation of pig embryo clones. If all goes smoothly, he intends to begin clinical trials within three years.

However, not everyone is so positive about the use of animals for transplantation purposes. Animal rights activists in Germany have argued that it essentially degrades pigs to the status of organ factories while Germany's Animal Welfare Association have described the project as being ethically questionable.

More than 25 years on from the experiment that captured the world's imagination, cloning is just as relevant and controversial a topic as it was back when Dolly was born.

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From duplicate dogs to modern mammoths, cloning has come a long way since Dolly the sheep took her first tentative steps.

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https://www.straitstimes.com/world/europe/diseases-hidden-in-ice-are-waking-up-as-earths-climate-warms

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Diseases hidden in ice are waking up as Earth's climate warms

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LONDON - Climate change is melting permafrost soils that have been frozen for thousands of years. And as the soils melt, they are releasing ancient, once-dormant viruses and bacteria that are springing back to life, the BBC reported on Thursday (May 4). . Read more at straitstimes.com.

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https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/science/2022/mar/22/oinks-squeals-grunts-scientists-decode-pig-emotions