Early Mars was covered in ice sheets, not flowing rivers, researchers say

Illustration of Mars, polar ice cap

A large number of the valley networks scarring Mars's surface were carved by water melting beneath glacial ice, not by free-flowing rivers as previously thought, according to new UBC research published today in Nature Geoscience. The findings effectively throw cold water on the dominant "warm and wet ancient Mars" hypothesis, which postulates that rivers, rainfall and oceans once existed on the red planet.

To reach this conclusion, lead author Anna Grau Galofre, former PhD student in the department of earth, ocean and atmospheric sciences, developed and used new techniques to examine thousands of Martian valleys. She and her co-authors also compared the Martian valleys to the subglacial channels in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago and uncovered striking similarities.

"For the last 40 years, since Mars's valleys were first discovered, the assumption was that rivers once flowed on Mars, eroding and originating all of these valleys," says Grau Galofre. "But there are hundreds of valleys on Mars, and they look very different from each other. If you look at Earth from a satellite you see a lot of valleys: some of them made by rivers, some made by glaciers, some made by other processes, and each type has a distinctive shape. Mars is similar, in that valleys look very different from each other, suggesting that many processes were at play to carve them."

The similarity between many Martian valleys and the subglacial channels on Devon Island in the Canadian Arctic motivated the authors to conduct their comparative study. "Devon Island is one of the best analogues we have for Mars here on Earth -- it is a cold, dry, polar desert, and the glaciation is largely cold-based," says co-author Gordon Osinski, professor in Western University's department of earth sciences and Institute for Earth and Space Exploration.

In total, the researchers analyzed more than 10,000 Martian valleys, using a novel algorithm to infer their underlying erosion processes. "These results are the first evidence for extensive subglacial erosion driven by channelized meltwater drainage beneath an ancient ice sheet on Mars," says co-author Mark Jellinek, professor in UBC's department of earth, ocean and atmospheric sciences. "The findings demonstrate that only a fraction of valley networks match patterns typical of surface water erosion, which is in marked contrast to the conventional view. Using the geomorphology of Mars' surface to rigorously reconstruct the character and evolution of the planet in a statistically meaningful way is, frankly, revolutionary."

Grau Galofre's theory also helps explain how the valleys would have formed 3.8 billion years ago on a planet that is further away from the sun than Earth, during a time when the sun was less intense. "Climate modelling predicts that Mars' ancient climate was much cooler during the time of valley network formation," says Grau Galofre, currently a SESE Exploration Post-doctoral Fellow at Arizona State University. "We tried to put everything together and bring up a hypothesis that hadn't really been considered: that channels and valleys networks can form under ice sheets, as part of the drainage system that forms naturally under an ice sheet when there's water accumulated at the base."

These environments would also support better survival conditions for possible ancient life on Mars. A sheet of ice would lend more protection and stability of underlying water, as well as providing shelter from solar radiation in the absence of a magnetic field -- something Mars once had, but which disappeared billions of years ago.

While Grau Galofre's research was focused on Mars, the analytical tools she developed for this work can be applied to uncover more about the early history of our own planet. Jellinek says he intends to use these new algorithms to analyze and explore erosion features left over from very early Earth history.

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Cooling of Earth caused by eruptions, not meteors

Volcanic eruption

Ancient sediment found in a central Texas cave appears to solve the mystery of why the Earth cooled suddenly about 13,000 years ago, according to a research study co-authored by a Texas A&M University professor.

Michael Waters, director of The Center for The Study of the First Americans and Distinguished Professor at Texas A&M University, and colleagues from Baylor University and the University of Houston have had their work published in Science Advances.

Some researchers believed the event -- which cooled the Earth by about 3 degrees Centigrade, a huge amount -- was caused by an extraterrestrial impact with the Earth, such as a meteor collision.

But Waters and the team found that the evidence left in layers of sediment in Hall's Cave were almost certainly the result of volcanic eruptions.

Waters said that Hall's Cave, located in the Texas hill country, has a sediment record extending over 20,000 years and he first began researching the cave in 2017.

"It is an exceptional record that offers a unique opportunity for interdisciplinary cooperation to investigate a number of important research questions," he said.

"One big question was, did an extraterrestrial impact occur near the end of the last ice age, about 13,000 years ago as the ice sheets covering Canada were melting, and cause an abrupt cooling that thrust the northern hemisphere back into the ice age for an extra 1,200 years?"

Waters and the team found that within the cave are layers of sediment, first identified by Thomas Stafford (Stafford Research Laboratories, Colorado), that dated to the time of the proposed impact that could answer the question and perhaps even identify the trigger that started the ancient cold snap.

The event also likely helped cause the extinction of large mammals such as mammoth, horse and camel that once roamed North America.

"This work shows that the geochemical signature associated with the cooling event is not unique but occurred four times between 9,000 and 15,000 years ago," said Alan Brandon, professor of geosciences at University of Houston and head of the research team.

"Thus, the trigger for this cooling event didn't come from space. Prior geochemical evidence for a large meteor exploding in the atmosphere instead reflects a period of major volcanic eruptions.

"I was skeptical," Brandon said. "We took every avenue we could to come up with an alternative explanation, or even avoid, this conclusion. A volcanic eruption had been considered one possible explanation but was generally dismissed because there was no associated geochemical fingerprint."

After a volcano erupts, the global spread of aerosols reflects incoming solar radiation away from Earth and may lead to global cooling post eruption for one to five years, depending on the size and timescales of the eruption, the team said.

"The Younger Dryas, which occurred about 13,000 years ago, disrupted distinct warming at the end of the last ice age," said co-author Steven Forman, professor of geosciences at Baylor.

The Earth's climate may have been at a tipping point at the end of Younger Dryas, possibly from the ice sheet discharge into the North Atlantic Ocean, enhanced snow cover and powerful volcanic eruptions that may have in combination led to intense Northern Hemisphere cooling, Forman said.

"This period of rapid cooling coincides with the extinction of a number of species, including camels and horses, and the appearance of the Clovis archaeological tradition," said Waters.

Brandon and fellow University of Houston scientist Nan Sun completed the isotopic analysis of sediments collected from Hall's Cave. They found that elements such as iridium, ruthenium, platinum, palladium and rhenium were not present in the correct proportions, meaning that a meteor or asteroid could not have caused the event.

"The isotope analysis and the relative proportion of the elements matched those that were found in previous volcanic gases," said Sun, lead author of the report.

Volcanic eruptions cause their most severe cooling near the source, usually in the year of the eruption, with substantially less cooling in the years after the eruption, the team said.

The Younger Dryas cooling lasted about 1,200 years, "so a sole volcanic eruptive cause is an important initiating factor, but other Earth system changes, such as cooling of the oceans and more snow cover were needed to sustain this colder period, "Forman said.

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Music training may not make children smarter after all

Music training does not have a positive impact on children's cognitive skills, such as memory, and academic achievement, such as maths, reading or writing, according to a study published in Memory & Cognition.

Previous research trials, carried out to examine a potential causal link between music training and improved cognitive and academic performance, have reached inconsistent conclusions, with some suggesting that there may be a link between music training and better cognitive and academic performance and others finding little effect.

Researchers Giovanni Sala at Fujita Health University, Japan and Fernand Gobet at the London School of Economics and Political Science, UK examined existing experimental evidence regarding the impact of music training on children's non-music cognitive skills and academic achievement.

The authors re-analyzed data from 54 previous studies conducted between 1986 and 2019, including a total of 6,984 children. They found that music training appeared to be ineffective at enhancing cognitive or academic skills, regardless of the type of skill (such as verbal, non-verbal, speed-related and so on), participants' age, and duration of music training.

When comparing between the individual studies included in their meta-analysis, the authors found that studies with high-quality study design, such as those which used a group of active controls -- children who did not learn music, but instead learned a different skill, such as dance or sports -- showed no effect of music education on cognitive or academic performance. Small effects were found in studies that did not include controls or which did not randomize participants into control groups (ones that received different or no training) and intervention groups (ones that received music training).

Giovanni Sala, the lead author said: "Our study shows that the common idea that 'music makes children smarter' is incorrect. On the practical side, this means that teaching music with the sole intent of enhancing a child's cognitive or academic skills may be pointless. While the brain can be trained in such a way that if you play music, you get better at music, these benefits do not generalize in such a way that if you learn music, you also get better at maths. Researchers' optimism about the benefits of music training appears to be unjustified and may stem from misinterpretation of previous empirical data."

Fernand Gobet, the corresponding author added: "Music training may nonetheless be beneficial for children, for example by improving social skills or self-esteem. Certain elements of music instruction, such as arithmetical music notation could be used to facilitate learning in other disciplines."

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'Little brain' or cerebellum not so little after all

When we say someone has a quick mind, it may be in part thanks to our expanded cerebellum that distinguishes human brains from those of macaque monkeys, for example.

Sometimes referred to by its Latin translation as the '"little brain"', the cerebellum is located close to the brainstem and sits under the cortex in the hindbrain. New research at San Diego State University, however, calls the "little" terminology into question.

The cerebellum plays a versatile role, contributing to our five senses as well as pain, movements, thought, and emotion.

It's essentially a flat sheet with the thickness of a crepe, crinkled into hundreds of folds to make it fit into a compact volume about one-eighth the volume of the cerebral cortex. For this reason, the surface area of the cerebellum was thought to be considerably smaller than that of the cerebral cortex.

By using an ultra-high-field 9.4 Tesla MRI machine to scan the brain and custom software to process the resulting images, an SDSU neuroimaging expert discovered the tightly packed folds actually contain a surface area equal to 80% of the cerebral cortex's surface area. In comparison, the macaque's cerebellum is about 30% the size of its cortex.

"The fact that it has such a large surface area speaks to the evolution of distinctively human behaviors and cognition," said Martin Sereno, psychology professor, cognitive neuroscientist and director of the SDSU MRI Imaging Center. "It has expanded so much that the folding patterns are very complex."

Unprecedented insights

Collaborating with imaging and cerebellum experts from the United Kingdom, Netherlands and Canada, Sereno used customized open source FreeSurfer software that he originally developed with colleagues while at the University of California San Diego to computationally reconstruct the folded surface of the cerebellum. The software also unfolds and flattens the cerebellar cortex so as to visualize it to the level of each individual folia -- or thin leaf like fold.

A pioneer in brain imaging who has leveraged functional MRI to uncover visual maps in the brain, Sereno found that when the cerebellum is completely unfolded, it forms a strange "crepe" four inches wide by three feet long. The findings were published this week in a study in PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences).

"Until now we only had crude models of what it looked like," Sereno said. "We now have a complete map or surface representation of the cerebellum, much like cities, counties, and states."

Puzzle pieces

Previous research discovered that while there were many similarities between the cortex and the cerebellum, there was one key difference. In the cerebral cortex, regions representing different parts of the body are arranged roughly like they are in the actual body: juxtaposed and orderly. But in the cerebellum, they were placed more randomly.

"You get a little chunk of the lip, next to a chunk of the shoulder or face, like jumbled puzzle pieces," Sereno explained.

Those parts of the cerebellum are therefore set up to pull in and coordinate information from disparate parts of the body.

It is intriguing to think that there might be analogs of '"fractured somatotopy"' in the cognitive parts of the cerebellum that could help support highly complex, sophisticated cognitive functions, such as language or abstract reasoning, Sereno said.

"When you think of the cognition required to write a scientific paper or explain a concept, you have to pull in information from many different sources. And that's just how the cerebellum is set up."

Until now, the cerebellum was thought to be involved mainly in basic functions like movement, but its expansion over time and its new inputs from cortical areas involved in cognition suggest that it can also process advanced concepts like mathematical equations.

"Now that we have the first high resolution base map of the human cerebellum, there are many possibilities for researchers to start filling in what is certain to be a complex quilt of inputs, from many different parts of the cerebral cortex in more detail than ever before," Sereno said.

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How human sperm really swim: New research challenges centuries-old assumption

A breakthrough in fertility science by researchers from Bristol and Mexico has shattered the universally accepted view of how sperm 'swim'.

More than three hundred years after Antonie van Leeuwenhoek used one of the earliest microscopes to describe human sperm as having a "tail, which, when swimming, lashes with a snakelike movement, like eels in water," scientists have revealed this is an optical illusion.

Using state-of-the-art 3D microscopy and mathematics, Dr Hermes Gadelha from the University of Bristol, Dr Gabriel Corkidi and Dr Alberto Darszon from the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, have pioneered the reconstruction of the true movement of the sperm tail in 3D.

Using a high-speed camera capable of recording over 55,000 frames in one second, and a microscope stage with a piezoelectric device to move the sample up and down at an incredibly high rate, they were able to scan the sperm swimming freely in 3D.

The ground-breaking study, published in the journal Science Advances, reveals the sperm tail is in fact wonky and only wiggles on one side. While this should mean the sperm's one-sided stroke would have it swimming in circles, sperm have found a clever way to adapt and swim forwards.

"Human sperm figured out if they roll as they swim, much like playful otters corkscrewing through water, their one-sided stoke would average itself out, and they would swim forwards," said Dr Gadelha, head of the Polymaths Laboratory at Bristol's Department of Engineering Mathematics and an expert in the mathematics of fertility.

"The sperms' rapid and highly synchronised spinning causes an illusion when seen from above with 2D microscopes -- the tail appears to have a side-to-side symmetric movement, "like eels in water," as described by Leeuwenhoek in the 17th century.

"However, our discovery shows sperm have developed a swimming technique to compensate for their lop-sidedness and in doing so have ingeniously solved a mathematical puzzle at a microscopic scale: by creating symmetry out of asymmetry," said Dr Gadelha.

"The otter-like spinning of human sperm is however complex: the sperm head spins at the same time that the sperm tail rotates around the swimming direction. This is known in physics as precession, much like when the orbits of Earth and Mars precess around the sun."

Computer-assisted semen analysis systems in use today, both in clinics and for research, still use 2D views to look at sperm movement. Therefore, like Leeuwenhoek's first microscope, they are still prone to this illusion of symmetry while assessing semen quality. This discovery, with its novel use of 3D microscope technology combined with mathematics, may provide fresh hope for unlocking the secrets of human reproduction.

"With over half of infertility caused by male factors, understanding the human sperm tail is fundamental to developing future diagnostic tools to identify unhealthy sperm," adds Dr Gadelha, whose work has previously revealed the biomechanics of sperm bendiness and the precise rhythmic tendencies that characterise how a sperm moves forward.

Dr Corkidi and Dr Darszon pioneered the 3D microscopy for sperm swimming.

"This was an incredible surprise, and we believe our state-of the-art 3D microscope will unveil many more hidden secrets in nature. One day this technology will become available to clinical centres," said Dr Corkidi.

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Remember the first time you...? Mysterious brain structure sheds light on addiction

Do you remember where you were when you first heard that two planes had crashed into New York's Twin Towers? Or where you had your first kiss? Our brains are wired to retain information that relates to the context in which highly significant events occurred. This mechanism also underlies drug addiction and is the reason why hanging out in an environment or with people associated with memories of drug use often leads to relapse.

How our brains create this strong association, however, is less clear. Now, new research by Professor Ami Citri and PhD student Anna Terem at Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HU)'s Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Brain Sciences and the Alexander Silberman Institute of Life Science, shows that a relatively obscure brain region known as the claustrum plays a significant role in making these connections. They published their findings in the latest edition of Current Biology.

The researchers' findings fit the idea of "incentive salience," the process that determines the desirability of an otherwise neutral stimulus. For example, a candy store façade becomes very attractive to kids after repeated associations with the rewarding treats that lie within. In time, children unconsciously learn to "want" to see the store stimulus, which is separate from their "liking" the actual candy reward. Taking a closer look at how context becomes associated with cocaine, the researchers found a group of neurons within the claustrum that lit up during cocaine use. Further, these neurons are pivotal in the formation of an incentive salience that links context with the pleasure of cocaine.

To determine when and how the claustrum participates in incentive salience, Citri and his team employed a conditioned-place preference (CPP) test for a group of lab mice. During this test, the mice learned to associate reward with context. The researcher administered cocaine to the mice and placed them in an area with distinctive flooring (rugged) and wall patterns (dots), ones that a mouse would notice, as the drug started to kick in. After a few times of this, when placed in a room where the mice could choose either to hang out in a region similar to the one paired with cocaine (rugged floors and dots wall) or a neutral area (smooth floor and striped walls), the mice would quickly congregate in the area where their drug high had played out.

To test the claustrum's involvement in how a context becomes associated with a given reward, Citri and his team observed the changes in mice behavior when they inhibited these claustral neurons. They found that the inhibition of these neurons inhibited the mice's behavioral responses to cocaine, meaning they no longer preferred hanging out in the cocaine-paired environment. On the other hand, activating these neurons -- even in the absence of any cocaine -- caused the mice to develop a preference for this context.

Importantly, the team found that the activity of the claustrum was not necessary for retrieval of the cocaine memory. Once the mice had been placed in a cocaine-paired context several times to enjoy their cocaine high, the memory for this context was encoded and inhibition of the claustrum had no effect on their preference for the cocaine-paired context. "These findings boosted our confidence that the claustrum is indeed integral to incentive salience, heightening the awareness of the mouse to the context in which it experienced the drug high" shared Citri.

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Coastal cities leave up to 75% of seafloor exposed to harmful light pollution

The global expansion of coastal cities could leave more than three quarters of their neighbouring seafloor exposed to potentially harmful levels of light pollution.

A study led by the University of Plymouth (UK) showed that under both cloudy and clear skies, quantities of light used in everyday street lighting permeated all areas of the water column.

This could pose a significant threat to coastal species, with recent research showing the presence of artificial skyglow can disrupt the lunar compass species use when covering long distances.

However, the current study found that the colour of the wavelengths shone at the surface had a marked difference on how much biologically important light pollution reached the seafloor.

Many of the white LEDs now being used to illuminate the world's towns and cities use a mixture of green, blue and red wavelengths to generate their brightness.

Green and blue wavelengths left up to 76% and 70% of the three-dimensional seafloor area exposed to light pollution respectively, while the presence of red light was less than 1%.

The research -- which also involved Bangor University, the University of Strathclyde and Plymouth Marine Laboratory -- is published in Scientific Reports, an online journal from the publishers of Nature.

It is the first study in the world to quantify the extent to which biologically important artificial light is prevalent on the seafloor and could, in turn, be having a detrimental effect on marine species.

Dr Thomas Davies, Lecturer in Marine Conservation at the University of Plymouth and the paper's lead author, said: "The areas exposed here are not trivial. Our results focused on a busy marine area and demonstrate the light from coastal urban centres is widespread across the sea surface, sub surface and seafloor of adjacent marine habitats. But Plymouth is still just one coastal city with a population of 240,000 people.

"Seventy-five per cent of the world's megacities are now located in coastal regions and coastal populations are projected to more than double by 2060. So unless we take action now it is clear that biologically important light pollution on the seafloor is likely to be globally widespread, increasing in intensity and extent, and putting marine habitats at risk."

The study focussed on Plymouth Sound and the Tamar Estuary which together form a busy waterway and are home to the largest naval port in Western Europe.

It was conducted over four nights in 2018, when there was little or no moonlight, and blue, green, and red artificial light was shone at the sea surface during both clear and cloudy conditions, and at low and high tide.

A combination of mapping and radiative transfer modelling tools were then used to measure exposure at the surface, beneath the surface, and at the seafloor.

The researchers are now calling for a more comprehensive review of the full impacts of coastal light pollution, to try and mitigate against the most harmful effects as coastal cities grow globally.

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Surprising number of exoplanets could host life

Our solar system has one habitable planet -- Earth. A new study shows other stars could have as many as seven Earth-like planets in the absence of a gas giant like Jupiter.

This is the conclusion of a study led by UC Riverside astrobiologist Stephen Kane published this week in the Astronomical Journal.

The search for life in outer space is typically focused on what scientists call the "habitable zone," which is the area around a star in which an orbiting planet could have liquid water oceans -- a condition for life as we know it.

Kane had been studying a nearby solar system called Trappist-1, which has three Earth-like planets in its habitable zone.

"This made me wonder about the maximum number of habitable planets it's possible for a star to have, and why our star only has one," Kane said. "It didn't seem fair!"

His team created a model system in which they simulated planets of various sizes orbiting their stars. An algorithm accounted for gravitational forces and helped test how the planets interacted with each other over millions of years.

They found it is possible for some stars to support as many as seven, and that a star like our sun could potentially support six planets with liquid water.

"More than seven, and the planets become too close to each other and destabilize each other's orbits," Kane said.

Why then does our solar system only have one habitable planet if it is capable of supporting six? It helps if the planets' movement is circular rather than oval or irregular, minimizing any close contact and maintain stable orbits.

Kane also suspects Jupiter, which has a mass two-and-a-half times that of all the other planets in the solar system combined, limited our system's habitability.

"It has a big effect on the habitability of our solar system because it's massive and disturbs other orbits," Kane said.

Only a handful of stars are known to have multiple planets in their habitable zones. Moving forward, Kane plans to search for additional stars surrounded entirely by smaller planets. These stars will be prime targets for direct imaging with NASA telescopes like the one at Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Habitable Exoplanet Observatory.

Kane's study identified one such star, Beta CVn, which is relatively close by at 27 light years away. Because it doesn't have a Jupiter-like planet, it will be included as one of the stars checked for multiple habitable zone planets.

Future studies will also involve the creation of new models that examine the atmospheric chemistry of habitable zone planets in other star systems.

Projects like these offer more than new avenues in the search for life in outer space. They also offer scientists insight into forces that might change life on our own planet one day.

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Laughter acts as a stress buffer -- and even smiling helps

People who laugh frequently in their everyday lives may be better equipped to deal with stressful events -- although this does not seem to apply to the intensity of laughter. These are the findings reported by a research team from the University of Basel in the journal PLOS ONE.

It is estimated that people typically laugh 18 times a day -- generally during interactions with other people and depending on the degree of pleasure they experience. Researchers have also reported differences related to time of day, age, and gender -- for example, it is known that women smile more than men on average. Now, researchers from the Division of Clinical Psychology and Epidemiology of the Department of Psychology at the University of Basel have recently conducted a study on the relationship between stressful events and laughter in terms of perceived stress in everyday life.

Questions asked by app

In the intensive longitudinal study, an acoustic signal from a mobile phone app prompted participants to answer questions eight times a day at irregular intervals for a period of 14 days. The questions related to the frequency and intensity of laughter and the reason for laughing -- as well as any stressful events or stress symptoms experienced -- in the time since the last signal.

Using this method, the researchers working with the lead authors, Dr. Thea Zander-Schellenberg and Dr. Isabella Collins, were able to study the relationships between laughter, stressful events, and physical and psychological symptoms of stress ("I had a headache" or "I felt restless") as part of everyday life. The newly published analysis was based on data from 41 psychology students, 33 of whom were women, with an average age of just under 22.

Intensity of laughter has less influence

The first result of the observational study was expected based on the specialist literature: in phases in which the subjects laughed frequently, stressful events were associated with more minor symptoms of subjective stress. However, the second finding was unexpected. When it came to the interplay between stressful events and intensity of laughter (strong, medium or weak), there was no statistical correlation with stress symptoms. "This could be because people are better at estimating the frequency of their laughter, rather than its intensity, over the last few hours," says the research team.

From Science Daily

Compounds show promise in search for tuberculosis antibiotics

Compounds tested for their potential as antibiotics have demonstrated promising activity against one of the deadliest infectious diseases -- tuberculosis (TB).

Researchers from the John Innes Centre evaluated two compounds with antibacterial properties, which had been produced by the company Redx Pharma as antibiotic candidates, particularly against TB.

TB, which is caused by the bacterium Mycobacterium tuberculosis, is often thought of as a disease of the past. But in recent years it has been increasing due, in part, to rising resistance to treatments and decreasing efficacy of vaccines.

One strategy in the search for new treatments is to find compounds that exploit well-known existing targets for drugs such as the bacterial enzyme DNA gyrase. This member of the DNA topoisomerase family of enzymes is required for bacterial DNA functionality, so compounds that inhibit its activity are much sought after as antibiotic candidates.

Using X-ray crystallography, the team elucidated the molecular details of the action of the compounds against their target.

Surprisingly, a very common mutation in DNA gyrase that causes bacteria to be resistant to a related group of antibiotics, the aminocoumarins, did not lead to resistance to the compounds under scrutiny here.

"We hope that companies and academic groups working to develop new antibiotics will find this study useful. It opens the way for further synthesis and investigation of compounds that interact with this target," says Professor Tony Maxwell one of the authors of the study which appears in the Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy.

To date, efforts to develop new treatments for TB have been unsuccessful, with current treatments having been used for over 50 years.

World Health Organisation (WHO) figures reveal that each day over 4000 people die from TB and 300,000 people fall ill from the disease. Nearly 500,000 people fell ill with drug-resistant TB in 2018.

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