There will be a new name on the timing screens for Free Practice 1 at Silverstone this weekend, as Red Bull Junior Arvid Lindblad jumps into Yuki Tsunoda’s RB21 during the one-hour session.
The 17-year-old has made plenty of waves in junior formula racing over the last couple of years, earning rave reviews from many fans and pundits. But most importantly, Lindblad has impressed members of the Red Bull hierarchy, including Christian Horner and Helmut Marko.
After several Testing of Previous Car (TPC) runs this year, he now has a chance to drive next to Max Verstappen on home soil. Here is everything you need to know about the young British talent…
Motorsport family and karting
Born to a Swedish father, an Indian mother, and into a motorsport-loving family, Lindblad grew up in Surrey, England, but he started on two wheels rather than four. Lindblad’s father had been a motocross rider and at three-years-old, bought his son a bike.
But with his mother wanting him to have a good life balance, ruling that school was a non-negotiable and Lindblad preferring four-wheel racing, they switched to karting at five with his first karting venture at Surrey’s Daytona Sandown Park circuit.
He won several competitions both in the UK and in Europe, including the 2018 British Karting Championship, which he claimed driving for Oliver Rowland Motorsport. The current Formula E driver and Lindblad met when he was seven and, since then, the former Renault and Williams Development Driver has served as a mentor.
Lindblad’s most successful year in karting came in 2021, when he joined the likes of Charles Leclerc and Kimi Antonelli in winning the WSK Euro Series, before coming out on top of the WSK Final Cup. This was in his first year as part of the Red Bull Junior programme, having signed to them at the 2020 Portuguese Grand Prix, aged just 13.
Switch to single-seaters
The Briton’s first full single-seater season started with the 2023 Italian F4 Championship where, helped by his six victories, he finished third in the standings.
Lindblad also finished fourth in the Euro 4 Championship and fifth in Formula 4 UAE, and later that year, he won the F4 race around the famous streets of Macau.
In 2024, Lindblad stepped up to Formula 3 with PREMA Racing, becoming the youngest winner in the championship’s history at 16-years-old when he won the Bahrain Sprint Race on his debut. He finished the year with four victories, which included a historic double at Silverstone – where he became the first driver ever to win every race on a single F3 weekend.
Lindblad went into the final round at Monza as the only rookie in with a chance of claiming the title, before eventually finishing fourth in the standings.
Currently, Lindblad is in the midst of his debut Formula 2 season with Campos Racing, and so far, the Red Bull talent has shone. Until his retirement at Round 7’s Sprint Race in Austria, the rookie had finished every race in the top 10.
He has also won two races – the Jeddah Sprint and the Barcelona Feature – and is currently sixth in the standings with 79 points, trailing leader Richard Verschoor by 35 points with half the season remaining.
How good is Lindblad?
Lindblad’s speed is clear, but his work ethic and ability to adapt has been eye-catching. Jumping up from F4 to F3 is not easy, but his adaptability impressed many, especially PREMA Team Principal Rene Rosin, who said after Silverstone last year he had not expected it.
That trend has continued in F2, and current Team Principal Adrián Campos Jr explained in Austria why he thinks this is the case.
“Arvid is a very strong driver,” said Campos Jr. “When you speak with him you don’t notice he is 17-years-old. That’s his strongest point, he is really mature. It’s like speaking with an old guy who has a 17-year-old body.”
That maturity has also been acknowledged by the FIA World Motor Sport Council, who granted Lindblad a Super license before his 18th birthday – as they did for Mercedes’ Antonelli last year. As the FIA International Sporting Code states: “At the sole discretion of the FIA, a driver judged to have recently and consistently demonstrated outstanding ability and maturity in single-seater formula car competition may be granted a Super Licence at the age of 17-years-old.”
This marks what has been a rapid rise for Lindblad, as in two years he has gone from F4 to the pinnacle of the sport. If he continues to perform just as he has throughout his career, this run out at Silverstone might not be the only time we see his name on the F1 timing screens.
Intense heat has contributed to record-breaking summer temperatures around the globe in recent years. Here’s the latest forecast, and where it’s expected to be warmer than usual:
See temperatures as…
High-temperature forecast for Thursday
Sources: University of Maine Climate Change Institute and the National Centers for Environmental Prediction Global Forecast System
See temperatures as…
Where the forecast temperatures for Thursday were unusually hot
Degrees above or below average for July 3
Sources: University of Maine Climate Change Institute and the National Centers for Environmental Prediction Global Forecast System
Note: Averages based on data from 1979 to 2000.
While tying a single heat wave to climate change requires extensive analysis, scientists have no doubt that heat waves around the world are becoming hotter, more frequent and longer-lasting.
The World Meteorological Organization confirmed in March 2025 that 2024 was the hottest year on record and the first year in which Earth’s surface was more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above its average during the preindustrial era.
Note: Maps on this page show temperature forecasts for the period between 8 p.m. on July 2 through 8 p.m. on July 3. All times Eastern.
For the first time in a decade, Pakistan’s Chief of the Air Staff paid an official visit to the US recently to further enhance bilateral defence cooperation. Air Chief Marshal Zaheer Ahmed Baber Sidhu held top-level meetings at the Pentagon, State Department and Capitol Hill to “further enhance bilateral defence cooperation and mutual interest”.
Coming weeks after Army Chief Field Marshal Asim Munir’s unprecedented lunch with US President Donald Trump, Sidhu’s visit signals a possible recalibration in US strategic priorities in the region. Though shrouded in some ambiguity, the optics and timing of these two visits suggest that the US may be seeking a deeper reengagement with Pakistan’s military establishment — a shift that carries significant implications for India.
What’s behind the renewed US-Pak engagement? For much of the past decade, US-Pakistan relations have been cold. America’s strategic focus shifted decisively toward India as it emerged as a counterweight to China and a central pillar of America’s Indo-Pacific strategy. In contrast, Pakistan’s deepening military and economic partnership with China, particularly through the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), placed it at odds with evolving US strategic objectives. However, the apparent renewal of military-level engagement marks a notable departure. The US hosting Air Chief Marshal Sidhu across its key institutions — notably ahead of the Quad Foreign Ministers Meeting and Indian External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar’s Washington visit — appears more than coincidental. Symbolically, it creates an image of equivalence between India and Pakistan, a perception India has consistently sought to dispel.
America’s renewed interest in Pakistan could be driven by several factors. Pakistan’s military has intensified operations against Islamic State Khorasan (IS-K), whose regional rise in Afghanistan and spillover into Pakistan represents a shared concern for both Pakistan and the US. As the US recalibrates its counterterrorism posture post-Afghanistan withdrawal, Pakistan remains a geographically critical partner.
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Reports of Munir’s meeting with Trump, with suggestions of discussions around impending US military action against Iran, added another dimension. Amid heightened tensions with Tehran, Pakistan’s strategic location and its influence over key border logistics and airspace made it an indispensable partner.After years of favouring India in its South Asia calculus, America may now be reintroducing strategic ambiguity. This could serve several purposes such as checking India’s drift toward multipolar hedging (for example, its neutrality in the Russia-Ukraine conflict), pushing New Delhi toward more alignment within the Quad, and creating options for leverage in the Indo-Pacific balance.Why India should be concerned From an Indian perspective, the implications of this renewed US-Pakistan engagement are concerning. India has long cherished its emerging special relationship with the US, particularly in defense cooperation, technology transfers and intelligence sharing. If America begins equating Islamabad as a parallel partner in regional military affairs, India’s perceived strategic primacy could be compromised.
With Pakistan’s civilian institutions weakened and economic distress mounting, any renewed US support, particularly to the military, risks reinforcing the dominant role of the army and air force in Pakistan’s political system. A more emboldened Pakistan military, with a sense of external endorsement, could adopt a more aggressive posture toward India, especially in Kashmir or along the Line of Control (LoC). The juxtaposition of hosting Jaishankar and Pakistan’s top air force official in parallel engagements sends mixed signals about US commitment to its strategic ties with India and its Indo-Pacific strategy.
While it is too early to see it as a strategic realignment, America’s renewed overtures to Pakistan’s military leadership mark a significant development. India’s economic size and its role in Indo-Pacific maritime security makes it indispensabile to the US global strategy. But it must also prepare for a more competitive regional environment where a Pakistani military backed by the US can play aggressive games.
Flashes this year launched an Instagram alternative built on top of the Bluesky social network. Now available on the App Store, the app offers a different way to browse the visual posts on Bluesky. Instead of viewing them in a timeline-like feed, similar to X, the app draws inspiration from photo-based social networks, like Instagram.
What you can post
The app, built by Berlin-based developer Sebastian Vogelsang, runs on the same underlying protocol that powers Bluesky, the AT Protocol (or atproto for short). That means it will have the same requirements around posting images and videos as you’d find on Bluesky directly.
Originally, that meant support for posting up to four images and videos of one minute in length, but as of the Bluesky version 1.99 update released on March 10, users have been able to upload videos up to 3 minutes in length.
Image Credits:Flashes
How Flashes is like Instagram — and how it’s different
Flashes is somewhat similar to Instagram, as it offers a scrollable feed of photos and videos, user profiles, and even photo filters to enhance your images when posting.
Instead of having to start your network from scratch, Flashes’ users are immediately tapped into the wider Bluesky community, which now has over 37 million users. Even if not all of Bluesky’s users are on Flashes, their images and videos will be displayed in the app, as it essentially filters the Bluesky feed for visual content.
When you post on Flashes, it creates a post that appears on Bluesky as well. (For that reason, you may want to make a secondary Bluesky account if you want to keep the two networks separate.)
Image Credits:Flashes
In addition, the app lets you browse your own Bluesky feeds and choose from Bluesky’s over 50,000 custom feeds, including those that focus on particular topics — like art, birds, gardening, or cat pics, for example — or those dedicated to specific formats, like Bluesky’s video feed.
As you browse through the posts in Flashes, you can like, repost, and reply to them, just as you could on Bluesky itself. Those interactions will also appear in Bluesky’s app, while Bluesky users’ interactions will show up in Flashes.
Photographers looking for a place to showcase their work will appreciate Flashes’ “Portfolio” feature.
To toggle this setting on, you’ll head to the “Advanced” tab on your user profile, then tap on “Flashes profile.” Here, there will be an option to enable Portfolio, which lets you curate which images should appear on your Flashes user profile.
You can also customize your user profile further by opting to show or hide likes, lists, and feeds, or using other media filtering options.
How to get started
To use Flashes, you’ll first need a Bluesky account. If you already have one, you can sign in with those credentials.
If not, you can choose to sign up for a Bluesky account from within the Flashes app. The app defaults to setting up your account on the main Bluesky server, bluesky.social, but more technical users can opt to set up a custom hosting provider instead.
To create your account, you’ll need to provide an email address, password, and date of birth, then accept the terms of use, which means you agree to Bluesky’s Community Guidelines and Terms.
Once signed in, you can immediately start browsing the images and videos shared on your Bluesky timeline or any other Bluesky feed, or post your own media.
A subscription may be coming
Vogelsang hopes that Flashes will help pull in more users to the Bluesky community, including those who aren’t as interested in a Twitter/X-like experience. Instead, the app appeals more to people looking for open alternatives to Meta’s Instagram.
It’s not the only app building in this space, however. Another app working on similar experiences is Pinksky. Meanwhile, users of Mastodon’s social network may prefer Pixelfed, which uses the fediverse’s ActivityPub protocol under the hood instead of Bluesky’s atproto.
Image Credits:Flashes
Over time, Vogelsang wants to add more features to Flashes, like push notifications, support for multiple accounts, bookmarks, and more editing options.
Plans to add subscriptions with premium features are in the works, which would help fund Android and web development. These paid tiers could also provide premium access to Vogelsang’s third-party Bluesky app, Skeets, and his video-focused app, Bluescreen.
Other planned features include iPad layout improvements, support for longer videos, posts that are only visible for a limited time (like Stories), albums, and batched image transfer from other platforms. Eventually, the developer would like to evolve Flashes to be its own AT Protocol-based platform, while still being compatible with Bluesky’s network.
The app is a free download from the App Store and requires iOS 17 or higher to run.
The actor Lea Thompson has had a distinguished screen career but hesitated to share it with her daughters when they were growing up. “I did not show them most of my stuff because I end up kissing people all the time and it was traumatic to my children,” she recalls. “Even when they were little the headline was, ‘Mom is kissing someone that’s not Dad and it’s making me cry!’”
Thompson’s most celebrated role would be especially hard to explain. As Lorraine Baines in Back to the Future, she falls in lust with her own son, Marty McFly, a teenage time traveller from 1985 who plunges into 1955 at the wheel of a DeLorean car.
Back to the Future, released 40 years ago on Thursday, is both entirely of its time and entirely timeless. It was a box office summer smash, set a benchmark for time travel movies and was quoted by everyone from President Ronald Reagan to Avengers: Endgame. It is arguably a perfect film, without a duff note or a scene out of place, a fantastic parable as endlessly watchable as It’s a Wonderful Life or Groundhog Day.
It also, inevitably, reflects the preoccupations of its day. An early sequence features Libyan terrorists from the era of Muammar Gaddafi, a caricature wisely dropped from a stage musical adaptation. In one scene the young George McFly turns peeping tom as he spies on Lorraine getting undressed. To some, the film’s ending equates personal fulfilment with Reagan-fuelled materialism. It caught lightning in a bottle in a way that is unrepeatable.
“If you made Back to the Future in 2025 and they went back 30 years, it would be 1995 and nothing would look that different,” Thompson, 64, says by phone from a shoot in Vancouver, Canada. “The phones would be different but it wouldn’t be like the strange difference between the 80s and the 50s and how different the world was.”
Bob Gale, co-writer of the screenplay, agrees everything fell into the right place at the right time, including the central partnership between young Marty (Michael J Fox) and white-haired scientist Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd). The 74-year-old says from Los Angeles: “Oh man, the film wouldn’t even be made today. We’d go into the studio and they’d say, what’s the deal with this relationship between Marty and Doc? They’d start interpreting paedophilia or something. There would be a lot of things they have problems with.”
Gale had met the film’s director, Robert Zemeckis, at the USC School of Cinema in 1972 and together they sold several TV scripts to Universal Studios, caught the eye of Steven Spielberg and John Milius and collaborated on three films. The pair had always wanted to make a time travel movie but couldn’t find the right hook. Then Gale had an epiphany.
“We put a time travel story on the back burner until I found my dad’s high school yearbook and boom, that was when the lightning bolt hit me and I said, ha, this would be cool: kid goes back in time and ends up in high school with his dad!”
Gale and Zemeckis pitched the script more than 40 times over four years but studios found it too risky or risque. But Spielberg saw its potential and came in as executive producer. After Zemeckis scored a hit with Romancing the Stone in 1984, Universal gave the green light.
The character of Doc Brown was inspired by Gale’s childhood neighbour, a photographer who showed him the “magic” of developing pictures in a darkroom, and the educational TV show Mr Wizard which demonstrated scientific principles. Then Lloyd came in and added an interpretation based on part Albert Einstein, part Leopold Stokowski.
Thompson was cast as Lorraine after a successful audition. She felt that her background as a ballet and modern dancer gave her a strong awareness of the movement and physicality required to play both versions of Lorraine: one young and airy, the other middle-aged and beaten down by life.
“I was perfectly poised for that character,” she says. “I understood both the dark and the light of Lorraine McFly and understood the hilarity of being super sexually attracted to your son. I thought that was frickin’ hilarious. I understood the subversive comedy of it.”
Thompson has previously worked with Eric Stoltz, who was cast in the lead role of Marty at the behest of Sidney Sheinberg, a Universal executive who had nurtured Spielberg and put Jaws into production. But over weeks of filming, starting in November 1984, it became apparent that Stoltz’s serious tone was not working.
Gale recalls: “He wasn’t giving us the kind of humour that we thought the character should have. He actually thought the movie turned out to be a tragedy because he ends up in a 1985 where a lot of his life is different. People can argue about that: did the memories of his new past ripple into his brain, did he remember both his lives? That’s an interesting conversation to have and it gets more interesting the more beer you drink.”
Eventually it fell to Zemeckis to inform Stoltz that his services were no longer required. Gale continues: “He said he thought that possibly Eric was relieved: it was not like a devastating blow to him. This is just hindsight and speculation but maybe Eric’s agents thought that it would be a good career move for him to do a movie like this that had Spielberg involved. Who knows?”
Stoltz’s abrupt departure came as a shock to the rest of the cast. Thompson says: “It was horrible. He was my friend and obviously a wonderful actor. Everybody wants to think that making a movie is fun and that we’re laughing for the 14 hours we’re standing in the middle of a street somewhere.
“But it’s also scary because you need to feel like you’ve made a little family for that brief amount of time. So the minute someone gets fired, you’re like, oh wait, this is a big business, this is serious, this is millions of dollars being spent.”
Lea Thompson and Michael J Fox in Back to the Future. Photograph: Universal/Allstar
Stoltz was replaced by the young Canadian actor Michael J Fox, whom Zemeckis and Gale had wanted in the first place, and several scenes had to be reshot. Fox was simultaneously working on the sitcom Family Ties so was often sleep-deprived. But his boundless charm, frazzled energy and comic timing – including ad libs – were the missing piece of the jigsaw.
Thompson comments: “He is gifted but he also worked extremely hard at his shtick like the great comedians of the 20s, 30s and 40s: the falling over, the double take, the spit take, the physical comedy, the working on a bit for hours and hours like the greats, like Laurel and Hardy and Charlie Chaplin. Michael understood that.
“Being a dancer, I was fascinated and kind of weirdly repelled because it didn’t seem like the acting that we were all trying to emulate: the De Niro kind of super reality-based acting that we were in awe of in the 80s, coming out of the great films of the 70s. I feel like Eric Stoltz, who is a brilliant actor, was trying to do more of that. Michael was the face of this new acting, especially comedy acting, which was in a way a throwback and a different energy.”
It was this lightness of touch that enabled Fox and Thompson to carry off moments that might otherwise have seemed weird, disturbing and oedipal. When 1950s Lorraine – who has no idea that Marty is her future son – eventually kisses him inside a car, she reports that it is like “kissing my brother” and the romantic tension dissolves, much to the audience’s relief.
Thompson says: “It was a difficult part and it was a very dangerous thread to put through a needle.I have to fall out of love with him just by kissing him and I remember Bob Zemeckis obsessing about that moment. It was also a hard shot to get because it was a vintage car and they couldn’t take it apart. Bob was also worried about the moment when I had to fall back in love with George [Marty’s father] after he punches Biff.
“For those moments to be so important is part of the beauty of the movie. These are ‘small’ people; these are not ‘great’ people; they’re not doing ‘great’ things. These are people who live in a little tiny house in Hill Valley and to make the moments of falling out of love and falling in love so beautiful with that incredible score is fascinating.”
Back to the Future was the biggest hit of the year, grossing more than $200m in the US and entering the cultural mainstream. When Doc asks Marty who is president in 1985, Marty replies Ronald Reagan and Brown says in disbelief: “Ronald Reagan? The actor? Then who’s vice-president? Jerry Lewis?” Reagan, a voracious film viewer, was so amused by the joke that he made the projectionist stop and rewind it. He went on to namecheck the film and quote its line, “Where we’re going, we don’t need roads,” in his 1986 State of the Union address.
Thompson, whose daughters are the actors Madelyn Deutch and Zoey Deutch, was amazed by Back to the Future’s success. “But when I look at the movie, I do understand the happy accident of why it’s become the movie it’s become to generation after generation. The themes are powerful. The execution was amazing. The casting was great. The idea was brilliant. It was a perfect script. Those things don’t come together usually.”
And if she had her own time machine, where would she go? “If I could be a man, I might go back to Shakespeare but as a woman you don’t want to go anywhere in time. Time has been hard on women. So for me, whenever I’m asked this question, it’s not a lighthearted answer. I can only give you a political answer.”
The film ends with Doc whisking Marty and girlfriend Jennifer into the DeLorean and taking off into the sky. But Gale points out that the message “to be continued” was added only for the home video release, as a way to announce a sequel, rather than being in the original theatrical run.
Back to the Future Part II, part of which takes place in 2015, brought back most of the main characters including the villain Biff Tannen, who becomes a successful businessman who opens a 27-storey casino and uses his money to gain political influence. Many viewers have drawn a comparison with Donald Trump.
Robert Zemeckis, Bob Gale, Michael J Fox, Neil Canton and Steven Spielberg on the set of Back to the Future. Photograph: Amblin Entertainment/Universal Pictures/Kobal/Rex/Shutterstock
Gale explains: “Biff in the first movie is not based on Donald Trump; Biff is just an archetype bully. When Biff owns a casino, there was a Trump influence in that, absolutely. Trump had to put his name on all of his hotels and his casinos and that’s what Biff does too.
“But when people say, oh, Biff was based on Donald Trump, well, no, that wasn’t the inspiration for the character. Everybody has a bully in their life and that’s who Biff was. There’s nothing that resembles Donald Trump in Biff in Part I.”
Back to the Future Part III, in which Marty and Doc and thrown back to the old west, was released in 1990. A year later Fox was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease at the age of 29. He went public with his diagnosis in 1998 and became a prominent advocate for research and awareness. He also continued acting, with roles in shows such as The Good Wife and Curb Your Enthusiasm, and in October will publish a Back to the Future memoir entitled Future Boy.
Thompson, whose brothers both have Parkinson’s, sees Fox twice a year.“He’s endlessly inspiring. He’s very smart and he’s done the spiritual work, the psychological work on himself to not be bitter about something awful happening to him but also be honest: this sucks.”
Time’s arrow moves in one direction but Back to the Future found a way to stage a comeback. One night after seeing the Mel Brooks musical The Producers in New York, Zemeckis’s wife Leslie suggested that Back to the Future would make a good musical. Gale duly wrote the book and was a producer of the show, which premiered in Manchester in 2020 and has since played in London, New York and around the world.
Gale says: “It was total euphoria. The first time I saw the dress rehearsal with the DeLorean, before we had an audience, I went out of my mind how great it was, and then to see the audience going completely out of their minds with everything was just such a joyous validation.
“I’m so blessed to have a job where I get to make people happy. That’s a great thing to be able to do and get paid for that. I don’t ever take any of this for granted. I’m having a great time and the idea that Back to the Future is still with us after all these years, as popular as it ever was, is a blessing. I think about it all the time that if we had not put Michael J Fox in the movie, you and I probably wouldn’t even be having this conversation right now.”
Why, indeed, are we still talking about Back to the Future four decades later? “Every person in the world wonders, how did I get here, how did my parents meet? The idea that your parents were once children is staggering when you realise it when you’re about seven or eight years old.
“Your parents are these godlike creatures, and they’re always saying, well, when I was your age, and you’re going, what are they talking about, how could they have ever been my age? Then at some point it all comes together. If you have a younger sibling and you’re watching them grow up, you realise, oh, my God, my parents were once screw-ups like me!”
And if Gale had a time machine, where would he go?“I don’t think I would go to the future because I’d be too scared,” he says. “We all see what happens when you know too much about the future. My mom, before she was married, was a professional musician, a violinist, and she had a nightclub act in St Louis called Maxine and Her Men. I’d like to travel back in time to 1947 and see my mother performing in a nightclub. That’s what I would do.”
All mosquitoes used in this study were colony-reared An. gambiae (Kisumu strain). Eggs to establish the colony were initially obtained from the Malaria Alert Centre, Blantyre, Malawi, and the colony was maintained in the laboratory facilities at Majete Wildlife Park in Chikwawa District, Malawi. The colony rearing facility was not climate controlled, and the temperature and relative humidity in this facility ranged from 24 °C to 36 °C and from 62% to 85%, respectively. Mosquitoes were allowed to blood-feed twice per week on a human arm, and eggs were distributed over larval rearing trays (46 × 30 × 9 cm) filled with water from a well near the laboratory facility or from a tap at the nearby Kapichira Power Station. Each tray held 300–400 larvae, fed on ground pellets of Marltons koi and pond fish food (Marltons Pet Care Pty Ltd, Westmead, South Africa). Pupae were collected daily and placed in cages for emergence to adults. All cages with adult mosquitoes were provided a 10% sucrose solution via a piece of soaked cotton wool. Cages with experimental mosquitoes were not provided with a blood meal prior to the experiments.
Experimental set-up
Experiments were performed in a semi-field screened enclosure measuring 12.0 × 12.0 × 2.1–4.0 m (length, width, height) at the Majete Wildlife Park in Chikwawa District, Malawi. The walls of the screened enclosure were made from fiber glass, mosquito-proof screening (Phifer Inc, Tuscaloosa, AL, USA), and the roof was a waterproof tarpaulin. Within this enclosure, we built an experimental house measuring 5.0 × 3.0 × 2.2–2.7 m (length × width × height) (Fig. 1). The walls of the experimental house were constructed from locally produced bricks and plastered with cement, and the roof was made of corrugated iron sheets, including a 20-cm overhang. The front wall of the experimental house was fitted with a door (inner dimensions 197 × 60 cm) in the middle, two windows (30 × 30 cm) and four removable eave frames (inner dimensions 90 × 10 cm per frame). The back wall of the house was also fitted with two windows and four eave frames, but no door. The wooden door, window frames and eave frames were painted black with water-based chalkboard paint.
Fig. 1
The experimental set-up for studying house-entry behavior of female malaria mosquitoes. a Schematic top view of the screened enclosure (12 × 12 m) including the experimental house (brown rectangle 3 × 5 m), the 4 high-speed cameras (labeled C1a, C2a, C1b, C2b), the infra-red lights for camera illumination (IR) and the mosquito release point (R). b Picture of the experimental setup, showing the large screened enclosure and within it the experimental house with door, window and metal roof with eave, and the 4 high-speed cameras and infra-red lights. c Example showing an overlay of all mosquito flight tracks within 1 experimental night with eaves and windows screened. A blue line was drawn each time a single mosquito entered the view. Orange to red colors are used to indicate when more individuals were tracked at the same time. d The three-dimensional (3D) coordinate system and volume in front of the house in which the mosquitoes could be tracked using our videography system. The X-axis and Y-axis are oriented normal and parallel to the front wall of the house, and the Z-axis is oriented vertically. The 3D trackable volume is highlighted in white and projected on the floor, house and the house symmetry plane. The location of the eave and window are indicated in red, with an eave height of between 2.12 and 2.31 m and a window height of between 1.48 and 1.97 m. e, f To study the flight activity near the eave and window, we defined corresponding volumes-of-interest near these structures, as defined by the blue boxes.
The windows and eave frames could be left completely open, fitted with insect screens or closed completely with wooden shutters. The screens were made of charcoal-colored fiber glass (Wire Weaving Co. Dinxperlo, The Netherlands), and the shutters were made of plywood painted black with water-based chalkboard paint. Using this system, we were able to systematically investigate the effect of window and eave closure and screening on mosquito house-entry behavior. The door remained closed overnight for all experimental treatments.
Two beds were positioned inside the house, one along each outside wall, and each bed was covered with an untreated bednet. During experimental nights, one adult man slept in each bed, under the bednets, to act as a bait for mosquitoes. Three pairs of adult men volunteered to sleep in the house for 10 experimental nights each. Written informed consent was obtained from the volunteer sleepers. The College of Medicine Research and Ethics Committee (COMREC) in Malawi approved the study (Proposal Number P.02/19/2598). A US Centers for Disease Prevention and Control (CDC) light trap (John W. Hock Ltd, Gainesville FL, USA) was placed near each bed to collect a sample of the mosquitoes that entered the house [28, 29].
Camera and real-time mosquito tracking set-up
A multi-camera videography system was used to track the three-dimensional (3D) flight kinematics of An. gambiae mosquitoes around the experimental house. The videography system consisted of four synchronized machine-vision cameras (Basler acA2040-90umNIR, USB 3.0; Basler AG, Ahrensburg, Germany), equipped with 16-mm f1.4 wide-angle lenses (Kowa LM16HC; Kowa Optical Products Co., Ltd., Nagoya, Japan), with lens aperture set at f2.8. The cameras were operating at 50 frames per second (fps), with a 1-ms exposure time. To improve the light sensitivity of the cameras, pixels within each 2 × 2-megapixel camera image were binned 2 × 2. Binning combines the charge from adjacent pixels (in this case, 2 × 2-pixel bins), resulting in increased light sensitivity but a reduced spatial resolution (in this case, reduced to 1 × 1 megapixel). Image capture on the cameras was synchronized by means of an external trigger pulse, generated by an Arduino Uno microcontroller board (Arduino, Monza, Lombardy, Italy) (https://github.com/strawlab/triggerbox.git).
To protect the cameras and lenses from water, heat and dust, each set was placed in a camera housing (Transpac THP 4000; Basler AG, Ahrensburg, Germany). These camera housings were mounted onto an aluminum frame (MayTec Aluminium Systemtechnik GmbH, Olching, Germany) that was fixed to the concrete floor on which the house was built (Fig. 1b). The cameras were placed at an approximate distance of 2.5 m from the front wall of the house, at heights between 0.8 and 1.3 m. As a result, the camera system imaged the front, right side of the experimental house, including half the door and one window. The cameras were oriented slightly upwards to film the volume below the roof near the eave area. The dimensions of the area in front of the house where mosquitoes could be tracked were approximately 2.5 × 1.0 × 1.5 m (Fig. 1d).
The filming volume was illuminated with eight near-infrared light-emitting-diode (NIR-LED) lights (two ABUS TVAC71000-60° lights and six ABUS TVAC71070-95° lights; ABUS, Volmarstein, Germany). The NIR-LED lights were mounted on a frame placed on the concrete slab directly below the area of interest (Fig. 1b), and the lights were directed upwards and arranged to uniformly light the filming volume near the eave and window, aiming for optimal contrast between the illuminated mosquitoes and the dark background of the house.
We used an automated tracking software [30] to track in real-time the positions of multiple mosquitoes flying in the four camera views, and from these we reconstructed the 3D flight tracks. The tracking software ran on a single laptop (Lenovo ThinkPad P51; Lenovo, Beijing, China) with an Intel Xeon E3-v6 processor and Ubuntu Linux operating system, which performed the real-time image analysis and object tracking for all four cameras, as well as the 3D flight track reconstruction. Based on pilot recordings, sensor gain was set to 1.0 for all cameras, and the maximum number of simultaneously tracked mosquitoes was set to 10. Tracks were reconstructed only when the mosquito was visible in at least two of the four camera views. A dynamic background model was used with update intervals for each 100 frames and a 1% weight factor to compensate for slow changes in illumination conditions.
Cameras were calibrated with the multi camera self-calibration routine [31] by tracking a single moving LED light with each of the four cameras (Cree SunBright 535 nm Green LED; CreeLED Inc, Durham, NC, USA). This calibration was aligned to world reference points based on landmarks on the experimental house. The resulting coordinate system in the world reference frame was defined as X, Y, Z, with the X-axis oriented perpendicular to the house front wall, the Y-axis oriented parallel to the house front wall along the ground and the Z-axis oriented vertically. We defined values within this coordinate system as {x, y, z}, with the origin {x, y, z} = {0,0,0} located against the house front wall (x = 0), on the ground in front of the house (z = 0) and (y = 0) at the right side of the door frame as observed from the cameras.
The calibration procedure was repeated every experimental day to correct any inadvertent change in camera position. A correction for lens distortions was generated for each camera at the start of the experiment, using a 6 × 10 checkerboard pattern with 90-mm squares. Distortion parameters were computed using openCV procedures (https://docs.opencv.org). Tracking results were corrected for lens distortions.
Videography experiments were performed from 20:00 to 04:00 h. If volunteers briefly left the experimental house during the night, a 5-min buffer period was marked prior to leaving and post re-entering the experimental house. Tracking data within those time slots were removed from further analyses.
Eave and window modifications
We evaluated five experimental house modifications (Fig. 2). For our control condition, both the eaves and windows were fully open (eaves open – windows open [EO-WO]). We used two treatments to test the effect of window modifications on mosquito house entry behavior. In the first treatment, we screened the windows and left the eaves open (EO-WS), and in the second treatment we closed the windows while leaving the eaves open (EO-WC). To test the effect of eave modifications on mosquito house entry behavior, we used treatments in which we screened or closed the eaves while, in each case, screening the windows (ES-WS and EC-WS, respectively).
Fig. 2
Overview of the five different experimental treatments, in which we systematically closed or screened the window and eave. In the overview, the three rows show the different window treatment conditions (from bottom to top: open, closed and screened), and the three columns show the eave treatments (from left to right: open, closed and screened). Each condition was defined using a four-letter code, where E, W, O, C, and S stand for Eave, Window, Open, Closed and Screened, respectively. The door was closed during all experiments. Eave and window treatments were changed using removable frames, as shown in the inset image. The inset image shows the back of the experimental house, where the eave and window treatments were the same as the front.
Experimental procedure
Before each experiment, the house was prepared by closing, screening or leaving open the eaves and windows, as randomly assigned for each replicate night of the study (Fig. 2). Each treatment was in place for 6 replicate nights (see experimental treatment schedule in Additional file 1: Table S1).
On the day of each experimental replicate, 500 female mosquitoes (5–8 days old and not previously blood-fed), were selected before 12:00 h and set aside in the insectary in a release bucket (diameter 12.5 cm, height 12.5 cm), covered with a mesh and provided with water-soaked cotton wool. Two volunteers slept inside the house under untreated bednets, starting at 19:30 h. The volunteers’ heads were positioned towards the front (door) side of the house, and each pair of volunteers shifted beds (to the left or right side of the house) after each replicate. At 19:30 h, the two CDC light traps at the end of each bed were turned on, with their lights switched off, and the bucket with mosquitoes was placed in the screened enclosure, 5.8 m in front of the experimental house.
At 20:00 h, mosquitoes were released from the bucket by lifting the mesh using a fishing line operated from outside the screened enclosure. Mosquito flight was tracked until 04:00 h, after which the CDC light traps were turned off, and the volunteers could leave the house. Any temporary absence of volunteers during the recording period was recorded in a logbook. A Prokopack aspirator (John W. Hock Company) was used to collect mosquitoes from inside the experimental house at 04:00 h. Together with these Prokopack catches, CDC light trap catches were briefly frozen, and the collected mosquitoes were then counted. Mosquitoes remaining in the release bucket were also counted, and the number of responding mosquitoes for each replicate night was defined by subtracting the number remaining in the release bucket from the initial 500 mosquitoes. Remaining mosquitoes found inside the screened enclosure later that day were removed with the Prokopack and discarded after freezing. Experimental replicates were carried out no more frequently than every other day to ensure proper preparation and to allow any uncaught mosquitoes remaining in the screened enclosure to die before the next experimental replicate.
Data analysis
The real-time tracking algorithm used a Kalman predictor to reconstruct 3D flight paths from stereoscopic videography data [30], and thus the output data consisted of Kalman-filtered flight paths defined by location, flight velocity and the Kalman covariance error e(t). In post-processing, we filtered the resulting database of flight tracks in two steps. First, to remove potential extrapolation errors from the Kalman predictor, we deleted the end of tracks if either the estimated flight speed exceeded 1.5 m/s or the Kalman covariance error was > 0.01. Second, we then discarded all tracks that were shorter than 10 cm or less than 0.2 s (10 video frames at 50 fps). These settings were based on a sensitivity analysis and the assumption that flying Anopheles mosquitoes have a maximum flight speed of < 1.5 m/s. The resulting flight paths consisted of the temporal dynamics of the 3D location {x(t), y(t), z(t)} and velocity {u(t), v(t), w(t)} of each flying mosquito; these were used for our subsequent analyses.
We used all combined flight tracks per treatment to calculate average mosquito density distributions and flight velocity distributions around the house. For this, we divided the filming volume into 40 × 40 × 40 voxels (spatial bins), resulting in an approximate voxel size of 5 cm in the X- and Z-direction, and 7.5 cm in the Y-direction. In each voxel we estimated the mosquito density as the relative proportion of time mosquitoes spent in that voxel, defined as T* = Ti/Ttotal, where Ti is the time spent in voxel i, and Ttotal is the total flight time. We visualized these density distributions as heat maps projected on three two-dimensional (2D) planes (X–Y, X–Z and Y–Z). We determined the flight velocity vector in each voxel as the mean flight velocity of all mosquitoes that passed through that voxel. We visualized the velocity distributions using streamline plots derived from these velocity fields, projected on the same set of 2D planes as for the density distributions (X–Y, X–Z and Y–Z).
For measuring and comparing flight activities near the eave and window area, we defined volumes-of-interest around the eave and window (Fig. 1e, f, respectively). These volumes had the same rectangular or square shape as the eave or window, respectively, but extended 10 cm on each side (in the Y- and Z-direction). The volumes started at the wall and extended 30 cm outward in the direction perpendicular to the wall (in the X-direction). We then identified all flight tracks that intersected these volumes around the eave and window. Based on these, we quantified flight activity around the window and eave using the time that mosquitoes spent in the corresponding volumes. We determined this time spent in each volume by summing all durations that flight tracks remained in the defined volume; this was done for each experimental night and for an array of time bins with a temporal resolution of 10 min.
Next, we used the flight tracks around the window and eave to study when and how mosquitoes visited the window and eave, and when and how they arrived, departed, remained in and returned to these volumes. ‘Arrivals’ were defined as flight tracks that started at least 10 cm outside the volume-of-interest and ended within the volume. ‘Departures’ started within the volume-of-interest and ended at least 10 cm outside the volume. ‘Visitors’ started outside the volume-of-interest, entered the volume, left the volume and finally ended outside the volume. ‘Returnees’ started inside the volume-of-interest, left the volume, re-entered the volume and finally ended inside the volume. ‘Remainers’ started and ended inside the volume-of-interest, without moving outside the volume. It should be noted that if a flight track ended within the window or eave volume, the mosquito might have entered the house or might have landed on the house, because the tracking algorithm only tracked mosquitoes flying outside the house.
Based on these data, we determined the number of mosquitoes that showed each type of flight behavior (visiting, arriving, departing, remaining and returning). We then used the flight kinematics data to determine the behavior-specific flight dynamics around the eave and window. Specifically, we constructed streamline plots, both per treatment and across all 30 replicates, for all mosquitoes that arrived at the volumes around the eave and window. To focus on the approach kinematics only, we removed the parts of the tracks after arrival.
We used analysis of variance (ANOVA) to test for differences among treatments in various flight kinematics and house entry parameters. The dependent parameters were the number of responding mosquitoes, the percentage of responding mosquitoes collected inside the experimental house, flight track duration (time spent) and the number of flight tracks. We used Tukey’s HSD for pairwise comparisons when the ANOVA test showed a significant difference between treatments. We also used ANOVA to test for differences in house entry rates among the three pairs of volunteer sleepers. We defined P < 0.05 as significant, 0.05 ≤ P < 0.10 as marginal, and P ≥ 0.10 as non-significant.
Russian President Vladimir Putin and U.S. President Donald Trump.
Mikhail Metzel | Evelyn Hockstein | Via Reuters
President Donald Trump said he will speak to Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday at 10 a.m. ET.
The call, announced by Trump in a Truth Social post, comes two days after the U.S. said it would halt some missile and ammunitions shipments to Ukraine, which continues to fight off invading Russian forces.
U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered the pause weeks after ordering a review of America’s munitions stockpile, sources told NBC News.
White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly told NBC that the “decision was made to put America’s interests first” following the Pentagon’s review of U.S. military support for other countries.
“The strength of the United States Armed Forces remains unquestioned — just ask Iran,” Kelly said.
The decision fueled further concerns from those skeptical of Trump’s commitment to providing U.S. assistance to Ukraine in the fourth year of its war with Russia.
“Ukraine has never asked America to send in the 82nd airborne; they’ve asked for the weapons to defend their homeland and people from Russia attacks,” said Mike Pompeo, who served as secretary of State during Trump’s first presidential term, in an X post Wednesday.
“Letting Russia win this war would be a unmitigated disaster for the American people and our security around the world,” Pompeo wrote.
On Wednesday, Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said the department “continues to provide the President with robust options regard regarding military aid to Ukraine, consistent with his goal of bringing this tragic war to an end.”
At the same time, he said, the Pentagon is “rigorously examining and adapting its approach towards achieving this objective while also preserving U.S. military readiness and defense priorities that support the president’s America first agenda,” Parnell said.
“This capability review, and that’s exactly what it is, going forward, we see this as a common sense pragmatic step towards having a framework to evaluate what munitions are sent and where,” he said.
Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Wednesday that Washington and Kyiv are “clarifying all the details of defense support, including air defense.”
“One way or another, we must ensure protection for our people,” Zelenskyy said.
The pause comes as Russia has ramped up its attacks all around Ukraine. Kyiv’s foreign affairs minister, Andrii Sybiha, said Russia launched more than 5,000 combat drones and hundreds of missiles, including nearly 80 ballistic missiles, in June alone.
Ukraine’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said it stressed to a U.S. official on Wednesday that “any delay or slowing down in supporting Ukraine’s defense capabilities would only encourage the aggressor to continue war and terror, rather than seek peace.”
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Pakistan’s first-ever international gold medallist wrestler Din Mohammad. — Geo News
LAHORE: Pakistan’s first-ever international gold medallist wrestler Din Mohammad passed away after a prolonged illness. He was over 100 years old.
Hailing from Lahore’s Bata Pur area, Din Mohammad earned the honour of winning Pakistan’s first gold medal in the 1954 Asian Games held in Manila.
Representing the country in wrestling, he defeated opponents from the Philippines, India, and Japan to claim the top podium spot.
Besides the Asian Games gold, Din Mohammad also brought home a bronze medal from the Commonwealth Games and represented Pakistan in numerous international events, raising the national flag with pride.
Punjab Sports Board spokesperson confirmed his passing and recalled that it was Din Mohammad who gave Pakistan its first-ever gold at an international event.
Punjab Sports Minister Malik Faisal Ayub Khokhar expressed deep sorrow at his death, saying: “Din Mohammad’s services to the nation and wrestling are unforgettable. He lifted Pakistan’s flag in international arenas and is a true national hero.”
Punjab Director-General of Sports Khizar Afzal Chaudhry also conveyed heartfelt condolences, saying: “May Allah grant him the highest place in Jannah. Wrestler Din Mohammad made the nation proud and his contribution to Pakistani sports will always be remembered.”
Both officials extended prayers and sympathies to the bereaved family, terming Din Mohammad a source of pride for the nation and an inspiration for future generations.
A team of researchers is beginning work on creating new tools that could eventually lead to the synthesis of the human genome in the lab. Wellcome is providing £10 million to the Synthetic Human Genome Project, which it expects will unlock new medical treatments.
Making the whole genome of three billion base pairs of nucleotides is the ‘moonshot’, says Tom Ellis, one of the project leads who researches synthetic chromosomes at Imperial College, London.
The scientists will first try to create a small chromosome, comprising about 2% of total human DNA. Along the way, they’ll also develop the tools to design DNA and get it into human cells that could enable the development of targeted treatments and better tools for screening drugs.
‘If we’re making huge progress in understanding health from reading and then editing [DNA], then logically, it makes sense that we’ll learn a lot more if we can do writing as well,’ says Ellis. Improving and standardising technologies so they can be routinely used to write whole genes or regions of multiple genes should help researchers understand how mutations in those genes lead to disease.
Two of the groups involved in the new project, at Imperial and the University of Manchester, have been involved in synthesising the yeast genome and another group, the Escherichia coli genome, consisting of 4 million base pairs of nucleotides. In theory, says Ellis, scaling up to 50 million base pairs could be done with 10 times as many people working in parallel were it not for the practicalities.
Compared with a yeast or bacterial genome, human DNA is ‘more full of junk, and that junk is a lot harder to work with because it contains a lot of the same sequence repeated many, many times’. A great number of those sequences are there for structural reasons rather than encoding information. ‘Those bits of DNA are much harder to work with in terms of synthesising them and linking them together,’ explains Ellis.
And unlike fast-growing microbes that will accept DNA, ‘human cells are much harder to get big pieces of DNA into and it can take you weeks before you know whether it’s worked or not’, he points out.
The project will rely on the commercial sector to synthesise sections of DNA. At present, says Ellis, biotech companies are chemically synthesising DNA up to about 300 bases at a time. Those sections are then linked together, getting to 10,000 to 20,000 bases by cloning the DNA using bacteria. ‘Where there’s room for innovation is if chemistry can do it all with very good accuracy – up to 20,000 bases or longer – then this huge effort of parallelised building can be dramatically reduced.’ The synthesis project will then focus on the means to assemble those long DNA sections.
Screening for accuracy and isolating accurately synthesised DNA gets costlier the longer the sections are. And the cost of chemicals to custom-make synthetic DNA could swallow up half the project budget. ‘We don’t want to spend it on the DNA, we want to spend it on people innovating. So we really need to push the chemistry community to longer DNA, cheaper DNA,’ adds Ellis.
