Here Are the Most Popular Emojis From the #Brexit Reaction

Last Friday, Quartz published a short article tantalizingly titled “The world’s reaction to Brexit, in emoji.” (Brexit is the colloquial shorthand for Britain’s vote in favor of exiting the European Union.) While the piece was mostly fluff, it does raise a fascinating question: Can emojis teach us anything about situations like Brexit?

With Twitter reporting that 110 billion emojis have been tweeted since 2014, the idea isn’t as fanciful as it might seem. Emojis provide a rich and unexplored prism for understanding the evolution of language and culture.

Inspired by the Quartz headline, this past weekend, I downloaded a sample of 100,000 publicly available tweets using the Twitter API. I pulled data for five Brexit-related hashtags, selected to be representative of both sides of the debate: #NotMyVote, #VoteRemain, #EURef, #Brexit, and #VoteLeave. All tweets were from Friday, June 2, the day after the election, and were in English. After removing retweets, I was left with 23,989 unique tweets (I call this “the Brexit dataset”). Of these tweets, 6.3 percent (1,505) contained at least one emoji. Yay!

First, I found the 10 most commonly used emojis in the dataset (Figure 1). Face with tears of joy and the British flag both crushed it here, appearing, respectively, 11.9 and 10.4 times for every 1,000 tweets. The other emojis are a good mix of both celebratory emojis as well as more melancholy ones.

Figure 1. Image: Hamdan Azhar

But are these emojis actually reflective of Brexit, or are some of them just generally popular emojis? Luckily, emojitracker has been tracking every emoji publicly tweeted since mid-2013. So, for each of these ten emojis, I compared how often they appeared in the Brexit dataset with their general popularity.

Five of the ten emojis over-indexed for Brexit (Figure 2). Reasonably, the British flag is over 400 times as likely to be included in a tweet about Brexit than in a random tweet on the platform. Thumbs up and clapping hands both over-indexed at 2.3 times and 3.9 times respectively, while crying face and see-no-evil monkey over-indexed at 1.3 times.

Figure 2. Image: Hamdan Azhar

Brexit seems to elicit strong emotions from people on Twitter, on both sides of the spectrum, with slightly more prevalent use of celebratory emojis. This could mean that people disappointed by Brexit are less likely to tweet, or if they do tweet, they might be less likely to use emojis.

I then took a closer look at a few emojis used in context. Even basic emojis can encompass a wide variety of meaning. The British flag, for example, can be used to express nationalism but sometimes it’s just a neutral shorthand (Figure 3). Irony is also common, for example, with the thumbs up emoji, which is used both mockingly as well as sincerely (Figure 4).

Figure 3. Image: Hamdan Azhar

Figure 4. Image: Hamdan Azhar

Can we use data to understand how people on different sides of the Brexit debate use emojis differently? It turns out we can! We know the overall distribution of the five hashtags of interest in our dataset. #Brexit is most prevalent at 29 percent, followed by #EURef at 20 percent, #VoteLeave at 19 percent, #VoteRemain at 17 percent, and #NotMyVote at 15 percent. For a particular emoji, we can look at all tweets that use both that emoji and one of these five hashtags and compare the hashtag distributions to the one above.

For example, we find that 34 percent of tweets with the British flag emoji also include the #VoteLeave hashtag. This is significantly higher than the 19 percent prevalence of #VoteLeave in the overall dataset so we say that #VoteLeave over-indexes with the British flag. The celebratory emojis also over-index with #VoteLeave, while the crying, sad face, and praying emojis over-index on #VoteRemain (Figure 5).

Figure 5. Image: Hamdan Azhar

Below, I’ve included a heat map summarizing the co-occurrence of the five hashtags with the top 10 emojis (Figure 6). It’s fascinating to see how distinct the celebratory and sad emojis are in terms of the political sentiments they’re used to magnify. It’s almost as if the emojis show us #VoteLeave clapping and cheering, while #VoteRemain is crying, distraught, and heartbroken. (Curiously, none of the emojis over-index on #Brexit, suggesting that it may be more of a identifying hashtag for the situation rather than one used by partisans who are emotionally invested in the debate.)

Figure 6. Image: Hamdan Azhar

As emojis become more ubiquitous, we should remain open and curious about what they reveal. Does the meaning of emojis change over time? How do we use emojis to talk about war, or DJ Khaled, or our search for love? Will two different people ever see the same emoji the same way?

The Brexit dataset shows us that emojis, far from being trivial objects used ad hoc, have the ability to reflect our emotional states back at us.

Perhaps what makes emojis so exciting is their limitless potential for nuance. Robert Greene wrote that “Paradox is seductive because it plays with meaning. We are secretly oppressed by the rationality in our lives.” He might as well have been talking about emojis. Emojis allow us to play with meaning, to inject varying combinations of emphasis, irony, and humor in our communication. While we may never fully understand what they mean, treating emojis as data can help us gradually chip away at the mystery, and in doing so, come to better understand ourselves.

Acknowledgements: I’m indebted to earlier work by Lauren Ancona and Chris Tufts on measuring emoji prevalence among Twitter users in Philadelphia, Jessica Peterka-Bonetta’s mapping of emojis from UTF-8 to their R encodings, and of course to Matthew Rothenberg’s emojitracker.

Hamdan Azhar is a writer and data scientist based in New York. His writings on politics, culture, and technology have appeared in the Washington Post, the Christian Science Monitor, and the Huffington Post. Read more of his work at hamdanazhar.com.

Here Are the Most Popular Emojis From the #Brexit Reaction

Inside the High-Tech US Army Lab Where Scientists Blow Things Up

Alfred Nobel made his fortune by blowing things up. The Swedish scientist and entrepreneur got in on the ground floor of the explosives business, and was the first to make serious coin from military and industrial applications of a new chemical called nitroglycerin. Extremely potent but highly sensitive, nitroglycerin had the power to transform the world. Trouble was, it’s very dangerous. Under the right conditions, a slight shock can cause it to detonate.

On September 3, 1864, a huge blast ripped through Nobel’s explosives factory in Stockholm, where his company was manufacturing nitroglycerin for the military. The explosion killed five people, including the scientist’s younger brother. This tragedy spurred Nobel to create explosives that were safer to handle than the notoriously unstable nitroglycerin. The result was dynamite, which earned him a fortune—paying for his eponymous prize—and is still used to this day.

In 2016, the science of blowing things up has come a long way. One of the most advanced facilities for testing exactly how explosives inflict their deadly damage is located at the Aberdeen Proving Ground, a huge US Army research facility in rural Maryland, about an hour’s drive northeast of Baltimore.

Here, military scientists analyze the fundamental characteristics of different types of explosives, looking at how the energy they produce affects objects, from bunkers to bodies, in the path of the blast wave.

The Army guards its secrets closely. In June, after two separate security checks, I was granted clearance to visit their high-tech explosions laboratory.

The squat, concrete bunker that houses the test facility. Image: Paul Tadich

On that searing hot and swamp-humid morning, I entered the military base, where I was accompanied at all times by an escort. I drove 20 minutes or so, past a scenic lake populated with fishing boats, and onto an island situated somewhere on the base. I was warned against photographing any signs, and most of the buildings, too.

A few winding roads later, the lab came into view—a squat, burly concrete structure that looked like it could withstand a direct nuclear hit. As I approached, I could see two red lamps mounted on poles. A very stern sign said that under no circumstances should you turn left when the lights are flashing.

But the lights were out, and the testing range quiet. My escort and I turned right, toward the main lab space. This is where I met Richard Benjamin, a US Army research scientist who is paid to spend his time blowing things up and watching explosions at 2.5 million frames per second. The place, quite frankly, is a pubescent boy’s dream.

Inside the lab, we entered a long, metal-lined workshop. At first glance, it didn’t look very different from a garage workshop a suburban dad might tinker in on weekends. A homey sign read Help Keep This Place Clean. In most garages, such homilies are not posted above a bin filled with high-caliber shell casings.

The workshop. Image: Paul Tadich

Benjamin, who is the lead physical science technician at the US Army Research Lab’s Detonation Science Facility, was disarmingly polite, considering he’s the guardian of so much power. He’s ruddy, rotund, and meticulously well-mannered.

Benjamin explained that he uses the tools in his lab to analyze in fine detail what happens to an explosive as it detonates. “The basic definition of an explosive is that when it reacts, the reaction proceeds faster than the speed of sound,” said Benjamin.

As the explosive material violently degrades into a gas, shock waves build up inside of it. These shock waves press against one another, forming an expanding shell of gas. This shell rips through the material and transfers its energy to the surrounding atmosphere, which in turn rapidly expands. This energy is also transferred to any object in its path. The results can be damaging—or deadly.

An image of a video showing an artificial skull (which has the same density as a human skull) fitted with electrodes to measure the impact force of an explosion. Image: Paul Tadich

Benjamin took me over to a large TV mounted above a workbench to show me a series of clips of various types of explosive charges detonating in extreme slow-motion. This is done to analyze how the shock wave travels through the explosive.

The most striking clip showed footage of a sphere of C-4 (short for Composition-4, a military-grade plastic explosive) detonating, slowed down to the point where I could see the searing, white-hot gases escape from the metal casing surrounding the charge.

I became aware of several portholes in the room, fitted with glass as thick as my fist. There was a faint glow emanating from behind them. I asked Benjamin what the source of the light was, and he only said that it was next on the agenda.

The door leading into the blast chamber. Image: Paul Tadich

He lead me around a corner. A hydraulic pump whirred, a lock clanged open, and a metal door about a foot thick swung open. We stood face-to-face with the facility’s centrepiece: the blast chamber. Inside was a reinforced-concrete cube, with walls 18 inches thick. The room was lined with a painted-over impact-resistant alloy, rusty and speckled with craters, inch-deep dents where fragments of metal were propelled into the walls.

Finally, I could see the source of the mysterious light: two movie-set-style spotlights were pointed at a raised dais in the middle of the room. That’s where the explosives sat, awaiting detonation.

A mockup explosive. Image: Paul Tadich

I saw footage of a metal-jacketed cylinder, stuffed with TNT, blowing up in the test chamber. When it exploded in extreme slow motion, you could see the energy travelling down the length of the object. As each frame advanced, the metal puffed out from its rigid form as easily as a balloon inflated with air. As this line of fragmentation rolled down the length of the object, it was followed a couple of inches behind by a ferocious bloom of yellow and white fire as the hot gases expanded out of the zig-zagging cracks that formed in the casing.

An image captured from a video of TNT exploding inside a canister. Image: Paul Tadich

It really gave me a sense of the raw power contained in the chemistry of an explosion. Solid metal is forced apart into tiny, twisted fragments with ease.

Huge cameras, which sweep images at very high rates of speed across a series of imaging sensors, were positioned on the other side of the glass portholes, to capture the explosions. The chamber is designed to be sealed so all its leftovers can be captured and analyzed. This means it’s almost perfectly insulated, and on the day I visited, the heat from the spotlights alone had pushed the mercury well past 30℃.

This sends the electrical charge to set off explosives in the blast chamber. Image: Paul Tadich

All this armoring and protection is absolutely necessary. Despite the foot-and-a-half-thick walls, I asked Benjamin if he can hear the explosives going off from his laboratory next door. “Oh, absolutely,” he said. “You can feel it, too.”

It’s a stark reminder that while this is a place of science, it’s also part of the US military machine. This is made abundantly clear when I asked Benjamin why he feels his work is important. With no hesitation, he answered: “It’s all to help the soldier. We do what we can to make his job safer and easier.”

As I was escorted in my rented Jeep to the final checkpoint, and then out again into the swampy afternoon, I was reminded of why explosives research started in the first place: to project military power.

Inside the High-Tech US Army Lab Where Scientists Blow Things Up

How a Hacker Is Gaming the Media to Extort His Victims

Over the past few days, millions of health care organisation records have been listed on the dark web. But rather than simply selling the data at a low price for a quick payday, this hacker is advertising it to extort the unnamed companies into paying money to protect their patients’ details.

“The Dark Overlord” is taking full advantage of a weapon that many other cybercriminals overlook; one that he hopes will make him more threatening, and ultimately help in getting targets to cough up ransom demands: the media. By courting press attention, he puts pressure on organisations to pay up.

“There has always been a specific method and plan,” the hacker told Motherboard in an encrypted chat, referring to his publication strategy.

"Every time I put a new listing up it gets reported without hesitation now."

The Dark Overlord wouldn’t explicitly spell out this process, but it goes something like this: First, he posts a database; then, he gives samples of the data to reporters, who go out and verify them. These articles, and the subsequent reblogging of them by other outlets, convinces companies that the hacker is a legitimate threat. These steps repeat over and over, building up the hacker's reputation as someone to be taken seriously.

I pitched this to the Dark Overlord. “Something like that,” he said. He claimed that the media attention has already encouraged a few organisations to pay up.

The Dark Overlord doesn’t list the databases on the dark web straight away. At first, he might extort targets in private, threatening to sell or release their data if they don't pay the ransom. Typically, the hacker said, those initial phone calls or emails get ignored.

“It is never, ‘Hey, okay you got us, where do we pay?'” he joked.

If the company doesn’t comply, he proceeds to the next stage and lists company data for sale without naming the organisation.

“The databases that you see listed are ones from victims [who] have either declined to pay or whose deadlines are coming up and need a little pressure put on them,” the Dark Overlord said.

So far, the hacker has put up five databases: 48,000 records from a healthcare organisation in Farmington, Missouri; hundreds of thousands from Atlanta, Georgia, and the Central/Midwest US; 9 million apparent patient insurance details; and, on Tuesday, information on 34,000 supposed New York healthcare patients.

But just listing the data might not be enough to secure a ransom payment, and that's where the media comes in, which is able to quickly, dramatically, and inadvertently squeeze the target organizations tighter.

“I have a reputation with this handle now. Another step accomplished,” the Dark Overlord added. “Every time I put a new listing up it gets reported without hesitation now.”

Hackers using the media to their own ends is not new. Anonymous has distributed attention-grabbing and ready-to-publish imagery or press releases that were easy for journalists to quickly report on. Impact Team, the hackers behind the Ashley Madison breach, sent a link of the data to at least one well-known security journalist.

But this latest campaign sticks out in its systematic and very deliberate approach. The Dark Overlord knows how to game the media, and reporters are playing along.

How a Hacker Is Gaming the Media to Extort His Victims

‘Pay-Per-View’ Mode Keeps Canadian Space Telescope Flying After 13 Years

The MOST space telescope was designed to measure variations in intensity in the brightness of stars. Image: Canadian Space Agency

Here’s a pay-per-view option with more stars than you'd ever find on TV. Canada’s first space telescope has solved a government funding riddle by asking customers to pay to look through its viewfinder. And the results are really beginning to pay off, its principal investigator told me, as MOST marks its 13th birthday in space.

Canada’s Microvariability and Oscillation of Stars (MOST) telescope launched June 30, 2003 on what was supposed to be a one-year mission to study star vibrations, but the machine was still going strong in 2014 when the Canadian Space Agency yanked its funding, saying the mission had achieved its objectives and it was time to retire.

After considering crowdfunding to keep it going, the University of British Columbia’s Jaymie Matthews found a buyer: Microsat Systems Canada Inc., which creates stabilization devices for spacecraft. MSCI, which now operates MOST, makes time available to any astronomer's group that wants to use the telescope, as long as MOST can safely do it and the buyer can use it for a minimum of a week. Booking the telescope for that length of time costs $6,000 US (nearly $7,700 Canadian), which sounds like a deal.

Jaymie Matthews in a clean room with MOST. Image: Canadian Space Agency

“I would still hope eventually we would be able to find a funder or a donor. I've been kicking around the idea of a Kickstarter campaign where we would put together the elevator pitch and a one-year [science] program,” said Matthews. He added that he is grateful for the MSCI funding, and that MOST is being made available practically at cost, but he misses the days of judging submissions against each other by scientific merit.

MOST was originally designed to look at star variability, but even before its design phase was over, astronomers realized it could also examine exoplanets (planets beyond the solar system). MOST has also looked at objects in the solar system, such as the icy small worlds in the Kuiper Belt beyond Neptune.

This makes MOST a versatile telescope for all sorts of astronomy investigations. Matthews said he is proud of the two published articles from its new pay-per-view mission so far.

One, published in The Astronomical Journal, looked at a bizarre exoplanet called HD 20782. The planet has such an eccentric, cigar-shaped orbit that it is close to flying away from its parent star and into space. The planet swings through extreme cold when it is far away from the star, and extreme heat when it is close by.

Even more strangely, MOST detected a reflection of the planet's light on its star. With more observations, this could provide information on how the planet’s atmosphere behaves as the planet ricochets between hot and cold.

"We are studying the planet in this kind of weird way you could have never imagined," Matthews said. "It's the stuff that science fiction writers would have dismissed as being too outlandish."

A birthday cake celebrating the 10th birthday of MOST. Image: Jaymie Matthews

Another published work involved refining measurements of stellar variability using the example of Epsilon Eridani. MOST is also involved in planet-hunting; a paper about a search around one star will be submitted for publication soon.

To Matthews’ knowledge, MOST is the only space telescope that charges for access. Typically, telescopes are open to all astronomers who must compete for telescope time based on their expected scientific return from the investigation.

There is at least one example on Earth, however, of a sky-gazing telescope that charges for access. The Keck telescopes, Matthew said, are free for astronomers in the University of California system. Those outside of teams with U of C astronomers pay per use. The calculated observing cost per night is $53,700 US (nearly $68,900 Canadian).

‘Pay-Per-View’ Mode Keeps Canadian Space Telescope Flying After 13 Years

Snowden’s Favorite Cloud Service Now Has a Group Chat App

Group chats are such an integral part of many organizations that sharing sensitive information is par for the course, but it’s fair to say that the majority of users would prefer it if whatever was discussed in Slack stayed in Slack— forever. And it’s not just mild embarrassment at stake. Think of all the business secrets being traded or relationships that would come to a screeching halt if customers or clients knew what was really being said within the confines of a group chat room. (This reality recently hit home for teachers at Blackstone Valley Prep in Rhode Island, who came under fire after insulting their own students in a series of disparaging, expletive-laden Slack discussions, which were likely accessed when a teacher’s email account was hacked, and then forwarded widely from that same account.)

Image: SpiderOak

Enter Semaphor. Think of it as Slack’s privacy-savvy and slightly paranoid younger cousin. It’s the brainchild of SpiderOak, the same company whose backup product Edward Snowden recommended as a Dropbox alternative a few years back. SpiderOak almost made waves for ditching Google Analytics in December 2015. All content (including file attachments) is end-to-end encrypted so that even SpiderOak can’t read it. If the company is hacked (or the chats are subpoenaed--something that Gawker learned about the hard way), the only information SpiderOak will be able to access is a bunch of gobbledygook ciphertext.

Semaphor’s design decisions protect communications in various additional ways. For one, it’s an app you download to your phone, laptop, or desktop computer, so it lacks the many security risks associated with web apps. The tool generates multi-word passphrases for users, offering some protection from the security risks associated with self-generated passwords, which are often so poor that they’re susceptible to guesswork, not to mention brute force attacks.

Image: SpiderOak

Because you can’t use emails to invite or onboard users into a group, companies are less susceptible to phishing. Channels, groups, and personal messages are independently cryptographically secure conversations using different keys. (That prevents someone with a USB drive who has access to the servers from walking out with all the data). Users can even compare public keys or unique patterns to verify each other’s identities, a feature that other messaging tools don’t offer. Oh, and you can view the client-side source code, too.

Some companies store data along with the keys to access it on their own servers. Other companies allow users to host collaborative chat tools on their own servers, but then there’s nothing stopping a rogue sysadmin from accessing whatever information they want (other than their own conscience, that is). Because Semaphor encrypts chat before it even leaves users’ computers, any data collected from their servers will have no value because nobody will be able to read it.

Semaphor is easy to use and visually appealing, but it does lack a few features—no URL previews, no email digest—but really, it’s for your own privacy and security. SpiderOak doesn’t store passwords or answers to password hints, which means that if you lose your devices and your backup code, you’re S.O.L., so that’s something to keep in mind as well. But if you’re paranoid aware of all of the risks associated with your chat transcripts getting leaked, Semaphor could well be the chat tool for you.

Semaphor has a free basic plan with a 30-day history, a $6/month plan for personal use, and a $9/month pro plan. It is available for iOS, Android, MacOS, Windows, and Linux.

Snowden’s Favorite Cloud Service Now Has a Group Chat App

NRA Complaint Takes Down 38,000 Websites

38,000 websites hosted by the automated publishing service Surge went down today, after the National Rifle Association sent a legal notice over a parody website created by the Yes Men.

A few days ago, the Yes Men released the parody video, “Share the Safety”—announcing a supposed NRA program to deliver firearms into the hands of those too impoverished to afford guns.

The opening frame of the video says “Paid for in part by the National Rifle Association of America with additional support from Smith & Wesson Holding Corporation."

“Systemic poverty and dumb laws keep the urban poor unable to acquire life-saving firearms,” says the video, which is available on YouTube. “That’s why we at the NRA are teaming up with Smith & Wesson to share the safety.” The YouTube description includes a link to the “official” website, ShareTheSafety.org.

ShareTheSafety.org currently looks like this:

Surge is a service that allows for easy web publishing of static web pages—think something along the lines of Wordpress, or github.io. The Yes Men apparently used the service to create their website.

As the late Senator Ted Stevens once said, the internet is a series of tubes. And in 2016, those tubes are mostly owned and controlled by a convoluted network of many different companies. A site might be published via Surge, but Surge itself is hosted via cloud computing provided by Digitalocean, and uses Cloudflare as a content distribution network.

According to a series of tweets from the Surge twitter account, the NRA sent a legal complaint to Cloudflare, which then forwarded it to Digitalocean. Surge responded “within 22 minutes.” Digitalocean asked Surge to provide counterclaim documents. Some minutes later, Digitalocean shut down Surge.sh. According to Surge, 38,000 sites became unavailable.

Nothing but radio silence from Surge June 29, 2016

Although Surge referred to “counterclaim documents,” which sounds like part of the DMCA notice-and-takedown process, other sources say that the legal complaint sent by the NRA was not a DMCA notice, and was likely based on trademark law.

The Yes Men video does use NRA trademarks. If you are familiar with the Yes Men’s work, I don’t need to spell out why they would do that, or why it would be for a parodic purpose. (And for what it’s worth, parodies are protected under trademark law.)

Novel forms of takedowns sent to upstream infrastructure providers are not exactly new. In 2015, Cloudflare fought off a court order that would have required them to police trademarks for the many, many sites they service.

For those seeking ad hoc censorship of parody and criticism, the advantages of turning to legal avenues outside the DMCA are obvious. The DMCA has its problems, but DMCA notice-and-takedown has one thing going for it: The process is well-established, with known rules and procedures, and dedicated and trained staff at companies adhering to said rules and procedures. As opposed to, like, being some whackadoodle legal theory transmitted via very scary letter.

There’s a reason why the Yes Men video is still up on YouTube and why their Digitalocean-hosted, Cloudflare-distributed site is down. After over a decade of sparring with rights holders, YouTube has a robust team of employees whose job it is to deal with legal disputes over content. Maybe sometimes they still make the wrong calls, but the company has manpower and experience.

Services like Digitalocean might have dedicated teams handling DMCA notices, but employees might not be able to handle a more unusual variety of complaint. The NRA got Digitalocean to choke up and hit a panic button, sending 38,000 websites into purgatory.

Most of the Surge websites went back up around 3:30 PM PDT, but the Yes Men website is still unavailable—successfully censored, for now, by the National Rife Association.

NRA Complaint Takes Down 38,000 Websites

Malaria Vaccine Can Cause Negative 'Rebound Effect,' Study Says

A vaccine for malaria has been a long-time dream for researchers, but it’s no easy feat. Now, a new study on our most advanced vaccine shows its efficacy not only wanes, but it can also make some kids get more bouts of malaria later in life.

In a seven-year follow up of the Phase II trial of the RTS,S vaccine—the malaria vaccine that has been in development the longest—researchers found the vaccine significantly dropped in efficacy over time.

In fact, for some areas with high rates of malaria, the vaccine actually had a negative effect, according to the paper published in the New England Journal of Medicine Wednesday.

“We don’t know the extent of the problem. I think it raises a question that needs to be followed up on,” Dr. Philip Bejon, Director of the Wellcome-KEMRI-Oxford Collaborative Research Programme and co-author of the study, told me on the phone from Kenya.

Early in the trial, the vaccine was fairly effective, with a 27 percent efficacy against a first episode of malaria after vaccination. But over time, the efficacy waned: By the end of seven years, the overall efficacy was 4.4 percent.

What’s more worrisome is that, in areas where trial participants had high exposure to malaria, there was a negative effect: Those vaccinated actually got more cases of malaria than the control group by the end of the trial.

The researchers dubbed this effect “malaria rebound.” This is because the vaccine protects against sporozoites—kind of the “baby” malaria parasites that enter the blood stream when an infectious mosquito bites a human—but it doesn’t produce immunity to the later stage parasites. When children with high exposure to malaria are vaccinated, they’re protected at first, but are not able to build up a natural immunity that comes from infection, and end up getting sick more often later, the authors suggest.

But Bejon pointed out that the results are far from conclusive. For one, the sample size was quite small, with only 312 children completing the full seven-year follow up.

“With the study size that we’ve got, I think all we can say is that there isn’t a clear benefit overall by the time you get to the end of seven years,” Bejon explained. “Because of the sample size, the confidence intervals for both the negative effect in the subgroup and the positive effect overall overlap zero. So the effect size we’re seeing is relatively marginal.”

The Phase II trial also only doled out three doses of the vaccine, but the Phase III trial used four doses with better success. Right now, researchers are following up on the Phase III trial to see the long term effects, the results of which will come out some time next year. In the meantime, the World Health Organization has approved a much larger pilot study of the vaccine that’s currently in the planning stages.

For a long time, a malaria vaccine has been the holy grail pursuit of public health research, and there are dozens of other candidates in the pipeline. Bejon said that this paper contributes to our understanding of this first generation vaccine, but that a vaccine was never going to be a magic bullet for malaria.

“You can get some quantifiable protection in the field with one antigen, so it’s really important to invest in this field to get better vaccines,” Bejon said. “But a malaria vaccine is only going to be useful in a setting where there’s already a malaria control program functioning. A vaccine would be an add on.”

Malaria Vaccine Can Cause Negative 'Rebound Effect,' Study Says