DayVectors

* 23 entries including: US Constitution (series), society of viruses (series), COVID-19 menace (series), mosaic HIV vaccine, NEOCam, Empire State Building & COVID-19, hidden primordial galaxies, fast radio bursters as magnetars / FRBs & intergalactic medium, & Jeff Bezos.

[FRI 31 JUL 20] NEWS COMMENTARY FOR JULY 2020

* NEWS COMMENTARY FOR JULY 2020: While America struggles with COVID-19 and Donald Trump, events roll on towards the November election. Neither the pandemic nor Trump are permanent afflictions; in time, it seems sooner than later, both will be overcome, with the Democrats left with the question of: "What now?" To that end, on 8 July, a joint task force headed by Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders issued a 110-page paper titled: "Combating The Climate Crisis & Pursuing Environmental Justice".

The task force recommendations do not include the far-reaching structural changes that Sanders had advocated, such as "Medicare for All", the "Green New Deal", and eliminating Immigration and Customs Enforcement. They instead conform more closely to the priorities established by Biden during the primary campaign, Biden during the primary, like expanding the Affordable Care Act through a public option -- but add ambitious time lines for reaching certain environmental benchmarks, such as eliminating carbon pollution from power plants and achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions for new buildings. The paper also includes a list of criminal justice reforms, including to law enforcement and policing practices, issues that have risen to a high profile since the death of George Floyd in police custody in May.

The idea of joint task forces was born out of Biden and Sanders' pledges to unite the party ahead of the November election, to defuze the infighting that helped Donald Trump in 2016. The former Democratic primary rivals unveiled their unity task forces in May. Each of the six task forces, focusing on climate change, criminal justice reform, the economy, education, health care and immigration included members picked by Biden and Sanders, as well as co-chairs selected by each man. Most notably, the joint task force on climate change was co-chaired by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), the champion of the Green New Deal.

Biden, commenting on the release of the document, said:

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No surprises there. The Sanders statement was more interesting:

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That shows the exercise was a coup for Joe Biden, and a testimony to his well-honed political skills. In one smooth movement, he brought the Woke Left into the mainstream of Democratic policy, and ensured there would be no serious challenge to him from the Left: they bought in to the program.

Devious? No, obvious. The reality is that there is not a great difference of goals between Moderate Democrats and the Woke Left; there is mostly a difference of opinion over tactics. Once Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez sat down and talked with Biden's team, Biden had basically won: instead of demanding the Moon as usual, the Woke Left had to come to agreement, and Biden could offer many concessions without sacrificing anything he didn't want to give away. After all, as the nominee, he had a better hand of cards to play.

The nutjob Right takes a reverse-skewed view of the same issue, claiming the Woke Left has taken over the Democratic Party. Nonsense: again, there has never been much difference between the goals of the two arms of the party, and the Left's attacks on the Moderates were typically over-the-top. The Right's take on the matter says much less about the Democrats than it does about the Right, showing how far out of step with America in the 21st century the Republicans really are.

Next up, Biden selects a running mate. There's been a great deal of discussion about who he might select -- but nobody really knows. Wait and see.

* In the meantime, the COVID-19 pandemic is taking the USA to hell in a helicopter. It was obvious after the mass carelessness exhibited during the Memorial Day holiday at the end of the May that things were going to get much worse during June; it took until late in that month, but cases began to skyrocket. The carelessness over 4th of July holiday was even greater, there being more travel across the USA this Independence Day than last year. Now the Red States and the rural areas have been infected.

In a significant demonstration of the impact of the pandemic, late in July Herman Cain -- once CEO of Godfather's Pizza, and a prominent black Trump supporter -- died of COVID-19. It seemed likely he had contracted the disease at Trump's rally in Tulsa OK on 20 June. Many deaths could have been avoided had people worn masks, kept washing their hands, and observed social distancing. There would have been some resistance to pandemic-control measures in any case, but the resistance was greatly inflated by Donald Trump's refusal to lead in the crisis -- trying to downplay it, refusing to wear a mask, attempting to shift blame to China and others. His approval numbers have plummeted as a result. He's made attempts to act more responsibly, but he can't stay on message.

There were tales that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told him that if he didn't turn things around by Labor Day, 7 September, he was on his own. There was some skepticism over the story, but it is believable: the only real hold that Trump has over the GOP is his influence over voters, and if they desert him, the Republicans will focus on saving themselves. They will have a hard time, all the indications being that 2020 will be a bloodbath for the GOP. The Republican Party is in a worse position now with Trump than they were in 1932 with Herbert Hoover, and not just because of the pandemic: Hoover hadn't been impeached, nor was he irresponsible, malign, corrupt, and dysfunctional. The Republicans lost the White House in 1932 and didn't get it back for 20 years.

Incidentally, although the 2020 election was a "Big Blue Wave" for the Democrats, allowing them to handily retake the House of Representatives, I was a bit disappointed; the Democrats took 41 seats, while in 2010 -- the year of the Republican "counter-revolution" against Barack Obama -- the GOP took 63 seats. However, on recently thinking things over, I figured out that in terms of percentage of votes, the Democrats got an 8.6% plurality of the vote in 2018, while the GOP got a 6.8% plurality of the vote in 2010. The GOP got more seats out of fewer votes because they won in less populous rural districts. It really was a Big Blue Wave. 2020 is likely to be even more lopsided.

In any case, Trump also didn't do himself much good by dispatching Department of Homeland Security men to Portland, Oregon, to deal with ongoing protests and unrest there. The city and state governments said they weren't welcome; the Feds couldn't suppress the demonstrations, they just inflamed them, coming on like stormtroopers in unmarked uniforms. It was a publicity stunt for Trump, trying to impress his hardcore fans. Unfortunately for Trump, it antagonized a lot more people, dragging down his approval ratings even more. It wasn't a demonstration of strength: it was a demonstration of weakness, all the more so because he really wanted to send in the Army. The generals made it clear to him that wasn't going to happen.

No matter what Trump does, he can't escape the pandemic; no stunts he pulls can distract from it, and it won't go away when he ignores it. Late in the month, bolstered by an inept study from the Henry Ford Health System, he started promoting hydroxychloroquine as a cure for COVID-19, when all sensible studies performed to date shows it does little or nothing. Trump's reasoning is easy to follow: "The pandemic really isn't a problem [LIE], and to the extent it is, we have a miracle cure [LIE], but the Liberals are conspiring to suppress it [LIE]."

In other words, it's shifting the blame. This only works with the ignorant, who will accept anything Trump tells them. One of the popular memes among them at present is that the pandemic will disappear the day after election day -- as if every government in the world was conspiring to keep Trump from being elected.

* In reality, Trump is failing on his own, no conspiracy against him needed. The Lincoln Project, a collaboration of anti-Trump Republicans, has been hitting him with merciless, well-produced ads -- for example, one displaying "Trump's Wall", a line of upright coffins 66 miles long. The Lincoln Project includes, among others, George Conway, a prominent Trump critic, and Rick Wilson, a media attack dog.

Wilson has a dry, biting sense of humor. Early in the month, the Supreme Court judged that Congress could not subpoena Trump's tax returns, but gave the green light for New York State to proceed on doing so. Wilson wrote an essay for the DAILY BEAST, titled: "Trump's No Billionaire. He's a Bullshit Artist. And Soon, We'll Have the Taxes to Prove It." It read:

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Mary Trump, incidentally, greatly and blessedly upstaged John Bolton's self-serving book on the Trump Administration, hitting the best-seller lists and staying there. Mary Trump looks remarkably like her uncle, incidentally, but comes across as level-headed, intelligent, and articulate -- as her uncle does not.

Anyway, as a parting shot, in mid-month Rick Wilson commented on his Twitter feed:

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These days, if we couldn't laugh, we'd have to cry.

[THU 30 JUL 20] MOSAIC HIV VACCINE

* MOSAIC HIV VACCINE: As discussed by an article from NATURE.com ("Mosaic HIV Vaccine To Be Tested In Thousands Of People Across The World" by Emiliano Rodr?guez Mega, 31 July 2019), much progress has been made on treatment of AIDS patients -- but a vaccine against the HIV pathogen that causes AIDS has proven very elusive. Now, a promising experimental vaccine is going into a late-stage clinical trial.

This "mosaic" vaccine, which incorporates genetic material from strains of the virus found around the world, has demonstrated a high level of effectiveness in small trials performed to date, showing that it does prompt a significant immune response, such as the production of antibodies, against HIV. Trials are now being conducted with thousands of people to see if it actually provides any protection against HIV.

The phase III trial, being run by a team that calls itself "Mosaico", will test the vaccine in transgender individuals and in men who have sex with men, across the Americas and Europe. These two communities are disproportionately affected by HIV, with about two-thirds of new infections in the United States occurring among gay and bisexual men.

Susan Buchbinder -- an epidemiologist at the University of California, San Francisco, and a member of the Mosaico team -- says that adding an effective HIV vaccine to the arsenal of preventive measures currently available to protect people from infection, including condoms and an antiretroviral regimen called PrEP, could make a huge difference. Some of the preventive methods -- such as PrEP, which requires taking a pill every day -- can be hard to maintain, when it's even available. An HIV vaccine would be a "one-shot" deal, or at least only administered intermittently.

Unfortunately, although there's been work since the 1980s on HIV vaccines, nothing has much come of it so far. The problem is that HIV his highly mutable, quickly and easily mutating into new strains, making it a troublesome vaccine target. More than a hundred HIV vaccines have been developed, but only one has demonstrated any efficacy.

In 2009, researchers announced the results of a study conducted in Thailand that showed that subjects given an experimental vaccine were almost 60% less likely to become infected with HIV than those given a placebo. However, the effects quickly faded as new strains emerged. In contrast, small lab tests of the Mosaico vaccine in humans showed that it elicited strong immune responses for at least two years after researchers administered it.

This new study will feature 3,800 participants in eight countries, including Argentina, Italy, Mexico, Poland and the United States. Half of the participants will get four vaccine injections over the course of a year, while the other half will get a placebo. The shots contain a disabled common cold virus that carries synthetic versions of three HIV genes, found in strains from around the world. To boost the effectiveness of the Mosaico vaccine, the Mosaico team added two synthetic proteins -- based on proteins produced by HIV strains common in Africa, the Americas, Europe and Australasia -- to the last two doses in the series.

Virologist Dan Barouch -- of the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston MA, and a member of the Mosaico team -- says this "protein boost" makes Mosaico a "truly global vaccine". The team hopes the vaccine will protect almost two-thirds of the test subjects; results should be available in 2023. The study is sponsored by a consortium led by Janssen Vaccines & Prevention, part of Johnson & Johnson of New Brunswick, New Jersey.

There is some doubt they can reach their target, since the mutability of HIV is so hard to defeat. To deal with that problem, Tomas Hanke -- an immunologist at the University of Oxford in the UK -- is working on a mosaic vaccine that incorporates parts of the virus's genetic code in which mutations rarely occur. HIV researcher Ma Luo -- of the University of Manitoba in Canada -- believes the Mosaico researchers are too optimistic, but still thinks they're doing the right thing, saying that learning from human trials is valuable, she says, no matter the outcome.

[WED 29 JUL 20] NEOCAM ADVANCES

* NEOCAM ADVANCES: As discussed by an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("NASA To Build Telescope For Detecting Asteroids That Threaten Earth" by Paul Voosen, 23 September 2019), the US National Aeronautics & Space Administration (NASA) is now moving forward on plans to launch an infrared space telescope to track "near-Earth objects (NEO)" -- meaning asteroids or comets that have orbits near to or crossing the orbit of Earth.

The "Near-Earth Object Surveillance Mission", which will cost from $500 million to $600 million USD, is the product of long-considered plans for the "Near-Earth Object Camera (NEOCam)", originally proposed by the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, almost 15 years ago. NEOCam is required for meeting a congressional mandate that NASA detect 90% of all potentially hazardous asteroids and comets at least 140 meters (460 feet) in diameter by the end of 2020.

NASA won't meet that deadline; it wasn't connected to funding. However, a collaboration between an infrared space telescope and the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, a ground-based facility being built in Chile, will make it happen, according to a recent report by the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in Washington DC. The infrared space telescope is essential because dark asteroids, which are hard to see in visible light, are more common than once thought. Jay Melosh -- a planetary scientist at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, and an author of the report -- "There are a lot of really dark asteroids out there. That pushes the need for the infrared system."

Building NEOCam, however, might demand an increase in NASA's $150 million USD annual budget for planetary defense. Most of that money now goes to the "Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART)" mission being built by Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland. Set for launch in 2021, DART will test how to deflect the path of an asteroid. There has been no commitment to NEOCam yet.

Work on NEOCam has been kept alive by a team under Amy Mainzer, an astronomer at the Lunar & Planetary Laboratory of the University of Arizona in Tucson, previously of JPL, who has led NEOCam since it was first proposed. Over the past 15 years, with NASA support, Mainzer's team has refined NEOCam's electronics and sensors. Unlike an earlier infrared telescope, the "Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE)", NEOCam sensors will be able to operate without active refrigeration when parked at L1, the stable point balanced between the gravity of Earth and the sun. Design work has also dramatically lowered the "dark currents" of its detectors, which are noise currents that occur even when there's no light.

There have been criticisms of the NEOCam effort, one being that the estimates of asteroid diameters obtained by Mainzer and others from WISE observations are not to be trusted. There are also concerns that limiting the search to asteroids 140 meters or more in diameter isn't enough -- there being concerns that smaller asteroids could be damaging as well, for example by causing tsunamis.

Scientists have been skeptical of NEOCam as well, not believing it had much value as a science mission -- but such concerns are less relevant now that, in principle, it's part of the planetary defense budget. Melosh says: "It's something that we really need to do. It may not be absolutely the best science, but there's more to life than scientific knowledge."

[TUE 28 JUL 20] EMPIRE STATE BUILDING & COVID-19

* EMPIRE STATE BUILDING & COVID-19: As discussed by an article from REUTERS.com ("Will Office Buildings Ever Be The Same? Empire State Offers Clues", 29 June 2020), the 102-storey Empire State Building was opened in 1931, being the tallest skyscraper in the world at the time, and has since become an instantly recognizable icon of New York City.

The global COVID-19 pandemic rendered it a major blow, emptying it while NYC reeled from the virus. Its spire has been lit up with red-and-white flashes to honor emergency workers. It re-opened on 22 June 2020 and is now being cautiously re-occupied, with occupancy not to exceed 50% -- but it poses questions of what sense big office buildings will make in a post-pandemic world.

Companies had already adopted a degree of remote working and virtualization before the pandemic; it has greatly accelerated the dissipation of the brick-&-mortar headquarters. Most companies based in the Empire State Building -- which range from tech firms like LinkedIn Corp and luxury watch brand Bulova, to nonprofits like the World Monuments Fund -- have opted to extend work-from-home arrangements.

Over the near term, tenant polls showed that no more than 20% of the building's usual 15,000 worker population was likely to return. However, even among those who plan to maintain a presence, few expect to ever return to a workplace like the one they knew before coronavirus. Global Brands Group, which owns the likes of Calvin Klein, signed a 15-year lease for six floors of office space in 2011 -- but has already told employees based in New York that they won't be required to come back to the office.

The glamor of operating out of the Empire State Building no longer counts for much, according to Rick Darling, CEO of the apparel and marketing group, who says that a high-status headquarters has "become less important. If your people are dispersed, really the performance of your company becomes the prestige point." The company has not yet made any decisions on office space and will need showrooms for fashion launches, Darling said.

The change in client mindset poses a challenge to Empire State Realty Trust INC -- which owns and manages the building, along with other properties in the area -- as well as for other major commercial real-estate companies across NYC and elsewhere. The city's office property values have fallen an estimated 10% so far in the pandemic, Empire State Realty shares are down nearly 53% since the end of 2019, versus a 25% fall this year the value of office real estate investment trusts (REITs). The pandemic also shut down the Empire State Building's observatory, a tourism magnet that last year generated more than a fifth of revenue for the company.

Nonetheless, CEO Anthony Malkin remains optimistic. His family has been involved with the Empire State Building since the 1960s, and he is convinced its status as a high-profile element of the New York skyline will outlast the transient, if painful, impact of the coronavirus. Malkin points to Starbucks, which leased three floors in March, and says: "Since COVID, we've only had people sign leases, we haven't had anyone move out. In a post-COVID treatment, vaccine, herd-immunity world, everything's going to go back to the way it was."

For now, however, COVID-19 remains a severe constraint on building operations. Anyone entering the building must wear a mask and carry their own hand sanitizer. Management closed non-essential entrances and retrofitted retail space downstairs as temperature-check and sanitization stations, tenants said. The elevator lobby has stickers on the floor that people waiting must stand on to ensure social distancing. Similar stickers line the sidewalks outside the main entrance. The observatory will re-open, but it will be under the same constraints.

So far, Empire State Realty is financially stable, if injured; rents have rebounded to a degree, while a number of tenants say they have no plan to leave. For instance, Shutterstock INC, which signed an 11-year lease in 2013, plans to keep on operating out of the skyscraper. Officials from smaller non-profit tenants like the Human Rights Foundation and Human Rights Watch said the Empire State Building lends credibility with donors and potential partners, regardless of where staff work. Human Rights Foundation President Thor Halvorssen says: "Being in the Empire State Building was a solid component of our reputation. People immediately assume that you're solvent and you're real and you're happening."

Other tenants are not so confident. Unsure what the future of work might look like, they questioned whether it makes sense to spend big dollars for office space when remote operations have been working just fine. Some companies are re-evaluating leases. For example, beauty-products company Coty INC signed over a major component of its Empire State Building space to LinkedIn, owned by Microsoft. Travel site Expedia Group Inc which occupies space on the 72nd floor, said it had deferred "several real estate capital projects" to preserve liquidity.

Daniel Ismail, an analyst at Green Street Advisors, believes that even once the pandemic is over, as it will be in time, the office market is likely to remain permanently changed: "Major companies have found an increased level of comfort with people working from home, which I think will likely accelerate in the future."

[MON 27 JUL 20] THE COVID-19 MENACE (6)

* THE COVID-19 MENACE (6): As discussed by an article from NATURE.com ("Will Antibody Tests For The Coronavirus Really Change Everything?" Smriti Mallapaty, 18 April 2020), there is no vaccine and no cure for SARS-CoV-2 -- so at present, the only effective measure to protect against the disease is social distancing. However, social distancing is only of limited use in the absence of testing for the virus.

Nasal swab tests for SARS-CoV-2 are in widespread use in the USA, though they're not widespread enough. They use the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) to amplify genetic samples and spot the virus. There's been a push to introduce tests to spot antibodies to the virus in a drop of blood that could in principle tell people if they are immune to the pathogen. Biotech companies and research labs around the world are gearing up to produce millions of tests.

Unfortunately, as often happens with new technologies, the capabilities of SARS-CoV-2 antibody tests increasingly seem to be oversold, with the challenges underestimated. There's plenty of testing kits on the market, but most aren't accurate enough to confirm whether an individual has been exposed to the virus -- and even if the tests are reliable, nobody knows if they can really show anyone is immune to re-infection.

The UK government learned about this the hard way after it ordered 3.5 million tests from several companies in March 2020, only to then find out that none of them performed well enough to be useful. Michael Busch -- director of the Vitalant Research Institute in San Francisco -- says: "No test is better than a bad test."

Antibody tests are also being used by researchers globally to estimate the extent of coronavirus infections at a population level -- which is highly valuable, given that many places aren't doing enough swab testing, and people with mild or no symptoms are likely to be missed in official case counts. These surveys test a sample of the population and use that to estimate infections among the broader community. More than a dozen groups worldwide are doing such studies.

When a virus invades the body, the immune system generates antibodies to fight it. The antibodies lock on to specific components of the virus, known as "antigens". The test kits provide antigens for SARS-CoV-2; if antibodies are present in a blood sample, they will latch onto the antigens. There are two types of tests: lab tests that are processed by trained technicians and take about a day; and point-of-care tests that give on-the-spot results within 15 minutes to half an hour. A number of companies, including Premier Biotech in the United States and China-based Autobio Diagnostics, offer point-of-care kits, which are designed to be used by health professionals to check if an individual has had the virus. However, some companies market them for people to use at home.

The tests don't detect the virus itself, so they have limited use in diagnosing active infections. Nonetheless, since PCR tests don't always spot SARS-CoV-2, some countries, such as the United States and Australia, use antibody tests as a back-up for subjects that are negative in PCR tests.

Early studies in people who have recovered from COVID-19 have detected three kinds of SARS-CoV-2-specific antibody; manufacturers and research institutes have developing tests that target these antibodies. For instance, the German biopharmaceutical company EUROIMMUN has developed a lab test that detects SARS-CoV-2-specific "immunoglobulin G" and "immunoglobulin A".

In response to the pandemic, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has relaxed the rules that govern the use of such tests. It has authorized their use in laboratories and by health-care workers to diagnose active COVID-19 infection -- with the disclaimer that they have not been reviewed by the FDA and that results should not be used as the sole basis for confirming that someone has the disease. Australia has issued similar emergency authorizations.

There lies the problem: the antibody tests haven't been adequately reviewed. Peter Collignon -- a physician and laboratory microbiologist at Australian National University in Canberra -- says that kits need to be trialed on large groups of people to verify their accuracy: hundreds of people who have had COVID-19, and hundreds of people who haven't. So far, the kits have only been tested on handfuls of individuals.

It appears that many of the tests currently available are not accurate enough at identifying people who have had the disease -- a property called "test sensitivity" -- and those who haven't been infected -- or "test specificity". Collignon says that a high-quality test should achieve 99% or more sensitivity and specificity, translating to 1% false positives and negatives. [TO BE CONTINUED]

[FRI 24 JUL 20] AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (111)

* AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (111): Another significant advance in 1967 was the signing of the "Outer Space Treaty (OST)", which denied the right of any nation to claim sovereignty of another celestial body, and established the international right to free exploration of space -- somewhat like the free access of nations to the open seas. The OST also banned the testing or deployment of nuclear weapons in space, though it did not ban conventional weapons.

The superpowers were actually not eager to put any sort of weapons in orbit. Both tinkered with anti-satellite (ASAT) weapons, primarily to attack reconnaissance satellites; but never put them into use. Space had become a strategic asset through the use of satellites for surveillance, civil and military communications, and weather observation. Were one side to attack the satellites of the other, reprisals would inevitably take place, and quickly destroy the satellite constellations of both sides. Such an attack would be seen as preparatory to all-out war, and trigger a nuclear exchange. By that time, the nuclear arsenals of both the USA and USSR had reached maturity, each side having enough nuclear weapons to destroy the other several times over.

In fact, there were no major superpower confrontations during that time -- though the USSR and China competed to supply North Vietnam with weapons and other materiel for its war against the Americans, while the North Vietnamese shrewdly played the two sides off against each other. There were, however, very strong tensions during the 1967 October Mideast war -- the "Six-Day War", in which the Israelis inflicted a devastating defeat of the Arab nations, and the Israelis occupied Palestinian territory, which would lead to endless trouble. Tensions flared between the US Navy and the Red Navy in the Mediterranean, but a shoot-out was averted.

The war in Vietnam was LBJ's real sore point. By the middle of 1967, the USA had suffered almost 70,000 casualties in Vietnam, and the war was widely seen as a stalemate. Nonetheless, LBJ continued to increase troop strength and expanded the bombing campaign against North Vietnam; he offered to scale back the bombing if North Vietnam chose to negotiate, but the North Vietnamese were not interested. Public protests against the war grew in scale, frequency, and violence. Johnson believed the protests were being instigated by Communist governments, though a CIA investigation found no evidence they were.

On 30 January 1968, coinciding with the Vietnamese Tet (New Year), the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese launched the Offensive against South Vietnam's five largest cities, including Saigon and the US embassy there, along with other government installations. The "Tet Offensive" was crushed, with the Viet Cong in particular badly injured; but though a tactical loss for the Reds, it was a strategic win, since Americans were no longer very willing to believe the government line of "we're winning the war".

On 31 March, LBJ went on TV to announce steps to limit the war, then announced a unilateral halt to most of the bombing, and concluded: "I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President". Johnson's approval ratings were very low, and had no prospect of being re-elected; he was also suffering from heart problems, brought on by a history of smoking and drinking, and didn't think he would survive another term in office.

The Democratic Party was heavily divided going into the 1968 elections, with Vice President Hubert Humphrey, Senator Eugene McCarthy, and Bobby Kennedy competing for the Democratic nomination. Matters were further complicated when Kennedy was assassinated. Martin Luther King also had been assassinated earlier in the year, leading to massive unrest in the inner cities.

In response to the unrest, LBJ signed the "Civil Rights Act of 1968". It is more obscure than the 1964 Civil Rights Act, but nonetheless significant. It had two primary components:

• Indian Civil Rights Act: Applied incorporation of the Constitution's Bill of Rights to the people of the tribal nations.
  
  
• Fair Housing Act: Provided for equal housing opportunities regardless of race, creed, or national origin.

It also included an "Anti-Riot Act", clearly targeted at the urban riots, that made it a Federal offense to cross state lines to incite violence. The Anti-Riot Act would prove controversial, since it was difficult to sort out organizing peaceful protests, that went out of control, with inciting a riot.

In addition, LBJ signed into law the "Gun Control Act of 1968". It had its roots in the assassination of John F. Kennedy: Lee Harvey Oswald had obtained a old Italian military rifle through the posts, and used it to kill JFK. There had been talk from that time about a bill to halt mail-order sales of firearms, but it had gone nowhere. The killings of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy allowed it to be pushed through. It was a very limited measure, banning mail-order sales of rifles and shotguns, requiring that people and companies selling firearms be licensed to do so, with the licensing process coming down hard on mail-order sales. It also banned most felons, drug users, and people found mentally incompetent from buying guns.

Johnson also had the satisfaction of seeing the first crewed mission to the Moon, with the Apollo 8 space capsule performing an orbit around the Moon -- though not a landing -- during Christmas week. The Moon program was one of LBJ's pet projects; Apollo 8 ended his presidency on a bit of a high note, in otherwise dismal circumstances. Indeed, Johnson's presidency represented the high tide of the Space Race, not only in establishing civil and military uses of space, but also sending robot space probes to the Moon, Venus, and Mars. [TO BE CONTINUED]

[THU 23 JUL 20] WINGS & WEAPONS

* WINGS & WEAPONS: The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) -- the Pentagon's "blue sky" development agency -- has been investigating under the "Gremlins" program a scheme by which a transport aircraft can operate as a "flying aircraft carrier" to launch and recover drones. Gremlins was last discussed here in 2018. As discussed by an article from JANES.com ("DARPA, Dynetics Move Gremlins Focus To Aerial Recovery" by Pat Host, 22 January 2020), the X-61A Gremlin drone performed its first flight test in November 2019, with the project team now moving on to aerial recovery of sets of Gremlins.

The Dynetics / Kratos X-61A is intended to be low cost and reusable; once recovered, it can be readied for a new sortie within 24 hours. A Pentagon video shows that aerial recovery is performed using a towed, stabilized capture device that is reeled out of a C-130 transport, much like the C-130 performs probe-&-drogue aerial refueling. The Gremlin drone then deploys an arm to hook up with the capture device, tucks in its wings, and is pulled on board the C-130. Launch reverses the sequence. The docking system is to be a "roll-on roll-off" module, meaning any C-130 transport could handle Gremlin drones.

* As discussed by an article from JANES.com ("New Iranian Missile Reported To Be Loitering SAM" by Jeremy Binnie, 20 February 2020) a US Navy warship searching a dhow -- a lateen-rigged sailing ship, with one or two masts -- in the Arabian Sea on 25 November 2019, and another on 9 February 2020 -- found them carrying weapons to Houthi rebels in Yemen, with the weapons including what appears to be an unusual loitering surface-to-air missile (SAM).

Images show the missile has an electro-optical sensor and what seems to be an optical proximity fuze, appropriate for engaging aircraft. It has a solid-propellant booster that drops away after the air-breathing engine is brought up to speed. Together with its non-swept wings, that indicates it is a long-range subsonic weapon that would be ineffective against fast aircraft, and so is primarily an anti-helicopter weapon. Military officials say the missile will perform a figure-8 flight pattern over a battlefield, seeking a target.

* As discussed by an article from JANES.com ("ST Engineering Unveils Vanguard 130 Multi-Role Combatant Concept" by Ridzwan Rahmat, 16 May 2019), Singapore Technologies Engineering (STE) has now unveiled the latest in their "Vanguard" series of modular small warships, focused on a requirement from the Republic of Singapore Navy.

The "Vanguard 130" is optimized for drone vehicle operations; it features flushed doors on its port and starboard sides to support launch and recovery of remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) and autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs). The vessel can be equipped with an ST Engineering-designed launch-and-recovery system (LARS), known as the "Q-LARS 2.0", for rigid-hull inflatable boats (RHIBs) and uncrewed surface vessels (USVs).

The Vanguard 130 features an "integrated modular mast (IMM)" system, with a multi-mode radar and other operational electronics. The superstructure is designed with reduced radar cross section in mind. It has a rear helicopter pad that can handle a rotorcraft of up to 15 tonnes, or a comparable vertical take-off drone. It can also accommodate up to eight 9-meter (20-foot) containerized mission modules in its mission bay in the aft section, and a storage area amidships.

Weapons include a vertical launching system for anti-air missiles in the forward section, a 76-millimeter naval gun in the primary position, and launchers for anti-ship missiles amidships. The vessel can also be equipped with remote-controlled weapon system turrets on its bridge wings, and at various locations in the aft section.

[WED 22 JUL 20] SOCIETY OF VIRUSES (3)

* SOCIETY OF VIRUSES (3): Instances of collective action are common among disease-causing viruses. In poliovirus, for example, multiple genetically distinct viral strains can clump together to swap gene products and enhance their attack potential. In addition, two strains of influenza -- one that is good at cell entry, the other at cell exit -- grow better when maintained in cell culture together than when kept apart.

However, in the real world, nasal swabs from people with influenza suggest the two strains don't usually coexist. Jesse Bloom of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Washington, who led that research, suspects that has to do with some peculiarities of the flu virus' lifestyle, which involves population booms and crashes; two cooperative viral subtypes are unlikely to stick together, one or the other predominating in different hosts. Bloom suggests that viruses that don't face such transmission bottlenecks have a better chance of cooperation.

Microscopist Nihal Altan-Bonnet -- head of the Laboratory of Host-Pathogen Dynamics at the US National Heart, Lung, & Blood Institute in Bethesda, Maryland -- validated that suggestion through an investigation of rotavirus transmission between mouse pups. Rotavirus particles can travel together between cells in bubble-like vesicles, sharing resources and hiding from the host's immune system. Altan-Bonnet and her team found that the particles become more infectious to mice when they are inside these vesicles than when going it alone.

Many other pathogenic viruses -- including those responsible for Zika, hepatitis, chickenpox, norovirus, and the common cold -- are now known to transmit themselves through these vesicles as well. Altan-Bonnet says: "These viruses are very sneaky. And we have to think of strategies that disrupt this cooperativity and clustering of viruses."

Of course, in phage therapy, it might be useful to encourage viral cooperation. In 2019, for example , researchers described the first successful clinical use of genetically engineered phages to tackle a drug-resistant bacterial infection. For infections such as this, of course, the ideal solution is to use the virus to wipe out the bacteria entirely. For conditions that are marked by a microbial imbalance, such as acne, some types of cancer and inflammatory bowel disease, it might be better to deploy a phage that can be controlled more precisely. Knowing how viruses communicate could provide that control.

Going farther afield into synthetic biology, viral communication schemes might be exploited to develop tools to manipulate viral gene expression. Rotem Sorek, for example, has taken the arbitrium peptides out of their natural habitat in the phage and plugged them into other organisms, where they act as dimmer switches that dial up or dampen gene activity. Sorek and his graduate student Zohar Erez have inserted the arbitrium machinery into the bacterium Bacillus subtilis, allowing them to manipulate several of its genes at will. That work suggests genetically tweaking bacteria to turn them into factories to generate and deliver medicines.

Sorek also notes that some viruses, such as HIV and herpes simplex, spend much of their life cycles dormant in host cells. If they go dormant in response to some communication molecule, Sorek says, that molecule "immediately becomes a drug".

Rafael Sanjuan and a number of other practitioners in the field of viral communications have devised a new term, "sociovirology", for their line of investigation. In 2019, the American Society for Microbiology has hosted the first-ever workshop dedicated to the topic at its annual meeting this month in San Francisco. Sanjuan and others probing the language of viruses believe they have an idea whose time has come. [END OF SERIES]

[TUE 21 JUL 20] HIDDEN PRIMORDIAL GALAXIES

* HIDDEN PRIMORDIAL GALAXIES: As discussed by an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("Galaxy Hunters Spot Hidden Giants In The Early Universe" by Adrian Cho, 7 August 2019), astronomers have now spotted a population of large galaxies in the adolescence of the Universe. The new find provides insights into the evolution of the cosmos.

These big and distant galaxies were hard to find, being very faint. The clue that astronomers used to spot them is the fact the hydrogen cloud that surrounds young stars has a distinctive spectrum in the ultraviolet (UV). The expansion of the Universe stretches that UV light down into the visible or near-infrared spectrum. The NASA Hubble Space Telescope (HST) searched the sky in this spectrum, and found hundreds of galaxies that were shining when the Universe was less than 2 billion years old.

This technique has a serious limitation, in that it works well with smaller, younger galaxies, but doesn't work with bigger, older ones. In the larger, more mature galaxies of this early epoch, there were more supernovas -- supernovas being the death blast of big stars that don't have very long lives, meaning they were more common early on -- with the dust thrown out by the blasts soaking up the UV. Wang Tao, an astrophysicist at the University of Tokyo, says that early massive galaxies are simply invisible at optical wavelengths.

Wang and David Elbaz -- an astrophysicist at the French Alternative Energies & Atomic Energy Commission in Saclay -- have worked with an international team have found a way to spot the missing galaxies. It turns out the dust that conceals them also reveals them, by re-radiating the light that it absorbs at longer infrared wavelengths. The astronomers selected three patches of sky that had been thoroughly scanned by the HST, and used NASA's Spitzer space infrared observatory to search the patches in the mid-infrared.

The search turned up 63 candidate galaxies, but the Spitzer didn't have the resolution to get a good look at them. The researchers turned to the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA), an array of 66 dishes sited in the high deserts of Chile, to check them out at longer far-infrared wavelengths. The ALMA observations confirmed that 39 of the candidates were the galaxies the researchers had been looking for. Comparison with HST imagery showed the Hubble missed them completely, with the galaxies accordingly called "H-dropouts".

Observations show that these galaxies typically weigh about 100 billion solar masses -- maybe a tenth of the size of the Milky Way -- and are filled with dust, warmed to about 35 degrees Kelvin. That is what would be expected in a typical star-forming galaxy, and not a galaxy with a massive black hole in the center. The researchers estimate that, if their sampling holds true for the rest of the sky, the H-dropouts must account for half of all star production in the Universe in that era.

The new finding is significant to theorists modeling galaxy formation and evolution -- though at present, it's being argued whether it contradicts or reinforces mainstream models. The exercise did clearly demonstrate the power of ALMA. In 1998, astronomers used the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope, a single 15-meter infrared dish on Mauna Kea in Hawaii, to spot an early galaxy, but the Maxwell's resolution was so bad that it took 14 years to nail down the source. ALMA, in contrast, only two minutes to nail down each galaxy in the new search.

[MON 20 JUL 20] THE COVID-19 MENACE (5)

* THE COVID-19 MENACE (5): As discussed by an article from NYTIMES.com ("Trump Falsely Claims 99 Percent of Virus Cases Are Totally Harmless" by Roni Caryn Rabin and Chris Cameron, 5 July 2020), US President Donald Trump has taken an unorthodox approach to dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic that has swept the world: just ignore it, go on as if nothing's wrong, and it will blow over.

In early July 2020, Trump said:

BEGIN QUOTE:

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Many wondered if Trump was trying to say that if we didn't test, there wouldn't be a problem. The professional community didn't agree with the president. At that time, about 130,000 Americans had died, and almost 3 million Americans had been infected. Given the spottiness of testing, the proportion of known cases among those tested suggested the real number of infected was ten times higher.

Calculating the toll of a rapidly evolving pandemic while it's in motion is an overwhelming task; outbreaks pop up in different places, even as improvements in care and new therapies reduce mortality rates. Medical staffs learn what not to do and acquire useful tricks, such as administering dexamethasone to reduce inflammation.

A calculation of the US death rate, based on the total number of deaths officially attributed to the virus and the number of cases diagnosed through testing, suggests the mortality rate is about 4.5%. That is obviously inflated of course, since testing is spotty; many people infected with SARS-CoV-2 are asymptomatic and never report being sick. Studies that have calculated the death rate based on broader antibody testing that takes these silent cases into consideration does suggest an infection death rate of less than 1%, according to Dr. Ashish K. Jha, the faculty director of the Harvard Global Health Institute.

That's where Trump got his numbers, and they're not wrong. However, Jha doesn't believe they justify complacency:

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Given how infectious COVID-19 is, that is not at all good news. If half of all Americans are infected, then that means from almost a million to over a million and a half Americans will die. Yes, they will be the old and vulnerable, but that hardly makes them expendable.

Focusing strictly on the deaths is also myopic, since it excludes the many of thousands who spent weeks in the hospital. As many as 15% to 20% of known COVID-19 patients may require hospitalization, and of the group admitted, 15% to 20% are transferred into intensive care, according to some estimates. Some patients have prolonged courses of illness, with fevers and weakness that lasts for weeks on end; the disease has also been linked to strokes that can be disabling, and much about how the disease affects the immune system long term is still unknown.

Patients fortunate enough to survive a long hospitalization and weeks in an intensive care unit or on a ventilator face a long road to recovery. Residual symptoms such as continuing shortness of breath, muscle weakness, flashbacks, and mental fogginess can persist for some time. Many will suffer debilitating long-term effects, including impaired lung function, neurological problems, and cognitive deficits. Some may need lifelong care.

Even those who had mild cases and toughed it out at home may suffer lingering health problems, and we can't guarantee that those who had no symptoms at all won't have problems in the future. We just don't know. The asymptomatic cases are not "harmless" in any case, because those who are infected but show no symptoms can easily spread the disease to the vulnerable.

Dr. Thomas McGinn -- deputy physician in chief at Northwell Health and director of the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research in Manhasset, New York -- has been investigating the disease's long-term effects. He says:

BEGIN QUOTE:

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The bottom line is: COVID-19 is a real problem, and it will not go away if Trump ignores it. It will just get worse. [TO BE CONTINUED]

[FRI 17 JUL 20] AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (110)

* AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (110): In 1966, in the case of MIRANDA V. ARIZONA, the Warren Court established that anyone being interrogated in police custody had to be clearly informed of their rights, such as the right to an attorney and the right to remain silent, and acknowledge that they understood what they had been told.

In 1963, police in Phoenix, Arizona, arrested one Ernesto Miranda, who confessed while in police custody to kidnapping and rape charges. His lawyers worked to overturn his conviction after they found out that, during a cross-examination, Miranda hadn't been told he had the right to a lawyer and had the right to remain silent -- while he had signed a confession that said he understood his rights. SCOTUS judged 5:4 that his conviction should be overturned.

The legal reasoning was based on the 5th Amendment's protection against self-incrimination; the 6th Amendment's right to counsel; and the 14th Amendment's incorporation of the Bill of Rights to the states. The format of the "Miranda warning" varies from place to place, but typically it is of the form:

BEGIN QUOTE:

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Note that MIRANDA only applies to interrogation; if the police arrest people and forget to read them their rights, the police don't get into any trouble as long as they don't interrogate them. The police can ask people questions about identification -- name and address, for example -- without a Miranda warning; and they can use unprompted remarks by people as evidence.

MIRANDA V. ARIZONA -- along with MAPP V. OHIO and GIDEON V. WAINWRIGHT -- have been described as the "handcuffing of the police" by their critics, who point out that violent crime and homicide rates rose sharply from 1964 to 1974. However, it is very difficult to prove any correlation between the judgements and the rise in crime, and crime has fallen in more recent decades. Defenders of the decision say that they really do not inconvenience the police that much, that the police simply refined their procedures in response. Some defenders even suggest the three decisions didn't go far enough.

As for Ernesto Miranda, although his conviction was thrown out, he was re-tried and convicted again, staying behind bars until 1972 -- no, MIRANDA didn't mean he got away with his crimes. He was in and out of jail for four more years, finally being killed in an idiot bar fight in 1976. It is curious, if inevitable on reflection, that the subjects of significant court decisions are not necessarily admirable citizens.

* From 1965, the clouds began to gather over the Johnson presidency. Much did still seem to be going well. The economy was booming. In 1967, Johnson appointed civil rights attorney Thurgood Marshall to be the first black justice of the Supreme Court. LBJ signed the Public Broadcasting Act to create the Public Broadcasting System.

Unfortunately, the major legislative civil rights efforts of 1964 were paralleled by major riots in black neighborhoods during "long hot summers", beginning with riots in Harlem during the summer of 1964, moving on to more disastrous riots in the Watts district of Los Angeles in the summer of 1965 -- with 35 killed and tens of millions of dollars in damage. The summer riots would continue, off and on, through the decade. Whatever linkages there were between civil rights legislation and the riots were arguable; enough to say that they caused public support for Johnson's Great Society program to decline dramatically.

In 1966, LBJ tried to push through an urban-renewal bill; in the end, Congress passed a watered-down bill, the "Model Cities Program", that proved ineffectual. Vietnam remained an ongoing trial; while the Johnson Administration painted a rosy picture of progress in the war, the public increasingly found that hard to swallow, as the number of American casualties steadily climbed. By mid-1966, public dissatisfaction with the war in Vietnam was growing, while LBJ's public approval ratings were falling. [TO BE CONTINUED]

[THU 16 JUL 20] SPACE NEWS

* Space launches for June included:

-- 04 JUN 20 / STARLINK 7 -- A SpaceX Falcon 9 booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 0125 UTC (next day local time + 4) to put 60 SpaceX "Starlink" low-Earth-orbit broadband comsats into orbit. The satellites were built by SpaceX, each having a launch mass of about 225 kilograms (500 pounds). This was the 8th Starlink batch launch. The Falcon 9 main stage performed a soft landing on a SpaceX drone ship; it was its fifth flight.

-- 10 JUN 20 / HAIYANG 1D -- A Long March 2C booster was launched from Taiyuan at 1831 UTC (next day local time - 8) to put the "Haiyang (Ocean) 1D" ocean-observation satellite into orbit. The satellite had a launch mass of 442 kilograms (974 pounds), the primary payload being two instruments:

• China Ocean Color & Temperature Scanner (COCTS): A medium-resolution optical imager developed by Shanghai Institute of Technical Physics (SITP) of the China Academy of Sciences (CAS),
  
  
• Coastal Zone Imager (CZI): A multispectral pushbroom CCD instrument developed by the China Academy of Space Technology (CAST), for observing coastal vegetation.

The satellite also carried an ultraviolet imager, a calibration spectrometer, and an AIS system for ship tracking. It was based on the CAST968 satellite bus. Haiyang 1C was the fifth in the Haiyang series, with "Haiyang 1A" launched in 2002; "Haiyang 1B" in 2007; "Haiyang 2A", the first second-generation spacecraft, in 2011; and "Haiyang 1C", launched in 2018.

-- 13 JUN 20 / SMALLSATS -- A Rocket Labs Electron light booster was launched from New Zealand at 0512 UTC (local time - 11) to put a set of smallsats into orbit, including:

• Three undescribed payloads for the US National Reconnaissance Office, coded as "USA 301" through "USA 303".
  
  
• Ad-Hoc Network Demonstration for Extended Satellite-Based Inquiry & Other Team Endeavors (ANDESITE): A 6-unit (6U) CubeSat developed by Boston University, which deployed eight pico-satellites to perform magnetospheric observations. It was flown as part of NASA's Educational Launch of Nanosatellites (ELANA) program.
  
  
• M2 Pathfinder: A 3U CubeSat, being a technology demonstrator flown by the Australian government and the University of New South Wales Canberra Space, M2 Pathfinder was a communications and technology demonstrator, one payload being a software-defined radio system.

The flight was named "Don't Stop Me Now". It was the 12th Electron flight, from 1st launch in 2017.

-- 13 JUN 20 / STARLINK 8, SKYSATS 16:18 -- A SpaceX Falcon 9 booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 0921 UTC (local time + 4) to put 60 SpaceX "Starlink" low-Earth-orbit broadband comsats into orbit. The satellites were built by SpaceX, each having a launch mass of about 225 kilograms (500 pounds). One had an experimental Sun visor, to be used on later satellites. This was the 9th Starlink batch launch, with a total of 540 Starlinks in orbit. 800 satellites will be needed for initial operating capability, with the full constellation to have about 12,000.

The launch also included three "SkySat" Earth-imaging satellites from Planet Labs, this being the first SpaceX commercial "Rideshare" flight. Although a Falcon 9 normally launches 60 Skylink satellites, the number was reduced on this flight to permit carriage of the SkySats.

At the time of launch, Planet's fleet included more than 100 medium-resolution Dove / SuperDove 3-unit CubeSats, plus 15 larger SkySats. Built by Maxar, each of the SkySat satellites had a launch mass of about 110 kilograms (242 pounds), being about the size of a dorm refrigerator, with an imaging payload featuring best-resolution of 50 centimeters (20 inches). The SkySats usually fly in near-polar Sun-synchronous orbits, but these three were launched into medium-inclination orbits of 53 degrees, to provide more coverage of populous mid-latitudes.

The first 15 SkySats launched on a variety of boosters, riding a Ukrainian-Russian Dnepr booster in 2013, a Russian Soyuz launcher in 2014, an Indian PSLV and a European Vega rocket in 2016, Northrop Grumman's Minotaur-C rocket in 2017, and a Falcon 9 mission in 2018.

The first stage of the Falcon 9 booster soft-landed on SpaceX's drone ship floating in the Atlantic Ocean around 630 kilometers (400 miles) northeast of Cape Canaveral. This was the 54th recovery of a Falcon 9 first stage.

-- 17 JUN 20 / GAOFEN 9-03 -- A Long March 2D booster was launched from Jiuquan at 0719 UTC (local time - 8) to put the "Gaofen (High Resolution) 9-03" civil Earth observation satellite into Sun-synchronous low Earth orbit. As the designation implied, it was the third in the Gaofen 9 series. It carried an imaging payload with a best resolution of less than a meter (3.3 feet).

The launch also carried the HEAD 5 microsatellite for HEAD Aerospace of Beijing, which is flying a fleet of small spacecraft to track ships and aircraft; and the "Pixing 3A" demonstrator satellite from Zhejiang University.

-- 23 JUN 20 / BEIDOU 3 -- A Chinese Long March B booster was launched from Xichang at 0143 UTC (local time - 8) to put a "Beidou 3" navigation satellite into geostationary orbit. It was the 59th Beidou satellite to be put into space. The satellite was built by the China Academy of Space Technology, part of China's government-owned aerospace industry, and was based on the DFH-3B satellite platform. The Beidou satellites also have a communications store-&-forward ability.

-- 30 JUN 20 / GPS 3-03 (USA 304) -- A Falcon 9 booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 2010 UTC (local time + 4) to put the "GPS 3-03" AKA "USA 304" navigation satellite into orbit. It was the third third-generation GPS satellite. The Falcon 9 first stage performed a soft landing on the SpaceX drone ship in the Atlantic.

* OTHER SPACE NEWS: The US National Aeronautics & Space Administration (NASA) has now given the green light to a mission to fly a constellation of six CubeSats to observe massive particle emissions from the Sun. The "Sun Radio Interferometer Space Experiment (SunRISE)" is scheduled to be launched in 2023.

SunRISE will consist of six 6U CubeSats flying as close as 10 kilometers (6 miles) from each other. The nanosatellites will work as a giant radio telescope, detecting low-frequency emissions from solar activity and downlinking the measurements through NASA's Deep Space Network. The primary target of SunRISE is "coronal mass ejections (CME)", which are massive solar outbursts that can disrupt communications on Earth, or in the extreme even fry satellites and disable power grids.

The SunRISE constellation will create 3D maps to pinpoint the locations of CMEs, while tracking how the particle clouds and magnetic field lines evolve as they travel out from the Sun.

The principal investigator for the SunRISE mission is Justin Kasper at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. The mission will be managed at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Mission costs to launch are given as $62.6 million USD.

* As discussed by an editorial from AVIATIONWEEK.com ("When It Comes To Nanosatellites, The Hype Is Over" by Antoine Gelain, 20 May 2019), space commercialization is not a new concept, but it's become prominent with the introduction of CubeSats and other small satellites.

2014 was a big year for commercial smallsat companies, with Google acquiring startup Skybox Imaging for $500 million USD, and Planet Labs (now Planet) deployed its first two Dove 3U Earth-observation CubeSats from the International Space Station. Both Skybox and Planet had been founded in Silicon Valley a few years earlier, with the goal of obtaining up-to-date, high resolution satellite image data, backed up by cutting-edge data extraction and analysis.

At the time, smallsats seemed like a boom market, with thousands of them to be lofted in a few years. Investment skyrocketed -- but now, five years on, the vision of swarms of smallsats seems less credible. Only two commercial nanosat constellations are in operation: Planet Labs and Spire Global, which account for 90% of all commercial nanosats launched. Of course, that excludes academic, scientific, and institutional satellites, which are certainly a boom market, but not one intended to make a profit as such. While these two constellations are up and running, they're still not fully functional, with Planet Labs having to partner with Airbus to stay afloat, and Spire Global still trying to figure out how to make money.

Nanosatellite companies have appeared around the world, but they haven't thrived. Denmark's GOMspace, recognized as a world leader in CubeSat technology, was listed on the Stockholm Stock Exchange in 2016, with its valuation reaching more than $400 million USD in 2017; it has now fallen to a fifth of that. The Australia-listed Sky & Space Global -- a high-profile Internet of Things constellation company with three satellites in orbit, and a GOMspace client -- similarly has seen its 2017 valuation fall to a tenth of what it was.

Bad news? Yes, but somewhat no. As was discussed here in 2015, tech industries often go through a "hype cycle", in which excessive initial enthusiasm gives way to a "trough of disillusionment" -- which then leads to measured progress. Paragon European Partners -- a UK-based consultancy for the aerospace-defense industry estimates the current industry maturity level at around 15% -- meaning its revenues are about 15% of what they could be in maturity.

There's a chicken-&-egg problem in this, in that it's hard to bring commercial constellations of smallsats to maturity, when nobody has successfully done it yet. Out of 50 or so announced projects (excluding Planet and Spire) that should lead to the orbiting of 3,000 nanosatellites over the next few years, none has launched more than a few satellites, let alone started to mass-produce them, and only a handful have raised enough money to be confident of doing so.

As the saying goes, one can recognize the pioneers from the arrows in the back. The market can only take off if there is a critical mass of satellites to be produced on an annual basis, generating economies of scale and driving prices down. The target price of a 3U CubeSat produced in modest volume, say 100 per year, is about $500,000 USD -- but today, the actual market price is much more like $2 million USD.

Is the nanosatellite industry about to pass the threshold of operational success? Or is the bubble about to pop? Nobody knows -- but it's certain that those in the business have their work cut out for them.

[WED 15 JUL 20] SOCIETY OF VIRUSES (2)

* SOCIETY OF VIRUSES (2): Alberto Marina's research into biochemical communications between viruses has led him to suspect that they may be very elaborate. He bases his suspicion on his work with Jose Penades, a microbiologist at the University of Glasgow in Scotland. On investigating the arbitrium peptides that Rotem Sorek identified as an agent of communications between bacteriophages, the two researchers found that the receptor for arbitrium on the phage can interface not only with genes in the bacterium that help the virus to reproduce -- but also with other, unrelated stretches of DNA. That suggests a wider range of influence on a bacterial host.

Expanding on his own discovery, Sorek has found arbitrium peptides popping up everywhere. His research team has found at least 16 types of phage that infect soil microbes, and communicate using some sort of peptide. Sorek believes the phages have evolved communications between members of types of phage, saying that "each phage seems to speak in a different language, and only understands its own one."

However, although they may be focused on communications between members of a type, it appears they can listen in on communications between targets. Molecular biologist Bonnie Bassler and her graduate student Justin Silpe have found that viruses can use quorum-sensing chemicals released by bacteria to determine when best to start multiplying -- and attacking. Bassler says: "The phages are eavesdropping, and they're hijacking host information for their own purposes -- in this case, to kill the host."

This molecular eavesdropping occurs naturally in phages that infect the bacterium responsible for cholera, Vibrio cholerae. At their lab at Princeton University in New Jersey, Bassler and Silpe have engineered phages that can "spy" on signals unique to other microbes, such as Escherichia coli and Salmonella typhimurium, and eliminate them. That opens up possibilities for phage therapy, using precisely-targeted genetically-engineered phages to deal with bacterial infections.

More surprisingly, some viral cooperation seems almost altruistic. IN 2018, two different groups reported that some phages act selflessly to overcome the viral countermeasures of Pseudomonas bacteria. The teams -- one led by phage biologist Joe Bondy-Denomy at the University of California, San Francisco, the other by CRISPR expert Edze Westra and virologist Stineke van Houte at the University of Exeter in the UK -- observed as viruses bombarded bacteria with specialized proteins designed to break down the cells' CRISPR-based immune defenses. The first wave of viruses attacked the cells, killing themselves, but also weakening the bacteria, making it vulnerable to follow-on attacks. Bondy-Denomy says: "Those phages had to be there, and to die, and produce anti-CRISPRs before another phage could come along and succeed."

In later work, Westra and his postdoc Anne Chevallereau showed how phages lacking these anti-CRISPR proteins can exploit the cooperative offerings of others that do. Whether that is an example of altruism or exploitation becomes unclear.

Obviously, if phages can communicate with each other, other types of viruses -- such as those that infect human and animal cells -- presumably have communications capabilities of their own. Studies show that they do. For example, consider vesicular stomatitis virus (VSV), which mainly infects farm animals, but can cause a flu-like illness in humans, too. Research by a team under Rafael Sanjuan of the University of Valencia in Spain that particles of VSV suppress host immunity at a personal cost, but at a benefit to the group. The researchers are not certain of how that happens; VSV is still not very well understood. [TO BE CONTINUED]

[TUE 14 JUL 20] FRBS AS MAGNETARS? / FRBS & THE INTERGALACTIC MEDIUM

* FRBS AS MAGNETARS? As discussed by an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("Galactic Flash Points To Long-Sought Source For Enigmatic Radio Bursts" by Daniel Clery, 8 June 2020), the powerful cosmic "fast radio bursts (FRB)" -- discussed here in 2019 -- have posed a mystery to astronomers, who haven't been able to figure out what causes them.

That is now changing. On 28 April 2020, the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) radio telescope spotted yet another FRB event. It was very bright, which told astronomers it was nearby. Other FRB events had clearly taken place in distant galaxies, making it difficult to pin them down. The CHIME astronomers knew that orbiting telescopes had been tracking the activity of a "magnetar" -- a neutron star with a vastly powerful magnetic field -- throwing out bursts of x-rays and gamma rays. What if it was throwing out radio waves, too? Further analysis of the CHIME observations showed the FRB was "definitely colocated" with the magnetar,

Another radio telescope, the "Survey for Transient Astronomical Radio Emission 2" -- which consist of three radio antennas scattered across the western United States -- also spotted the 28 April burst and determined its energy, confirming the CHIME observation. It's too early to say that FRBs are caused by magnetars; this was only a single event, and it was weaker by a factor of 30 than any of the hundred-odd FRBs spotted since they were first noticed in 2007. However, it's an attractive model, being both plausible and explaining the FRB phenomenon neatly. CHIME is continuing observations of FRBs, particularly those known to repeat, to help confirm the theory.

Puzzlingly, the magnetar -- with a catalog name of "SGR 1935+2154" -- is nothing unusual among the class Only five of the 30 known magnetars in the Milky Way have been seen to emit weak radio signals, and SGR 1935+2154 is not one of them.

Theorists are hard at work on models to explain how magnetars could generate FRBs. Brian Metzger of Columbia University and colleagues had earlier proposed a model in which magnetars generate frequent bursts of near-light-speed particles -- similar to "coronal mass ejections (CME)", the monster blasts of plasma thrown out by the Sun. When the CME slams into material emitted earlier, it creates a shock wave that causes electrons to spiral around magnetic field lines, generating a powerful focused radio pulse. Metzger's group had not applied its model to something as weak as SGR 1935+2154, but when it did, "it worked OK," he says. The team's model, Metzger says, can also explain why the magnetar's x-ray pulse was 100,000 times more energetic than its radio one.

Maxim Lyutikov -- an astrophysicist at Purdue University in West Lafayett IN -- suspects the action occurs near the magnetar's surface. In 2002, before the discovery of FRBs, he proposed an "engine" based on "magnetic reconnection", in which a magnetar's magnetic field abrupt changes to a new configuration. On the surface of our Sun, the phenomenon drives powerful flares; Lyutikov says that on a neutron star, it could generate the nearly simultaneous bursts of both x-rays and radio waves seen from SGR 1935+2154, although it doesn't account for the laserlike beaming. Observers are now inspecting nearby galaxies, in hopes of finding more lightweight FRBs. Detailed studies of such events should help converge on an answer of what makes magnetars produce FRBs.

* FRBS & THE INTERGALACTIC MEDIUM: As discussed by an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("Mysterious Radio Bursts Reveal Missing Matter In Cosmos" by Daniel Clery, 27 May 2020, FRBs are shining light on another mystery, of the matter that pervades the Universe.

Although the debate continues on how they're generated, as it turns out, they're still handy for measuring intergalactic matter. Over the past few decades, cosmologists have determined that there's more to the Universe than meets the eye; about 68% is "dark energy", an unexplained force accelerating the universe's expansion, while another 27% is clumps of "dark matter" that hold galaxies together. Only 5% is "normal" matter.

Cosmologists know how much normal matter there should be, having calculated it from what should have been produced by the Big Bang, and from the microwave background of that event that pervades the Universe. However, only about half of normal matter can be observed, glowing as galaxies and dense gas clouds. The rest is thin intergalactic gas of about one or two atoms in the volume of a typical office room that is very hard to observe.

That changed with the first detection of an FRB blast in 2007. An FRB is very bright and short, and there were questions at first over whether they were just an instrument glitch, or a Earthly source -- indeed, some of the early "FRB" spottings turned out to be from a microwave oven at an observatory. However, as observations of FRBs accumulated, skepticism faded out. Unfortunately, along with being brief, they were also infrequent, and it was hard to pin them down to any location in the sky.

FRBs were quickly found to be from distant sources, through a phenomenon known as "dispersion". An FRB pulse starts out with a bunched-up radio spectrum, but according to Sarah Burke-Spolaor -- an astronomer at West Virginia University, not involved with the work -- "it feels every electron along its path." Interaction with electrons delays low frequencies more than high ones, resulting in a "smearing" of the pulse. The amount of smearing is an index of the amount of electrons in the path of the pulse, with the electrons being an index of the amount of matter.

This trick can give the density of matter across the cosmos, but only if the distance to the FRB's source is known. Up to very recently, only a few FRB sources have been pinpointed -- either because they happened to be one of the rare repeating FRBs, or because they were quickly tracked down with an extensive telescope array. Now, astronomers have reported the discovery of four new FRBs with known source galaxies, identified with the Australian Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) -- an array of 36 radio dishes in Western Australia.

Thanks to the FRB data, researchers calculated the density of normal matter across a large swath of the local universe. They found that if extrapolated across the universe, there was enough normal matter to account for the half that was missing, in line with theoretical predictions.

The FRB technique could also be used to map variations in matter density across the Universe -- which could help theorists understand how matter clumps together into the "cosmic web," the network of galaxy clusters strung across the universe. The ASKAP researchers hope to build up a collection of about 100 FRBs with known sources over the next year to provide a more general map of the density of matter in the Universe.

[MON 13 JUL 20] THE COVID-19 MENACE (4)

* THE COVID-19 MENACE (4): Yet another battlefield for COVID-19 is the brain and central nervous system. Jennifer Frontera says that neurologists end up inspecting 5% to 10% of coronavirus patients at her hospital -- but adds that's "probably a gross underestimate" of the number whose brains are struggling, especially because many are sedated and on ventilators.

Frontera has seen patients with encephalitis, the inflammation of the brain, and having seizures; and with a "sympathetic storm," an immune response that's the brain's version of a cytokine storm. Some people with COVID-19 briefly pass out; others have strokes; and it is common for patients to lose their sense of smell. Frontera and others also wonder whether in some cases, infection depresses the brain stem reflex that senses oxygen starvation -- which might also help to account for anecdotal observations that some patients aren't gasping for air, despite dangerously low blood oxygen levels.

ACE2 receptors are present in the neural cortex and brain stem, but nobody knows the circumstances under which the virus penetrates the brain and interacts with these receptors. It is known that the earlier SARS coronavirus could attack neurons and sometimes caused encephalitis. A Japanese team reported finding traces of SARS-CoV-2 in the cerebrospinal fluid of a COVID-19 patient who developed meningitis and encephalitis -- hinting that SARS-CoV-2 can also attack neurons.

However, other factors might be damaging the brain. For example, a cytokine storm could cause brain swelling, and the blood's increased tendency to clot could trigger strokes. Attempting to nail down precisely what is going on is troublesome, given that medical staff are focused on saving lives. Sherry Chou -- a neurologist at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center -- is setting up a worldwide consortium, with 50 centers at last count, to obtain neurological data from COVID-19 patients.

Chou speculates about a possible invasion route: through the nose, then up and through the olfactory bulb -- which would explain reports of a loss of smell -- and finally into the brain. Chou says: "It's a nice-sounding theory ... [but] we really have to go and prove that." As with most everything else with COVID-19, it's learning by doing, with Chou adding: "I don't think anybody, and certainly not me, can say we're experts."

Next, it is becoming apparent that SARS-CoV-2 can afflict the gastrointestinal tract. In March 2020, a 71-year-old Michigan woman returned from a Nile River cruise with bloody diarrhea, vomiting, and abdominal pain. Doctors originally thought it was some sort of stomach bug -- but when she started to cough, the doctors took a nasal swab, and found she was SARS-CoV-2 positive. Stool samples revealed viral RNA, and an endoscopy revealed signs of colon injury.

The evidence is growing to suggest that SARS-CoV-2 can infect the lining of the lower digestive tract, where ACE2 receptors are abundant. Viral RNA has been found in as many as 53% of sampled patients' stool samples. A Chinese team found traces of the virus from GI-tract biopsies of a COVID-19 patient. Reports suggest up to as many as half of patients, averaging about 20% across studies, experience diarrhea. GI symptoms were not originally on the CDC's list of COVID-19 symptoms, which could cause some COVID-19 cases to go undetected.

The presence of virus in the GI tract raises the unsettling possibility that it could be passed on through fecal contamination. However, it's not yet clear whether stool contains live, infectious virus, not just RNA and proteins. Coronavirus expert Stanley Perlman of the University of Iowa says that, so far, "we have no evidence" that fecal transmission is important. CDC says that based on experiences with SARS and with the coronavirus that causes MERS, the risk from fecal transmission is probably low.

There are still other battlegrounds in the fight against COVID-19. For example, up to one-third of hospitalized patients develop conjunctivitis -- pink, watery eyes -- while there are reports of liver damage. Nobody knows if these are the result of direct assault by the virus, or incidental damage. It will take years of careful research to determine exactly what SARS-CoV-2 does to its victims. That information is absolutely necessary for the treatment of the disease. [TO BE CONTINUED]

[FRI 10 JUL 20] AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (109)

* AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (109): Johnson's work towards a Great Society was complemented by a major 1965 SCOTUS decision on reproductive rights, GRISWOLD V. CONNECTICUT. The case had its roots in the Connecticut Comstock Act of 1873, which made the use of contraceptives illegal. Before the First World War, the pioneering feminist and reproductive-rights activist Margaret Sanger attempted to promote contraception for the empowerment and safety of women -- leading to clashes with the Comstock law that forced her to flee to Britain for a time.

She returned, to found what would emerge in the 1930s as the Planned Parenthood organization. The result in Connecticut was a long series of legal clashes with the Comstock law, with the law being effectively upheld in all the contests. Contraception was increasingly normalized, however, and by the 1950s, only Massachusetts and Connecticut had such laws still on their books -- and they were rarely enforced.

Nonetheless, the Comstock Law remained in effect, and in 1961, Yale School of Medicine gynecologist C. Lee Buxton and his patients challenged the law in the case of POE V. ULLMAN. They lost the case in state court and SCOTUS refused to hear an appeal -- but the door was left unlocked for further action by the well-known dissent of Justice John Marshall Harlan II, who wrote:

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In his dissent, Justice Harlan took a big step towards the establishment of sexual and reproductive freedoms -- though it was a carefully limited step, with Harlan upholding laws against adultery and homosexuality. Primed by the dissent, the Planned Parenthood League of Connecticut (PPLC) decided to challenge the law once more.

At the time, Estelle T. Griswold was the executive director of the PPLC. In 1961, Griswold and Buxton opened a PPLC clinic in contravention of the Comstock Law; they were arrested, convicted, and fined $100 each. Griswold appealed up to SCOTUS -- which decided, on a 7:2 vote, that the Connecticut law was unconstitutional. According to the decision, which was written by Justice William O. Douglas, the law violated the "right to marital privacy". That was not a right specifically articulated in the Constitution, but Douglas saw it as implicit in the suite of constitutional protections of the Bill of Rights. He wrote: "Would we allow the police to search the sacred precincts of marital bedrooms for telltale signs of the use of contraceptives? The very idea is repulsive to the notions of privacy surrounding the marriage relationship."

Justice Arthur Goldberg wrote a concurring opinion, leveraging off the 9th Amendment's statement that the People's rights didn't have to be specifically enumerated in the Constitution. Justices Byron White and John Marshall Harlan II also wrote concurring opinions in which they argued that privacy is protected by the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment. [TO BE CONTINUED]

[THU 09 JUL 20] GIMMICKS & GADGETS

* GIMMICKS & GADGETS: As discussed by an article from CNN.com ("Flying Cellphone Towers" by Emma Reynolds, 19 February 2020), a startup company named "Spooky Action", based in Minnesota, has a big idea for bringing wireless connections to underdeveloped regions: use drones instead of towers.

Rahul Tiwari, 22, devised the "Telelift" concept in 2017, when he was an engineering student at Purdue University in Indiana. He envisions a drone the size of a kitchen table, tethered to a small solar plant or other power source on the ground, hovering at 90 meters (200 feet). It would use about as much power as a microwave oven.

Tiwari was originally thinking of using tethered drones as "flying watchtowers" to protect Africa wildlife from poachers, but on trying to sell the idea, he realized there was a bigger opportunity: "If we took the drones that we were building -- that were very powerful, they could fly for a very, very long time -- and basically stuck 4G routers on them, we could bring the internet wherever we want it."

Spooky Action intends to start in Kenya, Niger, Botswana, and Senegal. According to Tiwari, mobile coverage drops considerably outside the main cities. The priority is to cover suburbs, where there are plenty of subscribers, and then cover rural areas. Each drone can provide service to several hundred customers over a footprint 32 to 48 kilometers (20 to 30 miles) wide; several may be needed in suburban areas where there are many subscribers.

Spooky Action has run trials with Verizon and Orange, which used Telelift to deliver internet to the French National Windsurfing Championships in Quiberon, France, in November 2019. The company is now working with non-profit WeRobotics, which is providing advice and introductions to African network providers.

Each drone costs about $40,000 USD each. The drones are fully automated in flight, though they need piloting for take-off and landing. There are concerns with civil aviation authorities about runaway drones. The tether does restrain the drone; if the tether is cut, the drone has a battery to allow it to land. Another issue is drones are not typically designed for continuous operation over the long term, with Tiwari saying that the drones will have to be designed to be robust.

* There's been ongoing work on transparent photovoltaic (solar / PV) cells that could be used as windows, the subject having been last mentioned here in 2015. As discussed by an article from ECONOMIST.com ("Solar Powered Buildings", 14 December 2019), nobody's been very successful so far -- transparent PV cells tend towards the too dark -- but work is continuing.

A research team led by Seo Kwanyong of the Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology, in South Korea, has fabricated solar cells that are as transparent as tinted glass. They took a conceptually straightforward approach, simply etching holes in a PV panel to let light through. They began with sheets of silicon 200 microns thick, which is typical for commercial silicon devices. The holes they etched were 90 to 100 microns across, that diameter having been calculated to be the minimum needed to let visible light through, without creating diffraction effects that would distort what was seen through the wafer.

Their initial efforts were unsuccessful, resulting in strange colors and opaque regions caused by diffraction and associate interference patterns. Investigation showed that problem was due to making the holes at random locations; the etching process was altered to produce a regular grid of holes with even spacing. The colors went away.

Tests showed that the wafer still could produce electric current. Of course, the greater the density of holes in the wafer, the less current it would produce -- but by tweaking the spacing of the holes, the team was able to produce wafers transmittances of between 20% and 50% of incident light. That is very good: commercial tinted and coated glass generally has a transmittance of between 30% and 70%.

A wafer with 20% transmittance had a solar energy conversion efficiency of 12.2%. Commercial silicon PV cells can do about 20% -- but 12.2% is pretty good, compared to an ordinary window that doesn't generate any power at all. Of course, cost remains an issue; there's a big gap between a lab demonstration and a commercial product. The research team is now working to bridge that gap.

* As discussed by an article from REUTERS.com ("Japanese Startup Creates 'Connected' Face Mask For Coronavirus New Normal" by Tim Kelly, Akira Tomoshige, 26 June 20), a Tokyo startup named "Donut Robotics" has developed an internet-connected "smart mask" that can send messages and translate from Japanese into eight other languages.

The white plastic "c-mask" fits over an ordinary face masks, and connects via bluetooth to a smartphone and tablet app that can transcribe speech into text messages, make calls, or amplify the mask wearer's voice. Donut Robotics built a prototype connected mask within a month by adapting existing translation software developed by the company for a robot, and a mask design that one of the company's engineers created several years ago for a student project.

The mask will cost about $40 USD. The first batch will be shipped to buyers in Japan in September, with the company looking to sell in China, the United States, and Europe too. Ono Taisuke, the company's CEO, says there has been strong interest. That's not at all surprising, given circumstances, and a low-cost techno mask might make young people more willing to wear one.

[WED 08 JUL 20] SOCIETY OF VIRUSES (1)

* SOCIETY OF VIRUSES (1): As discussed by an article from NATURE.com ("The Secret Social Lives Of Viruses" by Elie Dolgin, 18 June 2019), we've long known about viruses down to their genomes -- but we still remain ignorant about them in many ways, particularly their behavior.

For example, Rotem Sorek -- a geneticist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel -- and his research team were investigating bacteriophages, or viruses that infect bacteria, inflicting them on cultures of bacteria. The phages infected the bacteria, as expected; what was unexpected was that the viruses were molecularly communicating with each other. They were collectively deciding when to lie dormant in a host bacterium and when to replicate and burst out, to hunt for new victims.

Researchers had already known that phages have sensing mechanisms to tell them whether to stay quiet or attack, but the behavior was thought to be passive, with the viruses waiting for signals and not generating them. However, Sorek and his team found out that when a phage infects a cell, it releases a tiny protein -- a peptide chain only six amino acids long -- that tells its brethren: I've scored a hit! As the phages infect more cells, the message gets louder, indicating that uninfected hosts are becoming scarce. At a certain level, phages put a stop to lysis, in which viral replicants burst out of a cell, instead laying low, in a state named "lysogeny".

Sorek named the viral peptide "arbitrium", after the Latin word for "decision", reflected in the modern term "arbitrate". It appeared to work much like the communication system used by bacteria called "quorum sensing", sharing information about cell density and adjusting the population accordingly. However, nobody had ever demonstrated such molecular messaging in viruses. The discovery contributed to an emerging picture of viruses as having much more sophisticated social behaviors than had been believed.

One of the difficulties in obtaining this new view of viruses was that traditionally, researchers tended to only observe individual viruses in their studies. However, evidence has been growing that viruses can cooperate -- with the implication that experiments need to be rethought. The change in focus has substantial practical implications, since it could show how to develop new and more effective treatments.

Scientists first observed viruses interacting in the 1940s, when separate experiments by biophysicist Max Delbrueck and bacteriologist Alfred Hershey showed that two viral particles could simultaneously invade the same cell and swap genes. That observation didn't amount to much; the only consequence being a lab trick to create viral crosses, with the wider implications largely ignored.

It wasn't until 1999 that researchers began to consider viral cooperation. At that time, evolutionary biologists Paul Turner -- now at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut -- and Lin Chao, now at the University of California, San Diego -- showed that phages observe strategies in their interactions with each other, partnering in some circumstances, prisoner's dilemma strategy game, working in partnership under certain circumstances, acting in their own self-interests in others.

Other examples of viral interactions followed, including ones that involved the viral pathogens responsible for diseases such as hepatitis, polio, measles and influenza. The interactions were often between different viral strains that had a shared interest in boosting their own reproductive chances. However, the molecular basis of the interactions was not clear. That's why the arbitrium discovery was such a big step forward.

Very soon after Sorek first described the phenomenon in 2017, four independent groups -- including one under Cheng Wei, a structural microbiologist at Sichuan University in Chengdu, China, and another led by structural biologist Alberto Marina at the Biomedical Institute of Valencia in Spain -- began to dig into the molecular basis by which arbitrium peptides are made, sensed and acted on by phages. Their work led to five recent papers that helped to explain exactly how the short peptides Sorek discovered influence viral decision-making. [TO BE CONTINUED]

[TUE 07 JUL 20] JEFF BEZOS

* JEFF BEZOS: As discussed by an article from ECONOMIST.com ("The Genius of Amazon", 18 June 2020), back in 1995, Jeff Bezos and his wife were scrambling to get ahead, packing books into boxes and shipping them off. 25 years on, Bezos and his wife have parted company -- but that's only a glitch to one of the world's most famous tycoons. He finances space exploration and newspapers as hobbies, gets praise from Warren Buffett, and attacks from Donald Trump. His company, Amazon.com, is no longer merely a bookseller, instead being a digital conglomerate worth $1.3 trillion USD that its customers love, politicians hate, and rivals fear.

The COVID-19 pandemic, though a global disaster, has been a benefit to some, particularly to Amazon. In an age of social distancing, e-commerce has zoomed ahead, with Amazon in the lead -- not merely because of its online sales system, but also because of the impressive logistics system that supports those sales, and Amazon Web Services (AWS), the company's "cash cow". However, even as Amazon has boomed, it is faced with major challenges: political challenges, financial bloat, and energetic competition.

The pandemic surge began with online "pantry-loading" as consumers bulk-ordered toilet rolls and pasta. When stimulus checks arrived in mid-April 2020, Americans bought even more. Two rivals, eBay and Costco, say online activity accelerated in May. In response to the surge, Amazon has hired 175,000 staff, purchased with 34 million gloves, and leased 12 new cargo aircraft -- bringing its fleet to 82. In the meantime, AWS saw its cloud-computing service growing at a comparable rate.

Will the boom be sustained as the economy slowly re-opens? Possibly not at the same rate of growth, but the pandemic shift meant that a lot of people who hadn't been shopping online are doing so now. In the USA, "silver" customers in their 60s have set up digital-payment accounts. On the other hand, the pandemic has hit many "brick & mortar" retailers very hard; dozens have defaulted or are on the brink, including J Crew and Neiman Marcus.

Bezos sees the dominance of Amazon as inevitable, that the company is in an ongoing "virtuous circle", in which the firm spends its money to gain market share and continue expanding its business horizons. From books, Amazon moved into general e-commerce, then opened its cloud and logistics arms to third-party retailers, making them vast new businesses in their own right. Customers are kept loyal by perks such as the Amazon Prime subscription service and the Alexa voice assistant. Wall Street is a believer, Amazon's share price having risen to new heights.

There are the challenges. First is the political hostility targeting the company. Some of the criticisms are overblown, even nonsensical. Unlike, say, Google in search, Amazon not a monopoly; in 2019, the company had a 40% share of US e-commerce and 6% of all retail sales. There is no strong evidence that it destroys jobs, studies suggesting that that new warehouse and delivery jobs offset the decline in shop assistants, while the firm's minimum hourly wage of $15 USD in the USA is above the median for the retail trade. Amazon's embrace of a massive partners program has not only been profitable for the company, but done much to defuse complaints that it is destroying small retailers. Some of them are thriving in the new e-commerce world.

The important word there is "some": the small businesses that can adapt to e-commerce. It's the new rule of the business world, they would have had to adapt or die anyway -- particularly in the era of COVID-19 -- but the disruption of the old rules is still troublesome, and Amazon has to own it. The pandemic has also not been a complete blessing to Amazon, state district attorneys having been needling the company about unsafe working conditions.

There is also the fact that the very expansiveness of Amazon necessarily creates conflicts of interest. Does its platform, for example, treat third-party sellers on equal terms with its own products? Congress and the EU are concerned. In addition, how comfortable are other firms about giving their data to AWS when they are in competition with Amazon in other domains? That particular concern is mostly paranoia, of course; it would be stupidity on a grand scale for Amazon to mine data it is managing for clients, and Amazon is not stupid. The issue simply forces Amazon to make its commitments to client data security clear.

The second problem is bloat. As Amazon has expanded, Bezos' company has gone from being asset-light to having a huge balance sheet. Today, Amazon has $104 billion USD of plant, including leased assets, not far from $119 billion USD of its old-economy rival, Walmart. Except for AWS, Amazon's business margins are thin -- and trying to keep prices low in the face of the pandemic's disruption of the global economy has made them thinner. Spinning off AWS might get regulators off of Amazon's back, but the remaining e-commerce company might not survive.

The third and last problem is competition. Amazon hasn't been the only beneficiary of the pandemic: digital sales at Walmart, Target, and Costco have been booming as well, making them more of a threat to Amazon. Other firms that overlap with Amazon's businesses in various ways -- Shopify, Netflix, and UPS -- are similarly in growth mode. Amazon also can't get traction against regional competitors, such as MercadoLibre in Latin America, Jio in India, and Shopee in South-East Asia. China is dominated by Alibaba, JD.com, and energetic new players like Pinduoduo.

That leaves Bezos with a multidimensional puzzle to solve. If Amazon raises wages to keep politicians happy, it will lose its low-cost edge. If it spins off AWS to keep regulators happy, the remainder will be financially fragile; if it raises prices to keep shareholders happy, its competitors will gain market share at Amazon's expense. 25 years on, Jeff Bezos is on top of the world -- with the challenges having grown proportionally.

[ED: THE ECONOMIST was a bit edgy in heading this article with an image of Bezos as Dr. Evil. One thing that was too petty to cover in this essay was the controversy over its Alexa system, criticized for allowing Amazon to listen in on customers. Anyone who owns an Alexa knows that it represents about as much of a privacy threat as leaving the curtains open on a window -- yes, people might be listening in on Alexa, but then again people might be taking pictures of me through my windows. I can't think of what good reason Amazon would have to be listening in on me, and since I live by myself, they wouldn't hear much anyway. I often have to speak up to get Alexa to hear me in the first place.

Of course, Amazon does collect data on my purchases, but they get all that through my accesses to their website, and it doesn't seem very worrying. There is an issue here, but it's not one of Alexa spying on me. The article also did not mention that Amazon is investing aggressively in automation, robotics, and AI to improve work productivity, and ensure that rising wages won't disturb their bottom line.]

[MON 06 JUL 20] THE COVID-19 MENACE (3)

* THE COVID-19 MENACE (3): Along with blood clots, SARS-CoV-2 seems to also promote blood vessel constriction. Reports have emerged of "ischemica" in the fingers and toes, which is a reduction in blood flow that can lead to swollen, painful digits, and tissue death. Blood vessel constriction in the lungs might also help explain anecdotal reports of a strange phenomenon seen in pneumonia associated with COVID-19: some patients with very low blood oxygen levels are not gasping for breath.

If COVID-19 does target blood vessels, that could also help explain why patients with pre-existing damage to those vessels -- for example, from diabetes and high blood pressure -- face higher risk from COVID-19. Data from the US Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) data on hospitalized COVID-19 patients in 14 states found that about a third had chronic lung disease, and almost as many had diabetes; and fully half had pre-existing high blood pressure.

Confusingly, COVID-19 doesn't seem to strongly afflict asthmatics or other patients with chronic respiratory problems. Nilam Mangalmurti -- a pulmonary intensivist at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania (HUP) -- says she was "shocked" that there were so few patients with such problems in HUP's ICU: "It's very striking to us that risk factors seem to be vascular: diabetes, obesity, age, hypertension."

Why does the virus attack the cardiovascular system? It may target the cardiovascular damage. The virus may directly attack the lining of the heart and blood vessels, which, like the nose and alveoli, are rich in ACE2 receptors. Or possibly it's the low oxygen due to lung damage; or an overactive immune response assaults the heart. We simply don't understand the pathology of the disease yet.

A lot of public attention has been paid to shortages of ventilators, but there's also been a crunch for dialysis machines. The worldwide fears of ventilator shortages for failing lungs have received plenty of attention. Not so a scramble for another type of equipment: dialysis machines. Neurologist Jennifer Frontera -- of New York University's Langone Medical Center, which has treated thousands of COVID-19 patients -- says: "If these folks are not dying of lung failure, they're dying of renal failure." Her hospital is developing a dialysis protocol with different machines to support the influx of patients.

The need for dialysis may be because the kidneys are also richly endowed with ACE2 receptors, making them another viral target. According to one study, 27% of 85 hospitalized patients in Wuhan had kidney failure, while another reported that 59% of nearly 200 hospitalized COVID-19 patients in and near Wuhan had protein and blood in their urine, suggesting kidney damage. Those with acute kidney injury (AKI) were more than five times as likely to die as COVID-19 patients without it. Jia Hongbo -- a neuroscientist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences's Suzhou Institute of Biomedical Engineering and Technology -- says: "The lung is the primary battle zone. But a fraction of the virus possibly attacks the kidney. And as on the real battlefield, if two places are being attacked at the same time, each place gets worse."

It is not clear if the virus itself attacks the kidneys. Ventilators can enhance the risk of kidney damage, as do antiviral drugs such as remdesivir, which is being experimentally deployed in COVID-19 patients. Cytokine storms can also dramatically reduce blood flow to the kidney, causing often-fatal damage. Of course, pre-existing disease can boost the risk of kidney damage as well. [TO BE CONTINUED]

[FRI 03 JUL 20] AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (108)

* AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (108): Although LBJ began his new term in office with a strong mandate, he was reluctant to push civil rights for the moment, suspecting that he had exhausted the flexibility of Southern congressmen. However, the prominent Selma to Montgomery marches in Alabama, led by Dr. Martin Luther King, encouraged LBJ to begin debate on a voting rights bill in early 1965. Speaking to Congress, Johnson said:

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LBJ, like Harry Truman, used a lot of politically-incorrect language in private -- but no president more dedicated, in his own distinctive way, to civil rights than LBJ. His efforts led to the "Voting Rights Act" of 1965, which addressed the failure of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to address restrictive voter qualifications, such as literacy tests and poll taxes. The two acts, taken as a unit, did much to dismantle Jim Crow. One of the most visible consequences was that the number of black lawmakers and public officials expanded rapidly.

Other significant legislation enacted in 1965 included:

• Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965: Reformed the USA's immigration system, with all national origins quotas dating from the 1920s were removed. The annual rate of inflow doubled between 1965 and 1970, and doubled again by 1990, with dramatic increases from Asia and Latin American countries including Mexico. That would eventually lead to a backlash.
  
  
• Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965. Doubled Federal spending on education from $4 billion USD to $8 billion USD, with the Federal government becoming in public primary and secondary schools, with some funds provided to private schools. LBJ believed that public education could help lift the poor out of poverty, and so the ESEA was in principle focused on schools in poor neighborhoods. In practice, the money was disbursed by local officials and wasn't always focused on the poor, with the program having mixed results.
  
  
• Higher Education Act of 1965: Provided funding for lower-income students, including grants, work-study money, and government loans.
  
  
• National Endowment for the Humanities & National Endowment for the Arts: Established by the Johnson Administration to support academic studies including literature, history, and law; as well as arts such as music, painting, and sculpture. It followed in the footsteps of FDR's WPA.

One of LBJ's particularly far-reaching legislative efforts in 1965 was to set up a government-run national medical insurance system associated with Social Security, to be named "Medicare". The scheme involved hospital insurance under Social Security; an auxiliary and voluntary insurance program for additional medical services; and a "Medicaid" program, co-funded by the Federal government and state governments, to assist the poor. Johnson handed the first two Medicare cards to Harry Truman and his wife Bess, after signing the Medicare bill at the Truman Library in Independence, Missouri. After initial resistance from some states, Medicare would prove a huge success.

Johnson also established a new "Department Of Transportation", which was an expansion of the Commerce Department's Office of Transportation -- adding in the Bureau of Public Roads, the Federal Aviation Agency, the Coast Guard, the Maritime Administration, the Civil Aeronautics Board, and the Interstate Commerce Commission. [TO BE CONTINUED]

[THU 02 JUL 20] SCIENCE NOTES

* SCIENCE NOTES: As discussed by an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("Scientists Discover Virus With No Recognizable Genes" by Elizabeth Pennisi, 7 February 2019), viruses fill the world, and there is much to still be learned about them. Of those we know about, there appears to be many more that we don't. That suspicion has been reinforced by the discovery of a virus that has no familiar genes -- and also by a separate discovery of thousands of unfamiliar viruses in the tissues of a set of animals.

The virus with no familiar genes was discovered by a research team under Jonatas Abrahao, a virologist at the University of Minas Gerais in Brazil. Abrahoo made the discovery while investigating giant viruses. These unusual viruses, some the size of bacteria, were first discovered in amoebae in 2003. In a local artificial lake, the researchers found not only new giant viruses, but also a virus that was unlike most that infect amoebae, being unusually small. They named it "yaravirus", "Yara" being the "mother of waters" according to Indigenous Tupi-Guarani mythology.

On sequencing the yaravirus, they found that none of its genes matched any that had been seen before. Some of the genes did resemble those of a giant virus, but it's not clear what the relationship is, with the researchers continuing to investigate. Elodie Ghedin of New York University -- who hunts for viruses in wastewater and in respiratory systems -- says that is not surprising to find a completely unfamiliar virus, adding that more than 95% of the viruses in sewage data have "no matches to reference genomes [in databases] ... We seem to be discovering new viruses all the time."

While Abrahao's team was hunting the yaravirus, Christopher Buck and graduate student Michael Tisza -- virologists at the US National Cancer Institute -- were performing a broader investigation, searching in animal tissues for viruses that have circular genomes. These "circular viruses" include papillomaviruses, one of which, human papillomavirus, can cause cervical cancer, and another virus that's usually harmless to people. Buck, however, suspects the supposedly harmless virus may be linked to bladder cancer in patients with kidney transplants, and other patients.

The researchers accordingly isolated viral particles from dozens of tissue samples from humans and other animals, then screened them for circular genomes. The group confirmed that the DNA belonged to viruses by looking for a gene that codes for a virus's shell. Such gene sequences are not always easy to spot, but Tisza wrote a software that predicted which genes were most likely to code for the distinctive folds of these shells.

The end result was that the research team discovered about 2500 circular viruses, with about 600 being new to science. Buck says that it isn't know what impact these newly-discovered viruses have on human health -- but having found them, we will learn more about their lifestyles. It's unlikely any are big troublemakers, since we would have found them before if they were. Indeed, they may be beneficial Some viruses that live in the human body may help keep us healthy, and others are essential for keeping ecosystems running smoothly by helping to recycle essential nutrients. More research is in order.

* As discussed by an article from BBC.com ("Oldest Material On Earth Discovered" by Paul Rincon, 13 January 2020), researchers discovered dust grains in a meteorite that had fallen to Earth in the 1960s that were dated to as far back as 7.5 billion years ago.

In the beginning of the Universe, there was only hydrogen, some helium, and traces of lithium. Heavier elements were synthesized in the cores of stars, to be released into space when the stars died. There, they accumulated into new stars, planets, moons, and meteorites. A team of researchers from the US and Switzerland inspected 40 pre-solar grains found in a part of the Murchison meteorite, which fell in Australia in 1969. Jennika Greer -- from the Field Museum and the University of Chicago, and a member of the research team -- says:

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The paste was then dissolved in acid, leaving only the stardust. Philipp Heck -- team leader, a curator at Chicago's Field Museum and associate professor at the University of Chicago -- says: "It's like burning down the haystack to find the needle."

To determine how old the grains were, the researchers measured how long they had been exposed to cosmic rays in space. Sometimes cosmic rays will create new elements when they interact with atoms; the longer a material is exposed, the more of these elements form in it. The researchers focused on the Ne21 isotope of neon to date the grains. Some of the pre-solar grains turned out to be the oldest ever discovered, the Ne21 concentrations suggesting that most were from 4.6 to 4.9 billion years old. For comparison, the Sun is 4.6 billion years old, and the Earth is 4.5 billion. A few were well older than that, being about 7.5 billion years old. Heck says:

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Previously, the oldest pre-solar grain dated with neon isotopes was around 5.5 billion years old. There has been a discussion of whether the rate of star formation is constant or variable. Heck says: "Thanks to these grains, we now have direct evidence for a period of enhanced star formation in our Galaxy seven billion years ago with samples from meteorites."

[WED 01 JUL 20] ANOTHER MONTH

* ANOTHER MONTH: From late November 2019 into January 2020, there were tales of platoons of large drones cruising the prairies in Nebraska and northeastern Colorado at night, leading to excited speculation by the inhabitants. The stories died out before the end of January because -- according to an article from, of all things, the AKRON NEWS-REPORTER, dated 30 January 2020) -- there was nothing there.

Sergeant Vince Iovinella of the Morgan County Sheriff's Department in rural Colorado said things started happening in his area on 30 December: "Residents began calling in reports of drones of unknown origin moving above houses and farms . The numbers would range from four to ten drones in an area at a time. Some were reported to be low and at least six feet long."

Iovinella further detailed that the drones had white and red flashing lights, as he and other deputies made "several attempts" to follow the drones. The drones were moving "very fast at times" but could also "sustain a hover over an area for long periods of time." He added: "It is believed that there could have been up to 30 drones moving around the county, if not more, and appeared to be working in a search pattern across the county."

Reports indicated the drones were operating from about 7 to 10 PM. On 8 January 2020, a medical helicopter reported a near miss with a drone; in response local, state, Federal, and military authorities formed a joint task force to investigate, working from the town of Brush, Colorado, out on the prairie. On 13 January, the Colorado Department of Public Safety (CDPS) issued a statement summarizing the investigation, saying that the CDPS had "confirmed no incidents involving criminal activity, nor have investigations substantiated reports of suspicious or illegal drone activity."

Of 23 reports investigated between 6 January and 13 January, 13 were found to be "planets, stars, or small hobbyist drones"; six were commercial aircraft; while four remain unconfirmed. Much the same can be said of other reports of drones. Of course, something still might be going on, but there are no leads to suggest what.

The Colorado non-incident adds yet another instance of drone hysteria to the record books -- which has been documented by a white paper published by drone manufacturer DJI, and a study by the Academy of Model Aeronautics which found only 27 out of 764 reports of drone sightings by aircraft pilots were legitimate near misses. Stan Hilkey, CPDS executive director, cautiously told THE DENVER POST: "While I can't conclusively say we have solved the mystery, we have been able to rule out a lot of the activity that was causing concern. We will continue to remain vigilant, and respond as new information comes in." THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE.

* In petty adventures, I decided to get all my smartphones -- I have three now -- working with Google Voice. As I mentioned before, I don't have a SIM chip in any of my phones, I don't have a phone subscription; I only can communicate over wi-fi using a Google Voice (GV) VOIP number, or with a TextFree (TF) / Pinger VOIP number I got as a backup.

I decided to make a GV call through one of the phones as a test, thinking it would be easy -- I'd done it before -- but it proved troublesome. I had some difficulties getting my bluetooth phone headset to work, but that didn't take too long to work out, it was just a question of playing with Android Settings until the phone properly recognized the headset.

Trying to get the GV app to work proved trickier. I couldn't make a call at first. It would ask me to verify the phone, by asking me to enter another phone number to send a verification code to. I gave it the TF number, but it wouldn't send a text message with the verification code to TF. GV did also allow me to send a voicemail with the verification code to TF, and that way, I could get the code off of TF -- but it didn't change anything when I punched it into the GV app.

I got to wondering if there was some setting I had wrong. I got into GV settings and found a permissions list; I set all the permissions that made sense to set -- and then got to poking around a bit more, to find that I had to authorize the phone to make calls over wi-fi, the authorization being set to OFF by default. Makes sorta sense, I guess carriers aren't eager to tip off users that they can use their phones over wi-fi.

Anyway, I set the wi-fi authorization to ON, and then I was flying. The GV app still asked to verify the phone, but I simply went to the Contacts list and could call anyone on the list. No more going in circles. I figured out that Paypal support was a good number to call for testing, since I could verbally ask the automated response system for my funds balance, and ensure the headset was working. I then made sure all my phones worked.

After I got that done, I decided that I would leave one of the phones ON at all times, set to STANDBY and plugged into USB, on the basis that I would stick it in my pocket when I went outside. That was primarily for security purposes: it's nice to have a camera phone to get a video record of nuisances, and to call 911 if they get to be big nuisances. Yeah, I don't have a SIM chip, but I can still call 911 if I have to. I didn't realize that calls would ring through if I had the phone on STANDBY, so I was a bit surprised to hear it ring -- "Well, DUH!" I didn't think I could ever directly answer the phone with GV, and it was nice to find out I could. I found out I can still block phone spammers easily enough.

* As a related exercise, Twitter asked me to verify my identity to make sure I wasn't a bot, ending the exercise by sending a verification code to my GV number. Nothing happened, despite repeated tries. Twitter didn't have any problem with my GV number before -- some services won't accept a GV number, it seems on the assumption that free VOIP numbers are easy to scam -- and some exploration online suggested they hadn't any problem with GV to that time.

That made me nervous, since I have use for Twitter, and didn't want to get locked out for good. I tried again the next day, no joy; but the day after that, Twitter let me back in. I suspect there had been some system change that threw things into confusion for a while -- Twitter support said they were swamped on their web page -- and they had no real problem with me.

* In further petty adventures, I got a set of bandanas / masks from Amazon.com. I puzzled a bit on how to put them on, but they turned out to be tubes. They work very nicely, and even when it's hot, they are comfortable. There is the problem that sunglasses tend to fog up when wearing a mask; I pulled on an old sun visor cap out of storage, and it works OK to keep the Sun out of my eyes.

I'd picked up the cap in Kissimmee, Florida, on my 2008 Florida road trip, and it has Mickey Mouse on the front. That's good, because people are expressionless when wearing masks, and it's a friendly communication -- but I think I'll get a plain visor cap next month anyway. Incidentally, it also helps to be more verbally expressive -- laughing when appropriate -- and use hand gestures. I actually don't do that so much normally, but it comes to me well enough when I do.

Overall, though, I don't leave home any more than I have to. I'm a solitary old bachelor, and long been a bit agoraphobic -- but it's more than "a bit" now. It's not so much because of the pandemic itself, but because people are so jumpy. The USA is heading towards a big crunch in the near future, and people are going to get hurt. I don't want to hurt anyone, and I don't want them to hurt me. Best to stay home.