* 21 entries including: US Constitution (series), Jerome Powell takes charge (series), COVID-19 menace (series), GM fungus to kill mosquitoes, BAE Systems future fighter factory, super CRISPR, 2020 Mars probes, and falling human populations.
* NEWS COMMENTARY FOR AUGUST 2020: The USA continues to be a captive audience to the Donald Trump show, as the president continues his erratic approach to national leadership. Trump has long complained about voting by mail, insisting it is riddled with fraud. In reality, in recent history, voter fraud at no more than 0.001% of the vote, or one vote in 100,000.
Trump was caught short when it was discovered he, and a number of other prominent members of his administration, voted by mail. He then started to make a distinction between "honest" absentee ballots, and uniform mail voting, as is performed in states like Colorado. The irony there was that the biggest voter fraud scandal in the 2018 midterm election, in North Carolina, was with absentee ballots -- and the Republicans had to wear it.
Trump then set off a firestorm by flatly saying, on record, that he wanted to defund the US Post Office (USPS) to derail voting by mail. On top of that, the USPS sent out a letter to state governments saying that timely delivery of mail ballots could not be guaranteed. Postmaster General Louis Dejoy ended up being raked over the coals in Congress -- proclaiming there would be no problems with delivery of ballots, with the loud response of: WE DON'T BELIEVE YOU.
In the meantime, Trump suffered a legal setback when, on 20 August, a Federal district judge gave the go-ahead to allow New York state prosecutors to get their hands on Trump's financial records. The US Supreme Court had given the green light to allow the state to proceed on getting the records. There was a perception that Trump would still be able to drag out the legal proceedings indefinitely -- but it appears the courts have had enough, and aren't playing along any more. The issue may well be legally resolved before the elections. [ED: It wasn't, but that was only a stay of execution.]
Two days earlier, the Senate Intelligence Committee issued a massive report on Russian interference in the 2016 US elections, summing up a three-year investigation into the issue. The report concluded that the Russian government did disrupt the election to help Trump win; Russian intelligence services saw members of the Trump campaign as easily manipulated; and the Trump campaign welcomed the help. The report portrayed a Trump campaign that was loaded with businessmen ignorant of governance, advisors working at the fringes of the foreign policy establishment, and other dubious figures Trump had accumulated over the years.
Trump and 18 of his associates had at least 140 contacts with Russian nationals and WikiLeaks, or their intermediaries, during the 2016 campaign and presidential transition. The report did not conclude the Trump campaign engaged in a coordinated conspiracy with the Russian government, but the report provided plenty of evidence of contacts between Trump campaign advisors and people tied to the Kremlin -- notably a longstanding associate of the onetime Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, Konstantin V. Kilimnik.
The report identified Kilimnik as a "Russian intelligence officer". According to the report, Manafort's willingness to share information with Kilimnik and others affiliated with the Russian intelligence services "represented a grave counterintelligence threat." Other Russians in touch with the Trump campaign also had connections to Russian intelligence. Senator Angus King, a Maine independent who caucuses with the Democrats and is a member of the Intelligence Committee, said:
BEGIN QUOTE:
The Russians were doing things to disrupt American democracy and help the Trump campaign and the Trump campaign was doing things to amplify and utilize what the Russians were supplying. There may not have been an explicit agreement but they were both consciously pursing the same end, which was the election of Donald Trump. And for the Russians, the extra benefit was disrupting American democracy.
END QUOTE
The Senate report did criticize the FBI, saying the bureau should have done more to alert higher-level officials at the Democratic National Committee that their servers may have been infiltrated by Russian hackers. It also criticized the bureau's handling of the "Steele dossier", a file of rumors about alleged Trump-Russia links compiled by Christopher Steele, a British former intelligence agent. The bureau used some of Steele's information in applications to wiretap Carter Page, a former Trump campaign advisor.
The report portrayed the dossier as shoddy, and criticized the FBI's vetting of Steele as "not sufficiently rigorous or thorough." Nonetheless, there was no reason to think the FBI would have done things differently had the Steele dossier never existed, and the Senate report endorsed the FBI's decision to investigate Page: "Page's previous ties to Russian intelligence officers, coupled with his Russian travel, justified the FBI's initial concerns about Page."
The committee chairman, Republican Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, released a skewed assessment of the report's conclusions, saying:
BEGIN QUOTE:
We can say, without any hesitation, that the Committee found absolutely no evidence that then-candidate Donald Trump or his campaign colluded with the Russian government to meddle in the 2016 election. What the Committee did find however is very troubling. We found irrefutable evidence of Russian meddling. And we discovered deeply troubling actions taken by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, particularly their acceptance and willingness to rely on the 'Steele dossier' without verifying its methodology or sourcing.
END QUOTE
In short, Rubio shrugged off the Trump campaign's dirty fingers, and inflated the importance of the Steele dossier, inflating as the effective basis for the FBI's investigation. It is unlikely that will be good enough to establish that, as Trump claims, the FBI investigation was a plot by the "Obama deep state" to attack the Trump campaign, that being a crackbrained fantasy. Obviously, the report will amount to nothing as long as Trump is in control. It seems doubtful he will be in control much longer. The report will not disappear.
* The Democrats conducted their national convention on 17 August through 20 August. It was in principle taking place in Milwaukee, Wisconsin -- but that was just the coordinating center, with the convention being effectively virtual, something of an innovation. It had an all-star cast, of course, Michelle Obama taking a step out and delivering a speech that was a departure for a first lady, which concluded:
BEGIN QUOTE:
Donald Trump is the wrong president for our country. He has had more than enough time to prove that he can do the job, but he is clearly in over his head. He cannot meet this moment. He simply cannot be who we need him to be for us. It is what it is.
END QUOTE
Her husband Barack Obama, who had long avoided criticizing Trump personally while attacking the Trump Administration, was well more scathing:
BEGIN QUOTE:
The one Constitutional office elected by all of the people is the presidency. So at minimum, we should expect a president to feel a sense of responsibility for the safety and welfare of all 330 million of us -- regardless of what we look like, how we worship, who we love, how much money we have -- or who we voted for. But we should also expect a president to be the custodian of this democracy. We should expect that regardless of ego, ambition, or political beliefs, the president will preserve, protect, and defend the freedoms and ideals that so many Americans marched for and went to jail for; fought for and died for.
I have sat in the Oval Office with both of the men who are running for president. I never expected that my successor would embrace my vision or continue my policies. I did hope, for the sake of our country, that Donald Trump might show some interest in taking the job seriously; that he might come to feel the weight of the office and discover some reverence for the democracy that had been placed in his care.
But he never did. For close to four years now, he's shown no interest in putting in the work; no interest in finding common ground; no interest in using the awesome power of his office to help anyone but himself and his friends; no interest in treating the presidency as anything but one more reality show that he can use to get the attention he craves.
Donald Trump hasn't grown into the job because he can't. And the consequences of that failure are severe. 170,000 Americans dead. Millions of jobs gone while those at the top take in more than ever. Our worst impulses unleashed, our proud reputation around the world badly diminished, and our democratic institutions threatened like never before.
END QUOTE
Obama then went on to praise Joe Biden and his running mate, Kamala Harris, sketching out the agenda for their administration:
BEGIN QUOTE:
Along with the experience needed to get things done, Joe and Kamala have concrete policies that will turn their vision of a better, fairer, stronger country into reality.
They'll get this pandemic under control, like Joe did when he helped me manage H1N1 and prevent an Ebola outbreak from reaching our shores. They'll expand health care to more Americans, like Joe and I did ten years ago when he helped craft the Affordable Care Act and nail down the votes to make it the law.
They'll rescue the economy, like Joe helped me do after the Great Recession. I asked him to manage the Recovery Act, which jump-started the longest stretch of job growth in history. And he sees this moment now not as a chance to get back to where we were, but to make long-overdue changes so that our economy actually makes life a little easier for everybody -- whether it's the waitress trying to raise a kid on her own, or the shift worker always on the edge of getting laid off, or the student figuring out how to pay for next semester's classes.
Joe and Kamala will restore our standing in the world -- and as we've learned from this pandemic, that matters. Joe knows the world, and the world knows him. He knows that our true strength comes from setting an example the world wants to follow. A nation that stands with democracy, not dictators. A nation that can inspire and mobilize others to overcome threats like climate change, terrorism, poverty, and disease.
But more than anything, what I know about Joe and Kamala is that they actually care about every American. And they care deeply about this democracy. They believe that in a democracy, the right to vote is sacred, and we should be making it easier for people to cast their ballot, not harder. They believe that no one -- including the president -- is above the law, and that no public official -- including the president -- should use their office to enrich themselves or their supporters.
They understand that in this democracy, the Commander-in-Chief doesn't use the men and women of our military, who are willing to risk everything to protect our nation, as political props to deploy against peaceful protesters on our own soil. They understand that political opponents aren't "un-American" just because they disagree with you; that a free press isn't the "enemy" but the way we hold officials accountable; that our ability to work together to solve big problems like a pandemic depends on a fidelity to facts and science and logic and not just making stuff up.
END QUOTE
Compared to that, the speeches by Biden and Harris were almost anticlimactic. Not to be outdone, the Republican National Convention was conducted from 24 to 27 August. It was mostly virtual, except for components such as Trump's acceptance speech -- which was given on the White House lawn, a dodgy procedure, all the more so because social distancing and masks were not much in evidence among the spectators there.
There's not much to say about the RNC other than that it was, as popularly described, "sheer bullshit", asserting a mindlessly paranoid vision of a dark grim future if Biden were elected. Puzzlingly, as was pointed out, the dark grim future sounded only too much like the present, under Trump.
Two months to the election now. Things are not looking good for Trump; he keeps playing one trick after another, but his negative poll ratings don't budge. Not a single indicator gives him cause for hope. His blatant efforts to game the election are so ham-fisted that, as alarming as they are, the only thing they accomplish is to put everyone on red alert. Trump still might win, it's just not a good bet. Alas, election day will be like getting to the top of the lift hill on a roller-coaster, with a wild ride to follow.
* Fears of workers being displaced by robots come and go, being last discussed
in 2018. The general conclusion all along is that automation, though it means
troublesome changes, doesn't really threaten jobs. As discussed in an essay
by Free Exchange -- THE ECONOMIST's rotating business-economics columnist --
titled "The Fear Of Robots Displacing Workers Has Returned" (30 July 2020),
the COVID-19 pandemic has brought worries about automation back to the front
burner.
The pandemic has clearly given a boost to automation. If the workplace isn't safe for human workers, there's an obvious incentive to replace them with machines to the maximum extent possible. COVID-19 has accordingly boosted business automation, and worries about workers losing jobs to robots.
The worries are exaggerated. There were the same worries after the global economic downturn from 2007 -- robocars being a particular concern -- but by the end of the decade, employment had rebounded, and robocars no longer seemed around the corner. Driver aids? Yes. Autonomous cars? Not yet. The concerns have gone high again; many organizations have turned to software to automate paper-processing tasks that can't be done by homebound workers. Those facing a flood of customer enquiries, such as hospitals, are supplementing human assistants with chatbots.
It is, however, ridiculous to suggest that chatbots present a threat to workers. Automation tends to be incremental, and many jobs are hard to automate. In many cases, automation is intended to help human workers, not replace them. Chatbots, for example, are useful, but limited; they simply reduce the burden on human workers, answering routine questions.
Remote work is having a much more visible impact. It had been growing before the pandemic, but COVID-19 put it into high gear. About half of all Americans who were working before the arrival of covid-19 were doing their jobs remotely by May, according to one estimate. Some, maybe much of the shift towards home work will not be reversed after the pandemic ends. With remote work, companies don't need to operate big headquarters facilities, and workers wouldn't have to live in expensive cities.
Remote work may have some job-destroying effects, however. Telemedicine and distance learning might mean that fewer doctors and teachers can serve more patients and students. Their largest impact is likely to be on blue-collar workers, such as clerical and janitorial staff; as centralized facilities shrink, so do the jobs they support. A ripple effect would eliminate small business that support headquarters, such as catering services or cafes.
By holding down wage growth, remote work might well slow down automation by reducing the pressure to automate. COVID-19 might still force more automation if international supply chains break down, leading to reshoring of manufacturing, and strain on labor markets.
In addition, even before the pandemic, years of economic dysfunction have energized campaigns for higher minimum wages and a more generous welfare state. The economic devastation inflicted by the pandemic lends them momentum; like past crises, it could lay the groundwork for a new social contract, growing labor costs, and increasing automation. In an era where populations are graying, that may not be such a problem, automation allowing economic prosperity even as the labor pool shrinks. There's no sure things here.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (115): Along with balancing American relations with the USSR and China, Nixon had the secondary objective of maintaining American pre-eminence in NATO, West Germany having been seeking closer relations with the Soviet Union under a policy of "Ostpolitik". In addition, Nixon saw economic opportunities for the USA in trade with the USSR, while allowing both countries to reduce defense expenditures. It made no sense for the two sides to keep piling up weapons they couldn't use without destroying each other. The Soviets, though inclined to paranoia, understood that; they also worried about their struggling economy, and their difficulties with China.
Soon after taking office, Nixon took several steps to signal his intentions to the Soviets. In his first press conference, he stated that the USA would accept nuclear parity with the USSR, there being no need for superiority; Kissinger also conducted extensive back-channel talks with Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin on arms control, as well as Vietnam. At the same time, Nixon pushed development of "multiple independently-targeted re-entry vehicles (MIRV)", which were multiple warheads that could be carried by a single ICBM, and strike separate targets. Both sides were working on anti-ballistic missile (ABM) defense systems; MIRVs would greatly complicate defense.
After a year of negotiation, the two sides agreed to move towards two treaties: one to limit ABM systems, the other to limit nuclear arsenals. In May 1972, Nixon met with Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev and other senior Soviet officials at the 1972 Moscow Summit, and signed the two treaties:
The agreements also included the creation of the "Conference on Security & Cooperation in Europe", and the signing of a trade agreement between the two nations in October 1972. The agreement led to a massive expansion of trade between the two countries, though Congress did not approve granting "most favored nation" status to the USSR.
That was as far as it went. A 1974 meeting between Nixon and Brezhnev in Yalta yielded no further progress. In the meantime, opposition to detente had been growing in Congress -- the leader of the charge being Henry "Scoop" Jackson, Democratic senator from Washington State. The Soviet authorities had been making life difficult for Jews who wanted to leave the USSR, with these "refuseniks" becoming a cause in the United States. The consequence was the passage of the "Jackson-Vanik Amendment" to the Trade Act of 1974, which limited trade privileges to countries that unjustly limited emigration. It was counterproductive: the Soviets abrogated their trade agreement with the USA, and further restricted emigration of Soviet Jews.
Nixon was a strong opponent of Castro's Cuba, courting the Cuban-American exile community, and seeking ways to harass Castro. The Cubans were of course not happy about that, in particular worrying that Nixon might abrogate the pledge made by the USA after the Missile Crisis not to invade Cuba. The Cubans asked the Soviets to raise the issue with the Americans -- and they did so, asking Nixon to endorse the agreement. Detente was more important to Nixon than Cuba, so in the fall of 1970, Nixon did endorse the agreement. The diplomacy almost fell apart when US intelligence determined the Soviets were expanding their base at the port of Cienfuegos in Cuba; the Soviets promised the base would not be used to support ballistic-missile submarines, and Nixon was placated.
However, Nixon was not willing to accommodate another Red state in the New World. In 1970, when Chile elected a Marxist named Salvador Allende to the presidency, Nixon took covert actions to prevent him from taking office -- with CIA agents even trying to encourage senior Chilean military leaders to stage a coup d'etat. Allende took office anyway, with Nixon then cutting aid to Chile and continuing to direct, even micro-manage, CIA subversion of the Allende government. The effort paid off: in September 1973, General Agusto Pinochet took power in a violent coup, in which Allende died. The Americans, it seems, did not plan the coup, but it had tacit American approval. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* WINGS & WEAPONS: As discussed by an article from AVIATIONWEEK.com (USAF Aims To Accelerate eVTOL Maturity" by Graham Warwick, 02 January 2020), there's been widespread interest in "electric vertical take-off / landing (E-VTOL)" aircraft for urban air taxi service. Not surprisingly, the military is interested in the technology as well, with the US Air Force issuing a request for information (RFI) on commercial E-VTOL machines that might be procured and fielded within three years.
The USAF would help get these designs through qualification and certification for commercial use, with military requirements as a secondary design consideration. The Air Force is after information on electric, hybrid-electric, and non-electric aircraft, with a maximum take-off weight greater than 600 kilograms (1,320 pounds) for piloted, optionally piloted, and unpiloted personnel and cargo transport. The program envisions small aircraft that "offer a niche capability for specific tactical applications with a low acoustic signature, near instantaneous start/stop, ability to spread an assault force across multiple vehicles, and automated systems for more accurate navigation and landings."
According to the RFI, the EVTOL machines could have applications in distributed logistics, sustainment and maneuver, "with particular utility in civil and military disaster relief, medical evacuation, firefighting, installation and border security, search and rescue, and humanitarian operations."
* As reported by JANES.com ("Misaligned Iranian Air Defence Shoots Down Ukrainian Airliner" by Jeremy Binnie, 14 July 2020), on 8 January 2020, an Iranian surface-to-air missile (SAM) launcher fired on Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752, shooting the airliner down, with all on board killed. Investigation has shown the tragedy was due to a compass misalignment of the SAM launcher.
The Iranian Civil Aviation Organization (CAO) found that the launcher -- a Russian-made Tor-M1 tracked vehicle, operated by the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) -- had relocated to the north of Tehran, and the crew forgot to re-align the system. It was off by 107 degrees. According to the CAO report, this human error "initiated a hazard chain" as the crew believed Flight 752 was approaching from 52 degrees (approximately southwest), not from Imam Khomeini International Airport to the southeast.
The Tor-M1 crew attempted to inform the Air Defense Coordination Center (ADCC) of the possible threat within 30 seconds of detecting it. However, in a second bungle, the crew couldn't get in touch with the ADCC, which would have informed them the airliner had been cleared for departure, and that their directions were off. This was not long after the American killing of General Suleimani, and tensions were very high; although the crew had standing orders not to fire unless authorized to engage by the ADCC, they panicked and launched anyway. It was an absolutely classic demonstration, not so rare in military, of how a sequence of blunders can lead to disaster.
* As discussed by an article from AVIATION WEEK ("Airbus Unveils Blended Wing Body Demonstrator" by Guy Norris, 11 February 2020), European defense giant Airbus is now flight-testing a subscale drone "blended wing-body (BWB)" technology demonstrator.
The BWB is a "fat" flying wing, originally devised by McDonnell Douglas in the 1990s. Like all flying wings, all the fuselage contributes to lift, improving flight efficiency. It also features lower drag, and more room above the wing for more efficient higher bypass engines or other propulsion systems. The Airbus drone is named the "Model Aircraft For Validation And Experimentation Of Robust Innovative Controls (MAVERIC)".
MAVERIC features a length of 2 meters (6.5 feet), a wingspan of 3.2 meters (10.5 feet), and has a wing area of 2.25 square meters (24.2 square feet). It is powered by twin podded model aircraft turbine engines mounted above the aft deck. Initial flight was in June 2019. Initial test flights focused on flight control systems, but are moving on to evaluate broader aspects of the configuration including safety, manufacturability, airport compatibility, maintenance, and support.
Airbus believes an initial single-aisle sized BWB could potentially provide up to 20% lower fuel burn than current tube-and-wing designs. Boeing and Lockheed Martin have targeted BWB designs at military and cargo roles; the configuration has some problems with passengers undergoing a large vertical traverse in a banking turn, and also with passengers crammed into a center section not close to doors or windows. However, Airbus feels these problems are manageable, and that environmental concerns demand innovative solutions. The company believes the BWB configuration is particularly attractive because it can more easily support hybrid electric and, possibly ultimately, all-electric propulsion systems.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* MOSQUITO KILLER: As discussed by an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("Fungus With A Venom Gene Could Be New Mosquito Killer" by Gretchen Vogel, 30 May 2019), the village of Soumousso in Burkina Faso was a proving ground for a new weapon against malaria: insecticide-treated bed nets, which helped save millions of lives. Unfortunately but inevitably, mosquitoes developed resistance to the insecticides, with the effectiveness of the nets declining.
Soumousso is once again being used as a proving ground, for a new weapon against malaria: a genetically modified (GM) fungus that targets mosquitoes. A 600-square-meter (6,450-square-foot) structure named the "MosquitoSphere" -- something like a greenhouse, but with mosquito nets instead of glass -- was set up in the village. The fungus killed off 99% of the mosquitoes within a month.
Fungi naturally infect a variety of insects, effectively eating them alive, and have long been used to control crop pests. In 2005, researchers evaluated a fungus called Metarhizium in test huts in Tanzania, to find that it successfully killed malaria-transmitting mosquitoes. Unfortunately, mosquitoes didn't always pick up enough spores to be infected; and when they were infected, they often died too slowly to prevent them from passing on malaria.
Since then, researchers have tested dozens of different fungal strains against disease-carrying mosquitoes, but none were much more effective. Seeking a more effective weapon, a team of researchers -- from the University of Maryland (UMD) in College Park, and the Research Institute of Health Sciences & Centre Muraz in Bobo-Dioulasso, Burkina Faso -- genetically spliced a fungal strain named M. pingshaense with a gene for a toxin isolated from spider venom that is activated by hemolymph, the insect version of blood. Lab tests showed that just one or two spores could infect mosquitoes, and the fungus could kill mosquitoes faster. UMD entomologist Brian Lovett, who helped lead the study, said that lab tests, of course, weren't enough: "It's hard to replicate the complexities of nature in the lab."
Burkina Faso was a good place for a field test -- first, because unlike many African countries, it has a system in place for evaluating GM organisms. Second, it also has one of the highest rates of malaria in the world, and insecticide-resistant mosquitoes are widespread. The researchers obtained funding from the US National Institutes of Health to build the MosquitoSphere in Soumousso.
The researchers cooperated with local residents to collect insecticide-resistant mosquito larvae from shallow pools and raised them to adulthood inside the facility. After biting, female mosquitoes prefer to rest on a dark-colored surface, so the team mixed the fungus in locally-produced sesame oil and spread the oil on black cotton sheets, which they hung in the sphere's test compartments. They also put up sheets with the natural fungus, and oil without fungus, as controls.
That done, they released 500 female and 1,000 male mosquitoes in each test compartment and gave the mosquitoes a calf to feed on for two nights every week. After two generations -- 45 days -- there were as many as 2,500 adult mosquitoes in the compartment with no fungus, roughly 700 in the compartment with wild type fungus, but only 13 in the compartment with the GM fungus.
Entomologist Marit Farenhorst -- of In2Care, a mosquito-control company in Wageningen, the Netherlands, who was not involved in the study -- finds the work "elegant", saying: "To be able to clear insecticide-resistant mosquitoes to this level is amazing." However, she adds that approval for a GM fungus is time-consuming, and that anti-GM groups are likely to object -- as they do against malaria-resistant GM mosquitoes.
Nonetheless, the GM fungus has significant advantages: not only is it highly effective, but it only targets mosquitoes, and doesn't survive in sunlight, minimizing its ability to spread. Gerry Killeen -- a malaria expert at the Ifakara Health Institute in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania -- points out another advantage, in that as a transgenic organism, it says the transgenic fungus might have another advantage: it can be patented, and so commercially exploited.
Killeen says: "The greatest barrier to new malaria control tools isn't lack of technology or imagination, it's the lack of a market." While there are those who complain about the profit motive when it comes to public health, Killeen just wants to get the product out there: "If this technology has the potential to reduce costs and extend product lifetime simply by being more potent, then bring it on."
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* FUTURE FIGHTER FACTORY: As discussed by an article from AVIATIONWEEK.com ("Future Fighter Factory Technology Will Make Tempest Low-Cost" by Tony Osborne, 4 August 2020), British Aerospace Systems (BAE) is now moving towards development of the "Tempest" next-generation fighter, mentioned here in 2018. Along with developing the advanced-tech fighter, BAE is also developing a "factory of the future" to build it, with the factory fully digitized end to end.
Tempest is projected to go into first-line service by the 2030s. In order to ensure that the British Royal Air Force (RAF) gets their money's worth, and also bring in export orders, BAE wants to shake up its engineering processes and relations with suppliers as well as connect and digitize the entire through-life process.
The company has set up a factory of the future at its site in Warton, England, where it has been experimenting with initiatives such as "cobotics" -- in which robots in reconfigurable cells assist human operators with complex tasks -- and additive manufacturing of ever larger parts. During the past 12 months, the company has been steadily introducing the technologies into its existing programs, including the Eurofighter Typhoon fighter, as a stepping stone to the new factory era.
Currently, it can take about 36 months to complete a Typhoon, and that's assuming that the production line is running smoothly; it might take a year longer if it isn't. Those long lead times can be as much as 100 weeks using traditional manufacturing methods, according to Dave Holmes, manufacturing director of BAE's Air Business. He says: "We want to get that 100 weeks down to 100 days or less."
Holmes says that Tempest production calls for a "completely connected end-to-end environment from requirements, engineering, supply chains, production systems to support upgrades and enhancements." He adds that data and analytics would underpin the system. It would feature an open architecture that could take advantage of new technologies as they are introduced.
Holmes sees additive manufacturing -- 3D printing, that is -- as a major enabling technology. Additive manufacturing, which previously was restricted to producing components tens of centimeters in length, can now produce components that are several meters long. He says: "Additive will challenge the machining sector's production of castings and forgings." Subtractive manufacturing processes will still be needed for a future aircraft but will "become the exception rather than the rule." Holmes adds that these technologies will "force a different relationship with suppliers. The connected world will make that relationship with suppliers more intimate, less transactional."
For the Typhoons being exported by Italy to Kuwait, BAE has already supplied additive-manufactured ducting for the cooling of the active array radars. Metallic 3D-printed parts are being used in the structure of the Typhoons supplied to Qatar. BAE is now working on a full-scale fuselage section of the notional Tempest design. The first subassemblies are due to be completed in September using "smart benches", developed in conjunction with the University of Sheffield's Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre. The benches provide tailored cues and instructions to workers assembling parts and can be adapted for assembly of different components. BAE has also teamed up with aerospace automation firm Electroimpact to improve the accuracy of off-the-shelf robots to deal with the precise tolerances required for military aircraft.
Although the company was the first in the Eurofighter consortium to make use of laser alignment in the assembly of the fighter, BAE is now experimenting with optical projection systems with real-time measurement feedback to assemble the Typhoon's tailfin. The company is also in the process of rolling out technology for the Lockheed Martin F-35, BAE having its fingers in the program. Additionally, optical projection is being used on aircraft skins to provide information to workers on the size of a fastener for a particular section.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* THE COVID-19 MENACE (9): A number of SARS-CoV-2 tests are based on a technique known as "loop-mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP)", which also works at a constant temperature and has been used to identify viruses such as Zika. LAMP uses two enzymes -- one to convert the viral RNA to DNA, and another to copy DNA -- along with a set of four to six short primers designed to recognize different snippets of the viral genome. These fragments not only help get the copying started, as in RT-PCR, but also allow newly copied DNA strands to form looped structures that can be amplified much more rapidly than in standard PCR. It is less accurate, however, and only a few dozen samples can be run at a time.
Vicent Pelechano -- a genomics expert at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, who co-developed a LAMP-based assay for SARS-CoV-2 -- says that since the technique doesn't need special instruments, and can be used in the field. "All you need is a test tube containing the primers, a pipette, a hotplate and a pot of water." A single test costs about a dollar.
In the lab, Pelechano and colleagues found their LAMP-based test could detect as few as 10 copies of a SARS-CoV-2 genome in no more than 40 minutes. The researchers then tested the assay using samples from 248 people with confirmed coronavirus infection, and could detect the virus nearly 90% of the time. Pelechano acknowledges that the test might turn out to be less accurate for some samples, such as those contaminated with blood.
90% accuracy at best is not great, but in some places, the assay would be useful. Nabil Karah, a clinical microbiologist at Umea University in Sweden, says that low-income countries and war-torn areas don't have enough PCR machines to perform the standard diagnostic test for coronavirus. Karah is working with other researchers and with Pelechano's team to bring their LAMP-based test to Syria to grow local testing capacity.
In early March 2020, as the virus spread across the USA, chemical engineer Howard Salis decided to get involved. To speed up testing, he focused on a powerful sequencing approach that had accelerated the pace of genomics research. About three weeks later, Salis's team of synthetic biologists at Pennsylvania State University in University Park came up with a scheme to test samples from nearly 20,000 people in one run.
Their method adds individual "molecular barcodes" to clinical samples before pooling them, and using next-generation sequencing to decode them all at once. The barcodes then allow the researchers to identify which samples tested positive. Other teams have released details of similar mass-testing approaches, including the biotechnology start-up firm Octant in Emeryville, California, and researchers at the Broad Institute.
Because DNA sequencers can read out hundreds of millions of DNA snippets at once, researchers believe that sequencing-based tests could be used to analyze up to 100,000 samples in one run. In contrast, a standard PCR machine can test just dozens or hundreds of samples at the same time. However, this mass testing approach requires specialized equipment, takes at least 12 hours, and implies a logistical network to get large numbers of samples to a central facility. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (114): Richard Nixon remained committed to NATO and other alliances with American allies. He was, of course, a Cold War president, and he maintained the status quo of opposition to the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China (PRC). However, Nixon was flexible, and was interested in coming to terms with both Communist states, in part to help wind down the war in Vietnam. Frictions between the USSR and the PRC had become obvious to the USA by that time; Nixon felt that the tensions between the USSR and the PRC presented opportunities to the USA.
The USA had never recognized the PRC, America continuing to support the Republic of China (ROC) on Taiwan. The sheer mass of the PRC had been making that position increasingly difficult to support. Chinese markets presented an opportunity to American business, while the Sino-Soviet split suggested the two Communist powers might be profitably played off against each other. On their part, Chinese leadership wanted trade, their own counterbalance to the USSR, and an escape from isolation.
Nixon was confronted by resistance to opening the door to China from the Right Republicans, led by Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan; the PRC also had its isolationist faction. For the first two years of his presidency, the two countries made small, low-key steps towards rapprochement, such as the relaxation of travel restrictions. The war in Southeast Asia did not derail the drift towards better relations between the USA and China.
The first breakthrough came in 1971 when, through a mixup at the World Table Tennis Championship, the Chinese team invited the US team to tour China. Thanks to the "ping-pong diplomacy", Nixon then lifted America's long-standing trade embargo on the PRC.
In a July 1971 meeting with Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai, Kissinger pledged not to support independence for Taiwan; Zhou then invited Nixon to China for further talks. In the wake of the meeting, China and the USA announced that Nixon would visit China in February 1972. A motion to recognize the PRC government as the legitimate government of China was quickly put forward in the United Nations; that led to the passage of UN Resolution 2758 in late October, which duly granted that recognition to the PRC, which gave it a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. The Nixon Administration, given its intent to open up China, was willing to accept that -- but pushed back, without success, against the expulsion of the ROC from the UN.
In February 1972, Nixon traveled to China as planned, after having been carefully briefed by Kissinger. On arrival, Nixon was greeted by Zhou, with the two shaking hands in front of the cameras, live to the world. The following discussions were primarily with Zhou and other PRC senior officials, Mao not being in good health. Nixon agreed that Taiwan was part of China, with China saying reunification would be pursued by peaceful means. China promised not to intervene in Vietnam -- relations between China and North Vietnam had deteriorated by that time. The two countries agreed on preliminary trade relations, and the creation of diplomatic offices in each other's countries.
The trip to China was the high point of Nixon's career, cementing his authority as a statesman on the global chessboard; some of the Right Republicans grumbled, but the exercise received high public approval. It would later be even dignified in an opera, NIXON IN CHINA by John Adams, first performed in 1987. It was a balancing act as Nixon simultaneously pursued "detente" with the USSR, his goal being to "minimize confrontation in marginal areas and provide, at least, alternative possibilities in the major ones." [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* Space launches for July included:
-- 03 JUL 20 / GAOFEN DUOMO -- A Long March 4B booster was launched from Taiyuan at 0310 UTC (local time - 8) to put the "Gaofen (High Resolution) Dual Mode (DuoMode) 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).
This was the first flight of the "Agility" remote sensing medium satellite platform. This platform can be used by various remote sensing satellites orbiting between 500 km and 1,500 km. The launch also included the "Xibaipo (BY 70-2)" smallsat, being a technology demonstrator for educational purposes. Both satellites were developed by the 5th Academy of China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation.
-- 03 JUL 20 / CE-SAT-IB (FAILURE) -- A Rocket Labs Electron light booster was launched from New Zealand's North Island at 2119 UTC ( previous day local time - 11) to put a set of smallsats into orbit. The payloads included the "CE-SAT-IB" Earth-imaging satellite for Canon Electronics; five SuperDove Earth observation CubeSats for Planet; and the Faraday 1 CubeSat for In-Space Missions. Rocket Labs nicknamed the launch "Pics Or It Didn't Happen". The flight suffered an upper-stage failure, and didn't make orbit. It didn't happen.
-- 04 JUL 20 / SHIYAN 6-02 -- A Long March 2D booster was launched from Jiuquan at 2344 UTC (next day local time - 8) to put the "Shiyan 6-02" satellite into orbit. It was a classified payload, presumably an optical-IR reconnaissance satellite.
-- 06 JUL 20 / OFEK 16 -- A Shavit 2 booster was launched from Palmachim at 0100 UTC (local time - 3) to put the "Ofek (Horizon) 16" military electro-optic surveillance satellite into orbit.
The first of the series, "Ofek 1", was launched in September 1988. There have been 10 more launches, with 9 making orbit. Ofek 16 was Israel's first launch in almost four years -- the country's last launch coming in September 2016 with the Ofek 11 satellite aboard.
Israel's only coastline faces west onto the Mediterranean, so to avoid overflying the country's neighbors, boosters fly westward and target an unusual retrograde orbit. With inclinations of around 142 degrees, Ofek satellites orbit in the opposite direction to most other satellites and do not pass over the high latitude regions of the Earth as spacecraft in the polar or Sun-synchronous orbits more typically used by reconnaissance missions.
The Ofek satellites are manufactured by Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI), with the current-generation spacecraft based on the company's IMPS 2 platform. The satellites are three-axis stabilized, with two deployable solar arrays generating power. OPTSAT 3000 had a mass of 368 kilograms (811 pounds), so it is likely that Ofek 16 weighs in around this figure - although its mass may be constrained by the limitations of the Shavit-2 carrier rocket.
Ofek 16 appears visually similar to the Ofek 11 satellite that was launched in 2016, and the two satellites are likely equipped with identical or closely-related systems. Italy's OPTSAT-3000 reconnaissance satellite, which was built by Israel and launched in August 2017, is believed to be of the same design as Ofek 11 and 16. OPTSAT has a maximum imaging resolution of about one meter (3.3 feet) and was designed to operate for at least seven years.
As Israel is not known to have attempted any satellite launches between the Ofek 11 and 16 missions, it is not immediately clear whether the Ofek 12, 13, 14 and 15 designations have been skipped, or applied to other spacecraft -- possibly satellites that have not yet been launched.
The Shavit 2 booster that deployed Ofek 16 was a three-stage all-solid-fueled rocket, consisting of two ATSM13 motors burning sequentially, with an AUS-51 motor comprising the third stage. The Shavit family of rockets are derived from the Jericho II missile, which is itself an improved version of the original Jericho, which Israel developed in the 1970s in partnership with Dassault Aviation of France.
The original version of Shavit, which was used for Israel's first two satellite launches, used less powerful ATSM9 motors as its first and second stages. This configuration was used in the successful deployment of two technology demonstration satellites -- Ofek 1 and 2 -- in September 1988 and April 1990. The Shavit 1 configuration, used for operational launches, replaced the first stage with an ATSM13. It flew four times between 1995 and 2004. Two of these launches failed, resulting in the loss of the Ofek 4 satellite in January 1998 and of Ofek 6 in September 2004.
From June 2007 onwards, the Shavit 2, with ATSM13 motors for both its first and second stages, has been used. This flight was the fifth of the Shavit 2 in this configuration.
-- 09 JUL 20 / APSTAR 6D -- A Chinese Long March 3B/G2 booster was launched from Xichang at 1211 UTC (next day local time - 8) to put the "Apstar 6D" geostationary comsat into orbit for the APT Satellite Company LTD of Hong Kong.
The satellite was built by the China Academy of Space Technology (CAST), being based on the CAST DFH-4E comsat platform. It had a launch mass of 5,550 kilograms (12,235 pounds), a payload of 45 C / Ku / Ka-band transponder, and a design life of 15 years. It was placed in the geostationary slot at 134 degrees east longitude to provide commercial video broadcast, VSAT connectivity and cellular backhaul services over the Asia-Pacific and Southeast Asia for APT Satellite.
-- 10 JUL 20 / JILIN 1 GAOFEN 02E, CENTISPACE 1-S2 (FAILURE) -- A Chinese Kuaizhou 1A booster was launched from Jiuquan at 0417 UTC (local time - 8) to put the "Jilin 1 Gaofen 02E" AKA "BilibiliSat" and "CentiSpace 1-S2" AKA "Xiangrikui 2" smallsats into orbit. The booster failed, and the payloads did not make orbit.
The KZ11 booster was developed by the China Aerospace Science & Technology Corporation (CASIC) and commercialized by the China Space Sanjiang Group Corporation (Expace). The launch vehicle can loft a 1,500-kilogram (3,300-pound) payload into a Low Earth Orbit (LEO) or 1,000 kilograms (2,200 pounds) to a 700-kilometer (435-mile) Sun-synchronous orbit.
The KZ11 solid-fuel booster is handled by a mobile launch platform (MLP), consisting of power supply equipment, test and launch control facilities, aiming facility and temperature control facility, to carry vehicles from the technical support center to launch site, complete temperature control of payload, vehicle test and launch.
The KZ11 launch vehicle is 25 meters (68 feet) long with a lift-off mass of 78 tonnes (86 tons), and its maximum diameter is 2.2 meters (7.2 feet). It has three solid-fuel stages and a liquid-fuel top stage. All three solid motors use a single fixed nozzle. The vehicle can fly with three kinds of fairings, with diameters of 2.2, 2.6 and 3.0 meters (7.2, 8.5, and 9.8 feet).
The MLP hauls the booster and provides temperature and environment control of payload, power, test and fire control equipment, aiming equipment, temperature control devices, which are integrated into the platform. The transport and launch vehicle employs a semi-trailer, adapted from a conventional semi-trailer for transporting containers.
The Jilin 1 satellite constellation was developed on China's Jilin Province and is the country's first self-developed remote sensing satellite for commercial use, providing data for disaster relief and resource exploitation. The satellites were developed by the Chang Guang Satellite Technology CO LTD under the Changchun Institute of Optics, Fine Mechanics and Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Like earlier Jilin 1 Gaofen 02 satellites, the 02E satellite was designed to obtain a static push-scan image with a full-color resolution better than 0.76 meters (30 inches) and a multi-spectral resolution better than 3.1 meters (10 feet). Image width is greater than 40 kilometers (25 miles), transmitted to the ground stations at 1.8Gbps. The launch weight was 230 kilograms (505 pounds).
Built by CAS Microspace and based on the WN-100 bus, the CentiSpace 1 S2 would have been operated by the Beijing-based Future Navigation. The satellite, with a launch mass of 97 kilograms (214 pounds), was intended to provide GNSS augmentation techniques using a laser inter-satellite communication link.
-- 15 JUL 20 / NROL 129 (USA 305:308) -- A US Air Force / Northrop Grumman Minotaur 4 booster was launched from Wallops Island at 1346 UTC (local time + 4) to put four classified spy satellite payloads into orbit for the US National Reconnaissance Office (NROL). The set of payloads was designated "NROL 129", with the payloads given the sequence numbers of "USA 305" through "USA 308". This was the 27th flight of a Minotaur booster since January 2000, and the first Minotaur satellite delivery mission in nearly three years. It was the seventh Minotaur launch from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport on Wallops Island, Virginia, and the first Minotaur to take off from there since 2013.
-- 19 JUL 20 / EMIRATES MARS MISSION -- An H2A booster was launched from Tanegashima at 2158 UTC (next day local time - 9) to send the "Emirati Mars Mission (EMM)" to Mars for the United Arab Emirates. EMM AKA "Hope" was a Mars orbiter, developed by the Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Center in Dubai in partnership with the Laboratory for Atmospheric & Space Physics at the University of Colorado.
-- 20 JUL 20 / ANASIS 2 -- A SpaceX Falcon 9 booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 2130 UTC (local time + 4) to put the "Anasis 2" AKA "KMilSatCom 1" geostationary comsat into orbit for the South Korean military. The satellite was built by Airbus Defense and Space, being based on Airbus's Eurostar E3000 satellite design. Details of the satellite were not announced.
The Falcon 9 first stage landed on the SpaceX drone barge in the Atlantic. It had been flown previously 51 days earlier, this being the fastest turnaround of a Falcon 9 stage. Both payload fairing halves were recovered as well, this being the first successful recovery of two at once.
-- 23 JUL 20 / TIANWEN 1 -- A Long March 5 booster was launched at 0441 UTC (local time - 8) from the Chinese Wenchang launch center on Hainan Island to send the "Tianwen 1" probe to Mars. The mission included an orbiter and a rover.
-- 23 JUL 20 / PROGRESS 76P (ISS) -- A Soyuz booster was launched from Baikonur at 1426 UTC (local time + 6) to put a Progress tanker-freighter spacecraft into orbit on an International Space Station (ISS) supply mission, docking with the ISS 3 hours after launch. It was the 76th Progress mission to the ISS.
-- 25 JUL 20 / ZIYUAN 3-3, SMALLSATS x 2 -- A Chinese Long March 4B booster was launched from Taiyuan at 0313 UTC (local time - 8) to put the "Ziyuan 3-3" Earth observation satellite into Sun-synchronous orbit. The satellite had a launch mass of more than 2,500 kilograms (5,510 pounds) and followed two earlier Ziyuan 3 satellites, launched in 2012 and 2016. They provided land survey imagery and data to the Chinese Ministry of Natural Resources. China began launching Ziyuan satellites in 1999, and some spacecraft in the Ziyuan program have been developed in partnership with Brazil.
The launch also included two secondary payloads, provided by Shanghai ASES Spaceflight Technology CO LTD. "Tianqi 10" was launched for the Beijing-based company Guodian Gaoke for a communication and data relay mission, while "Lobster Eye 1" carried a wide-field X-ray astronomy instrument.
-- 30 JUL 20 / MARS 2020 -- An Atlas 5 booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 1150 UTC (local time + 4) to send the NASA Mars 2020 mission to the Red Planet. After landing in February 2021, the Mars 2020 rover, named "Perseverance", will study Martian geology, search for organic compounds, demonstrate the ability to generate oxygen from atmospheric carbon dioxide, and collect rock samples for return to Earth by a future mission. The rover will also deploy a small drone helicopter, named "Ingenuity". The booster was in the "541" vehicle configuration with a 5-meter (16.4-foot) fairing, four solid rocket boosters and a single-engine Centaur upper stage.
-- 30 JUL 20 / EXPRESS 80 & 103 -- An International Launch Services Proton M Breeze M booster was launched from Baikonur in Kazakhstan at 2125 UTC (next day local time - 6) to put the "Express 80" and "Express 103" geostationary communications satellites into orbit for the Russian Satellite Communications Company (Roscosmos).
The two satellites were built by ISS Reshetnev of Russia, and had a 15-year design life. The satellites each had 16 C-band transponders, 20 Ku-band transponders, and an L-band payload. The communications payloads were supplied by Thales Alenia Space of Italy. They had a combined launch mass of 4,390 kilograms (9,680 pounds). Express 80 was placed in a geostationary slot at 80 degrees east longitude, while Express 103 was positioned at 96.5 degrees east. They provided fixed and mobile communications, digital TV and radio broadcasting services, high-speed Internet connectivity, and other data transmission services.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* JEROME POWELL TAKES CHARGE (3): Jerome Powell would like to return the Federal Reserve to a more conservative posture -- but both he and those around him say he is no ideologue, being much more concerned with the facts. After the COVID-19 crisis began in China, Powell said, on 11 February 2020: "We'll be watching this carefully." The Fed watched; more importantly, it reacted, dramatically.
These days, as with so many other people, Powell works from home, using conference calls and video conferences to stay networked. He keeps one document particularly close at hand: a compilation of major excerpts from the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial-reform act. The law defined how the Fed can use its emergency lending powers during a crisis, in partnership with the US Treasury. It's become Powell's guidebook.
According to former Fed senior economist Claudia Sahm, the Fed culture changed after the crash of 2008, to become more aggressive and fast-moving. In the wake of the crash, the Fed set up an internal policy group to study its emergency responses; the group concluded that the Fed was too slow to respond to the housing bubble, then too slow to respond when the bubble burst. Sahm says:
BEGIN QUOTE:
The lesson of the Great Recession is if you don't move fast, if you don't go big, you are going to have a mess. The best opportunity that you have to short-circuit a recession, and make it less severe, is right at the start.
END QUOTE
Despite his inclination to the conservative, Powell appears to have taken that lesson to heart. From 3 March to 23 March 2020, the Fed pulled out the script from 2009, and played it with a vengeance:
The also Fed ramped up the quantitative-easing engine -- but these emergency measures weren't enough to keep the markets from continuing to crash. Panic spread across financial markets. It even upset the market for Treasury bills, the bedrock of the US financial system. This was the kind of flashing red signal that indicates a financial crisis. All around the world, investors dumped whatever securities and assets they owned.
On 23 March, the Fed introduced a new set of interventions, announcing three programs that dramatically expanded its reach into the economic landscape. Known as "special purpose vehicles (SPV)", they are joint ventures between the Fed and the Treasury that will be part of the Fed. Using Fed and Treasury money, the SPVs will be used to buy up a variety of assets that the Fed had avoided purchasing before.
Corporate debt has been a particular worry. Companies like Ford and Kraft Heinz took on billions in debt when interest rates were low. When the virus hit, their revenues plunged, and their debt burdens became unbearable. In March alone, about $90 billion USD worth of investment-grade corporate debt was written down to "junk-debt" status, according to Deutsche Bank. That presented the threat of a snowball effect: as the debt of more companies was downgraded to junk, the market for junk bonds would falter. Companies, unable to finance debt, would be faced with default.
The Fed created two new SPVs to buy corporate debt to prevent this implosion. As of 9 April, the Treasury had put down $75 billion USD between these two bond-buying SPVs. The taxpayer's cash will act as the "first loss" money, meaning that if the bonds default, the losses will be paid with the Treasury money first. Another major SPV will buy loans that have been given to businesses with as many as 15,000 employees. Subsidizing loans to companies that once relied only on the private banking system is a big change for the Fed. All indications are that the measure is working.
In sum, these programs have one goal. The Fed and the Treasury are joining forces to buy up debt when the private market won't do so. The Fed will print new dollars to do this, and the debt will effectively reside on the Fed's balance sheet. This is why the balance sheet is predicted to roughly double this year from about $4.1 trillion USD before the crisis to $8 trillion USD or more.
The rise of the SPVs will fuse the Fed and the Treasury in the most significant way since 1951, when the two agreed to an "accord" that established the Fed's independence. Ever since it was founded, the Fed's leaders have worried that if elected politicians got hold of the Fed's money-printing power, they would simply run the presses whenever they faced election, eventually creating out-of-control inflation or asset bubbles.
Powell has famously guarded this independence even as President Trump has made him a target of his Twitter rants, pressuring the Fed to cut interest rates and boost economic growth. Powell has stood firm that the Fed's job is to act independently, without regard to the next election. Powell insists that the Fed will remain fiercely independent when it comes to setting monetary policy and launching programs like quantitative easing.
The Fed's war plan, of course, has its critics. Inevitably, the Fed has to be selective in its actions, leading to resentment from the losers. Senator Sherrod Brown, the top Democrat on the powerful Senate Banking Committee, commented: "The Federal Reserve is always creative about helping Wall Street and corporations during crises, but workers get left behind."
The Fed is also attempting to prop up the entire US economy in a crisis situation -- something it was never really designed to do, and which may end up being beyond its capabilities. For now, however, under Powell's direction, the Fed is continuing to take dramatic actions. There may well come a time when there's nothing more the Fed can do. [END OF SERIES]
START | PREV | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* SUPER CRISPR: As discussed by an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("Forget Single Genes: CRISPR Now Cuts And Splices Whole Chromosomes", by Robert F. Service, 29 August 2019), the CRISPR gene-editing scheme has proven a great benefit to genomics researchers, allowing them to target and edit genes as well. CRISPR has led to significant advances, including genetically modified organisms, and gene therapies. However, to date, it's only worked on single genes. Researchers have now modified the CRISPR scheme and added new tools to allow it to easily cut and splice large genome fragments.
The traditional tools of genetic engineering can't handle long stretches of DNA. Restriction enzymes, which are used to cut DNA, can snip chunks of genetic material and join the ends to form small circular segments that can be shuttled from cell to cell -- the DNA has to be in a loop because other enzymes known as "endonucleases" will break down linear DNA. However, the loops can can accommodate a couple of hundred thousand bases at most. That's inadequate for synthetic biologists, who may want to move large segments of chromosomes containing multiple genes, which can be millions of bases, tens of millions of bases, long.
Worse, the traditional cut-&-paste tools can't be targeted precisely, so they end up leaving unwanted DNA at the splicing sites, something like genetic scars. Of course, the more changes are made, the more the errors build up. The traditional tools cannot be used to glue large segments together. Tweaking a genome is straightforward; major revisions to it are out of the question.
Jason Chin -- a synthetic biologist at the Medical Research Council (MRC) Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge UK -- and his colleagues have now overcome these obstacles:
The research community is excited about the new technique, since it will allow the design of microbes that can produce levels of proteins as desired. It can also permit the wholesale rewriting of genomes, with work being done on the production of proteins that not only can handle the normal 20 amino acids, but also for large numbers of non-natural amino acids throughout the genome. That's an entirely new field of investigation; nobody knows where it will go, but researchers are eager to find out.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* THE COVID-19 MENACE (8): As discussed by a more recent article from NATURE.com ("The Explosion Of New Coronavirus Tests That Could Help To End The Pandemic" by Giorgia Guglielmi, 17 July 2020), the desperate scramble for better and cheaper tests for COVID-19 seems to be yielding results.
The standard "reverse-transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR)" test is highly effective, but it is also expensive and not easy to use. Research groups around the world are now working to develop better tests. Dozens of diagnostic methods are in development, all of which the virus, but in different ways:
A number of these tests are now in clinical trials. In April, the US National Institutes of Health set aside $1.5 billion USD for coronavirus-test development, aiming to support millions of tests per week by the end of this summer. Zhang Feng -- a co-discoverer of CRISPR, who is working on a CRISPR-based test -- says: "The sooner we can come up with a solution, the sooner we can resume some form of normalcy."
Mitchell O'Connell -- a biochemist at the University of Rochester in New York -- says that a mix of test methods will be needed to support massive testing. Different tests will have different supply chains and different instruments, ensuring that there won't be any show-stoppers in production or distribution: "Any new technology that is able to expand the number of tests that we can do is good news."
The development work being performed on COVID-19 tests should also be helpful if, when a new pandemic comes along. Isabella Eckerle -- a virologist at the University of Geneva in Switzerland -- says that many of the assays in development could be quickly adapted to an emerging pathogen once its genetic sequence is decoded. She adds that, even though the ideal test doesn't yet exist -- that is, one that is accurate, rapid, cheap, plus easy to use and scale up -- "there are many things in the pipeline that could be useful."
COVID-19 tests fall into two broad categories:
Antibody tests have an obvious weakness, in that they can't detect an infection before an immune response takes place. Since patients can be infectious early on, tests for viral material are crucial to identify who should be isolated. In the USA, viral diagnostic assays account for the majority of tests conducted.
The RT-PCR test works by focusing on a sample taken from cells or fluid in a person's nose or throat for a specific genetic sequence from SARS-CoV-2. If the viral sequence is present, the technique amplifies it to levels that can be detected. Initially, the virus RNA is converted to DNA; once that's done, short designed DNA sequences known as "primers" perform several jobs:
Standard RT-PCR tests for the coronavirus take between one and four hours and have a low error rate -- though the accuracy of any diagnostic test depends on many factors, such as when in the course of infection a sample was taken. There are ways to streamline the procedure to get faster results, for example by a by amplifying the DNA at a constant temperature, instead of conducting multiple rounds of heating and cooling.
In some cases, existing tools have been modified to detect SARS-CoV-2. For example, US health-care companies Cepheid and Abbott have developed coronavirus assays that run on toaster-sized testers and take less than one hour to perform. However, expense remains a concern, and use of the gear requires training and caution. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (113): Economically, the Nixon years saw the start of a period of "stagflation" that would continue into the 1970s. In his first term, Nixon remained popular, mostly because of his efforts, fitful as they were, to disengage America from the conflict in Vietnam.
Nixon's relative indifference to his cabinet had a big positive aspect, in that he gave his cabinet officials a loose leash to do what they thought best in matters that he wasn't very concerned about. Nixon was generally progressive on environmental policy, because it didn't concern him much one way or the other. In a 1970 memo to his closest aides, he said that, outside of domestic issues such as crime, school integration, and the economy: "I am only interested when we make a major breakthrough or have a major failure. Otherwise don't bother me."
Nixon did not appoint any women or black Americans to his cabinet, and he didn't bring many Ivy League graduates on board -- one prominent exception being George P. Schultz, who held a number of cabinet positions in the Nixon Administration. Nixon did want to bring a prominent Democrat into his White House; he finally managed to recruit John Connally of Texas as Secretary of the Treasury. Connally, a strong personality, became an influential cabinet secretary, and exerted considerable influence over the administration's economic policies.
Although Nixon's goal was to get the US out of South Vietnam, he took aggressive action against the Communists. In the spring of 1969, he expanded carpet-bombing attacks by Boeing B-52 heavy bombers into Cambodia, with the assent of Cambodian leader Norodom Sihanouk. In early 1970, he sent US and South Vietnamese troops into Cambodia to attack North Vietnamese bases, expanding the ground war out of Vietnam for the first time. Even many in Nixon's administration were unhappy with the Cambodia incursion, considering it half-baked and ineffective; anti-war protesters were outraged. The incursion was short-lived, but the B-52 strikes continued -- in support of the Cambodian government of Lon Nol, which was then battling a Khmer Rouge insurgency in the Cambodian Civil War.
The next year, 1971, Nixon ordered incursions into Laos to attack North Vietnamese bases. The exercise was a fiasco and provoked more domestic unrest. To compound his headaches, that same year THE NEW YORK TIMES planned to publish excerpts of leaked government documents that described the often dubious behind-the-scenes decision-making of America's involvement in Vietnam. Nixon wasn't too concerned about the issue, but Kissinger encouraged him to act, and the administration tried to block publication of the excerpts. SCOTUS judged in the 1971 case of NEW YORK TIMES CO. V. UNITED STATES that publication could go ahead. The leaked documents became known as the "Pentagon Papers". They had been leaked by an economist named Daniel Ellsberg, who had worked on secret defense studies. Ellsberg became a high-profile target of the Nixon Administration.
Nixon was caught between the need to disengage from Vietnam, but not suffer a humiliating defeat. Nixon had pursued negotiations with North Vietnam to end the war in Southeast Asia; he wanted "Peace With Honor", in which America could get out, but South Vietnam would remain intact. The North Vietnamese were unwilling to budge. He promoted a "Madman Theory", in which the North Vietnamese were let to know that Nixon was a closet madman who, if frustrated enough, would do mad things. His long history as an anti-Communist lent some weight to that idea, but the North Vietnamese were unimpressed.
Attempting to exploit the US disengagement from Southeast Asia, the North Vietnamese launched a ground offensive into South Vietnam in 1972. It was crushed by American air power, leveraging off new "smart" munitions that had been introduced, and was followed by a bombing campaign of unprecedented ferocity at the end of the year. The North Vietnamese, having realized the "Madman Theory" was not completely a fiction, became more willing to negotiate, with the Paris Peace Accords signed in 1973. Nixon withdrew the last US troops, and ended the draft.
Fighting continued in Vietnam. Not trusting Nixon to stay out of Southeast Asia, Congress passed the "War Powers Resolution", over Nixon's veto. The War Powers Resolution stipulates that the president could send the US armed forces into action abroad only by declaration of war by Congress, "statutory authorization," or in case of "a national emergency created by attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions, or its armed forces."
The War Powers Resolution requires the president to notify Congress within 48 hours of committing armed forces to military action, and forbids armed forces from remaining in theatre for more than 60 days -- not counting a further 30-day withdrawal period -- without congressional "authorization for use of military force (AUMF)", or formal declaration of war by the United States. The War Powers Act effectively shut the door on further US involvement in Vietnam.
There have been arguments that the War Powers Resolution is unconstitutional, but it's never been seriously challenged in court, in part because it's never amounted to much. The War Powers Resolution has been invoked repeatedly, typically just as a formality by the White House to keep Congress happy. However, presidents have defied Congress over the matter a number of times, and got away with it. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* GIMMICKS & GADGETS: An article from THEVERGE.com ("The Rise And Fall Of The PlayStation Supercomputers" by Mary Beth Griggs, 3 December 2019) provided a footnote to a quirky story in the history of computing: the era when Sony PlayStation (PS) game consoles were ganged up to be used as supercomputers.
By the beginning of the 21st century, game consoles had acquired sophisticated 3D-graphics capabilities, which were enabled by graphics coprocessors AKA "graphics processor units (GPU)". GPUs supported number-crunching that was clearly useful for scientific applications; they weren't common in personal computers, and nobody was making processor systems with GPUs for scientific applications, at least at reasonable prices. Game consoles were available and relatively cheap.
In 2002, Sony released a Linux-based operating system that allowed a PlayStation 2 to be used as a personal computer. Craig Steffen -- now chief researcher for the US National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) PS Linus made the PS2 accessible to his purposes: "They built the bridges, so that you could write the code, and it would work."
The NCSA wired together a system of 60 or 70 PS2s to cobble together a home-brew supercomputer. Steffen says: "It worked okay; it didn't work superbly well." It often had to be rebooted. The NCSA researchers quickly abandoned the effort. The idea, however, didn't die out.
In late 2006, Sony introduced the PlayStation 3, with more powerful hardware and a better scheme for booting up with Linux. The PS3 made the idea of assembling a PlayStation supercomputer more attractive. Astrophysicist Gaurav Khanna, of the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, was interested in investigating black holes, but money was a problem: "Doing pure period simulation work on black holes doesn't really typically attract a lot of funding, it's just because it doesn't have too much relevance to society."
One of the members of Khanna's team was a hard-core gamer, and he suggested that the PS3 might be able to solve the problem. Khanna and his people started out wiring together eight PS3s; having got them to work together, they gradually expanded the system to 176 PS3s. Other research teams had the same idea. A group in North Carolina also built a PS3 supercomputer in 2007, and a few years later, at the Air Force Research Laboratory in New York, computer scientist Mark Barnell began working on a similar project named the "Condor Cluster".
Barnell's team proposed the project in 2009. However, by that time, Sony was backtracking on PS Linux support. The company's new PS3 Slim couldn't run it -- and in fact, after being hacked, Sony issued a firmware update that eliminated PS Linux support from all PS3s. The Air Force managed to obtain PS3s without the new firmware from Sony, with the Condor Cluster going online in 2010. It had more than 1,700 PS3s connected by kilometers of wire; in its prime, it was in the top 50 supercomputers in the world.
That was as far as it went. The PlayStation 4 wasn't flexible enough to be used as a supercomputer element, and neither was any of the competition. Khanna described the PS4 as a "regular old PC", saying: "We weren't really motivated to do anything with the PlayStation 4." New, much more powerful hardware came out, with startups offering dedicated and cheap supercomputer modules, or researchers home-brewing their own using available tools.
The PS3 supercomputer at Dartmouth is still working, though it has been trimmed back. The Air Force phased out the Condor Cluster about five years ago, with some of the old consoles sold off as excess. One subset ended up on a TV series -- playing a supercomputer.
* South Korean tech vendor Samsung sells TVs in a wide range of sizes, up to the enormous. That implies a lot of packing material to ship the TVs in. To make the packaging a little more user-friendly, the Samsung boxes are now labeled with a QR code that, when scanned, links to a little manual that explains how to turn the boxes into kitty houses, micro-shelves, magazine racks, and the like. A major breakthrough? Not at all, but it's fun.
* As discussed by an article from REUTERS.com ("Apple Pushes Recycling Of IPhone With 'Daisy' Robot", 10 January 2020), tech giant Apple is working to improve the recycling of its flagship iPhone. In a warehouse on the outskirts of Austin, Texas, the company's Daisy robot tears down iPhones to extract 14 minerals, including lithium, for recycling. Apple is already using recycled tin, cobalt and rare earths in some of its products, and plans to add more to that list.
Daisy can methodically take apart 200 iPhones per hour. The components are sent off to recyclers for the minerals to be extracted. Although Apple management describes the effort as a step towards a "closed-loop" system where new minerals don't have to be mined, they admit it doesn't bring Apple all that close to that goal -- industry observers saying that recycling can only meet part of the needs for raw materials. Some critics suggest that Apple would be better off to build products that are easier to repair, instead of simply discard when they break. However, Apple management believes Daisy is a step in the right direction, and is interested in sharing the tech with other companies.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* JEROME POWELL TAKES CHARGE (2): What makes the "forced radicalism" of the Federal Reserve in response to the COVID-19 crisis is that history shows the Fed's interventions are very difficult to withdraw once a crisis is over. The actions it took from 2008 to 2010, supposed to be temporary, remain mostly in place. A decade from now, the Fed may be struggling to untangle the consequences of decisions made today.
Powell is perfectly aware of this. After he came onto the Fed's board in 2012, he tried, without success, to roll back some of the Fed's emergency actions. Now he's roaring ahead. He collaborates closely with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, spending hours on the phone daily. Both Powell and Mnuchin declare they stand ready to do more if the situation demands it, but emphasize the emergency measures are temporary. Powell says: "These are emergency powers that we can only use with the Secretary of Treasury's permission," and under the law as written by Congress, "And when that emergency is over, we're going to put those powers back away again."
Will they be able to? Roberto Perli, a former senior economist at the Federal Reserve, is skeptical: "Once you cross a line, it's really hard to go back. It will be really hard, maybe not in the next recession but in the next crisis, for the Fed to say: NO."
Powell understands that, saying: "The danger is that we get pulled into an area where we don't want to be, long-term. What I worry about is that some may want us to use those powers more frequently, rather than just in serious emergencies like this one clearly is."
He doesn't apologize for it; he and other Fed leadership see the bank as operating on a war footing, to prevent the economy from imploding. Former Fed Chair Janet Yellen says:
BEGIN QUOTE:
This is why the Fed was invented. There was just a huge, broad-based flight from risky assets of every type. And that's like a modern-day bank run. The role of a central bank is to take risks and to avoid harm to the economy when no one else is willing to do so.
END QUOTE
* When Powell came to the Fed, he wanted to challenge the system. Powell, incidentally, was nominated by President Barack Obama, who wanted to appoint a Republican to one of two empty seats on the board. The Fed traditionally prizes consensus and civility, and so there was a bit of a shock when he came out swinging in meetings in early 2013.
Powell was not happy with the drastic, by the standards of the time, Fed interventions in the economy in the wake of the 2007:2008 financial crisis. The sticking point was "quantitative easing (QE)", in which the Fed simply made up money to give to banks. Normally, that would be inflationary, but the idea was to head off deflation -- which is a symptom of an economy grinding to a halt, money going nowhere. The economy did start to revive, but banks ended up with massive amounts of reserve cash, several orders of magnitude more than they had before the crisis.
The Fed had injected hundreds of billions of dollars into the banking system while keeping interest rates near zero, which affected banks' behavior by encouraging them to lend instead of save. Critics of QE pointed out that all this money created a desperate "search for yield," meaning that banks, pension funds, and hedge funds couldn't just let their excess cash sit, doing nothing, and so were willing to invest in just about anything that yielded more than 1% or 2%. Powell was apprehensive, saying in a meeting:
BEGIN QUOTE:
While financial conditions are a net positive, there's also reason to be concerned about the growing market distortions created by our continuing asset purchases. Many fixed-income securities are now trading well above fundamental value, and the eventual correction could be large and dynamic.
END QUOTE
In other words, QE was pumping up an asset bubble, which was likely to pop dramatically sooner or later. Unlike many Fed officials, Powell is not an economist. He is a lawyer who has spent his career toggling between two worlds: government service and private finance. His experience gave him a firsthand view of how Fed interventions could distort credit markets, and he was worried about what he saw.
In response to pressure from Powell and other Fed governors who worried about asset bubbles, Ben Bernanke -- the Fed chairman at the time -- started to publicly hint that the Fed might back off from QE. Investors panicked and started dumping long-term Treasury bonds, worrying that the market would drop once QE was given up. The Fed backed off, to end up in a troublesome cycle.
Bernanke and then his successor, Yellen, and then her successor, Powell, have all tried to scale back the Fed's asset purchases, raise interest rates, and reduce the size of the Fed's balance sheet. It was problematic: every time the Fed tried to pull back, it caused volatility in the markets, threatening a downturn, putting pressure on the Fed to back off. After Powell became chairman, in December 2018, he publicly commented that the Fed was going to break the QE habit:
BEGIN QUOTE:
... we thought carefully about this, on how to normalize policy, and came to the view that we would effectively have the balance-sheet runoff on automatic pilot and use monetary policy, rate policy, to adjust to incoming data.
END QUOTE
OK, this is not easy for people who aren't finance wonks to parse, but enough to say the "automatic pilot" part of that statement got Wall Street's attention. Powell was saying that the Fed intended to reduce its footprint in financial markets. The stock market immediately began to crater, with the Dow Jones falling more than 600 points on Christmas Eve. That was particularly alarming because traditionally in finance, nothing much usually happens on Christmas Eve.
In January, Powell reversed course, saying in a public appearance: "As always, there is no preset path for policy -- and particularly with muted inflation readings that we've seen coming in, we will be patient as we watch to see how the economy evolves." Markets recovered, but the Fed remained hooked on money pumping. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* THREE TO MARS: About every two years, an optimum "launch window" opens for sending spacecraft to Mars. The 2020 launch window has been busy, with Mars missions being launched by China, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and the USA.
China's Mars mission, named "Tianwen (Questions to Heaven) 1", was launched from Wenchang on a Long March 5 heavy-lift booster on 23 July. The probe consists of an orbiter and rover, with an overall mass of 5,000 kilograms (11,025 pounds). The probe was developed by the China Aerospace Science & Technology Corporation (CAST), while the overall mission is managed by the National Space Science Center in Beijing.
Tianwen 1 will arrive in Mars orbit on 11 February 2021, with the lander and rover to be dropped onto Utopia Planitia in April. The orbiter carries seven instruments, including:
The six-wheeled rover will descend to the Martian surface on a lander platform, touching down using parachutes. The rover has a mass of 240 kilograms (530 pounds), being the size of a golf cart, and powered by solar panels. It carries six instruments, including:
The rover is expected to operate for at least 90 Martian days -- about 93 Earth days -- using the orbiter to relay data back to Earth. The orbiter has a design lifetime of a Martian year, or about 23 months.
The only other country to have landed rovers on Mars is the USA. China has landed probes on Earth's Moon, but has never landed one on Mars. The Chinese attempted to send an orbiter named "Yinghuo 1" to Mars on a failed 2011 Russian mission to the Martian moon Phobos.
* The UAE mission is an orbiter, the first Arab Mars probe, named the "Emirates Mars Mission (EMM)" AKA "Al Amal (Hope)". It was launched by a Japanese H2A booster from the Tanegashima space center. Hope had a launch mass of 1,350 kilograms (3,000 pounds) and carries three instruments, including:
Hope will arrive at Mars in February 2021, to go into an initial capture orbit that will eventually be normalized to range from an altitude of 20,000 to 43,000 kilometers (12,400 to 26,700 miles), with a period of 55 hours. The flight of Hope roughly coincides with the 50th anniversary of UAE independence in December 1971. Hope was developed in a partnership between the Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Center in Dubai and the Laboratory for Atmospheric & Space Physics at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
* The US mission is "Mars 2020" from the National Aeronautics & Space Administration, launched by an Atlas V booster from Cape Canaveral on 30 July 2020. It is a landing mission that will place the "Perseverance" rover, and a drone helicopter named "Ingenuity", on the Red Planet.
In February 2021, Perseverance will land in Jezero crater, where it will be able to inspect a tall cliff of mudstone, a relic of the era when Mars had running water. Perseverance is part of a campaign that will ultimately result in the return of about 30 samples of Martian rock and grit.
Perseverance looks much like the earlier NASA Curiosity rover, being a six-wheeled chassis the size of a small SUV, an imaging turret, and a radioisotope power source. It carries six instruments:
Perseverance carries an improved drilling system, capable of taking and storing cores, instead of merely pulverizing rocks. The system involves two robotic arms, nine drill bits, 43 sample tubes, and a rotating carousel. The samples will be later recovered by a robot Mars-return mission.
The rover also carries an experimental payload to extract oxygen from Martian minerals, as a feasibility test of the idea of obtaining oxygen as a propellant for a Mars sample-return probe. The experiment was named "Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment (MOXIE)."
The most visible of the experiments, however, is the Ingenuity Mars helicopter, the first helicopter to fly on another planet. It weighs 1.8 kilograms (4 pounds), and flies with contra-rotating carbon-fiber blades rotating at 2,400 RPM. It is solar-powered, and can fly for 90 seconds every Martian day. Ingenuity is intended as a technology demonstration; its only payload is two cameras for terrain imaging and navigation. It is necessarily capable of autonomous flight. It will never go more than a kilometer away from the rover, which will relay the helicopter's video stream back to Earth.
Like Curiosity, Perseverance will use a "sky crane" landing system, the rover being winched down on a tether from the carrier platform -- though Perseverance is smarter, having a camera on its underside to assess the landing zone beneath it, and seek an alternate if the landing zone looks hazardous. During its two-year primary mission, the rover will take advantage of upgraded wheels and autonomous navigation capabilities to traverse more than 15 kilometers (9 miles) -- a distance Curiosity took more than four years to cover. The rover will collect its first 20 samples for an eventual return mission from the geologically diverse terrain it will cross.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* THE COVID-19 MENACE (7): If a test for COVID-19 needs to have a specificity of 99%, we're not close to meeting that standard yet. Some commercial antibody tests have recorded specificities as low as 40% early in the infection. An analysis of nine commercial tests available in Denmark, three lab-based tests had sensitivities ranging from 67% to 93% and specificities of 93% to 100%. In the same study, five out of six point-of-care tests had sensitivities ranging from 80% to 93%, and 80% to 100% specificity, but some kits were tested on fewer than 30 people. Testing bogged down and was given up for one kit. Sensitivity, not surprisingly, improved the longer a patient had been infected. Some of these tests are also being used in other countries, including Germany and Australia.
David Smith -- a clinical virologist at the University of Western Australia in Perth -- says that the reliability of point-of-care tests is lower than that of lab tests, since the point-of-care tests only use a single droplet of blood, and they aren't conducted in as controlled an environment as lab tests. The WHO recommends that point-of-care tests only be used for research. Peter Collignon says that, without reliable tests, "we may end up doing more harm than good."
One problem with testing is timing. If a test is done too soon after a person is infected and the body hasn't had time to generate the antibodies the test is designed to detect, it could miss an infection. The difficulty is that nobody currently knows enough about the progression of the body's immune responses to SARS-CoV-2 to say exactly how long it takes for specific antibodies to develop.
As far as false positives go, it is difficult to know when a test picks up on an antigen from a different pathogen instead of SARS-CoV-2 -- for example, the previously-known coronavirus variants that are harmless. An analysis of EUROIMMUN's antibody test found that although it detected SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in three people with COVID-19, it returned a positive result for two people who were infected with a harmless coronavirus. Collignon says that ironing out all these issues takes time and involves trial and error. He adds that it took several years to develop antibody tests for HIV with more than 99% specificity, he says.
Still another big question relative to antibody tests is the extent to which being infected with a pathogen confers immunity to reinfection. To have protective immunity, the body needs to produce a certain type of antibody, a "neutralizing antibody", that prevents the virus from entering cells.
However, it's not clear if all people who have had COVID-19 develop these antibodies. An analysis of 175 people in China who had recovered from COVID-19 and had mild symptoms reported that ten individuals produced no detectable neutralizing antibodies, even though some had high levels of binding antibodies. According to Wu Fan -- a microbiologist at Fudan University in Shanghai, who led the study -- these people had been infected, but it's unclear whether they have protective immunity: "The situation for patients is very complicated."
So far, there's no evidence that people can get reinfected with the virus. Rhesus macaques infected with SARS-CoV-2 could not be reinfected at about a month following their initial infection, according researchers at Peking Union Medical College in Beijing. Collingnon says: "We should presume that once you have been infected, your chance of getting a second infection two to three months later is low." However, nobody knows how long immunity will last: A year? Two years? Five years?
To compound the headache, most tests currently don't detect neutralizing antibodies; the tests that do tend to be more complicated, and not widely available. That makes using antibody tests as "immunity passports" problematic. Researchers are trying to determine whether the antibodies detected by current kits can act as a proxy for protective immunity.
Yet another complicating factor for immunity passports is that antibody tests can't prove that a person has stopped being infectious. Viral RNA, a marker for infection, may linger after antibodies appear. Nobody is saying that antibody tests are worthless, only that they have a lot of challenges, and nobody should under-estimate the difficulty. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (112): Richard Milhous Nixon won the 1968 election, defeating Hubert Humphrey. Spiro Agnew, previously governor of Maryland, became vice president. If indeed LBJ said that desegregation would mean the South would defect from the Democratic Party, he was proven right. Nixon became the first Republican to pursue a "Southern strategy", attempting to bring old Dixiecrat states into the GOP fold. Between Nixon and Alabama Governor George Wallace, who ran as an independent, the Democrats were slaughtered in the South.
Nixon's central focus was on foreign policy. Despite being a long-time Cold Warrior, his goal was a realpolitik detente with both the USSR and the People's Republic of China and the Soviet Union. To that end, he signed two landmark arms-control treaties: the "Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM)" Treaty, and the "Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT)", which would become SALT I when later versions were devised.
As far as Vietnam went, Nixon established the "Nixon Doctrine", which meant that America would back up its allies, and be cautious about direct intervention. Nixon wanted to "Vietnamize" the war, shifting the combat burden to South Vietnamese troops while withdrawing US forces. Vietnamization was a dismal prospect, since South Vietnamese officers were largely incompetent and corrupt, while South Vietnamese troops were poorly trained and motivated. The Nixon Doctrine was global, of course, with the US ramping up arms sales, particularly to Israel, Iran, and Saudi Arabia, and pumping resources into Pakistan -- which made the US a tacit enemy of India.
Nixon did not rely heavily on his cabinet for making important executive decisions, preferring instead to deal with a close-knit circle in the White House. Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman and advisor John Ehrlichman became his most trusted staffers regarding domestic affairs, with Haldeman controlling access to the president. Attorney Charles Colson also became an important advisor after he joined the Nixon Administration in late 1969, while Attorney General John Mitchell exerted more influence on Nixon than other cabinet members. Nixon relied heavily on Mitchell for selecting judiciary nominees. Nixon also put his own stamp on the administrative structure of his administration:
Nixon wanted to centralize control over the intelligence agencies, but he proved largely unsuccessful, in good part due to resistance from powerful FBI director J. Edgar Hoover.
Nixon planned to reduce the number of government departments to eight. The departments of State, Justice, Treasury, and Defense would be retained, while the others would be reshuffled as the new departments of Economic Affairs, Natural Resources, Human Resources, and Community Development. Congress did not approve, but Nixon did manage to get rid of one government department, the US Post Office Department. The "Postal Reorganization Act of 1971" reformed the department as the "United States Postal Service", an independent entity within the executive branch of the federal government.
Domestically, Nixon pushed a scheme of "New Federalism", which was no more than a fairly typical Republican scheme for pushing Federal powers and responsibilities back on to the states. However, there was not so much that Nixon could do in the face of a Democrat-dominated Congress. He attempted to reform of the welfare system; Congress only approved an element of it, Supplemental Security Income, to provide aid to the poor who were aged or disabled. The Nixon Administration kept a low profile on school desegregation -- but enforced court desegregation orders, and even implemented the first affirmative action plan in the USA.
Significantly, even though Nixon remains stereotyped as a Rightist, he was supportive of environmental regulation, signing into existence the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), as well as signing major environmental laws, such as the Clean Water Act. Public concerns over water and air pollution had been growing from the early 1960s, boosted by environmental calamities such as massive oil spills.
In early 1970, Nixon went to Congress with an agenda for an environmental protection effort, elements including improvement of water treatment; national air quality standards; control of vehicle emissions; clean-up of polluted Federal facilities; control over dumping of toxic wastes; and improved ability to deal with oil spills. Nixon also set up a committee to recommend actions to that end, with the committee proposing the EPA. The agency would do research on environmental issues, monitor the environment, set national environmental regulations, and support the states in their environmental efforts. Congress approved the agency, with its first administrator, William Ruckelshaus, taking office in December 1970. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* SCIENCE NOTES: As discussed by an article from CNN.com ("A Giant Red Star Is Acting Weird" by Ryan Prior, 26 December 2019), the bright red supergiant star Betelgeuse, in the constellation of Orion, had been dimming rapidly -- which suggests the star is about to brew up in a supernova.
Ed Guinan -- an astronomy professor at Villanova University and the lead author on a recent paper on the star -- says that Betelgeuse (pronounced "BEH-tel-juice", not "beetle-juice") has been fading in brightness sharply since October, and was now about 2.5 times fainter than usual. Once the ninth brightest star in the sky, Betelgeuse has fallen now to about the 23rd brightest. Betelgeuse is a variable star, and does change in brightness over a cycle lasting about 420 days, but the dimming has greatly accelerated.
Betelgeuse is about 700 light-years away. Guinan and his colleagues have been closely observing the star for decades, with continuous coverage from 1980. The dimming is unprecedented, and Guinan believes something may be up. Supergiant stars like Betelgeuse emerge out of "star nursery" nebulas to live short lives, burning up their nuclear fuel -- to finally run out, and collapse in a supernova explosion.
Guinan says: "What's special about this is how close it is." He says it's the most likely nearby supernova candidate; when it brews up, it will be visible in daytime, though it is unlikely to do the Earth any harm. It's about nine million years old, and stars as large as Betelgeuse don't usually have lifespans past 10 million years. Though its time is coming, it probably won't explode soon, in human terms. He says: "It'll probably happen in the next 200,000 or 300,000 years."
* As discussed by an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("Massive, Blimplike Experiment Lowers Weight Limit On Neutrino" by Adrian Cho, 16 September 2019), it was once believed the ghostly neutrino particle -- which barely interacts with matter -- was massless, but that was disproven decades ago. Since then, physicists have been trying to determine its mass.
Now, researchers at the Karlsruhe Tritium Neutrino (KATRIN) experiment at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany have determined the neutrino can weigh no more than 1.1 electron volts (eV) -- less than one-500,000th the mass of an electron. It had previously been determined to be no more than 2 eV.
To deduce neutrino mass, researchers study the radioactive "beta decay" of tritium, in which a nucleus ejects an electron and a neutrino. KATRIN features a drive system that vectors the electrons from tritium beta decay into a 23-meter (75-foot) long blimplike spectrometer to measure the electron energies from with unprecedented precision. The limit obtained is based on 28 days' worth of data; the KATRIN experimenters want to get a thousand days, and see if they can push the limit down to 0.2 eV -- or find out if the neutrino's heavier than that.
* As discussed by an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("Echolocation In Blind People Reveals The Brain's Adaptive Powers" by Kelly Servick, 1 October 2019), the human brain has a definite architecture and partition of functions -- but the architecture is flexible. Now, a study of blind people who vocalize clicks to judge the location of objects when sound bounces back shows that a brain area normally devoted to the earliest stages of visual processing can use the same organizing principles to interpret echoes, as it would to interpret signals from the eye.
In sighted people, images obtained by the retina are relayed to a region at the back of the brain called the primary visual cortex (PVC). The layout of the PVC matches to the layout of physical space around us: points that are next to each other in our environment project onto neighboring points on the retina, and activate neighboring points in the PVC. In the new study, researchers wanted to know if blind echolocators used this same sort of spatial mapping in the PVC to process echoes.
The researchers asked blind and sighted people to listen to recordings of a clicking sound bouncing off an object placed at different locations in a room, while the brains of the subjects were being monitored in a functional magnetic resonance imaging scanner. The researchers found that expert echolocators -- unlike sighted people, as well as blind people who don't use echolocation -- showed activation in the PVC like that of sighted people when looking at visual stimuli.
The PVC, then, was repurposed from a "visual" system to one using a different sense. The more an echolocator's brain activity matched the spatial mapping during listening, the better they were at guessing the location of the object in the recording from its echo.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* JEROME POWELL TAKES CHARGE (1): As discussed by an article from TIME.com ("How Jay Powell's Coronavirus Response Is Changing the Fed Forever" by Christopher Leonard, 11 June 2020), in 2018 President Donald Trump installed Jerome "Jay" Powell as chairman of the US Federal Reserve Banking System. He was obviously qualified for the position, having long experience in the financial sector, and also having sat on the board of directors of the "Fed" since 2012. However, few would have thought him a daring choice either, since he looked every bit the investment banker he was.
And then came the COVID-19 pandemic. On 11 March 2020, a group of traders inside the New York Federal Reserve Bank watched, appalled, as the stock market crashed in response to the assault of the virus. The traders went into conference, trying to assess the situation and determine what to do next. They passed their conclusions on to Powell -- who almost immediately announced that the Fed would generate a half-trillion dollars the next day, to provide short-term loans for distressed borrowers on Wall Street.
The day after that, the Fed offered another half-trillion dollars in the short-term loans -- "repurchase agreement" AKA "repo loans" -- market. Repo loans are effectively loans for a day or two, used by large financial institutions, to bring in a bit of money for liquid funds while they're in transit.
In any case, It was dramatic action by the central banking system, a "shock & awe" campaign. However, even the announcement of the second infusion of money didn't stop the crisis. Markets continued to crash. The Fed, having grabbed onto the crisis with both hands, didn't let go. In a series of actions in late March and early April, the Fed all but underwrote the entire US economy.
Powell never contemplated taking such drastic actions when he became Fed chairman, but he adapted -- saying in an interview in early May: "My views evolve with the evidence." Powell showed no sign of fear in his actions, but he was faced with a terrifying prospect. The coronavirus pandemic, in a few months, wiped out roughly a decade's worth of job creation, destroying some 20 million positions as of late May and pushing the unemployment rate to its highest level since the Great Depression. The crisis strained worldwide financial markets and corporations that were already burdened with painful levels of debt. It was as if the US economy had run into a brick wall.
In response, the Fed has printed money at a scale that dwarfs all previous efforts. After the financial crash of 2008, for example, over a period of two years, the Fed added $1.4 trillion USD to its balance sheet, that a rough index of the money generated by the central bank system. That broke records. In comparison, now the Fed added $2.9 trillion USD in less than three months. Back in 2007, the Fed's balance sheet was about 6% of the size of the entire US economy; by the end of 2020, it is expected to be about 40%.
In 2010, following the infusion of money into the economy, the Fed launched a second round of a controversial stimulus program called "quantitative easing (QE)", under which it bought $600 billion USD worth of American debt over several months. In March, the Fed bought roughly $543 billion USD in a week through similar programs. In 2015, the Fed's balance sheet hit $4.5 trillion USD; it is expected to reach about $8 trillion USD or more by the end of 2020.
The Fed is working hand-in-hand with the US Treasury to keep the US economy afloat, the two collaborating in buying up corporate debt and small-business loans. The Fed, concerned for its independence, has traditionally kept the Treasury at arm's length -- but this is not the time for caution.
The Fed is not demonstrating caution; it is, for no motive other than necessity, rewriting the rules of American capitalism. In a few months, the bank increased the size of its footprint in the economy by more than two-thirds, as well as buying all sorts of things that it hadn't bought before, such as corporate junk debt and small business loans. Despite the Trump Administration's loud denunciations of "socialism", the Fed has effectively underwritten corporate debt, what has been called "socialized credit risk". [TO BE CONTINUED]
NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* POPULATION IMPLOSION: The slowing growth of global population has been discussed here in the past, notably in 2009. An article from BBC.com ("Fertility Rate: 'Jaw-Dropping' Global Crash In Children Being Born" by James Gallagher, 15 July 2020) suggests that falling fertility rates mean nearly every country could have shrinking populations by the end of the 21st century. In addition, 23 nations, including Spain and Japan, are expected to see their populations halve by 2100. Countries will also age dramatically, with as many people turning 80 as there are being born.
The fertility rate -- that is, the average number of children a woman gives birth to -- is dropping. If it falls below approximately 2.1, then population starts to decline; it's a bit more than 2 because not all the offspring will survive to reproduce, or wish to reproduce. In 1950, women were having an average of 4.7 children in their lifetime. Researchers at the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics & Evaluation showed the global fertility rate nearly halved to 2.4 in 2017 - and their study projects it will fall below 1.7 by 2100. As a result, the researchers expect the number of people on the planet to peak at 9.7 billion around 2064, before falling down to 8.8 billion by the end of the century.
Researcher Christopher Murray told the BBC: "That's a pretty big thing; most of the world is transitioning into natural population decline. I think it's incredibly hard to think this through and recognize how big a thing this is; it's extraordinary, we'll have to reorganize societies."
The driving force in the decline is more women in education and work, as well as greater access to contraception, with women choosing to have fewer children. Japan's population is projected to fall from a peak of 128 million in 2017 to less than 53 million by the end of the century. Italy is expected to see an equally dramatic population crash from 61 million to 28 million over the same timeframe. They are two of 23 countries -- also including Spain, Portugal, Thailand, and South Korea -- - expected to see their population cut by more than half, which Murray calls "jaw-dropping".
China, currently the world's most populous nation, is expected to peak at 1.4 billion in 2024, to then halve to 732 million by 2100. The UK is predicted to peak at 75 million in 2063, and fall to 71 million by 2100. 183 out of 195 countries now have a fertility rate below the replacement level.
That's good news, since it will reduce the human footprint on the planet. However, it's also bad news, since it means that, during the transition, the old will increasingly outnumber the young. Who pays tax in a massively aged world? Who pays for healthcare for the elderly? Who looks after the elderly? Will people still be able to retire from work? Murray says: "We need a soft landing."
Increased automation will be necessary, to allow production to be maintained with a shrinking labor force -- as well as to provide robots and AI systems to help care for the elderly. Immigration can compensate for falling populations, but tolerance for immigrants tends to be variable, and it will become less of an answer as population starts to fall in all countries. Murray says: "We will go from the period where it's a choice to open borders, or not, to frank competition for migrants, as there won't be enough."
Some countries have tried policies such as enhanced maternity and paternity leave, free childcare, financial incentives, and extra employment rights; they seem to work a bit, if not enough, in some places, such as Sweden, but not at all in others. Singapore still has a fertility rate of around 1.3.
The answer, of course, is not to undo education and empowerment of women, or restrict access to contraceptives. The population of Sub-Saharan Africa is still booming at an unsustainable rate, being expected to triple to more than three billion people by 2100 -- Nigeria becoming the second biggest country, with a population of almost 800 million.
In the end, reproduction may no longer be an individual decision, with children all but "manufactured" and raised by the state or collectives. In the present day, that's unthinkable; but faced with plunging populations, there may be no real alternative. A later generation, seeing the scheme as normal, will have no problem with it.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* ANOTHER MONTH: As reported by an article from CNN.com ("The Pandemic's Unlikely Pet: Chickens" by Mallory Hughes, 25 July 2020), the COVID-19 pandemic has led to substantial changes in American society. One has been a boom in raising urban chickens.
Urban chickens are nothing all that new, but COVID-19 has made raising them much more popular. Gillian Frank -- a historian at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville -- and his wife, Kathryn Jones -- a lawyer -- got to thinking that, given uncertainties in food supply, it would be nice to have a source of fresh eggs. Their 8-year-old daughter Charlotte loved the idea, so it was a go.
They got six chickens, which Charlotte named after women's rights activists, Supreme Court Justices, and her favorite singers: Susan Egg Anthony, Eggena Keggan, Sonia Eggomayor, Ruth Bader Eggsburg, Egger Swift (after Taylor Swift) and Katy Eggry (after Katy Perry). Frank says:
BEGIN QUOTE:
They are hilarious. They are funny little creatures who like to wander around the yard when they're not in their coop, and run, and they get into all the weeds. They get into the flowers and everything too, but I'm looking at the positives.
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Traci Torres, CEO of My Pet Chicken, says sales of backyard chicken coops have gone crazy. In March, sales were up 325%. By April, 525%. Torres says: "It started coming back down because we ran out of everything to sell. We just didn't have time to ramp up production of product."
Torres set up the business in 2004, when she got into raising chickens herself, and found there was little support for urban chicken-raising. The company is a full-service operation, Torres saying: "We have the coops, we have the supplies, we also have free information and short little guide books on the website to give you the basics."
Frank's chickens are now busy laying eggs, producing about a half-dozen eggs a day. He says: "It's made us popular with the neighbors, because we have more eggs than we can handle. So everyone on our block that we're friends with is getting farm-fresh eggs." Frank said it's fun to have the eggs and cheap to keep the chickens, so they will maintain their new hobby after the pandemic ends. The hardest part, Frank said, is getting them back in the coop -- thanks to the troublemaker, Susan Egg Anthony, who always puts up a fight.
* In local news about birds, on the last day of July I was attending to my daily morning task of trimming my lawn -- when I turned around and saw a crow watching me from the sidewalk, about arm's length away. I was very surprised. It showed no fear of me at all. I eventually sorted out that somebody had likely been feeding it, and it was begging for a handout. For want of anything better, I gave it some bran shredded wheat squares, knowing that crows are anything but fussy eaters. I hope it comes by again; I understand crows do well on dry cat food, along with a bowl of water for them to dunk it in. The next morning, I picked up a small bag of cheap dry cat food at Walmart, but so far, he hasn't dropped by again.
* I ran across a Twitter feed titled BURMA-GRAM, which was based on the old sequential Burma Shave signs, though with a modern and definitely partisan bent:
HEADING INTO TOWN? HEED LONE RANGER'S PLAN LEAVE PEOPLE ASKING: "WHO WAS THAT MASKED MAN?" - burma-gram WE HOLD THIS TRUTH TO BE SELF-EVIDENT DONALD TRUMP SHOULD NOT BE PRESIDENT - burma-gram THERE'S A GUY ON FOX NEWS GOES BY THE NAME OF TUCKER BUT THANKS TO HIS RACIST RANTS MOST CALL HIM ... NOT A NICE GUY - burma-gram WHERE THERE'S SMOKE THERE'S OFTEN A FIRE WHERE THERE'S TRUMP THERE'S ALWAYS A LIAR - burma-gram MAKE AMERICA EVEN GREATER REMOVE & REPLACE TRUMP THE TRAITOR - burma-gram YOUR NAME MIGHT BE TOM OR DICK OR HARRY BUT WITH NO MASK YOU'RE TYPHOID MARY - burma-gram IT'S LONG PAST TIME TO PULL THE PLUG THIS NOVEMBER VOTE OUT THE THUG - burma-gram
* The COVID-19 pandemic continues to rage in the USA, fueled by the ignorance and pig-headedness of Trump at the top, and his minions at the bottom. Other countries like Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, and Germany have coped well; Americans, in contrast, seem bent on self-destruction.
The scene doesn't promote a positive outlook on life. I am enduring as well as possible; I keep to myself in normal times, don't have to leave the house much, and so hunkering down isn't such a problem. The tube bandanas I bought work very well as masks, though they are thin, and I double them up when I go to the super or the like. I found one of the popular paper masks as litter on my morning walk; I took it home, sanitized it, and tried it on -- the two-layer bandanas work better. I just ordered another set of them from Amazon.com, these in more garish colors than my custom, just to make sure people see the mask.
I've long been a bit agoraphobic, but it's become more than a bit as of late. I don't like going out, less because of the disease than because of the presence of "maskholes", people who refuse to wear a mask. I was thinking that after the fall of Trump -- which is becoming increasingly certain as he visibly disintegrates -- there would be an uprising of sorts, scattered and uncoordinated acts of violence by malcontents. COVID-19 seems to have moved up the schedule, the malcontents having decided to exploit the pandemic to sow disorder. As the pandemic deepens, so does the rage against them.
I've taken to carrying a kubotan -- which is just a hard plastic cylinder about the size of a cigar, to add emphasis to a punch. It's a minimalist weapon, one I wouldn't dare use unless I had to, and I hope I don't have to. I also bought a combination pen / penlight / kubotan from Amazon along with the bandanas. It has a clip, so I can carry it on my kit bag strap where it's visible, meaning it's not a concealed weapon, and I can get to it quickly. I doubt most people would notice it, and most would not really know what it was. Good, that would sow uncertainty. From the pictures, it certainly looks tactical.
I don't think I'm over-reacting. Early in July, a French bus driver named Philippe Monguillot of Bayonne got into a dispute with three maskholes, who beat him severely; a week later, the doctors pronounced him brain-dead, and the family agreed to shut off life support. The French are up in arms over the killing; from what I've seen of the French, anyone who refuses to mask is going to be treated harshly from now on. No such luck here yet.
As mentioned last month, I also always carry a smartphone, even when I go out in the front yard, much less anywhere else. If somebody starts acting up, I can get them on video -- it seems to intimidate people. I don't have a phone contract, but I can call Emergency 911 if it comes to that. The phone is my first line of defense. In addition, as symbols of resistance against Trump and his Trumpbots, I've been accumulating Joe Biden campaign gear -- a decal on the rear window of my car, a magnetic sticker on the side, a visor cap, a yard sign. I don't go anywhere without the Biden cap. It calls out to friends, and challenges enemies.
It was fortunate that, as mentioned earlier this year, I set up a secondary credit-card account as a "wallet" for routine purchase of groceries, fuel, and so on. The pandemic has discouraged handling cash -- I would say less because of the possibility of passing the virus on with the cash, than because cash implies a close-range hand-to-hand transaction. I have, somewhat to my surprise, now effectively gone cashless. It works because I don't need to balance the wallet account: I just refill it every now and then, and monitor my drafts on it. It actually makes it easier to log my spending, since I don't have to puzzle through sales receipts any more.
As far as the pandemic is going in the USA, July was bad. August will be worse. I think by September there will be a change in mindset -- because if there isn't, the USA will be brought to its knees. Things are going to get worse, maybe much worse, before they get better. [ED: Which is exactly what happened.]
* Thanks to a reader for a donation this last month. It is much appreciated.
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