* 23 entries including: US Constitution (series), minds of animals (series), COVID-19 menace (series), cleaning up space radiation, COVID-19 vaccines, Hyper-Kamiokande detector, dark matter theory problems, and COVID-19 in the developing world.
* NEWS COMMENTARY FOR DECEMBER 2020: On 24 December 2020, after months of fractious negotiations at the brink and at the last moment, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced that Britain had sealed a trade deal with the European Union: no quotas, no tariffs. There was widespread relief; a no-deal "Brexit" from the EU would be politically and economically disastrous, so much so that it seemed hard to believe it would happen. It didn't. It is not thought that ratification will be a problem.
In addition, the two sides agreed to an independent arbitrator to judge on future trade controversies, and a system for settling disputes that doesn't involve the European Court of Justice, the ECJ having been a particular Brexiter boogeyman. The EU gets fishing rights in British waters for five years, if with quotas cut by 25%; a long-term solution on fisheries will require more talking.
However, the agreement is very limited. The trade provisions relate almost entirely to goods, meaning there is next to nothing for services, which constitute 80% of Britain's economy and make up the fastest-growing sector of global exports. Financial services remain up in the air, nothing yet on free transfer of data, nothing on recognition of professional-services qualifications. There also nothing on foreign-policy cooperation -- Boris Johnson's government doesn't seem to care much about it -- and little on police cooperation.
The thing that ordinary Britons will notice immediately will be losing the right of free movement throughout the EU, a consequence of ending the open right of EU citizens to enter the UK. There will be travel and work restrictions. Some scientific and research co-operation should continue, but Britain has been excluded from the Galileo navigation-satellite project.
And then there is the particularly troublesome issue of Northern Ireland, which will awkwardly remain in the EU single market and customs union. Border and customs checks in the Irish Sea are likely to generate continuing debate over the future unity of the UK, as will continuing Scots opposition to Brexit. There's definitely going to be a hit to the UK's economy, at a time when it is already in trouble because of the pandemic. The British government has played up trade deals with minor partners, but big trade deals with the likes of the USA, China, and India do not seem imminent.
This is a hard Brexit, the second-worst option as compared to No-Deal -- far better, but still not good. It is not clear who is happy with it: hard-core Leavers never wanted a deal of any sort, at least not one that was at all realistic, while Remainers by definition didn't want to Leave. The most that can be said is that it provides a basis for further negotiations; having broken the ice, they may go smoothly, but then again, they may not.
Of course, Boris Johnson will not be in #10 Downing Street forever. After Britain gets over "Brexit fever", might there be a rapprochement with the EU from a Labour government? Switzerland has a generally -- if not completely -- reasonable relationship, both politically and economically, with the EU, even though it is not formally part of the single market ETC; the Swiss instead have a matrix of agreements to define their relationship with the EU. Might Britain eventually adopt a Swiss solution? Possibly -- but only after the damage has been done.
* As discussed by an article from TIME.com ("Donald Trump's Foreign Policy Leaves Behind Destruction -- And Opportunity -- For Joe Biden" by Kimberly Dozier and WJ Hennigan, 3 December 2020 6:22 AM), as President-Elect Joe Biden is working towards inauguration, he's been getting briefings on world events, and putting together a foreign-policy team -- incoming National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan and Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
Since Biden hasn't taken office yet, there's not so much he can do other than set a tone and directions. There's no serious complaint about that, since the tone and directions are welcomed. Donald Trump's foreign policy was deliberately chaotic, emphasizing snubs and insults to America's friends and kissing up to the country's enemies.
Even senior Republicans members of Congress who have worked with Biden -- and with Blinken and Sullivan -- quietly say they are looking forward to a sensible US foreign policy. Former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said that, among US allies, the response to Biden's election "was the collective breathing of a huge sigh of relief. You could sense the unknotting of shoulders all the way from Seoul to Sydney."
However, reconstructing America's relations with the world is not going to be easy. Relations with China haven't been this bad since the days of Chairman Mao, while US commitment to NATO has been damaged. North Korea remains a menace -- and of course, there's the overwhelming dark reality of the COVID-19 pandemic. On the other hand, reconstruction is an opportunity to get a fresh start on long-standing problems. In conversations with TIME, Biden aides say they have a policy blueprint for Biden's first 100 days, the next 100 days and beyond, that fixes what they can and does the best with what they can't.
Jake Sullivan comments that the immediate strategy "starts with renewal at home, and builds to reinvesting in alliances and rejoining institutions." On the first day of Biden's presidency, Sullivan says, the US will rejoin the Paris climate accord and the World Health Organization. That can be done in parallel with the most important effort: getting the COVID-19 pandemic under control, demonstrating that the USA can get its own house in order. After that, Sullivan continues, the strategy is to work with allies that represent "half the world's economy" to address common challenges like China, North Korea, Russia, and Middle East instability.
Biden's team got off to a difficult start, partly because of Donald Trump's refusal to admit that he lost. Sufficient pressure was exerted on Trump to force him to grudgingly allow the transition process to begin, though he still insists he was cheated, and the transition process hasn't exactly been smooth. The pandemic makes things troublesome as well, all the more so because Trump's White House has been heavily compromised by the virus, and face-to-face interactions between the two administrations are problematic. Julie Smith -- Biden's former Deputy National Security Advisor, who's now with the transition team -- says: "I don't know how tall anybody is. I don't know how short anybody is. All I've seen is their kitchen. We've had to work together with people we've never met together in person."
In the bigger view, the Biden Administration is confronted with having to rebuild a government apparatus that was badly damaged by Trump, in his war against the "deep state" -- that is, any part of the government that he didn't like or resisted him. Trump eliminated or left unfilled hundreds of positions at the State Department, the Defense Department and other agencies, and cut the National Security Council (NSC) staff in half. He trimmed back or killed off entire offices, like the NSC's pandemic cell, which Sullivan intends to rebuild. Dozens of ambassador posts remain vacant.
That's another challenge -- but again, also an opportunity. Julie Smith comments: "We're going in with a bit of a clean slate in these institutions, because the damage is so severe." She adds: "We obviously have to build back the workforce." -- but the Biden Administration can also revamp structures that were designed "70-plus years ago."
In China, the Middle East and Europe, Trump kicked over long-standing foreign policy dilemmas. For years American diplomats struggled to figure out how to stop China from cheating on international rules of commerce without starting a trade war, how to make peace between Arabs and Israelis without selling out the Palestinians, and how to get Europe to bear more of the costs of its own defense without weakening the USA's alliance with them.
Trump simply smashed everything up, yielding no long-term solutions, and suffering painful costs: America is in an economically burdensome trade war with China, the two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is comatose, and NATO is limping. However, a new start may yield, at long last, progress.
That won't be easy. China is, overall, stronger than it was before Trump, while Russia, emboldened by Trump, is more mischievous on the global stage. Biden, however, will be working from strengths: he is warm, empathic, earnest, level-headed, and startlingly blunt for a politician. He is experienced in diplomacy, he is easy to communicate with, and he seeks agreements -- while never forgetting American interests. He is a pragmatist: he has strong principles, but he cares about solutions, not ideology. Biden appears to recognize the opportunity he's been given. Introducing his foreign policy team on 24 November 2020, the President-elect declared: "We cannot meet these challenges with old thinking and unchanged habits."
He will be playing in an altered international landscape. German Chancellor Angela Merkel left her first meeting with Trump convinced that Europeans had to start taking care of themselves, recalls the State Department's former Number 3, Ambassador Thomas Shannon. Trump's assault on NATO and collective security undermined faith that Europe and the USA would stand together against common enemies. European allies did, in response to Trump, raise their defense spending, while France strengthened its counter-terrorism presence in Africa, to the relief of US commanders there.
Nonetheless, collective security was weakened, much to the liking of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Putin insinuated Russia into European politics, supporting Moscow-friendly candidates with a mixture of money and a flood of disinformation.
Trump, as much as he wanted to, was never able to get rid of sanctions on Russia, and so that gives the Biden Administration leverage. There's an opening as well: the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) expires on 5 February 2021. Neither the US nor Russia want to get into a renewed nuclear arms race, since nuclear weapons are tactically useless and more than sufficiency is just a waste of money. Moscow has dropped hints it may be ready to deal.
Biden has already moved to restore faith in NATO in calls with Merkel, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, and French President Emmanuel Macron. Julie Smith says: "They know that he wants to revitalize alliances. They're counting on him to do that."
Trump similarly upset the applecart in the Middle East. He cut off aid to the Palestinians, embraced an Israeli plan to take control of most Palestinian territory, and recognized Jerusalem as Israel's capital. At the same time, Trump courted Gulf states by getting tough on Iran. The gambit yielded the Abraham Accords: the United Arab Emirates' recognition of Israel, in return for halting the threatened seizure of West Bank territory. Bahrain and Sudan followed by normalizing relations with the Jewish state.
This process had its positive aspects, but the first casualty was the long-sought "two-state" solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The incoming administration recognizes getting peace talks between Israelis and Palestinians back on track will be hard. Biden says he won't reverse the Trump Administration's move to Jerusalem, since it would just create frictions without result. Beyond that, according to Jake Sullivan, all that can be done is reach out to both sides to "just try to preserve the possibility of a two-state solution, [and] not allow for further erosion or deterioration."
As far as Iran goes, the Biden Administration would like to restore the Obama nuclear deal. The Iranians are raising the stakes in talks by expanding their nuclear program, and now threatening to bar inspectors if US sanctions aren't lifted by February. Nonetheless, the fact that the Iranians are raising the stakes means they're after a deal, and Tehran has indicated its willingness to talk. Sullivan has signaled openness to lifting sanctions to salvage the 2015 agreement, adding that Trump's get-tough approach did indeed have its silver linings: "We have proven to Iran over time that we can put sanctions back on after they have been relaxed in ways that create enormous economic pressure."
Of course, there's China. The USA once wanted to bring China into the global rules-based order -- but Beijing replied by building military bases in the South China Sea and, according to US intelligence, cyberstealing US technology and government personnel records, as well as hacking the Pentagon. Trump's team waged solo economic war, slapping on tariffs, sanctioning Chinese officials, and labeling companies like Huawei and TikTok as national-security threats -- all to little effect.
Trump's antagonistic approach to China was justified to a degree, but it didn't accomplish much, with China effectively ending Hong Kong's autonomy decades early and expanding its crackdown on minorities like the Uighurs. China is now one of the biggest traders, funders, infrastructure builders and preferred lenders in Africa, Latin America, and Central and Southeast Asia. In November 2020, it minted a 15-country free-trade alliance, the world's largest, that includes Australia and New Zealand.
Trump did negotiate a bilateral trade deal that threatens more tariffs if China doesn't buy $200 billion USD in American goods and services over the next two years, which hands Biden some leverage. However, Trump's attendant China-bashing has helped fuel historically high anti-China sentiment among Americans, making future compromise with Beijing harder politically.
Biden is looking for a new approach on China: after a 2011 visit he declared that "a rising China is a positive, positive development, not only for China but for America and the world writ large." Now his team will spend its opening months rounding up a hands-across-the-water mix of democratic Pacific and European allies to check China's expansionism. The size of their combined markets -- more than half the world's economy -- will, according to Sullivan, lay down "a marker that says, if you continue to abuse the system in the following ways, there will be consequences."
Biden has been publicly cool to joining up with the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which had been a goal of the Obama Administration, to be torpedoed off by Trump. However, there are real advantages to a trade alliance that helps restrain China, and it appears Biden simply wants Congress to buy into trade alliances before proceeding on them. Sullivan adds: "If we invest in ourselves, invest in our relationships with our allies, and play this key role in international institutions, there is no reason why we cannot effectively manage the China challenge in a way that avoids the downward spiral into confrontation."
And then there's North Korea, always a problem. Trump attempted personal diplomacy with Kim Jong Un, the country's ruler, but it was half-baked, and accomplished nothing. The North Koreans correctly recognized that Trump was simply engaging in personal promotion, selling himself as a global deal-maker, and giving them nothing that they wanted. They finally broke off discussions in irritation.
Improving matters with North Korea will mean working with South Korea and Japan. Relations under Trump with these two long-standing American allies in the Far East were not good, Trump calling them "freeloaders" and demanding billions of dollars to pay for the 80,000 US troops in the two countries. The good thing is, of course, that Biden is not Trump, and they appreciate the fact. Colin Kahl -- previously a Biden National Security Advisor, and now on his transition team -- says: "What you'll see is much more of a united front. Making real progress on these issues in the medium to long term is exponentially greater if we're working alongside our allies, but also managing our allies' relations with one another."
* One item left out of this TIME.com article was Afghanistan, which will present a challenge to the Biden Administration: the fighting there has gone on for two decades, and Americans aren't all that happy about being involved there -- but can we afford to let the Taliban win?
Admiral James Stavridis, once a NATO supreme commander, made a case for continued involvement in an essay from TIME.com ("I Commanded NATO Forces in Afghanistan. Here's How We Could End this 'Forever War'", 9 December 2020). He began with his own experience in the conflict:
BEGIN QUOTE:
From 2009 to 2013, as Supreme Allied Commander at NATO, I was the strategic commander for Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan. We had over 50 nations in the coalition, including the 28 NATO members, and over 150,000 troops at the mission's peak. We were spending billions of dollars a week, and over my four years I had superb generals working for me in tactical command in country: Stanley McChrystal, David Petraeus, John Allen, and Joe Dunford. With all that money, those brave troops, and the best leaders in the US military, we still struggled. The war has now dragged on through two decades, with hundreds of thousands of casualties on all sides.
END QUOTE
Stavridis went on to say that Afghanistan is by no means a lost cause:
BEGIN QUOTE:
Let me begin by pointing out what has improved. Over the past twenty years since the departure from power of the Taliban regime in 2001, no terrorist attack on the US has been launched from Afghanistan; the entire population and especially women have vastly better human rights; hundreds of thousands more children (both girls and boys) now attend school; literacy and life expectancy have both increased dramatically; and the country has conducted a series of elections and has a rudimentary democracy.
Most importantly, the vast majority of the fighting (and the casualties) are now being borne by the Afghan National Security Forces. As a result, we now have fewer than 10,000 coalition troops in country, a 95% drop from peak, most of whom were withdrawn under the Obama Administration. Coalition casualties are few and far between, and the Afghan government controls all the major population centers. Above all, a peace process -- after many starts and stops -- is taking hold, with the government and the Taliban sitting together and ironing out a process to move forward.
END QUOTE
The Taliban, however, remains strong in rural districts, being financed by the opium trade -- and with support of Pakistani intelligence services, continues to perform attacks. Al-Quaeda / Islamic State remains present and influential, while Trump's evident lack of interest in the fate of Afghanistan has shaken Afghan confidence. Stavridis suggested a list of measures for success:
BEGIN QUOTE:
First, we need to understand our objectives: we want Afghanistan to be a democratic nation with some level of power-sharing that will have to include representation from the Taliban; basic human rights for women and girls; expulsion of terrorist groups; disengagement with Pakistani intelligence; and drive reductions in narcotics production. We should recognize there will be a certain level of corruption, leakage across borders, and some degree of ongoing narcotic activity. Afghanistan is not going to become Switzerland, and some things will be flawed. ...
Second, in order to push the negotiations forward, we must show the Taliban that a credible NATO force will remain. It should include combat air-to-ground capability, strong special forces, intelligence production and dissemination, and a motivated training mission. To do that will require the current force level of 10,000 troops, including 5,000 from the US. The Biden administration should strongly consider reinstating that very minimal troop level, and state clearly that until the Taliban lives up to a cease-fire agreement for at least 180 days there will be no further troop withdrawals.
A third element would be retaining Trump-appointed Ambassador Zal Kalizad as the envoy for Afghanistan. An Afghan-American diplomat who speaks the local languages and was our Ambassador there, Zal (with whom I am friendly) is indispensable to the process at this point. He is indefatigable, and much of the progress to date is a result of his tireless shuttling between Doha and Kabul. ...
Finally, the Biden team would be wise to push the international community for a long-term financial commitment to Afghanistan. These funds should, of course, be closely monitored to prevent corruption (a constant challenge) and they must be sufficient to maintain the capability of the Afghan security forces. ...
People said to me often during my time in command that "Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires." Perhaps. But we are not seeking an empire in Afghanistan, and never have. We went after 9/11 to destroy an al-Qaeda sanctuary, something in which we have largely succeeded. Yet the embers are still on the ground, and a minimal fire watch still makes sense.
END QUOTE
With the end of World War II, the USA entered the era of "dirty little wars", which Americans have found endlessly frustrating. Can we really win the "dirty little wars"? Do we have the staying power? [ED: We didn't.]
BACK_TO_TOP* CLEANING UP SPACE RADIATION: As discussed by an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("US Tests Ways To Sweep Space Clean Of Radiation After Nuclear Attack" by Richard Stone, 26 December 2019), on 9 July 1962, under Project STARFISH PRIME, the US detonated a 1.4-megaton nuclear weapon at an altitude of 400 kilometers (250 miles). The test shot was targeted to steer clear of satellites in orbit -- but following the test, satellite after satellite stopped working.
As it turned out, high-energy electrons generated by radioactive debris and trapped by Earth's magnetic field in "radiation belts" were frying the satellites' electronics and solar panels. The 1967 Outer Space Treaty banned further nuclear tests in orbit -- but the possibility remains that a rogue state, read as "North Korea", that has nuclear weapons and doesn't have satellites might decide that indiscriminately frying satellites is a good idea.
If that were to happen, could anything be done to get rid of the radiation? Three space experiments -- one currently in orbit, two being prepared for launch in 2021 -- are investigating how to drain high-energy electrons out of the radiation belts, a procedure called "radiation belt remediation (RBR)". It already happens naturally, with radio waves from deep space, terrestrial lightning, or human radio communications knock electrons out of Earth's natural Van Allen radiation belts into the upper atmosphere, where they quickly shed energy, often triggering auroras.
The problem is that natural RBR is much too slow to dissipate radiation from a space nuclear blast; high-energy electrons from STARFISH PRIME lingered for five years. Researchers got clues on a potential solution from NASA's Van Allen Probes, which were launched in 2012, to duck in and out of Earth's radiation belts until the mission ended in the summer of 2019. The probes showed how radio waves resonate with high-energy electrons, scattering them down the magnetic field lines and sweeping them out of the belts.
Now researchers are beaming radio waves into Van Allen belts to see if they can artificially accelerate the process. Physicists have used the Very Low Frequency (VLF) towers -- built to communicate with submerged submarines -- to conduct such experiments; other big transmitter systems might also be used to clean out space radiation.
An orbiting RBR platform, closer to the target, might well be more effective. In June 2019, the US Air Force launched what the service claimed was the largest uncrewed structure ever flown in space: the DSX dipole antenna. About as long as an athletic field, DSX's primary mission is to transmit VLF waves into the Van Allen belts, and measure the precipitation of particles with onboard detectors.
A team of scientists at Los Alamos and NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center is working on a second experiment in VLF precipitation. In April 2021, the team plans to launch a sounding rocket carrying the "Beam Plasma Interactions Experiment" -- a miniature particle accelerator that would create a beam of electrons, which in turn would generate VLF waves capable of sweeping up particles.
A third experiment would manipulate the atmosphere itself to create turbulent waves that would draw down electrons. In the summer of 2021, the Naval Research Laboratory plans to launch a mission named the "Space Measurements of a Rocket-Released Turbulence". A sounding rocket will fly into the ionosphere and release 1.5 kilograms (3.3 pounds) of barium atoms. Ionized by sunlight, the barium would create a ring of moving plasma that emits radio waves.
All three experiments are proofs of concept; they may not be effective, or they may have drawbacks. A full-scale space cleanup might dump as much energy into the upper atmosphere as the geomagnetic storms caused by the Sun's occasional eruptions -- disrupting navigation and communication for commercial airliners. It could also create large quantities of nitrogen oxides and hydrogen oxides, which could corrode the stratospheric ozone layer.
Still, nobody's really expecting any show-stoppers, and advocates think RBR might have useful applications, even if nobody detonates a nuke in orbit. Crewed space flights headed out of low Earth orbit end up traversing the Van Allen belts, giving the crew an unwanted dose of radiation. It might be nice to open a hole in the belts to let them pass through more safely. However, nobody's close to an operational RBR system just yet.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* COVID-19 VACCINES: As discussed by an article from ABCNEWS.com ("What To Know About COVID-19 Vaccines And How They Work" by Sony Salzman, 17 November 2020), the COVID-19 pandemic has led to a global scramble for a vaccine to stop lethal coronavirus. There are well over a hundred development efforts, with dozens in advanced qualification or pilot introduction.
All vaccines work on the same fundamental principle: they prime the human immune system to recognize a pathogen and then attack it. There are several different approaches to making vaccines:
Most of the COVID-19 vaccines now being introduced require two shots, spaced about three weeks apart, but some will only need one. Outside of production and distribution, the biggest challenge is to get people to take the shots -- about a third of Americans don't want the vaccine, indeed don't think COVID-19 is a real problem.
Problems with the vaccines are exaggerated. Although these vaccines have been developed with unprecedented speed, they have been much more heavily funded than earlier vaccine development efforts and -- as something of a silver lining to the wretched pandemic -- there's been no shortage of test subjects. Negative reactions from vaccines are rare, and the most common side effects like a rash or a sore arm occur within a few hours of being vaccinated. Worries about long-term effects are misplaced: although there have been claims that autism and diabetes could be linked to vaccines, thorough studies show these claims have no basis in fact.
In any case, early distribution of the vaccines will be generally restricted to high-risk groups, such as frontline medical staff. They will be monitored for vaccine safety and effectiveness. Billions of doses of vaccines will be manufactured and delivered to the end of 2021. In the USA, vaccination will not be mandatory; the approach is to use an intensive public-relations campaign to encourage vaccination.
Unstated is the reality that people who do not get vaccinated, and don't have a legitimate excuse for it, may encounter problems, such as being refused entry to other countries. There is also the question of what to do about the flood of misinformation on COVID-19 and vaccines. Given a new US president who is determined to end the pandemic, it will be interesting to see what measures are taken to deal with those working to prolong it.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* THE COVID-19 MENACE (24): The ability of SARS-CoV-2 to infect and actively reproduce in the upper respiratory tract was something of a surprise, given that its close genetic relative, SARS-CoV, lacks that ability. Clemens-Martin Wendtner and his team have conducted studies in which they cultured virus from the throats of nine people with COVID-19, showing that the virus is actively reproducing and infectious there. That points to a crucial difference between the close relatives. SARS-CoV-2 can shed viral particles from the throat into saliva even before symptoms start, and these can then pass easily from person to person. SARS-CoV was much less effective at making that jump, passing only when symptoms were full-blown, making it easier to contain.
These differences have led to confusion about the lethality of SARS-CoV-2. Some experts and media reports describe it as less deadly than SARS-CoV because it kills about 1% of the people it infects, while SARS-CoV killed at roughly ten times that rate. However, that may only be due to the fact that SARS-CoV-2 is much more infectious; once it gets into the lungs, it's just as lethal as SARS-CoV. In other words, if a thousand people are exposed to SARS-CoV-2, an order of magnitude more of them will be infected than with SARS-CoV -- but about the same number will die.
Once in the lungs, the action of SARS-CoV-2 has similarities to those of what respiratory viruses. Like SARS-CoV and influenza, it infects and destroys the alveoli, the tiny sacs in the lungs that shuttle oxygen into the bloodstream. As the cellular barrier dividing these sacs from blood vessels break down, liquid from the vessels leaks in, blocking oxygen from getting to the blood. Other cells, including white blood cells, plug up the airway further. A robust immune response will clear all this out in some patients, but overreaction of the immune system can make the tissue damage worse. If the inflammation and tissue damage are too severe, the lungs never recover, and the person dies or is left with scarred lungs.
And as with SARS-CoV, MERS-CoV and animal coronaviruses, the damage doesn't stop with the lungs. A SARS-CoV-2 infection can trigger an extreme immune response known as a "cytokine storm", which can lead to multiple organ failure and death. The virus can also infect the intestines, the heart, the blood, sperm (as can MERS-CoV), the eye, and possibly the brain.
Guan Wei-jie -- a pulmonologist at the Guangzhou Institute of Respiratory Health at Guangzhou Medical University, China, an institution praised for its role in combating SARS and COVID-19 -- says that damage to the kidney, liver, and spleen observed in people with COVID-19 suggests that the virus can infect various organs or tissues wherever the blood supply reaches.
Wendtner isn't so sure. Although genetic material from the virus is showing up in these various tissues, it is not yet clear whether the damage there is being done by the virus or by a cytokine storm. He says: "Autopsies are under way in our center. More data will come soon."
Whether it infects the throat or the lungs, SARS-Cov-2 punches through the protective membrane of host cells using its spike proteins. First, the protein's receptor-binding domain latches on to a receptor called "ACE2", which sits on the surface of the host cell. ACE2 is expressed throughout the body on the lining of the arteries and veins that course through all organs, but it is particularly dense on the cells lining the alveoli and small intestines.
Although the exact mechanisms remain unclear, evidence suggests that after the virus attaches itself, the host cell snips the spike protein at one of its dedicated 'cleavage sites', exposing fusion peptides: small chains of amino acids that help to tear open the host cell's membrane so that the virus's membrane can merge with it. Once the invader's genetic material gets inside the cell, the virus takes over the host's molecular machinery to produce new viral particles. When complete, those progeny exit the cell to go and infect others. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (131): Likely the most visible SCOTUS judgement during Ford's administration was UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA V. BAKKE, also in 1978. It was, in hindsight, an inevitable consequence of affirmative action measures implemented in the wake of desegregation. Allan Bakke, a young Vietnam War veteran, had been rejected from medical school at the University of California twice. The school accepted 100 people, with 16 of them "minority groups." Bakke argued his rejections were due to "reverse racism", since his grades were better than the 16 who had been accepted on minority seats.
SCOTUS judged 5:4 that Bakke should be admitted -- but also stated that diversity could be taken into account in college admissions. In one opinion, Justice Harry Blackmun wrote: "In order to get beyond racism, we must first take account of race. There is no other way. And in order to treat some persons equally, we must treat them differently." This was not the last of the "reverse racism" cases, and they would generally lead to the same contradictory result.
* Ford was not keen on running for the White House in 1976, but he came around to doing so. He was, however, under pressure from the Republican Right, who were pushing former California Governor Ronald Reagan. The Republican Right attacked Ford particularly for "losing" South Vietnam and for signing the Helsinki Accords -- though there had been little support in Congress for continuing the war in Vietnam, and the Soviets would find the Helsinki Accords much more burdensome than the Americans. Ford beat Reagan in the primaries, though pressure from the Right Republicans led Ford to dump Nelson Rockefeller in favor of conservative Senator Bob Dole of Kansas as a VP running mate. As incumbent, Ford had the edge in the primary race; it would have been a humiliation to have been dumped.
Ford had reason to believe his chances in the general election were good. He had TV debates with Jimmy Carter, his Democratic rival; there hadn't been a TV debate since the 1960 election, and this was the first time an incumbent president engaged in one. The debates did not go well for Ford; in the second one, he proclaimed, in response to unrest against the Soviet Union in Iron-Curtain Poland: "There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, and there never will be under a Ford Administration." It appears that what he meant was that the USSR would never stamp out Polish independence, but the statement was awkwardly phrased.
Carter won the election by a narrow margin, obtaining 50.1% of the popular vote and 297 electoral votes, compared to Ford's 48.0% and 240 electoral votes. The Nixon pardon and Ford's reputation as an oaf worked against him. The Ford family went to live in Denver, Colorado, with Gerald Ford making profitable investments in oil. He maintained the honorary dignity of a retired president, establishing a generally good relationship with Jimmy Carter, obtaining honors, sitting on public boards -- and playing golf.
Ford published a compact autobiography in 1979 titled A TIME TO HEAL, flatteringly described by a reviewer as: "Serene, unruffled, unpretentious, like the author." There was some talk of him running for president in 1980, or becoming Ronald Reagan's VP candidate, but that amounted to nothing. In 2001, the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation awarded Ford the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award for his pardon of Nixon -- that being as much vindication as was needed in all respects.
Gerald Ford died on 26 December 2006. He was the only person to be vice-president or president without being elected to either office, and had the shortest time in office of any president who didn't die in office. Historically, he remains something of an historical non-entity, mostly due to circumstance; he had no opportunity to really shine in office, but he didn't disgrace it, either. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* WINGS & WEAPONS: As discussed by an article from JANES.com ("BAE Systems Completes Proof-Of-Concept Testing Of Surface-Launched APKWS II", 02 June 20), the venerable 70-millimeter (2.75-inch) unguided rocket has been modernized by the addition of a screw-on laser-guidance module, to become the "AGR-20A Advanced Precision Kill Weapon System (APKWS) II".
APKWS II was originally envisioned as an air-to-ground weapon, but successful trials were conducted of a ground-launch system in 2018 at the US Army's Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona. The launch system for the APKWS-GL was built around the "Common Remotely Operated Weapon Station (CROWS)", a turret fitted with a daylight camera, a thermal camera, and a laser rangefinder. CROWS can mount a variety of weapons; in this case, it mounted an Arnold Defense "Land-LGR4 Fletcher" four-round rocket launcher. It is not clear if the CROWS system used in this case was updated to a laser rangefinder / target designator, or if designation was performed by another system. CROWS will very likely add target designation if the Land-LG4 launcher is integrated.
The Land-LGR4 is a lightweight four-cell laser-guided rocket launcher designed to deliver single or ripple fire against static or moving ground targets at ranges from 1 to 8 kilometers (0.6 to 5 miles), with an effective guided maximum range of 6 kilometers (3.7 miles). The launcher has an unloaded weight of 25.4 kilograms (56 pounds) and a length of 1.9 meters (6.2 feet).
* As discussed by an article from JANES.com ("USMC Says Goodbye To Tanks And Hello To Long-Range Fires" by Ashley Roque, 24 March 2020), the US Marines are now planning to get rid of their main battle tanks, to instead rely on "organic precision fires" for heavy firepower. "Organic" in this context means "owned and operated by the Marines"; the precision fires systems are a work in progress, but it is clear they will consist of extended-range / guided artillery, and short / long-range precision missiles.
It's part of a "force design initiative", to create a Marine Corps that is smaller and more nimble to support naval expeditionary warfare operations, while drawing funding away from legacy systems and towards modernized ones. Over the next decade, the service will reduce its footprint by 12,000 marines and make the III Marine Expeditionary Force (MEF) formation its main focus -- featuring three Marine littoral regiments (MLR) organized, trained, and equipped for "sea denial and sea control".
* As discussed by an article from JANES.com ("USAF Contracts Cockpit Sensor Suite To Safeguard Pilot Physiology" by Gareth Jennings, 22 June 2020), in recent years the US military has become increasingly concerned with pilot blackouts, which can lead to the loss of aircraft and pilots. A "physiological event" occurs when aircrew experience symptoms that can result from a variety of factors, including hypoxia (oxygen deficiency to the brain), hypocapnia (reduced carbon dioxide in the blood), hypercapnia (elevated carbon dioxide in the blood), or disorientation.
Accordingly, in June 2020, the US Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) awarded a contract to Ohio-based Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corporation to develop, prototype, and demonstrate an integrated sensor suite capability for effective cockpit sensing, including pilot physiology and cockpit environments. The effort is to yield a prototype system as a basis for production development. The contract follows an investigation lasting more than two years into the issue of pilot disorientation by the USAF's Unexplained Physiologic Events (UPE) team, which was formed in January 2018 following a series of such incidents.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* MINDS OF ANIMALS (4): Probing the small brains of fruit flies and zebrafish is rewarding, but neuroscientists really want to get into more elaborate brains. That's a challenge, since it's hard to monitor more than a small part of a large brain at any one time -- but they have been able to find hints of internal brain states with networks that are widely distributed through the brain. In challenging experiments in mice, they have recorded the activity of thousands of neurons throughout the brain using calcium imaging, and of hundreds of neurons using a single Neuropixels electrode, several of which can be inserted at once.
In a study published in 2019, neuroscientist Karl Deisseroth at Stanford University in California and his team used Neuropixels probes to observe the activity of 24,000 neurons across 34 cortical and subcortical brain regions in thirsty mice that were licking water from a spout. The scientists were able to sift out signals related to the brain state of thirst from signals related to licking behavior. They found that these state-signaling neurons were activated throughout the brain -- not just in the hypothalamus, which is focused on thirst.
Using their extensive recording techniques, neuroscientists are finding that there is a lot going on beneath the surface when an animal performs a task, and not all of it seems relevant at first sight. In major papers released in 2019, groups led by Kenneth Harris at University College London and by Cold Spring Harbor's Anne Churchland showed that when a mouse is busy at a task, neurons activate throughout the brain -- but that a large proportion of the activation is not correlated with the task. Some activity correlated instead with the animals' fidgety movements, but about two-thirds of the off-task activation didn't tally with any movement or action.
Trying to get the neural data is difficult; coping with the massive volumes of data is even more troublesome, that issue being seen as the field's biggest bottleneck. Researchers have been making some progress, one popular trick being to use a mathematical method known as the "hidden Markov model (HMM)" to predict the probability that a system will switch between different states at a particular time.
Mala Murthy at Princeton University, New Jersey, and her team used the HMM to discover rhythms in the brains of male fruit flies that influenced their selection of song pattern when courting females. Whether male flies choose on a moment-to-moment basis to sing in staccato pulses or longer hums depends in large part, if not completely, on how the females respond to them. Murthy's group found that three different internal brain states also affected the male's song choice. They named the fly dispositions "Close", "Chasing", and "Whatever".
Steve Flavell, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, says that, whatever model organisms are being investigated, the question of how the entire brain coordinates internal states "is what we are all starting to think about."
In 2013, Flavell and his colleagues discovered that even the brain of the Caenorhabditis elegans worm, which has only 302 neurons, displays properties of internal brain states that drive particular behaviors -- including two sets of persistently active neurons controlling whether the animal lingers, or moves purposely. His group has since identified the complete neural circuitry involved in the two states and switching between them.
Max Planck's Jennifer Li sees her field of research as pioneering, saying: "At this stage, we are still trying to understand what the questions are." [END OF SERIES]
PREV | START | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* HYPER-KAMIOKANDE: As discussed by an article from NATURE.com ("Japan Will Build The World's Largest Neutrino Detector" by Davide Castelvecchi, 16 December 2019), the ghostly neutrino particle known as the "neutrino" can penetrate light-years of lead with a low probability of it being stopped. The only way to observe them is with massive detector systems, placed deep underground to screen out confounding sources of radiation.
Japan has already built the "Kamiokande" and its follow-on "Super-Kamiokande" neutrino detectors; the government has now authorized work on the "Hyper-Kamiokande", AKA "Hyper-K". Hyper-K will hold 260,000 tonnes (286,000 tons) of ultrapure water -- more than five times the amount contained by Super-Kamiokande. Most of the neutrinos flooding through the detector will pass right through it, but a few will interact with the water molecules. The detector will have sensitive instruments to detect the interactions.
The new detector will be built inside a gigantic cavern to be dug next to Hida City's Kamioka mine, where Kamiokande and then Super-Kamiokande were installed. Hyper-K will be more sensitive than any neutrino detector built to day, allowing it to detect neutrinos from a range of sources -- including cosmic rays, the Sun, supernovas, and beams artificially produced by an existing particle accelerator.
In addition to catching neutrinos, Hyper-K will monitor the water for the possible spontaneous decay of protons in atomic nuclei. The original Kamiokande detector was built primarily to search for the decay of the proton, the name meaning "Kamioka Nucleon Decay Experiment". Proton decay, if it happens at all, is expected to be a rare event -- with a half-life of about 10^34 years, vastly longer than the lifetime of the Universe -- and nobody's spotted it yet.
The Japanese government has approved initial funding for Hyper-K, with the funds to be approved by the Diet, the Japanese parliament. Building the Hyper-K will cost about 64.9 billion yen, or about $600 million USD. Another 7.3 billion yen will be spent to upgrade the J-PARC accelerator, about 185 miles (300 kilometers) away, which will generate neutrino beams. Japan will provide about 75% of the funds, with the rest provided by international partners.
Hyper-K will be built around a drum-shaped tank 71 meters deep and 68 meters wide (233 x 223 feet). A gallery to house the tank will be dug with explosive charges at a site 8 kilometers (five miles) from the existing Kamioka facilities, to avoid vibrations disturbing the new KAGRA gravitational-wave detector. The Kamioka site was chosen because of the existing mining facilities and the high quality of the rock, as well as a plentiful supply of fresh water.
As with its predecessors, the water tank inside Hyper-K will be lined with 40,000 photomultiplier tubes (PMT), which are sensitive light detectors. The PMTs will capture faint flashes of blue light, known as "Cerenkov radiation", emitted when a neutrino collides with an atom in the water, causing a charged particle to shoot out at high speed. PMTs are expensive, so there's work being done on solid-state photodetectors as an alternative.
Hyper-K will be one of three major next-generation neutrino experiments to start in the 2020s; the others are the "Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE)", due to start in the USA in 2025, and the "Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO)" in China, which is expected to begin collecting data in 2021.
Kajita Takaaki -- a physicist at the University of Tokyo -- says that physicists are excited about Hyper-K because it will be able to study differences in the behaviors of neutrinos and their anti-matter counterparts, antineutrinos. The observations may help resolve the puzzle as to why the Universe seems to be mostly matter, and not anti-matter; symmetry considerations suggest they should be equal. Kajita, incidentally, shared the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physics for his co-discovery of neutrino oscillations, made using the Super-K in the 1990s. There's also excitement over the possibility of detecting proton decay; if it can't be spotted, the half-life of the proton will need to be raised by another order of magnitude.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* THE COVID-19 MENACE (23): Nobody's sure how long coronaviruses have been around -- some suggesting they arose hundreds of millions of years ago, others saying it was more like 10,000 years ago. As noted earlier in this series, scientists now know of dozens of strains, seven of which infect humans.
Among the four that cause common colds, two -- OC43 and HKU1 -- came from rodents, and the other two -- 229E and NL63 -- from bats. The three that cause severe disease -- SARS-CoV (which causes SARS), MERS-CoV (which causes MERS), and SARS-Cov-2 -- all came from bats. However, researchers suspect there was some intermediary animal, which was infected by bats and then passed the viruses on to humans.
With SARS, the intermediary is thought to have been civet cats, which are sold in live-animal markets in China. The origin of SARS-CoV-2 is still unknown. The virus shares 96% of its genetic material with a virus found in a bat in a cave in Yunnan, China -- which strongly suggests it came from bats. However, there's a crucial difference: the spike proteins of coronaviruses have a unit called a "receptor-binding domain", which is central to their success in entering human cells. The SARS-CoV-2 binding domain is particularly efficient, and it differs in important ways from that of the Yunnan bat virus, which seems not to infect people.
Complicating matters, a pangolin -- scaly anteater -- showed up with a coronavirus that had a receptor-binding domain almost identical to the human version -- but the rest of the coronavirus was only 90% genetically similar, so some researchers suspect the pangolin was not the intermediary. The fact that both mutations and recombinations are at work complicates efforts to draw a family tree.
Recent studies suggest that SARS-CoV-2, or a very similar ancestor, has been hiding in some animal for decades. According to one paper, the coronavirus lineage leading to SARS-CoV-2 split more than 140 years ago from the closely related one seen today in pangolins. Then, sometime in the past 40 to 70 years, the ancestors of SARS-CoV-2 separated from the bat version, which subsequently lost the effective receptor binding domain that was present in its ancestors, and remains in SARS-CoV-2. Another study came to similar conclusions.
Rasmus Nielsen -- an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, and co-author of one of the studies -- believes that SARS-CoV-2 has a long family history, with many coronavirus branches in bats and possibly pangolins carrying the same deadly receptor binding domain, including some that might have similar abilities to cause a pandemic. Nielsen says: "There is a need for continued surveillance and increased vigilance towards the emergence of new viral strains by zoonotic transfer."
Although the known human coronaviruses can infect many cell types, they all mainly cause respiratory infections. The difference is that the four that cause common colds easily attack the upper respiratory tract -- while MERS-CoV and SARS-CoV have more difficulty gaining a hold there, but are more successful at infecting cells in the lungs.
SARS-CoV-2, unfortunately, can do both very efficiently. Xiao Shu-Yuan, -- a pathologist at the University of Chicago, Illinois -- points out that gives it two places to get a foothold. A neighbor's cough that sends ten viral particles your way might be enough to start an infection in your throat, but the hair-like cilia found there are likely to do their job and clear the invaders. If the neighbor is closer and coughs 100 particles towards you, the virus might be able to get all the way down to the lungs.
That might help explain why people with COVID-19 have such different experiences. The virus can start in the throat or nose, producing a cough and disrupting taste and smell, then end there -- or it might work its way down to the lungs, and attack them.
Clemens-Martin Wendtner -- an infectious-disease physician at the Munich Clinic Schwabing in Germany -- believes it could be a problem with the immune system that lets the virus sneak down into the lungs. Most infected people create neutralizing antibodies that are tailored by the immune system to bind with the virus and block it from entering a cell. However, some people seem unable to make them, which might be why some recover after a week of mild symptoms, while others get hit with late-onset lung disease.
Wendtner adds that the virus can also bypass the throat cells and go straight down into the lungs; patients might then get pneumonia without the usual mild symptoms such as a cough or low-grade fever that would otherwise come first. Having these two infection points means that SARS-CoV-2 can mix the transmissibility of the common cold coronaviruses with the lethality of MERS-CoV and SARS-CoV: "It is an unfortunate and dangerous combination of this coronavirus strain." [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (130): As president, Gerald Ford had middling approval ratings. He was generally seen as an honest and decent man, but as not too bright and lacking in determination. He acquired a reputation as an oaf, having been caught on camera doing something clumsy a few times -- with the news media playing up his fumbles from then on, and comedians playing up "clumsy Ford" in skits. That was greatly unfair, Ford being a generally competent and, in Congress, respected figure, those around him finding him upright, conscientious, and not particularly clumsy.
People tried to kill Ford twice. The first time was on 5 September 1975, when Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme -- a follower of cult leader Charles Manson -- came up to Ford and took a shot at him with a handgun; a Secret Service man grabbed the gun, and the shot missed. Fromme would end up doing 34 years in prison, being released in 2009. The Secret Service began to keep Ford farther away from anonymous crowds; that may have saved his life 17 days later when, 17 days later, during a visit to San Francisco, one Sarah Jane Moore also took a shot at Ford with a handgun, missing him, to be grabbed by an onlooker when she fired again -- the bullet hit a taxi driver and wounded him slightly. Moore did 32 years in prison, being released in 2007.
In 1975, Ford appointed John Paul Stevens to the Supreme Court retiring Justice William O. Douglas. This was a bit surprising, since as House minority leader, Ford had pushed efforts to have Douglas impeached. Many Republicans would be disappointed in Stevens, since he ended up siding with the liberal wing of the court -- but late in his life, Ford praised Stevens, Ford having drifted more Left as well.
* The first major SCOTUS decision during the Ford Administration was O'CONNOR V. DONALDSON in 1975. In 1956, one Kenneth Donaldson was living in Philadelphia; he visited his elderly parents in Florida, and told them that a neighbor was trying to poison him. His parents took action, having him diagnosed as a "paranoid schizophrenic", leading to him being locked up in the Florida State Hospital at Chattahoochee. He spent 15 years there challenging his incarceration, and managed to win release.
Donaldson didn't give up the case then; he obtained help from advocates for the mentally ill, with the case making its way up to the Supreme Court. SCOTUS judged unanimously that Donaldson had been unjustly locked up: he had not been seen as a threat to himself or society. The court did not grant him damages, though allowed him to pursue them in lower courts; he was awarded $20,000 in 1977.
The next major court decision in the Ford Administration was BUCKLEY V. VALEO in 1976. It had roots in attempts by Congress to regulate campaign finance, going back to the 1907 "Tillman Act" -- which prohibited corporations and national banks from contributing to Federal campaigns -- and the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, mentioned earlier -- which banned corporate contributions to political campaigns. Neither were enforced, and they were not effective.
The 1971 "Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA)" was a limited attempt to police campaign financing, focusing on disclosure rules. In 1974, Congress passed significant amendments to the FECA, which imposed strict rules on contributions to political campaigns, stipulated disclosure, and provided for the public financing of presidential elections. It created the Congressional bipartisan "Federal Election Commission (FEC)" to oversee elections.
In 1975, a group represented by Senator James L. Buckley (R-NY, brother of well-known conservative pundit William F. Buckley) brought suit against the law, saying it violated the 1st and 5th Amendment rights to freedom of expression and due process, respectively. In 1976, SCOTUS judged that blanket restrictions on campaign contributions was indeed a violation of the 1st Amendment, though it stated that caps were allowable, and affirmed reporting of campaign contributions.
BUCKLEY V. VALEO led to the 1978 decision in FIRST NATIONAL BANK OF BOSTON V. BELLOTI. The State of Massachusetts planned to increase personal income taxes on high-wage earners; a group of plaintiffs, including the First National Bank of Boston, wanted to buy advertising to challenge the increase, However, Massachusetts law said they couldn't unless they were "materially affected" -- and Massachusetts Attorney General Francis Bellotti said the bank wasn't materially affected.
SCOTUS judged that corporations were entitled to 1st Amendment free speech protections, though again added that contributions could be capped, and underscored transparency in campaign contributions. These two decisions did improve transparency, but also led to the rise of political action committees (PAC) -- eventually; they were narrow decisions. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* Space launches for November included:
-- 05 NOV 20 / GPS 3-04 (USA 306) -- A Falcon 9 booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 2324 UTC (local time + 3) to put the "GPS 3-04" AKA "USA 306" navigation satellite into orbit. It was the fourth third-generation GPS satellite.
-- [06 NOV 20] CN TY / LONG MARCH 6 / ALEPH 1-9:18 -- A Chinese Long March 6 booster was launched from Taiyuan at 0319 UTC (local time - 8) to put the "Aleph 1-9" (AKA "Nusat 1-9") through "Aleph 1-18" Earth-observation smallsats into orbit. They were flown for from Satellogic of Argentina, which plans to orbit a constellation of 25 Aleph satellites. Each had a launch mass of 37 kilograms (76 pounds); they each had a payload of two imagers operating in the visible / infrared spectrum, including a multispectral camera with 1-meter (3.3-foot) resolution, and a hyperspectral camera with 30-meter (100-foot) resolution.
The mission also launched three smallsats:
The Chang Zheng 6 (CZ6) is a liquid-propellant booster developed by the Shanghai Academy of Space Technology (SAST). The CZ6 core stage consists of a single 1,340 kN (136,600 kgp / 301,200 950 lbf) thrust YF 100 engine that burns oxygen and kerosene (LOX-RP) propellant, in contrast with the UDMH-N2O4 propellant currently in use. The second stage is also powered by LOX-RP, using a single YF 115 engine providing 176.5 kN (17,990 kgp / 39,670 lbf) thrust. The upper stage has four small restartable engines, burning kerosene and hydrogen peroxide.
-- 07 NOV 20 / TIANQUI 11 -- A Chinese Ceres 1 booster was launched from Jiuquan at 0712 UTC (local time - 8) to put the "Tianqui 11" microsatellite into orbit for Guodian Gaoke, a Beijing-based company. This was the inaugural launch of the four-stage Ceres 1 booster, developed by Galactic Energy of Beijing. The booster is about 19 meters (62 feet) tall; its lower three stages are solid rocket motors likely derived from missile stages developed for the Chinese military, and an upper orbital insertion stage using a hydrazine propulsion system. It can put 350 kilograms (770 pounds) into low Earth orbit. The Ceres 1 is to lead to the bigger Pallas 1, which will be powered by kerosene-fueled engines and be partly re-usable.
-- 07 NOV 20 / EOS 1 -- An ISRO Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) was launched from Sriharikota at 0941 UTC (local time - 5:30) to put the "EOS 1" radar Earth observation satellite into orbit. Originally designated "RISAT 2BR2", EOS 1 was a radar surveillance platform, joining two similar satellites, RISAT 2B and 2BR1, launched by India in May and December 2019 respectively. EOS 1 is likely designed for a five-year mission, with an X-band synthetic aperture radar.
The PSLV also launched nine CubeSats:
The flight used the PSLV-DL variant of the PSLV, with two strap-on solid rocket boosters.
-- 12 NOV 20 / TIANTONG 1-02 -- A Chinese Long March 3B/G2 booster was launched from Xichang at 1559 UTC (next day local time - 8) to put the "Tiantong 1-02" geostationary comsat for mobile communications into orbit. It was an S-band mobile communication satellite developed by the Chinese Academy of Space Technology and operated by China SatCom. It was based on the DFH4 comsat bus, with a launch mass of about 4,600 kilograms (10,150 pounds), and a design lifetime of 15 years. The first Tiantong 1 was launched in 2016.
-- 13 NOV 20 / NROL 101 -- An Atlas 5 booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 2232 UTC (local time + 4) to put a classified payload into orbit for the US National Reconnaissance Office. The booster was in the "551" vehicle configuration with a 5-meter (26.4-foot) fairing, five solid rocket boosters and a single-engine Centaur upper stage. This was the first launch of an Atlas 5 booster with new Northrop Grumman-built GEM-63 solid rocket motors, replacing the Aerojet Rocketdyne AJ-60A solid rocket motors used on previous Atlas 5s.
-- 16 NOV 20 / SPACEX CREW DRAGON ISS 1 -- A SpaceX Falcon booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 0027 UTC (previous day local time + 3), carrying a "Crew Dragon" space capsule on its first flight with a crew to the International Space Station. The crew included NASA astronauts Mike Hopkins (2nd space flight), Victor Glover (1st space flight), and Shannon Walker (2nd space flight), plus experienced Japanese astronaut Noguchi Soichi (3rd space mission, all in different spacecraft). The capsule docked with the ISS Harmony module on 17 November, with the crew joining NASA astronaut Kate Rubins and Russian cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and flight engineer Sergey Kud-Sverchkov, raising the ISS's crew to seven people for the first time.
This was the first flight of a space capsule with a crew of four. This was the first human spaceflight mission to Earth orbit operated as a commercial service, under the Commercial Crew Program. NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken had flown on 30 May as a developmental flight, to spend two months on the ISS.
The Commercial Crew Program has its roots in the Obama administration, which canceled NASA's Constellation Moon program in 2010 after the George W. Bush administration's lunar exploration initiative suffered delays and cost overruns. An independent commission found in 2009 that it would cost more than $34 billion to complete the first phase of the Constellation program, which would have fielded the Ares 1 rocket and an Orion crew capsule capable of flights to the International Space Station. The Commercial Crew Program was a fall-back for supporting ISS missions, while the Orion project was rethought.
-- 17 NOV 20 / SEOSAT-INGENIO & TARANIS (FAILURE) -- A Vega booster was launched from Kourou in French Guiana at 0152 UTC (previous day local time + 3) to put the "SEOSat-Ingenio" Earth observation satellite and the "Taranis" scientific research satellite for Spanish and French customers respectively. SEOSat-Ingenio was built by Airbus Defense & Space; it was flown by the Spanish Center for Development of Industry Technology, an arm of the Spanish government, in partnership with the European Space Agency. The Taranis spacecraft, developed by the French space agency CNES, was to study the transfers of energy between the Earth atmosphere and the space environment occurring above thunderstorms. The booster did not make orbit.
-- 20 NOV 20 / SMALLSATS x 30: -- A Rocket Labs Electron light booster was launched from New Zealand's North Island at 0221 UTC (local time - 11) to put a set of smallsats and other payloads into orbit for a set of customers.
Two of the satellites on the Electron launch were built by Millennium Space Systems, a subsidiary of Boeing, under the "DragRacer" effort, to test a "de-orbit tether" scheme. One of the two satellites, named "Alchemy", extended a 70-meter (230-foot) long electrically-conductive tether, or "Terminator Tape", to induce drag, causing it to fall from orbit. The other satellite, "Augury", was a control and did not have the tether. The two satellites were otherwise identical, having a total mass of about 25 kilograms (55 pounds).
The Terminator Tape technology was from the US company Tethers Unlimited. The tether module attaches to the side of a satellite, is about the size of a notebook, and weighs about a kilogram. The Prox 1 microsatellite developed by students at Georgia Tech deployed a 70-meter (230-foot) long Terminator Tape in 2019. Tethers Unlimited said tracking of the spacecraft showed its orbit decaying 24 times faster after extending the tether.
The other satellites were all CubeSats:
A "mass simulator" in the form of Gnome Chompski, an item from the "Half-Life" video game, remained attached to the Electron's kick stage after it released the mission's other payloads. This was the 16th launch of the Electron; the flight was nicknamed "Return To Sender" -- since it involved the first attempt to recover the Electron first stage by parachute. The booster first stage successfully splashed down in the Pacific; it will not be re-used after being immersed, the full plan being to snag the booster's parachute with a helicopter.
-- 21 NOV 20 / SENTINEL 6A -- A SpaceX Falcon 9 booster was launched from Vandenberg AFB at 1717 UTC (local time + 8) to put the "Sentinel 6A" AKA "Jason-CS A" satellite into orbit.
The Sentinel 6A satellite was a joint mission between the European Space Agency, NASA, NOAA, CNES and Eumetsat to continue the sea level measurements previously collected by the Jason series of satellites. Sentinel 6A, built by Airbus Defense and Space and Thales Alenia Space, had a launch mass of about 1,192 kilograms (2,628 pounds). It was shaped like a house, with a "roof" of dual solar panels.
Sentinel 6A added to the European Commission's Copernicus Earth observation satellite network. The satellite was named "Michael Freilich" in honor of the late director of NASA's Earth science division.
Sentinel 6A Michael Freilich was the latest in a series of spacecraft designed to monitor changes in sea states. It was to continue high-precision ocean altimetry measurements alongside an identical spacecraft, Sentinel-6B, which is due to launch sometime in 2025. A secondary objective of Sentinel-6A Michael Freilich is to collect high-resolution vertical profiles of temperature using the Global Navigation Satellite System -- Radio Occultation science instrument.
-- 23 NOV 20 / CHANG'E 5 -- A Long March 5 booster was launched at 2030 UTC (next day local time - 8) from the Chinese Wenchang launch center on Hainan Island to send the "Chang'e 5" lunar sample-return probe to the Moon. This was the first lunar sample-return mission since 1976.
The Chang'e 5 lander touched down on 1 December in the Oceanus Procellarum (Ocean of Storms) region in the northern hemisphere of the near side of the Moon. It took samples, drilling as deep as 2 meters (6.6 feet). The samples were launched back up to the Chang'e 5 return vehicle in lunar orbit on 3 December. The return vehicle left lunar orbit on 13 December, to drop its sample-return capsule on 16 December.
Nine missions have returned Moon samples to Earth, including NASA's six crewed Apollo missions, and three robot Luna spacecraft launched by the Soviet Union. Before Chang'e 5, China had successfully dispatched four robot explorers to the Moon, beginning with the Chang'e 1 and Chang'e 2 orbiters in 2007 and 2010. In 2013, China landed the Chang'e 3 mission on the Moon with a mobile rover that drove across the lunar surface.
China's most challenging lunar mission previous to Chang'e 5 was Chang'e 4, which accomplished the first soft landing on the far side of the Moon in January 2019. Chang'e 4's rover was at last notice still operating, sending back data and imagery through a dedicated relay satellite China placed in a position beyond the far side of the Moon to transmit signals between Earth and the Chang'e 4 spacecraft.
The Chang'e missions are named for a Moon goddess in Chinese folklore. China has a backup to the Chang'e 5 spacecraft named Chang'e 6, which could be used to return samples from the lunar farside. Unlike Chang'e 5, which is an all-Chinese mission, the Chang'e 6 spacecraft will carry foreign instruments. The French space agency, CNES, announced in 2019 that it will provide an instrument for the Chang'e 6 mission to study the Moon's exosphere and water cycle.
China is also considering a robot station on the Moon's south pole before a possible landing on the Moon with Chinese astronauts in the 2030s. Chinese officials have signaled they are open to partnering with other countries on lunar exploration. Instruments developed by scientists in Sweden, Germany, and Saudi Arabia have flown to the Moon on past Chinese missions.
-- 25 NOV 20 / STARLINK 15 -- A SpaceX Falcon 9 booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 0213 UTC (previous day local time + 4) to put 60 SpaceX "Starlink" low-Earth-orbit broadband comsats into orbit. The satellites were built by SpaceX, each having a launch mass of about 225 kilograms (500 pounds). This was the 16th Starlink batch launch.
-- 29 NOV 20 / OPTICAL DATA RELAY SATELLITE -- An H2A booster was launched from Tanegashima at 0725 UTC (local time - 9) to put the "Optical Data Relay Satellite" into geostationary orbit. It was the first element of the "Japan Data Relay System (JDRS) featured the "Laser Utilizing Communication System (LUCAS)", a high-bandwidth laser satellite intercommunication system. It supported both Japanese civil Earth-observation satellites, and military intelligence satellites.
The new optical data relay satellite had a design life of 10 years. It replaced JAXA's Kodama spacecraft, which had S-band and Ka-band inter-satellite links that provided communication speeds of about 240 megabits per second. JAXA decommissioned the Kodama satellite in 2017 after a 15-year mission. The new laser-equipped relay satellite provides data transmission speeds up to 1.8 gigabits per second. JAXA launched an experimental test satellite named "Kirari" in 2005 to demonstrate inter-satellite laser communication links.
* OTHER SPACE NEWS: Work on nuclear thermal rocket (NTR) propulsion goes back to the 1960s, but has never led to an operational system. As discussed by an article from NEWATLAS.com ("Gryphon Technologies To Develop Nuclear Rocket Engine For DARPA" by David Szondy, 30 September 2020), the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has now awarded a contract to Gryphon Technologies -- a US engineering firm -- to take another shot at NTR.
DARPA has awarded a $14 million USD contract to an engineering firm named Gryphon Technologies to develop and demonstrate an NTR engine for the agency's "Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Operations (DRACO)" program. The "High-Assay Low Enriched Uranium (HALEU) Nuclear Thermal Propulsion (NTP)" system will support US military operations in "cislunar" space -- that is, between Earth orbit and the Moon.
NTR propulsion involves heating a propellant, such as hydrogen, to high temperatures using a fission reactor; it provides thrust that is about five times more efficient than that from a chemical rocket, though at low levels. It is not useful for lifting payloads off the Earth, instead being intended for space transfers.
The DRACO program envisions development of a reactor design, and then fabrication of an operational system. For the current contract, Gryphon will investigate a HALEU propulsion system using nuclear fuel made from recycled civilian reactor fuel that has been reprocessed and enriched to between 5% and 20% -- more than civilian reactors, less than naval reactors. The higher level of enrichment will result in a more efficient and compact reactor that will produce less waste.
* In another article from NUATLAS.com ("New Nuclear Engine Concept Could Help Realize 3-Month Trips To Mars" by David Szondy, 25 October 2020), NASA is also conducting investigations on NTR engines, having obtained a design for such a system from Seattle-based "Ultra Safe Nuclear Technologies (USNC-Tech)".
UNSC-Tech's NTR is based on "fully ceramic micro-encapsulated (FCM)" fuel, with HALEU encapsulated in zirconium carbide (ZrC) -- suggesting a "pebble bed" reactor. USNC-Tech officials say the concept was "designed to enable a successful near-term system demonstration and reduce barriers to full-scale deployment." However, there's no commitment to an operational system at this time.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* MINDS OF ANIMALS (3): For his initial study of an internal brain state, Caltech's David Anderson decided to build on his laboratory's previous interest in aggression in the fruit fly, which has a tiny brain consisting of about 100,000 neurons. In many animal species, males fight over females -- a well-established behavior that Anderson calls the "Helen of Troy effect", in which competing suitors started a war. Evidence suggests the presence of females causes males to engage in both courtship songs and aggressive behavior towards other males for many minutes. Anderson points out that's a substantial investment by the males: "That's a long time in the short life of a fruit fly."
He decided to search for neural activity that correlated with the persistent courtship and fighting behaviors initiated by neurons designated "P1", found in a region that controls such social behaviors. These neurons fire so quickly that they couldn't, by themselves, be responsible for maintaining a long-term internal state. Using imaging techniques along with automated behavioral analysis, his group identified cells in other brain areas that become active as a consequence of P1 activation.
Most of these "follower cells" switched on and off quickly, but a cluster known as "pCd neurons" stayed active for many minutes. When the researchers inserted a light-sensitive protein into these cells and switched them off using a flash from a laser, the persistent effect of P1 activation on behavior disappeared. When they activated them directly, bypassing P1, nothing happened: the pCd neurons needed P1 as a trigger and, once sparked into action, they stayed on for much longer than the initial prompt. Anderson calls this a "ready to engage in these social behaviors" state.
His team has conducted a similar experiment in mice, which have more elaborate brains containing about 100 million neurons. The researchers found a particular group of neurons in the hypothalamus that, just like the pCd neurons, became persistently activated in association with an innate drive -- in this case, fear. When the scientists placed a rat close to experimental mice for just a few seconds, the mice responded defensively by hugging the wall for several minutes; the group of neurons remained active for all this time. When the team again used light to switch the neurons on and off, the wall-hugging behavior came and went in tandem, even with no rat present.
Neuroscientists are now discovering other groups of neurons with persistent activity in different brain areas. Using calcium imaging in mice, Andreas Luethi at the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research in Basel, Switzerland, and Jan Gruendemann at the University of Basel searched in the amygdala, which is central to the regulation of a range of emotions and behaviors. The team found two different populations of neurons that displayed sustained but opposing activation when the mice switched between two distinct behaviors: exploring the environment, and performing defensive behaviors such as going into a freeze.
Gruendemann acknowledges that the amygdala cells are unlikely to be working in isolation, and that cells across the whole brain are involved in maintaining the explorative or defensive states. He says: "I'm sure it is just one node in larger, brain-wide networks."
While many researchers have searched particular brain areas for neurons that have enduring activity, Jennifer Li and Drew Robson -- who moved to Germany last September from Harvard to jointly run a lab at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tuebingen -- came across their persistently active neurons almost by chance.
Their zebrafish larvae are less elaborate than fruit flies, having only 80,000 or so brain cells. Since these baby fish are transparent, the activity of nearly all of their neurons can be monitored simultaneously using calcium imaging. The two researchers have developed a method of following both the movements and the neural activity as fish larvae swim freely around a dish. They use a fluorescent-microscope tracking system that moves on its imaging platform to keep the fish in constant view, and captures every flash of each neuron as the larvae move. The system also films them -- typically for 90 minutes, generating 4.5 terabytes of data -- allowing the experimenters to align movement with neuronal activity every second.
Fish larvae might not seem to have the rich internal life enjoyed by mice, or even flies, but they have at least one robust behavioral choice to make in their lives: whether to hunt locally, or to swim to unfamiliar waters to search for new food sources. When Li and Robson watched larvae making this choice, they found three groups of neurons:
Surprisingly, hunger didn't seem to influence the states, which switched automatically every few minutes. Robson says that's "just like our own sleep–wake states [that] switch automatically, but on a much shorter timescale". [TO BE CONTINUED]
NEXT | PREV | START | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* DARK MATTER QUANDARY: Cosmologists have spent decades pondering "dark matter", an unseen form of matter that appears to pervade the Universe, controlling the influence of gravity throughout the cosmos. Theoretical considerations say it can't be like ordinary matter -- but so far, nobody's spotted dark matter. Along with hunts for dark matter, theoretical physicists have tried to see if there's something wrong with theory, and dark matter is just a misunderstanding.
As discussed in an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("To Explain Away Dark Matter, Gravity Would Have To Be Really Weird, Cosmologists Say", by Adrian Cho, 20 November 2020), it is becoming apparent that dark matter is not easily swept under the rug as a misunderstanding. A new study suggests that, if dark matter were scratched out of the equations, we would end up with a gravitational force that, at some distances, pulls massive objects together and, at other distances, drives them apart. Scott Dodelson -- a theoretical physicist at Carnegie Mellon University, who wasn't involved in the study -- says that devising such a theory of gravity "is so complicated that it seems very unlikely that anyone could come up with a scenario that would work."
One of the first to try to get rid of dark matter was Israeli physicist Mordehai Milgrom, who in 1983 suggested that the high speeds of stars swirling around the peripheries of galaxies could be accounted for by modifying Isaac Newton's famous second law of motion: force equals mass times acceleration. It was a simple idea, but it didn't have simple consequences -- since it meant dramatically rethinking Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity, Einstein's theory of gravity. In practice, it meant adding new fields on top of the gravitational field.
To make things worse, Milgrom's idea didn't address the effect of dark matter on much larger, cosmological scales. Kris Pardo, a cosmologist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and David Spergel, a cosmologist at Princeton University, say that consideration makes things substantially more difficult to explain. To make their case, they compared the distribution of ordinary matter in the early Universe as revealed by measurements of the afterglow of the creation of the Universe in the Big Bang -- the cosmic microwave background (CMB) -- with the distribution of the galaxies today.
According to the two cosmologists, the Big Bang left ripples in the dark matter, which under its own gravity began to coalesce into the denser spots. Ordinary matter -- at that time, a hot plasma of free-flying protons and electrons -- also began to fall into the dark matter clumps. However, those charged particles themselves generated radiation that pushed them back out, creating sound waves known as "baryon acoustic oscillations". The waves continued to spread until the Universe cooled enough to form neutral atoms, 380,000 years after the Big Bang, when the CMB was born. The sound wave left its imprint on the CMB and, faintly, in the distribution of the galaxies.
Pardo and Spergel got to wondering if they could get the same results by assuming only ordinary matter, using a modified gravity. They devised a mathematical function that describes how gravity would have had to work to get from the distribution of ordinary matter revealed by the CMB to the current distribution of the galaxies. What they found was that function must swing between positive and negative values, meaning gravity would be attractive at some length scales and repulsive at others. Pardo says: "And that's super-weird."
Pardo adds that the weird behavior is required to explain how the larger baryon acoustic oscillation faded over cosmic time, while the smaller galaxies emerged. Dodelson says that theoreticians would need to jump through many hoops to explain that.
Some are willing to try. In another recent study, theoretical cosmologists Constantinos Skordis and Tom Zlosnik of the Czech Academy of Sciences presented a theory of modified gravity that eliminates dark matter, but is consistent with CMB data. They added to a theory like general relativity an additional, tunable field called a "scalar field". It has energy, and through Einstein's equivalence of mass and energy, it can behave like a form of mass. At large spatial scales, the scalar field interacts only with itself and acts like dark matter.
There is skepticism that this line of reasoning actually goes anywhere, since it only replaces one mysterious thing, dark matter, with another: a carefully tuned scalar field. Layfolk can only shrug, and not all the professionals are impressed, either. Pardo offers that "dark matter is kind of the easier explanation."
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* THE COVID-19 MENACE (22): To end this series on the same note as it began, an article from NATURE.com ("Profile Of A Killer: The Complex Biology Powering The Coronavirus Pandemic" by David Cyranoski, 4 May 2020) examined the SARS-CoV-2 to understand why it is so dangerous.
In 1912, German veterinarians puzzled over the case of a feverish cat with a grossly swollen belly. That is thought to be the first case of a coronavirus infection ever observed. Veterinarians didn't know it at the time, but coronaviruses were also giving chickens bronchitis, and pigs an intestinal disease that killed almost every piglet under two weeks old.
The recognition of the disease didn't mean people knew what caused it. That took until the 1960s, when researchers in the United Kingdom and the United States isolated two viruses with structures causing common colds in humans. Scientists soon noticed that the viruses identified in sick animals had the same bristly structure, studded with spiky protein protrusions. In the two-dimensional images obtained by electron microscopes, these viruses resembled crowns, and so in 1968 researchers coined the term "coronaviruses" for the entire group -- "corona" being Latin for "crown".
The coronaviruses were not highly species-specific: dog coronaviruses could make cats sick, the cat coronavirus could ravage pig intestines. Researchers thought that coronaviruses caused only mild symptoms in humans -- until the outbreak of SARS in 2003 showed that these viruses could kill people, too.
Now, as the COVID-19 pandemic rolls on, researchers are scrambling to learn as much as possible about the biology SARS-CoV-2, the latest of the coronavirus. A profile of the pathogen is emerging. Scientists are learning that the virus has evolved an array of adaptations that make it more lethal than the other coronaviruses humans have met so far. Unlike close relatives, SARS-CoV-2 can energetically attack human cells at multiple points, with the lungs and the throat being the main targets. Once inside the body, the virus makes use of a big toolkit to inflict damage. And genetic evidence suggests that it has been hiding out in nature, possibly for decades.
Many questions remain, including how exactly it kills; whether it will evolve into something more, or less, lethal; and what it can say about the next outbreak from the coronavirus family. Andrew Rambaut, who studies viral evolution at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, says: "There will be more, either out there already or in the making."
Of the viruses that afflict humans, coronaviruses are big. At 125 nanometers in diameter, they are also relatively large for the viruses that use RNA to replicate -- the group that accounts for most newly emerging diseases. However, coronaviruses really stand out for their genomes. With 30,000 genetic bases, coronaviruses have the biggest genomes of all RNA viruses. Their genomes are more than three times as big as those of HIV and hepatitis C, and more than twice the size of influenza's.
Coronaviruses are also one of the few RNA viruses with a genomic proofreading mechanism, which prevents the virus from accumulating mutations that could weaken it. That ability might be why common antivirals such as ribavirin, which can suppress viruses such as hepatitis C, don't affect SARS-CoV-2; the drugs weaken viruses by inducing mutations -- but coronaviruses can weed out those changes.
Mutations are not all bad for viruses; influenza is noted for its ability to evade the immune system by mutating rapidly, about three times faster than coronaviruses do. However. coronaviruses have a special trick that makes them adaptable as well: they often recombine, swapping chunks of their RNA with other coronaviruses. Typically, this is a meaningless trading of like parts between like viruses -- but when two distant coronavirus relatives end up in the same cell, recombination can lead to formidable versions that infect new cell types and jump to other species.
Recombination happens often in bats, which carry 61 viruses known to infect humans -- some bats carry as many as 121. In most cases, the viruses don't harm the bats; it appears the bats have long hosted the viruses, and have acquired adaptations to allow them to live with them. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (129): It was left to Gerald Ford to handle the final collapse of the US war in Southeast Asia. Nixon had been able to push through the Paris Peace Accords, which were signed on 27 January 1973. The agreement guaranteed the territorial integrity of Vietnam and, like the Geneva Conference of 1954, called for elections in both North and South Vietnam. The Americans withdrew their forces.
In December 1974, only months after Ford took office, North Vietnamese forces invaded South Vietnam. Ford asked Congress to approve a $722 million aid package for South Vietnam, the funds having been promised by the Nixon Administration. Congress resoundingly voted down the request; it was too much like throwing good money after bad. At the end of April 1975, Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese, and South Vietnam ceased to exist. The US evacuated Americans and thousands of Vietnamese. It was a debacle, with people clinging to helicopters, so many landing on some vessels that, when emptied, the machines were just pushed overboard.
An "Indochina Migration & Refugee Assistance Act" was passed to help the refugees, providing $455 million to help with their relocation. About 130,000 Vietnamese refugees came to the United States in 1975, and thousands more followed in subsequent years.
In the meantime, Cambodia had been taken over by Khmer Rouge insurgents, who set up a brutal regime that would murder more than a million Cambodians. The Americans could do and did nothing to stop the new regime -- but when, in May 1975, Khmer Rouge forces seized the American merchantman SS MAYAGUEZ in international waters, Ford sent the Marines to show that the US would respond to provocations. The operation didn't go all that well, with dozens of Marines killed, but it still gave Ford a boost in public approval.
Another provocation took place at Panmunjom, a village which sits in the demilitarized zone between the North and South Koreas, where the two sides sometimes met for discussions. Believing the Americans were off-balance, the North Koreans set up a campaign to encourage the US to pull its forces out of South Korea. In August 1976, North Korean troops killed two American officers and injured South Korean guards who were in trimming a tree in Panmunjom's Joint Security Area. At the time, there was a meeting of the Conference of Non-Aligned Nations in Colombo, Sri Lanka; the North Koreans claimed the incident was due to US aggression, and pushed through a resolution calling for the withdrawal of US forces from South Korea.
The Ford Administration had no choice but to respond forcefully, sending a strong armed contingent in to cut down the tree in question, while performing major demonstrations of armed might -- including B-52 bomber flights over Panmunjon. The North Koreans backed up, and even issued an unprecedented official apology.
Distracted by the collapse of South Vietnam and the turmoil in Indochina, the Ford Administration turned a blind eye towards other events in Southeast Asia. In 1975, the former Portuguese colony of East Timor declared its independence; Indonesian president Suharto, a firm American ally in the region, decided to invade East Timor, with the US making no objections. The Americans feared East Timor might turn Communist, as had Indochina, and did not anticipate the occupation would be troublesome. Tens of thousands died in the following invasion and occupation. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* GIMMICKS & GADGETS: As discussed by an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("Next Generation Water Splitter Could Help Renewables Power The Globe" by Robert F. Service, 10 March 2020), hydrogen is seen as an attractive fuel in a post-carbon future. It burns clean, producing water as an output, and there are s vast quantities of hydrogen in the world's waters. Renewable energy can be used to drive an "electrolyzer" to split the hydrogen out of the water. The problem is that current electrolyzers are costly, demanding either expensive catalysts or pricey metal housings. Now, researchers have figured out a cheaper electrolyzer.
Scientists knew how to electrolyze water more than 200 years ago: put two metal electrodes, a negative cathode and a positive anode, in a jar of water; apply an electrical voltage between them; and hydrogen (H2) and oxygen (O2) will bubble up at the separate electrodes. Since the two molecules have a tendency to explosively recombine, in modern electrolyzers the two electrodes are separated by a plastic membrane that isolates the gases. At the cathode, water molecules split into H+ and OH– ions, with the H+ ions combining with electrons from the cathode to make H2. The OH– ions diffuse through the membrane to the anode, where they generate O2 and water.
Modern electrolyzers also use metal catalysts, typically cheap ones like nickel and iron, to speed the reaction. They also add potassium hydroxide (KOH) to the water to support the migration of ions. Unfortunately, KOH is highly caustic, requiring that devices be made out of expensive inert metals like titanium. In consequence, in the 1960s researchers developed electrolyzers using a "proton-exchange membrane (PEM)", in which the dividing membrane is constructed to allow H+ ions through. In a PEM electrolyzer, the catalysts are on the two sides of the membrane, not on the electrodes. The catalysts on the anode side split water molecules into H+ and OH– ions, with the OH- ions instantly reacting at the catalysts to form O2 molecules. The H+ ions then migrate through the plastic membrane to the cathode side, where the catalysts on the membrane convert the H+ ions into H2.
Since OH- ions don't persist in PEM cells, there's no need for a highly alkaline electrolyte. PEM cells also typically produce hydrogen at five times the rate of the alkaline version. Nonetheless, PEM cells have their downsides: the membrane sets up highly acidic conditions, demanding the use of expensive corrosion-resistant metals, and also demand the use of expensive platinum and iridium as catalysts.
Now, Yu Seung Kim and his colleagues at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, working with researchers at Washington State University, have come up with a new electrolyzer that gets around this obstacle. In the new scheme, catalysts on the cathode split H20 into H+ and OH- ions. The H+ ions form H2 molecules, while the OH- ions migrate through an "anion exchange membrane (AEM)" to the anode, where they react via catalysts to produce O2. There's no need to use expensive catalysts, the electrolyzer instead using catalysts based on nickel, iron, and molybdenum. Although the AEM membrane does create a highly alkaline environment, it is localized to the membrane, and so the electrolyzer can be made of stainless steel.
The new device generates hydrogen about three times faster than conventional alkaline devices, though still not as fast as commercial PEM electrolyzers. It is strictly a lab demonstration; at present, the membrane tends to break down after ten hours of use, apparently because it absorbs water. The researchers believe that adding fluorine to the membrane will cause it to repel water.
Other research teams are working on improved electrolyzers, with some moving towards commercialization. Kim believes the technology is practical, and that improved electrolyzers may well join solar cells and windmills as a key technology for a carbon-free world.
* As discussed by a related article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("New Fuel Cell Could Help Fix The Renewable Energy Storage Problem" by Robert F. Service, 12 March 2019), everyone knows that renewable energy sources don't work all the time -- solar power doesn't work at night -- and so energy storage is needed to allow them to provide continuous power. The most common approach is to use large banks of batteries, but they're expensive on a unit-storage basis.
Another option is to store the energy by converting it into hydrogen fuel. The conversion is performed by an electrolyzer, with electricity splitting water into O2 and H2. The two gases are then recombined in a fuel cell. It would be nice if the same device could be used as an electrolyzer and a fuel cell -- in a way parallel to how batteries can be recharged and discharged. Unfortunately, at present electrolyzers and fuel cells use different catalysts, and one device can't do both jobs. To get around this obstacle, researchers have been experimenting with a new type of fuel cell, called a "proton-conducting fuel cell (PCFC)", that can do both.
A PCFC consists of two electrodes separated by a membrane that allows protons across. Consider what happens when it's operated as an electrolyzer:
In earlier PCFCs, the nickel catalysts performed well, but the ceramic catalysts wasted about 30% of the electricity, mostly as heat. Two research teams have now obtained improved efficiency.
Researchers led by chemist Sossina Haile at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, have devised an air electrode made from a ceramic alloy containing six elements that has an efficiency of 76% in use of electricity to split water molecules. A team under Ryan O'Hayre, a chemist at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden, has done much better, devising a ceramic alloy electrode, made up of five elements, with a remarkable efficiency of 98%.
When both teams run their setups in reverse as fuel cells, the fuel electrode splits H2 molecules into protons and electrons. The electrons travel through an external circuit to the air electrode. When they reach the electrode, they combine with oxygen from the air and protons that crossed back over the membrane to produce water. Haile is impressed by the School of Mines work, but she cautions that neither team has anything more than a lab demo. Scaling the schemes up will demand a lot of work, and efficiencies seen in the lab may not be maintained in real-world devices.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* MINDS OF ANIMALS (2): The function of the mind is to assess the external world, including the body, and determine what to do next. The brain of any animal is constantly flooded with information about the creature's environment from sensory organs such as the eyes, ears, nose or skin. This information is initially processed in the brain's sensory cortex -- but then the processing becomes harder to trace, with that information creating and being filtered by a sequence of brain states, representing the creature's constantly changing moods and drives. That finally leads the motor cortex to generate movements that are appropriate to the circumstances -- to brush away an annoying fly, for example, or grab a tasty treat. Internal states can also be generated entirely in the brain, without sensory input and without an immediate behavioral output: think of daydreaming, or replaying the events of the day in the mind. These internal states may, of course, influence future courses of action.
Over the past few years, insights into the nature of internal states are altering how neuroscientists who study brain networks think about animal behavior. Anne Churchland -- a neuroscientist at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, New York -- says:
BEGIN QUOTE:
We used to think of animals as being kind of stimulus-response machines. Now we're starting to realize that all kinds of really interesting stuff is being generated within their brains that changes the way that sensory inputs are processed, and so changes the animals' behavioral output.
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David Anderson of Caltech has devoted himself to probing this middle ground. In 2014, he decided to create a theoretical framework for research into internal brain states that represent emotion. He was exasperated with the view of some psychologists, who think that because animals can't express their feelings in words, those feelings can't be studied at all. Together with his Caltech colleague Ralph Adolphs, Anderson developed and published a hypothesis about the characteristics that neural circuits associated with internal brain states should have.
Most importantly, they thought, an internal brain state should outlast the original stimulus that triggered it. So a key feature of a neural circuit underpinning such a state would be its persistence, he says: "If you are hiking in mountains and see a snake, then you might jump in fear. Ten minutes later, your brain's internal state of fear is still active, so when you see a stick on your path you might jump again."
Other characteristics of internal states should include generalizability, meaning that different stimuli should be able to generate the same state; and scalability, in which different stimuli can create states of different strength. The paper became influential. Harvard's Jennifer Li says that it "was inspirational" in guiding her work with Drew Robson to make sense of their "psychic cells".
Anderson and Adolphs published their paper in 2014, just as new neurotechnologies were becoming available that could make the appropriate experiments feasible. It was already possible to record from large numbers of individual neurons at the same time; since then, the technologies have improved and expanded considerably, allowing researchers to analyze previously inaccessible activity.
The most important of these new technologies is the "Neuropixels" probe, just 10 millimeters long, which can directly record activity in hundreds of neurons across different brain areas. In addition, special imaging techniques can indicate where as many as tens of thousands of individual neurons are active across the brain. In calcium imaging, for instance, animals are genetically engineered to express a molecule in their cells that detects calcium ions; when these flood into a neuron as it fires, the molecule fluoresces.
New automatic behavior monitors take video recordings of freely behaving animals over many hours, and analyze every movement in millisecond intervals. The elements can then be aligned with neural recordings, matching moment-to-moment brain activity with specific movements. Neuroscientists have capitalized on a surge in machine learning, artificial intelligence and new mathematical tools to make sense of the gigabytes or terabytes of data that any experiment with these technologies can generate, and to find the neural activation patterns that could represent internal brain states. [TO BE CONTINUED]
NEXT | PREV | START | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* COVID-19 IN THE DEVELOPING WORLD: As discussed by an article from BBC.com ("Coronavirus: Are Indians More Immune To COVID-19?" by Soutik Biswas, 2 November 2020), India's population is skewed toward the poor, who have limited access to clean water, consume unhygienic food, breathe foul air, and live in densely packed surroundings. Their poor environment makes them susceptible to a host of non-communicable illnesses like heart and chronic respiratory diseases, cancer, and diabetes. Air pollution alone kills more than a million Indians every year.
One of the basic defenses against the SARS-CoV-2 virus is washing one's hand, but India's poor don't have much in the way of facilities to do that. That led to fears that COVID-19 would tear through the population, causing millions of deaths. India has a sixth of the world's population and a sixth of the reported cases -- but surprisingly, it accounts for only 10% of the world's deaths from the virus. Its case fatality rate (CFR), which measures deaths among Covid-19 patients, is less than 2%, which is among the lowest in the world.
How can this be? Two new studies by Indian scientists suggests that the unhygienic living conditions endured by poor Indians, and poor folk in other developing nations, actually left them better-prepared to deal with the new virus than people in developed nations. The poor folk have had much more exposure to different pathogens, and that has left them with stronger immune systems.
One study compared publicly available data from 106 countries on two dozen parameters like density of population, demography, prevalence of diseases, and quality of sanitation. The scientists found more people had died of COVID-19 in high-income countries. Dr. Shekhar Mande -- director general of India's Council of Scientific & Industrial Research (CSIR), and one of the researchers involved in the study -- says: "People in poorer, low income countries seem to have a higher immunological response to the disease compared to high income peers."
The other study looked at the role played by microbiome, the colonies of microorganisms that inhabit our bodies -- in COVID-19 infections. Praveen Kumar and Bal Chander from Dr. Rajendra Prasad Government Medical College sifted through at data from 122 countries, including 80 high and upper middle-income ones. They suggest that COVID-19 deaths are lower in countries which have a higher population exposed to a wide range of microbes, particularly of what is called "gram-negative bacteria". Such bacteria are often responsible for pneumonia, as well as blood, urinary tract, and skin infections. However, they also are believed to produce an antiviral "cytokine" -- molecules that fight pathogens -- named interferon, which protects cells against the coronavirus.
The bottom line of these studies is reflected in the "hygiene hypothesis" -- that is, the idea that our environment has become so clean that it has left our immune system insufficiently trained. Matt Richtell -- author of AN ELEGANT DEFENSE: THE EXTRAORDINARY NEW SCIENCE OF THE IMMUNE SYSTEM -- says: "The broad idea is that we are starving our immune systems of training and activity by excessive focus on cleanliness."
It's not that new an idea. A paper on hay fever published in 1989, found a strong association between the likelihood of a child getting hay fever allergy and the number of his or her siblings. The paper suggested that "allergic diseases were prevented by infection in early childhood, transmitted by unhygienic contact with older siblings or acquired prenatally from a mother infected by contact with her older children". A similar published by the World Allergy Organization said migration studies showed that types of both allergy and auto-immunity "rise as people move from poorer to richer countries".
Of course, it's extremely tricky to identify causal relationships in health science, and nobody thinks the hygiene hypothesis is proven in any way. Krutika Kuppalli --an assistant professor in infectious diseases at the Medical University of South Carolina -- says the recent studies are based on arguable assumptions. She concludes that "they are more hypothesis than scientific fact." Dr. Mande adds that, even if the hygiene hypothesis is accepted, it "should not be inferred as our advocating a move towards weaker hygiene practices for handling future pandemics".
Some epidemiologists have attributed the low fatality rate in countries like India to the fact that there are more young in the population, and the young are not highly vulnerable to COVID-19. Another possibility is that Indians have better immunity against COVID-19 because so many of them have contracted earlier coronavirus variants that cause common colds. Kuppali says: "We still have a lot more to learn about the virus."
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* THE COVID-19 MENACE (21): Along with genomic studies of SARS-CoV-2, researchers have also performed cell culture experiments. When Bette Korber's group at Los Alamos engineered "viruslike particles" to carry one spike protein or the other, the G614 variant seemed to be more efficient at entering cells. Jeremy Luban of the University of Massachusetts Medical School, who found the same thing, says that causes a slight change in the configuration of the spike, apparently enhancing the ability of the virus to invade cells. Luban says that's unsettling: "Our data looks like it's somewhere between three and 10 times more infectious. That's a pretty enormous effect."
However, according to virologist Emma Hodcroft of the University of Basel, that doesn't mean the mutation really makes the virus much more dangerous. In the past, she says, "We have cases where we really thought that we had evidence for a mutation that was changing viral behavior and as more evidence came, it didn't seem to be the case." Infecting cells in a petri dish is one thing; infecting a complex human biosystem is another.
Animal experiments have also been used to investigate the effects of G614. One option, virologist Marion Koopmans of Erasmus Medical Center (EMC) in Rotterdam explains, would be to infect ferrets with it and D614 and look for differences in how much virus they shed. The problem is that infections in ferrets only last about a week, Koopmans saying: "The effect would have to be very big to show up in an experiment like that."
Yet another idea is to expose uninfected ferrets to animals carrying either of the two variants and see how well the virus is transmitted. An uncontrolled transmission experiment has already taken place on Dutch mink farms, where the new coronavirus jumped from humans to minks at least five separate times. Koopman says that twice it was the D614 variant, and three times G614. She hopes data from the outbreaks could show whether either one spread faster and wider than the other -- but the lack of experimental controls limits the utility of the exercise. She says: "We have a natural experiment here. The study design is not optimal."
In any case, as Edinburgh's Andrew Rambaut says, G614 has become the dominant strain and the world is living with it. Most recent estimates of the virus reproduction number are already based mostly on the mutant strain. Would D614 been different? Rambaut: "We don't know."
The attention focused on G614 may conceal a bigger question, however: With the virus having spread to at least 11 million people worldwide, why aren't we seeing more mutations that affect its behavior? Some suggest that, given such a large pool of immunologically naive humans to spread through, it just hasn't been under enough selection pressure to promote change. That could change with the introduction of vaccines or new therapies, forcing the virus to evolve.
The more interesting suggestion is that the virus has been with humans longer than we know, and was spreading before the first known cases in Wuhan, China, in December 2019. Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at Columbia University in New York City, says: "The evolution of this virus to become a human pathogen may have already happened, and we missed it."
Wang Linfa of Duke / Singapore suggests that a strain of the virus may have circulated earlier in humans in southern Asia, possibly flying under the radar because it didn't cause severe disease. Wang says: "If it happens in a small or remote village, even with some people dying, nobody is going to know there's a spillover."
The virus could then have infected an animal that was taken to Wuhan and started the pandemic. At Dutch mink farms, Wang adds, the virus jumped not just from humans to animals, but also back from animals to humans: "If that can happen in the Netherlands, surely it can happen in a village in Thailand, or in Yunnan province in southern China." [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* AMERICA'S CONSTITUTION (128): Gerald Ford continued Nixon's detente policy, of course with guidance from Secretary of State Kissinger. Ford appreciated the thaw with both the Soviet Union and Mao's China. In 1975, Ford signed the Helsinki Accords with the USSR -- which set up the "Helsinki Watch" an independent non-governmental organization created to monitor compliance to human-rights agreements; it later evolved into the "Human Rights Watch". The Soviets signed the Helsinki Agreement on the basis that it was just meaningless verbiage; they would be proven wrong.
As for China, Ford visited Beijing in December 1975, though relations with the People's Republic were thrown into a degree of confusion with the death of Mao Zedong in September 1976, leading to a succession crisis among Chinese leadership. However, the groundwork remained for a closer relationship between the US and China.
Ford continued his support of NATO, and fostered multilateral diplomacy -- saying in a 1974 speech: "We live in an interdependent world and, therefore, must work together to resolve common economic problems." Following up meetings of the finance ministers of the "Group of Five (G5)" industrialized nations, in 1975 Ford attended the first meeting of the "Group of Six (G6)" leaders -- with Canada, thanks to American encouragement, joining in 1976, to establish the "Group of Seven (G7)".
By the mid-1970s, concerns over abuses of government power had reached Congress. A report published in THE NEW YORK TIMES in December 1974 stated that the CIA had conducted illegal domestic activities, notably experiments on American citizens -- with a particular focus on a program named MKUltra, which focused on "mind control" exercises using drugs and focused interrogation technique, plus a little tinkering with brain implants. President Ford responded by setting up a commission under Vice President Rockefeller to investigate the allegations against the CIA. It also performed a little investigation of JFK assassination.
The White House significantly altered the final report of the commission, over the objections of its senior staff. Edits were notably performed by then-deputy White House Chief of Staff Dick Cheney. In parallel, the US Senate set up an investigatory committee under Idaho Senator Frank Church, which mutated into other committees over time. The Church Committee would have more lasting influence.
In July 1974, the long-simmering dispute between Greeks and Turks over Cyprus came a boil with the Turkish invasion of the island. One of the consequences was extreme strain in the NATO alliance. In mid-August, the Greek government pulled Greece out of the NATO military structure; in mid-September, both houses of Congress overwhelmingly voted to stop military aid to Turkey. Ford believed Turkey was still important to the defense of NATO in the east, and vetoed the bill. Congress passed a second bill, which Ford also vetoed. In any case, US-Turkish relations remained in an unsettled state.
US-Israeli relations were also troubled. The October 1973 Mideast War had led to a cease-fire, but Secretary of State Kissinger's "shuttle diplomacy" was not moving towards a peace agreement at any speed. Ford believed the Israelis were "stalling", writing that they made him "mad as hell." When the Israelis stepped too hard on Kissinger's toes during negotiations, Ford wrote Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, indicating a need for "a reassessment of United States policy in the region." That was, in diplomatic terms, very strong language.
It translated into a suspension of US aid to Israel from March 1975. The American Jewish community and Israel's allies in Congress did not take it well, exerting pressure on the Ford Administration to lift the ban on aid -- but Ford stuck to his guns, persisting in what he called a "test of wills" between the US and Israel. After considerable haggling, the "Sinai Interim Agreement (Sinai II)" was signed in September, and the aid ban was lifted. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* SCIENCE NOTES: As discussed by an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("Long-Acting Injectable Drug Prevents HIV Infections" by Jon Cohen, 18 May 2020), nobody has yet devised an effective drug against HIV-AIDS -- but a long-acting antiretroviral drug given as an injection every two months gave strong protection against infection by HIV a large-scale study. The injection offers a potentially easier alternative to taking daily pills of other antiretrovirals, which has proved troublesome for many people.
"Pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP)" against AIDS is not new, the US Food and Drug Administration having given a green light in 2012 for a daily pill that combines two drugs that hinder the virus. In this new study, this combo, which is marketed as "Truvada", was tested against intramuscular injections of the experimental drug cabotegravir or placebos, in men who have sex with men and transgender women. Cabotegravir is made by ViiV Healthcare -- a joint venture of GlaxoSmithKline, Pfizer, and Shionogi that focuses on anti-HIV drugs -- while Truvada is made by Gilead Sciences.
The trial, which was sponsored by the U.S. National Institute of Allergy & Infectious Diseases (NIAID), started in December 2016 and enrolled more than 4,500 participants worldwide, with the participants randomly assigned to one of the three equal-sized groups. As of late April 2020, 12 infections had occurred in the cabotegravir group, compared to 38 in the group that received Truvada. That translates to a 0.38% incidence in the cabotegravir group versus 1.21% in the Truvada one.
COVID-19 interfered with the trial. HPTN 083, the name of the cabotegravir study, has 43 sites in the United States, South Africa, Argentina, Brazil, Peru, Vietnam, and Thailand. COVID-19 shut down 11 of the sites, while others struggled to continue because participants increasingly had difficulty attending appointments. The limitations of the trial meant that nobody wanted to conclude that cabotegravir is superior to Truvada -- but it is clear it was at least as good, and the injection represents an alternative that may be well more convenient for some patients.
The main problem with dropping pills is, of course, that people tend to forget to do it; it's much easier to keep track of an injection every few months. There does remain the puzzle as of why a dozen test subjects who got the cabotegravir shots still got AIDS. Weight might be one explanation. Other studies have shown that men and transgender women with a lower body mass index more rapidly eliminate the drug from their blood. Another possibility is those who got infections did so very early in the study. Because of safety concerns about cabotegravir, the study required people in the injection group to first take pills of the drug for 5 weeks; some in that group may have failed to take the pills. There is also the possibility that some of the people could have been infected with an HIV variant that is resistant to cabotegravir.
It is not clear if injected cabotegravir will work in other populations; further trials are required. ViiV is nonetheless planning for "global scale-up" of the injections and to have them accessible in low-resource settings, but nothing has been said about pricing yet.
* As discussed by an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ("The Moon Is Losing 200 Tons Of Water A Year To Meteorite Strikes" by Sid Perkins, 15 April 2019) the Earth's Moon, lacking an atmosphere, is continuously pounded by meteor strikes. The impacts kick up some dust; a new study suggests they also toss about 200 tonnes of the Moon's water into space every year.
Between November 2013 and April 2014, the NASA Lunar Atmosphere & Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) Moon orbiter recorded occasional spikes in the numbers of particles, including water molecules, that had been ejected from the Moon. Of the 39 spikes, 29 occurred within 48 hours of the Moon and Earth passing through annual meteor showers that are broad enough to hit both bodies. In general, the stronger the meteor stream, the more particles were measured by LADEE.
The amounts of water detected were much too high to have come from the meteorites themselves. The researchers suggest that most of that water was shaken loose from lunar soil grains near the meteorites' impact sites. They estimate that the impacts kick up about 300 tonnes of water each year, with two-thirds of that amount escaping into space. The rest falls back to the Moon's surface, sometimes into permanently shadowed areas near the lunar poles where it can accumulate.
* As discussed by an article from SCIENCEMAG.org ( ("How Venus Flytraps Evolved Their Taste For meat" by Elizabeth Pennisi, 14 May 2020), there's a certain popular fascination with carnivorous plants like the Venus flytrap. Scientists go a bit farther, wondering how a plant ever acquired a taste for meat. A study of three closely related carnivorous plants points to genetic shuffling helped them evolve the ability to catch and digest protein-rich meals.
Carnivorous plants have evolved various approaches to the carnivorous lifestyle. Pitcher plants, for example, use "pitfall traps", with prey falling into a bath that contains enzymes that digest them. Others, including the closely related Venus flytrap (Dionaea muscipula), the aquatic waterwheel plant (Aldrovanda vesiculosa), and the sundew (Drosera spatulata) -- take an active approach. The sundew rolls up its sticky landing pad when mosquitoes get caught, while the Venus flytrap uses modified leaves -- pads -- that snap shut when an insect lands and activates a number of trigger hairs.
To investigate the evolution of these plants, researchers led by computational evolutionary biologist Joerg Schultz and plant biologist Rainer Hedrich -- both of the University of Wuerzburg -- sequenced the genomes of the sundew, the aquatic waterwheel, and the Venus flytrap, all three being close relatives. They then compared those genomes with those of nine other plants, including a carnivorous pitcher plant and noncarnivorous beetroot and papaya plants.
They discovered that the key to the evolution of meat eating in this clade of the plant kingdom was the duplication of the entire genome in a common ancestor that lived about 60 million years ago. While genome duplication is unusual in animals, it happens fairly often in plants. The duplication That duplication freed up copies of genes once used in roots, leaves, and sensory systems that then mutated, and allowed the plants to detect and digest prey. For example, carnivorous plants repurposed copies of genes that help roots absorb nutrients, to absorb the nutrients in digested prey.
Hedrich and his team concluded that the carnivorous lifestyle evolved once in the ancestor of the three species and, independently, in the pitcher plant. Adding these two new origins to others already documented, the researchers believe that meat-eating in plants has evolved at least six times.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* MINDS OF ANIMALS (1): As discussed by an article from NATURE.com ("Inside The Mind Of An Animal" by Alison Abbott, 11 August 2020), humans have minds with major distinctions from those of animals, but with much in common with them as well. Animals can be and are used as probes to understand the structure of their brains and the minds they support, and so give insights into the human mind.
In 2018, Jennifer Li and Drew Robson were sifting through terabytes of data from a zebrafish brain experiment when they came across a number of cells that seemed to be psychic. The two neuroscientists had planned to map brain activity while zebrafish larvae were hunting for food, and to see how the neural chatter changed. It was their first major test of a technological platform they had built at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The platform allowed them to view every cell in the larvae's brains while the larvae, hardly the size of an eyelash, swam freely in a 35-millimeter-diameter dish of water, eating up their microscopic prey.
Out of the scientists' torrent of data emerged a handful of neurons that predicted when a larva was next going to catch and swallow a bit of food. Some of these neurons even became activated many seconds before the larva fixed its eyes on the prey. What was going on? On closer inspection, the researchers realized that the 'psychic' cells were active for an unusually long time -- not seconds, as is typical for most neurons, but many minutes, more or less the duration of the larvae's hunting bouts. Li says: "It was spooky. None of it made sense."
Li and Robson studied the literature, and gradually realized that the cells were setting an overall "mode" or "brain state": a pattern of prolonged brain activity, a brain state, that focused the larvae on obtaining food in front of them. The pair learned that, in the past few years, other scientists using various approaches and different species had also found internal brain states that alter how an animal behaves, even when nothing has changed in its external environment.
Some, such as Li and Robson, had come to the discovery serendipitously while working through their own brain-wide data. Others have hypothesized that neurons coding for internal brain states must exist, and have been hunting for them in discrete and well-researched brain regions. For example, in early 2020, neurobiologist David Anderson at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena and his colleagues identified an internal brain state, represented by a small network of neurons, that prepares fruit flies to engage in courtship or fighting behaviors.
Neuroscientists wanting to understand the brain's coding language have traditionally studied how its networks of cells respond to sensory information, and how they generate behaviors such as movement or speech. But they couldn't see in detail the vast quantities of neuronal activity that conceal patterns representing the animal's mood or desires, and which help it to calibrate its behavior. Even just a few years ago, measuring the activities of specific networks that underlie internal brain states was impossible.
A number of new techniques are starting to change that. These methods allow scientists to track electrical activity in the brain in unprecedented detail, to quantify an animal's natural behavior on millisecond timescales, and to find patterns in the mountains of data these experiments generate. These patterns could be signatures of the countless internal states that a brain can adopt. Now the challenge is to find out what these states mean.
Some neuroscientists are using the technologies to probe one powerful group of internal brain states: emotions. Others are applying them to states such as motivation, or existential drives such as thirst. Researchers are even finding signatures of states in their data for which they have no vocabulary. The number of papers on the subject is growing. Scientists working in the field have no doubt their work will improve the understanding of the human brain -- and its dysfunctions, helping with treatments. [TO BE CONTINUED]
NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* ANOTHER MONTH: As discussed by an article from REUTERS.com ("The Truckers Who Keep India's Coronavirus Patients Breathing" by Devjyot Ghoshal, 2 November 2020), there's a lot of infrastructure that we take for granted, or barely know exists -- but if it stops, we're in trouble.
Subhas Kumar Yadav is a 33-year-old truck driver with Linde India LTD, a branch of the world's biggest supplier of industrial gases. He delivers oxygen from a plant in India's Himalayan foothills to hospitals in the northern plains. They need oxygen to help patients breathe, a matter that has become critically important in the time of the COVID-19 pandemic. Delivery was particularly troublesome during lockdown, when motels and other facilities were shuttered. Yadav says he had to persist nonetheless: "We were on duty. It's not like we could just give up and go home."
In the face of the pandemic, the government says demand for medical oxygen has jumped four times to about 2,800 tonnes a day, prompting some states to restrict movement of the commodity from local factories to other regions. Around half of the total liquid oxygen production in India is now being used for medical needs, up from only 15% earlier.
Linde, which competes with nearly two dozen oxygen suppliers in India, including France's Air Liquide, has had to divert its production away from industrial gases like nitrogen and argon -- less needed as the economy was more or less in suspension -- to keep the oxygen flowing. It has also deployed its entire fleet of trucks to deliver medical oxygen to hospitals across the country, many of them in the hinterlands and with limited oxygen storage capacity. Linde India officials proudly say: "Despite the limitations, there has not been a single stock-out situation for our partner hospitals." There was a crunch for oxygen in mid-September as infections peaked, but the Indian government says supplies are now stable, and is seeking to import large quantities to ensure supply.
India has the world's second highest number of confirmed coronavirus infections at more than 8 million, behind only the United States. However, India's deaths-per-million people ratio of around 88 is one of the lowest in the world among hard-hit countries; the government has said getting oxygen to critical patients in time has played a key role.
Linde India's factory in Selaqui, at the foot of the Himalayas in northern India, normally produces 154 tonnes of oxygen daily, but since the pandemic, the facility has ramped up to 161 tonnes a day. It helped that the depressed economy also depressed industrial demand. Surendra Singh, a Linde India official, says: "We did maximum oxygen production. Almost 85:90% went to medical [clients]."
To ship the oxygen to hospitals -- the furthest is 680 km (420 miles), a two-day drive away on India's roads -- and two regional depots, the factory depends on a fleet of 33 container trucks and a pool of 66 drivers. Its fleet has on-board cameras, GPS trackers, and careful safety procedures to ensure timely deliveries. When the drivers found that roadside restaurants and motels were shut down, the factory's canteen provided them with packed meals, along with biscuits and dry fruit. Although they were provided with masks and other protective gear, drivers worried about being infected when they transferred their oxygen load to hospitals.
The pandemic receded for a time, but it may be ramping up again as winter approaches. Drivers like Yadav are braced for the challenge: "Doctors are working hard, the nurses are working hard, and we are doing our part. If we give up, then the hospitals will close down."
[ED: Somehow I envision a Bollywood movie about heroic oxygen truck drivers -- of course, with a lot of singing and dancing.]
* I'd bought a little toy drone to fly around my living room a few years back. It proved to be very hard to control, and I eventually lost interest. However, I ran across an ad for a "hand-controlled" toy drone on Twitter, and was interested.
It turns out there's a lot of them on the market, and I bought one cheap, about $16 USD, from a company named Amcrest. It's a little handy-size drone in a plastic cage; I just lift up my hand and give it a little bounce up, it turns on and flies around a bit, to then go into a hover. It has some sort of sensing and avoids running into things, at least usually. I can accordingly shove it around with my hands.
It's purely a toy, it only has a few minutes of flight endurance before I have to recharge it. However, I find it a surprising amount of fun, flying it around my living room in the dark. It looks like a little UFO with colored LEDs. It's welcome in this otherwise dismal holiday season.
* Thanks to four readers this last month for donations to the website, one being very generous. They are much appreciated.
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