- How America’s push for the atomic bomb spawned enduring radioactive waste problems in St. Louis The Associated Press
- Records reveal 75 years of government downplaying, ignoring risks of St. Louis radioactive waste • Missouri Independent Missouri Independent
- Newly released government records shed light on radioactive waste problems in St. Louis St. Louis Post-Dispatch
- Takeaways from AP’s examination of nuclear waste problems in the St. Louis region The Associated Press
- Government documents expected to raise new concerns about radioactive waste KMOV4
- View Full Coverage on Google News
Tag Archives: enduring
The physics behind building an enduring soap bubble
Blowing soap bubbles, besides being a favorite pastime for children, also happens to be an art form and a subject of interest for physicists. Emmanuelle Rio, François Boulogne, Marina Pasquet, and Frédéric Restagno from the Laboratory of Solid State Physics at the University of Paris-Saclay have been studying bubbles for years, trying to understand the different processes at play in these innocuous-looking structures.
“Bubbles are important as they appear in many places, including washing products, cosmetics, building materials, and also in nature. For example, sea foam plays a role in terms of the exchanges between the atmosphere and the sea,” Boulogne said.
Now, the team has described a key event in the life of bubbles: when they pop.
Taking the temperature
In a recent study, Boulogne and Rio established the role played by the temperature of the bubbles’ surface in their stability. “In some cases, the aging of the bubbles and their bursting has been associated with the thickness of the soap film. Recently, researchers began associating the thinness of the soap film with evaporation. However, in our study, we pointed out that heat transfer, which is associated with evaporation, wasn’t taken into account,” Boulogne said.
To explore this aspect, the researchers measured the temperature of the bubbles’ surface and found a significant difference compared to room temperature. “The temperature of bubbles’ surface can decrease by up to 8° Celsius,” Boulogne said.
Boulogne stated that although there is a link between temperature and aging of the bubbles, the impact of low temperatures on when the bubbles pop remains to be understood—and is likely to stay that way for a while. “So far, we have no model that can make this prediction. Understanding the stability of bubbles is a challenge that will take several decades,” he said.
He reasoned there are several factors that need to be considered when it comes to the stability of bubbles. “This includes temperature, rate of evaporation, film-thinning, marginal regeneration (the phenomenon of small patches, which are thinner and lighter than the surrounding film, rising toward the top), and geometry. To have all these factors in a single model is very challenging.”
Building the perfect bubble
While predicting the stability of bubbles in different scenarios may take some time, Rio identified an optimal combination of ingredients to make bubbles last longer while at the same time being easy to create.
The key to longevity is glycerol. The other ingredients include a long polymer like the naturally occurring guar gum and “optimum proportion” of dishwashing liquid. “If you add more dishwashing liquid, creating bubbles becomes easier. However, their life time is shortened. That’s why you need to find the right amount of dishwashing liquid to ensure bubbles last long enough and are easy to generate,” Rio said.
Working with the French artist Pierre-Yves Fusier, who specializes in bubbles art, Rio and her colleagues developed the recipe, which consists of 40 milliliters of dishwashing liquid, 100 milliliters of glycerol, and 1 gram of long polymer such as the naturally occurring guar gum mixed in 1 liter of water. Using this recipe, Rio created 5 cm-diameter bubbles in her laboratory that lasted an hour.
While adding glycerol may make the bubbles more stable, Rio said the impact of other ingredients on the bubbles’ stability is still an open question. “Glycerol is a hydroscopic molecule which can help condensate water. But we know the surfactant (dishwashing liquid) and the polymer also impact evaporation. The next step in our study, therefore, is to find out how our recipe impacts the evaporation,” Rio said.
Rio added that evaporation, which is yet to be completely understood, is just one phenomenon that plays a role in bubble bursting. “You also have to consider gravity, which contributes to thinning of the surface that leads to the fluctuation of film thickness. All of this makes it extremely difficult to predict when a bubble will burst,” Rio said.
Dhananjay Khadilkar is a journalist based in Paris.
10 Enduring Space Mysteries That Spilled Their Secrets
The pages of astronomy books are packed with old mysteries. Thanks to the advancement of technology, experts can now look back and solve some of the gnarliest space mysteries on record. From the sudden appearance of a “star” 900 years ago above China to the truth about the famous Wow Signal, here are ten cosmic enigmas that have finally been cracked.
Related: 10 Historical First Images Captured Of Space
10 Antarctica’s Missing Iron Meteorites
Some space mysteries exist on Earth. One such riddle can be found in Antarctica. This frosty corner of the globe is where most meteorites are recovered. This abundance has nothing to do with location but instead with color differences. It’s easier to spot dark cosmic debris against the white expanse of this region than in places with forests or sand dunes.
Thousands of space rocks enter our atmosphere every year, so one might think that every type of meteorite can be found in Antarctica. Not so. The snow-covered continent is strangely empty of iron meteorites.
The mystery lasted for decades until 2016. That year, UK researchers released a study that suggested Antarctica has plenty of iron meteorites—they are just well hidden. Their iron content ensures that these meteorites become hotter than other space rocks when they enter our atmosphere. Once they impact ice or snow, they’ll burrow under the surface (melt their way down, really) and completely disappear from sight. Antarctica probably has a treasure trove of iron-rich meteorites; we just can’t see them.[1]
9 No Green Comet Tails
Astronomers have never recorded a comet with a green tail. This was odd because many comets develop radiant green heads as they fly closer to the sun. What was stopping the color from spreading to their tails? Interestingly, this question went unsolved for 90 years.
Since the 1930s, researchers suspected dicarbon could explain the whole thing. Dicarbon is a chemical that forms when the organic matter on the comet’s head reacts to sunlight, causing the green color. Unfortunately, sunlight also destroys dicarbon, which could explain why the chemical never survives long enough to reach a comet’s tail.
In 2021, this theory was proved in an amazing way. Scientists had to recreate the process, and that was no easy task. Dicarbon only exists in extreme places (like space), and it’s also a volatile chemical. In a world first, they created dicarbon, and while inside a vacuum chamber, it was brought into contact with gas and lasers to simulate the conditions in space. The lasers, in particular, proved that the sun’s radiation ripped apart the dicarbon before it could turn a comet’s tail green.[2]
8 The Mystery of Jovian Lightning
Ancient astronomers theorized for centuries that the largest planet in the solar system had lighting, but it wasn’t confirmed until 1979 when NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft hurtled past Jupiter. However, apart from confirming an old suspicion, Voyager 1 also discovered that Jovian lighting only appeared near the planet’s poles. In comparison, Earth’s lighting is more common among the equator.
It took another flyby to understand why lighting bolts avoided Jupiter’s midriff like the plague. In recent years, the craft Juno buzzed Jupiter and identified heat as the reason why lightning never zings the planet’s equator.
Earth catches the brunt of the sun’s warmth around the equator which fuels rising hot air—the very thing that lightning needs to form. The process is reversed on Jupiter in a peculiar way. Once sunlight makes Jupiter’s equator toasty, the world’s upper atmosphere stabilizes in such a way that it suppresses rising warm air. For this reason, lighting strikes freely at the poles where there is no atmospheric stability, and heat from inside the planet pushes hot air upward.[3]
7 A Strange Light Show
In 2022, the James Webb Telescope beamed back a fantastic photograph to Earth. It showed a bright light at the center of several rings. Cutting through the rings were eight spikes of light that radiated from the center outward, almost creating a spiderweb effect. When the bizarre but beautiful image hit social media, people had one question, “What the heck is this?”
Researchers quickly determined that the spikes were a “fault” on the telescope’s part. It tended to produce such anomalies when photographing bright objects in space. Since the spikes weren’t real, that left the unusual concentric circles around the star.
A closer look revealed that the “light” came from two stars. They orbited each other in an eight-year cycle, and each time the stars came close to each other and moved away again, that’s the moment when they produced dust and threw out another ring.[4]
6 The Glowing Blobs
In 2000, astronomers stumbled upon a bizarre space… thing. Billions of light-years from Earth floated a blob. It was as big as a galaxy and also glowed as brightly as one. But here’s the mystery—the giant space bubble had no stars, only hydrogen gas. So, what caused it to shine so brilliantly?
All told, about 30 blobs were eventually discovered. However, it wasn’t until dozens of astronomers, countless telescopes, and advanced simulations came together that their light source was revealed. Unexpectedly, stars were involved—but in a very unusual way.
As it turns out, these mammoth orbs are star factories. Deep inside the blobs, fresh stars are being produced at a rate 100 times faster than those born in our Milky Way galaxy. For some reason, nearby galaxies also pour star-forming materials into the chaos. But the actual light comes from the moment when new stars are born. In that instant, the stars exude a burst of bright ultraviolet light, which scatters in the hydrogen gas, causing the blob to glow.[5]
5 A 900-Year-Old Mystery
In 1181, Japanese and Chinese astronomers noticed a difference in the night sky. A new light had appeared, shone as brightly as Saturn, and stayed for six months. The description given by these early star gazers provided modern researchers with enough reason to believe that they were describing a supernova. This celestial explosion became quite famous in scientific circles, mostly because nobody could find any trace of it.
In 2021, roughly 900 years after the mystery of the missing supernova began, the origins of the so-called “Chinese Guest Star” were finally discovered. The ancient reports stated that the light had appeared between the Chinese constellations of Huagai and Chuanshe. In this region were a star and nebula thought to have been created when two White Dwarf stars merged. Such an event is known to trigger supernovas and the location, description of the light, and the age of the nebula all fit the events of 1181.[6]
4 That Time When Betelgeuse Blinked
Stargazers are very familiar with Orion. This star constellation is also known as “the hunter,” and Betelgeuse is the red supergiant that marks Orion’s eastern shoulder. The star is among the most luminous in the night sky, so when it suddenly dimmed in September 2019, astronomers quickly noticed. For a while, the fading continued, and by February 2020, Betelgeuse had dimmed by an unprecedented 35 percent.
Although the star regained its former brilliance, experts were at a loss. Nobody could explain why the red giant had “blinked.” Putting their best guesses on the table, researchers theorized that the dimming was the result of a dust cloud or a drop in temperature. During a multinational attempt, researchers combed through observatory data and satellite images and realized that both theories were correct.
Betelgeuse had ejected a massive cloud of gas from its innards, but it wasn’t until the star’s photosphere started to cool that the gas condensed into dust. This dusty atmosphere temporarily cloaked the star’s light. [7]
3 The Lunar Fireball Photograph
In 1953, Dr. Leon Stuart from Oklahoma photographed an event on the Moon. He believed that the gigantic fireball he captured was a plume of vaporized rock. If true, that would make him the first person to witness and document a lunar impact. It became known as “Stuart’s Event,” but nobody, not even astronauts or space probes, could find the crater.
Yet, the photograph proved that something had happened on the Moon in 1953. In 2003, NASA researchers analyzed the image and calculated that the object would’ve left a fresh-looking crater up to 1.24 miles (2 kilometers) across. Taking cues from the lunar landscape, they searched a grid of roughly 22 miles (35 kilometers) using photographs taken in 1994 by the lunar-orbiting Clementine spacecraft.
Incredibly, the NASA team found Stuart’s crater. It was smaller, measuring 0.93 miles (1.5 kilometers) across, but it was fresh, had the right appearance, and was also located in the middle of the famous photograph. The size of the crater also matched the estimated energy output of the impact, which would’ve been 35 times stronger than the atomic bomb that had devastated Hiroshima.[8]
2 The Impossible Twin Galaxies
No two galaxies are alike. Keeping this rule in mind, scientists were blown away when they discovered identical twin galaxies in 2013. The pair even sat next to each other, making it immediately obvious that they were freakishly similar. The odd phenomenon became known as Hamilton’s Object.
No theory made sense until someone suggested, in 2015, that gravitational lensing might be responsible. This rare phenomenon is bonkers. When large celestial bodies line up in a row, they can actually curve light and space-time in such a way that when astronomers view the objects through telescopes, they appear closer than they really are. Very often, they also produce mirages of themselves. The result? The illusion that two identical objects are sitting side by side.
When researchers looked closer at the setup that might be causing Hamilton’s Object, they discovered that between Earth and the “twins” sat a massive cluster of galaxies. The latter is causing the duplicate effect, but in reality, Hamilton’s Object is a single spiral galaxy.[9]
1 Origins of the Wow Signal
In 1977, a legendary mystery was born. Astronomer Jerry Ehman captured radio waves from space that were unlike anything he’d ever seen before (or anyone else, for that matter). He wrote “Wow!” next to the printed signal, and the name stuck. Even today, the Wow Signal is touted as proof of alien contact or, at the very least, an unsolved mystery. In truth, the origins had already been discovered in 2017.
Researchers from St Petersburg College suspected that comets might be the culprits. More specifically, a pair called 266P/Christensen and 335P/Gibbs. Both were enveloped in clouds of hydrogen gas. This detail is important because hydrogen naturally emits 1420MHz. This was the same radio frequency the “alien” signal emitted.
The telescope that picked up the Wow Signal was pointing at a specific group of stars in the Sagittarius constellation, and both comets were confirmed to have been in the area at the time. A closer look also revealed that 266/P Christensen was probably the comet that sparked the 40-year-old mystery. When its radio signals were compared to those from the Wow Signal, they were a match.[10]
10 years of FTL: The making of an enduring spaceship simulator
Enlarge / WARNING! INTRUDERS DETECTED
Today, FTL: Faster than Light is recognized as one of the most influential games in the indie sector. Alongside The Binding of Isaac and Spelunky, it was part of a holy trinity of games that popularized the roguelite genre in the early ’10s.
But before it was a hit, FTL was just a humble idea shared by Matthew Davis and Justin Ma, two developers working at 2K’s Shanghai office. The studio wasn’t a bad place to work, by their accounts, but they just weren’t making the kinds of games they were interested in. So Davis and Ma departed the big-budget firm and started a hobby project to keep them busy while they were looking for new jobs.
“The original intention, at least from my perspective, was that [FTL] was only intended as a hobby project or a prototype,” Davis tells Ars. “It was something in between jobs to build up a resume that we could use to get a job at a studio working on projects that we were more excited about. But we stumbled into something that became a lot bigger than what we set out to do.”
Enlarge / Davis and Ma say board games like Red November helped inspire FTL‘s design.
Getting inspired
In setting out to make a new kind of indie game, Ma and Davis say they were inspired by the strategic board games that filled their free time when they lived in Shanghai. “Games like the Battlestar Galactica board game, and there was this submarine game called Red November that did a lot of crew management and cooperative play which we really enjoyed,” Davis remembers.
Before starting development in earnest, Davis and Ma jotted down some of the mechanics they wanted to draw from those kinds of games to include in their prototype. They also wrote down what kinds of feelings they were hoping to impart to the player, landing on an angle that was reasonably unique to video games at the time.
“We wanted to put the player in the captain’s shoes rather than the pilot’s shoes on a spaceship,” Davis explains. “Most games at that point were focused on fighter pilots and dogfighting in space. We wanted to give you more of that Picard feel of shifting power and protecting your shields and repairing damage and that kind of thing.”
“We wanted them to struggle with managing the ship’s systems and feel the pain of losing a crew member from their bad decision-making,” Ma adds.
In trying to engender those kinds of player feelings, Ma remembers being inspired by the randomized situations and permanent death of roguelike games. At the time, those kinds of design elements were expanding from traditional turn-based adventures into other types of gameplay.
“I did play a ton of traditional roguelikes in the previous few years, but it was only Spelunky Classic that made me think about how the principles of roguelikes could apply to other genres,” Ma remembers.
That being said, a lot of the decisions to incorporate similar mechanics were practical ones. “For example, we wanted you to be forced to live with the consequences of your decisions, so a run-based game with permadeath just made sense,” Ma said. “We wanted you to have the feeling of exploring an unknown world, so randomized text events with various outcomes sounded like the easiest way to create that. We were also a bit masochistic and enjoyed failing at the game, so it naturally became quite challenging.”
During Sleep, One Brain Region Teaches Another, Converting Novel Data Into Enduring Memories
Summary: As the body moves between REM sleep and slow-wave sleep cycles, the hippocampus and neocortex interact to facilitate memory formation.
Source: University of Pennsylvania
What role do the stages of sleep play in forming memories?
“We’ve known for a long time that useful learning happens during sleep,” says University of Pennsylvania neuroscientist Anna Schapiro. “You encode new experiences while you’re awake, you go to sleep, and when you wake up your memory has somehow been transformed.”
Yet precisely how new experiences get processed during sleep has remained mostly a mystery. Using a neural network computational model they built, Schapiro, Penn Ph.D. student Dhairyya Singh, and Princeton University’s Kenneth Norman now have new insight into the process.
In research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they show that as the brain cycles through slow-wave and rapid-eye movement (REM) sleep, which happens about five times a night, the hippocampus teaches the neocortex what it learned, transforming novel, fleeting information into enduring memory.
“This is not just a model of learning in local circuits in the brain. It’s how one brain region can teach another brain region during sleep, a time when there is no guidance from the external world,” says Schapiro, an assistant professor in Penn’s Department of Psychology. “It’s also a proposal for how we learn gracefully over time as our environment changes.”
Broadly, Schapiro studies learning and memory in humans, specifically how people acquire and consolidate new information. She’s long thought that sleep played a part here, something she and her team have been testing in a lab, recording what happens in the brain as participants sleep.
Her team also builds neural network models to simulate learning and memory functions. For this work specifically, Schapiro and colleagues built a neural network model composed of a hippocampus, the brain’s center for new memories, tasked with learning the world’s day-to-day, episodic information, and the neocortex, responsible for facets like language, higher-level cognition, and more permanent memory storage.
During simulated sleep, the researchers can watch and record which simulated neurons fire when in these two areas, then analyze those activity patterns.
The team ran several sleep simulations using a brain-inspired learning algorithm they built. The simulations revealed that during slow-wave sleep, the brain mostly revisits recent incidents and data, guided by the hippocampus, and during REM sleep, it mostly reruns what happened previously, guided by memory storage in the neocortical regions.
“As the two brain regions connect during non-REM sleep, that’s when the hippocampus is actually teaching the neocortex,” says Singh, a second-year doctoral student in Schapiro’s lab. “Then, during the REM phase, the neocortex reactivates and can replay what it already knows,” solidifying the data’s hold in long-term memory.
Alternation between the two sleep stages matters, too, he says. “When the neocortex doesn’t have a chance to replay its own information, we see that the information there gets overwritten. We think you need to have alternating REM and non-REM sleep for strong memory formation to occur.”
The findings are consistent with what’s known in the field, though aspects of the model are still theoretical.
“We still need to test this,” Schapiro says. “One of our next steps will be to run experiments to understand whether REM sleep is truly bringing up old memories and what implications that might have for integrating new information into your existing knowledge.”
Because the current simulations were based on a typical adult getting a healthy night of sleep, they don’t necessarily transfer to other types of adults or less-than-stellar sleep habits.
They also don’t offer insight into what’s happening with children, who require different amounts and types of shut-eye than adults. Schapiro says she sees great potential for her model to answer some of these outstanding questions.
“Having a tool like this allows you to go in many directions, especially because sleep architecture changes across the lifespan and in various disorders, and we can simulate these changes in the model,” she says.
In the long run, better understanding the role of sleep stages in memory could help inform treatments for psychiatric and neurological disorders for which sleep deficits are a symptom. Singh says there could also be implications for deep learning and artificial intelligence.
“Our biologically inspired algorithm could provide new directions for more powerful offline memory processing in AI systems,” he says.
This proof-of-concept work connecting sleep and memory formation moves the field one step closer to these goals.
Funding: Funding for this research came from the National Institutes of Health (Grant R01 MH069456) and Charles E. Kaufman Foundation (Grant KA2020-114800).
See also
About this sleep and memory research news
Author: Michele Berger
Source: University of Pennsylvania
Contact: Michele Berger – University of Pennsylvania
Image: The image is in the public domain
Original Research: Closed access.
“A model of autonomous interactions between hippocampus and neocortex driving sleep-dependent memory consolidation” by Anna Schapiro et al. PNAS
Abstract
A model of autonomous interactions between hippocampus and neocortex driving sleep-dependent memory consolidation
How do we build up our knowledge of the world over time?
Many theories of memory formation and consolidation have posited that the hippocampus stores new information, then “teaches” this information to the neocortex over time, especially during sleep. But it is unclear, mechanistically, how this actually works—How are these systems able to interact during periods with virtually no environmental input to accomplish useful learning and shifts in representation?
We provide a framework for thinking about this question, with neural network model simulations serving as demonstrations.
The model is composed of hippocampus and neocortical areas, which replay memories and interact with one another completely autonomously during simulated sleep. Oscillations are leveraged to support error-driven learning that leads to useful changes in memory representation and behavior.
The model has a non–rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep stage, where dynamics between the hippocampus and neocortex are tightly coupled, with the hippocampus helping neocortex to reinstate high-fidelity versions of new attractors, and a REM sleep stage, where neocortex is able to more freely explore existing attractors.
We find that alternating between NREM and REM sleep stages, which alternately focuses the model’s replay on recent and remote information, facilitates graceful continual learning.
We thus provide an account of how the hippocampus and neocortex can interact without any external input during sleep to drive useful new cortical learning and to protect old knowledge as new information is integrated.
Distressing Study On Long COVID-19 Reveals Just How Enduring It Can Be
While most people can recover from COVID-19 and go back to their normal lives, many still have symptoms for months after an initial infection, according to new research from Scotland.
A study published Wednesday in the Nature Communications journal followed 33,281 people with recent COVID-19 infections, as well as a control group of 62,957 people who had never been infected, to determine what symptoms were most associated with long COVID-19. This way, vague symptoms that are often dismissed ― like “brain fog” or confusion ― could be more definitively linked to long COVID.
Researchers found that among those infected with COVID-19, people who went on to show signs of long COVID were more likely to persistently suffer from 24 of 26 tracked symptoms. Most commonly, those with long COVID experienced breathlessness, palpitations, brain fog and chest pain. When compared with those who had never had COVID-19, study participants with long COVID symptoms were 3.5 times more likely to report breathlessness.
The new findings underscore what other research has also found: People who had severe COVID-19 infections were more likely to have long COVID symptoms. Additionally, people with asymptomatic infections were less likely to suffer from long COVID.
The study also showed that vaccination may be linked to a lower risk of long COVID and was specifically connected with a reduced risk of developing seven of the 26 tracked symptoms.
But if you have a mild infection and are vaccinated, that doesn’t mean you are not at risk for developing long-haul symptoms, said Dr. Andrew Schamess, an internal medicine physician who treats patients at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center’s Post-COVID Recovery Program.
While participants in the Scottish study were less likely to deal with long COVID if they were vaccinated and asymptomatic, developing the condition is still possible — and COVID-19 is an ever-changing and unpredictable virus.
“You may be vaccinated, you may get a mild infection [and] you could still wind up with your life completely turned upside down by long COVID,” said Schamess, who was not involved with the new research.
In a particularly grim finding, the study discovered that 6% of infected participants had not recovered from COVID-19 at all, while 42% reported partial recovery six to 18 months after infection. Additionally, older adults, women and people with economic challenges were more likely to suffer from long COVID symptoms.
It’s worth noting that 91% of study participants were white, so further research is needed to determine the exact impact on other communities.
At what point does COVID-19 become long COVID?
According to Schamess, long COVID has two definitions. First, the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggest that symptoms lasting for a month or more can indicate long COVID.
That said, a lot of people may need a month to fully recover from COVID-19, according to Schamess. Just think of all of the people you know (maybe including yourself) who had trouble getting back to working out or had a lingering cough for weeks after infection.
“I think the better definition to me is the World Health Organization’s, which sets three months as the mark” for long COVID, he said. In the Scottish study, symptoms persisted for as long as a year and a half after infection.
Chanin Wardkhian via Getty Images
It’s important to keep protecting yourself and others from COVID-19 infections
While certain factors may put you at higher risk of developing long COVID, you can take some steps to protect yourself.
First, get vaccinated against COVID-19 and make sure you are up to date on your booster, too. A new bivalent shot targeting the omicron variant is available for people ages 5 and up.
Next, if you do get sick, make a treatment plan with your doctor. Treatments like Paxlovid and short-acting monoclonal antibodies are available for some people, Schamess noted.
Additionally, if you are immunocompromised and may not mount a good response to the vaccine, you may be eligible to get Evusheld, “a long-acting monoclonal antibody that gives you extra protection against COVID,” he said. (However, new data suggests that Evusheld may not protect against all variants, and antibody treatments have shown limited efficacy against omicron. So it’s best to talk to your doctor about what approach is best for you.)
Lastly, be sure to still take precautions like mask-wearing in crowded indoor spaces.
“I do think this is going to be the hidden aftermath of the pandemic,” Schamess said of long COVID.
“While we’re seeing less immediate death and people in the [intensive care unit] … I think as long as COVID is circulating, we are going to see these cases of long COVID, which can be utterly disabling.”
Experts are still learning about COVID-19. The information in this story is what was known or available as of publication, but guidance can change as scientists discover more about the virus. Please check the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for the most updated recommendations.
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‘Enduring Welcome’: Biden administration pivoting to long-term strategy to assist Afghans
The administration is doubling down on existing immigrant pathways, like special immigrant visas (SIVs) and the refugee admissions program, to help Afghans interested in coming to the US.
“This commitment does not have an end date — the commitment to resettle our Afghan allies,” the senior administration official told reporters.
“Under Enduring Welcome, we will focus our relocation efforts on three main eligibility categories,” the official said, citing family reunification for the immediate relatives of US citizens and legal permanent residents and those who resettled over the past year, special immigrant visa applicants, and the US refugee admissions program.
It’s part of an ongoing effort to provide relief to Afghans and streamline processing.
Senior administration officials previously announced they are eliminating one of two forms for most new SIV applicants, a change in process that they said “will shave about a month off of the adjudication time.” Removing the form means that the processing will all be done by the State Department, and no longer through United States Citizenship and Immigration Services. But it will still be a very rigorous process.
As of July, there were more than 74,000 applicants in the SIV pipeline — more than 16,000 of whom had submitted all the documents required for Chief of Mission approval, according to a State Department spokesperson.
As the administration transitions to a long-term strategy, officials anticipate phasing out parole for Afghans on a large scale, like occurred last year, and ending the use of a facility that served as a final pitstop in the US for those resettling in the country.
Earlier this year, the administration contracted the National Conference Center, located in a neighborhood in Loudoun County, Virginia, to be used as a temporary pit stop for Afghan evacuees. The contract runs through the end of this fiscal year.
“We’re now able to assign people to their destination communities directly from overseas and so people can travel without a stopover,” the senior administration official said.
Prince Harry and Meghan Markle Are So Far Enduring an Ice-Cold Platinum Jubilee
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Buckingham Palace’s favorite method of communication sometimes seems to be semaphore. Over the course of the Jubilee celebrations so far, the palace couldn’t have made it clearer via several mime shows that it has little interest in trying to flatter the egos of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle—nor any inclination to use the political capital of the queen’s last hurrah to sell a narrative of reconciliation between Harry and his brother Prince William, or their wives.
Instead, Harry and Meghan have been firmly treated as rather unimportant, second-class guests. Having apparently been strongly urged to do nothing to steal Her Majesty’s limelight they have had little choice other than to like it or lump it, as the old British saying goes.
The fact that they are so desperately unpopular in Britain that their ratings are in the toilet and on Friday they were subjected to audible boos amongst the more usual cheers when they arrived at St Paul’s Cathedral is likely to have made this ruthless strategic decision by the palace somewhat easier.
At the church service, the couple were seated across the aisle from Charles (representing the queen, who was too unwell to attend) and William, a long, long way, physically and spiritually, from the new nexus of royal power. Their seat mates were not future kings and queens of the United Kingdom but a collection of second division players; Beatrice, Eugenie, Prince Edward et al.
As Tina Brown, founding editor of The Daily Beast and author of the new book The Palace Papers, told The Daily Beast: “The seating definitely declared they have slipped to supporting players, buried in the royal B-list.”
After Friday’s service, and some careful choreography that avoided even the merest possibility of Sussex and Cambridge entering each other’s personal space or even making eye contact, the great and the good were whisked off to London’s Guildhall to hobnob and backslap, with the notable exception of Harry and Meghan, who, were back at their house in Windsor, Frogmore Cottage, before the last stragglers had left the shindig.
It was the latest in a series of meaningful unspoken slights. On Thursday they were excluded from any visual presentations around the Trooping the Color celebration (although a few grainy long-lens photos trickled out eventually), explicitly not invited to the Buckingham Palace balcony appearance with the queen and were not present at any of the beacon lighting ceremonies around the country.
The messaging clearly suggested that while it was jolly nice to have them there, these Californians were highly expendable in terms of the royal master plan—and certainly wouldn’t be getting any special treatment.
Nothing happens by accident in the world of royal choreography. Courtiers were well aware that the billions of eyes on social media were very much hoping for a re-run of the 2020 Commonwealth Service when Kate blanked Meghan.
The palace was understandably not interested in facilitating a game of spot the difference. And they know that if Harry or Meghan had been photographed with William or Kate, the giant exercise of compare and contrast is all anyone would have been talking about this weekend.
As far as the palace is concerned, that’s not what the millions of hours of planning that have gone into the Platinum Jubilee were intended to achieve.
The low-profiling of Harry and Meghan is likely to continue for the remainder of the weekend. For example, although sources say that William and Kate will each give speeches at Saturday night’s Platinum Party at the Palace, there is no indication that Harry and Meghan will even be in attendance.
“A forecast of torrential downpours on Sunday is adding to fears the great national celebration could have a rather soggy, underwhelming end.”
For similar reasons, The Daily Beast understands that it is also considered highly unlikely that the queen will attend a rumored first birthday party for her great-grand-daughter Lilibet at Frogmore Cottage on Saturday, and even more unlikely that a photograph of the queen with Lilibet will be released, as some have suggested, again at least partially out of concern that to do so would provide a major distraction from the core message of the Jubilee, which is, of course: “God save the queen,” and the achievements of Queen Elizabeth.
Will the queen be seen in public again? Not on Saturday during the day at least—Buckingham Palace said she would not attend the Derby horse race; Princess Anne will most likely stand in for her. It is a wait-and-see for the concert at the palace on Saturday night. A forecast of torrential downpours on Sunday is adding to fears the great national celebration could have a rather soggy, underwhelming end.
It was interesting to note that a story saying that the queen had met Lilibet at a lunch party on Thursday had its genesis in a claim by by Omid Scobie, the reporter who wrote the sympathetic Sussex biography Finding Freedom. Scobie, who is thought to be close to the Sussexes and their team, and was briefed by Meghan’s representatives when writing the book, said on a BBC breakfast show that the queen had finally met her namesake on Thursday.
The palace, for their part, flatly refused to comment on the veracity of Scobie’s claims, even off the record.
The reality is that despite several opportunities to position Harry and Meghan in any of many permutations with William Kate Charles and Camilla, the inherently risk-averse powers at the palace have definitively chosen not to do so.
The focus of a Jubilee is apparently the individual whose reign is being marked, but really this human is a Trojan horse for the wider institution of monarchy. In this sense, the Jubilee has given us a glimpse of the rapidly oncoming world of King Charles III, who was undoubtedly handed a gift from the heavens when his troublesome brother Andrew went down with Covid, meaning he could not attend the one event to which he had been invited, Friday’s church service, which Charles ended up presiding over in place of his ailing mother.
The glitz of its ceremony-making runs in tandem with the ruthlessness of the palace. Harry and Meghan have spent the last two years attacking the royal family, so it should hardly be a surprise that the institution has retaliated by treating them with ill-disguised disdain.
Bobby Rydell, Teenage Idol With Enduring Appeal, Dies at 79
“I had the good fortune to spend my peak years as a recording artist during the golden age of the TV variety show,” Mr. Rydell wrote in his autobiography. “Throughout the early ’60s, I appeared on almost all of them.” Those included shows hosted by, among others, Ed Sullivan, Johnny Carson, Perry Como, Jack Benny, Milton Berle and, most notably, Red Skelton.
After making two appearances on “The Red Skelton Hour” on which he just sang, he appeared in sketches intermittently from 1961 to 1969 as various characters, including Zeke Kadiddlehopper, cousin to Skelton’s country-bumpkin character Clem Kadiddlehopper.
“Mr. Skelton fell in love with Bobby,” Mr. Rydell’s personal assistant, Linda F. Hoffman, said in 2013. “His son had passed away, and Bobby always felt he was looked upon by Mr. Skelton as a son. They were very close.”
New York Times reviews of two rock ’n’ roll revival shows at Madison Square Garden suggested reasons for both his lesser place in the rock firmament and his future career longevity. In 1975, Ian Dove wrote: “Mr. Rydell is not your hard rocker — his era was in the late 1950s, when rock was being softened and made less frightening. With such songs as ‘Volare,’ he emerges more like a crooner than a rocker.” Reviewing a 1977 show, Robert Palmer wrote that Mr. Rydell “seemed uncomfortable with his rock ’n’ roll hits and would probably have become an Italian crooner had he not grown up in the rock ’n’ roll era.”
After his television appearances dwindled, he continued to perform in nightclubs and nostalgia shows, and to tour Australia, until the promoter Dick Fox put the Golden Boys together in 1985, initially for a PBS special. Mr. Rydell, Mr. Avalon and Fabian would perform their own songs and then sing together; there would also be tributes to Frank Sinatra and to Mr. Rydell’s favorite singer, Bobby Darin.
“When the three of us are onstage, we’re having fun,” Mr. Rydell said in a 2012 interview with the writer Pat Gallagher. “We’re not trying to fool anybody. Everybody has known us for the better part of 50 years. We just go out there and have fun and the audience can see that.”
Strong, Sporadic Magnetic Fields Could Explain One of The Moon’s Enduring Mysteries
It’s been half a century since the Apollo missions returned from the Moon, and yet the lunar samples they brought home continue to baffle us.
Some of these rocks are more than 3 billion years old and appear to have been formed in the presence of a strong geomagnetic field, like the one on Earth. But the Moon today doesn’t have a magnetosphere; it’s too small and dense, frozen right through to the core.
Unlike Earth, the Moon’s insides aren’t constantly churning with electrically conductive material, which produces a geomagnetic field in the first place. So, why do lunar rocks tell us otherwise?
It’s possible the Moon didn’t freeze over as quickly as we thought; a few billion years ago, its core might have still been slightly molten.
But even if the field was sustained for a surprisingly long time, the strength of this field – given the Moon’s size – is unlikely to match what the surface rocks are telling us.
Some scientists suggest the Moon used to wobble more, which kept the liquid in its belly sloshing away for slightly longer. Constant meteorites could have also given the Moon a boost in energy.
Researchers have previously entertained a new angle to the question, suggesting patches of the lunar surface were exposed to short bursts of intense magnetic activity.
In this latest study, a duo from Stanford and Brown University in the US has proposed a model describing just how these short-lived but powerful fields might form.
“[I]nstead of thinking about how to power a strong magnetic field continuously over billions of years, maybe there’s a way to get a high-intensity field intermittently,” explains planetary scientist Alexander Evans.
“Our model shows how that can happen, and it’s consistent with what we know about the Moon’s interior.”
In the first billion years or so of the Moon’s existence, its core was not much hotter than the mantle above. This meant the heat from the Moon’s interior didn’t have anywhere to dissipate, which is what usually causes molten material to move. The lighter, hotter bits tend to rise until they cool, while the denser, colder bits sink until they heat, and so on, and so forth.
Something else must have been stirring the pot, generating a magnetic field.
In its youth, an ocean of molten rock likely covered the Moon, and as the object cooled, this rock would have solidified at slightly different rates.
The densest minerals, such as olivine and pyroxene, would have sunk to the bottom and cooled first, while lighter elements like titanium would have floated to the top and cooled last.
Titanium-rich rock, however, would have weighed more than the solids below, causing chunks near the Moon’s crust to drop through the mantle, right into the core.
Researchers think this sinking effect continued until at least 3.5 billion years ago, with at least a hundred blobs of titanium-rich material hitting ‘rock bottom’ in a billion years.
Each time one of these massive slabs, about 60 kilometers (37 miles) in radius,connected with the core, the mismatch in temperature would have temporarily reignited a surprising convection current, one strong enough to generate a strong pulse of magnetism.
“You can think of it a little bit like a drop of water hitting a hot skillet,” says Evans.
“You have something really cold that touches the core, and suddenly a lot of heat can flux out. That causes churning in the core to increase, which gives you these intermittently strong magnetic fields.”
The new models could help explain why different lunar rocks show different magnetic signatures. The Moon’s magnetosphere may not have been a constant or consistent phenomenon.
The authors are now testing their explanation by looking back at lunar rocks to see if they can detect a weak magnetic background that is only occasionally pierced by a stronger force. The presence of a weaker magnetic hum would suggest a stronger magnetosphere was the exception and not the rule.
The study was published in Nature Astronomy.