As Hurricane Milton surges toward Florida this week, hospitals should prepare for a spike in suicide attempts like those seen among victims of Helene.

A nurse told DailyMail.com that Mission Hospital in Ashville, North Carolina saw roughly 300 new patients on September 28, with many displaying signs of an overdose and even a gunshot wound.

The ‘Biblical devastation’ swept away roads and homes, downed trees and power lines, and killed at least 200 people in its wake.

Many residents of Ashville believe their community has been forgotten due to a lack of efforts from officials who have yet to send aid in the last week since Helene made landfall on September 27.

Hurricane Helene has left a trail of devastation and many of the lives stolen have been widely publicized including a 74- and 78-year-old couple who died holding each other in bed and a seven-year-old boy and his grandparents standing on a roof moments before it collapsed, sweeping them away in the floods.

But in Asheville, a city of nearly 94,000 people, no one knew disaster was heading for them until it was too late.

Residents didn’t receive flash flood warnings or orders to evacuate, but when the rain came bucketing down they knew they were in trouble.

‘When we woke up that morning, it felt like just any other morning. We didn’t think that hurricane was going to be that big of deal,’ Mi Truong,  a 32-year-old nurse at Mission Hospital, said. 

When the power went out and water stopped running, she said hospital staff started to panic about how to treat patients hygienically, but within hours the situation became much more dire.

The hospital has a capacity for about 80 people, but by the end of the day, the number of people had surged to roughly 300.

‘There was a lot of mental health issues coming in, a lot of suicide attempts,’ Truong said.

Although she wasn’t allowed to leave the hospital, Truong said other locals woke up on Sunday morning to massive floods and the hurricane’s victims in their backyards.

‘At first, I thought this was just rumor, but it’s been confirmed with our contacts that there are bodies found in trees,’ said Truong.

She explained that her husband, Randy Keener, is a HAM radio operator and received information from local police about ‘one guy who said he just went into his backyard one morning and just saw a deceased person in his tree, so this is real scary stuff.’

More than a week after Hurricane Helene swept through the area, Allison Faust, 33,  said she’s still running on a state of disassociation and adrenaline as she tries to help the people who weren’t able to escape Asheville.

‘Obviously the biggest problem is the flooding and death, but there’s no resources, there’s no communication, there’s no news,’ said Faust, who has lived in the area on and off since college.

Faust said she was lucky to escape the ‘Biblical destruction’ unscathed, in part thanks to her friend who she came across when her car broke down while trying to search for gas and other supplies.

The pair hunkered down for the night at Faust’s home and it was during this time that it struck them just how severe the storm would become and said they had to support each other’s mental health to avoid spiraling out of control.

‘We buddied up together, and she stayed the night over at my house because nobody had power. But when she woke up and I wasn’t done sleeping … I gave her my car, and she drove home and, like, cried and journaled and then came back,’ Faust said.

‘You kind of just trade back and forth with what the other person needs to feel okay.

‘You know, I think you have like 50 percent of yourself running on adrenaline and kind of disassociating, trying to get stuff done, because you have to do stuff, and then the other 50 percent you’re having a mental breakdown,’ she continued.

‘You just kind of trade back and forth with whoever you’re around and if they’re having a mental breakdown, it’s time for you to be on adrenaline, and if it’s your turn to break down, then they have to.’

She continued: ‘I swear, if there were not cheap beer and cigarettes going around, everyone would just be in the fetal position, rocking back and forth.’

As soon as they were able to leave the house on Sunday, they located a shower station after spending days without any running water to clean themselves.

‘People don’t understand how important that is because there’s so many dehumanizing things happening,’ she said.

‘Like my friend had to change her pad in the middle of the sidewalk. And you’re just dirty and you just want to feel clean.

‘And at that point, the only thing you need is hope and a semblance of reality.’

Faust was finally rescued by her dad around in the early hours on September 30 after he drove 11 hours nonstop from Indiana to rescue her.

But on the way, his transmission blew and as he arrived he shouted for his daughter to get her things and go for fear the car engine would give out before they could escape.

‘I was packing furiously and just whatever I could get in there, in the door, because I still didn’t have power, and threw it in there, grabbed the cat and got in.’

But as they pulled away, the engine died. ‘He was like, ‘This is my worst f****** nightmare. And I’m like, Yeah, same. I’ve been living my worst f****** nightmare for so many days in a row now.’

They drove nonstop through the night to get back to Indiana, ‘and the whole time, [the transmission] was about to die, but we just had to book it,’ Faust said. 

‘And we knew if we stopped, we’d get stranded.’

Truong and Faust both admonished that they haven’t seen any government help come to the area, and that most of the supplies, rescue missions and relief they’re getting is from other members of the community and private people driving in to help.

‘There was no one… like, the National Guard kind of showed up, but they were just standing around,’ Faust said. 

‘I don’t know what their purpose was. There was only like, two that I saw and then no FEMA [Federal Emergency Management Agency], no Red Cross, just days and days and days of sh** not getting better.’

Asheville locals need resources and funding to help them rebuild, but Faust said that even filling out a FEMA application is no guarantee that you’ll get aid.

She explained that FEMA applications offer several trick questions, and if you misunderstand just one, it could cost you funds that you desperately need.

So if you answer no to the question ‘Was my house damaged in the hurricane?’ because a tree didn’t fall directly on your home, you’ll be denied but the question actually applies to downed power lines on your property or no access to water. 

‘Also, the FEMA calls are displayed as potential spam. So people aren’t answering because it’s doesn’t say FEMA or whatever,’ Faust said.

‘So there’s just a lot of information that people need, like the biggest needs are drinkable water and airlifts, rescues, wellness checks, gasoline and information, because people want to get the hell out of there, and they just can’t.’

Truong said she’s seen a lot of ignorant posts saying people shouldn’t live in or near ‘natural disaster prone areas’ but the Blue Ridge Mountains where Asheville is nestled has rarely seen events like Helene.

The area last flooded in 2004, destroying 140 homes and killing 11 people but none was as bad as the catastrophic flood of 1916 when tropical storms caused water levels to reach 17 feet high and resulted in 80 deaths.

In 2016, the City of Asheville questioned if the city was ready for an event of that magnitude, claiming it was.

‘Today FEMA has mapping systems that can predict how much rainfall we are going to get, and which areas are going to be flooded,’ Kelley Klope of the Asheville Fire Department said on The City of Asheville site at the time. 

‘The City can help notify people ahead of time through its Everybridge emergency notification system (called Citizens Alert), announcements to local media and messages on our social media channels.’

Yet, when it came down to it and Hurricane Helene tore through the area, destroying everything in its wake, residents didn’t receive enough notification that could have sent them to safety.

Alice Bauman, 31, studies ecology, geology and forestry and is a resident of near Swannanoa River Road, an area that was under a story and a half of flooding at its worst.

She said the severe damage might have been prevented if it weren’t for climate change denial, which she claimed runs rampant throughout the state. 

North Carolina proposed House Bill 819 in 2012 which mandated that the scientific models used to predict the rising sea levels must be based on historical data and not on up-to-date models that account for acceleration due to climate change. 

After receiving backlash for years, House Bill 819 was updated in 2020 to look ahead a minimum of 30 years to address sea level change.

‘There is a direct correlation between higher sea level and stronger storms which push more water inland,’ Bauman said.

‘Unfortunately, the North Carolina law is just a symptom of a culture of climate change denial among the leaders in the southeast who are in charge of planning the budgets for things like emergency management.’ 

She added that another likely reason was that the local government hadn’t taken steps to secure the area after filing a report in 2020 that the infrastructure was out of date.

‘Securing those areas and putting in that infrastructure would be an expensive project with no immediately tangible product or results, so it’s a hard sell when funding for public projects is limited,’ Bauman said.

The local government should have been more proactive in taking steps to protect the area, should a major flooding occur, according to Faust, who said the infrastructure has needed to be updated for years.

‘It’s been disappointing, but not surprising, to observe the lack of lifesaving infrastructure that could have been in place if it had been a priority,’ Bauman said.

‘This disaster was geologically inevitable and our infrastructure was absolutely not prepared.’

For those who want to assist in the rescue and supply efforts in Asheville, North Carolina, you can visit the site belovedasheville.com.

Whether you’re making the spiciest curry or a simple spaghetti bolognese, no home cook would be happy without a well-furnished spice rack.

But experts now warn that you might be adding more than a little kick to your dinner when you reach for the chilli powder.

Seven of the most popular herbs and spices sold in UK supermarkets have been found to be bulked out with cheap alternatives.

Worryingly, this includes everything from coloured chalk to toxic lead-based dyes. 

Some of these fraudulent flavourings even contain chemicals that could increase your risk of cancer or lead to fatal allergic reactions. 

What is spice fraud? 

When buying spices, you might think that what it says on the label is what you are getting.

While this is the case most of the time, there is a growing concern that some unscrupulous producers are bulking out their products with other ingredients.

Spices are often produced only in specific regions, are extremely expensive for their weight, and are generally sold as highly pigmented powders.

The combination of these factors means that spice fraud is easy to do, hard to detect and extremely profitable.

A study of herbs and spices carried out by the European Commission between 2019 and 2021 tested 1,885 seasoning samples.

After nearly 10,000 different laboratory tests, the commission found that 17 per cent of all the herbs and spices tested contained some form of suspicious adulteration.

Likewise, a study undertaken by the Food Safety Agency in the UK this year found that as much as 13 per cent of some spices were faked.

Dr Terry McGrath, chief scientific officer for leading food testing company Bia Analytical, told MailOnline: ‘With the larger retailers implementing risk mitigation strategies it is less common.

‘However, you will still find it in less well-controlled supply chains; for example, smaller retailers without the capability or quality processes to assess the risk.’

What makes this concerning is not just that customers aren’t getting what they pay for. Some of the additives can be acutely toxic in high doses or even have long-term effects such as increased cancer risk.

Since the doses are generally low, these effects may never be noticed, but a bigger risk is posed by allergic reactions.

The EU study concluded: ‘A serious threat could be an allergic reaction to an allergenic ingredient that has not been declared on the label.’

Some spices have even been found to contain crushed nut or peanut shells which can cause fatal allergic reactions in some people.

So, with those risks in mind, these are the seven spices which most likely to be faked.

Saffron  

The fine, delicately flavoured threads of saffron are among the most valuable spices by weight.

To produce saffron, the stigmas of the saffron crocus must be delicately separated from each individual flower.

According to researchers from the University of Vermont, it can take as many as 160,000 flowers to produce a single kilogram of the spice.

Combined with the fact that the world’s two largest producers are Iran and Afghanistan, this results in an extremely volatile market which is ripe for fraud.

EU investigations showed that as much as 11 per cent of saffron on the market had been adulterated in some way.

Often, this involves adding natural or artificial dyes to improve the appearance of inferior produce or to give other products like silk from corn husks a saffron-like appearance.

These dyes are generally harmless but investigations have revealed some batches of saffron contaminated with Sudan dyes – industrial dyes used to colour oils and waxes.

These dyes are banned from food products due to their toxicity and potential carcinogenic effects.

To test for fake saffron, many recommend placing a small amount of the fronds in cold water.

Since the pigments in saffron dissolve less readily in water than some cheap synthetic dyes you should be able to see a difference in their reactions.

Real saffron will only colour cold water faintly after a minute or so, whereas fake saffron will quickly release its pigments and dye the water red.

After they have soaked, real saffron will also maintain its red colour while the corn silk in some very cheap fakes may lose its colour.

However, experts warn that this test isn’t foolproof, so you still can’t be quite sure that the saffron is real.

Dr McGraph says: ‘Consumers need to be careful when interpreting results of at-home tests.

‘Dissolving in water will only work if the dye is water-soluble, which not all of them are.’

Black pepper  

Pepper is one of the most commonly used spices in any kitchen, but that doesn’t mean it is protected from being faked.

Out of the 421 samples tested by the European Commission, 70 were found to have been bulked out with rice, grains, ‘non-declared plant material’, and even ash.

Nor are whole peppercorns a safer choice, since some dodgy producers will contaminate their products with similar-looking alternatives, including dried berries and papaya seeds.

Although papaya seeds look similar from the outside and even have a similar taste, they can cause stomach problems ranging from cramps to constipation.

For this reason, people are advised not to eat more than a teaspoon of papaya seeds per day.

Since papaya seeds are more buoyant than peppercorns you should be able to spot fakes by adding a tablespoon of the spice to a glass of water.

Real peppercorns will sink to the bottom of the glass, while any other added seeds will float.

The Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) also suggests trying to crush some of the seeds with your thumb.

Real pepper will be hard to crush, while any fake seeds should crumble or crack easily.

Oregano

This popular European seasoning is the most frequently adulterated herb sold in the UK.

A study conducted by the Food Standards Authority found that 27 per cent of dried oregano tested was below par.

Some jars contained insect fragments, small pieces of synthetic fibre and, in one instance, an ‘excessive’ amount of lead.

While some of those cases may be indicative of poor quality rather than deliberate fakery, investigations have also found clear cases of fraud.

In the EU’s 2021 study, almost half (48 per cent) of all samples were suspected of being adulterated – usually with olive leaves.

In some cases, samples of oregano were found to be up to 25 per cent olive leaf.

Unfortunately, unless you opt to buy fresh herbs there is very little you can do to spot the frauds.

Dr McGraph told MailOnline that consumers ‘would not be able to tell’ if their herbs had been bulked up with unknown plants.

‘It is easy to fool the senses by adding oleoresin – an extract from herbs and spices which holds flavour and smell,’ he explained.

‘Ground forms or oregano would be difficult to tell from sight if there was any additional plant matter added.’

To avoid being duped, the best thing to do is to stick to sources you can trust who are able to supervise their supply chains.

Dr McGraph adds: ‘Consumers shouldn’t need to worry about it if they are buying from reputable sources, such as mainstream supermarkets.’

Cumin 

Just like black pepper, cumin can be adulterated in both its powdered and whole forms.

What makes this form of spice fraud so troubling is that cumin is often bulked out with compounds which can trigger allergic reactions.

About five per cent of cumin samples tested in the EU in 2021 were found to contain excessively high levels of mustard.

While this spice is harmless for most people, mustard can trigger a severe allergic reaction in some and is regarded as a food allergen.

Even more dangerously, studies have found samples of cumin which have been bulked out with the shells of peanuts, pecans and walnuts which can trigger fatal anaphylactic reactions. 

In 2015, the Food Standards Agency launched an urgent inquiry and warned those with nut allergies to be very careful using cumin after a poor crop led to a rise in fraud.

Dr McGraph warns that at-home testing for this form of contamination is largely impossible and advises that customers should focus on purchasing their spices from reputable retailers.

In some cases, cumin seeds have been found to contain unidentified seeds coloured with ash.

Shockingly, almost a third of all suspicious samples collected in the EU were found to contain ash to levels in excess of the legal limit.

To check for this common form of fraud, the FSSAI suggests taking some cumin seeds and rubbing them into the palm of your hand.

If there are any seeds which have been dyed or coloured with ash this will rub off and leave a dark stain on your hands.

Turmeric   

Thanks to its anti-inflammatory benefits, the powdered root of the turmeric plant can now be found in a wide range of pills, shots and smoothies in shops across the UK.

But with a global market value worth more than $4 billion (£3.05bn) it is unsurprising that this international enthusiasm has attracted fraudulent producers.

If you want to ensure you get the purest and most beneficial turmeric, you might be tempted to opt for the priciest brands.

However, Dr McGraph warns that this is not the best idea – especially if you are shopping online.

Dr McGraph says: ‘Price isn’t necessarily an indicator of authenticity at the consumer level.

‘Consideration should be made when purchasing online as there is little to no supply chain visibility, which provides opportunities for fraud.’

Fortunately, we can use a little bit of at-home chemistry to spot one of the most common contaminants.

As disgusting as it sounds, studies have found that turmeric powder often contains yellow chalk.

At low concentrations, this doesn’t affect the taste or the appearance of the spice so is extremely difficult to detect.

Luckily, the calcium carbonate in chalk will react with some acids to produce salt, water, and bubbles of carbon dioxide.

To see if there is chalk in your turmeric, take a spoonful of the powder and add this to a tall glass or test tube, if you happen to have one.

Then, add an equal amount of strong white vinegar or hydrochloric acid drain cleaner.

If you are going to use drain cleaner rather than vinegar, it is essential that you take care when handling this dangerous chemical and wear appropriate eye protection.

If the spices have been contaminated with chalk you should begin to see small bubbles of CO2 begin to form, while unadulterated turmeric will not react.

Cinnamon 

Fake cinnamon is so common that there is a chance you may never have even had the real thing.

Genuine cinnamon, or Ceylon cinnamon, comes from the inner bark of the Cinnamomum verum tree.

However, in the US the majority of spice sold under the name ‘cinnamon’ is actually cassia bark from the Cinnamomum aromaticum tree.

Cassia bark is still technically a type of cinnamon and so can be sold under the name, but it is not true cinnamon and has a very different flavour.

While true cinnamon has a sweet, nuanced and aromatic flavour, cassia has a far more robust, spicy taste.

One of the biggest differences is that cassia bark contains a much higher level of a compound called coumarin which can be toxic in high doses and is regarded as a possible carcinogen.

In sensitive individuals, even relatively small doses is coumarin can lead to health complications, including liver damage according to the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment. 

Thankfully, true cinnamon is easy to distinguish from cassia through a quick inspection.

True cinnamon is thin and delicate and can easily be rolled or wrapped around a pencil.

Cassia, on the other hand, is thicker, harder to break and will look more like a rough cylinder than a rolled cigar when dried.

Chilli powder   

With its bright red colour and fiery taste, you might think that real chilli powder would be unmistakable.

However, just like with the other spices on this list, food fraudsters have found ways of cutting down their costs.

One of the more common ways that scammers try to boost their profits is by adding dyes to improve the apparent quality of the spices.

Research has found that chilli powder, cayenne pepper, and paprika have all been contaminated with both natural and artificial dyes.

In some cases, samples of chilli powder have even been found to contain red lead oxide – an extremely toxic chemical used in rustproof paints.

Luckily, cases of genuinely harmful dyes being added to chilli powder are rare.

A much more common form of fraud is the bulking out of the spice with starchy products like flour and potato starch.

But, once again, we can use a simple chemical reaction to spot whether we are being duped.

Real chilli powder is naturally low in starch, unlike the cheap products that are used to stretch the product further.

Iodine, which is sold as a disinfectant for first-aid kits, changes from brown to a deep blue-black colour in the presence of starch.

So, by adding a few drops of iodine to a sample of your chilli powder you can easily tell if extra starch has been added.

If you chilli powder is real, the iodine will remain reddish-brown, if it is fake the iodine will quickly change colour.

Of course, be sure not to ingest any of the chilli powder which has come into contact with iodine.

This same test can be used with any powdered spice such as ginger or garlic to test for the presence of cheap, starchy bulking agents.  

New video has surfaced of Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs telling guests at one of his legendary White Parties in the Hamptons that it was time for the kids to go home and the real partying to begin.

In footage obtained exclusively by DailyMail.com, Diddy, 54, stands, champagne glass in hand, like a dictator on his balcony as he calls in the quid pro quo for the hospitality so far extended.

‘We fed you all, we gave you drinks now it’s time to enjoy life,’ he says. ‘This is a celebration of life. This is the real White Party.

‘Kids have an hour left [then] this thing turns into something that when you get older, this is something y’all gonna want to come to… so let’s just start to get our groove on, put the kids away. It’s all good. 

‘All right DJ let’s hit it. Let’s do it.’

It’s impossible to hear his words today without catching in them a sinister overture to the sort of debauchery which now sees the rapper charged with a slew of heinous crimes and held without bail on suicide watch in Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center.

Diddy’s name will be forever tarnished by the charges he now faces of sexual assault and violence, kidnap, arson, and possession of firearms – and the revelations of sexual ‘freak offs’ which allegedly lasted days and saw participants – often sex workers – forced to rehydrate via an IVF drip in their aftermath.

But back in the day, before he stood accused of running a ‘criminal enterprise’ and was deemed a threat to society and justice, celebrities clamored for an invite to Diddy’s era-defining White Parties held at his East Hampton home between 1998 and 2009.

Images obtained exclusively by DailyMail.com show the glittering guest list – a who’s who of movie and music industry fame – all of whom have remained conspicuously silent since the music mogul’s arrest in New York earlier this week.

Among them is Jennifer Lopez who famously dated Diddy between 1999 and 2001 and went to more than one of the parties that he instituted to cement his reputation as a latter-day Gatsby and industry mover and shaker.

In pictures she is cozying up with her then-beau, all smiles and kisses for the man now charged as a serial predator.

Paris Hilton, too, was a regular guest who attended the first party, held on September 7, 1998, that she described as ‘iconic’.

Photos of the gatherings are like a time capsule of late nineties, early noughties celebrity. Howard Stern, Kelly Osbourne, Aretha Franklin, Leonardo di Caprio, Martha Stewart, Jay-Z and Beyonce, Mariah Carey and husband Nick Cannon, ‘it’ couple Tommy Lee and Pamela Anderson, a young Kim Kardashian… anybody who was anybody was there, and proudly so.

Poignantly, Diddy’s ex, Kim Porter, mother of three of Diddy’s children, who died in 2018 aged 47 is also there. In some shots she sits next to Diddy, smiling with their twins D’Lila and Jesse James Combs on her lap.

There is no hint in her demeanor and appearance of the violent abuse she suffered at Diddy’s hands, which is  exposed in a new memoir, In Kim’s Words, which published alleged entries from journals Porter left behind.

And, though there is no suggestion that the celebrities who attended the parties were involved in any of Diddy’s illegal activities, once the kids went home, things got wild.

In pictures shot at Diddy’s penultimate party in 2008, scantily clad, half-naked girls cavort in the swimming pool. A tangle of limbs, they pour champagne into the open mouth of a male guest.

In others, two girls, wearing only bikini bottoms, kiss while champagne flows over their bare skin.

According to former music industry insider Tom Swoope, who has recounted his own memories of ‘surviving’ Diddy’s White Parties on his YouTube channel, ‘First Off In My Opinion: Story Time’, the parties were separated into ‘tiers’ of access.

There was ‘general admission’ then a series of ‘tiers’ ending with entrance to the inner sanctum where the ‘real’ partying went on and allegedly included sexually humiliating male and female guests on the promise of record deals or money.

Swoope and others have spoken about the proliferation of drugs that were present – ecstasy, cocaine – being snorted off all sorts of surfaces including the bodies of guests.

As an industry ingenue when he first attended the party, Swoope describes an eye-popping reality.

Speaking to Oprah in 2006, Diddy told her that the intention behind the first White Party was to integrate hip-hop into the echelons of the mega-rich, to find an intersection of both worlds.

He said, ‘I wanted to strip away everyone’s image and put us all in the same color, and on the same level.’

Swoope recalled it as more of a power trip for the rapper. 

At one point, finding himself in the same room as Diddy, Swoope alleges that Diddy told a young artist to perform a sex act on his bodyguard in return for $100,000 and a record deal, before claiming it was a joke when the young man was on the cusp of submitting.

Swoope recalls Diddy wielding his power with words that echo the threat contained in allegations in the lengthy criminal complaint unsealed on Tuesday.

Chillingly, Swoope claimed Diddy told him, ‘I can make anybody do anything because this life is what they want, and I got the keys to the castle.’

For his part, Swoope said he left the party thinking, ‘If this is what goes on behind the curtain and you’re all comfortable with this… nah I don’t want this life’.

‘There were so many celebrities there who were cool with who he was and what he did to entertain them. It’s not isolated,’ he added.

‘You all need to think of everybody when you think of him and the access and amount of people who were there.’

When I was a small boy, I was adopted. I grew up remembering nothing of my birth family and unaware that I had a biological sister, named Betsy. Many years later, I went in search of my biological family, but for Betsy it was too late: she had died.

This is the story of how I was reunited with her — in Heaven.

Before I start, I should explain that I am a scientist, who has spent a lifetime studying the workings of the brain. 

My adoptive father was a neurosurgeon and I followed his path, becoming an neurosurgeon myself and an academic who taught brain science at Harvard Medical School.

Although nominally a Christian, I was sceptical when patients described spiritual experiences to me. 

My knowledge of the brain made me quite sure that out-of-body experiences, angelic encounters and the like were hallucinations, brought on when the brain suffered a trauma.

And then, in the most dramatic circumstances possible, I discovered proof that I was wrong. Six years ago, I woke up one morning with a searing headache. Within a few hours, I went into a coma: my neocortex, the part of the brain that handles all the thought processes making us human, had shut down completely.

At the time, I was working at Lynchburg General Hospital in Virginia, and I was rushed to the emergency room there. The doctors ascertained that I had contracted meningitis — a rare bacterial strain of E coli was in my spinal fluid and eating into my brain like acid. My survival chances were near zero.

I was in deep coma, a vegetative state, and all the higher functions of my brain were offline. Scans showed no conscious activity whatever — my brain was not malfunctioning, it was completely unplugged.

But my inner self still existed, in defiance of all the known laws of science.

For seven days, as I lay in that unresponsive coma, my consciousness went on a voyage through a series of realms, each one more extraordinary than the last — a journey beyond the physical world and one that, until then, I would certainly have dismissed as impossible.

For thousands of years, ordinary people as well as shamans and mystics have described brief, wonderful glimpses of ethereal realms. I’m not the first person to have discovered that consciousness exists beyond the body.

What is unique in my case is that I am, as far as scientific records show, the only person to have travelled to this heavenly dimension with the cortex in complete shut-down, while under minute observation throughout.

There are medical records for every minute of my coma, and none of them show any indication of brain activity. In other words, as far as neuroscience can say, my journey was not something happening inside my head.

Plenty of scientists have a lot of difficulty with this statement. My experience undermines their whole belief system. But the one place I have found ready acceptance is in church, where my story often tallies with people’s expectations.

Even the deep notes of the church organ and the glorious colours of the stained glass seem to echo faintly the sights and sounds of Heaven.

Here, then, is what I experienced: my map of Heaven.

After the blinding headache, when I had slipped into the coma, I gradually became aware of being in a primitive, primordial state that felt like being buried in earth.

It was, however, not ordinary earth, for all around me I sensed, and sometimes heard and saw, other entities. 

It was partly horrific, partly comforting and familiar: I felt like I had always been part of this primal murk.

I am often asked, ‘Was this hell?’ but I don’t think it was — I would expect hell to be at least a little bit interactive, and this was a completely passive experience. 

I had forgotten what it was even to be human, but one important part of my personality was still hard at work: I had a sense of curiosity. I would ask, ‘Who? What? Where?’ and there was never a flicker of response.

After an expanse of time had passed, though I can’t begin to guess how long, a light came slowly down from above, throwing off marvellous filaments of living silver and golden effulgence.

It was a circular entity, emitting a beautiful, heavenly music that I called the Spinning Melody. The light opened up like a rip in the fabric of that coarse realm, and I felt myself going through the rip, up into a valley full of lush and fertile greenery, where waterfalls flowed into crystal pools.

There were clouds, like marshmallow puffs of pink and white. Behind them, the sky was a rich blue-black.

This world was not vague. It was deeply, piercingly alive, and as vivid as the aroma of fried chicken, as dazzling as the glint of sunlight off the metalwork of a car, and as startling as the impact of first love.

I know perfectly well how crazy my account sounds, and I sympathise with those who cannot accept it. Like a lot of things in life, it sounds pretty far-fetched till you experience it yourself.

There were trees, fields, animals and people. There was water, too, flowing in rivers or descending as rain. Mists rose from the pulsing surfaces of these waters, and fish glided beneath them.

Like the earth, the water was deeply familiar. It was as though all the most beautiful waterscapes I ever saw on earth had been beautiful precisely because they were reminding me of this living water. My gaze wanted to travel into it, deeper and deeper.

This water seemed higher, and more pure than anything I had experienced before, as if it was somehow closer to the original source.

I had stood and admired oceans and rivers across America, from Carolina beaches to west coast streams, but suddenly they all seemed to be lesser versions, little brothers and sisters of this living water. 

That’s not to denigrate the seas and lakes and thunderstorms that I’ve marvelled at throughout my life. It is simply to say that I now see all the earth’s waters in a new perspective, just as I see all natural beauties in a new way.

In Heaven, everything is more real — less dense, yet at the same time more intense.

Heaven is as vast, various and populated as earth is … in fact, infinitely more so. But in all this vast variety, there is not that sense of otherness that characterises our world, where each thing is alone by itself and has nothing directly to do with the other things around it.

Nothing is isolated in Heaven. Nothing is alienated. Nothing is disconnected. Everything is one.

I found myself as a speck of awareness on a butterfly wing, among pulsing swarms of millions of other butterflies. I witnessed stunning blue-black velvety skies filled with swooping orbs of golden light, angelic choirs leaving sparkling trails against the billowing clouds.

Those choirs produced hymns and anthems far beyond anything I had ever encountered on earth. The sound was colossal: an echoing chant that seemed to soak me without making me wet.

All my senses had blended. Seeing and hearing were not separate functions. It was as if I could hear the grace and elegance of the airborne creatures, and see the spectacular music that burst out of them.

Even before I began to wonder who or what they were, I understood that they made the music because they could not contain it. It was the sound of sheer joy. They could no more hold it in than you could fill your lungs and never breathe out.

Simply to experience the music was to join in with it. That was the oneness of Heaven — to hear a sound was to be part of it. Everything was connected to everything else, like the infinitely complex swirls on a Persian carpet or a butterfly’s wing. And I was flying on that carpet, riding on that wing.

Above the sky, there was a vast array of larger universes that I came to call an ‘over-sphere’, and I ascended until I reached the Core, that deepest sanctuary of the Divine — infinite inky blackness, filled to overflowing with indescribable, unconditional love.

There I encountered the infinitely powerful, all-knowing deity whom I later called Om, because of the sound that vibrated through that realm. I learned lessons there of a depth and beauty entirely beyond my capacity to explain.

During this voyage, I had a guide. She was an extraordinarily beautiful woman who first appeared as I rode, as that speck of awareness, on the wing of that butterfly.

I’d never seen this woman before. I didn’t know who she was. Yet her presence was enough to heal my heart, to make me whole in a way I’d never known was possible. Her face was unforgettable. Her eyes were deep blue, and her cheekbones were high. Her face was surrounded by a frame of honey-brown hair.

She wore a smock, like a peasant’s, woven from sheer colour — indigo, powder-blue and pastel shades of orange and peach. When she looked at me, I felt such an abundance of emotion that, if nothing good had ever happened to me before, the whole of my life would have been worth living for that expression in her eyes alone.

It was not romantic love. It was not friendship. It was far beyond all the different compartments of love we have on earth. Without actually speaking, she let me know that I was loved and cared for beyond measure and that the universe was a vaster, better, and more beautiful place than I could ever have dreamed.

I was an irreplaceable part of the whole (like all of us), and all the sadness and fear I had ever suffered was a result of my somehow having forgotten this most central of facts.

Her message went through me like a breath of wind. It’s hard to put it into words, but the essence was this: ‘You are loved and cherished, dearly, for ever. You have nothing to fear. There is nothing you can do wrong.’

It was, then, an utterly wonderful experience.

Meanwhile, back on Earth, I had been in my coma for seven days and showing no signs of improvement. The doctors were just deciding whether to continue with life support, when I suddenly regained consciousness. My eyes just popped open, and I was back. I had no memories of my earthly life, but knew full well where I had been.

I had to relearn everything: who, what, and where I was. Over days, then weeks, like a gently falling snow, my old, earthly knowledge came back.

Words and language returned within hours and days. With the love and gentle coaxing of my family and friends, other memories emerged.

By eight weeks, my prior knowledge of science, including the experiences and learning from more than two decades spent as a neurosurgeon in teaching hospitals, returned completely. That full recovery remains a miracle without any explanation from modern medicine.

But I was a different person from the one I had been. The things I had seen and experienced while gone from my body did not fade away, as dreams and hallucinations do. They stayed.

Above all, that image of the woman on the butterfly wing haunted me.

And then, four months after coming out of my coma, I received a picture in the mail.

As a result of my earlier investigations to make contact with my biological family, a relative had sent me a photograph of my sister Betsy — the sister I’d never known.

The shock of recognition was total. This was the face of the woman on the butterfly wing.

The moment I realised this, something crystallised inside me.

That photo was the confirmation that I’d needed. This was proof, beyond reproach, of the objective reality of my experience.

From then on, I was back in the old, earthly world I’d left behind before my coma struck, but as a genuinely new person.

I had been reborn.

And as I shall reveal on Monday, I am by no means the only one to have glimpsed the afterlife — and the wonders it holds. 

Extracted from Map of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon Explores the Mysteries of the Afterlife & The Truth About What Lies Beyond by Dr Eben Alexander, published by Piatkus at £14.99. 

© 2014 Dr Eben Alexander

 

It’s close to midnight on June 20 of this year and I am lying in a bed in the Riverside ward of London’s Charing Cross Hospital.

The previous day a tumour had been removed from my colon in a six-and-a-half hour operation. My surgeon, Mr Paul Ziprin, the lead for colorectal cancer at the three large London hospitals that make up Imperial Healthcare, had reported that all had gone well. My boyfriend David had alerted this good news to waiting friends on a WhatsApp group.

Prematurely, as it turned out.

The next afternoon when a nurse tried to get me out of bed to sit in a chair, I nearly fainted. My oxygen levels were not as they should be, but all seemed well enough for first my son Sam, then David to leave my bedside and head home.

A few hours later my hospital bay had its curtains closed and began to fill with urgent-looking doctors and nurses — Mr Ziprin had been called and had ordered an X-ray and a CT scan.

It was then that a large pulmonary embolism (blood clot) was found in my lungs, something that can happen after surgery. As a result, my oxygen levels were getting increasingly worse and I had significant right-sided ventricular heart strain.

Strangely I didn’t feel at all ill, but the staff made me nervous by saying I could phone David and ask him to return at this late stage of the night.

‘But I’m not going to die tonight am I?’ I asked one of the doctors. His answer was not reassuring. It was long and convoluted and all I took in was that it wasn’t 100 per cent the case that I would stay alive.

Almost immediately the room was awash with whispering nurses who bundled me up and rushed me through the hospital corridors into intensive care.

I am someone who previously regarded myself as pretty healthy – closer to the invincible end of the sliding scale than the vulnerable. My mother is still thriving at 97. My father died at 90. Neither had ever had cancer.

However, three years ago I was diagnosed with a breast cancer, which was treated by a lumpectomy (leaving my breast intact), radiotherapy and hormone therapy. It was the first time I felt real fear about my health. But, nevertheless, I considered the odds of making relatively old bones were in my favour.

So it was with a casual attitude that I took the poo test sent out by the NHS bowel cancer screening programme to everyone over 54 and posted the envelope off.

After all why should I worry? I had none of the symptoms listed as potential warning bells – bleeding, bloating, stomach cramps.

When, a week later, I got a letter saying that further investigation was needed, I was concerned, but only slightly. It could be a polyp. Probably was a polyp. I’d had a colonoscopy ten years before and it had all been fine.

However this time the colonoscopy, where a camera is inserted into the colon, was not fine.

As the doctor halted the investigation and asked a colleague to come over and put pressure on my abdomen, I remembered the moment my breast cancer was found during an ultrasound. I was pretty sure they had found something similarly unpleasant.

Was it cancer? ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘There is an obstruction here which I can’t get past. And it looks like a cancer.’

From that moment I was immersed in the sometimes seemingly impenetrable maze of waiting for biopsy results and hospital appointments that any cancer patient is familiar with.

When I met my surgeon, he explained it was a major operation, but he hoped he would be able to use the ‘da Vinci robot’ (such a heartening name) which enables the surgeon to operate through tiny keyholes rather than slicing open the whole area.

The next weeks were a horrible wait. As someone used to being in control, I found it extremely difficult not having any say over one of the most serious events of my life.

I tried to carry on as normal, but hanging over my days was the grim knowledge that I had colon cancer and I was going to have a major operation.

The first thing I thought of when I woke each morning was the operation. Everyone I spoke to said encouragingly that it was a simple little thing. They all knew someone who had had bits chopped out of their colon and were now right as rain.

My oldest friend said, with tremendous conviction, based on absolutely no knowledge, that nowadays it was just like having your tonsils out. Another said that, in the event I would need a stoma bag, I should remember the Queen Mother had had one. This piece of information was not entirely welcome.

It was difficult for friends and family to say the right thing. Either they seemed to downplay it or made me more frightened. I worried in some karmic way that, because I had been fortunate in how my breast cancer had turned out, I might not be so this time.

I grew increasingly nervous during the four-week wait. Any moment I wasn’t doing something I would just worry.

One morning, feeling desperately sad, I visited the Maggie’s centre at Charing Cross Hospital, a place where anyone with cancer can go for support.

When I spoke to a counsellor there about how I was feeling, I realised what I really minded was being a person who needed to be in that building at all. Ludicrously I thought it wasn’t fair, as if fairness has anything to do with it.

It was the only time throughout the whole thing that I cried.

David tried to reassure me that I was catastrophising, that it was all going to be alright, however, a few days before the operation in a pre-op check-up my usually low blood pressure was so high that the man taking it told me I wouldn’t be able to be operated on unless I did something about it.

I asked him to take it again and again, trying my yoga breathing techniques, listening to soothing Joan Baez songs… no shift. So I booked an urgent appointment with my GP who immediately stepped up and gave me every anti-anxiety and blood pressure medication I could wish for. I choked them down by the handful.

By the time I was waiting to go into theatre I just wanted it to be over, eager for the blissful nothingness imparted by the general anaesthetic.

In all my worrying it had never once entered my head that 36 hours after the operation, I’d be in intensive care, battling a blood clot on my lungs.

Astonishingly, when I was made aware there was a possibility I might not survive the night, I don’t remember feeling frightened. Sad and surprised, definitely.

Perhaps it was the morphine pump attached to me (although I wasn’t using it) or the oxygen or possibly shock, but despite being of an anxious disposition, I didn’t experience any of the symptoms I am well acquainted with as a sufferer of panic attacks – icy terror that seeps through your body, a sickening dizziness, a sensation of a thread being pulled tight in the brain so that it might snap.

There was none of that. I felt only a kind of disbelief that this was happening. That this might be the end of things.

On one level being moved into the intensive care ward was reassuring with its ratio of one nurse to two patients. On another it was hard to avoid the thought that I was only in that place because this was serious.

I couldn’t see how many other patients were in the ward because everything I was wired into kept me prone, but I could hear their sometimes distressed shouts. It was a noisy place, filled with urgency.

About six o clock the next morning Mr Ziprin appeared, before heading off to another hospital for a day’s surgery.

He said he was sorry this pulmonary embolism had happened, but it can do. It was bad luck. He was in favour of keeping going with the blood thinners, but there would be a multi-disciplinary meeting including teams like respiratory and cardio which would also have an opinion.

A couple of hours later another doctor (there seemed to be millions) informed me that the clot was too large to leave in place.

‘It’s about as a big a mass as you can get,’ he told me both terrifyingly and, I felt, unnecessarily. The team had convinced my surgeon they should intervene with a procedure that involved threading a line into the vein from my groin to get rid of it. But – and I got very used to these ‘buts’ – this would carry a risk because I had so recently had a long surgical procedure under anaesthetic.

Ludicrously, that morning a nurse appeared with a fluffy dog of some description in her arms asking if I would like to cuddle it. ‘Some people find it reassuring,’ she said sweetly. Anyone who knows me would understand this was not the sedative I was after.

I wanted to cry. I thought that might help in some unidentifiable way, but at no point did a single tear appear, even faced with these two possibilities – a clot in my lung too big to leave, or an operation that post-surgery might be additionally life threatening.

I was appalled and miserable.

How lucky I was to have David and Sam with me throughout that day, both appearing so calm and encouraging.

I kept looking at my son’s huge brown eyes and thinking how unfair it was that he had to experience what must be so frightening for him, too. But he only smiled and spoke gently to distract me.

‘I probably won’t die,’ I said holding their hands. ‘But if I do, you have to know how much I love you and know you will be alright.’

Neither was foolish enough to tell me it was nonsense to talk like this.

By mid-afternoon two doctors came to check my heart. It was they informed us, in pretty good shape which was fantastic news because this persuaded the vast medical team that it wasn’t worth taking the risk of the procedure.

Two days later, I was moved into a regular four-bed ward for women only. From my bed by the window I spent hours watching the endless stream of planes coming in to land at Heathrow.

All day and night bells went off, usually because somebody’s drip had finished or their arm was in the wrong position.

Although my embolism was being managed by the blood thinners, my bowels were, as Mr Ziprin said, stubbornly ‘sleepy’. It was possible there was a kink and they might have to reoperate, although he hoped not. As did I!

He sent another senior member of his team in to check me who said – joy of joys – that he was all for ‘masterful inactivity’.

Every day I was taken to X-ray to see if the dye I had swallowed had progressed through my body and every day, there was no sign of it in my colon.

Unless this happened I would not be able to go to the toilet. They wouldn’t be able to leave things as they were for very much longer.

By Day six, as I lay on the X-ray table, I sang the Sinatra song Luck Be A Lady to myself, hoping this time my fortunes would change.

I was fed up with the tube down my nose sucking gruesome liquids out of my stomach. I loathed dragging a catheter around the wards as I tried to do some exercise to encourage my body to get its act together.

I hated the long nights when I couldn’t sleep, and couldn’t move because of all the tubes and instead streamed box sets on my iPad, waiting till dawn when the ward would come alive with the tireless night-shift nurses doing their rounds before changeover.

And my luck did change that very afternoon or at least my colon decided to wake up, and slowly, very slowly, I was on the road to recovery, each day losing another wire or drip from my body.

Two weeks after the operation, I was out of the hospital gown and dressed in my clothes and David came to take me home.

What bliss it was to sink into my own bed and look out at the leafy green of the park opposite. What pleasure to wash in my bathroom with my favourite shower gels even though my stomach and arms were still covered in dressings.

Initially I was simply happy. Happy to be alive, happy to be in my wonderful home, so aware of the love of family and friends. And a few weeks later absolutely delighted that tests showed I needed no further cancer treatment, undoubtedly because of the early diagnosis.

There is still a blood clot in my lung, but I’ve been told it will dissipate with blood thinners.

However, this experience has changed how I feel about life.

I no longer feel I’m wrong to catastrophise — in the end the whole affair brought with it more horror than I expected.

For weeks I couldn’t sleep at night. My thoughts continually flashed back to the hospital ward and fears of another operation, no matter how hard I tried to distract myself.

I now know that however much friends and family might love and support you, there is nothing they can really do when you’re seriously ill. Endless concern, heart emojis, and bunches of flowers can only go so far.

And even now, as I go about the day, I see everything through the filter of this experience: I feel vulnerable and fragile and no longer so certain of living for decades more.

I think of practical things like money and realise there needs to be a plan A that covers me making a respectable old age and a plan B for that not being the case.

I feel more frail and fearful. I worry about tripping as I walk along the street and starting an unstaunchable bleed.

Every pain and ache makes me think something is going wrong again. And then I chide myself for being so melodramatic when so many people are much sicker than I have been.

After any kind of life-threatening event some people make radical changes to their lives, but I have realised how much I like mine how it is. I love my family and thoroughly enjoy my work. I know how fortunate I am.

Yet even so, there is a small part of me that is still waiting for an epiphany, something that would make me drastically reassess my life.

The International Space Station (ISS) is not just a remarkable feat of scientific progress but, for many, is humanity’s crowning achievement.

For the last 24 years, this football field-sized testament to human ambition and cooperation has whizzed silently over our heads 16 times a day without fail.

But it will soon be time to say goodbye to our outpost among the stars as NASA begins to lay out its $1 billion plan to bring the ISS crashing back to Earth.

By 2030, a SpaceX-operated tugboat will drag the space station back into Earth’s atmosphere where it will burn up and, hopefully, fall harmlessly into the ocean.

However, while it might be sad to see the station go, experts say the ISS is already long past its expiry date.

How will the ISS be brought back to Earth? 

Since 1998 when construction began on the first modules, the ISS has hosted more than 250 visitors from 20 different countries.

In that time, astronauts have produced over 400 research papers and have studied everything from how mice embryos develop in microgravity to more efficient ways to recycle urine.

But after roughly 146,000 orbits, the systems and hardware installed on the ISS are beginning to show their age.

Weighing 400 tonnes (880,000 lbs), equivalent to more than 400 elephants, the ISS is so large that it can’t actually stay in such a low-Earth orbit unassisted.

As it orbits, the station constantly hits particles from Earth’s atmosphere which gradually but inevitably drag it back toward the planet.  

This means that the station’s thrusters need to be regularly fired in order to keep it at a stable orbit of around 250 miles (400km) above Earth.

If these thrusters failed, the station would gradually fall out of orbit and crash, uncontrolled down to Earth.

To avoid the station falling of its own accord and potentially threatening a populated area, NASA unveiled its plan to deorbit the station in 2022.

Starting from 2026, the ISS will be allowed to fall under the effects of atmospheric drag until it reaches a height of about 200 miles (320km).

At this point, the last human crew will depart the station on a regular crew capsule, taking with them whatever equipment or items are deemed most historically important.

Once the last crew have gone, the station will continue to fall over several months until it reaches the ‘point of no return’ at an altitude of 175 miles (280 km).

When the station hits this point NASA deems that there is no way the ISS could be boosted back up to its old orbit and it now must be brought safely down to Earth.

To deliver the finishing blow, NASA has commissioned a ‘space tug’ which will launch from Earth, dock with the ISS, and then push the station out of orbit.

Speaking in a recent NASA press conference, Dana Weigel, NASA’s ISS manager, explained that the tug would do this over several stages over 18 months.

Ms Weigel says: ‘At the right time it will perform a complex series of actions… over several days to deorbit the space station.

‘First, the deorbit vehicle will perform orbit shaping burns to put the station in a low elliptical orbit and then, eventually, it will perform a final reentry burn’.

Most of the space station will be destroyed as it hits the thicker parts of the atmosphere at speeds of around 18,000 miles per hour (29,000km/h).

However, between 40 and 100 tonnes of material, mainly made up of the station’s denser components, are still expected to slam into a remote region of Earth.

NASA hopes that its careful planning will bring the remaining pieces down at Point Nemo, a spot in the Pacific Ocean so remote that astronauts on the ISS are often the closest living people.

So far, between 260-300 space objects have already been brought down at Point Nemo, earning it the nickname ‘the spaceship graveyard’. 

However, developing a spaceship capable of bringing this monumental station safely to Earth will not be easy or cheap.

Ms Weigel said: ‘The deorbit vehicle will need six times the usable propellant and three to four times the power generations and storage of today’s Dragon spacecraft.

‘The thing that I think is most complex and challenging is that this burn must be powerful enough to fly the entire space station all the while resisting the torques and forces caused by increasing atmospheric drag.’

NASA had originally suggested that it would employ a Russian Progress spacecraft to deliver the final push.

But as geopolitical tensions escalated, Russian officials have gone back and forth on whether they will commit to the ISS beyond 2024. 

Perhaps spooked by their partner’s lack of commitment, the space agency has now commissioned Elon Musk’s SpaceX to provide the space tug instead.  

The final tug will be based on the SpaceX Dragon with an enhanced trunk section.

That trunk will essentially be a spaceship in its own right complete with navigational equipment, a huge fuel supply, and an enormous array of engines. 

NASA now estimates that the total cost of developing this new system will be $1 billion (£800 million).  

Is the plan safe?

Bringing satellites out of orbit is always somewhat risky but, thanks to improved modelling, has become a fairly routine part of the space industry.

While there is room for error at every step of the mission, the most critical moment will come as the space tug begins its final deorbit burn.

Dr Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, told MailOnline: ‘You can lower the ISS down to maybe 250km (150 miles) and still fly it the way you are now, but below that you’re flying 17,000 miles per hour through the upper atmosphere so you need much more muscle power.’

The biggest concern is that when the ISS reaches an altitude of 100 miles (150km), the rocket won’t be able to keep it pointed in the right direction.

Dr McDowell says: ‘Now you’re firing the rocket in the wrong direction and you’re tumbling end over end so you end up.

‘You end up with a space station that is in a very, very low orbit that’s going to reenter somewhere in a matter of days but you don’t know where.’    

However, that station was only one-fifth the size of the ISS so the space tug will need to be significantly stronger.

To make matters worse, space weather conditions can cause the Earth’s atmosphere to fluctuate, changing the amount of resistance on the space station.

This could potentially trigger the station to tumble out of control, falling past the point of no return earlier than NASA anticipated. 

Unfortunately,  NASA already has a clear example of what can happen when deorbiting a space station goes wrong.

In 1979, NASA’s first space station, Skylab, had been slipping from its intended orbit for months and the space agency made the decision to push into a dive over an uninhabited region of the Indian Ocean.

The 75-tonne structure tore itself apart as it crashed through the atmosphere sending debris falling over parts of populated parts of Western Australia.

Most of the debris did fall in the ocean as intended and no one was hurt, but the Australian town of Esperance did fine NASA for littering.

NASA’s new space tug will need to deliver one final kick which is strong enough to bring the station down in less than half an orbit while not being so powerful that it tears the station apart. 

Over recent years there has also been a worrying trend of more space material surviving re-entry than intended.

Laura Forczyk, founder of space consultancy firm Astrolytical, told MailOnline: ‘One thing that is popping up as a bit of a concern is that our modelling for what gets burned up in the atmosphere is proving to be a little off.’

Fragments of SpaceX Dragon trunk sections have scattered over farms in Canada and the US and part of an ISS battery array even crashed through the roof of a house in Florida. 

‘But this shouldn’t be too much of a concern since it’s just going over the Pacific Ocean,’ Ms Forczyk adds.

Ultimately, since 1979 when Skylab crashed to Earth, NASA has gotten a lot better at bringing material out of orbit and the risk of the ISS missing its target is exceptionally low.

Ms Forczyk also points out that NASA is giving itself an extremely long mission time which should help mitigate any unexpected interference from space weather.  

Provided SpaceX’s tug meets the specifications NASA provides and doesn’t suffer any kind of software glitch in flight, the ISS should return to Earth with minimal risk.  

Why is it time to destroy the ISS?

While it might be sad to see the ISS go, the hard truth is that the ISS’s time is finally up.

Ms Forczyk said: ‘The bottom line is that the ISS is getting older, some of that hardware’s been up there for almost 25 years.’

The ISS was initially meant to be deorbited in 2016 but has had its lifespan extended several times in the intervening years.

This means that many of the systems and equipment on the station are now out of date and increasingly incompatible with modern technology.

More worryingly, the very structure of the ISS is beginning to show troubling signs of deterioration.

Each day the exterior of the station shifts from -120°C (-184°F) to 120°C (248°F) as it moves in and out of the sun’s rays.

The ISS was originally coated with materials designed to reflect most of the heat, but constant exposure to UV radiation has degraded these coatings in some areas.

This has created uneven expansion which is putting an intense strain on the station’s structure which has now created leaks.

In 2021, former cosmonaut Vladimir Solovyov told state media that at least 80 per cent of the in-flight systems on the Russian section had passed their expiry date and could soon suffer irreparable failures. 

Then in February this year, NASA said it was monitoring a growing leak in the Russian section of the ISS which doubled in size over the course of a week. 

Ms Forczyk says that these risks are dangerous but that the costs of keeping the station safe are simply no longer worth it.

‘I don’t believe it’s a risk worthy of evacuating early, but as we’re seeing with Boeing’s Starliner you can never tell when equipment is going to go in another direction,’ Ms Forczyk says.

‘There’s nothing saying we absolutely have to retire the ISS by 2030, it’s simply budgets and balancing logistics.’ 

Beyond these structural concerns, some argue that the ISS is now outdated in terms of what NASA wants to get out of its space programme.

Dr McDowell explains: ‘There’s an argument to be had that we’ve learned most of what we need to from the ISS.

‘Now, NASA wants to spend their human spaceflight on going to the moon, and you can’t fund both.’

Dr McDowell says that the true legacy of the ISS is that it has taught us how to operate a large facility in space for a long period of time.

That is knowledge which will be critical for NASA’s future missions to the moon and Mars, but the ISS has now simply outlived its usefulness.

Mr McDowell concludes: ‘NASA is an agency that does the frontier, and the frontier is moving out.

‘Now, low earth orbit is just another place where humans do business and that’s not where NASA should be – NASA should be at the frontier.’

By Olivia Christie

Published: 06:38 EDT, 17 August 2024 | Updated: 06:42 EDT, 17 August 2024

Fans of the late, great Dr Michael Mosley will be graced with one last fantastical documentary fronted by the health guru.

Filmed last year, the three-part Channel 5 programme sees the former Mail columnist decode the marvels of the human body – and discover everything from why bones break as we age, to pioneering cancer treatments.

Dr Mosley, who died from heat exhaustion aged 67 while on holiday in Greece, puts his own body under the microscope, undergoing experiments to test his heart health, saliva production and how his body copes with a dip in freezing waters. 

In the first installment, to be broadcast at 8pm on Thursday, Dr Mosley heads to Fife to meet Thomas, who suffers a common neurological condition, and is about to undergo pioneering brain surgery.

The 71-year-old suffers essential tremor, which affects roughly a million Brits and causes involuntary shaking or trembling.

Essential tremor is nearly ten times more common than Parkinson’s and tends to affect people over the age of 65. 

But for Thomas, symptoms began in his forties, when he first noticed his right hand shaking. 

By his mid-fifties, both hands, as well as his head, were shaking – and it just continued to worsen.

But now, Thomas is off to Dundee to receive a potentially life-changing surgery. 

The innovative procedure uses a beam of ultrasound waves to zap a tiny cluster of cells in a part of his brain called the thalamus, which is involved with movement.

Doctors hope this will create a circuit breaker that will stop Thomas’s brain from sending out too many confusing messages that cause his uncontrollable tremor. 

Fitted with a head brace to help keep him still, Thomas is kept awake throughout the surgery to ensure the beam doesn’t impact the parts of his brain that control his speech. 

If it strays even a fraction, he could be left unable to speak – or paralysed. 

To test his brain function after each round of the ultrasound, Thomas’ doctors have him draw a spiral on a piece of paper. 

At first, he’s barely able to make a mark on the page. 

But after seven rounds, his hand has stopped shaking enough that he is able to make a full spiral.  

‘I’m so grateful,’ Thomas says – ‘I noticed a change right away. I’ve improved way more than I thought I would.’

‘It’ll make a life-changing difference.’ 

Later in the episode, Dr Mosley meets 76-year-old Allen, who is about to learn if his experimental cancer treatment has been a success. 

Allen was diagnosed with stage 4 lymphoma – a type of blood cancer – a few years prior. 

‘They said that there wasn’t really much they could do to cure me,’ he explained. 

Prior to his diagnosis, Allen was a policeman in London, and spent nine years as Princess Diana’s personal protection officer. 

He started noticing symptoms of his cancer once he’d retired to Dorset, around the same time a family of Ukrainian refugees came to live with him. 

After his diagnosis, they decided to stay and help care for their host.  

‘I’d already planned and paid for my funeral,’ Allen said. 

‘I didn’t think I’d be around much longer.’

But then, Allen was thrown a lifeline by his medical team in Southampton; a treatment known as CAR T-cell therapy. 

The revolutionary new cancer treatment works by boosting the body’s immune system, helping it to spot and fight cancer. 

T-cells – the body’s fighter cells – are removed, modified in the lab and re-injected into the bloodstream. 

These genetically edited cells now have a turbo-charged ability to track down and eradicate cancer cells. 

The approach doesn’t work for everyone, but Allen luckily receives brilliant news at his check-up; he’s in complete remission. 

Previously littered with cancerous tumours, his scans are now showing up clean.

Thanks to breakthrough treatments like this, Dr Mosley explains, we’re now six times more likely to survive cancer than we were 40 years ago – although one in two of us will be diagnosed with it in our lifetimes. 

Similarly astonishing technologies have emerged in recent years that tackle another major health concern for Brits – heart disease.  

Almost a quarter of all deaths in the UK are due to cardiovascular problems.

But a new test developed by researchers at the University of Oxford claims to be able to detect heart problems long before you have any symptoms. 

By looking at the fat that surrounds the heart vessels, scientists are able to spot early signs of infammation in the arteries, which could indicate a heart attack later down the line.

 To test it out, Dr Mosley steps forward for the procedure – which sees him have dye injected into his bloodstream so that his arteries show up on the CT scan. 

The episode also sees the doctor bravely sign up to a slightly more bracing experiment – a cold water swim.  

Speaking to cold water devotees – as well as trying it out himself – Dr Mosley reveals that when you swim in cold water, your arteries narrow – making your heart work harder to pump blood, strengthening its muscles. 

The plunge also releases hormones that are said to increase the body’s metabolic rate and boost your mood. 

Some regular swimmers even claim it helps with immune function as well – stopping them, ironically, from catching common colds. 

Finally, Dr Mosley examines why our bones become more brittle as we age. 

To investigate bone health, he travels back to the University of Oxford – this time to meet with Professor Sue Black. 

She explains that bones – while they may look solid from the outside – are actually very much alive and moving on the inside. 

As we age, the hormones such as estrogen that feed these bone cells begin to lessen. 

After menopause, however, estrogen levels drop – causing the bones to become rapidly weaker. 

Microfractures begin to form, which often fail to heal themselves. 

The condition – known as osteoporosis – is incredibly common: affecting one in five women and one in 20 men.  

To protect our bones as we age, we need to consume plenty of calcium and vitamin C – as well as continuing to do weight-bearing exercises like running and dancing.

The episode concludes with Dr Mosley agreeing to have a camera inserted through his nose to look at his voicebox – and revealing the shocking fact that humans produce enough saliva each month to fill an entire bathtub. 

In the next installment of the docuseries, he’ll look at hip replacements, stress and three things you can do at home to reduce blood pressure without joining a gym. 

One of Britain’s top forensic psychologists who sat across the table from some of the world’s most deranged criminal minds has revealed he has never disliked a subject more than Moors Murder Ian Brady.

Professor Jeremy Coid first met Brady back in 2003 whilst conducting a mental health review for him at Ashworth High Security Psychiatric Hospital in Merseyside. 

Brady, then aged 65, had been incarcerated for 37 years at this point for the gruesome Moors Murders with evil accomplice Myra Hindley in the 1960s. 

The twisted couple who have been remembered as ‘The Moors Murderers’ engaged in the sadistic brutality and murder of five children, before burying their bodies in Saddleworth Moor in North West England.

Professor Coid made his comments in an interview with independent filmmaker Thomas Gardner, recalling that his first impression of the sadistic killer was remarkably low key. 

‘He was quite pleasant and courteous’, he recalled, ‘he looked to me like quite a shabby Oxford don. He was wearing a sports jacket and had a shot of grey hair.’ 

The child killer was born in 1938 in Glasgow, where he was raised by foster parents in the Gorbals, infamously known as one of Glasgow’s toughest and most impoverished slums.  

As a teenager, Brady committed a slew of petty crimes, with the courts eventually sending him to Manchester to live with his mother, and her new husband, Patrick Brady.

As time went on, with the intention to ‘better himself,’ Brady pursued new interests in building up a library of books on Nazism, sadism and sexual perversion.

Staring across the table at the psychopathy, Professor Coid remarked that he exuded a desperate sinister need to ‘control’.  

He continued: ‘What happened during the interview was it became very clear it was very difficult to interrupt him. 

‘This was a man who was so self centered that he didn’t want to do anything but talk about himself and about his negative feelings towards others.’ 

Brady and Hindley eventually tortured and killed five children aged between 10 and 17 and buried their bodies in Saddleworth Moor – at least four of the victims were sexually assaulted. 

Their first victim was Pauline Reade, who was murdered by Brady and Hindley when she was just 16 years old, in 1963. She had picked up by Hindley and taken to the moor where she was sexually assaulted and strangled by Brady. 

Hindley and Brady then lured schoolboy, 12-year-old John Kibride, from a market in Ashton-Under-Lyne in 1963. 

In a familiar pattern, the three of them ended up taking a detour to windswept Saddleworth Moor. Brady told Hindley he sexually assaulted and strangled the boy. 

The third victim was 12-year-old Keith Bennet in 1964, with Hindley luring him into a van by asking him to help with some boxes and sadistic lover Brady watching his prey from the back seat.

With the three taking yet another detour to windswept Saddleworth Moor, Brady later told Hindley he sexually assaulted and strangled the boy. He is the only of the five victim’s whose body has never been found. 

Youngest victim Lesley Ann Downey, 10, had been lured from a fairground to Hindley and Brady’s home in 1964, where, once inside the house, she was undressed, gagged and strangled. 

She was later found naked with her clothes at her feet, in a shallow grave on the moor, after a sickening 16-minute recording of her death was captured by the pair. 

The final victim was 17-year-old Edward Evans, who was attacked with an axe, smothered with a cushion and strangled with an electrical cable in 1965. 

Professor Coid said that although Brady’s crimes were shocking he had on the occasion encountered worse. However, the Moors Murderer’s aura engendered in him a personal dislike he had never encountered before. 

He explained: ‘I think if you’re an experienced forensic psychiatrist it’s important to be aware of how your patients make you feel and how they make you feel towards them. 

‘He didn’t make me afraid at all, but he produced in me a profoundly negative feeling. 

‘A feeling of personal dislike towards him that grew and grew as the interview went on.

‘He was doing something to me, to my inner world. It became quite clear he was trying to control me throughout the interview

‘I’ve seen offenders who have committed extremely unpleasant and sometimes possibly even worse murders that haven’t managed to produce such a negative reaction in me.’

Brady never showed any remorse for his heinous crimes, while Hindley maintained she had been beaten and drugged by her partner into becoming a cold-blooded killer. 

Touching on the deviant’s callous lack of remorse, Professor Coid said: ‘He never showed any remorse and made it clear he never would. 

‘I asked him about remorse and he referred to it as wind and said “if they want wind they would have to wait till Doomsday before they got it.”‘