FASTER, PLEASE: Researchers develop potential antibiotic for drug-resistant pathogen.
Search Results
FASTER, PLEASE: NASA chooses 4 firms for first private lunar sample collection.
FASTER, PLEASE: Drug reverses age-related cognitive decline within days.
FASTER, PLEASE: US Scientists Developing Nasal Spray To Prevent Covid-19.
FASTER, PLEASE: New therapy to target the spread of bowel cancer.
SPACE: HALO space habitat module passes preliminary design review.
If NASA’s ambitions to set up a permanent human presence of the Moon and to send an expedition to Mars are to be fulfilled, astronauts will need someplace to hang their space helmets. The HALO module is critical to this vision, acting as a place to house crew and a docking hub between low-Earth orbit and the cislunar region and beyond.
Because the first HALO unit is scheduled to launch in November 2023 along with the Power Propulsion Element module, primary contractor Northrop Grumman is pursuing a fast-track approach by basing the design on its already flown Cygnus robotic cargo ship, which has been used to transport supplies to the International Space Station. The design of the hull is basically the same, though it will have radial docking ports, body-mounted radiators, batteries and antenna installed on the outside.
Inside the HALO will be command and control systems as well as a life support system that can support four astronauts for up to 30 days, with the aid of the Orion spacecraft. All of this will allow the module to act as both a crew habitat and a docking hub for other vehicles, such as a lunar lander.
Faster, please.
FASTER, PLEASE: Trump on Operation Warp Speed: Five Times Faster* Than Fastest Prior Vaccine.
* Offer void in New York: Trump rips Cuomo, says NY won’t get COVID-19 vaccine until gov OKs it.
Or as CNBC attempts to spin the news:
FASTER, PLEASE: New strategies for restoring myelin on damaged nerve cells.
FASTER, PLEASE: CDC Launches New Plan to Tackle Antibiotic-Resistant Infections.
FASTER, PLEASE: Chemists create new crystal form of insecticide, boosting its ability to fight mosquitoes and malaria. Every time a mosquito dies, the world becomes a slightly better place.
HERE’S HOW THAT SPACE PROGRAM IS COMING ALONG: This spacecraft is being readied for a one-way mission to deflect an asteroid. “Can slamming into a space rock at 15,000 miles per hour prevent it from hitting Earth? The DART mission aims to find out.”
Faster, please.
FASTER, PLEASE: CDC launches new plan to tackle antibiotic-resistant infections.
DECOUPLING, GOOD AND HARD: Chinese chip giant SMIC ‘in shock’ after US trade ban threat.
Related: U.S. ban worries cloud China’s hopes for chip self-sufficiency.
Faster, please.
FASTER, PLEASE: Japan on Track to Introduce Flying Taxi Services in 2023. I really want something more like The Jetsons, though.
FASTER, PLEASE: FDA authorizes rapid, low-cost, card-based COVID-19 test.
FASTER, PLEASE: More than 200 charged with federal crimes, 1,000 arrested in major metropolitan cities in Operation Legend, AG Barr announces. “It was named in honor of 4-year-old LeGend Taliferro, who was shot and killed while he slept in the early morning of June 29 in Kansas City, Mo. Last week, a Jackson County prosecutor announced second-degree murder charges against his suspected killer, 22-year-old Ryson Ellis, who was being held in Tulsa County Jail.”
Related: Austin Defunded Its Police. Texas Steps Up to Defend Them. “Texas Gov. Greg Abbott appeared with Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and other leaders including Fort Worth Mayor Betsy Price Tuesday to address Austin’s defunding its police. Gov. Abbott proposed legislation that would forbid any city from being able to increase property taxes until it restores funding to satisfy the proposed law.”
OLD AND BUSTED: Waiting for Godot.
The New Hotness? Waiting for Durham.
Fortunately, as Roger Kimball writes, “Things seem to be speeding up now, which is good. I was beginning to think that John Durham was auditioning for a PoMo production of ‘Waiting for Godot’ with himself in the title role. The public would be left like Vladimir and Estragon, disillusioned and alone.”
Faster, please.
Related: Mollie Hemingway: We Are Finally Seeing Some Measure Of Accountability For Russian Collusion Hoax.
FASTER, PLEASE: Gottlieb says U.S. likely “a long way” from herd immunity to virus.
Gottlieb said seroprevalence studies overall indicate that roughly 8% of the U.S. population has been exposed to the coronavirus, though the rate of exposure varies depending on whether states have experienced outbreaks. In Arizona, for example, roughly 25% of the population has been exposed based on modeling, while as much as 20% of the population in Florida has been exposed, he said.
“That’s getting closer to a level of immunity where the rate of transmission will start to decline,” Gottlieb said. “It’s not quite herd immunity, but you’re to see declines in the rate of transmission because of that level of infection.”
Despite all the hand-wringing by the press, it looks like the Sun Belt is doing much better than elsewhere.
DECOUPLING: Foxconn says trade war means China can no longer be ‘the world’s factory.’
Foxconn, which has just reported second quarter profits 34% up from last year, is now said to believe China’s manufacturing supremacy is over.
According to Bloomberg, the chair of Foxconn’s parent Hon Hai Precision Industry Company, says that the company is planning to move ever more manufacturing away from China. Young Liu said it was specifically to avoid the escalating tariffs on Chinese-made goods intended for the US.
“No matter if it’s India, Southeast Asia or the Americas, there will be a manufacturing ecosystem in each,” he Liu said. Reuters reports that he added that China will still remain a key part of its production, but the country’s “days as the world’s factory are done.”
Reportedly, the current proportion of Foxconn manufacturing made outside China is now 30%. In June 2019, it was 25%.
Faster, please.
FASTER, PLEASE: U.S. Adds 1.8 Million Jobs, Unemployment Drops to 10.2 Percent.
FASTER, PLEASE: US Missile Defenses Are About to Level Up.
FASTER, PLEASE: Virgin Galactic unveils designs for Mach 3 supersonic aircraft.
FASTER, PLEASE: Dozens charged with federal crimes in Portland riots. “Federal law enforcement in Portland has arrested 74 people and charged 60 of them with federal crimes for actions they allegedly took against federal police and facilities in the Oregon city, according to the Justice Department. DOJ spokeswoman Kerri Kupec announced Monday afternoon that U.S. attorneys have also arrested 236 people and charged 238 nationwide in cases related to ‘violent opportunists’ and ‘civil unrest.’”
FASTER, PLEASE: Gaetz Demands Bezos Get a ‘Divorce from the SPLC.’
FASTER, PLEASE: Single nanoparticles could pave the way for medicines on demand.
FASTER, PLEASE: Hebrew U. scientist: Drug could eradicate COVID-19 from lungs in days. The drug, Tricor, is cheap and already FDA-approved. So it’s got that going against it.
FASTER, PLEASE: New solar material could clean drinking water.
FASTER, PLEASE: Noise-Cancelling Smart Window Blocks Street Din.
DR. FRANCIS COLLINS: A Long Talk With Anthony Fauci’s Boss About the Pandemic, Vaccines, and Faith.
I am guardedly optimistic that by the end of 2020 we will have at least one vaccine that has been proven safe and effective in a large-scale trial. Nobody should accept it as safe and effective without that large-scale trial. There are at least four vaccines that will be getting into such large trials this summer beginning as early as July. Each one of those trials will involve roughly 30,000 volunteers, half of whom will get the vaccine, half of whom will get a dummy placebo. You have to have that control or you will never know if the vaccine worked or not.
Those trials will have to be conducted in areas where the virus is actively spreading because that’s the only way you’re going to know whether it was protective. With four different vaccines with four different approaches, we’ve kind of hedged our bets against putting too much emphasis on one particular strategy. That’s good — because vaccines are really interesting science, but every new virus presents surprises in terms of how the vaccine turns out to work. So I’d be very worried right now if we had one platform that everybody was counting on. Having four makes me feel a lot better.
Maybe all four of them will work. As long as one of them works, we’ll be in a far better position by the end of the year to see our way out of this global pandemic mess. But there will be, then, a time of having to do the scale-up to have billions of doses, which might be what the world needs. So there will still be some time involved, even though we are doing everything possible to prepare for that by manufacturing millions of doses of each of those vaccines even before we know if they would work, so that the highest-risk people can get access right away. So I’m guardedly optimistic that we will see all that happen.
I’d add a “Faster, please,” except that they’ve been making remarkably fast progress already.
FASTER, PLEASE: Injected electrode could offer pain relief without medications.
FASTER, PLEASE: Democrats are Panicking at the Prospect of Quick Economic Recovery.
FASTER, PLEASE: Slow, Steady Progress for Two U.S. Nuclear Power Projects.
FASTER, PLEASE: President Trump Cutting Additional Regulations To Reignite Economy.
FASTER, PLEASE: After Devastating Economic Contraction, Glimmers of Growth Emerge: Daily and weekly data suggest a recovery might be brewing, though its strength is unclear. “For example, map requests on Apple Inc. devices fell 50% throughout the country between mid-January and the week ended April 9, but they have steadily climbed since then and are now down just 20%. While driving doesn’t necessarily equate to spending, retail visits show the same trend, according to Unacast, a mobility-data analytics company: off more than 50% in mid-April from a year earlier, but down just 32% this past week. Real-estate brokerage Redfin Corp. said home-buyer demand as measured by customers contacting affiliated agents, after plummeting by one-third, is now above prepandemic levels. Some companies also report a turning point. On May 7, Uber Technologies Inc. said rides had risen for three straight weeks, and were up more than 40% from the trough in large cities in Georgia and Texas, which are starting to reopen businesses shut down by the coronavirus pandemic. Fast-food chain Wendy’s Co. reported that same-store sales in the week ended May 3 were down just 2% from a year earlier. They were down 26% in the week ended April 5.”
I still think we can have a v-shaped recovery, so long as we don’t listen to Nancy Pelosi.
FASTER, PLEASE: Drug combo may be effective against metastatic bladder cancer.
FASTER, PLEASE: Is NASA Actually Working On A Warp Drive? “An internal feasibility report suggests the agency might be, or at least that the idea of traveling through folded space is part of the NASA interstellar spaceflight menu.”
FASTER, PLEASE: Unleash the entrepreneurs America needs to build a post-coronavirus economy. Perhaps we need some sort of across-the-board regulatory suspension, like in postwar Germany under (and even before) the Marshall Plan. Here’s more on the German plan:
On July 7, 1948, the German government approved a law giving the economic authorities the right to “take all necessary measures in the field of control and to determine in detail which goods and production should be freed from price controls.”
The ensuing deregulation was dramatic and shocking to occupation forces. As Erhard notes, “It was strictly laid down by the British and American control authorities that permission had to be obtained before any definite price changes could be made. The Allies never seemed to have thought it possible that someone could have the idea, not to alter price controls, but simply to remove them.” With determined action and the strong support of one American, a Gen. Lucius Clay, the German free market exponents were able to blast through the inertia of Allied supervision.
The sweeping success of the currency reform is of little doubt. As Prof. Henry Wallich put it, “The spirit of the country changed overnight.” Two observers not native to Germany, Jacques Rueff and Andre Piettre, had the following report: “Only an eye-witness can give an account of the sudden effect which currency reform had on the size of stocks and the wealth of goods on display. Shops filled up with goods from one day to the next; the factories began to work. On the eve of currency reform the Germans were aimlessly wandering about their towns in search of a few additional items of food. A day later they thought of nothing but producing them. One day apathy was mirrored on their faces while on the next a whole nation looked hopefully into the future.”
I’m just sayin’. Plus:
Almost all consumer goods were immediately deregulated (excepting agricultural commodities); wages were set free three months after the currency reform; and industrial commodities (steel, iron, coal, oil, etc.) were gradually deregulated over the next few years; while foreign trade, which was under technical restrictions in law, was turned to free competition in practice in a very short time. The one area where price control would remain in effect throughout the 1950’s was the special case of rents.
The result of this substantial deregulation was to let the Germans take full advantage of the powerful incentives set before them. The gravity of the German postwar condition provided strong motivation for productive effort, yet economic restriction had prohibited the enterprise and imagination of the populace. In a system where supply and demand cannot coincide, the result is economic chaos. In the German instance, the price regulation had legislated massive shortages, for the surest way to curtail supply is to make it impossible to reap the rewards of production. Additionally, the heavy reliance on black markets created vast senseless gyrations and economic waste. Commenting bn the explosion of effort in the post-reform era, Gordon Hallet has noted how “the startling change between the period before and after July 1948 indicates the extent to which an economic system can either frustrate individual efforts or give them the opportunity to be effective.”
Contemporary analysts might paint the German policy as harsh in that it left few rewards for those who did not seek to take care of themselves. While government expenditures on social welfare through transfer payments were comparable with those of other European nations, the State abstained from further economic intrusions via “full employment” policies, subsidies, and income redistribution. In fact the tax policy was shifted to reduce the burden on upper-income brackets. The tight money policies pursued by Erhard created buyers’—rather than sellers’—markets.
If the harshness of the policy was great, so was the positive record of accomplishment. Industrial production and national income skyrocketed. Industrial output increased 50 percent within the year, and national income (in constant prices) was restored to the 1936 level in just over a year (it had fallen 20 percent below this figure). Economic recovery was complete except for one plaguing phenomenon—the emergence of unemployment, which steadily rose to a peak of 10.2 percent in 1950. The instantaneous response of the British and Americans was to explain the dilemma in Keynesian terms and diagnose the problem as “insufficient effective demand.” The prescription; immediate government and monetary expansion, along with reintroduction of economic controls.
The German response, in the light of the Keynesian revolution, was terribly naive. The Germans theorized that an increased money supply would simply cause inflation and that the employment problem was frictional, fueled basically by the stream (still flowing) of millions of refugees. The resultant policy was a strict balanced-budget fiscal framework and a conservative monetary course by the Deutsche Bundesbank. Unemployment dropped steadily—to six percent in 1952, three percent in 1956, and one percent by 1960.
Again.
FASTER, PLEASE: Durham moving ‘full-throttle’ on Russia probe review.
FASTER, PLEASE: Trump administration pushing to rip global supply chains from China.
FASTER, PLEASE: Researchers move toward once-yearly treatment for HIV.
FASTER, PLEASE: A Challenge to Accept. The FDA should allow testing Covid-19 vaccines through deliberate human infection.
FASTER, PLEASE: Inexpensive, portable detector identifies pathogens in minutes.
FASTER, PLEASE: Texas Gov. Abbott says he’s ready to reopen ‘massive amounts of businesses.’
Just remember to wear your face bananas in Houston…
FASTER, PLEASE: The race to find a covid-19 drug in the blood of survivors.
FASTER, PLEASE: UPMC Leads Global Effort to Fast Track Testing of Hydroxychloroquine and other COVID-19 Therapies with ‘Learning While Doing’ Clinical Trial. “REMAP (randomized, embedded, multi-factorial, adaptive platform) allows researchers to rapidly test multiple treatment approaches simultaneously at a lower cost and with fewer patients than traditional clinical trials.”
FASTER, PLEASE: Planning the Great Escape from House Arrest—and From Communist China.
FASTER, PLEASE? A Team Exploited the Coronavirus Pandemic to Set a 26-Hour 38-Minute Cross-Country Record. “It did not escape many long-time Cannonballers that an immobilized workforce and hard times might create ideal road conditions for fast driving thanks to much lower traffic volumes. Musing in online chat groups ensued. But most decided that it was better to cast their lot with the rest of humanity and stay home. Most, but not all.”
FASTER, PLEASE: Now metal surfaces can be instant bacteria killers.
FASTER, PLEASE: “White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow on Thursday said the U.S. economy should be able to reopen ‘on a rolling basis’ over the next month or two.”
FASTER, PLEASE*: Texas Lt. Gov. Announces Task Force to Work on ‘Restarting the Economy.’
* At least in Texas’ myriad smaller counties.
FASTER, PLEASE: Finland to begin randomized coronavirus antibody testing.
LABOUR’S LONG ROAD BACK FROM CORBYNISM:
What remains of Labour is not liberated from the taint of Corbynism. [Labour’s new leader, Keir Starmer], an avowed socialist, was a member of Corbyn’s shadow cabinet, and his opposition government is composed of the same odious lawmakers who once flanked Corbyn. As the Atlantic’s Tom McTague convincingly argued, Corbyn has left an indelible ideological stamp on the party he led for nearly half a decade. But it was unrealistic to expect an institution that was once so invested in the success of its leadership to tear out his legacy root and branch overnight. It will take time before the party or its most loyal members are willing to acknowledge and atone for the scale of their errors. But Starmer chose to mark his ascension with an explicit acknowledgment of the conditions that rendered the party toxic. Even if it’s only the first step, it’s in the right direction.
Faster, please.
FASTER, PLEASE: Bandage-like coronavirus vaccine shows promising results in mice.
FASTER, PLEASE: Facing Trump’s wrath, 3M vows boosted mask production for US.
FASTER, PLEASE: Stanford researchers turn back the clock on aging cells.
FASTER, PLEASE: Researchers discover potential boost to immunotherapy. “Mount Sinai researchers have discovered a pathway that regulates special immune system cells in lung cancer tumors, suppressing them and allowing tumors to grow. The scientists also figured out how to interrupt this pathway and ramp up the immune system to prevent tumor formation or growth, offering a potential boost to immunotherapy, according to a study published in Nature in March.”
FASTER, PLEASE: Israeli doctor in Italy says new, innovative treatments ‘flattening the curve:’ Carmi Sheffer describes connecting patients to ventilators via scuba gear, placing them on stomachs, in battle with unpredictable virus which ‘spreads like wildfire’ among elderly. “One technique he said had yielded dramatic results was to have patients lie on their stomach instead of on their back while on a ventilator.”
