A professor of religion at Columbia University writes, "I do not think human beings are the last stage in the evolutionary process." Whatever comes next will be neither simply organic nor simply machinic but will be the result of the increasingly symbiotic relationship between human beings and technology. Bound together as parasite/host, neither people nor technologies can exist apart from the other because they are constitutive prostheses of each other... So-called "artificial" intelligence is the latest extension of the emergent process through which life takes ever more diverse and complex forms.
The article lists "four trajectories that will be increasingly important for the symbiotic relationship between humans and machines."

- Writing about neuroprosthetics, the professor argues that "Increasing possibilities for symbiotic relations between computers and brains will lead to alternative forms of intelligence that are neither human nor machinic, but something in between."

- Then there's biobots. The article argues that with nanotechnology, "it will be increasingly difficult to distinguish the natural from the artificial."

But there's also an interesting discussion about synthetic biology. "Michael Levin and his colleagues at the Allen Discovery Center of Tufts University — biologists, computer scientists and engineers — have created "xenobots," which are "biological robots" that were produced from embryonic skin and muscle cells from an African clawed frog." As Levin and his colleagues wrote in 2020...

Here we show a scalable pipeline for creating functional novel lifeforms: AI methods automatically design diverse candidate lifeforms in silico to perform some desired function, and transferable designs are then created using a cell-based construction toolkit to realize living systems with predicted behavior. Although some steps in this pipeline still require manual intervention, complete automation in the future would pave the way for designing and deploying living systems for a wide range of functions.
And the article concludes with a discussion of organic-relational AI: While Levin uses computational technology to create and modify biological organisms, the German neurobiologist Peter Robin Hiesinger uses biological organisms to model computational processes by creating algorithms that evolve. This work involves nothing less than developing a new form of "artificial" intelligence... Non-anthropocentric AI would not be merely an imitation of human intelligence, but would be as different from our thinking as fungi, dog and crow cognition is from human cognition.

Machines are becoming more like people and people are becoming more like machines. Organism and machine? Organism or machine? Neither organism nor machine? Evolution is not over; something new, something different, perhaps infinitely and qualitatively different, is emerging.

Who would want the future to be the endless repetition of the past?

CNN reports SpaceX made a second attempt to successfully launch Starship, the most powerful rocket ever constructed. The uncrewed rocket took off just after 7 a.m. CT (8 a.m. ET). The rocket took off as intended, making it roughly 8 minutes into flight before SpaceX confirmed it had to intentionally explode the Starship spacecraft as it flew over the ocean...

This mission comes after months of back-and-forth with federal regulators as SpaceX has awaited a launch license. The company is also grappling with pushback from environmentalists...

After separating from the Super Heavy rocket booster, the Starship spacecraft soared to an altitude of approximately 93 miles (150 kilometers) before SpaceX lost contact, according to a statement issued by the company. For context, the U.S. government considers 50 miles (80 kilometers) above Earth's surface the edge of outer space...

SpaceX is OK with rockets exploding in the early stages of development. That's because the company uses a completely different approach to rocket design than, say, NASA. The space agency focuses on building one rocket and strenuously designing and testing it on the ground before its first flight — taking years but all but guaranteeing success on the first launch. SpaceX, however, rapidly builds new prototypes and is willing to test them to their breaking point because there's usually a spare nearby. During a drive by the company's facilities on Friday — four Starship spacecraft and at least two Super Heavy boosters could be seen from public roadways.
CNN reminds readers that "so far in 2023 alone, the Falcon 9 has launched more than 70 spaceflights...

"Elon Musk described Starship as the vehicle that underpins SpaceX's founding purpose: sending humans to Mars for the first time. NASA has its own plans for the rocket."

Doctors have long relied on a few key patient characteristics to assess risk of a heart attack or stroke, using a calculus that considers blood pressure, cholesterol, smoking and diabetes status, as well as demographics: age, sex and race. Now, the American Heart Association is taking race out of the equation. From a report: The overhaul of the widely used cardiac-risk algorithm is an acknowledgment that, unlike sex or age, race identification in and of itself is not a biological risk factor. The scientists who modified the algorithm decided from the start that race itself did not belong in clinical tools used to guide medical decision making, even though race might serve as a proxy for certain social circumstances, genetic predispositions or environmental exposures that raise the risk of cardiovascular disease.

The revision comes amid rising concern about health equity and racial bias within the U.S. health care system, and is part of a broader trend toward removing race from a variety of clinical algorithms. "We should not be using race to inform whether someone gets a treatment or doesn't get a treatment," said Dr. Sadiya Khan, a preventive cardiologist at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, who chaired the statement writing committee for the American Heart Association, or A.H.A. The statement was published on Friday [PDF] in the association's journal, Circulation. An online calculator using the new algorithm, called PREVENT, is still in development.

Davide Castelvecchi, writing for Nature: A Nature retraction last week has put to rest the latest claim of room-temperature superconductivity -- in which researchers said they had made a material that could conduct electricity without producing waste heat and without refrigeration. The retraction follows the downfall of an even more brazen claim about a supposed superconductor called LK-99, which went viral on social media earlier this year. Despite these high-profile setbacks, superconductivity researchers say the field is enjoying somewhat of a renaissance. "It's not a dying field -- on the contrary," says Lilia Boeri, a physicist who specializes in computational predictions at the Sapienza University of Rome. The progress is fuelled in part by the new capabilities of computer simulations to predict the existence and properties of undiscovered materials.

Much of the excitement is focused on 'super-hydrides -- hydrogen-rich materials that have shown superconductivity at ever-higher temperatures, as long as they are kept at high pressure. The subject of the retracted Nature paper was purported to be such a material, made of hydrogen, lutetium and nitrogen. But work in the past few years has unearthed several families of materials that could have revolutionary properties. "It really does look like we're on the hairy edge of being able to find a lot of new superconductors," says Paul Canfield, a physicist at Iowa State University in Ames and Ames National Laboratory.

Richard Speed reports via The Register: Scientists have revealed how data from a NASA telescope was secured thanks to creative thinking and a batch of Raspberry Pi computers. The telescope was the Super Pressure Balloon Imaging Telescope (SuperBIT), launched on April 16, 2023, from Wanaka Airport in New Zealand. The telescope was raised to approximately 33km in altitude by NASA's 532,000-cubic-meter (18.8-million-cubic-foot) balloon and, above circa 99.5 percent of the Earth's atmosphere, it spent over a month circumnavigating the globe and acquiring observations of astronomical objects. The plan had been for the payload to transmit its data to the ground using SpaceX's Starlink constellation and the US Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System (TDRSS). However, the Starlink connection went down soon after launch, on May 1, and the TDRSS connection became unstable on May 24. The boffins decided to attempt a landing on May 25 due to poor communications and concerns the balloon might be pulled away from further land crossings by weather.

The telescope itself was destroyed during the landing; it was dragged along the ground for 3km by a parachute that failed to detach, leaving a trail of debris in its wake. Miraculously, though, SuperBIT's solid-state drive was recovered intact. However, other than as a reference, its data was not needed thanks to the inclusion of Raspberry Pi-powered hardware in the form of four Data Recovery System (DRS) capsules. Each capsule included a Raspberry Pi 3B and 5TB of solid-state storage. A parachute, a Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) receiver, and an Iridium short-burst data transceiver were also included so the hardware could report its location to the recovery team. The capsules were connected to the main payload via Ethernet, and 24V DC was also available.

The plan had been to release the first DRS capsule on day 40, and then another every 20 days after that, whenever SuperBIT passed over land. However, when it became clear that SuperBIT would have to come down on May 25, it was decided to drop two DRS capsules over Argentina's Santa Cruz Province. Both of the DRS capsules released were recovered from their reported locations -- a curious cougar apparently nosed around one of them without causing damage -- and the data was fully intact. Of the unreleased DRS capsules, one failed for unknown reasons at launch -- the team speculated that perhaps a cable came loose -- but the other also contained an intact data set.

Britain's drugs regulator has approved a groundbreaking treatment for two painful and debilitating lifelong blood disorders, which works by "editing" the gene that causes them. From a report: The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) has given the green light for Casgevy to be used to treat sickle cell disease and beta thalassemia. It is the first medicine licensed anywhere that works by deploying gene editing that uses the "genetic scissors," known as CRISPR, for which its inventors won the Nobel prize for chemistry.

Casgevy's developers hope the pioneering treatment could banish the pain, infections and anaemia sickle cell disease brings and the severe anaemia experienced by those with beta thalassemia. About 15,000 people in the UK, almost all of African or Caribbean heritage, have sickle cell disease. About 1,000 -- mainly of Mediterranean, south Asian, south-east Asian and Middle Eastern background -- have beta thalassemia and need regular blood transfusions to treat their anaemia. Experts in the illnesses hope Casgevy may be a cure, making it no longer necessary for people with the conditions to have a bone marrow transplant. Until now this has been the only treatment available, even though the body can reject the donor marrow. The Sickle Cell Society welcomed the MHRA's decision as a "historic moment for the sickle cell community" which "offers [them] newfound hope and optimism."

The FAA has cleared SpaceX to launch its second spaceflight attempt of its Starship rocket. CNBC reports: SpaceX posted on the social media platform X shortly after the greenlight that it was "targeting Friday, November 17 for Starship's second flight test." A two-hour launch window will begin at 8 a.m. ET. SpaceX plans to livestream the Starship launch, with a webcast beginning about 30 minutes before lift off. Starship first launched in April, achieving flight for a few minutes before exploding mid-air, severely damaging the ground infrastructure and raising environmental concerns. The FAA in coordination with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service launched a safety review prior to issuing a new flight license for the second attempt.

FWS determined that the rocket launch and subsequent damage to the pad infrastructure had no long-term negative effects on the surrounding ecology, according to an agency report released Wednesday. Still, SpaceX will help mitigate damage to the area by reducing sound waves and vibrations, assisting in fire suppression, and providing launch pad protection, the agency said. As a result, "the FAA determined SpaceX met all safety, environmental, policy and financial responsibility requirements," the agency said in a statement Wednesday.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NBC News: A prolonged decline in male fertility in the form of sperm concentrations appears to be connected to the use of pesticides, according to a study published Wednesday. Researchers compiled, rated and reviewed the results of 25 studies of certain pesticides and male fertility and found that men who had been exposed to certain classes of pesticides had significantly lower sperm concentrations. The study, published Wednesday in Environmental Health Perspectives, included data from more than 1,700 men and spanned several decades. "No matter how we looked at the analysis and results, we saw a persistent association between increasing levels of insecticide and decreases in sperm concentration," said study author Melissa Perry, who is an environmental epidemiologist and the dean of the College of Public Health at George Mason University. "I would hope this study would get the attention of regulators seeking to make decisions to keep the public safe from inadvertent, unplanned impacts of insecticides." [...]

Scientists have long suspected changes to the environment could be contributing, and they've been probing the role of pesticides for decades in studies of animals and in human epidemiology research. The new analysis focuses on two groups of chemicals -- organophosphates and some carbamates -- that are commonly used in insecticides. The researchers looked at data collected from groups of people with exposures to pesticides and others who were not. Most, but not all, of the research centered on exposures in the workplace. The researchers controlled for outside factors that could contribute to lower sperm counts like smoking and age. Perry said researchers aren't sure how pesticides are affecting sperm concentrations and more research will be needed.

It's likely that pesticides are one of many environmental factors that could be contributing to a decline in sperm concentrations. The trend of sperm concentration declines has been widely observed in studies around the world, but it's a complicated topic and some scientists still have reservations. Sperm are notoriously difficult to count and the technology to do so has changed over the years. There are many confounding factors that can affect male fertility, including age, obesity and opioid use, to name a few. Sperm concentrations are one important data point to consider, but other factors -- like how sperm are shaped and how they swim -- are also critical to male fertility. Perry said she hopes agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency begin to factor the impact of chemicals and pesticides on reproductive health in their assessments. "Given the body of evidence and these consistent findings, it's time to proactively reduce these insecticide exposures for men wanting to have families," Perry said.

Nasa's James Webb space telescope has revealed a planet where specks of sand fall as rain, in groundbreaking observations. From a report: The planet, Wasp-107b, lies 200 light years away in the Virgo constellation and had already caught the attention of astronomers because it is very large but very light, earning it the nickname the "candy floss" planet. The latest observations give an unprecedented glimpse of a strange and exotic world beyond our solar system that features silicate sand clouds and rain, scorching temperatures, raging winds and the distinct burnt-matches scent of sulphur dioxide. "Our knowledge of other planets is based on what we know from Earth," said Prof Leen Decin, of the Catholic Institute (KU) Leuven and first author of the research. "That's a very restricted knowledge."

The planet was discovered in 2017 after astronomers spotted a telltale periodic flickering of light from its host star each time the planet passed in front of it. "It's like a fly in front of a street lamp," said Decin. "You see a slight dimming of the light." James Webb takes these observations to the next level by measuring starlight that is filtered through the planet's atmosphere. Because different elements absorb different wavelengths of light, the spectrum of starlight indicates which gases are present. Wasp-107b is similar in mass to Neptune but almost the size of Jupiter, and its vast, diffuse nature allows the James Webb telescope to peer deep into its atmosphere.

Amazon said on Wednesday that it was removing seven eyedrops products from its website after the Food and Drug Administration warned the company that the eyedrops had not been recognized as safe and effective. From a report: The F.D.A. said in a letter to Andrew Jassy, Amazon's chief executive, on Monday that Amazon had violated federal regulations by selling the eyedrops, which claimed to help with problems including pink eye, dry eyes, eyestrain and floaters. "These products are especially concerning from a public health perspective," the F.D.A. letter said. "Ophthalmic drug products, which are intended for administration into the eyes, in general pose a greater risk of harm to users because the route of administration for these products bypasses some of the body's natural defenses."

The eyedrops named in the letter are: Similasan Pink Eye Relief, The Goodbye Company Pink Eye, Can-C Eye Drops, Optique 1 Eye Drops, OcluMed Eye Drops, TRP Natural Eyes Floaters Relief, and Manzanilla Sophia Chamomile Herbal Eye Drops. None of the eyedrops appeared to be available for purchase on Amazon on Wednesday morning. The company said in an emailed statement on Wednesday that "safety is a top priority."

Airbus has launched an innovative "detumbler" device designed to mitigate the risks posed by tumbling satellites in space. Space Daily reports: The Detumbler, a brainchild of Airbus and supported by the French Space Agency CNES under their Tech4SpaceCare initiative, was unveiled on Saturday, November 11. This magnetic damping device, weighing approximately 100 grams, is engineered to be attached to satellites nearing the end of their operational lives. Its purpose is to prevent these satellites from tumbling, a common issue in orbital flight dynamics, especially in LEO. The device features a central rotor wheel and magnets that interact with the Earth's magnetic field, effectively damping unwanted motion.

Airbus' development of the Detumbler commenced in 2021. Its operational principle is simple yet innovative. When a satellite functions normally, the rotor behaves akin to a compass, aligning with the Earth's magnetic field. However, if the satellite begins to tumble, the movement of the rotor induces eddy currents, creating a friction torque that dampens this motion. The design of the Detumbler involves a stator housing, complete with a bottom plate and top cover, along with the rotor comprising the central axle, rotor wheel, and magnets.

Tumbling satellites, particularly those in LEO, pose a significant challenge for future active debris removal missions. Dead satellites naturally tend to tumble due to orbital flight dynamics. The introduction of the Airbus Detumbler could revolutionize this scenario, making satellites easier to capture during debris-clearing missions and enhancing the overall safety and sustainability of space operations. Airbus is expected to perform an in-orbit demonstration of the Detumbler in early 2024.

A tool bag that astronauts accidentally let float away during a routine spacewalk at the International Space Station is now orbiting Earth and can be seen with a pair of binoculars. NBC News reports: The bag drifted away from the space station this month when NASA astronauts Jasmin Moghbeli and Loral O'Hara were performing maintenance on the exterior of the orbiting outpost. "During the activity, one tool bag was inadvertently lost," NASA officials wrote Nov. 1 in a blog post detailing the outcome of the spacewalk. "Flight controllers spotted the tool bag using external station cameras. The tools were not needed for the remainder of the spacewalk."

The bag is now circling the planet in low-Earth orbit, but NASA said there's little danger of the tools hitting the International Space Station. "Mission Control analyzed the bag's trajectory and determined that risk of recontacting the station is low and that the onboard crew and space station are safe with no action required," the agency said in the blog post. For now then, the lost tool bag has become a new artificial "star" in the night sky. The tool bag is orbiting about a minute ahead of the space station and may be bright enough to see with a pair of binoculars. "Skywatchers who want to try to spot the tool bag in orbit should head out on a clear night and first determine when the International Space Station is passing overhead," reports NBC News. "The tool bag will likely remain visible in the night sky for a few months, before its orbit slowly degrades and it eventually falls toward Earth."

You can track the ISS via NASA's Spot the Station website.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: On Oct. 9, 2022, telescopes in space picked up a jet of high energy photons careening through the cosmos toward Earth, evidence of a supernova exploding 1.9 billion light-years away. Such events are known as gamma ray bursts, and astronomers who have continued studying this one said it was the "brightest of all time." Now, a team of scientists have discovered that this burst caused a measurable change in the number of ionized particles found in Earth's upper atmosphere, including ozone molecules, which readily absorb harmful solar radiation.

"The ozone was partially depleted -- was destroyed temporarily," said Pietro Ubertini, an astronomer at the National Institute of Astrophysics in Rome who was involved in discovering the atmospheric event. The effect was detectable for just a few minutes before the ozone repaired itself, so it was "nothing serious," Dr. Ubertini said. But had the supernova occurred closer to us, he said, "it would be a catastrophe." The discovery, reported Tuesday in a paper published in the journal Nature Communications, demonstrates how even explosions that occur far from our solar system can influence the atmosphere, which can be used as a giant detector for extreme cosmic phenomena.

To study the effects of last year's gamma ray burst on Earth, Dr. Ubertini and his colleagues looked for signals at the top of the ionosphere using data from the China Seismo-Electromagnetic Satellite, an orbiter designed to study changes in the atmosphere during earthquakes. They identified a sharp jump in the electric field at the top of the ionosphere, which they correlated to the gamma ray burst signal measured by the European Space Agency's International Gamma-Ray Astrophysics Laboratory, a mission that launched in 2002 to observe radiation from faraway celestial objects. The researchers found that the electric field rose by a factor of 60 as gamma rays ionized (essentially knocking away electrons from) ozone and nitrogen molecules high in the atmosphere. Once ionized, the molecule is unable to absorb any ultraviolet radiation, temporarily exposing Earth to more of the sun's damaging rays.

AI could be used to predict if a person is at risk of having a heart attack up to 10 years in the future, a study has found. From a report: The technology could save thousands of lives while improving treatment for almost half of patients, researchers at the University of Oxford said. The study, funded by the British Heart Foundation (BHF), looked at how AI might improve the accuracy of cardiac CT scans, which are used to detect blockages or narrowing in the arteries.

Prof Charalambos Antoniades, chair of cardiovascular medicine at the BHF and director of the acute multidisciplinary imaging and interventional centre at Oxford, said: "Our study found that some patients presenting in hospital with chest pain -- who are often reassured and sent back home -- are at high risk of having a heart attack in the next decade, even in the absence of any sign of disease in their heart arteries. Here we demonstrated that providing an accurate picture of risk to clinicians can alter, and potentially improve, the course of treatment for many heart patients."

About 350,000 people in the UK have a CT scan each year but, according to the BHF, many patients later die of heart attacks due to their failure in picking up small, undetectable narrowings. Researchers analysed the data of more than 40,000 patients undergoing routine cardiac CT scans at eight UK hospitals, with a median follow-up time of 2.7 years. The AI tool was tested on a further 3,393 patients over almost eight years and was able to accurately predict the risk of a heart attack. AI-generated risk scores were then presented to medics for 744 patients, with 45% having their treatment plans altered by medics as a result.

Japan plans to establish a new 1 trillion yen ($6.6 billion) fund to develop the country's outer space industry. "We believe it is a necessary fund to speed up our country's space development so we don't lag behind the increasingly intensifying international competition," Sanae Takaichi, minister in charge of space development, said in a news conference last week. The Japan Times reports: The fund will be allocated over a 10-year period for the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), an Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Ministry spokesperson said. Some 300 billion yen has been set aside for the fund in the latest supplementary budget approved by the Cabinet on Friday. The funding, which will support JAXA and the development of Japan's space industry, was a response to increased public and private sector focus on space activities.

Back in June, Tokyo unveiled a Space Basic Plan, detailing budgetary support for innovation in the private sector as an area of business growth. At the same time, it also unveiled a Space Security Initiative, which labeled space "a major arena for geopolitical competition for national power over diplomacy, defense, economic, and intelligence, as well as the science and technology and innovation that support these national powers."

Rovers and orbiters will continue collecting limited data during a two-week communications pause due to the position of Earth, the Sun, and the Red Planet. From a report: NASA will hold off sending commands to its Mars fleet for two weeks, from Nov. 11 to 25, while Earth and the Red Planet are on opposite sides of the Sun. Called Mars solar conjunction, this phenomenon happens every two years. The missions pause because hot, ionized gas expelled from the Sun's corona could potentially corrupt radio signals sent from Earth to NASA's Mars spacecraft, leading to unexpected behaviors.

That's not to say those robotic explorers are on holiday. NASA's Perseverance and Curiosity rovers will monitor changes in surface conditions, weather, and radiation as they stay parked. Although momentarily grounded, the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter will use its color camera to study the movement of sand, which poses an ever-present challenge to Mars missions. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and the Odyssey orbiter will continue imaging the surface. And MAVEN will continue collecting data on interactions between the atmosphere and the Sun.

There's already a powerful immunotherapy that "involves engineering a patient's T cells so they recognize and attack cancer cells," writes one of America's top cancer hospitals. The Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center notes that CAR T cell therapy has already begun to revolutionize cancer treatment," with these "chimeric" T cells "multiplied in a lab and given back to the patient to be a continual fighting force against the cancer."

But now "New research from the lab of physician-scientist Michel Sadelain, MD, PhD, shows that disrupting a single gene in the CAR T cells can make them more potent and able to fight tumors longer." In a paper published in Cancer Discovery, the team demonstrated that disrupting the gene SUV39H1 causes a ripple effect: It restores the expression of multiple genes that help sustain the T cells' longevity. The researchers showed that this approach improved CAR T cell effectiveness against multiple cancers in mice...

The researchers used the gene-editing tool CRISPR/Cas9 to alter SUV39H1 in human CAR T cells. They placed these modified CAR T cells into mice that had been implanted with either human leukemia cells or prostate cancer cells. For both cancers, the CAR T cells were able to sustain their function without becoming exhausted, leading to tumor elimination. By contrast, mice with unedited CAR T cells did not survive the cancer. "The edited CAR T cells can maintain their anti-cancer effects, even when we challenged them repeatedly by exposing them to new tumors over time," Dr. Zhao says. "These results suggest that SUV39H1-edited CAR T cells may reduce tumor relapse in patients."

There did not appear to be serious side effects in the mice, although researchers will need to confirm the safety of this approach in humans. The biotechnology company Mnemo Therapeutics is exploring the possibility of conducting clinical trials based on this research.

Cells have a protein receptor that will cause that cell to die — in theory. Unfortunately, "Previous efforts to target this receptor have been unsuccessful," says Jogender Tushir-Singh, an associate professor in the Department of Medical Microbiology and Immunology at the University of California, Davis.

But he's now led a team of researchers at the university's Comprehensive Cancer Center that's identified a receptor-activating protein section. And more importantly, "now that we've identified this epitope, there could be a therapeutic path forward" for targeting that receptor... in tumors. The findings were published Oct. 14 in the Nature journal Cell Death & Differentiation... Death receptors do precisely what their name implies — when targeted, they trigger programmed cell death of tumor cells. They offer a potential workaround that could simultaneously kill tumor cells and pave the way for more effective immunotherapies and CAR T-cell therapy...

Tushir-Singh and his colleagues knew they might be able to target cancer cells selectively if they found the right epitope. Having identified this specific epitope, he and other researchers can now design a new class of antibodies to selectively bind to and activate Fas to potentially destroy tumor cells specifically.
Singh says their research "sets the stage" to develop antibodies that selectively kill tumor cells.

A new book argues lockdowns during the pandemic were "a failure." But in response CNN published an opinion piece disagreeing — written by physician/infectious disease expert Kent Sepkowitz from the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York — who argues "You bet it was worth it." [Authors Joe Nocera and Bethany McLean] consider the lockdown a single activity stretched across the entire pandemic; in contrast, I would distinguish the initial lockdown, which was crucial, from the off-and-on lockdowns as therapies, vaccines and overall care improved. There is an argument to be made that these were not anywhere near as effective... One only had to work in health care in New York City to see the difference between early 2020, when the explosion of cases overwhelmed the city, versus later in 2020 when an effective therapy had been identified, supplies and diagnostic testing had been greatly improved (though still completely inadequate) and the makeshift ICUs and emergency rooms had been set in place. It was still a nightmare to be sure, but it was a vastly more organized nightmare.

The "short-term benefits" at the start of the pandemic are simple to characterize: Every infection that was delayed due to the lockdowns was a day to the good, a day closer to the release of the mRNA vaccines in December 2020, a less-hectic day for the health care workers, a day for clinical trials to mature. Therefore, the authors' statement that lockdowns "were a mistake that should not be repeated" because they had no "purpose other than keeping hospitals from being overrun in the short-term" is to me a fundamental misunderstanding of the day-to-day work that was being done. Most disturbing to me about this assessment and the others that have come along are the minimal mention of the death and debility the infection caused. A reminder for those who have forgotten just how brutal the pandemic was: Worldwide there have been 7 million deaths. In the U.S., there have been more than a million deaths, millions have some post-infection debility and many health care workers remain profoundly demoralized. [By these figures the U.S., with 4.2% of the world's population, had 14% of Covid fatalities.]

In this context, many of the outcomes of concern listed by Nocera and McLean — suicidal thoughts in teens, alcoholism and drug use increases, violence — are as easily explained by this staggering death toll as by the cabin fever brought on by lockdowns. Once again: About 1 out of every 350 Americans died in the Covid-19 pandemic. Another way to consider the impact of so many deaths is examination of life expectancy. Of note, life expectancy in the U.S. fell in 2020 (1.8 years) and 2021 (0.6 years), the sharpest drop since the 1920s; per the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 74% of the drop was attributed to Covid-19... To fall more than two years so precipitously requires the deaths of many in their 30s and 40s and 50s, as occurred with the first year of the pandemic.

"Scientists have discovered the oldest black hole yet," reports the CBC, calling it "a cosmic beast formed a mere 470 million years after the Big Bang."

"The findings, published Monday, confirm what until now were theories that supermassive black holes existed at the dawn of the universe..." Given the universe is 13.7 billion years old, that puts the age of this black hole at 13.2 billion years. Even more astounding to scientists, this black hole is a whopper — 10 times bigger than the black hole in our own Milky Way. It's believed to weigh anywhere from 10 to 100 per cent the mass of all the stars in its galaxy, said lead author Akos Bogdan of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. That is nowhere near the miniscule ratio of the black holes in our Milky Way and other nearby galaxies — an estimated 0.1 per cent, he noted. "It's just really early on in the universe to be such a behemoth," said Yale University's Priyamvada Natarajan, who took part in the study published in the journal Nature Astronomy. A companion article appeared in the Astrophysical Journal Letters...

The researchers believe the black hole formed from colossal clouds of gas that collapsed in a galaxy next door to one with stars. The two galaxies merged, and the black hole took over.
The researchers combined data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, reports NASA: "We needed Webb to find this remarkably distant galaxy and Chandra to find its supermassive black hole," said Akos Bogdan of the Center for Astrophysics/Harvard & Smithsonian who leads a new paper in the journal Nature Astronomy describing these results. "We also took advantage of a cosmic magnifying glass that boosted the amount of light we detected." This magnifying effect is known as gravitational lensing...

This discovery is important for understanding how some supermassive black holes can reach colossal masses soon after the big bang. Do they form directly from the collapse of massive clouds of gas, creating black holes weighing between about 10,000 and 100,000 Suns? Or do they come from explosions of the first stars that create black holes weighing only between about 10 and 100 Suns...? Bogdan's team has found strong evidence that the newly discovered black hole was born massive... The large mass of the black hole at a young age, plus the amount of X-rays it produces and the brightness of the galaxy detected by Webb, all agree with theoretical predictions in 2017 by co-author Priyamvada Natarajan of Yale University for an "Outsize Black Hole" that directly formed from the collapse of a huge cloud of gas.

"We think that this is the first detection of an 'Outsize Black Hole' and the best evidence yet obtained that some black holes form from massive clouds of gas," said Natarajan. "For the first time we are seeing a brief stage where a supermassive black hole weighs about as much as the stars in its galaxy, before it falls behind." The researchers plan to use this and other results pouring in from Webb and those combining data from other telescopes to fill out a larger picture of the early universe.