A Sense of Doubt blog post #2720 - "Doesn't take much to rip us into pieces" - Weekly Hodge Podge for 2207.30
This is my laziest ever HODGE PODGE, but here it is.
Maybe that's truly like a big STEW, a gallimaufry.
Thanks for tuning in.
Here it is uncurated and uncommented.
Tori Amos’s LITTLE EARTHQUAKES gets a 30th anniversary graphic novel from Z2 Comics https://t.co/G4lHGQFiaA via @comicsbeat
— gmrstudios (@gmrstudios) February 23, 2022
https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/bandcamp-epic-games-acquisition/#intcid=recommendations_right-rail-personalized-popularity-mab-experiment
https://www.tor.com/2022/03/22/morena-baccarin-deadpool-2-fridging-online-blowback/
Morena Baccarin Reveals That Online Blowback Led to Her De-Fridging in Deadpool 2
Vanessa ArmstrongThose who have seen Deadpool 2 know that the fate of Morena Baccarin’s Vanessa—Deadpool/Wade/Ryan Reynolds’ love interest—got mixed reviews from viewers.
It turns out that the initial response to Vanessa’s plotline in Deadpool 2 was tweaked last minute, at least in part due to the negative response received online.
Warning: Spoilers for Deadpool 2 reside below.
Vanessa gets killed off early in Deadpool 2 to give our main male character something to feel sad about and spur into action. This is a classic example of the “fridging” phenomenon, where the death of a woman catalyzes the male protagonist to Do Something.
It’s so common of a trope that Catherynne M. Valente wrote a book of monologues from these deceased women, and it’s one that the Deadpool 2 writers should have known about (I say should, because they made clear in an interview that they had no idea that killing women to give men motivation was a thing to think about).
Deadpool 2 does “fix” Vanessa’s fridging in a mid-credits scene, where Deadpool goes back in time to save her. In a recent interview with SYFY WIRE, however, Baccarin revealed that the this moment was added in part because of online blowblack.
“I feel like I got a call from [Deadpool 2 director] David Leitch one day,” Baccarin told SYFY WIRE, “and he was just like: ‘You know, your [scenes] with Ryan are testing so well in this movie, and people are getting so upset [online] that she’s dead, so we’re gonna have to leave the door open for her to possibly come back.'”
The last-minute inclusion of Deadpool saving Vanessa helps explain why the whole plotline doesn’t make much sense. The bright side of things is that the writers and director of Deadpool 2 listened enough to add the mid-credits moment, and that Vanessa is still alive and well. Hopefully she’ll be back for Deadpool 3 (although Baccarin said in the same interview that they haven’t called her yet), and if so, her character will be more than just set dressing.
In 1871, Congress crafted a law to break the Klan. Today, it's targeting Trump. https://t.co/D3T641Ooa4 via @MotherJones
— gmrstudios (@gmrstudios) February 25, 2022
https://slashdot.org/story/22/03/19/056213/russias-cosmonauts-arrive-on-the-space-station---wearing-ukraines-colors
Russia's Cosmonauts Arrive on the Space Station - Wearing Ukraine's Colors (space.com)
They were wearing flight suits "in the yellow and blue of the Ukrainian flag, in what appeared to be a daring statement against the war."
Space.com reports:Cosmonaut Oleg Artemyev, the Soyuz commander, was asked about the colors during a hatch-opening ceremony webcast by Russia's federal space agency Roscosmos. He responded (in Russian) that there was a surplus of yellow fabric in the warehouse, according to space exploration enthusiast Katya Pavlushchenko, who posted a Twitter thread about the exchange.
Not everybody's buying this answer, however. Some folks with knowledge of spaceflight procedures seem to think it could be a show of support for Ukraine, which Russia invaded on February 24.... There are other possible explanations for the flight suits as well. For example, multiple people on Twitter have pointed out that the colors are close to those of Bauman Moscow State Technical University, which Artemyev, Matveev and Korsakov all attended.
This is all just speculation; all we have to go on at the moment is Artemyev's cryptic response during the hatch-opening ceremony. Hopefully one of the cosmonauts will offer some more details in the not-too-distant future. None of the three newly arrived cosmonauts hails from Ukraine, by the way. Artemyev was born in present-day Latvia, Matveev is from St. Petersburg and Korsakov was born in what is now Kyrgyzstan.
Next month a SpaceX Dragon is expected to carry three millionaires to the Space Station for a week-long visit.
When I asked people what politics meant to them, they often answered by telling me what they believed (“I believe in freedom”) or who they’d vote for (“I was for Ted Cruz, but now I’m voting Trump”). But running beneath such beliefs like an underwater spring was what I’ve come to think of as a deep story. The deep story was a feels-as-if-it’s-true story, stripped of facts and judgments, that reflected the feelings underpinning opinions and votes. It was a story of unfairness and anxiety, stagnation and slippage—a story in which shame was the companion to need. Except Trump had opened a divide in how tea partiers felt this story should end.
Michael Brochstein/ZUMA |
Republicans Aren’t Even Pretending They’ll Make Your Life Better Anymore
Instead of economic populism, Scott is betting on a politics of pure grievance.
In 2016, Donald Trump became president by appealing to white people who resented both minorities and billionaires. Trump’s economic populism was always murky. Later in his presidency, he often broke with conservative economics, but that only came after self-dealing, trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act, and cutting taxes for the rich. Regardless of whether Trump actually governed as an economic populist, it was at least slightly comforting that he thought winning required pretending to care about helping working-class Americans.
Six years later, it seems Republicans are no longer trying.
The clearest evidence for that is the “11 Point Plan to Rescue America” that Florida Senator and National Republican Senatorial Committee Chairman Rick Scott released on Tuesday as his party tries to take back Congress in November’s midterm elections. Scott’s plan for saving the country contains no mention of reducing the cost of housing, health care, child care, and college. Trump’s talk about lowering prescription drug prices for seniors is gone.
Instead of economic populism, Scott is betting on a politics of pure grievance that involves blocking the government from ever asking about a person’s race, naming a border wall after Trump, and treating socialism as a “foreign combatant” (a designation usually associated with being tortured or killed by US forces). As Scott warns in his introduction, the “plan is not for the faint of heart.”
For a party theoretically obsessed with liberty, Americans of all ages will also be banned from doing, or forced to do, a remarkable number of things. Kids will have to recite the pledge of allegiance and stand for the national anthem. Transgender athletes will be barred from women’s sports. Generals who do anything deemed too woke will be relieved of their command. Immigrants will be required to love America. States will be blocked from allowing people to register to vote on election day.
When it comes to taxation, the IRS would see its budget cut in half. At the same time, the more than 50 percent of households that don’t make currently enough to pay federal income taxes will have to pay them. It’s a de facto policy of raising taxes on most Americans, even though Rick Scott is now trying to deny that his plan would lead to anyone paying more. This is not a party that’s trying to make good on the economic promises Trump abandoned. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) may play footsie with supporting the Amazon union in Bessemer, Alabama, but his party’s midterm agenda has nothing to say about rebuilding unions or the middle class. It is opting instead for the usual mix of harm to the poor and hatred of the other.
Scott’s plan is a messaging document, not a guide to what Republicans would actually do if they take back the House and Senate. There was nothing stopping him from making empty promises about cutting taxes or reducing health care costs, aside from the fact that it might sound a bit rich coming from the person who oversaw the largest Medicare fraud in US history. (The only reference to the program Scott’s company defrauded is about how Congress would be be forced to produce an annual report on what it plans to do when Medicare goes bankrupt; Medicare remaining solvent is, apparently, not one of the options.)
This is not to say Republicans are proposing no new spending. To prevent abortions, low-income single women, for example, would be paid to carry children to term and put them up for adoption. The adoptive parents would then get money to take care of those kids. Parents hoping for a child tax credit to take care of children they didn’t adopt from low-income single women would be out of luck.
GOPQ wades deeper into the stupid.
— gmrstudios (@gmrstudios) February 25, 2022
Tulsi Gabbard, Michael Flynn: Why Is Joe Biden Invading Ukraine???!!! https://t.co/NbPZQOBmR5
But actually, anti-mask rhetoric is only part of what’s driving these memes. The broader goal is to sow distrust in the CDC’s developmental milestones as a whole to convince parents to skip the recommended schedule of well-child visits to the pediatrician, during which the majority of childhood vaccines are given.
Anti-vaxxers have a new obsession: Keeping your kids from seeing their doctors https://t.co/zhjx8rExC0 via @MotherJones
— gmrstudios (@gmrstudios) February 25, 2022
As I wrote last year, the Trump era helped calcify the conservative movement’s shift away from governance and toward the performance of governance. The future of the party is content creation. Few have embraced that ethos as thirstily as Cruz, who in his opening statement on Monday vowed that “this will not be a political circus,” moments before becoming the first senator in history to plug his podcast during a Supreme Court confirmation hearing.
[...] At issue is a federal regulation that broadly governs emissions from power plants. But in a curious twist, the regulation actually never took effect and does not currently exist. The legal wrangling began in 2015 when President Barack Obama announced the Clean Power Plan, his chief strategy to fight climate change. Citing its authority under the Clean Air Act, the Obama administration planned to require each state to lower carbon dioxide emissions from the electricity sector -- primarily by replacing coal-fired power plants with wind, solar and other clean sources. Electricity generation is the second largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States, behind transportation.
Russian Government Sites Facing 'Unprecedented' Cyberattacks from Thousands in Pro-Ukranian 'IT Army' (msn.com)
Meanwhile, the Washington Post interviews 22-year-old Alex Horlan, a Ukrainian cybersecurity expert in Spain "helping take down some of Russia's most powerful websites — including state media and even the official page of the Kremlin."The attacks he and others are helping to carry out on Russian websites are part of a wide information war in the background of the much larger conflict here, as Ukrainians target Russian websites to rewrite the narrative Moscow is presenting to Russians back home. "We are creating an IT army," Ukrainian Vice Prime Minister Mykhailo Fedorov tweeted on Saturday. Horlan is a cybersecurity expert who recently launched an app called disBalancer that helps take down scam websites by overwhelming them with online traffic. He has redirected his team's efforts in recent days to instead target Russian websites he says are spreading dangerous disinformation about the Russian invasion of Ukraine....
Thousands of people are joining Horlan and others' efforts to target the Russian sites, with around 2,000 logging into his app at any given time, he said. The main challenge is that many are losing WiFi when air raid sirens force them to retreat to underground bunkers....
Volunteers are gathering information on attacks and casualties to fact check and challenge Russia's version of events, posting messages on Telegram and other Russian social media platforms [according to Liuba Tsbulska, a Ukrainian analyst and activist who has tracked Russian disinformation for eight year]. Others work to educate international audiences or produce patriotic content. Some also target Russian military and intelligence officers, flooding their emails and other platforms with messages. Volunteers are reaching out to the mothers of Russian soldiers to convince them to call for Russian President Vladimir Putin to bring their boys back home.
In Kharkiv, after reports that Russian troops and armored vehicles entered Ukraine's second largest city early Sunday, one local Telegram channel with more than 400,000 subscribers urged people to continue to document the adversary's movements as a way to aid Ukraine's forces in the area. In one message, the Truha Kharkiv channel asked citizens to "carefully film and send information about the movement of Russian troops to our channel. This is vital to the defense of our city."
Another message instructed citizens on how to make molotov cocktails.
The states hope to use $8 billion in recently approved federal infrastructure funding to make hydrogen — the most abundant element in the universe — "more available and useful as clean-burning fuel for cars, trucks and trains."Hydrogen can be derived from water using an electric current and when burned emits only water vapor as a byproduct. The fuel could theoretically reduce greenhouse emissions and air pollution, depending on how it's obtained. As with electric vehicles, however, hydrogen's potential has been limited by infrastructure. Lack of fueling stations limits the market for hydrogen-fueled vehicles. Few hydrogen-fueled vehicles limits investment in producing and moving hydrogen....
Critics point out that as it's now produced, hydrogen isn't green, carbon-free or unlimited. Currently nearly all hydrogen commercially produced in the U.S. comes not from water but natural gas, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. While advocates say using fossil fuels to produce hydrogen now can help to develop a clean industry later, environmentalists are skeptical. "It's essentially a push for expanded oil and gas development. More oil and gas development is completely at odds with the need to confront the climate crisis and drastically reduce our dependence on fossil fuels," Jeremy Nichols with the Santa Fe, New Mexico-based environmental group WildEarth Guardians said by email.
Colorado, New Mexico and Wyoming rank seventh, eighth and ninth, respectively, for U.S. onshore gas production. Utah also is significant gas-producing state, according to the Energy Information Administration.
Unfortunately, "It's those projects that are facing pushback."Local governments in states such as California, Indiana, Maine, New York and Virginia have imposed moratoriums on large-scale solar farms, as a national push for cleaner energy has collided with complaints about how the projects affect wildlife and scenic views. In one Nevada town west of Las Vegas, residents are trying to block a proposed 2,300-acre solar field. NBC News counted 57 cities, towns and counties across the country where residents have proposed solar moratoriums since the start of 2021, according to local news reports, and not every proposed ban gets local news coverage. At least 40 of those approved the measures. Other localities did so in earlier years.
That resistance is a threat to the big ambitions of the solar energy movement.
The current workaround? Solar panel installations "in unexpected places..."[Walmart] told NBC News it has more than 550 renewable energy projects, including solar and wind, implemented or under development. Several have opened recently in California, including with parking lot canopies. The company has a goal of using 100 percent renewable energy by 2035, up from 36 percent by its estimate now....
Houston has chosen the 240-acre site of a former landfill to install what the city said will be the largest infill solar project in the nation. In a neighborhood named Sunnyside, the project will generate enough electricity for 5,000 homes, according to the city. Similar projects have been built on landfills throughout New Jersey. An energy firm is building a solar project on a former coal mine on the border of Kentucky and West Virginia, while in New York state, researchers at Cornell University are testing putting solar panels in a field where sheep graze.
A city in Northern California says it has the largest floating solar farm in the U.S. at its wastewater treatment plant, and in January, a China-based energy company said it had built the world's largest floating solar array on a reservoir there. And last year, the Biden administration encouraged the development of solar projects on highway right-of-way, with a notice from the Federal Highway Administration telling field offices to work with states on ideas. Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin, including Webber, have said most states have more than 200 miles of interstate frontage suitable for solar development, especially near exits and rest stops.
Creative locations have a particular benefit: fewer potential neighbors who might complain.
Storchaka lives outside of Konotop, a city in northeastern Ukraine which is occupied by Russian forces. He tweeted on February 26, "Russian tanks were on the road 2km from my house, and Russian armored vehicles were passing by my windows. Most likely, I will find myself in the occupied zone, where the law does not apply...."
Insider was unable to contact Storchaka, but spoke with Langa... [A]s the military crisis worsened on Friday and over the weekend, the Python developer community rallied to help Storchaka's younger family members. Communicating with Storchaka's family through Google Translate, Langa managed to secure temporary housing for Storchaka's niece and best friend, aged 11. They crossed the border to Poland via bus with their mother, and met Langa, who drove over 300km to Warsaw to pick up keys and secure basic necessities for the family.
"Two little 11-year-old girls (my niece and her best friend) are now safe thanks to @llanga," Storchaka tweeted last Monday, adding "My sister and I are immensely grateful." (He'd been especially worried because their town was near one of Ukraine's nuclear power plants, "a strategic target".)
Business Insider points out Storchaka is just one of many Python core developers from Ukraine, and one of many Ukrainians working in its tech sector.Andrew Svetlov, another influential Python developer who specializes in asynchronous networking support, also remains in Ukraine.... Svetlov is in Kyiv, where Russian troops have surrounded the city....
"Neither of them wanted to leave their country, even in the face of the great risk this poses for them," Langa told Insider.
Researchers 'Upgrade' DNA Alphabet Beyond A, C, G, T to Expand Data Storage (cnet.com)
So the Institute is now announcing the results of a project Tabatabaei worked on "to transform the double helix into a robust, sustainable data storage platform." CNET reports:Tabatabaei is the co-author of a new study, published in last month's edition of the journal Nano Letters... Essentially, the study team is the first to artificially extend the DNA alphabet, which could allow for massive storage capacities and accommodate a pretty extreme level of digital data.... DNA encodes genetic information with four molecules called nucleotides. There's adenine, guanine, cytosine and thymine, or A, G, C and T. In a sense, DNA has a four-letter alphabet, and different letter combinations represent different bits of data....
But what if we had a longer alphabet? Presumably, that'd give us a much deeper capacity. Following this line of thought, the team behind the new study artificially added seven new letters to the DNA repertoire.... "Instead of converting zeroes and ones to A, G, C and T, we can convert zeroes and ones to A, G, C, T and the seven new letters in the storage alphabet."
One of the study's co-principal investigators said their work "provides an exciting proof-of-principle demonstration of extending macromolecular data storage to non-natural chemistries, which hold the potential to drastically increase storage density in non-traditional storage media."
Common to China, Taiwan, Japan and Korea, the Joro spider is part of a group of spiders known as "orb weavers" because of their highly symmetrical, circular webs. The spider gets its name from Jorgumo, a Japanese spirit, or Ykai, that is said to disguise itself as a beautiful woman to prey upon gullible men. True to its mythical reputation, the Joro spider is stunning to look at, with a large, round, jet-black body cut across with bright yellow stripes, and flecked on its underside with intense red markings. But despite its threatening appearance and its fearsome standing in folklore, the Joro spider's bite is rarely strong enough to break through the skin, and its venom poses no threat to humans, dogs or cats unless they are allergic. That's perhaps good news, as the spiders are destined to spread far and wide across the continental U.S., researchers say.
The scientists came to this conclusion after comparing the Joro spider to a close cousin, the golden silk spider, which migrated from tropical climates 160 years ago to establish an eight-legged foothold in the southern United States. By tracking the spiders' locations in the wild and monitoring their vitals as they subjected caught specimens to freezing temperatures, the researchers found that the Joro spider has about double the metabolic rate of its cousin, along with a 77% higher heart rate and a much better survival rate in cold temperatures. Additionally, Joro spiders exist in most parts of their native Japan -- warm and cold -- which has a very similar climate to the U.S. and sits across roughly the same latitude. [...] While most invasive species tend to destabilize the ecosystems they colonize, entomologists are so far optimistic that the Joro spider could actually be beneficial, especially in Georgia where, instead of lovesick men, they kill off mosquitos, biting flies and another invasive species -- the brown marmorated stink bug, which damages crops and has no natural predators. In fact, the researchers say that the Joro is much more likely to be a nuisance than a danger, and that it should be left to its own devices.
In the new study, Tom Gilbert, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Copenhagen, thought it best to start small. "If we want to try something so crazy, why not start with a simple model," he reasoned. So, he, Jian-Qing Lin, a molecular biologist at Shantou University, and their colleagues, focused on the Christmas Island rat (Rattus macleari), which disappeared by 1908 from that island, located about 1200 kilometers west of Australia. This species "should be a dreamy candidate for de-extinction," McCauley says, given its close relationship with the Norway rat, a well-studied lab animal with a complete genome sequence that scientists already know how to modify.
Gilbert and Lin extracted DNA from the skins of two preserved Christmas Island rats and sequenced it many times over to get as much of the genome as possible. They achieved more than 60 times' coverage of it. Old DNA only survives in small fragments, so the team used the genome of the Norway rat as a reference to piece together as much as possible of the vanished rat's genome. Comparing the two genomes revealed almost 5% of the Christmas Island rat's genome was still missing, Lin, Gilbert, and their colleagues report today in Current Biology. The lost sequences included bits of about 2500 of the rat's estimated 34,000 genes. "I was surprised," Gilbert says. The recovered DNA included the genes for the Christmas Island rat's characteristic rounded ears, for example, but important immune system and olfaction genes were either missing or incomplete. The work "really highlights the difficulties, maybe even the ridiculousness, of [de-extinction] efforts," says Victoria Herridge, an evolutionary biologist at the Natural History Museum in London.Herridge says many of the missing genes make each species unique. It's also worth noting that the human genome differs by just 1% from those of chimps and bonobos.
Others researchers like Andrew Pask, a developmental biologist at the University of Melbourne, Parkville, says that the missing 5% of an extinct animal's genome likely won't affect how the transformed animal looks or behaves.
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She’s not alone. When, in March 2020, a science story became the biggest news story in the world, scientists became household names overnight, even celebrities. But many also became the targets of new and extreme levels of harassment, intimidation, and threats. U.K. Chief Medical Advisor Chris Whitty was accosted by two men in a London park; disease ecologist Peter Daszak of the EcoHealth Alliance received a letter containing white powder that resembled anthrax; Belgian virologist Marc Van Ranst and his family were moved to a safe house after he was threatened by a former soldier who was later found dead in a national park.
To better understand the level of intimidation, its effects, and the ways scientists cope with it, Science asked 9585 researchers who have published on COVID-19 to fill out an online survey about their experiences. Of 510 who responded, 38% reported at least one type of attack, ranging from insults to death threats, delivered on social media, by email or phone, or sometimes even in person. Those who were harassed described a range of effects on their lives, including workplace problems and mental health issues. (For more details on the survey, see sidebar, below.)
Last week, after reporting from the Guardian on mortality rates among children, the CDC corrected a "coding logic error" that had inadvertently added more than 72,000 Covid deaths of all ages to the data tracker, one of the most publicly accessible sources...
Are Movies Dying?
As viewership drops for Hollywood's annual Academy Awards ceremony, "Everyone has a theory about the decline..." argues an opinion piece in the New York Times.
"My favored theory is that the Oscars are declining because the movies they were made ...
As Far as China Is Concerned, Keanu Reeves No Longer Exists
"It's no longer possible to watch any content starring Keanu Reeves in China," reports PC Magazine, "and searching for his name returns no results from search engines."
The AV Club explains: Earlier this year, about a month after the...
Retro Computing Museum In Ukraine Destroyed By Russian Bomb
A privately owned collection of more than 500 pieces of retro computer and technology history has been destroyed by a Russian bomb in the city of Mariupol. PC Gamer reports: The destruction was highlighted by Mark Howlett on Twitter, and confirmed by t...
Massive Ice Shelf Collapses in Antarctica
"A massive ice shelf in eastern Antartica collapsed, scientists said on Friday, marking the first time an ice shelf has done so in the region," reports the Hill: The 460-square mile wide ice shelf, which was roughly the size of New York City and helped...
Dangerous Chemicals In Food Wrappers At Fast-Food Restaurants, Grocery Chains
fahrbot-bot shares a report from CNN: Alarming levels of dangerous chemicals known as PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances) were discovered in food packaging at a number of well-known fast-food and fast-casual restaurants and grocery store chains, ...
Can VW's Electrify America Make EV Charging Stations a 'Customer Oasis'?
Tesla has a vast network of over 30,000 superchargers spread across the globe. But there's also already another network of over 730 D.C. charging stations spread across the U.S. by "Electrify America."
Thank Volkswagen, which founded the company...
That Big Tech Exodus Out of California? It Didn't Happen
"Wannabe innovation hubs from coast to coast have been slavering over the prospect that the work-from-home revolution triggered by the COVID pandemic would finally break the stranglehold that California and Silicon Valley have had on high-tech jobs," write...
Russia Considers Accepting Bitcoin For Oil and Gas
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Russia is considering accepting Bitcoin as payment for its oil and gas exports, according to a high-ranking lawmaker. Pavel Zavalny says "friendly" countries could be allowed to pay in the crypto-currenc...
Could Deepfakes Change the Course of War?
CNN Business reports a deepfake video of Russian president Volodymyr Zelensky was fabricated to falsely depict him urging viewers to lay down their weapons and return to their families. But at the same time, "there was another widely circulated deepfak...
Good morning. Many experts expect Covid caseloads to rise soon. Here are four steps to protect people. |
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Minimizing the toll |
The BA.2 subvariant — an even more contagious version of Omicron — has already caused Covid-19 cases to rise across much of Europe. In the U.S., caseloads have held steady over the past week, ending two months of sharp declines, and many experts expect increases soon. |
Today’s newsletter looks at four promising strategies for minimizing Covid’s toll in the coming months. |
1. More boosters |
Dr. Aaron Richterman, an infectious-disease specialist in Philadelphia, regularly sees patients who have been vaccinated against Covid but have not received a booster shot. Some are not aware they are eligible for a booster. Others have heard about boosters but are not interested. “I just feel like I don’t need it,” one patient — an older man — recently told Richterman. |
That attitude is common. Almost one-quarter of U.S. adults have been vaccinated but have not received a booster shot, according to Kaiser Family Foundation surveys. (Any American who was vaccinated more than six months ago is eligible.) |
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These vaccinated-but-unboosted Americans are clearly open to receiving a Covid shot. And many would benefit significantly from getting boosted. Without a booster, immunity tends to wane. With a booster, people are even more protected than they were shortly after receiving a second shot, data shows. |
Consider the numbers from California, which publishes detailed data by vaccination status. For every million boosted Californians, fewer than two have been hospitalized with Covid at any given time recently: |
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“I remain most worried about lack of booster uptake among the elderly and the immunocompromised,” Jennifer Nuzzo, a Johns Hopkins University epidemiologist, told me. |
Many Americans still have not gotten this message, though. What might help? A prominent public-service campaign, focused specifically on booster shots rather than vaccination, could. So could encouragement from politically conservative voices. Fewer than 30 percent of Republican adults have received a booster; many Republicans have not received even a first shot. |
“The most powerful weapon we have, by far, is vaccination,” Richterman told me, “and that includes first doses, second doses and third doses.” |
What about fourth doses (that is, second booster shots)? The Biden administration will soon begin offering them to anybody 50 or older. The evidence suggests that these shots may offer additional protection but that they are less important than first booster shots, as Katelyn Jetelina, an epidemiologist, has explained in her newsletter. |
2. The immunocompromised |
For a small percentage of Americans, vaccination is impossible or ineffective. This group includes people who are receiving cancer treatments and those who have received certain organ transplants. |
Fortunately, a drug now exists that may help many of them. It is an injection called Evusheld, developed by AstraZeneca with help from government funding. It appears to provide months of protection, and the Biden administration has ordered enough doses to treat 850,000 people. |
But about 80 percent of the available doses are sitting unused, in warehouses, pharmacies and hospitals, my colleagues Amanda Morris and Sheryl Gay Stolberg have reported. Among the reasons: Many patients are unaware of Evusheld’s existence. Some doctors are uncertain about who qualifies. Some hospitals are refusing to dispense it to eligible patients, saving it for people who they think might benefit more from it. |
“The biggest problem is that there is absolutely no guidance or prioritization or any rollout in place at all,” Dr. Dorry Segev of N.Y.U. Langone Health told The Times. “It’s been a mess.” |
Biden administration officials have been working with state officials, hospitals, doctors and patient advocates to clear up the uncertainty. They have a long way to go. |
3. Post-infection treatments |
A knowledge gap is also hampering the distribution of Paxlovid — a post-infection treatment from Pfizer that seems to sharply reduce the chances a Covid illness will become severe. It is most effective when prescribed shortly after symptoms begin, but many Americans do not know it exists. |
The good news is that Paxlovid has become more widely available in recent weeks. If you are in a high-risk group and get infected with Covid, you should immediately talk with a doctor. (Here’s an explainer.) |
One thing to keep in mind: The government has so far authorized Paxlovid only for high-risk people, like those 65 and older or those with serious underlying medical conditions. I know that many Americans, especially liberal Democrats, are nervous about their own Covid risk and may be tempted to seek out Paxlovid. |
But the risk of developing severe Covid for most people who are boosted remains very low, as the chart above shows. And the current supply of Paxlovid is not large enough to treat anywhere near everybody who gets infected, especially if cases rise. “Our supply is fragile,” Dr. Scott Dryden-Peterson of Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston told Bloomberg News. |
If many younger, otherwise healthy people rush to get a Paxlovid prescription, they may effectively be taking doses from vulnerable people. |
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4. Masks |
Broad mask mandates have not done much to prevent Omicron’s spread. Too many people wear low-quality masks or take them off at times, and Omicron is so contagious that it takes advantage of these gaps. |
But masks can still help reduce Covid’s spread: |
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The bottom line |
All four of these steps have small costs and large benefits. |
They avoid contributing to the pandemic’s continuing crisis of isolation and disruption, like closing classrooms and keeping children home from school for weeks on end. And they can save lives. Covid’s official death toll in the U.S. has already exceeded 975,000. But given the availability of vaccine shots and other treatments, the vast majority of deaths are now avoidable. |
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NEWS
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10 February 2022
Heart-diseaserisk soars after COVID — even with a mild case
Massive study shows a long-term, substantial
rise in risk of cardiovascular disease, including heart attack and stroke,
after a SARS-CoV-2 infection.
Anna Horleston of the University of Bristol and colleagues were able to identify reflected PP and SS waves from the magnitude 4.2 event, called S0976a, and locate its origin in the Valles Marineris, a massive canyon network that is one of Mars' most distinguishing geological features and one of the largest graben systems in the Solar System. Earlier orbital images of cross-cutting faults and landslides suggested the area would be seismically active, but the new event is the first confirmed seismic activity there.
S1000a, the magnitude 4.1 event recorded 24 days later, was characterized by reflected PP and SS waves as well as Pdiff waves, small amplitude waves that have traversed the core-mantle boundary. This is the first time Pdiff waves have been spotted by the InSight mission. The researchers could not definitively pinpoint S1000a's location, but like S0976a it originated on Mars' far side. The seismic energy from S1000a also holds the distinction of being the longest recorded on Mars, lasting 94 minutes.
"Assets, to have value, have to deliver something to somebody. And there's only one currency that's accepted. You can come up with all kinds of things — we can put up Berkshire coins... but in the end, this is money," he said, holding up a $20 bill. "And there's no reason in the world why the United States government... is going to let Berkshire money replace theirs."
Later Saturday Berkshire Hathaway's vice chairman Charlie Munger had an even harsher appraisal of bitcoin. "In my life, I try and avoid things that are stupid and evil and make me look bad in comparison to somebody else — and bitcoin does all three," Munger said.
"In the first place, it's stupid because it's still likely to go to zero. It's evil because it undermines the Federal Reserve System... and third, it makes us look foolish compared to the Communist leader in China. He was smart enough to ban bitcoin in China."
The new models point to a planetesimal-gobbling origin for Jupiter because the pebble-accretion theory cannot explain such a high concentration of heavy elements. If Jupiter had initially formed from pebbles, the eventual onset of the gas accretion process, once the planet was large enough, would have immediately ended the rocky accretion stage. This is because the growing layer of gas would have created a pressure barrier that stopped additional pebbles from being pulled inside the planet. This curtailed rocky accretion phase would likely have given Jupiter a greatly reduced heavy metal abundance, or metallicity, than what the researchers calculated. However, planetesimals could have glommed onto Jupiter's core even after the gas accretion phase had begun; that's because the gravitational pull on the rocks would have been greater than the pressure exerted by the gas. This simultaneous accretion of rocky material and gas proposed by the planetesimal theory is the only explanation for the high levels of heavy elements within Jupiter, the researchers said.
The study also revealed another interesting finding: Jupiter's insides do not mix well into its upper atmosphere, which goes against what scientists had previously expected. The new model of Jupiter's insides shows that the heavy elements the planet has absorbed have remained largely close to its core and the lower atmosphere. Researchers had assumed that convection mixed up Jupiter's atmosphere, so that hotter gas near the planet's core would rise to the outer atmosphere before cooling and falling back down; if this were the case, the heavy elements would be more evenly mixed throughout the atmosphere. However, it is possible that certain regions of Jupiter may have a small convection effect, and more research is needed to determine exactly what is going on inside the gas giant's atmosphere. The researchers' findings could also change the origin stories for other planets in the solar system.The study was published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.
Rutgers Scientist Develops Antimicrobial, Plant-Based Food Wrap Designed To Replace Plastic (rutgers.edu)
The research paper includes a description of the technology called focused rotary jet spinning, a process by which the biopolymer is produced, and quantitative assessments showing the coating extended the shelf life of avocados by 50 percent. The coating can be rinsed off with water and degrades in soil within three days, according to the study. [...] The paper describes how the new fibers encapsulating the food are laced with naturally occurring antimicrobial ingredients -- thyme oil, citric acid and nisin. Researchers in the Demokritou research team can program such smart materials to act as sensors, activating and destroying bacterial strains to ensure food will arrive untainted. This will address growing concern over food-borne illnesses as well as lower the incidence of food spoilage [...].
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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2207.30 - 10:10
- Days ago = 2584 days ago
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
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