EU Set to Ban American Travelers When Borders Reopen Due to COVID-19 Spikes
June 27th, 2020Via: The Hill:
The European Union is set to ban most American travelers from entering when the bloc reopens next week, with the U.S. among countries deemed too risky over its recent spike in COVID-19 cases, The New York Times reports.
The United States’s exclusion from a list of countries whose citizens are allowed to enter the EU comes as numerous states have reported surging numbers of coronavirus cases in recent weeks, with several states seeing all-time-highs in COVID-19 diagnoses and deaths.
The other countries included on the unsafe list include: Russia, Algeria, Australia, Canada, Georgia, Japan, Montenegro, Morocco, New Zealand, Rwanda, Serbia, South Korea, Thailand, Tunisia, Uruguay, Andorra, San Marino, Monaco and the Vatican.
The decision comes as the EU is set to lift its lockdown July 1.
‘Black Neutron Star’ Discovery: How Neutron Stars and Black Holes Form Will Need to be Rethought
June 27th, 2020Via: BBC:
Scientists have discovered an astronomical object that has never been observed before.
It is more massive than collapsed stars, known as “neutron stars”, but has less mass than black holes.
Such “black neutron stars” were not thought possible and will mean ideas for how neutron stars and black holes form will need to be rethought.
The discovery was made by an international team using gravitational wave detectors in the US and Italy.
The Case Is Building That COVID-19 Had a Lab Origin
June 27th, 2020Via: Independent Science News:
Was the WIV doing experiments that might release PPPs?
Since 2004, shortly after the original SARS outbreak, researchers from the WIV have been collecting bat coronaviruses in an intensive search for SARS-like pathogens (Li et al., 2005). Since the original collecting trip, many more have been conducted (Ge et al., 2013; Ge et al., 2016; Hu et al., 2017; Zhou et al., 2018).
Petrovsky does not mention it but Zheng-Li Shi’s group at the WIV has already performed experiments very similar to those he describes, using those collected viruses. In 2013 the Shi lab reported isolating an infectious clone of a bat coronavirus that they called WIV-1 (Ge et al., 2013). WIV-1 was obtained by introducing a bat coronavirus into monkey cells, passaging it, and then testing its infectivity in human (HeLa) cell lines engineered to express the human ACE2 receptor (Ge et al., 2013).
In 2014, just before the US GOF research ban went into effect, Zheng-Li Shi of WIV co-authored a paper with the lab of Ralph Baric in North Carolina that performed GOF research on bat coronaviruses (Menachery et al., 2015).
In this particular set of experiments the researchers combined “the spike of bat coronavirus SHC014 in a mouse-adapted SARS-CoV backbone” into a single engineered live virus. The spike was supplied by the Shi lab. They put this bat/human/mouse virus into cultured human airway cells and also into live mice. The researchers observed “notable pathogenesis” in the infected mice (Menachery et al. 2015). The mouse-adapted part of this virus comes from a 2007 experiment in which the Baric lab created a virus called rMA15 through passaging (Roberts et al., 2007). This rMA15 was “highly virulent and lethal” to the mice. According to this paper, mice succumbed to “overwhelming viral infection”.
In 2017, again with the intent of identifying bat viruses with ACE2 binding capabilities, the Shi lab at WIV reported successfully infecting human (HeLa) cell lines engineered to express the human ACE2 receptor with four different bat coronaviruses. Two of these were lab-made recombinant (chimaeric) bat viruses. Both the wild and the recombinant viruses were briefly passaged in monkey cells (Hu et al., 2017).
Together, what these papers show is that: 1) The Shi lab collected numerous bat samples with an emphasis on collecting SARS-like coronavirus strains, 2) they cultured live viruses and conducted passaging experiments on them, 3) members of Zheng-Li Shi’s laboratory participated in GOF experiments carried out in North Carolina on bat coronaviruses, 4) the Shi laboratory produced recombinant bat coronaviruses and placed these in human cells and monkey cells. All these experiments were conducted in cells containing human or monkey ACE2 receptors.
The overarching purpose of such work was to see whether an enhanced pathogen could emerge from the wild by creating one in the lab.
Tons of Microplastic Rain Onto Western U.S.
June 27th, 2020Via: EarthSky:
A new study estimates that more than 1,000 tons of microplastics from the air – equivalent to more than 123 million plastic water bottles – rain down onto protected areas in the western U.S. each year.
The discovery of the microplastics was a surprise. A research team was analyzing rainwater samples from national parks and wilderness areas across Colorado, as part of a pilot study on a new type of field equipment. They were shocked to find that the samples contained microplastics – plastic fragments less than 5 mm (.2 inch) in length – including a rainbow of plastic fibers, as well as beads and shards.
Utah State University assistant professor Janice Brahney is lead author of the study, published June 12, 2020, in Science. Brahney said in a statement:
We were shocked at the estimated deposition rates and kept trying to figure out where our calculations went wrong. We then confirmed through 32 different particle scans that roughly 4% of the atmospheric particles analyzed from these remote locations were synthetic polymers.
College Removes Word ‘Freedom’ From ID Cards Because It Reminds Some Students Of ‘Slavery’
June 26th, 2020Via: SummitNews:
A university in Pennsylvania is to remove the word ‘freedom’ from ID cards after a few students created a petition complaining that the word is offensive to minorities because it reminds them of ‘slavery’.
Robert Morris University in Pennsylvania now plans to change its “Freedom Cards” to “RMU ID Cards,” Campus Reform reports after students created a petition that argued black students feel “dehumanized” by the term ‘freedom card’.
‘No Amount of Money’ Can Undo the Damage if President’s Niece Mary Trump Publishes Tell-All Book
June 25th, 2020Via: Daily Mail:
The Trump family have claimed that ‘no amount of monetary damages can ameliorate the loss’ if Mary Trump is allowed to publish her tell-all book about them
In their application for a temporary restraining order, the Trumps said that they would suffer ‘irreparable harm’ if Mary’s book is released next month as planned.
They argued that Mary agreed not to write a memoir back in 2001 under the terms of a settlement which resolved a bitter family dispute over the estate of family patriarch Fred Trump Sr.
The agreement said that due to Donald Trump being famous and his sister Maryanne being a federal judge ‘the family made the decision collectively to enter into an agreement that would maintain the confidentiality of the family’s private matters’.
Texas Residents Told to Stay Inside
June 24th, 2020Here we go again.
Via: Dallas Morning News:
Gov. Greg Abbott sternly warned Texans of “rampant” spread of coronavirus that took the state to a new high Tuesday of more than 5,000 new cases in a single day.
Saying Texans should stay home unless they have a good reason to venture out, Abbott late Tuesday afternoon gave local officials more powers to limit public gatherings during the upcoming Fourth of July weekend.
How Fast Are Apple’s New ARM Mac Chips? It’s Hard to Tell
June 24th, 2020Actually, it’s hard to imagine how severely AMD’s upcoming Zen3 CPUs are going slaughter these scaled up iPhones.
Via: The Verge:
For years, Apple has steadily revealed how the ARM-based chips in its mobile phones were catching up in performance to the beefier silicon you’d find inside a laptop or desktop — in 2018, the company claimed its new iPad Pro was faster than 92 percent of portable PCs. At some point, it seemed inevitable that Apple would turn the more efficient chips into the primary processors for its Mac computers, too.
Now, it’s official: Apple is migrating the Mac to its own homegrown silicon, starting later this year.
But are Apple’s ARM chips actually powerful enough now to replace the likes of Intel and AMD? That’s still an open question — because at Apple’s 2020 Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), the company shied away from giving us any definitive answers.
This time, the company’s typical array of charts, benchmarks, and “fastest ever” claims for each new generation of homegrown ARM silicon were completely MIA. Apple wouldn’t chat about it when we asked. Even a prerecorded chat with one of its silicon architects didn’t provide much insight. Instead, the company showed a handful of canned demos and made some vague promises that the future might be faster.
Bayer Pays $10BN To Settle Thousands Of Monsanto Glyphosate Lawsuits
June 24th, 2020Via: ZeroHedge:
After decades of widespread use as company scientists played down research showing a definitive link between the product and growing rates of non-Hodgkins lymphoma, Monsanto parent company Bayer has agreed to pay up to $10 billion to settle claims that glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, causes cancer.
Citing people familiar with the matter, German newspaper Handelsblatt reported that the company has agreed to settle tens of thousands of glyphosate-related lawsuits in the US for between $8 billion to $10 billion.
Of that number, $2 billion is considered a “reserve” which can be used to settle future claims.
The rest will be used to settle all of the lawsuits pending in the United States from users of the controversial weed killer, the number of active lawsuits against the Roundup purveyor recently numbered more than 50k.
Pentagon Releases Images Of Stealth Jets Dropping Inert Nuclear Bombs
June 24th, 2020Via: ZeroHedge:
As the Pentagon builds an “F-35 friends circle” in the Asia-Pacific region,” mainly around China – new images have surfaced of stealth jets conducting mock nuclear attacks with inert bombs in the California desert.
The Aviationist reports the F-35 Joint Program Office has released a series of pictures showing various drop tests of inert nuclear bombs between 2019 and 2020. The tests were conducted with all variants of the fifth-generation F-35 Lightning II at Edwards Air Force Base, California.
