A 27-year-old British soldier on Putin's hitlist calls it a 'badge of honour.'

Fraser Good, a British citizen, delivered a defiant message upon learning that his name had been added to a Russian-operated wanted list. A British veteran has reaffirmed his pride in supporting Ukraine after finding his name and photo on a Russian wanted list. Fraser Good shared with Metro that being listed in the flawed database is a "badge of honour," symbolizing his service, which has seen him involved in some of the war's fiercest battles. The list also features British nationals who have died during humanitarian missions or in combat against Vladimir Putin's forces, with some names marked as "destroyed." Fraser Good served on some of the war's most intense frontlines, including the battle for Kyiv, the liberation of Irpin, and operations near Kharkiv. He suffered severe injuries from a tank round while he and a small group of comrades defended their position against a massive Russian assault in Donetsk. Reflecting on the list, Fraser remarked: “It would be nice if they could at least get one date right—the details are completely wrong. “I definitely see being named on the list as a badge of honour. “If anything, I want the enemy to know who I am, because I am proud to stand with Ukraine.” The 27-year-old combat veteran from Northamptonshire, who served seven years in the British Army, has been living in Ukraine since March 2022 and is currently out of contract with the military. He has previously been the focus of Russian propaganda, with false claims circulated twice alleging that he had been killed in the war zone.

Fraser Good has fought in intense frontline battles as part of Ukraine's struggle for freedom. In a Facebook post, he wrote: "My comrades and I will keep fighting until Ukraine is free. It's as simple as that. Your propaganda and politics have been tiresome for as long as I can remember. Swipe for a surprise... Yep, that's me. Still very much alive and smiling, with more than one eye captured this morning. Honestly, you all bore me." "I take great satisfaction in proving each and every one of you wrong, every single time." The list, reportedly created by pro-Russian volunteers, contains personal information like phone numbers and email addresses, indicating the data may have been acquired through questionable means, possibly in collaboration with Kremlin sources. The entries also feature exaggerated criminal charges, likely aimed at justifying severe punishments or enabling exchanges for high-value prisoners held by Ukraine and its allies if these individuals are captured. Metro interviewed three British nationals and one American, none of whom were aware they were listed. The website is registered with a Russian URL and an IP address in Rostov-on-Don, a heavily militarized city in southern Russia.

After Russia's full-scale invasion began, Fraser Good left his life in the East Midlands behind to start a new chapter in Ukraine (Picture: Fraser Good, Facebook). A Scotsman named in the database referred to Putin as "an evil little bastard" after *Metro* informed him of his inclusion. Mike Marley, a former British Army soldier with 20 years of service who later transitioned to civilian life, shared with *Metro* that he had considered joining the International Legion for the Defense of Ukraine but decided against it. In November 2023, Russian media reported that hackers from a group called Joker DPR had released the names and personal details of over 500 applicants to the Legion. *Metro* has contacted the formation for comment. "They've clearly gained access to documents from people who showed interest in going to Ukraine," said Mr. Marley. "I was planning to go, but at my age and with my injuries, I decided against it. They must have gotten hold of documents from the International Legion, which probably included my name. "It's a bit concerning that they've accessed my information. "However, in practical terms, it likely just means I can't go to Russia now—which I wouldn't want to do anyway."

In death of dinosaurs, it was all about the asteroid -- not volcanoes

Illustrated scene of dinosaurs and asteroid (stock image).

Volcanic activity did not play a direct role in the mass extinction event that killed the dinosaurs, according to an international, Yale-led team of researchers. It was all about the asteroid.

In a break from a number of other recent studies, Yale assistant professor of geology & geophysics Pincelli Hull and her colleagues argue in a new research paper in Science that environmental impacts from massive volcanic eruptions in India in the region known as the Deccan Traps happened well before the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event 66 million years ago and therefore did not contribute to the mass extinction.

Most scientists acknowledge that the mass extinction event, also known as K-Pg, occurred after an asteroid slammed into Earth. Some researchers also have focused on the role of volcanoes in K-Pg due to indications that volcanic activity happened around the same time.

"Volcanoes can drive mass extinctions because they release lots of gases, like SO2 and CO2, that can alter the climate and acidify the world," said Hull, lead author of the new study. "But recent work has focused on the timing of lava eruption rather than gas release."

To pinpoint the timing of volcanic gas emission, Hull and her colleagues compared global temperature change and the carbon isotopes (an isotope is an atom with a higher or lower number of neutrons than normal) from marine fossils with models of the climatic effect of CO2 release. They concluded that most of the gas release happened well before the asteroid impact -- and that the asteroid was the sole driver of extinction.

"Volcanic activity in the late Cretaceous caused a gradual global warming event of about two degrees, but not mass extinction," said former Yale researcher Michael Henehan, who compiled the temperature records for the study. "A number of species moved toward the North and South poles but moved back well before the asteroid impact."

Added Hull, "A lot of people have speculated that volcanoes mattered to K-Pg, and we're saying, 'No, they didn't.'"

Recent work on the Deccan Traps, in India, has also pointed to massive eruptions in the immediate aftermath of the K-Pg mass extinction. These results have puzzled scientists because there is no warming event to match. The new study suggests an answer to this puzzle, as well.

"The K-Pg extinction was a mass extinction and this profoundly altered the global carbon cycle," said Yale postdoctoral associate Donald Penman, the study's modeler. "Our results show that these changes would allow the ocean to absorb an enormous amount of CO2 on long time scales -- perhaps hiding the warming effects of volcanism in the aftermath of the event."

The International Ocean Discovery Program, the National Science Foundation, and Yale University helped fund the research.

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Materials provided by Yale University. Original written by Jim Shelton. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

In death of dinosaurs, it was all about the asteroid -- not volcanoes

Illustrated scene of dinosaurs and asteroid (stock image).

Volcanic activity did not play a direct role in the mass extinction event that killed the dinosaurs, according to an international, Yale-led team of researchers. It was all about the asteroid.

In a break from a number of other recent studies, Yale assistant professor of geology & geophysics Pincelli Hull and her colleagues argue in a new research paper in Science that environmental impacts from massive volcanic eruptions in India in the region known as the Deccan Traps happened well before the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event 66 million years ago and therefore did not contribute to the mass extinction.

Most scientists acknowledge that the mass extinction event, also known as K-Pg, occurred after an asteroid slammed into Earth. Some researchers also have focused on the role of volcanoes in K-Pg due to indications that volcanic activity happened around the same time.

"Volcanoes can drive mass extinctions because they release lots of gases, like SO2 and CO2, that can alter the climate and acidify the world," said Hull, lead author of the new study. "But recent work has focused on the timing of lava eruption rather than gas release."

To pinpoint the timing of volcanic gas emission, Hull and her colleagues compared global temperature change and the carbon isotopes (an isotope is an atom with a higher or lower number of neutrons than normal) from marine fossils with models of the climatic effect of CO2 release. They concluded that most of the gas release happened well before the asteroid impact -- and that the asteroid was the sole driver of extinction.

"Volcanic activity in the late Cretaceous caused a gradual global warming event of about two degrees, but not mass extinction," said former Yale researcher Michael Henehan, who compiled the temperature records for the study. "A number of species moved toward the North and South poles but moved back well before the asteroid impact."

Added Hull, "A lot of people have speculated that volcanoes mattered to K-Pg, and we're saying, 'No, they didn't.'"

Recent work on the Deccan Traps, in India, has also pointed to massive eruptions in the immediate aftermath of the K-Pg mass extinction. These results have puzzled scientists because there is no warming event to match. The new study suggests an answer to this puzzle, as well.

"The K-Pg extinction was a mass extinction and this profoundly altered the global carbon cycle," said Yale postdoctoral associate Donald Penman, the study's modeler. "Our results show that these changes would allow the ocean to absorb an enormous amount of CO2 on long time scales -- perhaps hiding the warming effects of volcanism in the aftermath of the event."

The International Ocean Discovery Program, the National Science Foundation, and Yale University helped fund the research.

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Story Source:

Materials provided by Yale University. Original written by Jim Shelton. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

How the solar system got its 'Great Divide,' and why it matters for life on Earth

Illustration of inner solar system (stock image).

Scientists, including those from the University of Colorado Boulder, have finally scaled the solar system's equivalent of the Rocky Mountain range.

In a study published today in Nature Astronomy, researchers from the United States and Japan unveil the possible origins of our cosmic neighborhood's "Great Divide." This well-known schism may have separated the solar system just after the sun first formed.

The phenomenon is a bit like how the Rocky Mountains divide North America into east and west. On the one side are "terrestrial" planet, such as Earth and Mars. They are made up of fundamentally different types of materials than the more distant "jovians," such as Jupiter and Saturn.

"The question is: How do you create this compositional dichotomy?" said lead author Ramon Brasser, a researcher at the Earth-Life Science Institute (ELSI) at the Tokyo Institute of Technology in Japan. "How do you ensure that material from the inner and outer solar system didn't mix from very early on in its history?"

Brasser and coauthor Stephen Mojzsis, a professor in CU Boulder's Department of Geological Sciences, think they have the answer, and it may just shed new light on how life originated on Earth.

A sun disk holds vital clues

The duo suggests that the early solar system was partitioned into at least two regions by a ring-like structure that formed a disk around the young sun. This disk might have held major implications for the evolution of planets and asteroids, and even the history of life on Earth.

"The most likely explanation for that compositional difference is that it emerged from an intrinsic structure of this disk of gas and dust," Mojzsis said.

Mojzsis noted that the Great Divide, a term that he and Brasser coined, does not look like much today. It is a relatively empty stretch of space that sits near Jupiter, just beyond what astronomers call the asteroid belt.

But you can still detect its presence throughout the solar system. Move sunward from that line, and most planets and asteroids tend to carry relatively low abundances of organic molecules. Go the other direction toward Jupiter and beyond, however, and a different picture emerges: Almost everything in this distant part of the solar system is made up of materials that are rich in carbon.

This dichotomy "was really a surprise when it was first found," Mojzsis said.

Many scientists assumed that Jupiter was the agent responsible for that surprise. The thinking went that the planet is so massive that it may have acted as a gravitational barrier, preventing pebbles and dust from the outer solar system from spiraling toward the sun.

But Mojzsis and Brasser were not convinced. The scientists used a series of computer simulations to explore Jupiter's role in the evolving solar system. They found that while Jupiter is big, it was probably never big enough early in its formation to entirely block the flow of rocky material from moving sunward.

"We banged our head against the wall," Brasser said. "If Jupiter wasn't the agent responsible for creating and maintaining that compositional dichotomy, what else could be?"

A solution in plain sight

For years, scientists operating an observatory in Chile called the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) had noticed something unusual around distant stars: Young stellar systems were often surrounded by disks of gas and dust that, in infrared light, looked a bit like a tiger's eye.

If a similar ring existed in our own solar system billions of years ago, Brasser and Mojzsis reasoned, it could theoretically be responsible for the Great Divide.

That's because such a ring would create alternating bands of high- and low-pressure gas and dust. Those bands, in turn, might pull the solar system's earliest building blocks into several distinct sinks -- one that would have given rise to Jupiter and Saturn, and another Earth and Mars.

In the mountains, "the Great Divide causes water to drain one way or another," Mojzsis said. "It's similar to how this pressure bump would have divided material" in the solar system.

But, he added, there's a caveat: That barrier in space likely was not perfect. Some outer solar system material may still have climbed across the divide. And those fugitives could have been important for the evolution of our own world.

"Those materials that might go to the Earth would be those volatile, carbon-rich materials," Mojzsis said. "And that gives you water. It gives you organics."

The rest is Earth history.

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Materials provided by University of Colorado at Boulder. Original written by Daniel Strain. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Trash talk hurts, even when it comes from a robot

Trash talk hurts

Trash talking has a long and colorful history of flustering game opponents, and now researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have demonstrated that discouraging words can be perturbing even when uttered by a robot.

The trash talk in the study was decidedly mild, with utterances such as "I have to say you are a terrible player," and "Over the course of the game your playing has become confused." Even so, people who played a game with the robot -- a commercially available humanoid robot known as Pepper -- performed worse when the robot discouraged them and better when the robot encouraged them.

Lead author Aaron M. Roth said some of the 40 study participants were technically sophisticated and fully understood that a machine was the source of their discomfort.

"One participant said, 'I don't like what the robot is saying, but that's the way it was programmed so I can't blame it,'" said Roth, who conducted the study while he was a master's student in the CMU Robotics Institute.

But the researchers found that, overall, human performance ebbed regardless of technical sophistication.

The study, presented last month at the IEEE International Conference on Robot & Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN) in New Delhi, India, is a departure from typical human-robot interaction studies, which tend to focus on how humans and robots can best work together.

"This is one of the first studies of human-robot interaction in an environment where they are not cooperating," said co-author Fei Fang, an assistant professor in the Institute for Software Research. It has enormous implications for a world where the number of robots and internet of things (IoT) devices with artificial intelligence capabilities is expected to grow exponentially. "We can expect home assistants to be cooperative," she said, "but in situations such as online shopping, they may not have the same goals as we do."

The study was an outgrowth of a student project in AI Methods for Social Good, a course that Fang teaches. The students wanted to explore the uses of game theory and bounded rationality in the context of robots, so they designed a study in which humans would compete against a robot in a game called "Guards and Treasures." A so-called Stackelberg game, researchers use it to study rationality. This is a typical game used to study defender-attacker interaction in research on security games, an area in which Fang has done extensive work.

Each participant played the game 35 times with the robot, while either soaking in encouraging words from the robot or getting their ears singed with dismissive remarks. Although the human players' rationality improved as the number of games played increased, those who were criticized by the robot didn't score as well as those who were praised.

It's well established that an individual's performance is affected by what other people say, but the study shows that humans also respond to what machines say, said Afsaneh Doryab, a systems scientist at CMU's Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII) during the study and now an assistant professor in Engineering Systems and Environment at the University of Virginia. This machine's ability to prompt responses could have implications for automated learning, mental health treatment and even the use of robots as companions, she said.

Future work might focus on nonverbal expression between robot and humans, said Roth, now a Ph.D. student at the University of Maryland. Fang suggests that more needs to be learned about how different types of machines -- say, a humanoid robot as compared to a computer box -- might invoke different responses in humans.

In addition to Roth, Fang and Doryab, the research team included Manuela Veloso, professor of computer science; Samantha Reig, a Ph.D. student in the HCII; Umang Bhatt, who recently completed a joint bachelor's-master's degree program in electrical and computer engineering; Jonathan Shulgach, a master's student in biomedical engineering; and Tamara Amin, who recently finished her master's degree in civil and environmental engineering.

The National Science Foundation provided some support for this work.

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Materials provided by Carnegie Mellon University. Original written by Byron Spice. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Daily exposure to blue light may accelerate aging, even if it doesn't reach your eyes

Woman looking at blue light from at computer screen 

Prolonged exposure to blue light, such as that which emanates from your phone, computer and household fixtures, could be affecting your longevity, even if it's not shining in your eyes.

New research at Oregon State University suggests that the blue wavelengths produced by light-emitting diodes damage cells in the brain as well as retinas.

The study, published today in Aging and Mechanisms of Disease, involved a widely used organism, Drosophila melanogaster, the common fruit fly, an important model organism because of the cellular and developmental mechanisms it shares with other animals and humans.

Jaga Giebultowicz, a researcher in the OSU College of Science who studies biological clocks, led a research collaboration that examined how flies responded to daily 12-hour exposures to blue LED light -- similar to the prevalent blue wavelength in devices like phones and tablets -- and found that the light accelerated aging.

Flies subjected to daily cycles of 12 hours in light and 12 hours in darkness had shorter lives compared to flies kept in total darkness or those kept in light with the blue wavelengths filtered out. The flies exposed to blue light showed damage to their retinal cells and brain neurons and had impaired locomotion -- the flies' ability to climb the walls of their enclosures, a common behavior, was diminished.

Some of the flies in the experiment were mutants that do not develop eyes, and even those eyeless flies displayed brain damage and locomotion impairments, suggesting flies didn't have to see the light to be harmed by it.

"The fact that the light was accelerating aging in the flies was very surprising to us at first," said Giebultowicz, a professor of integrative biology. "We'd measured expression of some genes in old flies, and found that stress-response, protective genes were expressed if flies were kept in light. We hypothesized that light was regulating those genes. Then we started asking, what is it in the light that is harmful to them, and we looked at the spectrum of light. It was very clear cut that although light without blue slightly shortened their lifespan, just blue light alone shortened their lifespan very dramatically."

Natural light, Giebultowicz notes, is crucial for the body's circadian rhythm -- the 24-hour cycle of physiological processes such as brain wave activity, hormone production and cell regeneration that are important factors in feeding and sleeping patterns.

"But there is evidence suggesting that increased exposure to artificial light is a risk factor for sleep and circadian disorders," she said. "And with the prevalent use of LED lighting and device displays, humans are subjected to increasing amounts of light in the blue spectrum since commonly used LEDs emit a high fraction of blue light. But this technology, LED lighting, even in most developed countries, has not been used long enough to know its effects across the human lifespan."

Giebultowicz says that the flies, if given a choice, avoid blue light.

"We're going to test if the same signaling that causes them to escape blue light is involved in longevity," she said.

Eileen Chow, faculty research assistant in Giebultowicz's lab and co-first author of the study, notes that advances in technology and medicine could work together to address the damaging effects of light if this research eventually proves applicable to humans.

"Human lifespan has increased dramatically over the past century as we've found ways to treat diseases, and at the same time we have been spending more and more time with artificial light," she said. "As science looks for ways to help people be healthier as they live longer, designing a healthier spectrum of light might be a possibility, not just in terms of sleeping better but in terms of overall health."

In the meantime, there are a few things people can do to help themselves that don't involve sitting for hours in darkness, the researchers say. Eyeglasses with amber lenses will filter out the blue light and protect your retinas. And phones, laptops and other devices can be set to block blue emissions.

"In the future, there may be phones that auto-adjust their display based on the length of usage the phone perceives," said lead author Trevor Nash, a 2019 OSU Honors College graduate who was a first-year undergraduate when the research began. "That kind of phone might be difficult to make, but it would probably have a big impact on health."

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Materials provided by Oregon State University. Original written by Steve Lundeberg. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.