* US Constitution (series), face recognition (series), COVID-19 menace (series), ancient droughts & tree rings, carbon-neutral China, modified bacteria metabolizing CO2, vertical video, renewable energy & jobs, & weak flu vaccines.
* NEWS COMMENTARY FOR OCTOBER 2020: The US election of 2020 is imminent, indeed well in progress in early voting, and things are not looking at all good for Donald Trump. As reported in an essay by Lexington, the rotating USA columnist of ECONOMIST.com ("Donald Trump's Effort To Sow Mistrust Is Looking Like An Own-Goal", 24 October 2020), Trump's tricks worked in 2016 -- but they're killing him in 2020.
Welcome to North Carolina, regarded as a battleground state, where voters around the state have been lining up to cast early votes -- one local public official saying: "I've never seen anything like it!" The voters are emotional, expressing fear, anguish, even shedding tears. Fortunately, the voting system is working effectively and efficiently, despite the pandemic and the attempts by Trump and others to undermine it.
Most of the early voters are Democrats, but some are Trump loyalists -- easily identified because they usually won't wear masks, regarding them as submission to a tyrannical government. According to Lexington:
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Republicans and Democrats seem increasingly to inhabit different realities. Little wonder they lined up together in mistrustful silence. "Normally you're talking and laughing when you come to vote," said Alejandro, a burly Democrat in Henderson. "This year there's so much fear and anger everybody's just doing what they have to do."
Most voters from the city's black majority said that they were voting in person, despite being worried about covid, because they were afraid their ballot would not count if they mailed it in. And voting was the only form of political expression one woman said she could take part in. For fear of her "violent" white pro-Trump neighbours, she had not dared to display a Democratic sign in her yard this year for the first time. "I decided I'd rather have peace than express myself," she said, as her eyes filled with tears.
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That may suggest a continued and possibly growing division of America -- but then again, the biggest factor in the problem, Donald Trump, seems clearly on the way out. He is dragged down by his flaws, arguably the most spectacular being how incompetent he is. In trying to undermine the election, Trump has only energized the Democrats against him.
Hillary Clinton had been favored to win in 2016, but an analysis of the relevant statistics at the time shows she had significant weaknesses, particularly a popularity distinctly under 50%. More to the point, nothing went right for her in the campaign -- but even at that, Trump's win was very weak, with Trump losing the popular vote by millions. Now, it's Trump's turn to go from stumble to stumble.
There were two debates between Trump and Democrat challenger Joe Biden; the first debate was a barking contest, the second was better, but still did Trump no good. Trump also presided over a COVID-19 spreader event at the White House that landed him in the hospital, where he was given the latest treatments, and seemed to quickly recover. Some thought it was a hoax and a ploy -- but if so, it accomplished nothing for Trump, indeed alienated some of his hard-core supporters. Finally, in an interview with Leslie Stahl of CBS News, Trump was petulant, to then cut off the interview and walk away. Stahl also interviewed Joe Biden, who was prepared down to his fingertips, being smooth and articulate.
Not bad for a man who Trump, in grand projection, has tried to label as senile. In addition Trump's attempts, through Rudy Giuliani, to smear Biden through his son Hunter Biden, have been an utter dud. The biggest of Trump's failures, of course, is his belief that the best thing to do about the pandemic is pretend it's not happening -- which has got to be the worst political strategy in American history. Who can believe Trump will win on election day? The only question is how badly he will be beaten, and how much he will drag the Republicans down with him.
Should Trump indeed lose, he will face almost certain indictment, giving him an incentive to skip the country. That leads to an unsettling thought: he would also have a motive to run off with a load of America's secrets, giving him something to trade for being taken in and protected. The question is then: "Would he dare do that?" The answer is clearly: "Yes." [ED: That's not what Trump did. He did something even more shocking.]
* As discussed by an article from REUTERS.com ("China Struggles To Fill Trump's 'America First' Leadership Void" by Tony Munroe, 21 October 2020), China has had mixed feelings about US president Donald Trump. Yes, he's a pain to China, but his rabid isolationism would seem to present opportunities for China to stand taller on the world stage, at the expense of the USA. However, despite big efforts, it hasn't proven that simple.
Paul Haenle, director of the Carnegie–Tsinghua Center for Global Policy in Beijing, says: "China has been trying its best to take advantage of the U.S. retreat to advance its own goals. Nevertheless, China has had difficulty translating its growing influence into foreign policy success."
China's initial bungling in response to the COVID-19 pandemic has made it the target of criticism. Beijing's clampdown on Hong Kong, the suppression of Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang province, its island-building in the South China Sea, saber-rattling towards Taiwan, and aggressive diplomacy haven't won China many friends either. Yes, America's allies are sick of Trump, but he is clearly a passing affliction, and China has not been able to exploit that annoyance with Trump.
Susan Thornton, the top US diplomat for Asia early in the Trump administration, says: "Many see the US retreat from global institutions under Trump as ceding fertile ground to China in this area, but what is striking is how much China's so-called 'wolf-warrior' diplomacy has undercut their ability to take advantage."
A survey by the US-based Pew Research Center found that negative views towards China in advanced economies including the USA had soared during 2020. There are reports that a Chinese internal paper released in April 2020 warned that Beijing faced a rising wave of hostility in the aftermath of the coronavirus, with global anti-China sentiment at its highest since the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown.
Assuming, reasonably, that Joe Biden wins the US presidential election, he will maintain a tough stance on China, while ending Trump's isolationism, dealing with allies and international bodies in a cooperative fashion, as a significant example rejoining the Paris climate accord. Although Biden has labeled Russia an "enemy", he calls China a "competitor", and clearly wants engagement. Jia Qingguo -- a professor at Peking University School of International Studies who has advised China's government -- says: "On many issues of global governance, there is still much room for cooperation between the two countries."
Simply put, the Americans are much more experienced and, lapses like Trump aside, much more skillful at playing on the world stage than China. The Chinese government has tried to have it both ways, working as a rival to the USA, while saying it does not want to challenge America. China's diplomatic efforts tend to be transactional, with a policy of non-interference in the domestic affairs of other countries, no matter how dreadful those affairs are -- and similarly protesting angrily at any criticism of its own internal affairs.
Its Belt & Road initiative has been criticized for a lack of transparency, over environmental concerns, and the financial sensibility of projects. China's success at putting one of its own as head of France-based police coordination agency Interpol ended disastrously when the chief, Meng Hongwei, resigned after going missing in China, where he was sentenced to jail in 2020 for graft.
Julian Gewirtz -- a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, a US think tank -- says: "China's explicit ambitions to 'lead the reform of the global governance system' have not been clearly defined. These statements are often swaddled in gauzy platitudes — and that means the rest of the world should judge China by its track record, rather than its promises."
* As discussed by an essay from ECONOMIST.com ("The Pragmatist", 3 October 2020), the Trump campaign has persistently tried to paint Democratic presidential hopeful Joe Biden as a radical, or at least under the control of radicals, who would upend America's economy pursuing an absurd "socialist" agenda -- never mind what "socialism" is really supposed to mean. Hardly:
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Some leaders, when they come into office, have a powerful economic vision for transforming how their country creates wealth and distributes it. Others approach power as pragmatists whose goal is to subtly shape the political and economic forces they inherit. Joe Biden is firmly in the second camp. He is a lifelong centrist whose most enduring economic belief is his admiration for hard-working Americans and who has shifted with the centre of gravity in his party.
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Assuming, as seems reasonable, that Biden wins the election, what then? There are concerns that his pragmatism won't be up to the huge job he will inherit, as seems likely, with the USA struggling against a pandemic and accompanying economic crash, along with huge government deficits. Not being an ideologue, he has no fixed concepts, instead doing what he believes, on the basis of his counsels, to make the best sense. Rightists fear that means he will end up stepping on capitalists; Leftists fear he won't -- and both fear he will fail. They are hyperventilating:
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Neither view is especially convincing once you consider Mr. Biden's goals. He says he will seek to tilt the balance of American capitalism in favour of workers, not the rich. He will offer competent administration; he is no fan of social experiments or trampling on institutions. His priority would be a stimulus bill to revive growth, though he is likely to pull America somewhat further to the Left than either of his Democratic predecessors, Barack Obama or Bill Clinton. He would leave the economy greener, with a more active industrial policy, somewhat higher public spending and borders open to skilled migrants. He would not reverse America's new protectionism, nor does he have a plan to resolve the country's long-term fiscal problems.
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Joe Biden's career in politics suggests less of a focus on economics than on the justice system and foreign policy. He is an advocate of the middle class, less so of the upper and lower classes; however, his home state of Delaware has a heavy corporate presence, and he is not hostile to business.
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As vice-president in 2009-17 Mr. Biden helped implement the stimulus package of 2009 and strike budget deals. But his strength was as a negotiator with Congress, not as a visionary. Allies from his Senate and White House years make up a big share of his advisers and entourage now, with additional advice coming from centre-left economists such as Jared Bernstein, Heather Boushey and Ben Harris. Unlike Mr. Obama, he has not appointed a dominant economic figure to his team so far.
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Where Biden's economic path takes him depends on three factors that could drive him to more daring economic initiatives. First, the COVID-19 recession: GDP hasn't taken as much of a hit as feared, but the pandemic isn't over, and much can still go wrong. Small businesses and the poor have suffered the most, while state and local governments are in a cash crunch. Some industries are prospering; some, like travel and movie theaters, are in dire condition. Normal laws of economics are topsy-turvy, with interest rates zeroed out, meaning borrowing is nearly free; a swelling budget deficit; and, most bewildering, a soaring stock market.
Second, the Woke Left: Biden has skillfully placated the Leftists in his party, while tempering their more ambitious proposals, such as the "Green New Deal" and "Medicare For All". The Woke Left doesn't control the Democratic Party, but it is a significant presence in it, and will retain influence in a Biden Administration. Biden is all for addressing climate change and getting the US healthcare system in order -- but he is not anti-capitalist, nor are the overwhelming majority of Americans. Nonetheless, there are pressures pushing him to the Left.
The third constraint will be Congress. The Democrats are certain to retain the House, indeed may gain seats, and are favored to retake the Senate. The Senate filibuster, which forces a 60-vote majority for critical votes, would still give the Republicans leverage even if they lose the majority; but the filibuster has been so hollowed out by partisan warfare that the odds are good Democrats will kill it, should they gain control of the Senate. It will be with no regrets: the House hasn't had the filibuster since 1842, and only 14 state legislatures retain it. For much of its life, the filibuster was rarely used, and then largely for theatrical effect; from the 1980s, following a change in the rules that made it easier to invoke, both sides escalated its use, to the point of absurdity. It needs to go.
Uncontested Democratic control of both wings of Congress would simplify life for Biden, but he would still have to give Congress its due. Biden loves Congress and is skilled at working with it, but he may not be able to get his own way in all cases. The pressure from the Woke Left would be less than that of centrists; the largest caucus, with over 100 members, is the Moderate New Democrat Coalition. Biden's instincts are centrist, but reality may push him Leftwards, with Congress finding some of his initiatives hard to buy. There is also the entirely unpredictable trajectory of the Republicans after the fall of Trump -- with a possible collapse of the GOP, and the rise of a new Center-Right party.
It seems unlikely that Biden will be willing or able to greatly expand the state, with the budget growing by only a few percent. He wants a jumbo recovery bill, with a prominent "green infrastructure" component that might include upgrades to electricity grids and charging stations for electric cars. He wants to pump money into green technologies, and also other leading-edge technologies like 5G or AI.
If the jumbo recovery bill goes well, there may be room for a Biden Administration to pursue one other big legislative priority. One possibility is immigration reform; another is boosting middle-class social mobility, where Biden proposes universal pre-school education, tax-credits for child care, and free public-university education for families earning less than $125,000 USD a year. Total spending for such a social-mobility agenda might come to a trillion USD over a decade.
Biden is proposing to moderately raise taxes. He would increase raise the rate on corporate income from 21% to up to 28%, levy minimum taxes on foreign earnings, and remove tax perks for real-estate and private-equity firms. Individuals earning more than $400,000 USD would see the top band of income tax rise to up to 39.6%, and those earning more than $1 million USD might have to pay a capital-gains rate that is closer to the one they pay on their income.
Of course, how Biden handles the economy depends on who he appoints to critical positions, such as treasury secretary. There's been talk of Senator Liz Warren taking that position -- giving Wall Street the shudders -- but again, Biden is not an anti-capitalist, and Massachusetts would need to hold a special election to fill her Senate seat. Biden will very likely pick centrists, for example Lael Brainard, a center-Left member of the Federal Reserve Board; Jeff Zients, a co-head of Biden's transition team; Sylvia Mathews Burwell, a former Obama official; or Sarah Bloom Raskin, a former Fed governor and Treasury official. If a business figure is needed then Ruth Porat, the finance chief of Alphabet, the parent group of Google, may be a contender.
His vice-president will also have a voice, a big one:
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Based on Mr. Biden's own experience as vice-president, in which he acted as a key counsellor to Mr. Obama, Ms. Harris would have an important voice in his administration. She sits to the Left of him on tax and spending, although she is within the mainstream. And having rejected its signature policies and outmanoeuvred its star figures, Mr. Biden might try to placate the Left of his party by giving it lots of jobs in the regulatory apparatus where they would emit a cacophony of Left-sounding signals.
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The final tool Biden has is executive orders, which the Obama Administration made big use of. The shift of the Supreme Court to the Right may make that more troublesome -- except for the fact that the Democrats are likely to, however reluctantly, shake up SCOTUS. In any case, Biden could use his executive power to reverse some of Trump's own executive orders -- most importantly, drop the ban on some migrants, while lifting Trump's clampdown on refugees and undocumented workers. The rules for visas for skilled workers would be streamlined.
Biden's stance on protectionism is more ambiguous. Biden has been a free trader in the past, and would certainly be less confrontational with China than Trump has been. He would rally America's allies to put in place a co-ordinated response to deal with China's economic model -- in which even notionally private Chinese firms are often acting under the strategic direction of the Chinese Communist Party. However, American suspicion of China is running high, and Biden will have to tread carefully in relaxing confrontation. He is not likely to stop the Trump Administration's war against Chinese high-tech firm Huawei, but he may regard Huawei as less of a threat and more of a bargaining chip.
It is similarly not clear how far Biden will go with trade deals. It may just be a question of how Biden presents them: he can sell deals on the basis of having zealously protected America's interests, glossing over the fact that trade deals of the past also protected America's interests, being the products of tough negotiation. There has, despite Trump's claim, never been unfettered free trade; there is only negotiated trade.
* In sum, a Biden presidency promises moderately higher taxes and more spending, especially on green infrastructure; more industrial policy, not too much change to trade policy. Who wins, who loses? In terms of individuals, his policies are aimed squarely at the middle classes and lower-paid who would benefit from a list of measures such as cheaper education, perks to get on the housing ladder, and a higher minimum wage. Increased taxes will fall on the rich.
As for businesses, which firms would gain and which would suffer? One estimate suggests corporate profits would fall by about 12% because of the tax rises, with alarmist warnings that higher taxes on business would impact the workers in those businesses -- a variation on the weary "trickle-down" argument. Investors have already begun to discount this, to bid up the shares of renewable-energy firms and construction and infrastructure companies which might benefit from a Biden presidency.
Of course, fossil-fuel energy companies are likely to suffer, but changing realities indicate that's their future in any case. Although there's clearly a drift towards clamping down on Big Tech firms, tech stocks have risen even in the face of the pandemic; indeed, the stock markets are doing well, despite difficult circumstances. It doesn't appear that many people are worried about a socialist revolution from above. True, a Biden presidency, along with being a crushing defeat for the Republicans, could open the door to radical legislation; but Biden is not a radical, and is unlikely to play along with excess.
Again, Biden is likely to give jobs to the Woke Left in the regulatory apparatus -- and there's certainly going to be a backlash against the Trump Administration's reckless trashing of regulations. The fear is that new rules will be turned out in an uncontrolled and strident fashion, without carefully considering their impact. Biden will try to act as a brake on excess, but it may be a lot to handle. A Biden Administration won't be as business-friendly as the Trump Administration, but it won't be as half-baked either.
One final concern is huge budget deficits. The pandemic has made them largely unavoidable, with the Fed pumping out funds to keep the economy afloat. Right now, Biden has no plan for getting America's long-term finances on a stable footing. That is clearly something that will have to be put off, as Biden addresses immediate problems:
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Mr. Biden, a life-long pragmatist, looks likely to govern as one. Stylistically that means getting sensible advice, behaving consistently, and working with America's institutions. While he may lack a formal economic doctrine, his goal will be to get the economy out of its COVID-19 slump, improve social mobility, and build a better safety net. He will place his biggest bet on giving a long-term boost in infrastructure and climate policy, and then try to moderate the wilder forces swirling around America's electorate and polity, including the more socialist ideas of the hard Left, chauvinistic protectionism and the indifference of the Right towards America's social fabric.
The claim that a Biden presidency would destroy American capitalism is silly. If he can restore competent management and make the economy work better for ordinary people, Mr. Biden's last job in politics will be done.
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BACK_TO_TOP* WINGS & WEAPONS: As discussed by an article from THEDRIVE.com ("USAF Getting Cast Ductile Iron Bomb Cluster Munition Replacement" by Joseph Trevithick, 26 February 2018), cluster munitions have got a bad reputation, primarily due to the fact that they tend to leave dud submunitions scattered around that can kill long after a conflict has ended. Although the Trump Administration has tried to defend their use, the writing is on the wall, and the US military is looking for replacements.
The US Air Force's main focus in the matter is the "Cast-Iron Ductile Bomb (CIDB)" -- a unitary bomb with a brittle casing that breaks into a far-reaching cloud of metal fragment on detonation to hit personnel and soft targets. In 2018, the USAF issued a request to industry for information on their ability to manufacture between 250 and 1,500 BLU-136/B 900-kilogram (2,000-pound) class cast ductile iron bomb warheads every year for at least four years. A budget request for fiscal year 2019 included an ask for nearly $85 million to purchase both the BLU-136/B and the 225-kilogram (500-pound) class BLU-134/B -- also known as the "Next Generation Area Attack Weapon (NGAAW) Increments II and I" respectively. The Air Force began active work on these two bombs in 2014 as part of the "Improved Lethality Warhead (ILW)" program.
The idea behind the BLU-134/B and BLU-136/B is simple. The bombs are to have casings of "cast ductile iron" that easily fragments into small shards, with scorings on the interior of the shell to boost the process. At the same time, its high graphite content makes it stronger than regular cast iron and better suited to the shock, vibration, and other environmental conditions encountered in a combat environment. Otherwise, the bombs use the same explosive filler as existing high explosive bombs. To further enhance their destructiveness, the final BLU-134/Bs and -136/Bs have a height-of-burst sensor-enabled fuze that pilots can set during a mission from inside the cockpit. Pilots will be able to fine-tune just how far above the ground the bomb will explode and govern the area of dispersal of the fragments.
The new bombs will be equivalent in appearance to comparable older bombs, allowing them to be mated to existing "Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM)" GPS-guidance and Paveway II/III laser-guidance kits to create new precision guided weapons. The bombs will be able to work with dual mode Laser JDAM and Paveway-type kits as well.
The Air Force started work on the CIDB as part of a general Pentagon effort to develop alternatives to existing cluster munitions, this effort having begun in 2008 under the Bush II Administration, at the direction of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. The goal was to get rid of cluster bomb or artillery shell bomblets that failed on average more than one percent of the time by the beginning of 2019. This policy shift came in response to the Convention on Cluster Munitions (CCM), an international treaty that the USA hasn't signed.
The new bombs will not generate fragmentation patterns as effective as those of cluster munitions, nor can the fragments penetrate heavy armor. That has led to some reconsideration of the cluster munitions ban, though the Air Force remains committed to the cast ductile bombs, and is moving towards production. The service is also considering a small cast-ductile bomb for integration with the Small Diameter Bomb family.
* Australia-based shipbuilder Austal showed off concepts for autonomous ships at a 2019 trade show in Sydney, the offerings being targeted for future US Navy requirements. The offerings are in single-hulled, catamaran, and trimaran configuration; they range in length from 40 to 110 meters (150 to 360 feet), with displacement from 260 to 2,500 tonnes (285 to 2,750 tons). They will have networking capabilities for command and control.
Operational configurations include small patrol craft for constabulary duties; high-speed troop transports; and replenishment-at-sea vessels. Optional kit includes vertical-launch missile arrays, self-defense weapons, berthing for optional crewed requirements, support of air and sea drones, refueling at sea, and vertical replenishment by helicopter. The ships will be able to operate for up to 90 days, with an unrefueled range of 18,500 kilometers (115,000 miles / 10,000 NMI) at a cruise speed of 30 KPH (18 MPH / 16 KT).
* As discussed by an article from AVIATIONWEEK.com ("Full Superconducting Motor Readied For Tests" by Guy Norris, 31 July 2019), aviation is moving towards electric and hybrid-electric propulsion for general aviation and regional aircraft. European researchers have now developed a lab prototype of a superconducting motor for large aircraft.
Superconducting motors offer the potential for much higher power densities and operating efficiency. The big attraction is that it then becomes more practical to split the motors from the power-generation system, which in turn enables highly efficient distributed propulsion systems.
Coordinated by Germany-based electric motor specialist Oswald Elektromotoren, the goal of the "advanced superconducting motor experimental demonstrator (ASuMED)" program was to run a 1-megawatt motor with a power density of 20 kW/kg. Turning at 6,000 RPM, the motor has an overall efficiency level of more than 99.9%, with thermal losses of only about 1%.
The demonstrator -- partly funded under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation initiative, is based on high-temperature superconductors that operate at -250 degrees Celsius (-418 degrees Fahrenheit). ASuMED is a synchronous motor -- that is, it rotates at the frequency of its input AC current. Stacks of high-temperature superconducting tapes, which generate magnetic fields greater than those made by rare earth magnets, are used on the rotor [rotating motor drive element] while superconducting coils are used in the stator [fixed motor drive element].
ASuMED uses an elaborate cryostat system to keep the motor cold. The stator cryostat uses liquid hydrogen while the rotor cryostat, which is designed to handle the estimated 150 watts of heat generated by the supercooled stacks, uses a gaseous helium system. The ASuMED effort also developed the appropriate power-control electronic hardware and software. The motor includes fail-safe features, and a control system to deal with the high dynamic speed, torque control, and idiosyncratic characteristics of superconductive windings.
The 1-megawatt motor is a demonstrator, the intent being to scale it up to 10 megawatts or more. Ultimately, aircraft designers will be able to choose between a few large motors or many small ones, or some combination of the two. The program began in 2017, with partners across Europe and in Russia. It has now been completed. A follow-on effort will consider development of a practical motor, not just a lab demonstrator.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* MESSAGE OF THE TREE RINGS: As discussed by an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("A Warning From Ancient Tree Rings" by Paul Voosen, 31 December 2019), for a decade, central Chile has suffered persistent drought. Rainfall has been 30% lower than normal, with vegetation withering and reservoirs running low; more than a hundred thousand farm animals have perished in the "megadrought", as some researchers call it.
The Chilean drought is similar to the decade-long drought that California, in another hemisphere, suffered under until 2019. By studying tree ring records, researchers have now found that such tandem droughts are more than a coincidence: They are surprisingly common over the past 1200 years, and they may often share a common cause: an unusually cool state of the eastern Pacific Ocean known as La Nina.
The first evidence for synchronous droughts in both South and North America was published in a 1994 study in the journal NATURE, which focused on dead tree stumps in the middle of lakes and rivers in both Patagonia and California's Sierra Nevada. For trees to grow in streambeds and lakebeds, the droughts must have lasted for decades, and at least one of these megadroughts seemed to have hit both continents simultaneously.
However, there was no way to pin down the exact timing in the 1990s. The width of tree rings is an indicator of drought -- the drier the year, the less the tree grows, the narrower the tree ring -- but at that time, tree-ring data was spotty. Since, however, tree ring researchers have put together "drought atlases" that provide consistent records for much of the world. Ed Cook -- a tree ring scientist at Columbia University in York City -- says: "We'll have most hemispheric land areas covered by the end of the year."
Nathan Steiger -- a paleoclimatologist at Columbia University -- these records with thousands of other proxies for dryness and temperature from trees, corals, ocean sediments, and ice cores, then fed them into a global climate model. Aligning itself to the records, it generated a global view of the changing climate, even in places with sparse proxies. The model confirmed that, from 800 to 1600 CE, repeated megadroughts occurred simultaneously across the hemispheres.
The model also identified the key factors driving the climate variations. Steiger and his co-authors, including Cook, first used the new tool to look at megadroughts in the US Southwest. They found that megadroughts in the Southwest were influenced by three factors: an anomalously warm North Atlantic Ocean, small global temperature rises driven by factors such as a brightening Sun, and, especially, La Nina. The cold sibling of El Nino, La Nina can persist for years, deflecting rainstorms away from their usual tracks.
The research team believes that La Nina is almost the sole driver of South American megadroughts. Since La Nina affects conditions on both sides of the equator, it could plausibly generate simultaneous droughts in both hemispheres. Jessica Tierney, a paleoclimatologist at the University of Arizona, in impressed by the work, but warns that models don't perfectly simulate the La Nina cycle. It's also uncertain whether the link between La Nina and distant droughts is a stable dynamic that lasts centuries, or might change over time. There's also the notorious unpredictability of weather: the current South American drought, for example, has endured through both El Nino and La Nina conditions.
Nor is it clear how the drought patterns will change as climate warms. As bad as the drought in Chile is today, it doesn't rival the medieval ones, which were longer and more severe. Cook believes there was some factor at work then that isn't now. If that factor arose again, with greenhouse warming amplifying it, Cook says, "then things could get quite catastrophic."
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* CARBON-NEUTRAL CHINA? As discussed by an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("Can China, The World's Biggest Coal Consumer, Become Carbon Neutral By 2060?" by Dennis Normile, 29 September 2020), in September 2020, the Chinese government pledged to reduce its net carbon emissions to zero by 2060. Right now, China is the biggest producer of CO2, with 28% of global emissions. Its commitment to fixing that problem grants China prestige on the global stage -- notably upstaging Donald Trump's America, which regards climate change as a hoax. It may also inspire other countries to ratchet up their efforts. However, China has obstacles to reaching that goal; it has a particular addiction to coal that will be hard to break.
China had earlier said its CO2 emissions would peak "around" 2030, a goal that seemed achievable. The more ambitious goal of achieving carbon neutrality by 2060 will require the drastic reduction of the use of fossil fuels in transportation and electricity generation, as well as investing in carbon capture and storage, or planting forests.
The Chinese government hasn't yet unveiled its plan for how it will achieve its goal -- but a research group at Tsinghua University has released a $15 trillion USD, 30-year road map that calls for ending the use of coal for electricity generation around 2050, dramatically increasing nuclear and renewable power generation, and relying on electricity for 80% of China's energy consumption by 2060.
Coal is a big challenge, and a big opportunity. In 2019, coal accounted for about 58% of China's total energy consumption and 66% of its electricity generation; in coal-producing regions, coal is also used to heat buildings. Recent advances in renewable energy have made replacing coal easier than cutting oil use in transportation and emissions from farm fields and livestock. Lauri Myllyvirta -- an air pollution analyst at the Center For Research On Energy & Clean Air in Helsinki -- says: "The power sector is the part of the energy system where zero emission technologies are the most mature and economically competitive." Zero-carbon electricity could make charging electric vehicles cleaner and supplant coal for heating.
However, coal has a lot of momentum. A study by Myllyvirta and colleagues found that China's coal-fired generating capacity grew by about 40 gigawatts (GW) in 2019, to about 1050 GW; another 100 GW is under construction, and coal interests are lobbying for even more plants. The study pointed out that the rush to build is in spite of the fact that there is considerable overcapacity in the sector, with plants running at less than 50% of capacity and many coal-power companies losing money. The race to build coal plants is due to confused incentives, and a desire to create construction jobs; many of the plants will be little used, and may end up being written off.
A related challenge is the need to reform the electricity market. Li Shuo, a climate policy adviser to Greenpeace China, says that renewable energy is increasingly cost competitive with coal -- but regulators allocate operational time among electricity plants to match generation to demand, with little consideration of economic or environmental implications. Li says the system is rigged in favor of coal, partly because it doesn't suffer from the variability of wind and solar power.
Expanding nuclear power presents challenges as well. The 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in Japan raised fears among Chinese citizens of nuclear accidents, with the result of piling up safety measures that made new plants more expensive. China has 48 nuclear power reactors in operation and 12 under construction, according to the World Nuclear Association.
China's Five-Year Plan for 2021:25, now being drafted, may articulate measures to help realize Xi's ambitious target. Zhang Junjie -- an environmental economist at Duke Kunshan University -- says: "China's interest in climate change has waned in recent years, due to the slowing down of economic growth and the US withdrawal from the Paris Agreement. The commitment on carbon neutrality reignited hopes for China's climate action."
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* THE COVID-19 MENACE (17): Monoclonal antibodies are not a perfect cure for COVID-19. For one thing, they are relatively hard to make and administer; they have to be given by intravenous drip or injected, and they have traditionally been high-cost -- niche medicines available mainly in wealthy countries. Although MABs to treat cancer and autoimmune diseases are a booming business, few to treat infectious diseases have come to market so far. One prevents respiratory syncytial virus in infants; two prevent and treat anthrax; and another helps HIV-infected people who haven't responded well to standard drugs.
However, Regeneron's monoclonal cocktail to treat Ebola suggests the power of the approach, having demonstrated its value in a study conducted in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) in 2019. Similarly, a single monoclonal antibody developed by an NIAID team that included John Mascola proved effective against Ebola virus in the same DRC study. No other treatments, including drugs and convalescent plasma, had worked against Ebola.
In addition, MABs are getting easier to manufacture. James Crowe says: "In the past, fully human antibodies were difficult to isolate and expensive to produce." Not so much any more, Crowe saying: "In the next five years, antibodies will become the principal tool used as a medical countermeasure in the event of an epidemic."
Hunting down MABs that can do the job is time-consuming. It usually takes several weeks before an infected person's B cells begin to pump out neuts. To work as fast as possible, Crowe's team -- one of four funded by the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to find monoclonals for emerging infectious threats -- sought out the first people in the United States to have confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infections, including Dr. X.
The team isolated antibody-producing B cells from the volunteers, then used the spike protein, tagged with a magnetic bead, as bait for the tiny percentage that produce neuts against SARS-CoV-2. When they initially bled Dr. X, about six weeks after she became infected, those special B cells were only faintly detectable. En route to the airport on a Sunday morning to fly home from Nashville, Dr. X stopped in the lab for yet another bleed, and they finally hit the jackpot.
A second DARPA-funded group, Canada's AbCellera Biologics, uses a version of spike that Mascola and co-workers carefully engineered as neut bait. To isolate single B cells, the AbCellera group places copies of the spike in 200,000 fluid-filled chambers in a device the size of a credit card. From the blood of an early US COVID-19 case in Seattle who had severe disease, AbCellera initially found 500 candidate antibodies against spike. The company sifted them down to 24 leads, selecting those that retain their shape when mass-produced and stick longest to the viral protein -- antibodies don't lock onto their targets, they bounce on and off of them.
Regeneron has also bled recovered COVID-19 patients, but is using an alternative approach as well: injecting spike protein into mice engineered with human genes for antibody production. From a pool of human- and mouse-derived antibodies, the company plans to select two that neutralize a broad range of SARS-CoV-2 variants, seeking a pair of antibodies that bind to non-overlapping sites on the spike as well. The cocktail of four MABs is intended to provide insurance against mutant strains of SARS-CoV-2 that resist treatment.
Christos Kyratsous, vice president of research at Regeneron, says that that while Regeneron developed a three-antibody cocktail for Ebola, the company is only after two for the COVID-19 cocktail. The more antibodies, the harder it is to synthesize the cocktail, and the more it costs. Besides, the targeted region of the spike -- the "receptor-binding domain (RBD)", near the tip -- is so small that a third antibody might be wasted, Kyratsous saying that it "can accommodate about two antibodies independently of each other." [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (123): The struggle between Nixon and the Watergate investigation continued -- to take a dramatic turn on 23 October 1973, when Nixon told the Justice Department to fire Cox. AG Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus both resigned instead -- but Robert Bork, the next-in-line at the Justice Department, went ahead and fired Cox. The "Saturday Night Massacre" raised an uproar. On 30 October, the House Judiciary Committee began consideration of impeachment procedures; on the following day, Leon Jaworski was named as Cox's replacement.
Firing Cox hadn't helped Nixon at all, and a few weeks later, he surrendered the tapes that had been requested. One turned out to have a substantial gap; Nixon's personal secretary said she had accidentally wiped the section, a claim that wasn't believed. The pressure on Nixon cranked up, with the president famously telling the press: "I am not a crook."
By early 1974, the ring was closing in on Nixon:
The tapes revealed that Nixon had learned about the Watergate break-in immediately, and had authorized cover-up efforts. On 7 August, he met with Republican Congressional leaders in the White House, who told him that he was certain to be impeached.
On 8 August, Nixon announced his intention to resign, accepting no blame in the matter. He resigned the next day, famously getting onto the airliner taking him away with a double "V for victory" sign. Gerry Ford became president, announcing to the public: "My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over." Nixon, to date, is the only US president to have resigned.
Nixon remains an ambiguous figure -- brilliant and competent in some respects, malign and corrupt in others. He was rehabilitated to a limited extent after his presidency, becoming a "senior statesman" of sorts, and to a degree confessing his errors. When he died in 1994, a cartoon showed Nixon at the Pearly Gates, with his double "V for victory" sign -- with Saint Peter confronting two fat files labeled "GOOD DICK" and "BAD DICK", and telling an angelic aide: "Cancel my appointments. This one may take a while." [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* Space launches for September included:
-- 02 SEP 20 / VEGA SSMS POC -- A Vega booster was launched from Kourou in French Guiana at 0151 UTC (previous day local time + 3) "Small Spacecraft Mission Service (SSMS) Proof of Concept (POC)" mission to carry a set of smallsats for commercial and institutional customers. SSMS is a multi-smallsat dispenser system; it carried 53 satellites from 21 customers in 13 countries.
According to Giorgio Tumino, ESA's Vega and Space Rider program manager: "The lower section is hexagonal and can hold six nanosatellites or up to a dozen CubeSat deployers. The upper section is used for microsatellites, minisatellites and small satellites. The lower section can also be used independently, coupled with a larger satellite replacing the top section." The satellites included seven microsats:
CubeSat payloads included:
-- 03 SEP 20 / STARLINK 11 -- A SpaceX Falcon 9 booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 1246 UTC (local time + 4) to put 60 SpaceX "Starlink" low-Earth-orbit broadband comsats into orbit. The satellites were built by SpaceX in Redmond WA, each having a launch mass of about 225 kilograms (500 pounds); channel capacity is about 100 megabits per second. This was the 12th Starlink batch launch, towards a planned total of 1,440 satellites in the constellation. The Falcon 9 first stage performed a soft landing on the SpaceX drone barge in the Atlantic.
-- 06 SEP 20 / CHINESE SECRET PAYLOAD -- A Long March 2F booster was launched from Jiuquan to put an unspecified satellite into orbit. No details were announced. It was clearly a secret military payload, possibly a recoverable spaceplane.
-- 07 SEP 20 / GAOFEN 11-02 -- A Long March 2B booster was launched from Taiyuan at 00557 UTC (local time - 8) to put the "Gaofen (High Resolution) 11-02" 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. The flight may have also carried two smallsats.
-- 12 SEP 20 / TEST FLIGHT (FAILURE): A commercial small satellite launch vehicle developed by Astra made its first orbital launch attempt at 0319 UTC (previous day local time - 6) from the Pacific Spaceport Complex on Kodiak Island, Alaska. There were no payloads on the booster. The booster did not make orbit.
-- 12 SEP 19 / JILIN 1 GAOFEN 02A (FAILURE) -- A Chinese Kuaizhou 1A booster was launched from Jiuquan at 0502 UTC (local time - 8) to put the "Jilin 1 Gaofen 02A" commercial Earth observation satellite into orbit for the Chang Guang Satellite Technology CO LTD, a commercial spinoff of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The booster did not make orbit.
-- 15 SEP 20 / JILIN 1 GAOFEN 03 x 9: -- A Long March 11 booster was launched from a sea platform in the Yellow Sea at 0123 UTC (local time - 8) to put nine "Jilin 1 Gaofen 03" Earth observation satellites into orbit. Each weighed about 40 kilograms (88 pounds). They included six "03B" satellites, with a "push-broom" scanner featuring 1-meter resolution, and three "03C" satellites, with a video imager featuring a resolution of 1.2 meters (3.9 feet), covering an area of about 14.4 kilometers (8.9 miles) by 6 kilometers (3.7 miles). Two of the video satellites were sponsored by CCTV, China’s state-run television network, and the other by Chinese video streaming platform Bilibili, the intent being to use imagery of Earth in media content and popular science videos.
-- 21 SEP 20 / HAIYANG 2C -- A Long March 2C booster was launched from Jiuquan at 0540 UTC (local time - 8) to put the "Haiyang (Ocean) 2C" ocean-observation satellite into orbit. Built by the China Academy of Space Technology, the Haiyang 2C satellite carried a radar altimeter and microwave scatterometer to measure the height of waves and monitor maritime wind field. The spacecraft also carried an AIS payload to track ships, and a data collection system to relay measurements from ocean buoys to forecast centers and other users.
The Haiyang satellite series is named for the Chinese word for “ocean.” China operates two families of Haiyang satellites -- the Haiyang 1-series and Haiyang 2-series -- that carry different sets of oceanography instruments. The latest member of the Haiyang 1 family, Haiyang 1D, was launched in June 2020 with imaging sensors to measure ocean color. The Long March first stage had grid fins to help control its impact location.
-- 27 SEP 20 / HUANJIN 2A & 2B -- A Long March 4B booster was launched from Taiyuan at 0323 UTC (local time - 8) to put the "Huanjing 2A (HJ2A)" and "Huanjing 2B (HJ2B)" Earth observation satellites into orbit.
Developed by the China Academy of Space Technology (CAST), the two new satellites replaced the Huanjing 1A and Huanjing 1B satellites, launched in 2008, to perform Earth resource monitoring. Both satellites were 16-meter optical satellites with high mobility, precision control, and stability, as well as strong load adaptability and long lifespans. HJ2A and HJ2B had the same instrument suite, being upgraded versions of the original HJ-1 instruments, with the addition of an atmospheric correction instrument. The satellites were based on the CAST 2000 bus.
-- 28 SEP 20 / GONETS M x 3 -- A Soyuz 2-1b booster was launched from Plesetsk Northern Cosmodrome in Russia at 1120 UTC (local time - 4) to put three "Gonets (Messenger) M" store-&-forward civil communications satellites into orbit. Each of the 280-kilogram (617-pound) Gonets M satellites was built by ISS Reshetnev, and had a five-year design life; the payloads were designated Gonets M satellites Number 17 through 19.
Gonets is a civilian program, operated by JSC Satellite System GONETS, a company in which the Russian Federal Space Agency, Roskosmos, owns a 51% stake. Gonets M satellites share a common design with the military Rodnik communications satellites and are used for store-and-dump operations where data is uploaded to a satellite, stored in its memory, and later downlinked to another user. Gonets M is the second generation of the Gonets system, earlier Gonets satellites were derived from Strela 3 satellites, and launched aboard Tsyklon 3 boosters between 1992 and 2001. The first prototype Gonets M was launched aboard a Kosmos 3M rocket in 2005, alongside an analogous Rodnik satellite.
There was a set of rideshare payloads, including:
* LIVING OFF CO2: The Escherica coli bacterium, which is a normal inhabitant of the human colon, is a popular "lab rat" for genetic modification. As discussed by an article from NATURE.com ("E. coli Bacteria Engineered To Eat Carbon Dioxide" by Ewen Callaway, 27 November 2019), a research team has modified E. coli to live off carbon dioxide, instead of sugars or other organic molecules. The experiment is a milestone, a drastic alteration of E. coli's biochemistry. It could potentially lead to using E. coli to produce biofuels or sequester CO2 from the atmosphere.
Plants and photosynthetic cyanobacteria -- which are aquatic microbes that produce oxygen -- use the energy from light to transform, or "fix", CO2 into the carbon-based biomolecules such as DNA, proteins, and fats. However, these organisms can be hard to genetically modify, which has hindered efforts to turn them into biological factories. In contrast, E. coli is easy to modify -- and grows fast, resulting in quick test cycles.
Normally, E. coli lives on glucose and emits CO2 as a waste gas. Ron Milo, a systems biologist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, and his team have spent the past decade rejiggering E. coli's lifestyle. In 2016, they came up with a strain that consumed carbon dioxide, but CO2 was only a fraction of the organism's carbon intake -- the rest being an organic compound named pyruvate that the bacteria were fed.
It was a start. Working back and forth between genetic engineering and lab evolution, they have now developed a strain of E. coli that gets all its carbon from CO2. First, they gave the bacterium genes that encode a pair of enzymes that allow photosynthetic organisms to convert CO2 into organic carbon. Instead of using photosynthesis to obtain energy, they inserted a gene that allows the bacterium to get energy from an organic molecule called formate.
That still wasn't enough to get the bacterium to live without glucose, so the researchers cultured successive generations of the modified E. coli for a year, giving them only tiny quantities of sugar, and CO2 at concentrations about 250 times those in Earth's atmosphere. The idea was that the bacteria would evolve to adapt to this new diet. After about 200 days, the first bacteria capable of using CO2 as their only carbon source emerged; after 300 days, these bacteria grew faster under the lab conditions than did those that didn't consume CO2.
According to Milo, these "autotrophic" E. coli strains can still grow on glucose, and indeed find it a more efficient energy source. Also, they grow slowly, doubling in number in 18 hours, compared to 20 minutes for normal E. coli. They have to be grown in an atmosphere of 10% CO2, being unable to get by without glucose at atmospheric concentrations of 0.04%. The researchers are now trying to get the bacteria to grow faster, and live on lower levels of CO2. They are also trying to understand how E. coli evolved to consume CO2: it seems about 11 genes are involved, though it's not clear how just yet.
E. coli is used to make synthetic versions of useful chemicals such as insulin and human growth hormone. Milo says that his team's work could expand the products the bacteria can make, to include renewable fuels, food and other substances. But he doesn't see this happening soon -- it's a proof-of-concept, and it remains to be seen if anything can be made of it.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* VERTICAL VIDEO: The smartphone has brought computing power and information access to the entire world, bringing cultural changes along with it. As discussed by an article from NEWATLAS.com ("The Ups And Downs Of Vertical Cinema" by Rich Haridy, 01 September 2020), one facet is that it has suggested a different way of making videos.
We are traditionally used to videos that are displayed in formats that are wider than they are tall -- the wider the better, it would seem, HDTV standardizing on a 16:9 aspect ratio. The smartphone, however, is taller than it is wide. To be sure, we can turn it on its side and watch wide-screen videos, but why not embrace the smartphone's tall screen? About a decade ago, "vertical video (VV)" enthusiasts started tinkering with the idea, with mixed reactions from viewers. The VV advocates persisted -- and now they have a streaming platform dedicated to VV, and even movies in production in a VV format. Have they won? Or is VV just a niche phenomenon?
Is there anything sacred about the wide screen? Or is it just what we're conditioned to want? When Thomas Edison's, laboratory was developing moving picture systems in the late 19th century, the developers settled on Kodak film with a 4:3 aspect ratio. In still photography, pictures could be taken with the tall axis vertical or horizontal; Edison's people chose to use the film horizontally.
There is a long-standing claim that the human visual system finds a wide aspect ratio more comfortable, but there are skeptics who counter-claim that we're just used to the wide screen. We have books in wide formats, but they're not all that popular. We have long experience in making films for the wide screen, and exploit its virtues; if we had tall screens all along, we would have devised other approaches more suited to it. In any case, the long-term drive in video has traditionally been towards ever wider aspect ratios, leaving anything taller than the 1:1 aspect ratio unknown territory.
The smartphone pushed into that territory, with VV gradually catching on in the 2010s. Apps such as Facebook and Instagram adapted to the way people mostly use their smartphones. The first step was embracing square 1:1 imagery, and then apps such as Snapchat and TikTok came along, normalizing vertical videos in the eyes of millions of people. A 2017 survey found 72 percent of millennials do not rotate their phones to watch videos horizontally, even if the video is produced in a horizontal format.
In 2019, An Australian team of content creators came up with a seven-part VV-TV series named "Content", concerning a single-minded millennial out to find fame. The series rotates around the character's own smartphone. The idea of a narrative centered on traffic through a computing is not so new, the concept being called "ScreenLife" --- with its best-known example being a 2014 horror film named "Unfriended", which takes place entirely within the frame of a high school student's Mac laptop screen.
OK, but do such examples show VV to be anything more than a cute gimmick? Some experiments suggest that it might accomplish more. In 2020 Apple released a short film from award-winning filmmaker Damien Chapelle, titled "The Stunt Double" -- mostly as a promotional ad for the iPhone 11, but it won a lot of favorable attention. The nine-minute film is essentially a charming replay of iconic moments from the past century of cinema, but all reframed from a vertical perspective. The film plays to the strengths of the vertical frame, drawing the eye up and down the image using a variety of clever composition techniques.
"The Stunt Double" is intriguing on a smartphone, but on a regular TV, it just looks weird. Vertical does not play well in a horizontal environment. That leads to the question: do we take smartphones as a viable viewing environment in their own right?
Jeffrey Katzenberg thought so. He led Disney Studios through a transformative period in the 1980s and 90s, to then co-found DreamWorks Pictures with Steven Spielberg, He saw the trend for smartphone viewing dramatically grow over the past decade and jumped in. In 2018 he founded Quibi, intended to be an entirely new kind of streaming platform.
Quibi, short for "Quick Bites", was intended to be something like Netflix, but just for streaming entertainment on mobile devices. Aimed at younger audiences, all the content produced for Quibi was developed in brief 10-minute episodes, to be played either horizontally or vertically, only on tablets or smartphones. Katzenberg raised big bucks to get Quibi started and got a lot of big Hollywood names to jump in. It launched in April 2020 with a big blast of interest ... but by July, it had gone flat. [ED: It was then shut down in December.]
New technologies tend to come in with a splash of excitement, to be followed by disappointment, and then slow growth from there. Quibi is not dead yet, with new content still being generation, and there is other action in vertical video. In early 2020, Russian filmmaker Timur Bekmambetov began filming an ambitious World War 2 blockbuster called "V2: Escape From Hell". Bekmambetov has experience in ScreenLife projects, including an original Snapchat series in 2019 named "Dead of Night", telling a zombie story using the same smartphone screen perspective as "Content".
Bekmambetov hopes to release "V2" in 2021, it seems in both a widescreen format for cinemas and a VV format for smartphones. VV has only really been around for a decade or so; give it another decade, it may well amount to something -- or it may just prove to really be a gimmick.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* THE COVID-19 MENACE (16): As discussed by an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("The Race Is On For Antibodies That Stop The New Coronavirus" by Jon Cohen, 5 May 2020), one of the first people to be diagnosed with COVID-19 in the USA was left with a memento of her experience that would prove very important: the antibodies in her blood.
The woman, a researcher only known as "Dr.X", went to Beijing early in 2020 to celebrate the Lunar New Year with her elderly parents and extended family. By the time she was ready to go home, her father and brother had developed a fever. Worried, she wore a mask and made heavy use of disinfectants on the way back home. After her return, she developed mild symptoms of COVID-19, to soon recover. All seven family members who had attended the New Years celebration had been infected by SARS-CoV-2, with her brother and father being hospitalized. Her father went on a ventilator, and then died.
Dr.X knew that in China, plasma from recovered people, which contains antibodies to the virus, was showing promise as a treatment. Convalescent plasma is an old trick, generally safe and often effective. On discussing the matter with her doctor, her doctor told her about a project -- a collaboration between Vanderbilt University and AstraZeneca, led by one James Crowe -- to develop something safer and more effective.
Convalescent plasma is hit-or-miss, indiscriminately administering antibodies whether they are particularly useful or not. The collaboration's goal is to identify antibodies that specifically neutralize the infectivity of SARS-CoV-2 by binding to the "spike protein" that allows it to enter human cells. Once one neutralizing antibodies have been identified, antibody-producing B cells can be engineered to generate them in quantity. These "monoclonal antibodies (MAB)" could treat or prevent COVID-19.
Dozens of other research teams are working to identify or engineer MABs against SARS-CoV-2. Unlike the many repurposed drugs now being tested in COVID-19 patients, including the modestly effective remdesivir, the MABs specifically target SARS-CoV-2. While some groups are searching fore neutralizing antibodies ("neuts", as they are called) from the blood of survivors like Dr.X, others are trying to produce a neut in mice by injecting them with the spike protein. Still others aim to re-engineer an existing antibody, or produce one directly from DNA sequences.
Most of the researchers involved are optimistic that antibodies will quickly -- by the standards of drug development -- prove their worth as a remedy or preventive that buys the world time until a vaccine is available. Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, which developed a cocktail of three monoclonal antibodies that worked against the Ebola virus -- a notoriously difficult disease to treat -- was one of the first to get a MABs treatment into clinical trials.
Immunologist Erica Ollmann Saphire -- of the La Jolla Institute for Immunology in San Diego CA, who leads an effort to coordinate and evaluate the many candidates -- says that many questions must be answered: "We need a sense of the landscape: What are the most effective antibodies against this virus? If we need a cocktail of two, what is the most effective combination? And you might want a very different kind of antibody to prevent infection versus treating an established one."
John Mascola, an immunologist at the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), adds that antibodies may also have non-neutralizing, immune-boosting properties. He says: "The field doesn't know very much about protective immunity to SARS-CoV-2. So there's a little bit of scientific guesswork here." [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (122): With the 1972 election coming up, Nixon and Ehrlichman established the "White House Special Investigations Unit" -- AKA the "Plumbers", since they were supposed to stop leaks. They had a particular grudge against Daniel Ellsberg, who had leaked the Pentagon Papers. The gang, which is what it was, broke into the office of Ellsberg's psychiatrist to see if they could scrape up dirt on him. More visibly, Nixon's re-election campaign, instead of relying on the Republican National Committee, set up a "Committee for the Re-Election of the President" -- "CRP", sometimes rendered "CREEP" -- run by Nixon loyalists. The Plumbers became an arm of the CRP, spying on Democrats.
During the 1972 Democratic primaries, the CRP engaged in dirty tricks in support of the Nixon campaign. In July 1972, the CRP went so far as to break into the Democratic National Committee's (DNC) headquarters at the Watergate complex in Washington DC. They were caught by an alert night watchman and arrested. The burglars were indicted, but a gag order was issued by the court to keep the matter quiet until after the election.
Nixon remained favored to defeat McGovern in the polls through 1972, with the president pushing on economic prosperity and an end to the war in Vietnam. On election day, Nixon comfortably beat McGovern in the popular vote, and slaughtered him in the electoral vote -- 520 to 17. Unfortunately for Nixon, the Democrats retained control of both houses of Congress.
The Watergate burglars were all convicted in January 1973, without implicating the White House. It does not appear that Nixon ordered the break-in, and it seems he became angry when informed of it: not only was it a bungle, all the more so because there was nothing much to be gained by it, the DNC being largely a party administrative service that didn't otherwise carry a lot of weight. Nonetheless, Nixon directed the cover-up, with him and Haldeman leaning on the FBI not to dig into the matter. White House Counsel John Deane promised the burglars hush money and executive clemency if they didn't talk.
Nonetheless, from early 1973, Congress began to follow the dirt the Nixon presidential campaign had left behind it, with trouble for Nixon then piling up. With the encouragement of Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield, Senator Sam Ervin of North Carolina set up the "Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities" to probe Watergate. The "Watergate hearings" were televised, being widely watched, with the committee gradually revealing misconduct by administration officials. Journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein also helped probe the scandal, publishing a best-seller titled ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN in June 1974. Nixon's approval ratings plunged. Nixon denounced the hearings as a "partisan witch hunt", but a number of Republican senators joined in on the investigation.
Nixon decided to clean house, dismissing Haldeman, Erlichman, and Attorney General Richard Kleindienst in April 1973. He replaced Kleindienst with Elliot Richardson -- who, with Nixon's permission, appointed Archibald Cox as an independent special prosecutor to investigate the Watergate scandal. John Deane, unnerved by Nixon's actions and worrying that he'd be thrown to the wolves, began singing like a canary to Watergate investigators.
In July, the Watergate investigators found out that Nixon had a secret taping system to record his conversations and calls in the Oval Office. Both Cox and the Senate Watergate Committee asked Nixon to surrender a subset of the tapes. Nixon refused, citing executive privilege and national security concerns. In the meantime, Vice President Agnew had been the subject of corruption investigations on his conduct as governor of Maryland; he resigned in early October. Under the 25th Amendment, Nixon had the right to select a new vice president; he chose Gerald Ford, a prominent and highly respected Republican member of the House of Representatives. Ford was easily confirmed as vice president by Congress, and took office in early December. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* GIMMICKS & GADGETS: Amazon.com made a big splash with its automated "Amazon Go" convenience store concept, discussed here in 2018. As discussed by an article from GIZMODO.com ("Amazon's Next Big Bet on Cashless Shopping Is a Smart Grocery Cart" by Sam Rutherford, 14 July 2020), Amazon hasn't stopped there, having developed a smart shopping cart named the "Dash Cart".
The idea is to automate old grocery stores, without having to rewire them with arrays of cameras. The Dash Cart has sensors and cameras built to track items as they are loaded into the cart. The customer then just pushes the cart through a designated Dash Cart lane to check out. The Dash Cart validates customers by using an onboard QR code reader that allows them to sign in to their Amazon account with their phones. A small built-in screen allows customers to check their Alexa Shopping List, and view an updated subtotal alongside a list of items in the cart.
The Dash Cart has an integrated scale to weigh fruit or veggies that don't have an easily scannable barcode. A customer punches in a product code for a particular item and places in the cart, which weighs it and displays the weigh and the charge. The only serious limitation of the cart is its small capacity, since it can only carry about two grocery bags of product. There is also the question of the technical overhead of operating a store with smart carts. The Dash Cart will be officially introduced at the Amazon's new Woodland Hills location in California, expected to open before the end of 2020. We'll see how it works in practice.
* As discussed by an article from BLOOMBERG.com ("From Lethal Viruses To Insect Sex, Farmers Use Bugs To Kill Bugs" by Agnieszka de Sousa, 16 January 2020), for decades, farmers have used pesticides to kill crop pests. However, there has been a growing realization that pesticides are too indiscriminate and counterproductive: for example, they can kill ladybug beetles that devour aphids, a significant crop pest.
Adam Baldwin -- a fifth-generation farmer in McPherson County, Kansas -- decided to try a different approach, using a lab-grown virus to kill caterpillars that eat his crops. He says: "It's very specific to the one insect, a safe product. It killed what we were going after, but it didn't kill what we weren't."
Baldwin uses Heligen, a natural virus obtained from infected caterpillars, with the virus sprayed on crops at the first sign of infestation. Once infected, the caterpillars will not only die, but then liquefy and spread vast numbers of viruses to other caterpillars. Heligen is one of a growing number of tools that provide natural protection for crops, ranging from bacteria to insect sex pheromones to substances derived from spider venom. It is estimated that global sales of such products will double to $10 billion USD annually by 2025. That's only about a sixth of what farmers will spend on crop treatments in 2020, but biopesticides are a growth field, with new startups arising rapidly.
Big agrotech players are watching carefully. The venture capital unit of BASF SE has invested in Provivi INC, which sells pheromones that disrupt mating by making it harder for insects to find one another. Bayer AG -- which is working on technologies based on microbes that can protect plants from diseases and pests, as well as help them better absorb nutrients -- is similarly teaming with Joyn Bio LLC to explore probiotics, beneficial bacteria that can improve crop yields and reduce chemical fertilizers.
It is believed that pests, fungi, and weeds reduce crop yields by as much as 40% globally, with losses of $1.4 trillion USD a year. The problem is getting worse as many pests acquire resistance to traditional pesticides, leading to a vicious cycle of more application of pesticides that have troublesome or potentially troublesome side effects. Advocates of biopesticides say they are safer because they are species-selective, and they're likely to be permitted under regulations governing organic produce, allowing farmers who use them to sell their harvests at a premium.
Several hundred companies sell biopesticides, using a range of approaches:
Obstacles remain. They can be more expensive than traditional pesticides, and they often require fussier handling. They have to be applied in a relatively narrow time window; since they contain living organisms such as viruses, fungi, or bacteria, they often need refrigeration -- which is a problem for developing countries. And while the USA has simplified licensing, many other countries regulate them like traditional products, which means approval can take years. Nonetheless, the growth curve for biologicals is headed up.
* According to an article from CNN.com ("Mumbai Tests Traffic Lights That Stay Red If You Honk Your Horn" by Rory Sullivan & Esha Mitra, 5 February 2020), smart traffic lights are a coming thing. India, where drivers are known to make generous use of their horns, has devised smart traffic lights that retaliate against noisy drivers.
In late 2019, police in Mumbai -- ranked as the 4th-most-congested city in the world -- wired up the lights at select intersections with decibel meters; if the noise level gets too high, the light stays red. The trial was only done for certain intervals of the day to see if the scheme works. Given encouraging results, the authorities plan a bigger trial, as a step towards general adopted of the noise-gated traffic lights.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* RITE AID & FACE RECOGNITION (2): Among the face-recognition systems used at Rite Aid stores was one from DeepCam LLC, which worked with a firm in China whose largest outside investor is a Chinese government fund. Security specialists worry that information gathered by a China-linked company could ultimately end up in that government's hands, helping Beijing refine its facial recognition technology globally and monitor people in ways that violate American standards of privacy.
In interviews, ten current and former Rite Aid loss prevention agents told REUTERS that the system they initially used in stores was from a company named FaceFirst. All tend said the system was prone to regular false positive matches. One said: "It doesn't pick up black people well. If your eyes are the same way, or if you're wearing your headband like another person is wearing a headband, you're going to get a hit."
At one store Reuters visited, a security agent scrolled through FaceFirst "alerts" showing a number of cases in which faces were obviously mismatched, including a Black man mixed up with someone who was Asian. Early in 2018, Rite Aid began installing technology from DeepCam LLC, ultimately phasing out FaceFirst in stores around the country, Six security staffers who used both systems said DeepCam's matches were more accurate, sometimes to a fault. The technology picked up faces from ads on buses or pictures on T-shirts, three said. One famous face captured in DeepCam was Marilyn Monroe's.
The FaceFirst technology that Rite Aid had used was based on an older method of biometric identification that compared maps of subjects' faces. DeepCam's is based on artificial intelligence (AI) deep learning -- being trained by given many images of faces and told which are supposed to match. The more faces the system is given, the better the matching.
DeepCam cameras photographed and took live video of every person entering a Rite Aid store, aiming to create a unique facial profile, Rite Aid agents said. If the customer walked in front of another DeepCam facial recognition camera at a Rite Aid shop, new images were added to the person's existing profile. Two agents said they couldn't access to the images after 10 days unless the person ended up on a watch list based on their behavior in stores.
When agents saw someone commit a crime -- or just do something suspicious, one said -- they scrolled through profiles on their smartphone to search for the individual, only adding the person to the watch list with a manager's approval. The next time the shopper walked into a Rite Aid that had the technology, agents received a phone alert and checked the match for accuracy. Then they could order the person to leave. Rite Aid said adding customers to the watch list was based on "multiple layers of meaningful human review."
The two founding owners of US-based DeepCam LLC were Don Knasel and Liu Jingfeng, who set up the firm in Longmont, Colorado, in 2017. Liu's residential address in Longmont was listed as its headquarters. A Chinese native with US citizenship and a doctorate from Carnegie Mellon University -- a well-known center of AI research. Liu is chairman of another facial recognition firm in China named Shenzhen Shenmu Information Technology CO LTD. Shenzhen Shenmu's largest outside investor, holding about 20% of its registered capital, is a strategic fund set up by the government of China.
DeepCam LLC and Shenzhen Shenmu were, at one time, closely connected: in addition to Liu's role in both companies, they shared the same website and email accounts. The two firms became more clearly separate after a 2018 agreement. Both Liu and Knasel now say no ties exist between the US and Chinese businesses, Liu telling REUTERS in an email: "We never do any business in USA. We focus in China market."
Clearly, the agreement was in response to the Trump Administration's hardline attitude towards Chinese firms operating in the USA. In 2019, the US government blacklisted several Chinese companies -- including Hikvision, one of the biggest surveillance camera manufacturers globally -- alleging involvement in human rights abuses. China has deployed facial recognition cameras widely within its borders, providing a level of monitoring appalling to many Americans.
It seems unlikely the Chinese government has any interest in data acquired by cameras from Rite Aid stores; but the connection is unsettling, and also suggests that facial-recognition technology remains controversial. We haven't seen the last of it, and the laws have yet to catch up to it. [END OF SERIES]
START | PREV | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* RENEWABLES MEAN JOBS: The theme that renewable energy is a coming thing has been played here repeatedly. An article from REUTERS.com ("As Fossil Fuel Jobs Falter, Renewables Come To The Rescue" by Jeff Berardelli, 25 September 2020) expanded on the theme, showing the growth in jobs in renewable energy.
In 2011, Don Williams came to North Dakota from Michigan to cash on the Bakken oil boom. He worked long hours in the oil fields and hauled in the pay. In May 2020, however, the money pipeline dried, when Williams and most of his co-workers were laid off. The oil boom had gone bust. Within a week, however, he was at work in a new environment -- 90 meters (300 feet) off the ground, starting a 12-week course in how to be a wind-turbine technician.
Williams was mechanically adept from his oil work and not particularly scared of heights, so the transition has not been troublesome. He didn't want to "ride the oil waves, the highs and lows" any more. The oil industry has more challenges than just climate change: it is unstable, prone to dislocations from international competition and economic shifts. 2020 started out with a price war between Russia and Saudi Arabia, which unbalanced the industry; the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic all but knocked it over. From June 2019 through June 2020, US crude oil production fell 38%, and natural gas production fell 31%. The unemployment rate in North Dakota rose to 11.3% in June 2020, and has continued to be high -- with unemployment heavily linked to the mining, quarrying, and oil & gas extraction sectors.
Fortunately, the empty lands of North Dakota are rich in wind energy. The average wind speed at the height of a wind turbine is 32 KPH (20 MPH). It ranks tenth in wind production among the states of the USA, with more than 3 gigawatts (GW) of installed capacity. Williams got his technician training at Lake Region State College, a few hours' drive east from the Bakken oil fields.
The one-year course cost him $5,000 USD; he got a job with Gemini Energy Services less than a month after getting his technician certificate. The starting salary was unimpressive, compared to what he had been getting in the oil fields -- but the work is more regular, not demanding long workdays and offering stable employment. He can spend a lot more time with his family, while the boom in the wind industry gives him expanding career options.
According to Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF), combined solar and wind power capacity has quadrupled since 2010. During that time, installed wind capacity has increased by 260%, from 41 gigawatts to 106; BNEF projects wind power capacity to expand by 60 gigawatts in the next five years. BNEF says the cost of generating power from solar photovoltaic (PV) modules has fallen by 90% since 2010, while the price of wind power has been cut in half. In fact, the prices of onshore wind and solar are now even with gas and cheaper than coal and nuclear.
Professor Jeffrey Sachs -- a well-known economist and sustainable development expert at Columbia University in New York City -- says clean energy now has an edge over fossil fuels:
BEGIN QUOTE:
Renewable energy now is at what is called "grid parity". That means it is no more expensive to put up a solar field than it is to put up a coal plant. The only difference is the coal plant will pollute the air, kill the people nearby and create incredible climate damage, while the solar will enable clean air and a safe and stable environment and actually put a lot more people to work.
END QUOTE
Currently, renewable energy employs about 850,000 people in the USA -- not including some 2.3 million jobs in energy efficiency -- as compared to a little more than 1 million in traditional oil, gas and coal. Most of the future job growth is projected to come from clean energy sources. The fastest growing occupation in the USA, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, is wind turbine service technician, with a median salary of about $53,000 USD per year. In total, the US wind industry employs 120,000 workers. Solar installer is the third fastest growing occupation on the list, with a median salary of almost $45,000 USD.
A recent poll conducted by Yale and George Mason University found that a large majority of registered voters in the USA believe combating climate change would be good for the economy. About 7 in 10 people surveyed expressed the view that government action on climate change would bolster renewable energy, create jobs, and help the economy. Only about one-third thought government action on climate would impose burdensome regulations, weakening the economy and job creation.
Political resistance to renewable energy on the Right has been declining. The stereotypically Red state of Texas is the clear leader in wind energy, generating three times as much as California, its nearest competitor -- though California is far ahead of Texas on solar power. Sachs sees that Republican-leaning states have much to gain from the surge in renewables. "They could be the leaders in building the new green economy. This is exactly a heartland issue for the United States."
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* THE COVID-19 MENACE (15): As discussed by an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("Can Plasma From COVID-19 Survivors Help Save Others?" by Kai Kupferschmidt, 27 May 2020), the abrupt onslaught of the COVID-19 pandemic left doctors scrambling to find tools to fight the virus.
In mid-March, Arturo Casadevall -- an infectious disease specialist at Johns Hopkins University -- and Lise-Anne Pirofski -- of Albert Einstein College of Medicine -- published a research paper that suggested an important treatment was already at hand: the blood plasma of people who have recovered from the disease, loaded with antibodies against the virus. "Convalescent plasma" has been used for a century, is known to be generally safe, while the infrastructure for collecting and administering plasma is already in place. Since then, tens of thousands of patients have been given convalescent plasma. Early studies hint that it is effective, but at last notice, large-scale randomized clinical trials (RCT) were still underway.
Blood or plasma from recovered patients has been used as a therapy since at least the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918. It seems randomized trials weren't performed, but reports suggest it helped. It has also been used to treat measles, SARS, and obscure diseases such as Argentine hemorrhagic fever. In a 1970s study of 188 patients with that disease, only 1% of plasma recipients died, as opposed to 16.5% in a control group. Casadevall says: "I think that it has a high likelihood [of working] based on history."
Marylyn Addo -- an infectious disease specialist at the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf -- replies that convalescent plasma is not a sure thing. In a study of 84 Ebola patients in Guinea in 2015, doctors did not see a benefit from convalescent plasma. One of the big problems with convalescent plasma is that it's hard to characterize just how effective any one unit of plasma is; it can vary greatly from donor to donor, depending on antibody concentration.
In addition, the treatment has its risks. Transfusions can transmit blood-borne pathogens, and in rare cases lead to problems such as "transfusion-related acute lung injury (TRALI)" -- in which transferred antibodies damage pulmonary blood vessels -- or "transfusion-associated circulatory overload (TACO)", when the patient's body doesn't cope well with the added blood volume, which can be up to half a liter. Both can lead to difficulty breathing and death. Addo says that convalescent plasma is "an interesting concept, but I'm rather cautious."
Chinese doctors began to experiment with convalescent plasma in COVID-19 patients in January. They published their results in April, saying that 10 patients who got convalescent plasma survived, while 3 of 10 who didn't, died. Other small studies from China, Italy, and elsewhere gave similar results.
These studies were too small and uncontrolled to be much more than suggestive. A study at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City was more ambitious, with 39 critically-ill COVID-19 patients. The hospital staff couldn't get much convalescent plasma early on, so they ended with four times that many controls. The plasma group had a mortality rate 12.8%, while the control group had a mortality rate of 24.4%. That was not statistically significant, but the team found that the plasma group had clearly reduced supplemental oxygen needs after transfusion.
The Mount Sinai study was still not a large-scale RCT, and nobody will rest much weight on convalescent plasma without one being performed. Such trials were underway in Germany, Britain, and the USA at last notice. Useful data is being accumulated on complications, and they appear to be rare A US paper that only focused on the therapy's safety in the first 5000 patients found 36 severe adverse events, including TRALI and TACO cases; some may have been confounded by the pernicious effects of COVID-19 itself, so the actual hazard is even lower than that. [ED: The trials showed convalescent plasma to be ineffective.]
Convalescent serum could also be useful as a prophylactic, to prevent infection in those at high risk. In a trial coordinated by Johns Hopkins, 150 health care workers exposed to COVID-19 while not wearing proper protection will receive either convalescent serum, or "control" serum collected last year. Researchers will compare how many people in each group develop disease.
If convalescent plasma is shown to work, much more may be needed, and collecting it could become burdensome. One plasma donation can be used by one or two patients; the donor and patient blood types also have to be matched. However, recovered patients can donate repeatedly. In New York City, there is now more than enough to go around, in part because thousands of members of the hard-hit Orthodox Jewish community have donated.
Again, there's also the problem of consistency. Together with several partners, Japanese pharma company Takeda is working to produce a product called "hyperimmune globulin", for which the blood of hundreds of recovered patients is pooled and the antibodies concentrated about tenfold. Hyperimmune globulin has a longer shelf life than plasma, and its higher concentration would allow doctors to give more antibodies to patients without the risk of TACO. Trials are in consideration.
The last time Takeda produced hyperimmune globulin was for the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic. The company concentrated antibodies from 16,000 liters of convalescent plasma, yielding enough product to treat thousands of patients. However, the flu strain proved milder than anticipated and the treatment was never used. Given the severity of the COVID-19 pandemic, hyperimmune globulin may well play a significant role in treating the disease -- at least until a vaccine is developed. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (121): Richard Nixon's term also saw the ratification of the 26th Amendment. In 1970, Congress amended the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the revised act included a provision for lowering the age qualification to vote in all to 18. There was widespread support for the idea: if 18-year-olds were eligible for the draft, shouldn't they be eligible to vote, too? However, later in 1970, SCOTUS judged in OREGON V. MITCHELL that the Federal government could lower the voting age in Federal elections, but not any others. Congress quickly proposed a constitutional amendment to give 18-year-olds universal voting rights, with the amendment ratified in 1973:
BEGIN QUOTE:
The right of citizens of the United States, who are eighteen years of age or older, to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of age. The Congress shall have the power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
END QUOTE
It was easily ratified, since there was little controversy over the proposal. 43 states would ultimately ratify it. Nixon certainly had no problem with it; it wasn't anything that concerned him.
Nixon also endorsed the "Equal Rights Amendment (ERA)", which stated:
BEGIN QUOTE:
Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.
END QUOTE
It passed both houses of Congress in 1972, to be submitted to the state legislatures for ratification. It didn't obtain the required number of ratifications in the time limit set and failed. Feminists criticized Nixon for not doing much to support the ERA, but it should be noted that he appointed more women to administration positions than LBJ had.
Although it wasn't that much noticed at the time, the Nixon Administration saw a SCOTUS decision, ROE V. WADE, that would have an outsized effect on women's rights, ensuring a right to abortion in all 50 states. The case began with a woman named Norma McCorvey, who in 1969 got pregnant with her third child. She wanted an abortion, but she lived in Texas, which did not allow discretionary abortions. McCorvey brought suit in Federal court -- under the pseudonym of "Jane Roe" -- alleging that the anti-abortion laws of Texas were unconstitutional.
A Federal district court ruled in her favor, with the state of Texas appealing to SCOTUS. In January 1973, the Supreme Court issued a 7:2 decision that judged in favor of McCorvey -- on the basis that the 14th Amendment guarantees a "right to privacy" that ensures women have the right to choose abortion. Effectively, it was a follow-up to the 1965 GRISWOLD V. CONNECTICUT decision, saying it was none of the business of the government.
Of course as always, there was fine print to that decision, the court also judging that the government had an obligation to protect the unborn. Accordingly, the court legally distinguished between the three trimesters -- three-month intervals -- of a pregnancy:
Challenges to abortion laws were to be subject to the "strict scrutiny" standard of judicial review, the highest standard. Surprisingly, at least in hindsight, public reaction to the decision was muted. Partly that was because the day of the decision, 22 January 1973, was the same day LBJ died, and that crowded the decision out of the headlines. More significantly, resistance to abortion rights hadn't really solidified at the time. Nixon himself was conservative on the subject, but it was yet another thing that he didn't see as central to his concerns.
Incidentally, late in her life, McCorvey would denounce the ROE V. WADE decision. She was paid to do so by an anti-abortion group. She told a journalist before her death in 2017: "I took their money, and they put me out in front of the cameras, and that's what I'd say." [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* SCIENCE NOTES: As discussed by an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("'Bodysnatching' Fungus Hides Inside Its Neighbors Between Blazes" by Jake Buehler, 1 November 2019), it is known that, after a forest fire, the mushroom called the "bonfire scalycap" -- more officially Pholiota highlandensis -- rises in numbers from the blackened earth. However, between fires, it all but disappears,
Scientists have long suspected that the bonfire scalycap -- and other fire-loving fungi -- remain undetected for years by hiding inside other organisms, emerging only when their cocoon burns up around them. To determine if this "bodysnatcher" hypothesis was correct, researchers collected mosses, lichens, and soil samples from burned and unburned areas in and near Great Smoky Mountains National Park months after a forest fire.
The team disinfected the surfaces of their samples, then analyzed the DNA inside. Remarkably, the team found genetic signatures from 19 species of fire-loving fungi within the mosses and lichens. It appears that the fungi may be using such materials as a kind of insulating shelter, only emerging after the next fire. However, the researchers also found the DNA of three fire-loving fungi species in the soil, even in unburned areas. The fungi may have various ways of hiding out, including as fire-resistant spores underground.
* As discussed by an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("Star's Strange Path Around Black Hole Proves Einstein Right -- Again" by Daniel Clery, 16 April 2020), Einstein's theory of general relativity, devised during World War 1, was originally confirmed by observations of the orbit of the planet Mercury, which had anomalies that couldn't be explained by Newtonian gravity.
There have been questions that these initial observations were accurate, but it doesn't matter, because later observations have backed up Einstein's relativistic theory of gravity. Most recently, after three decades of monitoring, researchers have spotted a subtle shift in the orbit of a star orbiting "Sagitarius A*" the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way -- and, once again, Einstein was vindicated.
The star, known simple as "S2", is the closest known star to the black hole, and tracks an elliptical 16-year orbit. It made a close approach -- within 20 billion kilometers -- to Sagittarius A*, in 2019. Following the close approach, it would have taken different paths, depending on whether Newtonian or Einsteinian gravity was true. A team using the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile found that it tracked Einstein's theory.
The star followed a "Schwarzschild precession", which would, cause S2 to trace out a spirographlike flower pattern in space. The researchers say their detailed study of the motion of S2 also provided insights on much invisible material, including dark matter and smaller black holes, exists around Sagittarius A*.
* As discussed by an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("Giant Viruses Aren't Alive -- So Why Have They Stolen Genes Essential For Life?" by Amand Heidt, 16 April 2020), the peculiar viruses known as "megaviruses" turn out, on inspection, to be ever stranger. It has now been discovered that, even though "megaviruses" don't metabolize, they carry genes associated with metabolism, which they apparently use to convert their highjacked hosts into energy factories. Since many of their hosts are important players in dampening climate change and in controlling ocean ecosystems, megaviruses may be exerting an unexpected leverage over life on Earth.
There are at least 200,000 different kinds of viruses in the world's oceans. Some are giant viruses, being about ten times bigger than the average virus. They're still only about a fifth the size of a red blood cell, which helps explain why they weren't discovered until 2003. It is known that they mostly infect amoebas and phytoplankton, but otherwise there is much left to be learned about them.
To learn more, microbiologists led by Frank Aylward of Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University scanned public genomic databases, searching through thousands of mostly marine genomes for the DNA fingerprints of giant viruses. They found 501 suspected giant virus genomes, mapping them against 121 known reference genomes to create a family tree. Their metagenomic study shows that giant viruses are extremely diverse, splitting into 54 distinct groups. Some of the genomes were previously unknown to science, and presumably represent new species.
A particular puzzle was the fact that while all the megaviruses had genes to help them infect hosts and replicate -- of necessity, all viruses do -- they also had genes for metabolic processes, even though viruses don't metabolize. It turns out these genes weren't a recent addition either, according to researcher Mohammad "Monir" Moniruzzaman: many had been evolving in the viruses for millions of years. He asks: "If your goal is simply to find a new host and multiply," then why do megaviruses need these genes?
The first and obvious suggestion is that the metabolic genes affect the metabolism of the host organism -- which means that, by affecting widespread phytoplankton, they could have a significant environmental impact. Frederik Schulz -- a microbiologist at the Joint Genome Institute -- has also conducted research on megaviruses. He is tempted to believe the metabolic genes do have a metabolic effect on host organisms; but he also knows that genes are often "repurposed", doing one thing in one set of organisms, something entirely different in another set. Moniruzzaman delivers the obvious conclusion: "As much as I can tell lots of stories, you really need to verify them in the lab."
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* RITE AID & FACE RECOGNITION (1): As discussed by an article from REUTERS.com ("Watchful Eyes" by Jeffrey Dastin, 28 July 2020), the US drugstore chain Rite Aid has been adopting facial recognition systems, creating controversy in doing so.
According to REUTERS investigators, Rite Aid began to add facial recognition systems to its stores about eight years ago, and now has then in at least 200 stores. In the hearts of New York and metropolitan Los Angeles, Rite Aid deployed the technology in largely lower-income, non-white neighborhoods, according to a Reuters analysis. And for more than a year, the retailer used state-of-the-art facial recognition technology from a company with links to China and its authoritarian government.
The retailer defended the technology's use, saying the installations had nothing to do with race, being intended to deter theft and protect staff and customers from violence. There is no evidence that data from the cameras is being sent to China. However, following the REUTERS investigation, company officials announced that the cameras had all been turned off. A company statement announced that the "decision was in part based on a larger industry conversation," adding that "other large technology companies seem to be scaling back or rethinking their efforts around facial recognition given increasing uncertainty around the technology's utility."
While Rite Aid does not publicly list which locations were fitted with the technology, during visits from October 2019 through July 2020, REUTERS found facial recognition cameras at 33 of the 75 Rite Aid shops in Manhattan and the central Los Angeles metropolitan area. The cameras were easy to spot, hanging from the ceiling on poles near store entrances and in cosmetics aisles. The cameras matched facial images of customers entering a store to those of people Rite Aid previously observed engaging in potential criminal activity. When a match occurred, the system sent an alert to a security agent; the agent then reviewed the match for accuracy, and could tell the customer to leave.
Among the 75 stores Reuters visited, those in areas that were poorer or less white were much more likely to have the equipment. Stores in more impoverished areas were nearly three times as likely as those in richer areas to have facial recognition cameras. Seventeen of 25 stores in poorer areas had the systems. In wealthier areas, it was 10 of 40. In areas where people of color, including Black or Latino residents, made up the largest racial or ethnic group, Reuters found that stores were more than three times as likely to have the technology. Rite Aid officials said the installations were "data-driven," based on stores' theft histories, local and national crime data, and site infrastructure.
Facial recognition technology has become highly controversial in the USA as its use expands. Civil liberties advocates warn it can lead to harassment of innocent individuals, arbitrary and discriminatory arrests, infringements of privacy rights, and chilled personal expression. Adding to these concerns, recent research by a US government institute showed that algorithms that underpin the technology erred more often when subjects had darker skin tones.
Facial recognition systems are largely unregulated in the United States, despite disclosure or consent requirements, or limits on government use, in several states, including California, Washington, Texas, and Illinois. Some cities, including San Francisco, ban municipal officials from using them. In general, the technology makes photos and videos more readily searchable, allowing retailers almost instantaneous facial comparisons within and across stores. [TO BE CONTINUED]
NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* WEAK FLU VACCINES? As discussed by an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("Why Flu Vaccines Don't Protect People For Long" by Jon Cohen, 13 August 2020), the best vaccines -- such as the ones for measles, rubella, and diphtheria -- provide almost 100% protection for life. That's not true for flu vaccines. The influenza A virus evolves rapidly, so vaccines against it are not all that effective. In the USA between 2009 and 2019, it ranged from a low of 19% to a high of 60%. The protection also fades quickly: anyone who lives in a temperate region of the world and gets the shot in the early fall, may find immunity disappearing before the end of that winter.
Rafi Ahmed -- an immunologist at Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta, Georgia -- decided to investigate, zeroing in on a type of B cell that lives in the bone marrow, and whose role Ahmed helped decipher in 1996. B cells make antibodies that can attach to and disable viruses. Ahmed focused on a type of B cell called "bone marrow plasma cells (BMPCs)", which continuously generate antibodies after an infection or vaccination. There are also "memory" B cells that produce antibodies and are created the same way -- but in contrast to BMPCs, they do not steadily pump out the protective proteins. Instead, as their name implies, memory B cells adapted to recognize a particular pathogen sit in standby, only re-activating when the host is exposed to the pathogen again. It takes them several days after an infection to generate high levels of antibodies -- which is a disadvantage in influenza, since it hits quickly.
Largely to the surprise of the biomedical community, in 1996 Ahmed's group showed that some BMPCs can live for many years -- meaning they could, in principle, confer long-lasting immunity. Whether influenza vaccines trigger high levels of BMPCs and if so, whether the cells are the long-lived variety was not known.
To probe further, Ahmed and his team repeatedly examined the bone marrow and blood of 53 volunteers aged between 20 and 45 years old in the weeks and months before and after they received influenza vaccines; some subjects participated over more than one flu season. The study subjects didn't find the experience fun: removing fluid from inside a bone is a difficult and painful procedure that involves piercing the pelvic bone with a special needle. Ahmed has his regrets: "The logistics ... were very difficult, and I think nobody will ever try to do the same thing again."
The researchers found spikes of BMPCs specific for influenza 4 weeks after immunization -- but after a year, the new cells were virtually gone. Few were surprised, though the work was appreciated. Adam Wheatley, an immunologist at the University of Melbourne in Australia says: "This finding tracks nicely with the observed rapidly waning [blood] antibody titers and decreasing protection in humans after getting the flu vaccine. It's a really nice piece of work."
Mark Slifka -- an immunologist at Oregon National Primate Research Center in Hillsboro, who earned his PhD with Ahmed more than 20 years ago, but was not involved with this work -- believes the study "helps define the landscape" of the flu vaccine's poor durability: "They chipped away at the stone in terms of understanding why the immune response is short-lived."
However, Slifka thinks the BMPC population stimulated by vaccines likely has a small proportion of long-lived cells that weren't spotted in the study that could offer more lasting protection. He believes the way to boost their presence is to stimulate the system so that it makes more BMPCs overall. One possible way to do this is with "adjuvants" -- additives to vaccines that act as irritants, ramping up the immune response. The adjuvants may also help concentrate the amount of viral proteins in the vaccines.
The first influenza vaccines, developed in the 1940s, used adjuvants. They contained killed flu viruses mixed in with a water-in-oil emulsion called "incomplete Freund's." Unfortunately, the adjuvant caused ulcers at the injection site, so it was dropped from later vaccines. To further reduce unwanted reactions, researchers also stopped injecting the entire killed virus, replacing it with only the surface proteins from the virus. They're much safer, but they don't work very well.
However, for the past 2 decades, improved adjuvants have been appearing into vaccines. An updated influenza vaccine that has an oil-in-water adjuvant -- the water shields the oil and makes it safer -- has been used in Italy since 1997, and has been approved by European and US regulators. It's not clear if that vaccine can trigger long-lasting BMPCs. No one in Ahmed's study received this product; when the project began, it wasn't even licensed in the USA.
Ahmed says that "it's totally crazy" that most commonly used influenza vaccines don't include an adjuvant: "I'm hoping that things will change in the influenza vaccine world, and 10 years from now, you will not be getting any nonadjuvated vaccines. This has been going on for years. It's hard to change the industry."
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* THE COVID-19 MENACE (14): Some researchers have concerns over the preliminary data from COVID-19 vaccine trials. Antibody responses tended to be highest in people with the most severe infection. Those with mild infections, meaning most of the people who get infected with SARS-CoV-2, sometimes only produced small amounts of neutralizing antibody. This pattern is often seen with viruses: the longer, more severe infections are more likely to produce strong, durable responses. Shane Crotty, a virologist at the La Jolla Institute for Immunology in California, says that's one reason common-cold coronaviruses sometimes don't produce long-lasting immunity.
Next, there's the question of how long antibodies last. When researchers tracked COVID-19 patients over time, they found that the amount of antibody peaked in the days following the onset of symptoms, then began to decline. In some study participants, the antibodies were practically undetectable after about three months. Major media outlets reported this as a loss of immunity, but immunologists found that declaration a bit hasty.
Luis Barreiro -- of the University of Chicago in Illinois, who studies the evolution of immune responses to pathogens -- says that's perfectly normal. In response to a viral infection, B cells proliferate, producing antibodies capable of recognizing pieces of the virus. Once the infection's over, antibody levels fade out. Miles Carroll -- an infectious-disease specialist with Public Health England in Porton Down UK -- comments: "There is a lot of fear out there, but I think, on the whole, that it's a fairly robust immune response."
To determine how significant that fade-out of antibodies really is, researchers still need to know how much antibody it takes to successfully block SARS-CoV-2. Mala Maini -- a viral immunologist at University College London -- "Even small amounts of antibodies can potentially still be protective."
Antibody levels also need to be tracked for longer, to find out whether they eventually stabilize at a low concentration, as is common in viral infections, or continue to rapidly decline. Virologist Katie Doores of King's College London, lead author of one of the antibody studies, says that the negative press coverage of her work startled her: "Everyone seems to have gone: AARGH! But we don't know what level of antibodies are needed for protection."
Even if antibody levels drop to undetectably low levels, the immune system has backups. Memory B cells linger in the bone marrow until a virus they remember attacks again, to transform into antibody-producing plasma cells. It's harder to trace such activity, but some research indicates that a SARS-CoV-2 infection actually can create memory B cells that guard against that coronavirus.
Similarly, T cells might be able to recognize virally infected cells and destroy them, limiting the virus's spread in the body. Like memory B cells, T cells are hard to trace than antibodies, but studies so far suggest that they are called into action during SARS-CoV-2 infection. One recent study surveyed immune responses in 36 people recovering from COVID-19, and found T cells that recognize the coronavirus in all of them. Danny Altmann -- an immunologist at Imperial College London -- "It looks like a virus that's very stimulatory to T cells. Most people have very good T-cell responses to it."
T-cell studies are also converging on the possibility of "cross-reactivity", in which T cells that recognize other coronaviruses also recognize SARS-CoV-2. Several studies have found T cells that react to SARS-CoV-2 in blood samples from people who had not been exposed to the virus; further work plausibly suggests these T cells got their targeting ability from coronaviruses that cause colds. There is speculation that this may help explain why there is such a wide variation in severity of COVID-19 infections, from unnoticeable to brutally lethal.
The question of how long immunity against SARS-CoV-2 lasts can only be answered by experience, but there's no cause for despair. T cells against the coronavirus responsible for SARS have been found 17 years after infection, suggesting long-lasting immunity. Barreiro also points out that SARS-CoV-2 doesn't seem to mutate as rapidly as influenza viruses, which change so frequently that fresh vaccination is needed each year.
The Common Cold Unit of the UK Medical Research Council study found little sign of hope for sterilizing immunity for its common-cold coronavirus, but the results also suggested that immunity could be strong enough to reduce or even eliminate symptoms. Sterilizing immunity for COVID-19 would be ideal, because it would reduce the risk of people with minimal symptoms spreading the infection widely. Nonetheless, even a vaccine that only reduces mortality would be welcome.
Barreriro concludes that, so far, the immune response to SARS-CoV-2 has produced few surprises, and there's no reason to despair over long-lasting immunity: "There are still a lot of things that we don't know, but so far, there's nothing really unique." [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (120): Nixon got very little credit for his integration measures, mostly because he was focused on a "law & order" agenda, working to control the mass protests over the war in Vietnam. The protests did decline after 1970, as US troops were pulled out, but Nixon took a dim view of the radical "New Left", with the FBI, CIA, NSA, and other intelligence agencies probing radical groups -- though they were much more smoke than fire.
Along the same lines, Nixon established the "Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA)" in 1973, a major step in an assertive "war on drugs" that would persist through the rest of the century, with not the best results and declining enthusiasm -- though at the outset, support was generally bipartisan. Nixon also introduced crime-fighting measures, such as:
One of the biggest triumphs of the Nixon Administration was the culmination of JFK's Moon program, with Apollo 11 touching down on the lunar surface on 20 July 1969. That was effectively the high point of the US space program. When JFK established the Apollo project, he specified a ten-year limit because he knew it was unlikely that a massive space effort could be maintained longer than that. LBJ had been a believer and pushed the effort, but Nixon vetoed plans for a Moon base and a crewed mission to Mars. They were much too ambitious; they wouldn't happen for the rest of the century. In 1972, however, in pursuit of detente, Nixon approved a five-year cooperative space effort with the USSR, culminating in the "Apollo-Soyuz Test Project", resulting in the 1975 docking between an American and Soviet space capsule. It would eventually pave the way towards the International Space Station.
In 1971, Nixon introduced two major medical research initiatives, implemented in law in 1972:
In support of the well-being of workers, in 1970 Nixon signed into law the "Occupational Safety & Health Act", which set up the "Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA)" and the "National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH)". In addition, Nixon signed the "Noise Control & Abatement Act of 1972" and the "Consumer Product Safety Act of 1972". The push towards enhanced government regulation would gradually lead to a backlash from the Right, the argument being -- with at least some basis in fact -- that government regulation was becoming overbearing -- with the clear need for regulation downplayed. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* ANOTHER MONTH As discussed by an article from ECONOMIST.com ("Cyber Heists", 10 September 2020), cyber-thieves never give up, they're having too much fun. One estimate, from 2018, put total cyber-crime revenue at $1.5 trillion USD or more a year -- including not only bank jobs, but also theft of intellectual property, counterfeiting, data-ransoms, and so on. Thanks to COVID-19, it might well be higher now, since many financial firms have struggled to keep security tight with so many staff working from home.
Most big heists are carried out either by organized-crime groups or state actors. There's more focus on the state actors these days, since hackers thought to be linked to the North Korean government stole $101 million USD, and almost nicked another $850 million USD from Bangladesh's central bank in 2016, after hacking transfer instructions from SWIFT, a global payments tool with 11,000 members.
After a lull, the North Koreans are back, the US government having issued an alert that they have been coming up with new bank-robbing schemes to help fund the regime of Kim Jong Un, cash-strapped by sanctions. One such scheme, known as an "ATM cash-out", is described in a new report by SWIFT and the financial-consulting arm of defense giant BAE Systems on how cyber-heists are carried out and the loot laundered. It's a labor-intensive scheme, involving hacking cash machines to pump out money, which is grabbed by accomplices called "money mules". Among those who specialize in cash-outs are the "BeagleBoyz", a group linked to the Reconnaissance General Bureau, a North Korean spy agency.
ATM cash-out is labor-intensive, since no one ATM stores a lot of cash -- so a lot of them are hit at one time. ATMs in more than 30 countries have been targeted in a single strike. An attack on one bank, by a group called Lazarus, involved 12,000 ATM withdrawals across 28 countries, all made within two hours, according to the report. Then there's the problem of laundering the stolen cash. One popular way is to take it to a casino, buy chips with it, then exchange it back into cash in the form of a check from the casino showing a legitimate transaction. The check can then be deposited in a bank without setting off alarms.
Countermeasures tend to focus on identifying mules from CCTV footage, then trying to connect dots up the chain of command. Some banks are taking stronger measures: after being warned about the latest threat from North Korea, some Bangladeshi lenders now shut their ATMs down between midnight and 6 AM to reduce the threat from cash-outs. It's not so easy to get away with snatching cash pouring out of ATMs in the daylight.
* As reported by CNN, the presidential campaign to elect Joe Biden has opened up a front in virtual space, in the popular "Animal Crossing" game for Nintendo. Animal Crossing features a society of animal characters, with players setting up villages and conducting daily life activities. Now, thanks to a deal with Nintendo, players can display four different Biden campaign signs.
The Trump campaign is of course stodgy, and has no interest in establishing a front in virtual space, a spokeswoman saying: "This explains everything: Joe Biden thinks he's campaigning for President of Animal Crossing from his basement. The Trump campaign will continue to spend its resources campaigning in the real world with real Americans."
"The Sneers are strong in this one!" Given that Trump's approval levels are negative compared to Biden's and not showing any sign of improvement, such an attitude does not suggest a healthy presidential campaign. Of course, Trump supports, and supporters of other political figures, have made their own signs for use in Animal Crossing. [ED: The political agitation got too strong in the game environment, and the management finally banned it.]
I got a flyer in the mail from the Trump Campaign, screaming at me: JOE BIDEN HAS COMPLETELY EMBRACED THE RADICAL LEFT! I just laughed: "You people really are crazy. You're doomed." My neighbors tell me they haven't got such stuff, so I must be on some mystery mailing list.
* The US West continues to have a nasty fire season. It has remained, with some chilly excursions, unseasonably warm. Nearby fires choked Loveland, Colorado, with smoke, with flecks of ash decorating my car. Late in September, the Moon came up as orange as a pumpkin one night.
It's no fun, but I just continue with my work -- nothing else I can do. I got to playing with the Signal encrypted messaging app a bit more, and discovered a few interesting things. First, it can only really be installed on one platform at a time. I tried to install it on two of my smartphones; it will install, but it will only work with one at a time. To change phones, I have to go through the validation process on the new phone, and give up use on the first phone. I think if I used different phone numbers for Signal, I could get it to work simultaneously on two platforms, but that sounds like undermining security.
Second, I tried to use Signal to send a text message to my niece Jordy to get her iPhone on Signal, so we could trade information. It wouldn't do it; I finally realized: "That's because I told it not to." I'd set it up so I could only handle encrypted messages.
Another thing I still need to figure out is how to cut and paste text from my PC to Signal on my smartphone. It turns out there are apps that allow a Windows cut to end up in an Android clipboard; when I get some time, I'll see how it works. Signal, by the way, is on a roll these days, with the US public demonstrations resulting in a boom in downloads.
In a parallel exercise, I was downloading a set of out-of-print aircraft books from an archive site. Most of them were in .PDF format, which was no difficulty, but some were in a .RAR format. What? After some poking around, that turned to be an unusual archiver format, I think out of Russia. I got to thinking that it might be nice to find an online site to unpack it, instead of going through the hassle of installing an app on my PC. Apps not found on official stores are security risks anyway.
After some dead ends, I finally found ZAMZAR.com, which is a site devoted to file conversions. It was put together by brothers Mike and Chris Whyley in England in 2006, and now covers a very wide range of conversions. It is free for casual use, though free users can only convert two files a day. I only had two .RAR files, so that wasn't a problem; I converted the files from .RAR to .ZIP, and I was flying. I'm keeping the link to that site; every rare now and then I run into some strange file type, with the result that I have to figure out what I've got, and then convert it to something I can use.
* Concerning the item about the pandemic, virtual education, and Chromebooks last month, school districts across the USA have tried to make sure all their students get access, by sending out school buses equipped with wi-fi to park near housing complexes and provide online access. This dovetails with my pet notion of an open national wi-fi network to give online access to everyone -- if at low data rates, about a megabit a second. Municipalities, businesses, or even private citizens could help support the network, and it would not need universal coverage. Given open access, it would have to be monitored by law enforcement, to keep the Black Hats from exploiting it.
Wi-fi access is so widespread that it seems we're part of the way there. As I've mentioned before, I don't have a phone subscription for any of my phones, relying on wi-fi instead. Since I spend most of my time at home, that works, and I can find wi-fi access when I'm on the road and need to make a call. Of course, these days, I'm never on the road.
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