DayVectors

22 entries including: US Constitution (series), dining & COVID-19, COVID-19 menace (series), bacterial genes in plants, sea drones to monitor seaquakes, TESS satellite reviewed, reverse genomics, vulnerability of voting machines, and product offerings shrink in response to pandemic.

[WED 30 SEP 20] NEWS COMMENTARY FOR SEPTEMBER 2020

* NEWS COMMENTARY FOR SEPTEMBER 2020: The COVID-19 pandemic continues on in the USA, as America gets closer to the wire for election day. Trump is still gaslighting on COVID-19, talking the usual trash, and in general weaving all over the road, running down everyone in his way.

The one big news was the death from cancer of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on 18 September. This was followed by an immediate push by the Senate GOP to confirm a new justice. That was exactly what they could be expected to do -- but it rankled, because in 2016, the Senate GOP stalled the nomination of Merrick Garland, Barack Obama's pick, for the better part of a year.

It is likely that the appointment of Trump's nominee will go through. One Chris Truax, a center-right columnist for USA TODAY, pointed out that this would have painful consequences for the Republicans. As Truax noted, it is hard to think that a confirmation vote will be held before the election on 3 November. The odds are good, not great but good, that the GOP will lose its Senate majority, and almost certainly the White House. If the GOP then decided to try to hobble the Biden Administration by installing a conservative majority on the high court, the Democrats would hit back hard:

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Truax thinks this would be calamitous for the USA. That is arguable. The House of Representatives eliminated the filibuster in 1842, and there's never been any real push to restore it. Only 14 US states permit filibusters in their legislatures. Such "supermajority" rules tend to die out in time, once the players start weaponizing them; it doesn't matter who starts it, they're unstable, they're doomed.

For the moment, although the Woke Left is enthusiastic about "court-packing", the mainstream Democrats are not, and polls also show no great public enthusiasm for the idea. However, none of the Democrats are flatly saying it can't happen, and the argument among the Dems seems to be a "bad-cop good-cop" act. The Woke Left makes it clear that court-packing is an option, while the Moderates say they don't want to do it. Since it can't be done until after the election and the Democrats (hopefully) have taken over the Senate, there's no need to commit to it until then. If the Democrats commit to it now, it might hurt them in the election; if they don't, it doesn't hurt them.

Once they do (hopefully) take over the Senate, they have every reason to implement it as fast as possible -- not only to block SCOTUS decisions unfavorable to the new administration, but to take the hit from public opinion right away, on the reasonable assumption voters will forget about it in time. For the moment, the Democrats are best off simply stoking public outrage over the nomination, to ensure support for court-packing when the time comes. It may not prove to be a hit at all.

As far as antagonizing the Republicans goes, it's hard to see it matters, since the GOP is in decline anyway. There's no doubt they're going to suffer in the election; it's just a question of how much. After the fall of Trump, the Republican Party will split, into the "Lincolnites" and the "Trumpbots". The Lincolnites will be tacitly aligned with the Democrats, working against the Trumpbots. There will be few of them, but they would have influence by controlling the swing vote. The Lincolnites will grow, while the Trumpbots fade away. The Democrats will learn to live with the Lincolnites. The Trumpbots? They can and will drop dead.

Oh yes, another thing happened late in the month: THE NEW YORK TIMES got hold of Trump's tax returns, to find that he barely pays any taxes, and in many years pays none at all. His businesses are not doing well, he's deeply in debt, and big loans are coming due presently. Trump also seems to employ dubious tax dodges, like hiring his family as "consultants" and handing them big consulting fees, then claiming the fees as deductions. Much more remains to be learned, and it's likely to all be bad news for Trump.

[ED: Hindsight from June 2021 shows that the Dems did take back Congress, if narrowly; they haven't killed off the filibuster yet, but it is likely they will hobble it severely before long; and there has been no action on court-packing. Court-packing appears to be a nonstarter; but term limits are on the table, and the odds of that happening are good. Oh yeah, Trump's tax troubles are starting to become very serious.]

* In the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, the World Health Organization (WHO) is under attack. As discussed by an essay from ECONOMIST.com ("The World Needs A Better World Health Organisation", 12 September 2020), the WHO's problems are by no means entirely of its own making; it is more sinned against than a sinner.

US President Donald Trump has loudly reviled the WHO and committed the USA to pulling out by July 2021. Trump needs scapegoats for the COVID-19 pandemic, while he has no interest in solutions. In reality, Trump's attacks on the WHO have little justification. Mara Pillinger, a health-policy researcher at Georgetown University in Washington DC, says the WHO has done a "pretty remarkable job" of coping with COVID-19, given the constraints built into the way it works:

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The WHO is primarily intended as a health-intelligence system -- to determine the best public-health measures, share that information, and provide support to members that need it. The countries themselves have to implement public-health measures, but the WHO will step in if necessary:

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One of the problems with the WHO is that it tends to work in the background and let countries take credit for WHO successes. If things go wrong, however, the WHO makes a convenient scapegoat, as Trump has realized. It is true that WHO's response to the COVID-19 pandemic left something to be desired, with critics saying the organization dithered too long in declaring a global public-health emergency. Of course, that was very much due to China's reluctance to keep the WHO informed, in violation of the IHR. There have been other complaints:

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However, the WHO's successes in dealing with the pandemic outweigh its failures:

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The World Health Assembly, the WHO's decision-making forum, has put in motion a full independent evaluation of the agency's response to the pandemic, as well as that of individual countries. The report will be published in 2021. Taiwan, it should be noted, was critical of the WHO's conduct early in the pandemic -- but Taiwanese officials clarified that they were not condemning the WHO, just suggesting things might be done better.

Much does need to be improved. Many of the WHO's problems are obvious: it is badly underfunded, overtaxed by demands of member states, and weak by design. It has a yearly budget of $2.5 billion USD, which is nowhere near of what it needs to do the job, while much of the funding is inconsistent, or comes with strings attached. Dr. Tedros has set up the "WHO Foundation" to create a more reliable source of funding, and has tried to persuade member states to give more unconditional funding. The WHO has gone from discussing its work with health ministers to talking to heads of state. In addition:

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Should Joe Biden win the US presidency, America will not leave the WHO -- and given Trump's ghastly failure to take the pandemic seriously, it is likely that Biden will win. The USA, almost as a form of penance, will need to absorb the "lessons learned" from the pandemic, and work with the WHO to ensure that mistakes aren't repeated. There will be another pandemic; it will come, sooner or later, and the WHO should be better-positioned to deal with it.

[TUE 29 SEP 20] BACTERIAL GENES IN PLANTS

* BACTERIAL GENES IN PLANTS: As discussed by an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("Alien Genes From Bacteria Helped Plants Conquer The Land" by Elizabeth Pennisi, 14 November 2019), a blob of slime found on a wet stone has led to a discovery that bacteria likely helped plants conquer land.

During 2006, while on a plant collecting trip about 50 kilometers (30 miles) from the University of Cologne in Germany where he worked, phycologist Michael Melkonian came upon an unusual alga -- known before then only from a 19th century French natural historian's description. Melkonian and his colleagues analyzed its genome and that of a close relative, to find genes important for life's emergence from water. At least two of those genes came from soil bacteria, and were likely transferred into an ancestor shared by these algae and land plants.

Sequencing these two algae, Spirogloea muscicola and Mesotaenium endlicherianum, provided insights into early plant evolution, with the link to soil bacteria being particularly interesting. Pamela Soltis -- a plant evolutionary biologist at the University of Florida in Gainesville, who was not involved in the study -- says: "That horizontal gene transfer may have contributed to the colonization of land is pretty exciting."

Horizontal gene transfer is well-known in bacteria, but an example of gene transfer in eukaryotic organisms is controversial. This study, if validated, should underline the importance of gene transfer in the evolution of eukaryotes.

Soltis and others have long puzzled over the migration of plants to land. Comparing genomes of related plants is one way of investigating how it happened -- but it was only from 2012 that researchers considered these algae, part of the class Zygnematophyceae, to be the closest to land plants. Most Zygnematophyceae are aquatic and have oversized and complicated genomes. In contrast, S. muscicola and M. endlicherianum have genomes less than one-tenth the size of the human genome, and both live on moist surfaces instead of water.

Melkonian teamed up with genomicist Gane Ka-Shu Wong from the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, to sequenced the algal genomes. That done, the researchers compared the two genomes to those of nine land plants and other algae. The comparison revealed 902 genes in 22 gene families that the two semi-terrestrial algae and land plants shared, but that other algae lacked. By implication, those genes represent the ones that had evolved just before these two groups branched away from each other on the plant family tree, about 580 million years ago.

Two of the shared gene families code for genes that help plants cope with desiccation and other stresses. To the researchers' surprise, those genes are also in soil bacteria, but no other organisms. The conclusion was that the genes had jumped through soil from bacteria into the common ancestor of these algae and land plants. Since claims of horizontal gene transfer between bacteria and more elaborate organisms are often dismissed as contamination, the researchers made sure the sequenced algae were pure, and also checked genes next to the transferred genes to make sure they were plantlike -- not bacteria-like, which would have been the case for contamination.

This study led to the first published Zygnematophyceae genomes -- but Jocelyn Rose, a plant biologist at Cornell University, and colleagues have analyzed another, Penium margaritaceum. They haven't reported any gene transfers, but they did uncover some adaptations to land, such as large numbers of genes for cell walls and for coping with bright light. Rose says that the two studies drop "a critical piece into the jigsaw puzzle that will ultimately reveal the evolutionary innovations that allowed the emergence of land plants."

[MON 28 SEP 20] THE COVID-19 MENACE (13)

* THE COVID-19 MENACE (13): As discussed by an article from NATURE.com ("What The Immune Response To The Coronavirus Says About The Prospects For A Vaccine" by Heidi Ledford, 17 August 2020), the urgent push for a vaccine against the SARS-CoV-2 virus has been shadowed by a disturbing question: can we even make a vaccine that is very effective against it?

As an example that needs to be considered, in the late 1980s, 15 healthy people moved into new apartments in Salisbury, UK. On their third day, each was asked to snort a solution containing a coronavirus, a variant that was known to cause the common cold. The volunteers then spent three weeks quarantined at the Common Cold Unit, part of the UK Medical Research Council, and were monitored for symptoms. It was a pleasant stay, aside from blood draws and nasal washes.

About a year later, 14 of the volunteers came back and did it all over again. This time, researchers wanted to know if the participants' exposure to the virus had made them immune. The answer was: "Sort of." Although they showed no symptoms, analyses revealed that nearly all of them became infected before their immune systems could launch an effective defense.

Researchers have been inspecting results from the Common Cold Study and others like it, while scrambling to understand the human immune response to SARS-CoV-2 using animals and cell cultures, along with the latest molecular techniques. They have rapidly catalogued antibody and immune-cell responses, determined which are likely to be the most effective, and designed vaccines and therapies that, in animal studies and small human studies, provoke at least short-term immune responses. However, the only way to know how effective the vaccines being developed will be, is to run them through trials.

Occasional reports of re-infections of people who apparently recovered from COVID-19, only to fall ill and test positive for the disease again, have led to fears that immunity against the disease might be short-lived. There's been an inclination towards gloom over the matter in the mass media; however, scientists are more guarded in their opinions. John Wherry -- an immunologist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia -- says: "We're all hearing anecdotes, but I don't know if any of us know what to think about them." He adds that so far, reports of reinfection have lacked sufficient information about the person's immune responses to rule out other possibilities.

Researchers investigating the human immune response to SARS-CoV-2 haven't seen anything to get upset about so far, there's just a lot they don't know. Mehul Suthar -- an immunologist at Emory University in Atlanta GA -- says: "We're seeing great immune responses and fantastic-looking antibodies. We just don't know the longevity of that response yet. Unfortunately, that will take time."

The human immune system has a range of ways to deal with a viral invader. It selects for the B cells that produce antibodies capable of binding to the virus; it also stores a set of long-lived memory B cells that produce those antibodies, and jump into action if the virus comes back. Another defense enlists T cells, which patrol the body seeking out and destroying infected cells, to disrupt the virus's ability to replicate. These immune cells can also endure for years.

Long-term immunity can vary by type and degree of response. Vaccine developers often hope to elicit what's known as "sterilizing immunity" -- a response, typically mediated by antibodies, that can rapidly prevent a returning virus from gaining ground in the body. However, not all vaccines or infections elicit the neutralizing antibodies required for sterilizing immunity. HIV, for example, rarely induces neutralizing antibodies, a fact that has complicated efforts to develop vaccines against it.

The signs so far for SARS-CoV-2 are encouraging. Several teams of researchers were quick to isolate neutralizing antibodies from people infected with the virus; most could mount such an antibody response within days of testing positive. And several vaccine candidates against SARS-CoV-2 provoke a strong antibody response, a positive sign that the vaccines might generate immunity. [TO BE CONTINUED]

[FRI 25 SEP 20] AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (119)

* AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (119): Public concerns over the environment had been growing through the Johnson Administration. Nixon didn't care much about environmental issues, but he wasn't all that opposed to environmental regulation, either; it was a peripheral issue to him. Accordingly, in 1970, he signed the "National Environmental Policy Act" and established the "Environmental Protection Agency", which was responsible for monitoring the environment and enforcing Federal environmental policy.

Nixon, almost in spite of himself, proved to be an environmentally-conscious president. He similarly signed the "Clean Air Act of 1970" into law, the CAA being a major expansion of previous air-pollution acts going back to 1955. Later, he also signed the "Clean Water Act of 1972" -- though he vetoed it first, with the veto overridden -- and the "Endangered Species Act of 1973".

His veto of the Clean Water Act demonstrated the limits of his commitment to the environment, since not only was it still passed over his veto -- he believed it cost too much -- but he then sat on the funds Congress allocated to support it. The administration also backed development of the expensive Boeing supersonic transport (SST), though it was opposed on environmental grounds, particularly high noise levels. Congress finally shut the SST program down in 1971; environmental issues aside, in hindsight it didn't make business sense.

As far as Nixon's impoundment of funds for the Clean Water Act went, Congress hit back by pushing through the "Congressional Budget & Impoundment Control Act of 1974" -- which set up a new budget process that included a provision that gave Congress leverage over the impoundment of funds by the president. The act also created the House and Senate Budget Committees, as well as the Congressional Budget Office. Nixon, with his presidency collapsing at the time, signed the law in July 1974.

As with the environment, Nixon was also surprisingly progressive on race relations. His administration energetically desegregated schools, but took a low-profile approach to doing so, letting the courts hand down verdicts -- and take the blame from the public -- and then quietly enforcing the verdicts through the Justice Department. That became more troublesome in 1971, after SCOTUS passed judgement in the case of SWANN V. CHARLOTTE-MECKLENBURG BOARD OF EDUCATION.

The case had arisen because the school system of Charlotte NC was grossly segregated. North Carolina had actually been quick to integrate its schools; the difficulty was that the school districts themselves were often composed of overwhelmingly white or overwhelmingly black residents. The students in the schools of course reflected that. The perceived solution was to bus students across districts; working from earlier decisions through the 1960s, SCOTUS approved, with district judges allowed to determine the ratio of races in the schools, with the balance to be maintained by cross-district busing.

The decision was controversial -- in large part because it forced integration, but also because it was necessarily clumsy in implementation. The city of Charlotte did all they could to make it work, with some success. However, there was nonetheless a backlash against busing, leading to the 1974 SCOTUS decision in MILLIKEN V. BRADLEY. The bottom line was that school segregation was basically OK if it were due to the circumstances of districting, and not to any specific policy to segregate.

Nixon also established the "Office of Minority Business Enterprise" to help boost the establishment of minority-owned businesses, and even implemented the first "affirmative action" plan in the USA. The "Philadelphia Plan", as it was named, required government contractors in Philadelphia to hire a minimum number of minority workers. In 1970, the Nixon Administration expanded the plan to cover all Federal contracts worth more than $50,000 USD, and in 1971, expanded the plan to cover women as well. In addition, Nixon and Attorney General Mitchell helped push through an extension of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that expanded Federal supervision of voting rights to all jurisdictions in which less than 50% of the minority population was registered to vote. [TO BE CONTINUED]

[THU 24 SEP 20] WINGS & WEAPONS

* WINGS & WEAPONS: As discussed by an article from JANES.com ("South Korea's Poniard Guided Rocket System Passes Pentagon's Foreign Comparative Testing" by Gabriel Dominguez, 7 April 2020), South Korea's "Poniard (Dagger)" AKA "Bigung" multiple-launch guided rocket system has passed the US Department of Defense's (DoD's) "Foreign Comparative Testing", clearing the way for US acquisition of the system. In a test, the road-mobile weapon system hit all ten designated targets, and passed all other requirements.

The US Navy cooperated with work on the Poniard early on, the original effort being named the "Low-Cost Guided Imaging Rocket (LCGIR)". It is a standard 70-millimeter (2.74-inch) rocket with inertial midcourse guidance, using a smart imaging infrared seeker for terminal attack -- giving it a "fire & forget" capability. It has a maximum range of 8 kilometers (5 miles) and is intended for coastal defense. The system is built around 6×6 Kia KM250 military truck, with self-contained target detection and launch control systems. 36 missiles are carried by each truck, with 18 each in dual launch packs.

Poniard was developed by the South Korean Agency for Defense Development, and South Korean defense company LIG Nex1. The Poniard system is intended for the South Korean Marines, with fielding by 2024. A launcher for small vessels is also on offer.

* As discussed by an article from JANES.com ("USN Adopts Modular Approach For SUUV Programme" by Nishant Kumar, 24 March 2020), the US military is now moving on development of a drone submarine, or "uncrewed underwater vehicle (UUV)" for the USN Navy. The Pentagon's "Defense Innovation Unit (DIU)" awarded two separate contracts to industry to supply prototype UUVs and mission-specific payloads for USN evaluation under the "Next Generation Small-Class UUV (SUUV)" program. The prototypes are to be delivered later this year.

The program will deliver an SUUV that can be easily reconfigured for different missions. The SUUV will also be able to accommodate 3rd-party sensors and different power sources, and will have a high degree of operational autonomy.

In early 2020, the Hydroid company announced it had delivered a prototype "REMUS 300" UUV to the USN for evaluation under the SUUV effort. The REMUS 300 has a diameter of 19 centimeters (7.5 inches), and a length of 1.85 to 2.51 meters (6.1 to 2.85 feet) -- with a dry weight of 36 to 58 kilograms (79 to 128 pounds) -- depending on configuration. It has a depth rating of 305 meters (1,000 feet), and a speed of 3 to 4 knots (3.5 to 4.6 MPH / 5.5 to 7.4 KPH).

The REMUS 300 features field-changeable, environmentally-sealed energy modules that enable operators to customize its endurance depending on the mission requirements. It can be fitted with high-power thrusters to get it up to 8 knots (9.2 MPH / 14.8 KPH), as well as a bigger energy module for longer missions. A modular and open architecture facilitates the integration of new payloads, sensors, and algorithms; it can also be given additional data storage.

* As discussed by an article from JANES.com ("Raytheon Set To Deliver New CUAS Capability To US Army", Raytheon is about to deliver a "counter-unmanned aircraft system (CUAS)" -- intended to detect, identify, and destroy drones -- to the US Army. The system includes the new "Coyote Block 2" interceptor missile, and the "Ku-band Radio Frequency System (KuRFS)" 360-degree detection & intercept radar.

The "Howler CUAS" system is built on the "4×4 Joint Light Tactical Vehicle (JLTV)", carrying the KuRFS and four-cell Coyote missile launchers. The Block II Coyote improves on the earlier Block IB by having a bigger blast-fragmentation warhead, for higher lethality against maneuvering drones. The Howler CUAS will operate in conjunction with the Army "Forward Area Air Defense / Counter-Rocket Artillery Mortar Command & Control (FAAD/C-RAM C2)" system provided by Northrop Grumman, also based on the JLTV.

The Howler CUAS grew out of a "Joint Urgent Operational Need (JUON)" requirement issued by the US Army in July 2018. The technology has been cleared for export to foreign governments.

[WED 23 SEP 20] SEA DRONES AGAINST EARTHQUAKES

* SEA DRONES AGAINST EARTHQUAKES: As discussed by an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("Drones Reveal Earthquake Hazards Hidden In The Abyss" by Paul Voosen, 14 November 2019), the floors of the world's oceans are edged with subduction zones, where plates of dense ocean crust drive beneath continents. Subduction implies geological activity, resulting in destructive earthquakes and tsunamis: 1964 in Alaska, 2004 in Indonesia, 2011 in Japan.

Unsurprisingly, given their inaccessible locations, subduction zones are not understood in much detail. We can track the movements of continents with GPS signals, but GPS won't reach to the bottom of the sea. The only that could be done to track the movements of subduction zones has been to plant acoustic beacons on the seafloor, with a research ship tracking them, the ship's own position being nailed down by GPS, at a cost of up to $50,000 USD a day.

Now a team under David Chadwell -- a geophysicist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego -- has come up with a better way, replacing the ships with much cheaper oceanic drones. The US National Science Foundation (NSF) has endorsed the effort with a $5.5 million USD grant to Chadwell's team. The money will buy beacons for 16 seafloor sites, and three drones to monitor them. That will more than double the ability of US scientists to track movements of the ocean floor.

The observations are needed to clear up ambiguities in the action of subduction zones. Consider, for example, the Cascadia subduction zone off the coast of the US Pacific Northwest. GPS stations on land suggest that enough strain has built up to cause a magnitude-9 when the fault finally gives way. However, the land-based measurements also hint that strain along the fault's midsection, off the coast of the state of Oregon, is being relieved by a type of harmless slip known as "creep". That suggests the fault could rupture in installments, meaning several relatively small quakes instead of one big one. Unfortunately, without offshore measurements, nobody is sure what will happen.

Japan is dangerously vulnerable to earthquakes and tsunamis generated by subduction zones. As a result, despite the cost of tracking seafloor beacons by ship, Japan has built up an extensive tracking network to monitor its threatening seafloor faults. By 2020, Japan's acoustic GPS network will include 27 stations, each consisting of multiple beacons.

A handful of sites were in operation at the time of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake; they showed that the fault slipped more than 30 meters (100 feet) in its shallow sections, generating the devastating tsunami. Since that time, ships have checked the expanding network every two months, with the data revealing how strain accumulates irregularly across the fault.

Even more intriguing is evidence, seen prior to the 2011 earthquake in Tohoku and elsewhere, of fault ruptures that occurred over the course of weeks, not minutes. Paul Segall -- a geophysicist at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California -- suggests that such "slow slip" regularly precedes earthquakes along subduction zones and could be used as a warning signal. Seagall says that would have "enormous societal implications."

Having to send a ship to check the beacons is not just expensive, it also means infrequent data collection. That's where Chadwell's drones come in. In 2012, Chadwell got to wondering if the Wave Glider, a drone developed by Liquid Robotics in Sunnyvale, California, could replace ships. The Wave Glider is a 3-meter (10-foot) long surface craft with a tube beneath it, 8 meters (26 feet) long that terminates in oscillating fins that obtain power from the waves. A Wave Glider costs about $500 USD a day to operate. One could be fitted with a GPS receiver and orbit around a network of beacons for weeks. Its silent operation will allow it to easily pick up acoustic signals from the beacons.

Exactly where the new acoustic beacons funded by NSF will be placed hasn't been decided yet, but the gear is adequate to cover one subduction zone in detail, possibly more. Modeling studies suggest each new seafloor site will add as much knowledge as up to 30 GPS stations on land. Of course, as Chadwell points out, the beacons could be profitably used at other sites besides subduction zones. They could be placed at the seams where tectonic plates spread apart, the majority of which are undersea; or they could be installed on the flanks of undersea volcanoes, which swell before eruption.

Many working in the field hope the NSF grant will be a step towards a much more ambitious project, originally known as the "Subduction Zone Observatory" and now called "Subduction Zone 4 Dimensions (SZ4D), that would cost hundreds of millions of dollars and would closely monitor subduction zones, to catch events like big earthquakes as they happen. Harold Tobin -- a geophysicist at the University of Washington in Seattle, who leads planning for SZ4D -- says: "Virtually everyone sees this as the first building block for that infrastructure."

[TUE 22 SEP 20] TESS REVIEWED

* TESS REVIEWED: As discussed by an article from NEWATLAS.com ("NASA Hails Primary Mission Of Planet-Hunting TESS A Roaring Success" by Nick Lavars, 11 August 2020), NASA launched the "Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS)" on 16 April 2018. After checkout in orbit, TESS went into full operation in early 2019, hunting for planets around other stars.

NASA's earlier Kepler orbiting observatory had proved highly successful, finding more than 2,600 extrasolar planets over a decade -- the sample implying hundreds of billions of planets in our Milky Way Galaxy. However, Kepler could not determine how Earthlike the planets in the sample were.

The TESS mission was devised by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge. It was selected as by NASA as a "Medium Explorer" project in 2013. Its stated objective was to identify at least 50 rocky exoplanets -- Earth-size or bigger -- near enough in space for their atmospheres to be inspected by the much larger James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), to be launched in 2021.

Like Kepler, TESS searches for planets by staring at stars and looking for a dip in brightness as a planet passes in front, blocking some of the star's light in a "transit". However, while Kepler only observed 0.25% of the sky to a distance of 3,000 light-years, TESS was assigned to observe 85% of the sky, to a distance of about 300 light-years.

TESS was built by Orbital Sciences, being based on the company's LEOStar 2 satellite bus. It was placed in a highly eccentric, high-altitude Earth orbit, in a resonance with the Moon's orbit, ranging from 108,000 to 374,000 kilometers (67,000 to 232,000 miles) on a period of 13.7 days, performing data dumps on the low end of the orbit.

Its launch mass was about 350 kilograms (772 pounds). It has a payload of four 16.8-megapixel CCD cameras, each with a field of view 24 x 24 degrees in size. The four cameras have a total field of view 24 x 96 degrees in size -- 400 times field of view of Kepler. The spacecraft bus has a three-axis stabilization system, using four hydrazine thrusters, plus four reaction wheels, providing three arc-second fine pointing control. It downloads data at a rate of up to 100 megabits per second.

TESS surveyed a strip of sky extending from the Solar System's pole to its equator, the ecliptic. The scopes watched a strip for 27 days, then shifted sideways and watched another strip. After observing 13 such strips over a year, covering almost an entire hemisphere of sky, TESS flipped over and surveyed the other hemisphere.

The primary targets were red dwarf stars, the most common stars in our galactic neighborhood. Red dwarfs have less than half the mass of the Sun and so do not burn very brightly -- which helps in spotting transits, since a planet blocks more of the light than it would of a brighter star. A planet could be in a close, fast orbit around a red dwarf and still have hospitable climates; the faster the orbit, the more often the transits, and the easier they are to spot. In addition, while a single transit reveals the presence of a planet, it takes two transits to determine the period of the planet's orbit.

Details of a transit, such as duration, how much light is blocked, and how quickly the brightness dips, provided additional details such as the planet's diameter. Transits can't reveal a planet's mass, but ground-based telescopes could follow up TESS observations, to spot the subtle Doppler shifts in a star's emissions, which do reveal the mass of the planet tugging on it.

The primary mission for TESS ended in early July 2020, with the observatory having imaged about 75% of the sky. In addition to the 66 exoplanets already discovered, it has found 2,100 candidates that astronomers are now investigating further. Of course, while it was looking for extrasolar planets, it imaged many other objects, including comets, supernovas, and a black hole devouring a distant star.

TESS is now beginning its extended mission. The TESS team has made improvements for the new phase of observations: the satellite can now capture images three times faster than during its primary mission, snapping one every 10 minutes, and can measure the brightness of thousands of stars every 20 seconds. The extended mission is expected to run until September 2022, starting with a year scanning the southern sky, followed by a 15-month survey of the northern sky and areas along the plane of Earth's orbit around the Sun.

TESS was joined in the extrasolar planet hunt in late 2019 by the European Space Agency's (ESA) "Characterizing Exoplanets Satellite (CHEOPS)", a smallsat that is going on its first year of observations. It is not trying to find new exoplanets, instead being designed to inspect known exoplanets to determine their sizes more precisely. A ground-based system, the "Search For Habitable Planets Eclipsing Ultracool Stars (SPECULOOS)", went online in late 2018. It has four 1-meter telescopes with near-infrared sensors to detect transits of the very dimmest, coolest stars; a similar array in the Canary Islands is surveying the northern sky.

The ESA will follow up CHEOPS with two more planet-hunting missions, including the "Planetary Transits & Oscillations Of Stars (PLATO)" satellite, to be launched in 2026, and the "Atmospheric Remote-sensing Infrared Exoplanet Large-survey (ARIEL)" satellite, to be launched in 2028. Both will observe stellar transits. PLATO will be comparable to TESS, with some improvements; ARIEL will inspect the atmospheres of exoplanets.

[MON 21 SEP 20] THE COVID-19 MENACE (12)

* THE COVID-19 MENACE (12): As discussed by an article from NATURE.com from July ("Coronavirus Vaccines Leap Through Safety Trials -- But Which Will Work Is Anybody's Guess" by Ewen Callaway, 21 July 2020), researchers have been moving rapidly on developing vaccines against SARS-CoV-2. In mid-July, four research teams released their data from initial human trials.

Because the trials were focused on safety and dosing, the data cannot say whether the vaccines will prevent disease or infection; large-scale efficacy trials are needed for that. However, they suggest that the candidate vaccines are safe, and can stimulate an immune response of some sort. Now, all four vaccine candidates are moving on to efficacy trials, in which volunteers receive a vaccine or placebo and rates of COVID-19 disease are compared between groups. The people who get or do not get the vaccine are selected randomly, and the medical personnel dealing with them do not know who is getting the vaccine and who is getting the placebo.

In the absence of extended, large-scale efficacy testing, there's no way to know which of the four candidates are the best, or if they're even worth putting into production. Researchers don't yet know exactly what immune responses protects against COVID-19 -- and there are likely to be multiple responses that do the job. Complicating the task of determining the efficacy of vaccines is that measurements of immune markers made in one lab are difficult to compare with those performed by another team, because they're not all looking at exactly the same thing. Rafi Ahmed -- an immunologist at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia -- says: "The data are so early and so preliminary, one thing to avoid is saying one is better at this stage because we just don't know."

Trial participants experienced side effects common to other vaccines, such as muscle pain, fevers and headaches, but few participants developed serious reactions to the different vaccines. Two teams -- at the University of Oxford in the UK, in collaboration with AstraZeneca; and researchers at Cansino Biologics in Tianjin, China -- are developing 'viral vector' vaccines.

Sarah Gilbert, an Oxford vaccinologist leading the effort there, reports that: "The vaccine is inducing the kind of immune responses that we think are inducing protection against coronavirus." Oxford's vaccine is based on a genetically-modified chimpanzee cold-causing adenovirus that expresses the coronavirus spike protein, which the virus uses to infect human cells. Cansino's, meanwhile, is based on a modified human adenovirus.

Another group, BioNTech in Mainz, Germany, is developing an RNA-based vaccine in collaboration with drug company Pfizer. Subjects are injected with an RNA sequence that their own cells use to generate the "receptor binding domain" portion of the spike protein. Moderna, a biotech company in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has developed a competing RNA vaccine made of the entire spike protein, working in collaboration with the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID) in Bethesda, Maryland.

Vaccines work by exposing the immune systems to components of a virus -- the coronavirus spike protein, in the case of nearly all COVID-19 vaccines -- in hopes of provoking a reaction against an assault by the virus in the future. The trials looked at two broad types of immune response: antibody molecules made by the body that can recognize and, in some cases, inactivate viral particles; and T-cells that can kill infected cells, as well as promote other immune responses including antibody production.

So far, the main focus has been on "neutralizing antibodies" circulating in the blood, which can render viral particles uninfectious. Most vaccine volunteers produced levels of these potent antibodies that were similar to those made by recovered Covid-19 patients, which can vary widely. However, many of the vaccines may require more than one dose to get this response.

T-cell responses have received less attention from vaccine developers. That's partly because they are harder to measure, especially as the numbers of trial participants pushes into the thousands. Shane Crotty, a vaccine immunologist at La Jolla Institute for Immunology in California, says that the data that's becoming available from natural infections suggest that T cells might have an important role in controlling the coronavirus.

The group of vaccine trials detected varying degrees of T-cell responses in participants. Crotty's team detected spike-recognizing CD4 T cells, which support antibody production, in all ten of the recovered patients they examined. Seventy per cent also had CD8 T cells, which kill virus-infected cells, against spike. Crotty believes that a vaccine that can promote neutralizing antibodies and both kinds of T-cells should offer strong protection, but he adds that nothing is certain just yet: "We don't know the rules for what's most important for protective immunity," he says. "It's definitely plausible that there's more than one way to protect against this virus."

Once efficacy trials give results, the capability of the vaccine candidates, or "correlate of protection", will become more obvious. Oxford's vaccine is being tested for efficacy in the United Kingdom, Brazil, and South Africa, while the Moderna-NIAID vaccine is undergoing trials in the USA. However, it's tricky to compare correlates of protection for the different vaccines. The same test can return widely different values when performed in different labs or even on different days of the week.

Adrian Hill, an Oxford vaccinologist, says: "It's hard for us to compare our vaccine results to other people's. We would really like to see different vaccines being tested in the same lab by the same people."

The World Health Organization in Geneva and the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness in Oslo, which has provided financial support to nine vaccine developers, have announced plans to identify immune correlates of protection and to be able to compare vaccines. Daniel Altman, an immunologist at Imperial College London, says: "The stakes have never been higher. We so desperately need it."

Altmann thinks that most of the frontrunner vaccines "could do the trick", but he worries that there is not enough emphasis on identifying vaccine candidates whose developers are most capable of manufacturing and delivering enough vaccine for much of the world. "That's like organizing a Moon landing or a world war invasion. Whichever candidates we pick, we want them to be the ones that can most optimize that." [TO BE CONTINUED]

[FRI 18 SEP 20] AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (118)

* AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (118): Despite Nixon's efforts on social welfare programs, he worked to trim back LBJ's Great Society effort -- defunding or abolishing a number of programs including the Office of Economic Opportunity, the Job Corps, and the Model Cities Program. It must be admitted that not all of the Great Society measures had proven very effective. Nixon envisioned a "New Federalism" that would devolve authority for social programs to the states and localities, but Congress proved uncooperative on that score.

Nixon didn't really manage to get the Federal government out of social programs: during his term in office, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid all increased dramatically. In October 1972, Nixon signed the Social Security Amendments of 1972, extending Medicare to those under 65 who had been severely disabled for over two years, or had end-stage renal disease; the bill also gradually raised the Medicare payroll tax.

Healthcare, however, remained bogged down. In August 1970, Democratic Senator Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts proposed legislation to set up a single-payer universal health care system, funded by taxes. In February 1971, Nixon countered that proposal with a more conservative healthcare package, featuring an employer mandate to offer private health insurance if employees volunteered to pay 25%; the federalization of Medicaid for poor families with dependent minor children; along with support for health maintenance organizations (HMOs).

It was a fairly representative conservative proposal for healthcare, Nixon saying it would "build on the strengths of the private system." Congress debated the issue, but nothing happened. In December 1973, Nixon signed the Health Maintenance Organization Act of 1973, establishing a trial federal program to promote development of HMOs.

Healthcare reform came back up as an issue in 1974. Early in the year, a "Health Security Act" was being proposed in Congress, which defined a universal national health insurance program without any cost sharing; it was backed by the labor unions. Nixon countered with the "Comprehensive Health Insurance Act", which proposed:

• An employer mandate to offer private health insurance if employees paid 25% of premiums.
  
  
• Replacement of Medicaid by state-run health insurance plans available to all, with income-based premiums and cost sharing.
  
  
• Replacement of Medicare with a new Federal program that eliminated the limit on hospital days; added income-based out-of-pocket limits; and added outpatient prescription drug coverage.

In April, Congress proposed the "National Health Insurance Act", which defined near-universal national health insurance with benefits like those of the Nixon plan, but with mandatory participation by employers and employees through payroll taxes, and with lower cost sharing. Reaction from labor, consumer, and senior citizens organizations to the proposals was very negative, and no healthcare plan made it out of Congressional committee. [TO BE CONTINUED]

[THU 17 SEP 20] SPACE NEWS

* Space launches for August included:

-- [06 AUG 20] / GAOFEN 9-04, Q-SAT -- A Long March 2D booster was launched from Jiuquan at 0401 UTC (local time - 8) to put the "Gaofen (High Resolution) 9-04" civil Earth observation satellite into Sun-synchronous low Earth orbit. As the designation implied, it was the fourth in the Gaofen 9 series. It carried an imaging payload with a best resolution of less than a meter (3.3 feet). A small spherical satellite named "Q-SAT", developed at Tsinghua University in Beijing, also flew on the launch, being intended to collect data on atmospheric density and Earth's gravitational variations.

-- [07 AUG 20] / STARLINK 9, BLACKSKY GLOBAL 5 & 6: -- A SpaceX Falcon 9 booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 0512 UTC (local time + 4) to put 57 SpaceX "Starlink" low-Earth-orbit broadband comsats into orbit. The satellites were built by SpaceX, each having a launch mass of about 225 kilograms (500 pounds). This was the first batch of Starlinks that all had Sun visors, to reduce their visibility so they didn't interfere with astronomical observations. Two Earth observation microsatellites from BlackSky Global, a Seattle-based company, flew as rideshare payloads on this mission. They each had a launch mass of 55 kilograms (121 pounds). This was the 9th operational Starlink batch launch.

-- 15 AUG 20 / GALAXY 30, MEV 2, BSAT 4B: -- An Ariane 5 ECA booster was launched from Kourou in French Guiana at 2204 UTC (local time + 3) to put three payloads into orbit:

• Galaxy 30: A geostationary comsat owned by Intelsat, to provide broadband and television broadcast services over the USA. It was built by Northrop Grumman and had a launch mass of 3,298 kilograms (7,270 pounds), and carried a payload C-band, Ku-band and Ka-band transponders. It also hosted an L-band WAAS navigation augmentation payload for the Federal Aviation Administration to support civilian air travel. It was placed in the geostationary slot at 125 degrees west longitude.
  
  
• BSat 4b: A geostationary comsat from B-SAT of Japan, built by Maxar. It was positioned in the geostationary slot at 110 degrees east longitude to provide direct-to-home 4K and 8K ultra HD broadcast services over Japan and neighboring regions.
  
  
• Mission Extension Vehicle (MEV) 2: The second robotic servicing vehicle from Space Logistics LLC. MEV 2 was built by Northrop Grumman had a launch mass of 2,875 kilograms (6,338 pounds). It was to dock with the Intelsat 10-02 communications satellite in geostationary orbit to extend its commercial life.

This launch introduced several upgrades for the Ariane 5 booster, including modified pressure vents on its payload fairing. Engineers will gather data on the changed vent configuration to ensure it meets stringent requirements for the launch of the $10 billion USD James Webb Space Telescope on an Ariane 5 rocket next year.

The launch vehicle also had a lighter vehicle equipment bay, increasing the Ariane 5's lift capability by about 85 kilograms (187 pounds). In addition, the booster flew with a new autonomous location system, which will eventually be used operationally on Europe's next-generation Ariane 6 rocket. The autonomous system uses signals from Europe's Galileo navigation satellites to determine the rocket's location, streamlining range safety requirements, which currently rely on extensive ground infrastructure to track rockets as they depart the Guiana Space Center.

-- 18 AUG 20 / STARLINK 10, SKYSATS 19:21 -- A SpaceX Falcon 9 booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 1431 UTC (local time + 4) to put 58 SpaceX "Starlink" low-Earth-orbit broadband comsats into orbit. The satellites were built by SpaceX, each having a launch mass of about 225 kilograms (500 pounds). This was the 10th Starlink batch launch; SpaceX says 24 launches will be needed in all to complete the constellation. 800 satellites will be needed for initial operating capability, with the full constellation to have about 12,000.

The launch also included three "SkySat" Earth-imaging satellites from Planet Labs, completing the constellation with a total of 21 satellites, from initial launch in 2013. Around half of the SkySats fly in orbits timed to fly overhead in the morning, and the other half fly over imaging targets in the afternoon, providing coverage of parts of the globe twice per day.

Built by Maxar, each of the SkySat satellites had a launch mass of about 110 kilograms (242 pounds), being about the size of a dorm refrigerator, with an imaging payload featuring best resolution of 50 centimeters (20 inches). They have a design life of six years. Although a Falcon 9 normally launches 60 Skylink satellites, the number was reduced on this flight to permit carriage of the SkySats.

The Falcon 9 first stage performed a soft landing on the SpaceX recovery barge; it was its sixth flight. Both halves of the payload fairing were recovered.

-- 24 AUG 20 / GAOFEN 9-05, SMALLSATS x 2 -- A Long March 2D booster was launched from Jiuquan at 0227 UTC (local time - 8) to put the "Gaofen (High Resolution) 9-05" civil Earth observation satellite into Sun-synchronous low Earth orbit. It carried an optical imaging payload with best resolution of less than a meter, to be used in civil land studies and disaster relief.

Two smallsats were launched as well. One, "Tiantuo 5", was developed by the National University of Defense Technology, a military academy founded by the Chinese People's Liberation Army. The 78.5-kilogram (173-pound) Tiantuo 5 spacecraft was designed to test technologies to collect data on maritime and aviation traffic, automated data collection, and a new electric propulsion system for small satellites.

The other was the "Duo Gongneng Shiyan Weixing (Multifunctional Test Satellite)" developed by the Academy of Military Science, a research institute of the People's Liberation Army. It was intended to "test and verify technologies such as communication, navigation and remote sensing in orbit."

-- [30 AUG 20] / SAOCOM 1B, SMALLSATS x 2 -- A SpaceX Falcon 9 booster was launched from Vandenberg AFB at 2318 UTC (local time + 8) to put the "SAOCOM 1B" satellite into orbit for CONAE, Argentina's space agency. It was the second of two "Satelite Argentino de Observacion Con Microondas (SAOCOM)" radar imaging satellites, developed by the "Comision Nacional de Actividades Espaciales (CONAE)", Argentina's space agency.

SAOCOM 1B had a launch mass of 3,000 kilograms (6,600 pounds), and a design life of five years. It was built by the INVAP company of Argentina, and based on the satellite platform for the SAC-C remote sensing satellite, launched in 2000. SAOCOM's sole payload was an L-band synthetic aperture radar. Two smallsats also flew on the mission:

• GNOMES 1: A microsatellite with a launch mass of 30 kilograms (66 pounds), from Colorado-based company PlanetiQ, to observe atmospheric and weather effects by measuring occultation data from navigation satellites. It was pathfinder for a planned constellation of 20 satellites.
  
  
• Tyvak 0172: A nanosat from Tyvak Nano-Satellite Systems. No details were released, but it was presumably a CubeSat, which Tyvak makes.

This was the first launch from Cape Canaveral on a southern trajectory since 1969; the maneuvering capability of the Falcon 9 allowed the shot to be performed safely. The Falcon 9 first stage landed back on Cape Canaveral.

-- [30 AUG 20] / SEQUOIA -- A Rocket Labs Electron light booster was launched from New Zealand's North Island at 0305 UTC (local time - 11) to put the "Sequoia" radar observation satellite for Capella Space, a commercial remote sensing company based in San Francisco.

Sequoia had a launch mass of about 100 kilograms (200 pounds), and was the first of a constellation of least seven "Whitney" Earth-imaging radar satellites Capella is building and launching to supply sharp imagery to a range of government and commercial customers. It featured a deployable mesh antenna with an unfurling diameter of 3.5 meters (11.5 feet). The Sequoia satellite could obtain radar images for 10 minutes out of every nearly 100-minute orbit. The radar imager had a resolution of better than 50 centimeters (20 inches), and could produce images in strips up to 4,000 kilometers (2,500 miles) long.

Sequoia was placed in a low Earth orbit with an inclination of 45 degrees. Two more Whitney-class satellites are expected to launch on a SpaceX rideshare mission into a polar Sun-synchronous orbit later in 2020. After the seven Whitney-class satellites, Capella will assess demand to determine how many more satellites to fly.

Capella's first test satellite, named Denali, was launched in December 2018 on a rideshare mission aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. A Finnish company named ICEYE is also building out a fleet of small commercial radar observation satellites. ICEYE has launched five radar satellites to date. The Sequioa launch was the 14th flight of the Electron booster. The mission was named "I Can't Believe It's Not Optical" in reference to Capella's synthetic aperture radar technology.

[WED 16 SEP 20] REVERSE GENOMICS

* REVERSE GENOMICS: As discussed by an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("New 'Reverse Genomics' Method Brings Previously Hidden Bacteria To Life" by Jon Cohen, 30 September 2019), during this decade, mass genomic analysis has revealed vast numbers of different microorganisms in everything from the human gut to a cup of seawater. However, identifying new microorganisms is one thing; it is another thing to grow most of them in the lab, because it's so hard to duplicate the environments they're tuned to live in. For example, the human gut has as many as a thousand microbial species; but their sequences, obtained by mass genomics, cannot explain whether they contribute to digestion, immune responses, metabolism of drugs, or other processes.

Mircea Podar -- who studies evolutionary microbial genomics at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee -- says: "There's only so much microbiology you can do on the computer." Now, Podar and his colleagues have devised an innovative "reverse genomics" strategy has been able to allow the cultivation of elusive bacteria.

They focused on Saccharibacteria, mainly mouth-dwelling bacteria of which nearly a dozen species live in humans. They have proven difficult to isolate and culture, because them make up such a tiny component of the mouth's microbiome, less than 1%. Podar's team used an antibody-based strategy to obtain isolates of Saccharibacteria that had been sequenced, but not cultured, obtained from saliva and other mouth fluids.

They first hunted for genes in the mix of Saccharibacteria DNA that appeared to code for proteins capable of punching through the surfaces of cells. The immune system produces antibodies in response to the portions of cell surface proteins it can "see", and so these proteins would be visible. Comparison with other bacteria allowed the researchers to identify specific regions of the surface proteins that would likely trigger the strongest antibody responses.

After injecting these protein fragments into rabbits, they purified and fluorescently labeled the antibodies the animals produced. Mixing the labeled antibodies with fluids from people's mouths allowed the researchers to pick out the relatively rare Saccharibacteria from the mix of cells in the samples. They then placed these bacteria in a range of laboratory media -- essentially broths made from body organs, sugars, soy, vitamins, and gastric juices -- eventually finding concoctions that allowed them to grow.

The researchers believe that their reverse genomics technique "should be broadly applicable to any target organisms," allowing them to produce antibodies, then tag, isolate, and grow previously uncultivable microorganisms. Podar says: "Once you separate your target organisms, then you can explore conditions under which your microbe can flourish."

Slava Epstein -- a microbiologist at Northeastern University in Boston who specializes in cultivating previously uncultivable organisms -- says this new work is significant: "Their approach is targeted, and all the others rely on statistics. That's a new development in principle. And it works."

Epstein is eager to try the technique himself, saying: "It opens up an intellectually teasing question: What is it that makes unculturables unculturable?" Epstein has some ideas that he wants to check out: "This could be a useful tool to get more species to prove my theory."

[TUE 15 SEP 20] VULNERABLE VOTING MACHINES?

* VULNERABLE VOTING MACHINES? With the 2020 US election coming up on 3 November, there's been worries that voting machines will be vulnerable to hacking. That's not a new concern, it was going around in 2016; an article from the LOS ANGELES TIMES ("Q&A: Could Russian Hackers Mess With The US Election Results? It Wouldn't Be Easy" by Del Quentin Wilber and Brian Bennett, 8 September 2016) from that time replied: yes and no, mostly no.

Though possible, it hasn't happened so far, and it wouldn't be easy. It is not all that realistic to think that hackers could break into the US election system and change vote tallies -- mostly because the electoral system is highly decentralized, and generally doesn't use leading-edge technology.

There are more than 8,000 separate local jurisdictions where voters cast ballots for president, and each one is generally free to use whatever methods, technology, and vendors they prefer, with direction from variable local or state rules and guidelines. The US Constitution broadly leaves the specifics of elections up to the states. The bottom line for hackers is that they don't have one big fat juicy target; they've got a big swarm of different targets, few of which are all that easy to get at.

About three-quarters of the 2016 vote was cast on paper. Paper votes have never been immune from tampering, but hackers aren't in a position to perform "hands-on" manipulation of votes. If there are any doubts about paper votes, they can be recounted. Voting results are often transferred by phone, fax, or hand delivery, which are similarly inconvenient to hack. Since voting has always been subject to fraud, voting systems always have crosschecks -- for example, following up an email with a phone call, fax, or hand delivery. The obvious holes in the systems have been plugged.

Very few voting machines are directly connected to the internet. They could be compromised by malware on a USB flash drive, or opened up and tinkered with directly, but that's obviously not a useful strategy for mass manipulation of votes. James Comey, in 2016 the FBI director, said that the US election system's antiquated nature has a benefit from a security standpoint: "The voting system is dispersed among 50 states. It's clunky as heck."

There has been a push towards modern digital voting machines, but it's been clumsy. Many early digital voting machines were unreliable; they also did not keep paper backups or receipts of votes cast, making it difficult to audit results. Modern digital voting machines literally maintain a paper trail. There has also been some interest in internet voting -- but at present, it's a security nightmare, and isn't going to happen soon.

Hackers might be willing to go the extra mile in cracking voting machines in swing states, where a small nudge might make a big difference. They could also get into a state's election results system and alter numbers, but the cheating would be detected when election officials in a locality found their numbers wrong on the state system. There is more of a potential problem with hackers getting into voter-registration databases; they are connected to the internet, and it has happened.

It is unlikely that hackers could steal an election, but they could confuse the results enough to raise doubts over its validity. For now, hacking the vote remains a potential but not an actual problem: it hasn't happened yet, and there are obstacles to making it happen. It is not impossible, of course -- but under current circumstances, there's nothing much to be done but remain alert. Election security clearly needs some work, but it's not really going to happen in 2020.

[MON 14 SEP 20] THE COVID-19 MENACE (11)

* THE COVID-19 MENACE (11): The onslaught of the COVID-19 pandemic was met with public lockdowns, which did much to control the spread of the virus, with particular success in the Asia-Pacific region. However, re-opening countries was certain to be troublesome. As reported by an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("Once Praised For Taming The Pandemic, Asian-Pacific Nations Worry About New Onslaught" by Dennis Normile, 4 August 2020), Asia-Pacific nations have seen a worrisome resurgence in the virus -- caused by complacency among officials, premature relaxation of control measures, and public indifference or even resistance to pandemic-control measures.

The most dramatic example is the Australian state of Victoria, which reported a record 723 new COVID-19 cases on 30 July, and declared a state of disaster three days later. The state government imposed an 8 PM to 5 AM curfew on Melbourne; only one person per household in the city could shop for essential goods once a day, and the state closed its borders to traffic with the rest of the country, effectively isolating its 6.7 million inhabitants. Victoria had reported zero new cases on 9 June.

The same thing has been seen elsewhere in the region. Hong Kong had twelve straight days with new cases topping 100 in July, after only a trickle of cases in May and June. Vietnam went for 3 months without reporting any domestic transmission -- until an unexplained case appeared in the central port city of Danang on 24 July. Hundreds of cases followed, spread all over the country. The government is putting hot spots under quarantine.

Japan is seeing a significant rise as well. China, having thoroughly quashed the Wuhan outbreak earlier this year, reported more than 1400 new cases during the last week of July, most of them in the far west Xinjiang region. Two notable exceptions to the trend are New Zealand and Taiwan, which have both ended local transmission and have lifted most restrictions on activities. Both test and quarantine returning citizens and residents to prevent new introductions of the virus, a task made easier because they're islands. Mark Wahlqvist -- an internist and emeritus professor at Monash University in Melbourne -- says that these two countries still owe much of their success to leaders who pushed "prompt and transparent evidence-based communication of risk, cost, and benefit to the citizenry" of measures to contain the outbreak.

Of course, the numbers across the Asian-Pacific region are still low compared with some other parts of the world. In mid-September, Victoria's total number of reported cases is 19,835, with 723 deaths; Indiana, whose population is almost the same, has reported more than 107,000 cases and over 3,400 deaths. The trend in East Asia is more similar to that in Europe at the moment, where cases are also ticking up, after having come down sharply from very high numbers in March through May.

Experts are concerned that early success may have given many countries a false sense of security. Ben Cowling, an epidemiologist at the University of Hong Kong (HKU), says the resurgence "is a warning sign". He adds that many people, even some in the scientific community, thought handling the crisis would be "like a hurricane lockdown, [where] once it's gone, life can go back to normal." With COVID-19, "that's not what's going to happen."

Take Japan, where a combination of voluntary social distancing and a focus on finding clusters of cases drove the daily tally from more than 700 in mid-April to low double digits in May. Shibuya Kenji, a global health specialist at King's College London, says: "Many people got complacent about Japan's success and assumed that the 'Japan model' did work." However, they zoomed back to over a thousand a day by the end of July.

The Japanese government is nonetheless resisting calls for a new state of emergency, on the basis that the majority of new cases are younger people who aren't straining health facilities. That leaves Tokyo Governor Koike Yuriko has been relying on pleas for people to stay home, and for bars and restaurants to close at 10 PM. She has warned that if things don't turn around, the city may need to declare a state of emergency on its own, with stricter measures. Renewed vigilance has cut the number of daily cases to about 500, with total deaths being over 1,400.

That still leaves much to be desired, Shibuya saying that with cases among the young surging, "it is a matter of time [before] elderly and those with preexisting conditions get infected." In the USA and some European countries, increased transmission among the young preceded a rise in cases among older age groups, and an increase in severe cases and deaths. He believes that Japan needs to expand testing to fully grasp the extent of transmission: "Japan is making things worse by just waiting and seeing."

Ben Cowling agrees that delaying action can lead to trouble. Hong Kong's daily case rate went from single to low double digits in early July, then zoomed to double digits. He says: "Numbers that seem small can get up steam pretty quickly." Now the government has been forced to close all gyms and bars, limit gatherings to just two people, made masks mandatory outdoors and in indoor public spaces, and banned dining in restaurants -- though it had to relax that last requirement in the face of a public backlash.

Cutting corners in countermeasures can also be costly. According to Nigel McMillan, an infectious disease specialist at Griffith University in Queensland, genetic analysis has proven that most of the outbreak in Victoria originated from security staff guarding hotels where residents returning from overseas were quarantined. The security staff had little or no preparation to deal with the virus, and many became infected, spreading the disease into their extended families and then into the community.

Catherine Bennett, an epidemiologist at Deakin University in Victoria, says that even countries that so far have done very well in the pandemic have to keep running to stay in one place, working to fine-tune their messaging and sustain public support for control measures. Changing directives, for example the evolving messaging on masks, can "lead to more pushback in some places," she says, especially among those in their 20s where antirestriction sentiment has been growing.

Epidemiologist Fukuda Keiji of HKU says that until vaccines arrive, countries will need to find ways to adjust control measures while minimizing their social impact. That balance, Fukuda says, "is very hard to achieve and maintain, but it is what countries should be striving to do." [TO BE CONTINUED]

[FRI 11 SEP 20] AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (117)

* AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (117): When Nixon took office, inflation had reached 4.7%; it hadn't been that high since the Korean War. Johnson's Great Society programs and his Vietnam War had led to big budget deficits; unemployment was low, but interest rates were high. A major component of Nixon's agenda was to reduce the deficit, with the most obvious way of doing so being to get out of Vietnam. That proved difficult, so the Fed kept interest rates high to tighten the money supply, and hopefully cut inflation. Nixon also tried to cut government spending where he could. In early 1970, he delayed pay raises to Federal employees for six months. Postal workers then went on strike; Nixon employed the US Army to keep the postal service working. In the end, the government had to settle with the postal employees.

At the end of 1969, Nixon signed a Tax Reform Act. It was an improvement on tax law, in that it established the "alternative minimum tax (AMT)", which established a floor on taxes paid by the wealthy -- they couldn't use deductions to pay less. One difficulty at the outset was that the AMT wasn't indexed to inflation.

In 1970, Congress gave Nixon the authority to impose wage and price controls. There was little thought that he would actually impose such controls, since he had always opposed them -- but inflation refused to go away, and in August 1971, after discussions with advisors, he announced temporary wage and price controls in an attempt to "cool off" inflation.

Nixon also allowed the dollar to float against other currencies, and significantly finally ended the convertibility of the dollar into gold, with the USA finally completely abandoning the gold standard. That action effectively overturned the Bretton Woods system, which had regulated the international monetary exchange system since World War II. Nixon moved against Bretton Woods because he felt the system disadvantaged the USA in the international balance of trade, the US having suffered its first negative trade balance of the 20th century in 1971. Nixon's actions did dampen inflation, but the effect was only temporary.

In 1973, inflation was gaining ground again. Nixon re-imposed price controls in June 1973, in response to rising food prices; the freeze was focused on agricultural exports, and limited to 60 days. The exercise was not popular with the public or the business community, since there were shortages of meat, and businesses had a particular dislike for price board bureaucracy. Unemployment was trending upward, as was inflation -- a peculiar circumstance, inflation normally being a marker of a booming economy. Economists coined the term "stagflation" to label the phenomenon.

One of Nixon's big campaign promises in the 1968 election was to "fix the welfare mess". The number of people in the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program had grown from 3 million in 1960 to 8.4 million in 1970. That could be seen as an index of success, since that meant a reduction in American poverty. However, the conservative conventional wisdom said that welfare created dependency by discouraging people from working, while conservatives played up "welfare queens" who gamed the system, hauling in a stream of benefits through fraud.

There was some truth to the tales of welfare queens, though the level of fraud was exaggerated. Nonetheless, Nixon regarded reform of the system as a high priority, and on entering office he established the "Council of Urban Affairs", chaired by Daniel Patrick Moynihan -- once a Democratic senator, then a scholar at Harvard. Moynihan's proposed that existing welfare programs be replaced with a "negative income tax"; the idea was that those under a certain income level would receive a payment to bring them up to minimum income level. In the face of opposition from many conservatives, in August 1969, Nixon publicly unveiled his "Family Assistance Plan (FAP)", which would establish a national income floor of $1,600 USD per year for a family of four.

The public generally liked FAP, but Congress was not that enthusiastic, in good part because Nixon had left Congress out of the loop in drafting the proposal. Conservatives were inclined to dislike the proposal on its face, while liberals thought it much too stingy. It got through the House, then died in committee in the Senate. It did lead to the "Supplemental Security Income" program, which provides aid to low-income individuals who are aged or disabled. [TO BE CONTINUED]

[THU 10 SEP 20] GIMMICKS & GADGETS

* GIMMICKS & GADGETS: As discussed by an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("New Solar Technology Could Produce Clean Drinking Water For Millions In Need" by Robert F. Service, 28 June 2019), according to UNICEF, at present 783 million, or nearly one in 10, of humanity lack ready access to clean water, spending large amounts of effort to get the such water as is available. The heat of the Sun has long been used to distill water to make it drinkable -- but such "solar stills" have always been big, expensive, and suffering from low throughout. Now researchers have come up with an improved scheme for solar distillation that promises to make it much more effective.

The traditional solar still is no more than a black-bottomed vessel filled with water, and covered with clear glass or plastic. The black bottom absorbs sunlight, heating water so that it evaporates and leaves the contaminants behind. The water vapor then condenses on the clear covering and trickles into a collector. The problem with the scheme is that the sunlight has to heat up the entire volume of water before it starts evaporating. Commercially available solar stills generate about 0.3 liters of water per hour per square meter (L/h/m2) of the covered water's surface area. On the average, individuals need about 3 liters of water a day; to stay hydrated, a small family would need a still about 5 square meters in size. The theoretical limit for a solar still is about 1.6 L/h/m2.

Yu Guihua -- a materials scientist at the University of Texas in Austin -- and colleague have devised a better way. They're using hydrogels -- polymer mixtures that form a 3D porous, water—absorbent network. The research team fabricated a gel-like sponge of two polymers -- including a water-binding polymer named "polyvinyl alcohol (PVA)", the other a light absorber named "polypyrrole (PPy)" -- and then placed a pad of the material on top of water.

Inside the gel, water molecules bonded tightly to the PVA, while weakening their bondings with fellow water molecules. This "intermediate water", as Yu calls it, evaporates much more easily than regular water, with the regular water then replacing the evaporated water in the pad. Tests in 2018 showed the still could produce 3.2 L/h/m2 of water. The research team then went on to add a third polymer, named "chitosan", which also strongly attracts water, which boosted production to 3.6 L/h/m2.

A still a square meter in area would be able to supply about 30 liters a day. Even better, all three polymers are commercially available and cheap. There's no immediate prospect of commercialization, but there doesn't appear to be any show-stoppers to prevent it, either.

* As discussed by an article from CNN.com ("India Has A Looming Air Con Headache. Does Antiquity Hold The Solution?" by Amani Al-Aidroos & Tom Page, 6 December 2019), India is a rapidly developing country. It also tends to be hot there, which means more prosperous Indians will buy more air conditioners. The International Energy Agency believes air conditioning could account for 45% of peak electricity demand by 2050.

New Delhi architect and designer Monish Siripurapu, founder of Ant Studio, has looked back on passive cooling schemes long used in India to come up with a more energy-efficient cooling scheme. His "CoolAnt" is a honeycomb-like array of terracotta tubes, with about 700 tubes in a typical array. The array is stood vertically, with water pumped to the top of the array, and dispersed to flow to the bottom. As the water flows over the tubes, it evaporates, cooling the tubes and the air driven through them by a fan.

Siripurapu says that the CoolAnt can take high ambient temperatures and reduce them by about 15 degrees Celsius (27 degrees Fahrenheit). His demonstrator system, at a factory in Noida, Uttar Pradesh, is topped up with 200 liters (53 US gallons) of water a week, and used up to four hours a day, six days a week.

ED: This is not conceptually all that different from an evaporative cooler, where water is pumped through a filter that cools air being driven through it by a fan. The evaporative cooler has two problems: the filter tends to mildew and has to be replaced on a regular basis, and the scheme only works well in dry heat. In sticky humid heat, it just increases the humidity. It appears this scheme does not have these problems.

* In less weighty gimmick news, a Kickstarter program has been set up to create the "Building Brick Waffle Maker". It's straightforward, being a waffle iron designed to turn out sets of Lego blocks, rendered as waffle chunks. One can then put together Lego constructions and eat them. How deliberately useless!

[WED 09 SEP 20] DINING & COVID-19 (2)

* DINING & COVID-19 (2): In the face of COVID-19, the Canlis restaurant in Seattle had drastically rethought its operation: drive-through for bagels and coffee in the morning, drive-through for burgers, home delivery of family high-class box meals. It didn't stop there, with Canlis obtaining fresh produce from its local farm suppliers, and selling "community-supported agriculture (CSA)" boxes. Mark Canlis says: "We started buying from all of our same vendors, and when we had all this extra stuff, we would make CSA boxes out of them. Then we started delivering cocktail kits and wine out of our cellar."

Their private dining coordinator came up with yet another idea: add bingo cards to the boxes. Every Friday night at 0830 PM, Mark's brother Brian puts on a tux and livestreams bingo "to like 4,000 people." They also livestream live music. Mark Canlis says people customers tell him: "This is the highlight of our week -- will you send us more bingo cards?"

Of course, the new Canlis operation is dependent on the internet. They already had a reservation system named "Tock"; as it was, it was generally useless for the new order of things, but they called up the software firm and asked if it could be converted into an order / delivery system. The company was also shut down because of the pandemic -- but the CEO, Nick Kokonas, threw together a team of programmers. They worked around the clock for 72 hours to give Canlis what the restaurant needed.

Looking back, now that the dust has settled, Mark Canlis says:

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Other restaurants have taken other approaches to surviving the pandemic. To the south in Los Angeles, prominent French chef Ludo Lefebvre was faced with the same quandary when his Trois Mec restaurants were shut down. As with the Canlis, the fine dining model couldn't be made to work any longer, but Lefebvre chose a different solution: to produce meals for the philanthropic World Central Kitchen (WCK), run by his longtime friend and fellow chef Jose Andres. Ludo's wife Krissy, who manages the restaurants, says:

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Now Trois Mec serves 400 of these family-style meals a day, five days a week, Krissy Lefebvre saying the meals include "a vegetable, a protein, like chicken and a pasta dish." Her chef husband and business partner has been in the kitchen since he was 13 years old and said, "all he's been taught is to cook and serve people." There's a satisfaction in keeping people fed -- but being a fine chef is something of a performance art, and there's something missing. Ludo Lefebvre says that sometimes he feels like crying. The restaurants are partly open right now, but Krissy Lefebvre says that fine dining can't work at 50% capacity.

Mark Canlis says the same thing; 50% won't work. The Canlis continue to rethink their operation:

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They're even working towards drive-in movies in the parking lot. Adapt or die; so far, Canlis is adapting very well.

ED: This is encouraging, in particular demonstrating how resourceful people can be when the heat is on. Unfortunately, things are bad right now, and though we can hope for a slow improvement as people adjust to changed circumstances, they're going to stay bad for a while. [END OF SERIES]

[TUE 08 SEP 20] SLIMMING DOWN FOR COVID-19

* SLIMMING DOWN FOR COVID-19: As discussed by an article from the WALL STREET JOURNAL ("Why the American Consumer Has Fewer Choices -- Maybe for Good" by Annie Gasparro, Jacob Bunge, & Heather Haddon, 27 June 2020), one of the peculiar effects of the global COVID-19 pandemic has been a streamlining of product lines. Before the pandemic, the 1,100 US grocery stores of IGA carried about 40 different choices of toilet paper; now they only carry about four. The COVID-19 impact has shown that retailers and consumer-goods manufacturers were "addicted" to endless varieties, said IGA Chief Executive John Ross: "We may not need 40 different choices of toilet paper."

Any visit to a supermarket in the past showed how companies engaged in wild product diversification -- sometimes to the point of making it too easy to confuse variants of product, and buy the wrong one. COVID-19 has changed that, snarling supply chains and discouraging consumer experimentation. Sellers of potato chips, cars, meals and more have been slimming down offerings. Some executives said they plan to stick with fewer choices when the pandemic fades, saying it forced them to ask if American consumers really need or want such a vast range of choices that can overburden factories and stores.

In grocery stores, variety has dropped by as much as 30%. Executives at Kraft Heinz, Coca-Cola, Hershey and other food giants have said they are trimming less-efficient and less-profitable products, while shelving some in development. Steven Williams, CEO of PepsiCo INC's North America foods business, said the company stopped producing a fifth of its products during the COVID-19 crisis, including lightly salted Lay's potato chips. He said he and his colleagues spoke with grocery executives as the pandemic deepened, determining that PepsiCo should focus on its fastest-selling products.

PepsiCo is starting to bring some items back, but Williams said he expects its Frito-Lay snacks business to emerge from the pandemic with 3% to 5% fewer products. The company is taking the opportunity to discontinue some items that have few fans or are complicated to produce, he said, making its factories and distribution network more efficient.

The rationale behind product diversification was to bring in more customers. Over the past 45 years, Lay's went gone from about four varieties of chips to 60. Since 1984, Campbell Soup has quadrupled the types of soup it sells to about 400. In 2018, the average US food retailer stocked about 33,000 different items, compared with roughly 9,000 in 1975, according to the Food Industry Association. Walmart Supercenters typically stock 120,000 items. The strategy of simplification was unusual, adopted by outliers like German discounter Aldi when it boosted its US presence in 2017. Aldi's focus is to reduce price to attract low-income customers who care more about cost than variety.

The panic buying in March cleared supermarket shelves of staples, with retail executives scrambling to load them back up again. Retailers and food companies had conference calls to determine what products to focus on. CEO Mark Smucker of jam maker JM Smucker Company, for example, paused production of reduced-fat Jif peanut butter and reduced-sugar Uncrustables frozen peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches. Bolthouse Farms CEO Jeff Dunn said he cut the variety of baby carrots it makes to four from more than a dozen: "We were all keeping up with the surge in demand by simplifying. Buckling down and taking care of basics and not worrying about all the bells and whistles." He plans to bring some back eventually, but not all.

Nestle SA is permanently dropping some Lean Cuisines varieties that were too unpopular to be worth producing, according to North America President John Carmichael. Carmichael says they're not giving up on variety, however; some of the frozen meals may come back, he said, and Nestle's food scientists are developing products for launch in 2021. With eating out restricted, frozen entrees have greater appeal. Carmichael says: "People like variety."

Meat producers like Tyson Foods were particularly hammered by the pandemic, since meat-packing plants were prone to COVID-19 outbreaks. Meat producers were forced to temporarily shut plants, reconsider plant safety, and allocate workers to lines producing more basic products. Meat shortages continue -- aggravated by employees afraid to come in to work -- while production has focused on items such as bone-in hams and chicken breasts with ribs attached that require less handling to produce.

Restaurants are thinning menus as COVID-19 changes how they can seat and serve customers. Adding menu options used to draw in customers; now it becomes more important to trim back prep work and costs. McDonald's has scaled back on all-day breakfast offerings that complicate service, allowing McDonald's outlets to handle drive-through faster. Outback Steakhouse owner Bloomin' Brands similarly stripped menu items such as French onion soup during the pandemic as the chain built up a to-go business centered on its steak and other entrees. Bloomin' CEO David Deno said they are studying customer reaction to see if some items should be dropped permanently.

Similarly, auto makers are trimming back options due to supply-chain bottlenecks and lower sales. Motorcycle maker Harley-Davidson isn't making as many models as before, focusing on bestsellers as it reconsiders future strategy.

Some coronavirus-fatigued consumers welcome fewer options, say companies like Deschutes Brewery in Bend, Oregon. Neal Stewart, a company vice-president, says: "We used to see people pacing the aisles and reading labels ... that treasure hunt of finding the exact right beverage. Now people are saying, 'I need to get in and I need to get out.' "

Tuna company Bumble Bee Foods LLC this spring cut some flavored tuna pouches to prioritize cans that sold faster as shoppers stocked up. It also decided with retailers to push back planned product launches up to six months. Bumble Bee plans to bring back some of the cut items but probably not all, said Chief Growth Officer Todd Putman, as tuna is an overcrowded aisle. For now, he says: "Consumers aren't ready to try new things yet."

[MON 07 SEP 20] THE COVID-19 MENACE (10)

* THE COVID-19 MENACE (10): Another approach to making COVID-19 tests more available is to develop assays that could be used in temporary testing facilities, drive-through testing centers, and even in people's homes.

At least two teams are taking advantage of the gene-editing technology CRISPR to drive such tests. For example, researchers led by Zhang Feng have developed a coronavirus assay that can be run in a single test tube in about an hour. However, it still requires heating the sample to about 65 degrees Celsius (150 degrees Fahrenheit), and it isn't as sensitive as a PCR-based assay. Zhang says: "That's okay, because it's much easier to use." Tests also show that it is highly accurate.

The assay is based on an approach that Zhang co-developed in 2017, called SHERLOCK, which relies on the ability of the CRISPR machinery to target specific genetic sequences. Researchers program a guide molecule to latch on to a particular stretch of the SARS-CoV-2 genome; if the guide molecule finds a match, a CRISPR enzyme produces a signal that can be detected either as a fluorescent glow or as a dark band on a paper dipstick. The US Food & Drug Administration (FDA) has authorized the assay for emergency use. The test is made by biotechnology firm Sherlock BioSciences in Cambridge, Massachusetts, of which Zhang is a co-founder, and the company has partnered with a manufacturer to mass-produce the kits.

Mammoth Biosciences -- a diagnostics company co-founded by CRISPR pioneer Jennifer Doudna of the University of California at Berkeley -- is also seeking an emergency-use authorization for its CRISPR-based coronavirus test, according to Mammoth's chief technology officer and co-founder Janice Chen. The test is based on a previous result showing that the technology can detect human papillomavirus. The company, based in San Francisco, California, is now trying to make the test simple and cheap enough for anyone to use at home. Chen says: "The ultimate goal is to take diagnostics directly to the consumers -- PCR has not been able to go there."

Liu Guozhen -- a bioengineer at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, says that technologies such as CRISPR could be "a game changer" in the current pandemic, Liu saying they "can find a needle in a haystack." They use different reagents from RT-PCR-based assays -- meaning they aren't limited by shortages of chemical supplies for standard tests -- and they can be designed to target any pathogen. For example, a team led by computational biologist Pardis Sabeti at the Broad Institute created rubber "chips" about the size of a smartphone that can search 1,000 samples for a single virus, or 5 samples for a panel of 169 viruses that are known to infect humans.

A different approach for faster and cheaper diagnostic tests would be to look for molecules that sit on the surface of the virus, instead of hunting for the viral genome. Such a test would contain an antibody tailored to bind to a specific protein, or antigen, operating much like home pregnancy tests. Such assays, which are inexpensive to produce and easy to conduct, are already used to detect influenza infections. However, antigen tests don't have an amplifying step as do genomic tests, so they are less sensitive.

The FDA has emergency-use authorization for a coronavirus antigen test that targets the nucleocapsid protein on the virus's surface. The Taiwan FDA is evaluating a similar assay that could provide results within 20 minutes, according to computational biologist Yang An-Suei Yang of Academia Sinica in Taipei, who developed the test. Yang's team used artificial intelligence to identify antibodies that could bind to proteins on the coronavirus surface. The team has not tested the scheme on infected people yet, however.

Even if a test can be made to work in the lab, there's the big issue of deploying it. The first challenge is to ensure predictable performance. Catharina Boehme -- CEO of the Foundation for Innovative New Diagnostics (FIND), a non-profit group in Geneva -- says: "It's a Wild West out there for assay development." FIND is working with the World Health Organization and the University Hospitals of Geneva to assess hundreds of SARS-CoV-2 testing options. Boehme says that most of the RT-PCR-based tests that FIND has evaluated perform just as well as the gold standard does, while antigen tests have so far fallen short of expectations.

Another challenge is scaling up the assays for mass production. Boehme thinks it is unrealistic that all the new tests will be deployed before the end of 2020. They will prove valuable once introduced, and will help prepare the world for future pandemics.

Even during this one, Boehme says, researchers mustn't neglect the development of tests for other viruses that cause respiratory symptoms, and monitoring for conditions such as diabetes, which can worsen the outlook for people with COVID-19. "We have to go beyond testing just for the coronavirus." [TO BE CONTINUED]

[FRI 04 SEP 20] AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (116)

* AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (116): Israel remained, as it had for Nixon's predecessors, a difficulty. Nixon pressured Israel over its secret nuclear program, while his administration developed a peace plan in which Israel would withdraw from the territories it had seized in the Six-Day War. Such plans would become a ritual for subsequent administrations. However, Nixon remained committed to supporting Israel. After the Soviet Union increased arms shipments to Egypt during 1970, Nixon authorized the sale of F-4 Phantom fighter jets to Israel.

The status quo in the Mideast was unstable, however. Egyptian President Anwar Sadat attempted to negotiate with Israel over the lands Israel had seized in the 1967 Six-Day War; when Israel snubbed him, Egypt and Syria launched a surprise attack on Israel in October 1973. Arab forces were much better trained, disciplined, and led than they had been in 1967, and were armed with the latest Soviet weaponry -- particularly surface-to-air missiles and anti-tank missiles, which inflicted painful losses on Israeli aircraft and armor. Israeli forces were beaten up and thrown back.

Kissinger was reluctant to side with the Israelis, but Nixon showed no such reluctance, beginning a massive airlift of military supplies -- particularly ammunition -- to Israel. Israeli forces, in the meantime, had regrouped, and the Arab drive was halted, with the Israelis then driving back the Arabs. Kissinger and Brezhnev set up a cease-fire; Kissinger adroitly sidelined the Soviets, and pushed through agreements between Israel and the Arab states. Israel had held its own in the conflict, but the Arabs felt they had won, having put up a strong fight, and obtained the diplomatic concessions that they wanted. The USA was the biggest winner, however, obtaining greater leverage in the Mideast at the expense of the Soviets.

Unfortunately, the war led to an energy crisis, thanks to the efforts of the Organization of Petroleum-Exporting Countries (OPEC). OPEC had been established in 1960, but amounted to little until 1970, when the cartel began to raise oil prices. US leadership didn't have much of a problem with that, thinking that would mean more production in the USA. However, growth in production didn't materialize; by 1973, the US was consuming 50% more oil than the country produced.

In response to the October War, OPEC countries cut oil production and raised prices, targeting the USA and other countries that had backed Israel. The result was a fuel shortage in America and lines at fuel stations, with the world suffering an economic slump. As things settled out in the wake of the conflict, OPEC phased out the embargo -- one big reason being that the economic problems affected everyone; they wouldn't try it again. This "first energy crisis" led to the USA considering, in an ineffectual fashion, alternative energy sources and "energy independence".

While Nixon was supportive of the NATO alliance, he didn't place a lot of weight on it, either. It was secondary to his foreign-policy goals of getting out of Vietnam and detente. However, Nixon still felt a need to cooperate in attaining European stability. In 1971, the USA, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union reached a "Four-Power Agreement", in which the Soviet Union guaranteed access to West Berlin, as long as it wasn't incorporated into West Germany. Nixon wanted no problems over West Berlin. [TO BE CONTINUED]

[THU 03 SEP 20] SCIENCE NEWS

* SCIENCE NOTES: As discussed by an article from CNN.com ("Unusual Tear-Drop-Shaped, Half-Pulsating Star Discovered By Amateur Astronomers" by Ashley Strickland, 9 March 2020), amateur astronomers poking through data from the NASA TESS planet-hunting space observatory found a star, designated "HD74423", -- about 1,500 light-years away and 1.7 times the mass of our Sun -- that had a very unusual light curve. Stars sometimes vary in brightness on a regular cycle, but this star's brightness varied in an asymmetric pattern.

The amateurs tipped off the professionals. Simon Murphy -- postdoc researcher from the Sydney Institute for Astronomy at the University of Sydney, and co-author of a study on HD74423 -- says:

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Incidentally, to stellar astronomers, "metals" are any elements heavier than hydrogen and helium, which include such elements as nitrogen, carbon, and oxygen. In any case, sorting through the light curve and other observations of the star showed that it was only pulsing on one hemisphere. Don Kurtz -- Visitor at the University of Sydney from the University of Central Lancashire in the UK, and the other author of the study -- says:

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As it turns out, HD74423 is one star of a binary star system, partnered with a dim red dwarf star. They are so close that their mutual orbit only lasts two days. The gravitational attraction between the two stars distorts the bigger star into a teardrop shape; gravity similarly focuses the pulsations of the larger star towards the red dwarf. The researchers say that now that they're aware this type of star exists, they expect to "find many more hidden in the TESS data."

* As discussed by an article from ECONOMIST.com ("The Bioluminescence People Find So Attractive Is A Defence Mechanism", 20 June 2019), it is well-known that many marine organisms are bioluminescent, emitting light. What is not so well understood is why they do so.

Ships at sea may leave a lovely glow in their wake, this light being produced by single-celled planktonic creatures known as "dinoflagellates". Dinoflagellates are also known as the agent of "red tides", which are reddish, toxic blooms of the organism that can kill fish and other animals. The toxins can also accumulate in filter-feeding clams and the like, presenting a hazard to those who eat the clams.

Might there be a relationship between these two characteristics of dinoflagellates? Two researchers, biologists Erik Selander and Andrew Prevett -- of Gothenburg University in Sweden -- decided to investigate. They chose as their test subject Lingulodinium polyedra, a common dinoflagellate. They raised, in tanks, several colonies of a strain of L. polyedra that don't produce defensive toxins.

The tanks also contained colonies of other species of plankton, resulting in mixed communities. In some cases, the researchers turned off the ability of the dinoflagellates to glow; in others, they were left to glow as they normally did. Some of the colonies were also dosed with a fat named "copepodamide" -- produced by small crustaceans known as "copepods" that often graze on dinoflagellates, the idea being to tip off the dinoflagellates that copepods might be present. Once all the colonies were established, the researchers unleashed copepods on them, with the results:

• In colonies consisting of toxin-free dinoflagellates that couldn't glow, the copepods readily devoured the dinoflagellates. Although L. polyedra made up only a quarter of the possible prey organisms in these colonies, they constituted three-quarters of the copepods' diets.
  
  
• In colonies where L. polyedra were able to glow normally, the dinoflagellates made up only a quarter of the copepod diet.
  
  
• In colonies where the dinoflagellates had been primed to the presence of copepods by exposure to copepodamide, the dinoflagellates flashed brightly as the copepods approached. The flash discouraged the copepods; in this case, L. polyedra made up only 2% of their diets.

In other words, with L. polyedra, bioluminescence amounts to a defense mechanism. Predators like copepods may have evolved to avoid the toxic dinoflagellates by being tipped off by the flash; or the flash may blind the copepods; or the flashes attract predators that prey on copepods in turn. Possibly it's some combination of those factors. Further research will nail down the mechanisms.

[WED 02 SEP 20] DINING & COVID-19 (1)

* DINING & COVID-19 (1): As discussed by an article from ABCNEWS.GO.com ("We Don't Need Fine Dining Right Now: What Chefs Are Doing Amid COVID Pandemic" by Kelly McCarthy, 4 May 2019), the global COVID-19 pandemic has painfully challenged many businesses, leading to a struggle to adapt. Restaurants are among those worst affected, and they've had to rethink their business -- or fold.

Canlis is a Seattle fine-dining restaurant, a family business for three generations, that has been serving artistic food for 39 years -- the menu including such things as caramelized mussels, fried rabbit with garden herbs and souffle. Shortly after the first US case of the virus hit Seattle in January 2020, Mark Canlis -- co-owner of the restaurant -- got the team together to consider options and figure out what to do next:

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Since March 2020, when the restaurant announced the closure of its dining room, Canlis has re-imagined itself as a multifaceted food supply service. Mark Canlis says:

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They made use of their large meat supply, ground it up into hamburgers, baked fresh buns, and they were in the high-end burger business. Canlis had a shipping container in the parking lot with a bread oven and flour mill in it. It turned out the restaurant's expediter -- a Jewish woman, from Manhattan's Lower East Side, who didn't really have a job any more -- happened to be "bada (baker)". She quickly started cranking out hundreds of delicious bagels every day. Mark Canlis says: "So we just opened at 8 in the morning for coffee and bagels and again, the lines were nuts."

Only three days after starting the transformation, Canlis began a family meal-delivery service, with servers, reservationists, and dishwashers -- who otherwise would have been laid off -- repurposed accordingly: "We just hired our entire staff as drivers and started delivering the dinners all over the city." Family box meals change by the day. They include options like Wagyu beef meatloaf with spicy ketchup, duck carnitas enchiladas, buttermilk fried chicken -- and a "weekend kit" that includes burgers, pasta salad and more.

The dinner boxes include a flower, a candle, and other things to set the ambiance, plus a link to livestream the restaurant's piano players, "so you can have the experience with the Canlis dinner." [TO BE CONTINUED]

[TUE 01 SEP 20] ANOTHER MONTH

* ANOTHER MONTH: The humble zipper is an invention that we take for granted. Of course, as discussed by an article from ECONOMIST.com ("Zip Fasteners", 18 December 2018), it has a history behind it.

In 2017, the global zipper market was estimated at $11.2 billion USD, and could almost double by 2030. It is not growing because of exciting new uses, just because of more luggage and clothes: a boom in cheap, disposable fashion and developing-world demand for Western-style clothing. Production is centralized: up to 40% of the market, by value, may be controlled by the Japanese company YKK, which makes more zippers every year than there are people on the planet.

The ancestor of the zipper is the button. Buttons go back thousands of years, but they were decorative for the longest time, there being no buttonholes. People snugged up clothing with loops or buckles or pins. Laces began to emerge in the 12th century; buttonholes finally arrived in the 13th. The hook & eye appeared in the 14th century. It led it turn to the first zipper, patented in 1893 by one Whitcomb Judson, an eccentric inventor. He came up with a scheme of using a sliding guide to pull together a line of hooks and a line of eyes on a boot.

Judson's primordial zipper didn't work very well, the hooks and eyes being too easily pulled apart. His Automatic Hook & Eye Company of Chicago didn't go anywhere -- until an immigrant engineer from Sweden named Gideon Sundback rethought Judson's design. Sundback saw that Judson was on to something, but that the hooks and eye connection was clumsy. According to the story, Sundback got his inspiration by tinkering with two interleaved sets of soup spoons, stacked bowl on bowl, locked firmly together. He came up with today's zipper design, more or less: two rows of metal protuberances with a tooth on one side and a socket on the other, forced together and pried apart by a puller. A similar design was patented by a Swiss woman named Katharina Kuhn-Moos around the same time, but it was never manufactured.

The zipper wasn't an overnight success, partly because Judson's gimmick had been a dud. It saw limited use until World War I, when the US Navy began to use them on aviator jackets. In 1918, the US Navy began to put them on its aviator jackets -- then, in 1923, B.F. Goodrich, an American company focused on tires and other rubber goods, put zippers on its rubber boots. It called the new footwear "Zippers", giving the device its name -- it had been previously called the "hookless fastener". The British just called it a "zip".

That was a step forward, but the zipper was still expensive -- and it also had overtones of sexual access, since it made it too easy to take off somebody else's clothes. If that sounds a reach, in Aldous Huxley's dystopian novel BRAVE NEW WORLD, the promiscuous inhabitants of his pleasure-seeking future society wore "zippicamiknicks" and "zippyjamas", taking them off instantly. By the 1930s, the zipper was hitting its second wind, becoming fashionable and popular. In 1940 a survey at Princeton University found the trousers of 85% of its students were zipped not buttoned -- while the class of 1894, by then in their 60s, still kept their flies buttoned.

In the postwar era, the zipper took off, thoroughly displacing buttons in roles such as flies, and has now become normalized -- though the sexual suggestiveness still makes an appearance every now and then. It has not led to any further technology revolutions, but there have been improvements: plastic teeth to replace metal ones; the coil zip, using continuous spirals of nylon to form the teeth, making them more flexible and lightweight.

There is, however, a challenge in achieving quality at low production cost -- a general issue with mature technologies. Misalignment as thin as a piece of paper can cause jams. A broken zipper, unlike a lost button, often leads to a garment being discarded.

The improvements have been almost exclusively led by YKK, which guarantees that each of its zips will last for 10,000 uses. Yoshida Tadao, "the zipper king", founded the company in 1934, but had to start again after his Tokyo factory was bombed in the Second World War. Gradually, the company established itself; when Sundback's patents expired in 1960, YKK expanded into the USA. Talon, the descendant of the original Universal Fastener Company, faded away in the face of the competition; YKK could offer as good or better a product at a lower cost, with a cost advantage of even a fraction of a penny meaning everything in a cheap commodity product.

YKK now operates in 73 countries, with much of its production in China. YKK has developed zips that are waterproof, heat-resistant, and that glow in the dark. The company is always looking for improvements -- though again, zippers are a mature technology, and that's a challenge.

Patarapong Intarakumnerd, a professor of innovation in Tokyo, suggests: "If the main function has not changed, it is then about how to apply it in different circumstances and products." Some doctors, for example, like the idea of a zipper that can replace stitches after operations where they may need to access the same part of the patient's body again. Intarakumnerd points out that radical innovation often comes from outside the dominant industry. Smartphones came from computer makers like Apple, not phone companies. Maybe some non-clothing, non-luggage industry will find a reason to rethink the zipper.

The zipper, of course, is not going away, having no real competitors. Velcro is a widely-used technology, but only useful in certain applications, for example snugging up shoes -- and it doesn't cope well with dirt. Zippers aren't really an essential technology, since we could go back to buttons and snaps if we had to; we don't want to. The zipper is like thousands of workaday inventions that evolve from novelty to necessity, without much fanfare, and end up hard to improve on.

* According to an article from CBSNEWS.com ("Alyssa Milano Says She Is Losing Her Hair After Long Battle With COVID-19" by Caitlin O'Kane, 11 August 2020), actress Alyssa Milano, a prominent voice of the anti-Trump "Resistance" on Twitter, ran foul of COVID-19. She's in recovery, but it's a long slog. In a video posted to Twitter, she brushed her hair to show it falling out in clumps: "Thought I'd show you what COVID-19 does to your hair. Please take this seriously. Wear a damn mask."

While hair loss is not a symptom on the CDC's official list, a recent survey found about 26% of people with long-term coronavirus symptoms said they suffered hair loss. The survey was conducted by Survivor Corps, a group that provides resources to coronavirus survivors. The group asked more than 1,500 patients to report what symptoms they had, including those not on the CDC list like weight gain, clogged ears, and hair loss.

The researchers found that "long haulers' COVID-19 symptoms are far more diverse than what is currently listed on the CDC's website." Many people in the Survivor Corps Facebook group have reported hair loss. In July, one woman said that ever since she was diagnosed with COVID-19 in March, her hair had been falling out in "massive clumps!"

Dr. Shilpi Khetarpal, a dermatologist at Cleveland Clinic, said there have been an increased number of reports of hair loss from COVID-19 patients. She says a phenomenon called "telogen effluvium" is to blame. Our hair doesn't grow evenly; some of it stops growing for a time, and is vulnerable to loss. Under telogen effluvium, most of it stops growing. There's generally a two- to three-month lag between a stressful event and the onset of hair loss, which is why, she says, "we're seeing these patients now, several weeks after COVID-19 symptoms resolve."

Milano began feeling coronavirus symptoms sometime in March. By early April, she was in big trouble, saying on Instagram:

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Milano said that after first testing negative for coronavirus and antibodies, she continued to have symptoms for four months, such as "vertigo, stomach abnormalities, irregular periods, heart palpitations, shortness of breath, zero short term memory, and general malaise." She took another antibody test; it came back positive, meaning she did in fact have COVID-19.

She told readers:

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* In less appalling news of the pandemic, the local paper reports that here in Loveland, Colorado, the school district plans to check out 13,000 Chromebooks to most of its 15,500 students to allow them to conduct remote learning. One 17-year-old student says:

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The effort actually preceded the pandemic, with 16 of the 30 schools in the district having a notebook or tablet for every student; the other let out computers to students who don't have access to a useful computer. They are checked out via a drive-through system, being "quarantined" for three days under ultraviolet before being handed out. One difficulty is that not all families have a good internet connection; the school district works with them to help.

Checking around online suggests that, in bulk, schools can get Chromebooks for about $160 USD each -- maybe more, maybe less in practice. Teachers have admin control, through the "Chrome partner ecosystem", over a network of up to 100 Chromebooks, for example specifying what students can install on the machine, so the kids don't spend their time playing games. It would seem the pandemic is an ideal time to push advanced remote learning technologies, such as an AI "teacher" who can recognize a particular student, monitor the student's progress, and keep the student on track. Students might learn to hate it.

Obviously, the younger the student, the harder remote learning is -- the younger the student, the more likely they get tablets. At least so far, Colorado doesn't seem to be having the big problems with "back to school" in the pandemic seen elsewhere in the USA. Thank Bob I live in a Blue state; Colorado is only losing a few people to COVID-19 now. That's not good, but it could be a lot worse. It would be better if the Colorado COVIDiots would straighten up and fly right: "Wear a damn mask!"

* Incidentally, I was surprised when I wrote up the item on the zipper that I couldn't find a reasonable picture of a zipper online. OK, I had to take my own, wearing a rain jacket on a warm dry day. The phone "selfie" capability is handier than I thought.