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“Lockdowns,” the mass quarantine of both sick and healthy people, have never before been used for disease mitigation in the modern Western world. Previously, the strategy had been systematically ruled out by the pandemic plans of the World Health Organization (WHO) and by health experts of every developed nation. So how did we get here? Mass lockdowns of entire countries as a technique for fighting disease sprung into the world’s consciousness on the order of Xi Jinping, general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), who fomented a global propaganda offensive targeting Western governments and media. Within weeks, the WHO,...

The Spike Protein - Dr. Byram Bridle Professor of Viral Immunology University of Guelph

TURNBERRY, Scotland (AP) -- Lizette Salas should be midway through her first round at the Women's British Open on Thursday morning when Donald Trump arrives via helicopter to expected fanfare at his Turnberry resort. Salas, a U.S golfer with Mexican heritage, likely won't pay much attention. Not because she holds a grudge at Trump's derogatory remarks about Mexicans that have dominated the pre-tournament chatter at the fourth major of the year. Quite simply, Salas will have more important things on her mind. ''He can say what he wants,'' the 26-year-old Salas said Wednesday. ''It does not change the way I...

A new computer model of the Gulf of Mexico in the period after the 2010 oil spill provides insights into how underwater currents may have primed marine microorganisms to degrade the oil. "It is called dynamic auto-inoculation. Parcels of water move over the ruptured well, picking up hydrocarbons. When these parcels come back around and cross back over the well, the bacteria have already been activated, are more abundant than before, and degrade hydrocarbons far more quickly," says David Valentine of the University of California, Santa Barbara, ... Valentine has been studying microbial communities and the fate of chemicals 4000...

Artificially engendered humans have long been a science fiction staple - from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein to Huxley's Brave New World and, most recently, Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake and Michel Houellebecq's The Possibility of an Island - their heroes dehumanised figures depicted amid bleak, biotechnologically devastated landscapes. But in the year of Darwin's bicentenary, science fact presses hard on the heels of science fiction. Three decades since Louise Brown, the first 'test tube baby', woke to the world, breakthroughs are now trumpeted almost every month. Chinese scientists recently announced that they had cloned the first animals from skin cells. Earlier,...

WHETHER it's showering spacecraft with lethal radiation, filling the sky with ghostly light, or causing electrical surges that black-out entire cities, space weather is a force to be reckoned with. Thankfully, all is calm in space on the day that I speak to Bill Murtagh at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Boulder, Colorado. "Last week we saw a moderate storm, and that was about the most interesting event in months," he reassures me. "It's pretty quiet today."

OXFORD, England (Reuters) – A rise of at least two meters in the world's sea levels is now almost unstoppable, experts told a climate conference at Oxford University on Tuesday.

Could Deep Source Hydrocarbons Migrate Up Into Oil and Gas Reservoirs? The oil and gas that fuels our homes and cars started out as living organisms that died, were compressed, and heated under heavy layers of sediments in the Earth's crust. Scientists have debated for years whether some of these hydrocarbons could also have been created deeper in the Earth and formed without organic matter. Now for the first time, scientists have found that ethane and heavier hydrocarbons can be synthesized under the pressure-temperature conditions of the upper mantle —the layer of Earth under the crust and on top of...

SULTAN, Wash. (AP) -- Five teens were charged Friday with second-degree murder in the beating and stabbing death of a 17-year-old Marysville youth in this Snohomish County town.

In the winter of 2000, the Journal of the American Medical Association published the results of a study indicating that 200,000 two- to four-year-olds had been prescribed Ritalin for an “attention disorder” from 1991 to 1995. Judging by the response, the image of hundreds of thousands of mothers grinding up stimulants to put into the sippy cups of their preschoolers was apparently not a pretty one. Most national magazines and newspapers covered the story; some even expressed dismay or outrage at this exacerbation of what already seemed like a juggernaut of hyper-medicalizing childhood. The public reaction, however, was tame; the...

Two hundred years of glacial shrinkage in Alaska, and then came the winter and summer of 2007-2008. Unusually large amounts of winter snow were followed by unusually chill temperatures in June, July and August.

... At a Senate hearing Tuesday, Maura Harty, assistant secretary of state for consular affairs, took the blame for the passport mess, even as she offered a wide array of explanations. Part of the problem, she said, was that in 2005 Hurricane Katrina reduced the capabilities of the agency’s New Orleans passport office. She also said the agency had not expected so many Americans to actually obey the new law. And, she said, many people were applying for passports with no specific travel plans in mind — but that is precisely what northern state lawmakers had warned would happen for...

'Many big ideas have struggled over the centuries to dominate the planet,' begins the argument by Jonathon Porritt, government adviser and all-round environmental guru. 'Fascism. Communism. Democracy. Religion. But only one has achieved total supremacy. Its compulsive attractions rob its followers of reason and good sense. It has created unsustainable inequalities and threatened to tear apart the very fabric of our society. More powerful than any cause or even religion, it has reached into every corner of the globe. It is consumerism.' According to Porritt, the most senior adviser to the government on sustainability, we have become a generation of...

AMSTERDAM, Jan. 25 — Just a few years ago, politicians and environmental groups in the Netherlands were thrilled by the early and rapid adoption of “sustainable energy,” achieved in part by coaxing electrical plants to use biofuel — in particular, palm oil from Southeast Asia. Spurred by government subsidies, energy companies became so enthusiastic that they designed generators that ran exclusively on the oil, which in theory would be cleaner than fossil fuels like coal because it is derived from plants. But last year, when scientists studied practices at palm plantations in Indonesia and Malaysia, this green fairy tale began...

Blackbeard and Ben Franklin deserve equal billing for founding democracy in the United States and New World, a new University of Florida study finds. Pirates practiced the same egalitarian principles as the Founding Fathers and displayed pioneering spirit in exploring new territory and meeting the native peoples, said Jason Acosta, who did the research for his thesis in history at the University of Florida. “Hollywood really has given pirates a bum rap with its image of bloodthirsty, one-eyed, peg-legged men who bury treasure and force people to walk the plank,” he said. “We owe them a little more respect.” Acosta,...

A buddy of mine is building a golf ball cannon. He sent me these specs asking for help. If anyone is a ballistics hacker, any thoughts would be appreciated. Here's his email: I am going to build a golf ball cannon and I have some questions that would help my final design. Maybe you could figure this out or have a friends who could. My plan is to use a 15-pound propane tank, attach a 2-inch full-flow ball valve to it, and then attach the 1-3/4 inch bore muzzle Questions are: What would be the optimum muzzle length? What would...

New research at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and Boston University shows that many of the complex biochemical networks that humans and other advanced organisms depend on for their existence could not have evolved without oxygen. "You could call it the 'oxygen imperative,' " said LLNL postdoctoral researcher Jason Raymond. "It's clear that you need molecular oxygen to evolve complex life as we know it." "Researchers have spent decades putting together maps of how the building blocks of life connect to each other," added Daniel Segrè of Boston University, who holds a joint appointment in LLNL's Biosciences Directorate. "It turns...

Geomagnetic flip may not be random after all One of the most fascinating natural phenomena on Earth is the flipping of its magnetic field, which has occurred hundreds of times in the last 160 million years. When the magnetic field flips, the North Pole becomes the South Pole and vice versa. The last time this happened was some 780,000 years ago, so we could be heading for another reversal soon. Now, physicists in Italy have found that the frequency of these polarity reversals is not random as previously thought but occurs in clusters, revealing some kind of "memory" of previous...

Massive peat burn is speeding climate change 09:45 06 November 04 Exclusive from New Scientist Print Edition. The recent surge in levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, which made front-page headlines around the world last month, may have been caused in part by smouldering peat bogs in Borneo. This is the claim of a UK expert on the bogs, who says that further fires will accelerate global warming. “Burning peat could be a major contributor to the as yet unexplained accelerating build-up of CO2 in the atmosphere since 1998,” says Jack Rieley of the University of Nottingham in the UK. His...

Rivera Thankful For Trip To Middle East by Adam Woullard, Packers.com posted 07/13/2004 For 16 weeks a year, Green Bay Packers guard Marco Rivera puts his body on the line each Sunday, going to battle for his teammates and coaches. But, having recently returned from a trip to the Middle East, Rivera says the week of June 19-24 that he spent with the real soldiers is one week in his life that he will never forget. After catching the short flight from Green Bay to Chicago, Rivera flew nearly eight hours to London. From London, he was in the air...