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Some immune defenses of the brain may have their roots in the gut.

A new study in mice finds that immune cells are first trained in the gut to recognize and launch attacks on pathogens, and then migrate to the brain’s surface to protect it, researchers report online November 4 in Nature. These cells were also found in surgically removed parts of human brains.

Every minute, around 750 milliliters of blood flow through the brain, giving bacteria, viruses or other blood-borne pathogens an opportunity to infect the organ. For the most part, the invaders are kept out by three membrane layers, called the meninges, which wrap around the brain and spinal cord and act as a physical barrier. If a pathogen does manage to breach that barrier, the researchers say, the immune cells trained in the gut are ready to attack by producing a battalion of antibodies.

The most common route for a pathogen to end up in the bloodstream is from the gut. “So, it makes perfect sense for these [immune cells] to be educated, trained and selected to recognize things that are present in the gut,” says Menna Clatworthy, an immunologist at the University of Cambridge.

Clatworthy’s team found antibody-producing plasma cells in the leathery meninges, which lie between the brain and skull, in both mice and humans. These immune cells produced a class of antibodies called immunoglobulin A, or IgA.

These cells and antibodies are mainly found in the inner lining of the gut and lungs, so the scientists wondered if the cells on the brain had any link to the gut. It turned out that there was: Germ-free mice, which had no microbes in their guts, didn’t have any plasma cells in their meninges either. However, when bacteria from the poop of other mice and humans were transplanted into the mice’s intestines, their gut microbiomes were restored, and the plasma cells then appeared in the meninges.

“This was a powerful demonstration of how important the gut could be at determining what is found in the meninges,” Clatworthy says.

Researchers captured microscope images of an attack in the meninges of mice that was led by plasma cells that had likely been trained in the guts. When the team implanted a pathogenic fungus, commonly found in the intestine, into the mice’s bloodstream, the fungus attempted to enter the brain through the walls of blood vessels in the meninges. However, plasma cells in the membranes formed a mesh made of IgA antibodies around the pathogen, blocking its entry. The plasma cells are found along the blood vessels, Clatworthy says, where they can quickly launch an attack on pathogens.

“To my knowledge, this is the first time anyone has shown the presence of plasma cells in the meninges. The study has rewritten the paradigm of what we know about these plasma cells and how they play a critical role in keeping our brain healthy,” says Matthew Hepworth, an immunologist at the University of Manchester in England who was not involved with the study. More research is needed to classify how many of the plasma cells in the meninges come from the gut, he says.

The finding adds to growing evidence that gut microbes can play a role in brain diseases. A previous study, for instance, suggested that in mice, boosting a specific gut bacterium could help fight amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, a fatal neurological disease that results in paralysis (SN: 7/22/19). And while the new study found the plasma cells in the brains of healthy mice, previous research has found other gut-trained cells in the brains of mice with multiple sclerosis, an autoimmune disease of the brain and the spinal cord.

For now, the researchers want to understand what cues plasma cells follow in the guts to know it is time for them to embark on a journey to the brain.

It’s official: 2020 now has the most named storms ever recorded in the Atlantic in a single year.

On November 9, a tropical disturbance brewing in the northeastern Atlantic Ocean gained enough strength to become a subtropical storm. With that, Theta became the year’s 29th named storm, topping the 28 that formed in 2005.

With maximum sustained winds near 110 kilometers per hour as of November 10, Theta is expected to churn over the open ocean for several days. It’s too early to predict Theta’s ultimate strength and trajectory, but forecasters with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration say they expect the storm to weaken later in the week.

If so, like most of the storms this year, Theta likely won’t become a major hurricane. That track record might be the most surprising thing about this season — there’s been a record-breaking number of storms, but overall they’ve been relatively weak. Only five — Laura, Teddy, Delta, Epsilon and Eta — have become major hurricanes with winds topping 178 kilometers per hour, although only Laura and Eta made landfall near the peak of their strength as Category 4 storms.

Even so, the 2020 hurricane season started fast, with the first nine storms arriving earlier than ever before (SN: 9/7/20). And the season has turned out to be the most active since naming began in 1953, thanks to warmer-than-usual water in the Atlantic and the arrival of La Niña, a regularly-occurring period of cooling in the Pacific, which affects winds in the Atlantic and helps hurricanes form (SN: 9/21/19). If a swirling storm reaches wind speeds of 63 kilometers per hour, it gets a name from a list of 21 predetermined names. When that list runs out, the storm gets a Greek letter.

While the wind patterns and warm Atlantic water temperatures set the stage for the string of storms, it’s unclear if climate change is playing a role in the number of storms. As the climate warms, though, you would expect to see more of the destructive, high-category storms, says Kerry Emanuel, an atmospheric scientist at MIT. “And this year is not a poster child for that.” So far, no storm in 2020 has been stronger than a Category 4. The 2005 season had multiple Category 5 storms, including Hurricane Katrina (SN: 12/20/05).

There’s a lot amount of energy in the ocean and atmosphere this year, including the unusually warm water, says Emanuel. “The fuel supply could make a much stronger storm than we’ve seen,” says Emanuel, “so the question is: What prevents a lot of storms from living up to their potential?”
A major factor is wind shear, a change in the speed or direction of wind at different altitudes. Wind shear “doesn’t seem to have stopped a lot of storms from forming this year,” Emanuel says, “but it inhibits them from getting too intense.” Hurricanes can also create their own wind shear, so when multiple hurricanes form in close proximity, they can weaken each other, Emanuel says. And at times this year, several storms did occupy the Atlantic simultaneously — on September 14, five storms swirled at once.

It’s not clear if seeing hurricane season run into the Greek alphabet is a “new normal,” says Emanuel. The historical record, especially before the 1950s is spotty, he says, so it’s hard to put this year’s record-setting season into context. It’s possible that there were just as many storms before naming began in the ‘50s, but that only the big, destructive ones were recorded or noticed. Now, of course, forecasters have the technology to detect all of them, “so I wouldn’t get too bent out of shape about this season,” Emanuel says.

Some experts are hesitant to even use the term “new normal.”

“People talk about the ‘new normal,’ and I don’t think that is a good phrase,” says James Done, an atmospheric scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. “It implies some new stable state. We’re certainly not in a stable state — things are always changing.”

The twilight time between fully awake and sound asleep may be packed with creative potential.

People who recently drifted off into a light sleep later had problem-solving power, scientists report December 8 in Science Advances. The results help demystify the fleeting early moments of sleep and may even point out ways to boost creativity.

Prolific inventor and catnapper Thomas Edison was rumored to chase those twilight moments. He was said to fall asleep in a chair holding two steel ball bearings over metal pans. As he drifted off, the balls would fall. The ensuing clatter would wake him, and he could rescue his inventive ideas before they were lost to the depths of sleep.

Delphine Oudiette, a cognitive neuroscientist at the Paris Brain Institute, and colleagues took inspiration from Edison’s method of cultivating creativity. She and her colleagues brought 103 healthy people to their lab to solve a tricky number problem. The volunteers were asked to convert a string of numbers into a shorter sequence, following two simple rules. What the volunteers weren’t told was that there was an easy trick: The second number in the sequence would always be the correct final number, too. Once discovered, this cheat code dramatically cut the solving time.
After doing 60 of these trials on a computer, the volunteers earned a 20-minute break in a quiet, dark room. Reclined and holding an equivalent of Edison’s “alarm clock” (a light drinking bottle in one dangling hand), participants were asked to close their eyes and rest or sleep if they desired. All the while, electrodes monitored their brain waves.

About half of the participants stayed awake. Twenty-four fell asleep and stayed in the shallow, fleeting stage of sleep called N1. Fourteen people progressed to a deeper stage of sleep called N2.

After their rest, participants returned to their number problem. The researchers saw a stark difference between the groups: People who had fallen into a shallow, early sleep were 2.7 times as likely to spot the hidden trick as people who didn’t fall asleep, and 5.8 times as likely to spot it as people who had reached the deeper N2 stage.

Such drastic differences in these types of experiments are rare, Oudiette says. “We were quite astonished by the extent of the results.” The researchers also identified a “creative cocktail of brain waves,” as Oudiette puts it, that seemed to accompany this twilight stage — a mixture of alpha brain waves that usually mark relaxation mingled with the delta waves of deeper sleep.

The study doesn’t show that the time spent in N1 actually triggered the later realization, cautions John Kounios, a cognitive neuroscientist at Drexel University in Philadelphia who cowrote the 2015 book The Eureka Factor: Aha Moments, Creative Insight, and the Brain. “It could have been possible that grappling with the problem and initiating an incubation process caused both N1 and the subsequent insight,” he says, making N1 a “by-product of the processes that caused insight rather than the cause.”

More work is needed to untangle the connection between N1 and creativity, Oudiette says. But the results raise a tantalizing possibility, one that harkens to Edison’s self-optimizations: People might be able to learn to reach that twilight stage of sleep, or to produce the cocktail of brain waves associated with creativity on demand.

It seems Edison was onto something about the creative powers of nodding off. But don’t put too much stock in his habits. He is also said to have considered sleep “a criminal waste of time.”

2021 was the year the COVID-19 vaccines had to prove their mettle. We started the year full of hope: With vaccines in hand in record-breaking time and their rollout ramping up, we’d get shots in arms, curb this pandemic and get life back to normal. That was too optimistic.

Roughly 200 million people in the United States — and billions globally — have now been fully vaccinated. Three vaccines — one from Pfizer and its partner BioNTech, and the other two from Moderna and Johnson & Johnson — are available in the United States. Pfizer’s is even available for children as young as 5. About two dozen other vaccines have also been deployed in other parts of the world. In some higher-income countries, the United States included, people have already queued up for booster shots.

But 2021 has also been the year of learning the limits of the vaccines’ superpowers. With the vaccines pitted against aggressive coronavirus variants, inequitable distribution, some people’s hesitancy and the natural course of waning effectiveness, there’s still a lot of work to do to bring this pandemic to an end. As if to hammer home that point, the detection of the omicron variant in late November brought new uncertainty to the pandemic’s trajectory. Here are some of the top lessons we’ve learned in the first year of the COVID-19 vaccine. — Macon Morehouse
The shots work, even against emerging variants
Many COVID-19 vaccines proved effective over the last year, particularly at preventing severe disease and death (SN: 10/9/21 & 10/23/21, p. 4). That’s true even with the emergence of more transmissible coronavirus variants.

In January, in the midst of a bleak winter surge that saw average daily cases in the United States peaking at nearly 250,000, the vaccination rollout here began in earnest. Soon after, case numbers began a steep decline.

Over the summer, though, more reports of coronavirus infections in vaccinated people began to pop up. Protection against infection becomes less robust in the months following vaccination in people who received Pfizer’s or Moderna’s mRNA vaccines, multiple studies have shown (SN Online: 9/21/21). Yet the shots’ original target — preventing hospitalization — has held steady, with an efficacy of about 80 percent to 95 percent.
A single dose of Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine is less effective at preventing symptoms or keeping people out of the hospital than the mRNA jabs. The company claims there’s not yet evidence that the protection wanes. But even if that protection is not waning, some real-world data hint that the shot may not be as effective as clinical trials suggested (SN Online: 10/19/21).

Evidence of waning or lower protection ultimately pushed the United States and some other countries to green-light COVID-19 booster shots for adults (SN: 12/4/21, p. 6).

Much of the worry over waning immunity came amid the spread of highly contagious variants, including alpha, first identified in the United Kingdom in September 2020, and delta, first detected in India in October 2020 (SN Online: 7/30/21). Today, delta is the predominant variant globally.

The good news is that vaccinated people aren’t unarmed against these mutated foes. The immune system launches a multipronged attack against invaders, so the response can handle small molecular tweaks to viruses, says Nina Luning Prak, an immunologist at the University of Pennsylvania. Dealing with variants “is what the immune system does.”
Vaccine-prompted antibodies still attack alpha and delta, though slightly less well than they tackle the original virus that emerged in Wuhan, China, two years ago. Antibodies also still recognize more immune-evasive variants such as beta, first identified in South Africa in May 2020, and gamma, identified in Brazil in November 2020. Although protection against infection dips against many of these variants, vaccinated people remain much less likely to be hospitalized compared with unvaccinated people.
Experts will continue to track how well the vaccines are doing, especially as new variants, like omicron, emerge. In late November, the World Health Organization designated the omicron variant as the latest variant of concern after researchers in South Africa and Botswana warned that it carries several worrisome mutations. Preliminary studies suggest that, so far, omicron is spreading fast in places including South Africa and the United Kingdom, and can reinfect people who have already recovered from an infection. The variant might be at least as transmissible as delta, though that’s still far from certain, according to a December 9 report from researchers with Public Health England, a U.K. health agency. How omicron may affect vaccine effectiveness is also unclear. Pfizer’s two-dose shot, for instance, may be about 30 percent effective at preventing symptoms from omicron infections while a booster could bring effectiveness back up to more than 70 percent, according to estimates from Public Health England. But those estimates are based on low case numbers and could change as omicron spreads.

“This is the first time in history that we’re basically monitoring virus mutations in real time,” says Müge Çevik, an infectious diseases physician and virologist at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. “This is what the viruses do. It’s just that we’re seeing it because we’re looking for it.”

But it’s unlikely that any new variant will take us back to square one, Çevik says. Because of the immune system’s varied defenses, it will be difficult for a coronavirus variant to become completely resistant to vaccine-induced protection. The vaccines are giving our immune systems the tools to fight back. — Erin Garcia de Jesús

The shots are safe, with few serious side effects
With billions of doses distributed around the world, the shots have proved not only effective, but also remarkably safe, with few serious side effects.

“We have so much safety data on these vaccines,” says Kawsar Talaat, an infectious diseases physician at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “I don’t know of any vaccines that have been scrutinized to the same extent.”

Commonly reported side effects include pain, redness or swelling at the spot of the shot, muscle aches, fatigue, fever, chills or a headache. These symptoms usually last only a day or two.
More rare and serious side effects have been noted. But none are unique to these shots; other vaccines — plus infectious diseases, including COVID-19 — also cause these complications.

One example is inflammation of the heart muscle, known as myocarditis, or of the sac around the heart, pericarditis. Current estimates are a bit squishy since existing studies have different populations and other variables (SN Online: 10/19/21). Two large studies in Israel estimated that the risk of myocarditis after an mRNA vaccine is about 4 of every 100,000 males and 0.23 to 0.46 of every 100,000 females, researchers reported in October in the New England Journal of Medicine. Yet members of Kaiser Permanente Southern California who had gotten mRNA vaccines developed myocarditis at a much lower rate: 5.8 cases for every 1 million second doses given, researchers reported, also in October, in JAMA Internal Medicine.

What all the studies have in common is that young males in their teens and 20s are at highest risk of developing the side effect, and that risk is highest after the second vaccine dose (SN Online: 6/23/21). But it’s still fairly rare, topping out at about 15 cases for every 100,000 vaccinated males ages 16 to 19, according to the larger of the two Israeli studies. Males in that age group are also at the highest risk of getting myocarditis and pericarditis from any cause, including from COVID-19.
Components of the mRNA vaccines may also cause allergic reactions, including potentially life-threatening anaphylaxis. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention calculated that anaphylaxis happens at a rate of about 0.025 to 0.047 cases for every 10,000 vaccine doses given.

But a study of almost 65,000 health care system employees in Massachusetts suggests the rate may be as high as 2.47 per 10,000 vaccinations, researchers reported in March in JAMA. Still, that rate is low, and people with previous histories of anaphylaxis have gotten the shots without problem. Even people who developed anaphylaxis after a first shot were able to get fully vaccinated if the second dose was broken down into smaller doses (SN Online: 6/1/21).

The only side effect of the COVID-19 vaccines not seen with other vaccines is a rare combination of blood clots accompanied by low numbers of blood-clotting platelets. Called thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome, or TTS, it’s most common among women younger than 50 who got the Johnson & Johnson vaccine or a similar vaccine made by AstraZeneca that’s used around the world (SN Online: 4/23/21).
About 5 to 6 TTS cases were reported for every 1 million doses of the J&J vaccine, the company reported to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The clots may result from antibodies triggering a person’s platelets to form clots (SN Online: 4/16/21). Such antibodies also cause blood clots in COVID-19 patients, and the risk of developing strokes or clots from the disease is much higher than with the vaccine, Talaat says. In one study, 42.8 of every 1 million COVID-19 patients developed one type of blood clot in the brain, and 392.3 per 1 million developed a type of abdominal blood clot, researchers reported in EClinicalMedicine in September.

“Your chances of getting any of these side effects, except for the sore arm, from an illness with COVID are much higher” than from the vaccines, Talaat says. — Tina Hesman Saey

Getting everyone vaccinated is … complicated
The quest to vaccinate as many people as quickly as possible this year faced two main challenges: getting the vaccine to people and convincing them to take it. Strategies employed so far — incentives, mandates and making shots accessible — have had varying levels of success.

“It’s an incredibly ambitious goal to try to get the large majority of the country and the globe vaccinated in a very short time period with a brand-new vaccine,” says psychologist Gretchen Chapman of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, who researches vaccine acceptance. Usually “it takes a number of years before you get that kind of coverage.”
Globally, that’s sure to be the case due to a lack of access to vaccines, particularly in middle- and lower-income countries. The World Health Organization set a goal to have 40 percent of people in all countries vaccinated by year’s end. But dozens of countries, mostly in Africa and parts of Asia, are likely to fall far short of that goal.

In contrast, the United States and other wealthy countries got their hands on more than enough doses. Here, the push to vaccinate started out with a scramble to reserve scarce appointments for a free shot at limited vaccination sites. But by late spring, eligible people could pop into their pharmacy or grocery store. Some workplaces offered vaccines on-site. For underserved communities that may have a harder time accessing such vaccines, more targeted approaches where shots are delivered by trusted sources at community events proved they could boost vaccination numbers (SN Online: 6/18/21).

Simply making the shot easy to get has driven much of the progress made so far, Chapman says. But getting people who are less enthusiastic has proved more challenging. Many governments and companies have tried to prod people, initially with incentives, later with mandates.
Free doughnuts, direct cash payments and entry into million-dollar lottery jackpots were among the many perks rolled out. Before the pandemic, such incentives had been shown to prompt some people to get vaccines, says Harsha Thirumurthy, a behavioral economist at the University of Pennsylvania. This time, those incentives made little difference nationwide, Thirumurthy and his colleagues reported in September in a preliminary study posted to SSRN, a social sciences preprint website. “It’s possible they moved the needle 1 or 2 percentage points, but we’ve ruled out that they had a large effect,” he says. Some studies of incentives offered by individual states have found a marginal benefit.

“People who are worried about side effects or safety are going to be more difficult to reach,” says Melanie Kornides, an epidemiologist at the University of Pennsylvania. And with vaccination status tangled up in personal identity, “you’re just not going to influence lots of people with a mass communication campaign right now; it’s really about individual conversations,” she says, preferably with someone trusted.
“Or,” she adds, “they’re going to respond to mandates.” Historically, sticks such as being fired from a job or barred from school are the most effective way of boosting vaccination rates, Kornides says. For example, hospitals that require flu shots for workers tend to have higher vaccination rates than those that don’t. For decades, mandates in schools have helped push vaccination rates up for diseases like measles and chickenpox, she says.

As COVID-19 mandates went into effect in the fall, news headlines often focused on protests and refusals. Yet early anecdotal evidence suggests some mandates have helped. For instance, after New York City public schools announced a vaccine requirement in late August for its roughly 150,000 employees, nearly 96 percent had received at least one shot by early November. Still, about 8,000 employees opted not to get vaccinated and were placed on unpaid leave, the New York Times reported.

Many people remain vehemently opposed to the vaccines, in part because of rampant misinformation that can spread quickly online. Whether more mandates, from the government or private companies, and targeted outreach will convince them remains to be seen. — Jonathan Lambert

Vaccines can’t single-handedly end the pandemic
One year in, it’s clear that vaccination is one of the best tools we have to control COVID-19. But it’s also clear vaccines alone can’t end the pandemic.

While the jabs do a pretty good job preventing infections, that protection wanes over time (SN Online: 3/30/21). Still, the vaccines have “worked spectacularly well” at protecting most people from severe disease, says Luning Prak, the University of Pennsylvania immunologist. And as more people around the world get vaccinated, fewer people will die, even if they do fall ill with COVID-19.

“We have to make a distinction between the superficial infections you can get — [like a] runny nose — versus the lower respiratory tract stuff that can kill you,” such as inflammation in the lungs that causes low oxygen levels, Luning Prak says. Preventing severe disease is the fundamental target that most vaccines, including the flu shot, hit, she notes. Stopping infection entirely “was never a realistic goal.”
Because vaccines aren’t an impenetrable barrier against the virus, we’ll still need to rely on other tactics to help control spread amid the pandemic. “Vaccines are not the sole tool in our toolbox,” says Saad Omer, an epidemiologist at Yale University. “They should be used with other things,” such as masks to help block exposure and COVID-19 tests to help people know when they should stay home.

For now, it’s crucial to have such layered protection, Omer says. “But in the long run, I think vaccines provide a way to get back to at least a new normal.” With vaccines, people can gather at school, concerts or weddings with less fear of a large outbreak.

Eventually the pandemic will end, though when is still anyone’s guess. But the end certainly won’t mean that COVID-19 has disappeared.

Many experts agree that the coronavirus will most likely remain with us for the foreseeable future, sparking outbreaks in places where there are pockets of susceptible people. Susceptibility can come in many forms: Young children who have never encountered the virus before and can’t yet get vaccinated, people who choose not to get the vaccine and people whose immunity has waned after an infection or vaccination. Or the virus may evolve in ways that help it evade the immune system.

The pandemic’s end may still feel out of reach, with the high hopes from the beginning of 2021 a distant memory. Still, hints of normalcy have returned: Kids are back in school, restaurants and stores are open and people are traveling more.

Vaccines have proved to be an invaluable tool to reduce the death and destruction that the coronavirus can leave in its wake. — Erin Garcia de Jesús

Concerns abound about what’s gone wrong in modern societies. Many scholars explain growing gaps between the haves and the have-nots as partly a by-product of living in dense, urban populations. The bigger the crowd, from this perspective, the more we need power brokers to run the show. Societies have scaled up for thousands of years, which has magnified the distance between the wealthy and those left wanting.

In The Dawn of Everything, anthropologist David Graeber and archaeologist David Wengrow challenge the assumption that bigger societies inevitably produce a range of inequalities. Using examples from past societies, the pair also rejects the popular idea that social evolution occurred in stages.

Such stages, according to conventional wisdom, began with humans living in small hunter-gatherer bands where everyone was on equal footing. Then an agricultural revolution about 12,000 years ago fueled population growth and the emergence of tribes, then chiefdoms and eventually bureaucratic states. Or perhaps murderous alpha males dominated ancient hunter-gatherer groups. If so, early states may have represented attempts to corral our selfish, violent natures.

Neither scenario makes sense to Graeber and Wengrow. Their research synthesis — which extends for 526 pages — paints a more hopeful picture of social life over the last 30,000 to 40,000 years. For most of that time, the authors argue, humans have tactically alternated between small and large social setups. Some social systems featured ruling elites, working stiffs and enslaved people. Others emphasized decentralized, collective decision making. Some were run by men, others by women. The big question — one the authors can’t yet answer — is why, after tens of thousands of years of social flexibility, many people today can’t conceive of how society might effectively be reorganized.
Hunter-gatherers have a long history of revamping social systems from one season to the next, the authors write. About a century ago, researchers observed that Indigenous populations in North America and elsewhere often operated in small, mobile groups for part of the year and crystallized into large, sedentary communities the rest of the year. For example, each winter, Canada’s Northwest Coast Kwakiutl hunter-gatherers built wooden structures where nobles ruled over designated commoners and enslaved people, and held banquets called potlatch. In summers, aristocratic courts disbanded, and clans with less formal social ranks fished along the coast.

Many Late Stone Age hunter-gatherers similarly assembled and dismantled social systems on a seasonal basis, evidence gathered over the last few decades suggests. Scattered discoveries of elaborate graves for apparently esteemed individuals (SN: 10/5/17) and huge structures made of stone (SN: 2/11/21), mammoth bones and other material dot Eurasian landscapes. The graves may hold individuals who were accorded special status, at least at times of the year when mobile groups formed large communities and built large structures, the authors speculate. Seasonal gatherings to conduct rituals and feasts probably occurred at the monumental sites. No signs of centralized power, such as palaces or storehouses, accompany those sites.

Social flexibility and experimentation, rather than a revolutionary shift, also characterized ancient transitions to agriculture, Graeber and Wengrow write. Middle Eastern village excavations now indicate that the domestication of cereals and other crops occurred in fits and starts from around 12,000 to 9,000 years ago. Ancient Fertile Crescent communities periodically gave farming a go while still hunting, foraging, fishing and trading. Early cultivators were in no rush to treat tracts of land as private property or to form political systems headed by kings, the authors conclude.

Even in early cities of Mesopotamia and Eurasia around 6,000 years ago (SN: 2/19/20), absolute rule by monarchs did not exist. Collective decisions were made by district councils and citizen assemblies, archaeological evidence suggests. In contrast, authoritarian, violent political systems appeared in the region’s mobile, nonagricultural populations at that time.

Early states formed in piecemeal fashion, the authors argue. These political systems incorporated one or more of three basic elements of domination: violent control of the masses by authorities, bureaucratic management of special knowledge and information, and public demonstrations of rulers’ power and charisma. Egypt’s early rulers more than 4,000 years ago fused violent coercion of their subjects with extensive bureaucratic controls over daily affairs. Classic Maya rulers in Central America 1,100 years ago or more relied on administrators to monitor cosmic events while grounding earthly power in violent control and alliances with other kings.

States can take many forms, though. Graeber and Wengrow point to Bronze Age Minoan society on Crete as an example of a political system run by priestesses who called on citizens to transcend individuality via ecstatic experiences that bound the population together.

What seems to have changed today is that basic social liberties have receded, the authors contend. The freedom to relocate to new kinds of communities, to disobey commands issued by others and to create new social systems or alternate between different ones has become a scarce commodity. Finding ways to reclaim that freedom is a major challenge.

These examples give just a taste of the geographic and historical ground covered by the authors. Shortly after finishing writing the book, Graeber, who died in 2020, tweeted: “My brain feels bruised with numb surprise.” That sense of revelation animates this provocative take on humankind’s social journey.

For the first time, astronomers have captured solid evidence of a rare double cosmic cannibalism — a star swallowing a compact object such as a black hole or neutron star. In turn, that object gobbled the star’s core, causing it to explode and leave behind only a black hole.

The first hints of the gruesome event, described in the Sept. 3 Science, came from the Very Large Array (VLA), a radio telescope consisting of 27 enormous dishes in the New Mexican desert near Socorro. During the observatory’s scans of the night sky in 2017, a burst of radio energy as bright as the brightest exploding star — or supernova — as seen from Earth appeared in a dwarf star–forming galaxy approximately 500 million light-years away.

“We thought, ‘Whoa, this is interesting,’” says Dillon Dong, an astronomer at Caltech.

He and his colleagues made follow-up observations of the galaxy using the VLA and one of the telescopes at the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii, which sees in the same optical light as our eyes. The Keck telescope caught a luminous outflow of material spewing in all directions at 3.2 million kilometers per hour from a central location, suggesting that an energetic explosion had occurred there in the past.
The team then found an extremely bright X-ray source in archival data from the Monitor of All Sky X-ray Image (MAXI) telescope, a Japanese instrument that sits on the International Space Station. This X-ray burst was in the same place as the radio one but had been observed back in 2014.

Piecing the data together, Dong and his colleagues think this is what happened: Long ago, a binary pair of stars were born orbiting each other; one died in a spectacular supernova and became either a neutron star or a black hole. As gravity brought the two objects closer together, the dead star actually entered the outer layers of its larger stellar sibling.

The compact object spiraled inside the still-living star for hundreds of years, eventually making its way down to and then eating its partner’s core. During this time, the larger star shed huge amounts of gas and dust, forming a shell of material around the duo.

In the living star’s center, gravitational forces and complex magnetic interactions from the dead star’s munching launched enormous jets of energy — picked up as an X-ray flash in 2014 — as well as causing the larger star to explode. Debris from the detonation smashed with colossal speed into the surrounding shell of material, generating the optical and radio light.

While theorists have previously envisioned such a scenario, dubbed a merger-triggered core collapse supernova, this appears to represent the first direct observation of this phenomenon, Dong says.

“They’ve done some pretty good detective work using these observations,” says Adam Burrows, an astrophysicist at Princeton University who was not involved in the new study. He says the findings should help constrain the timing of a process called common envelope evolution, in which one star becomes immersed inside another. Such stages in stars’ lives are relatively short-lived in cosmic time and difficult to both observe and simulate. Most of the time, the engulfing partner dies before its core is consumed, leading to two compact objects like white dwarfs, neutron stars or black holes orbiting one another.

The final stages of these systems are exactly what observatories like the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or LIGO, detect when capturing spacetime’s ripples, Dong says (SN: 8/4/21). Now that astronomers know to look for these multiple lines of evidence, he expects them to find more examples of this strange phenomenon.

The Chargers got outscored 27-14 in the fourth quarter on Sunday as Pittsburgh mounted a late comeback, but ultimately it wasn't enough for the Steelers, as Los Angeles won 41-37 after Justin Herbert hit Mike Williams for a 53-yard touchdown with 2:09 left to ice the game.

Herbert, along with running back Austin Ekeler out of the backfield, both did a bit of everything on offense. Herbert threw for 382 yards and three touchdowns while running for another 90. Ekeler, meanwhile, tallied four touchdowns — two rushing and two receiving — as he totaled 115 total yards.
The Chargers were 7-of-12 on third down, averaged 7.7 yards per play and amassed 533 yards of total offense. But it was two key plays late in the fourth quarter — a blocked punt and an interception by Justin Herbert — that allowed the Steelers to make a late comeback and even take the late lead for a short time.

Pittsburgh's offense flowed through Ben Roethlisberger, who turned in a three touchdown game as the ground game was sporadic at best, with Pittsburgh averaging just 3.1 yards per carry. Star rookie running back Najee Harris also missed much of the fourth quarter after being evaluated for a concussion. He was ultimately cleared to return on what wound up being Pittsburgh's final drive.

The win for Los Angeles improves its record to 6-4 and snaps a two-game home losing streak. They're now tied with Kansas City atop the AFC West with a game at Denver looming. Pittsburgh's loss drops it to 5-4-1, the Steelers' first loss since Oct. 3. They travel to Cincinnati next week to take on their fellow AFC North foes the Bengals.
Sporting News is tracked the live score, updates and highlights from 'Sunday Night Football.' Below is complete coverage.
Steelers vs. Chargers score
Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4 F
Steelers 3 7 0 27 37
Chargers 7 10 10 14 41
Steelers vs. Chargers updates, highlights
Final: Chargers 41, Steelers 37
11:35 p.m.: It's now fourth-and-32 from the 3 and the Steelers turn it over on downs and the Chargers take over with 1:15 left and will kneel it out here to end the game.

11:33 p.m.: Roethlisberger is dropped for 11 yards on second down after Joey Bosa gets the sack. Third-and-29 for the Steelers from their own 6.

11:31 p.m.: Roethlisberger is sacked on first down to bring up second-and-18 and the two-minute warning.

11:31 p.m.: Najee Harris clears concussion protocols and is back on the field for the Steelers for this drive. They start at their 25 with 2:09 left.

11:28 p.m.: TOUCHDOWN CHARGERS. Herbert hits Mike Williams for 53 yards and a score, Williams' first in a month. Chargers 41, Steelers 37 with 2:09 left as Pittsburgh needs a touchdown to win it with just one timeout left.
11:25 p.m.: FIELD GOAL STEELERS. The Steelers retake the lead as Boswell nails the 45-yarder with 3:24 left as Pittsburgh has come back from down 17 to tie it up. Pittsburgh 37, Los Angeles 34 with 3:24 remaining.

11:24 p.m.: Roethlisberger's pass falls incomplete and it brings up fourth-and-3 with Boswell slated to come on and kick the 45-yard field goal.

11:23 p.m.: The Steelers call their second timeout with 3:34 left. Third-and-3 from the 27 for the Steelers.

11:21 p.m.: Staley's gamble doesn't pay off as Ekeler is stuffed at the line. The Chargers turn it over on downs and Pittsburgh takes over at the LA 34.
11:20 p.m.: On third-and-14, Herbert to Jared Cook for 13 yards and Brandon Staley keeps the offense on the field on fourth-and-inches.

11:19 p.m.: Following the touchdown, it's almost immediately third-and-14 after Herbert is sacked. Pittsburgh calls its first timeout.

11:16 p.m.: TOUCHDOWN STEELERS. Roethlisberger hits Pat Freiermuth from 5 yards out on second-and-goal to tie it up with 4:23 left. Steelers 34, Chargers 34 with just over four minutes remaining.
11:15 p.m.: LA's Joey Bosa gets hit for a roughing the passer call and it sets up first-and-goal for the Steelers from the 5.

11:13 p.m.: INTERCEPTION STEELERS. Justin Herbert's pass is tipped but picked off and returned to the 11 yard line. First-and-10 for the Steelers who are looking to tie it up.
11:09 p.m.: TOUCHDOWN STEELERS. The Steelers make it a one-score game with 4:49 left after Roethlisberger finds Ebron again. Chargers 34, Steelers 27.
11:07 p.m.: Roethlisberger hits Ebron again for 9 yards and the Steelers are inside the red zone and showing signs of late life.

11:06 p.m.: Diontae Johnson hauls it in for 32 yards on the catch-and-run to put the Steelers at the LA 27 following the third-and-5.

11:05 p.m.: Harris heads to medical tent as It's now third-and-5 following the incompletion. 6:40 remaining in the game with Pittsburgh down two scores.

11:02 p.m.: On the first down play, Roethlisberger completes it to Harris for 5 yards, but Harris is down injured on the play. It'll be second-and-5 from Pittsburgh's own 41.
10:55 p.m.: TOUCHDOWN CHARGERS. Austin Ekeler notches his fourth touchdown of the game and has two rushing and two receiving touchdowns apiece. Now a two-score game with 8:38 left. Chargers 34, Steelers 20.
10:53 p.m.: Herbert's impressive ground game continues. He's up to 93 yards rushing after a 36 yard run on third-and-5. Tack on an unneccessary roughness penalty and it's first-and-goal from the 4.

10:47 p.m.: TOUCHDOWN STEELERS. This time the Steelers have no problem punching it in from short yardage as Najee Harris leaps over the pile for the score. Chargers 27, Steelers 20 with 11:35 left in the game.
10:44 p.m.: The Steelers are quickly looking at fourth-and-goal from the 5 and it's batted down but there's a penalty in the endzone for defensive pass interference. Now first-and-goal from the 1 for Pittsburgh.

10:40 p.m.: The Chargers punt It away from their 32 and it's blocked as the ball rolls out of bounds at the 3 yard line. First-and-goal for the Steelers upcoming.
10:34 p.m.: FIELD GOAL STEELERS. Boswell splits the uprights again, this time from 36 yards out. Chargers 27, Steelers 13 with 14:10 left in the game.

10:33 p.m.: It's third down again for the Steelers, this time from the Chargers' 20 but the pass gets batted away. The field goal unit comes out for Mike Tomlin.

End third quarter: Chargers 27, Steelers 10
10:28 p.m.: The Steelers are looking to convert on third down following the field goal and they do as Roethlisberger finds Najee Harris out of the backfield. Now first-and-10 from the Chargers 25 as Roethlisberger. hits Eric Ebron for 1 yard to end the third quarter.

10:22 p.m.: FIELD GOAL CHARGERS. Hopkins nails the 41-yarder and Los Angeles increases its lead with 3:40 left in the quarter. Chargers 27, Steelers 10,

10:21 p.m.: It's now fourth-and-8 and the Chargers move up 5 yards after the Steelers jump offsides as Hopkins lines up for a 41-yarder.

10:20 p.m.: It's now third-and-13 from the Steelers 28 but the Chargers can't convert. Brandon Staley brings out the field goal unit.

10:17 p.m.: Herbert takes off and runs again, this time on third down and he converts. The Chargers are 5-for-6 on third down so far and Herbert has five carries for 57 yards and is the team's leading rusher.

10:15 p.m.: The Chargers are quickly near midfield to the their own 42 where they'll be faced with first-and-20 following a holding penalty.

10:09 p.m.: The Steelers go three-and-out on their first drive to open the quarter. They punt it away and the Chargers take over at their 26.

10:04 p.m.: TOUCHDOWN CHARGERS. Austin Ekeler's monster day continues. He peels off a 12-yard run and then hauls in a 17-yard touchdown pass. It's his third touchdown of the game. Chargers 24, Steelers 10 with just under 12 minutes left in the third.
10:03 p.m.: Herbert goes to Allen again for 14 yards and the Chargers are in the red zone.

10:01 p.m.: This time Herbert has no problem hitting Allen. The two connect for 30 yards for an easy third-down conversion. Chargers now on the Steelers 43.

9:59 p.m.: It's quickly third-and-13 to open the second half as Herbert's pass to Keenan Allen falls short.

9:57 p.m.: The Chargers will receive the second half kick and take over at their 26 but there's a flag on the play. The penalty goes against the Steelers and the Chargers move up 5 yards to their own 31.

Halftime: Chargers 17, Steelers 10
9:41 p.m.: FIELD GOAL CHARGERS. Dustin Hopkins nails a 30-yarder with two seconds left on the clock to give the Chargers a touchdown lead heading into halftime. Chargers 17, Steelers 10.

9:35 p.m.: The Chargers have been marching to close out the first half following the touchdown. Looking at first-and-10 from their own 41 with 27 seconds left.

9:25 p.m.: TOUCHDOWN STEELERS. Roethlisberger throws up a floater that hangs in the air and he finds Johnson again in the back of the end zone. Chargers 14, Steelers 10 with 1:09 left in the first half.
9:24 p.m.: Roethlisberger hits Diontae Johnson for 9 yards to the LA 10. Steelers in a position to score before the half.

9:23 p.m.: Following the touchdown, Roethlisberger executes a nice throw and helps the Steelers march down the field.
9:14 p.m.: TOUCHDOWN CHARGERS. It's Austin Ekeler again, and the Chargers extend their lead. Chargers 14, Steelers 3 with 3:42 left in the first half.
9:12 p.m.: Another 18-yard run for Herbert followed by an 18-yard pass and it's now second-and-goal from the Pittsburgh 10 for LA.
9:09 p.m.: The Chargers are looking at third-and-6 from their own 28 and Herbert scrambles and keeps it for 18 yards to the LA 46. Nearing midfield.

9:06 p.m.: Ekeler takes it for 10 yards and a first down as the Chargers now have a more manageable field.

9:03 p.m.: The Steelers go 73 yards on 12 plays but turn it over on downs at the Chargers' 2 yard line. That's where LA takes over to begin its next drive.

9:00 p.m.: Roethlisberger hits Chase Claypool for 37 yards to the LA 5. Steelers in prime position to retake the lead here early in the second.
8:59 p.m.: The second quarter starts with a 3 yard run and a 5 yard run. Now third-and-2 from the LA 44 for the Steelers.

End first quarter: Chargers 7, Steelers 3
8:53 p.m.: The Steelers' drive following the touchdown is three plays, all of them to Najee Harris. Now third-and-6 from the Steelers' 40 for Pittsburgh.

8:47 p.m.: TOUCHDOWN CHARGERS. No doubt about that one as Austin Ekeler runs straight ahead and barrels his way through for the score. Caps off a 12 play, 73-yard drive that chewed nearly six minutes of clock. Chargers 7, Steelers 3 with 2:09 left in the first.
8:46 p.m.: The Chargers punch it in but get hit for illegal formation. Drives them back 5 yards to the Pittsburgh 6 and a replay of first down.

8:44 p.m.: On third-and-3 from the Pittsburgh 21, Justin Herbert hits Williams again, this time for 17 yards. Brings up first-and-goal from the 4.

8:40 p.m.: Los Angeles converts on third-and-14 after hitting Mike Williams for 22 yards. That's followed up by 5-yard catch by Jared Cook and an 11-yard grab by Keenan Allen. Chargers across midfield to the Steelers' 39.

8:38 p.m.: The Chargers open their game at their own 27.

8:36 p.m.: FIELD GOAL STEELERS. Boswell nails the the 36 yarder and the game's first points are on the board. Steelers 3, Chargers 0 with 8:33 left in the game.

8:34 p.m.: The Steelers go three-and-out in the red zone and will send Chris Boswell on to kick.

8:32 p.m.: After a gain of 16 yards and two defensive penalties on the Chargers, the Steelers are officially in the red zone for the first time tonight. Second-and-5 from the 18 upcoming.

8:28 p.m.: Roethlisberger hits tight end Pat Freiermuth to convert on third down once again. This time it goes for 4 yards and the Steelers are nearing midfield at their own 49.

8:27 p.m.: The game's first penalty is against Los Angeles' Joey Bosa, who gets hit for a neutral zone infraction Second-and-5 upcoming for the Steelers.

8:24 p.m.: Ben Roethlisberger's first pass of the game is complete to Chase Claypool on third down and the Steelers convert. Gain of 8 on the play.

8:23 pm.: The Steelers start the game with the ball at their own 25.

LAS VEGAS — All the questions about Terence Crawford have been answered.

For years, the only knock on him was that he lacked a signature victory. He finally picked up one — and in exceptional fashion — when he became the first fighter to stop Shawn Porter, recording a 10th-round TKO to retain his WBO welterweight championship in front of 11,568 fans at Michelob ULTRA Arena.
Now, the world will be clamoring for a unification bout with IBF and WBC champion Errol Spence Jr.

As it always has been against Porter, winning didn't come easy.

At the time of the stoppage, Crawford was up on all three scorecards: 86-85, 86-85 and 87-84. Porter routinely barreled inside and kept Crawford off balance with aggression and pressure. But Crawford began to time Porter's advances and then picked him off with counters that eventually wore down the former two-time champion.

In the 10th round, Crawford opened with a thudding left hand that deposited Porter on his backside. A frustrated Porter made it to his feet but was met with a scintillating combination that dropped Porter to his knees. Porter pounded on the canvas out of frustration and made it back to his feet again. Unfortunately, his father and trainer, Kenny Porter, decided that his son had had enough and threw in the towel.

Crawford improved to 38-0 with 29 knockouts. Porter became his ninth consecutive knockout victim. As for Porter, his career is at a crossroads of sorts as he falls to 31-4-1 and goes to the back of the line when it comes to title opportunities.

Here's how it all went down in Las Vegas.

Terence Crawford vs. Shawn Porter live updates, highlights
(All times Eastern.)

Round 10 (12:15 a.m.): Crawford drops Porter with a left hand to open the round! Porter is up and Crawford is a killer. He’s looking to finish the job. Crawford with a barrage that drops Crawford. Porter beats the canvas on his way up. Porter’s corner stops it! Wow!

Round 9 (12:13 a.m.): Short left hand by Porter lands to open the round. Big hook by Porter barely lands. Bud is unbothered. Body shot by Porter. Crawford looking for his spots and Porter isn’t making it easy. Crawford lands an uppercut on the inside and a body shot. 10-9, Crawford (86-85, Crawford)

Round 8 (12:09 a.m.): Crawford with a hard right hand and Porter comes straight at him throwing bombs. Crawford avoids and picks him off with a right hand. Beautiful sequence by Bud. Porter chops him on the inside with a short left and barrels inside. Hard left hand by Porter. Big right hand by Porter rattles Crawford. Crawford smiles and centers himself. How do you score this round? 10-9, Crawford (76-76)

Round 7 (12:04 a.m.): Porter strafes Bud with a left hand. Crawford gives Porter different looks and feints. They exchange left hands. Right hand by Porter lands and Crawford bounces off the ropes. Short counter right by Crawford as Porter rolls in. Porter won’t stop coming. Bud is smiling again. But he’s not throwing enough. 10-9, Porter (67-66, Porter)

Round 6 (12:01 a.m.): Crawford lands a big right hand They are going to war again. Crawford looking for the big shot and loading up. Porter comes roaring back. They clash heads. Crawford looks like he’s enjoying the dog fight. Porter roughs him up on the inside. Man, this is a damn fight. Counter left on the inside by Crawford. Lots of infighting to close a tight round. 10-9, Crawford (57-57)

Round 5 (11:57 p.m.): Porter working on Bud from the inside with some roughhousing. Crawford trying to walk Porter down. Flashes the jab. Porter bombing away on Crawford as he covers up. Not a lot gets through. Crawford walking him down. Porter is just outworking him in this round but Crawford is hoping he spent up his gas tank. 10-9, Porter (48-47, Porter)

Round 4 (11:52 p.m.): Hard left hook from Porter to open the round. Crawford lands a combination and a left hand. They exchange hard shots. Porter lands a right hand and Bud smiles. Porter with a jab and Bud responds to the body. Porter with a lunging hook that lands. Crawford with a check hook that almost Ricky Hatton'd Porter. They start swinging again. Closer round. 10-9, Crawford (38-38)

Round 3 (11:48 p.m): Crawford looks comfortable fighting lefty. Starts pushing Porter back. Porter lands a hard combination. Crawford tried to time and barely missed a counter hook. Porter stuns Bud with a left hand! Bud smiles but he was cracked. They are talking now. Porter is cut over the right eye. Crawford smiling but he knows that he's now in a fight. 10-9, Porter (29-28, Porter)

Round 2 (11:44 p.m.): Porter lands a jab and Bud switches to southpaw. Barely misses a counter. Lands a hard right hand on Porter. Porter cracks Bud with a hard right hand in response. Crawford lands a right hand and barely misses an uppercut. A firefight breaks out. Both landing hard shots. Bud with a counter uppercut and Porter with a right hand. Crawford lands the jab and smiles. We're about to have a good one. 10-9, Crawford (19-19)

Round 1 (11:40 p.m.): Porter rushes right at Crawford with a left hook and follows with a right hand that lands. Porter aims to rough Bud up along the ropes and gets tied up. Crawford is reading and timing Porter. Starts to fire the jab. Left hand by Porter lands. Hard jab by Bud lands. Crawford smirks at Porter. He may have figured out something already. 10-9, Porter

11:30 p.m.: "Showtime" Shawn Porter makes his entrance with WWE champion Big E and Grammy-nominated Hip Hop artist Rapsody while Terence Crawford keeps it simple by walking alone to LL Cool J's "I'm Bad."

10:58 p.m.: Through six rounds, Esquiva Falcao, the 2012 Olympic silver medalist from Brazil, has been applying immense pressure to Patrice Volny. Volny tried to work from the outside but Falcao's persistence to throttle Volny from the inside racked up rounds. But a nasty clash of heads in the sixth round split Falcao open above the left eye. Falcao is in a lot of pain and it's likely this fight is going to be stopped. Yup, it's over. Main event is next.

10:22 p.m.: Janibek Alimkhanuly didn't have much trouble turning back the challenge of Hassan N'Dam. He chopped him down over the course of eight rounds to earn the TKO stoppage. N'Dam's best years as a contender are clearly behind him, while Alimkhanuly remains one to watch in the middleweight division. As the rounds wore on, it became target practice for Alimkhanuly. N'Dam offered little resistance and was routinely clocked by power punches and a hard left hand. The mounting damage was too much for referee Kenny Bayless and the fight was called at the 2:40 mark of the eighth.

9:37 p.m.: As expected, Muratalia mowed down Araujo with an exceptional display of body punching and aggression to pick up the fifth-round TKO.

9 p.m.: We're live from Las Vegas and the pay-per-view portion of Crawford-Porter will kick off with Raymond Muratalla and Elias Araujo competing in a lightweight showdown.

Terence Crawford vs. Shawn Porter start time
Date: Saturday, Nov. 20
Main card time: 9 p.m. ET | 6 p.m. PT
Main event: 11 p.m. ET | 8 p.m. PT (approx.)
Crawford and Porter are set to step into the ring at about 11 p.m. ET. The night will begin with early prelims at 6 p.m. ET, followed by the prelim card at 7 p.m. ET and the main card at 9 p.m. ET.

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The King is back. 

LeBron James returned from an almost three-week absence for the Los Angeles Lakers against the Boston Celtics on Friday night. James had been out of the Lakers lineup since November 2, missing the team's past seven games with an abdominal strain.

He was listed as a game-time decision with the team announcing he would play just before tip-off. 

Prior to his injury, James was averaging 24.8 points - his lowest scoring average since his rookie season - while also averaging his least amount of rebounds (5.5) also since his rookie campaign and his least amount of assists (7.0) since 2015-16. Most concerning was his shooting percentage (46.7 percent) which was also his lowest since 2003-04.

James played 32 minutes against Boston, and looked like his old self for large parts of the contest, hitting fadeaways, and taking it strong to the basket and absorbing contact. 

He finished with 23 points (10-for-16 from the field), six rebounds, two assists and two steals before exiting the game for good with 4:26 left in the final quarter. 

He played 32 minutes and recorded a team-best plus-minus of -4, among Lakers players to have logged more than 20 minutes.

"Felt okay," James said postgame. "Felt like a rookie again being away from the game."

With the 130-108 loss, the Lakers have dropped to 8-9 for the season and 4-3 in games when James suits up.

Grizzlies star Ja Morant has earned a lot of attention early on in the 2021-22 season, and rightfully so.

The 22-year-old has taken a monster leap from Year 2 to Year 3, looking like a player who is aiming higher than just a Most Improved Player of the Year award or the first All-Star bid of his career.
He is, of course, arguably the frontrunner for Most Improved and is well on his way to an All-Star nod, but Morant's name was a part of even bigger conversations through the first couple weeks of the season. It was a small sample size, but Morant started to carve a realistic path to an MVP trophy. And although that momentum has decelerated as we get further into the season – primarily because the Grizzlies might not win enough games for him to truly be considered – Morant has still earned that level of respect from his peers.
After the last time Morant faced off against the Clippers, a game in which he had 28 points and eight assists in a win, All-Star forward Paul George couldn't help but compare the No. 2 overall pick to a former MVP in Derrick Rose.

"He’s just explosive, electrifying," George said of Morant. "I’d compare him to like, D-Rose. I guarded him my rookie year, Indy-Chicago, and guarding Ja is very similar to how D-Rose was.

"It was just how quick and his ability to change direction, move his body in-air," George continued. "He made it tough for us. He put a lot of pressure on us. He’s explosive. You know the direction he wants to go. He wants to go left, we knew that, but he’s just so good and so fast, he still gets to it."

It's hard to argue with the comparison and when you actually line them up side-by-side, it gets even scarier.

When Rose became the youngest MVP in league history back in 2010-11, it was his age 22 season and third year in the league. Morant entered this season at 22 years old, marking his third in the league.

Their numbers during their third season are almost identical, too.

Comparing Ja Morant's 2021-22 season to Derrick Rose's MVP season
Year GP PPG APG RPG SPG FG% 3P% FT%
Derrick Rose 2010-11 81 25.0 7.7 4.1 1.0 44.5 33.2 85.8
Ja Morant 2020-21 14 25.9 7.3 5.1 1.6 49.3 38.2 77.5
Morant has only played 14 games and would obviously have to keep up this production over the course of an entire season the way Rose did, but still, he's on quite the trajectory.

As George did, you could use these same adjectives to describe both players: explosive, electrifying, shifty and athletic. They both even have that same killer instinct, never shying away from a big moment.

I mean, who is the first player that comes to mind when you see dunks like this:

What about drives like this, where he's changing direction, changing speed, floating in the air and still finding a way to finish amongst the trees:

You'll see a whole lot of those same moves in any season-long highlight tape from Rose back in 2010-11.

Even if Morant can't match Rose as a 22-year-old MVP, it's looking like the star guard will see his name in those types of discussions for many years to come with the potential to win the league's most prestigious individual award at some point down the line.