Sunday, May 17, 2020


A Sitting President, Riling the Nation During a Crisis
Alexander Burns, Maggie Haberman, Jonathan Martin and Nick Corasaniti,
The New York Times•May 17, 2020
 
President Donald Trump speaks to reporters as he departs the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, on May 5, 2020. (Al Drago/The New York Times)

Even by President Donald Trump’s standards, it was a rampage: He attacked a government whistleblower who was telling Congress that the coronavirus pandemic had been mismanaged. He criticized the governor of Pennsylvania, who has resisted reopening businesses. He railed against former President Barack Obama, linking him to a conspiracy theory and demanding he answer questions before the Senate about the federal investigation of Michael Flynn.

And Trump lashed out at Joe Biden, his Democratic challenger. In an interview with a supportive columnist, Trump smeared Biden as a doddering candidate who “doesn’t know he’s alive.” The caustic attack coincided with a barrage of digital ads from Trump’s campaign mocking Biden for verbal miscues and implying that he is in mental decline.

That was all on Thursday.

Far from a one-day onslaught, it was a climactic moment in a weeklong lurch by Tru​mp back to ​​the darkest tactics that defined his rise to political power​. Even those who have grown used to Trump’s conduct in office may have found themselves newly alarmed by the grim spectacle of a sitting president deliberately stoking the country’s divisions and pursuing personal vendettas in the midst of a crisis that has Americans fearing for their lives and livelihoods.

Since well before he became president, Trump’s appetite for conflict has defined him as a public figure. But in recent days he has practiced that approach with new intensity, signaling both the depths of his election-year distress and his determination to blast open a path to a second term, even at the cost of further riling a country in deep anguish.

His electoral path has narrowed rapidly since the onset of the pandemic as the growth-and-prosperity theme of his campaign disintegrated. In private, Trump has been plainly aggrieved at the loss of his central argument for reelection. “They wiped out my economy!” he has said to aides, according to people briefed on the remarks.

It is unclear whether he has been referring to China, where the virus originated, or health experts who have urged widespread lockdowns, but his frustration and determination to place blame elsewhere have been emphatic.

Ken Goldstein, a professor of politics at the University of San Francisco, said that Trump and his campaign were going on the offensive in nasty ways in an attempt to shift the attention of the public away from him and onto other targets, and ultimately onto Biden.

“If this election is about Trump, he probably loses,” Goldstein said. “Trump’s only hope is to make the election about Biden.”

A number of Republican operatives believe Biden’s advantage is soft and that his penchant for gaffes will at least make the race more competitive than it would otherwise be amid a pandemic and an incipient economic depression.

“We have a very good story to tell on him, and we’ve got to do it,” Corry Bliss, a Republican strategist, said of the negative narrative his party aims to generate about Biden.

Still, Trump’s behavior has rattled even some supportive Republicans, who believe it is likely to backfire and possibly cost them the Senate as well as the White House. It has also further alarmed Democrats, who have long warned that Trump would be willing to use every lever of presidential power and deploy even the most unscrupulous campaign tactics to capture a second term.

In many respects Trump’s approach to the 2020 election looks like a crude approximation of the way he waged the 2016 campaign against Hillary Clinton, attacking her personal ethics, often in false or exaggerated terms; taking Clinton’s admitted errors and distorting them with the help of online disinformation merchants; and making wild claims about her physical health and mental capacity for the job. Given that the 2016 campaign — the only one Trump has ever run — ended in a razor-thin victory for him, it is perhaps not surprising that the president would attempt a kind of sequel in 2020.

But there are vitally important differences between 2016 and 2020, ones that amplify the risks involved both for Trump and for the country he is vying to lead.

He is running against an opponent in Biden who, despite his vulnerabilities, has not faced decades of personal vilification as Clinton did before running for president. And unlike 2016, Trump has a governing record to defend — one that currently involves presiding over a pandemic that has claimed more than 80,000 American lives — and he may not find it easy to change the subject with incendiary distractions.

Yet with the responsibility to govern also comes great power, and Trump has instruments available to him in 2020 that he did not have as a candidate four years ago — tools like a politically supportive attorney general, a Republican-controlled Senate determined to defend him and a vastly better financed campaign apparatus that has been constructed with the defining purpose of destroying his opponent’s reputation.

His attacks over the last week on Obama have showcased Trump’s persistent determination to weaponize those tools to bolster a favorite political narrative, one that distorts the facts about Flynn, the president’s former national security adviser, in order to spin sinister implications about the previous administration.

But Trump also appears to genuinely believe many of the conspiratorial claims he makes, people close to him say, and his anger at Obama is informed less by political strategy than by an unbending — and unsubstantiated — belief that the former president was personally involved in a plot against him.

This weekend, Trump will huddle with some of his conservative allies in the House at Camp David, where they are expected to discuss the efforts — entirely fruitless up to this point — to prove Obama was involved in a conspiracy.

Of all Trump’s efforts, this one may be among the least concerning to Democrats, given Obama’s strong popularity and the degree to which Trump’s claims of an “Obamagate” scandal have been confined so far to the usual echo chambers of Fox News and right-wing social media. As he did in 2016, Trump is trying to force other outlets to cover the matter through repetition on his Twitter feed.

Democratic anxiety about the president’s attacks on Biden runs higher. But in general Biden’s advisers have professed confidence that the severity of the country’s problems will make it difficult for Trump to retake control of the campaign and that Biden’s fundamental political strengths make him well positioned to survive a campaign of attempted character assassination.

On a conference call with reporters Friday, Mike Donilon, one of Biden’s closest advisers, said Trump was transparently engaged in “an all-out effort to take people away from what they’re living through.”

“I think that’s going to be real hard to do because the country has really been rocked,” Donilon said. “And where the president has succeeded in the past in terms of throwing up lots of distractions and smoke screens and trying to move the debate to other questions, I don’t think he’s going to succeed here.”

The president has been grumbling about his own campaign and this week complained to allies that he had not significantly outraised Biden in April, according to a Republican who spoke with Trump.

Still, Trump’s political operation has moved over the last month to devise a plan for tearing down Biden, who does not inspire great enthusiasm in voters but is held in higher esteem by most than the incumbent president. The result has been a blizzard of negative digital and television ads battering Biden on a range of subjects in a way that suggests Trump’s advisers have not yet settled on a primary line of attack.

The campaign’s ads on Facebook are as relentless as they are varied, as if plucked from a vintage Trump rally rant: Some make unfounded inferences about Biden’s mental state, saying “geriatric health is no laughing matter.” Others paint the presumptive Democratic nominee as “China’s puppet,” highlighting statements that Biden made when he was vice president, like, “China is not our enemy.” Still others stick to traditional themes of illegal immigration.

Over the last week, the Trump campaign has spent at least $880,000 on Facebook ads attacking Biden.

Yet there are persistent doubts even within Trump’s political circle that an overwhelmingly negative campaign can be successful in 2020, particularly when many voters are likely to be looking for a combination of optimism, empathy and steady leadership at a moment of crisis unlike any in living memory. And the more Trump lashes out — at Biden and others — the more he may cement in place the reservations of voters who are accustomed to seeing presidents react with resolute calm in difficult situations.

Private Republican polling has shown Trump slipping well behind Biden in a number of key states. Perhaps just as troubling for Trump, it has raised questions about whether his efforts to tar Biden are making any headway.

Last month, a poll commissioned by the Republican National Committee tested roughly 20 lines of attack against Biden, ranging from the private business activities of his son, Hunter Biden, to whether Biden has “lost” a step, a reference to mental acuity. None of the lines of attack significantly moved voter sentiment, according to two people briefed on the results. There were some lines of attack that had potential, one of the people briefed on the results said, but they were more traditional Republican broadsides about issues like taxes.

Trump has also been warned by Republican veterans that his efforts to define Biden in negative terms so far have been slow or ineffective. At a meeting with political advisers this week that included Karl Rove, the top strategist for former President George W. Bush, Rove warned Trump that he had fallen behind in the task of damaging Biden, people familiar with the meeting said.

Part of the challenge, though, is that Trump constantly undermines his own team’s strategy, in ways big and small. While he finally stopped doing his daily press briefings, after weeks of pleading from his allies, he still makes comments on Twitter or to reporters nearly every day that hand Democrats fodder and make Republicans squirm.

In addition to his attacks against Obama, he separated himself from the highly popular Dr. Anthony Fauci, downplayed the importance of testing and has refused to wear a mask. And Trump’s appetite for conspiracy theories is often embarrassing to his party: Several times in recent weeks, he has falsely accused a prominent television host of murder and called for a “cold case” investigation.

The president also routinely misses even the political opportunities his advisers deliberately tee up for him.

When Trump was visiting Pennsylvania this week, for instance, his team scheduled a friendly interview in the hope that he would make the case that Biden would undermine fracking, an important industry in Pennsylvania. But Trump made no mention of fracking and instead attacked Biden’s mental condition and called wind power a “disaster” that “kills all the birds.”

“He’s come back down because that’s where his natural state is,” said Terry Nelson, a Republican strategist, referring to Trump’s slide in the polls after a short-lived bump in March. “Because he’s not in position to rally the country in a way a president traditionally would in a situation like this.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

© 2020 The New York Times Company



Four species of Elvis worm identified on the deep sea floor

by Bob Yirka , Phys.org 

MAY 15, 2020 REPORT

Credit: ZooKeys (2020). DOI: 10.3897/zookeys.932.48532

A team of researchers from the University of California and CNRS-Sorbonne Université has identified four species of deep-sea worms that until now have been referred to as Elvis worms. In their paper published in the journal ZooKeys, the group describes the worms, how they were named, and some odd behavior they managed to capture on video.


The researchers described the worms as a few among many that they have been collecting from the seabed over a period of years. Known officially as scale worms, the team had taken to describing them collectively as Elvis worms because their iridescent plated covered shells reminded them of Elvis's sequined jumpsuits. It was only recently that they used genetics to distinguish between four of the most common. In so doing, they formally identified four species: Peinaleopolynoe goffrediae, P. mineoi, P. orphanage and P. elvisi—the first was named in honor of a noted marine biologist, the second after the father of one of the researchers, the man who paid for the research effort, the third was named for a noted geobiologist and the fourth for the famous singer. All four live on the seafloor at depths of 3,000 feet. Several specimens of each species were collected from the bottom of the ocean using a remotely operated vehicle, allowing the team to study the worms in their lab. In the wild, the worms tend to gather around dead whale carcasses or other organic matter as a source of food.

The researchers noted that the worms live in water that is too deep for light to penetrate, thus, other creatures that may live down there with them would not be able to see their shiny, purple, blue and pink iridescent shells, nor would they be able to see each other—they have no eyes. This raises the question of why have a colorful shell. The researchers were not able to answer that question, but suggest that there may be specialty bioluminescent creatures that seek them out. They also note that they were puzzled by notches on the worms' shells until they captured video of two of them fighting, which included dancing jigs in-between dashing over to take a bite out of an opponent's shell.



Explore further  Your sushi may serve up parasitic worms

More information: Avery S. Hatch et al. Hungry scale worms: Phylogenetics of Peinaleopolynoe (Polynoidae, Annelida), with four new species, ZooKeys (2020). DOI: 10.3897/zookeys.932.48532

Journal information: ZooKeys


© 2020 Science X Network

Virus 'eminently capable' of spreading through speech: study






LANGUAGE IS A VIRUS

SARS-CoV-2 AKA 2019-nCoV DNA CODE
This scanning electron microscope image shows SARS-CoV-2 (yellow)—also known as 2019-nCoV, the virus that causes COVID-19—isolated from a patient, emerging from the surface of cells (blue/pink) cultured in the lab. Credit: NIAID-RML

Microdroplets generated by speech can remain suspended in the air in an enclosed space for more than ten minutes, a study published Wednesday showed, underscoring their likely role in spreading COVID-19.



Researchers at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK) had a person loudly repeat the phrase "Stay healthy" for 25 seconds inside a closed box.

A laser projected into the box illuminated droplets, allowing them to be seen and counted.

They stayed in the air for an average of 12 minutes, the study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) showed.

Taking into account the known concentration of coronavirus in saliva, scientists estimated that each minute of loudly speaking can generate more than 1,000 virus-containing droplets capable of remaining airborne for eight minutes or more in a closed space.

"This direct visualization demonstrates how normal speech generates airborne droplets that can remain suspended for tens of minutes or longer and are eminently capable of transmitting disease in confined spaces," the researchers conclude.

The same team had observed that speaking less loudly generates fewer droplets, in a work published in the New England Journal of Medicine in April.

If the level of infectiousness of COVID-19 through speech can be confirmed, it could give a scientific boost to recommendations in many countries to wear a face mask, and help explain the virus's rapid spread.


Explore further

Study finds breathing and talking contribute to COVID-19 spread

More information: Valentyn Stadnytskyi et al. The airborne lifetime of small speech droplets and their potential importance in SARS-CoV-2 transmission, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2020). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2006874117


Journal information: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , New England Journal of Medicine

© 2020 AFP


AFTER CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC WE WILL ALL SPEAK IN SIGN LANGUAGE 
May 10, 2018 - BSL and American Sign Language are not even in the same language ... 250 certified sign language interpreters, and between 1.8 million and ...

Continuously active surface disinfectants may provide additional barrier against the spread of viruses



A technician is pictured in 2018 applying Allied BioScience's first generation antimicrobial coating product
A technician is pictured in 2018 applying Allied BioScience's first generation antimicrobial coating product
In the battle to slow or prevent the transmission of viruses, such as the novel coronavirus, continuously active disinfectants could provide a new line of defense, according to a recent University of Arizona study released on the health sciences preprint server MedRxiv.

While disinfecting high-contact surfaces is an important practice to prevent the spread of pathogens, these surfaces can be easily re-contaminated after the use of conventional surface disinfectants. Alternatively, continuously active disinfectants work to actively kill microorganisms and provide continued protection over an extended period of time.
"During the course of respiratory illnesses such as COVID-19, aerosols released during sneezing and coughing contain  that will eventually settle onto various surfaces," said Luisa Ikner, associate research professor in the Department of Environmental Science and lead author of the study. "Factors including temperature, humidity and surface type can affect how long viruses such as SARS-CoV-2 will remain infectious after surface deposition."
"The only tools we have currently in reducing the environmental spread of viruses via surfaces are hand sanitizer, hand washing and the disinfection of surfaces," said Charles Gerba, a microbiologist and professor of environmental science in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. "This technology creates a new barrier in controlling the spread of viruses in indoor environments."
Gerba and his research team designed and conducted the study—which was funded by Allied BioScience, a company that manufactures antimicrobial surface coatings—to evaluate continuously active antimicrobial technology and its potential use against the transmission of viruses.
"We evaluated this technology by testing a modified antimicrobial coating against the human coronavirus 229E, which is one of the viruses that causes the common cold," Gerba said. "Even two weeks after the coating was applied, it was capable of killing more than 99.9% of the coronaviruses within two hours."
Human coronavirus 229E is similar in structure and genetics to SARS-CoV-2 but causes only mild respiratory symptoms. It can therefore be safely used as a model for SARS-CoV-2 to evaluate antiviral chemistries. The results from these experiments may provide new opportunities for controlling the environmental transmission of COVID-19.
"The standard practice of surface disinfection using liquid-based chemistries according to product label instructions can render many viruses—including the coronaviruses—noninfectious," Ikner said. "In contrast, high-touch surfaces treated with continuously active disinfectants are hostile environments to infectious viruses upon contact and demonstrate increasing effectiveness over time."
Continuously active disinfectant technology has been around for almost a decade but has been focused primarily on controlling hospital-acquired bacterial infections, such as invasive methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA.
UArizona researchers from the Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health investigated the impact of antimicrobial surface coatings in reducing health care-associated infections in two urban hospitals. The results of that study were published in October and found a 36% reduction in hospital-acquired infections with the use of a continually active antimicrobial.
"As communities are reopening after weeks of stay-at-home restrictions, there is significant interest in minimizing surface contamination and the indirect spread of viruses," Gerba said.
Previous research on the environmental spread of viruses through contaminated surfaces modeled the spread of germs and the risk of infection in an office workplace. In that study, a contaminated push-plate door at the entrance of an office building led to the contamination of 51% of commonly touched surfaces and 38% of office workers' hands within just four hours. With the use of disinfecting wipes, environmental contamination was reduced to 5% of surfaces and 11% of workers' hands.
"Antimicrobial coatings could provide an additional means of protection, reducing the spread of coronaviruses in indoor environments and public places where there is continuous contamination," Gerba said. "We're evaluating a number of products right now and believe it may be the next major breakthrough.

I HAVE POSTED ANOTHER VERSION OF THIS EARLIER IN MY BLOG FROM ANOTHER SOURCE



WHAT IS DARK ENERGY? PHYSICISTS AREN'T EVEN SURE

15-Minute Listen Download Transcript


MADDIE SOFIA, HOST:
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SOFIA: You're listening to SHORT WAVE...
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SOFIA: ...From NPR.
Going out into nature - hiking, paddling, looking up at the stars - has always helped me center myself. It reminds me that I'm just Madeline Kelly (ph) Sofia, one human among millions of critters and trees and galaxies that don't care about me or acknowledge me at all. I'm just a group of random atoms - matter taking up space. And it turns out that matter as we normally think of it is a tiny, tiny portion of the universe, meaning your genes, the ocean, trees, computers, all the stars and planets - all of that is only 5% of the universe.
SARAFINA NANCE: And the rest of the stuff is dark matter and dark energy.
SOFIA: Right, which is wild. That's so much. (Laughter) That's so much of it. That's too much of it. Honestly, it's too much.
NANCE: (Laughter) Yeah. It's like a very uncomfortable place to be in when you think about - oh, you know, we study the universe, and theoretically we understand, you know, on some scale, how the universe works. And then all of a sudden, you're like - oh, wait; we actually do not understand, like, over 95% of our universe. What?
SOFIA: The large majority of our universe is made up of this mysterious thing called - I kid you not - dark energy.
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SOFIA: And get this - it's how we know that our universe is expanding. I learned about dark energy, honestly, like, three weeks ago. And it blew my mind.
NANCE: Dark energy is intrinsic to the fabric of space-time that is somehow pushing galaxies apart.
SOFIA: This is Sarafina Nance's day job.
NANCE: I am a Ph.D. student at UC Berkeley studying supernova and cosmology.
SOFIA: Supernova, meaning an exploding star that can help us understand how our universe is changing. You know, no big deal.
NANCE: It's a really phenomenal thing in sort of the scale of the universe to see something change. And that's this class of astronomy called transience, where things change in the night sky and you can learn about them through their changes.
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SOFIA: So today we explore one of the universe's biggest mysteries - dark energy - from the days of Einstein to the exploding stars that help us understand the very fabric of our universe.
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SOFIA: So. OK, Sarafina, to really understand dark energy, we have to go back to Einstein. Right?
NANCE: Yeah. So Einstein came up with this theory of general relativity, which is basically his version of gravity, in the early 1900s. And the only way to make his equations work and satisfy what he thought was a static universe, he introduced this fudge factor - in his words - called the cosmological constant.
SOFIA: So Einstein actually thought that the universe was static, not that it was expanding.
NANCE: That's right. And over the next 10 years, people sort of manipulated these equations and tried to find solutions and started hinting at perhaps the universe wasn't static.
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SOFIA: Well, it's nice to see that, you know, Einstein can get things wrong. That's cool.
NANCE: (Laughter) So the funny thing is this cosmological constant, he called it his biggest blunder.
SOFIA: Honestly, it's just nice to hear Einstein say I messed up, you know what I mean?
NANCE: I know. Well, the fun fact...
SOFIA: We can all mess up.
NANCE: The fun fact is that he ended up actually being right.
SOFIA: Right (laughter). Dang it.
NANCE: So it turns out that that cosmological constant is exactly what we think dark energy is...
SOFIA: (Laughter).
NANCE: ...And is necessary to actually describe our universe.
SOFIA: I feel like that's classic Einstein. Him being wrong...
NANCE: Yep.
SOFIA: ...Is being more right than I've ever been in my entire life.
NANCE: Exactly. Yes (laughter).
SOFIA: OK. So after Einstein introduces this idea that the universe is static, we figure out, actually, that the universe is expanding. Right?
NANCE: Yeah. So in 1929, Edwin Hubble showed that the universe is not static; it's actually expanding. So what he did is he measured, basically, galaxies and how far away they are. And he found that galaxies are actually moving away from us. So that means that the universe is not static. It's, in fact, expanding.
SOFIA: And at this point, we think that the universe is expanding but that that expansion is slowing down. Is that correct?
NANCE: Exactly. So we think that the expansion comes from the Big Bang and it comes from inflation, which was right after the Big Bang, which is this rapid expansion of space. But because there's gravity in the universe and there's mass in the universe, we would think that gravity starts to take over and the expansion decelerates because gravity starts to pull things back in.
SOFIA: And then in the late '90s, we get turned on our head again, right? There's another big discovery. And we're like - oh, wait, wait wait...
NANCE: (Laughter).
SOFIA: ...Maybe she's not slowing down.
NANCE: That's right. So in 1998 and in 1999, there were two teams that were studying a specific type of supernova. And they found that these supernova that were super far away from us were fainter than what we would have expected if the universe was in fact expanding but decelerating that expansion. And the only way to explain away that faintness is if the universe was instead accelerating its expansion.
SOFIA: Wild. So we went from, the universe is static - OK, it's not static; it's expanding, but it's slowing down that expansion to - wait, wait, wait - not only is it expanding but it's expanding faster than we thought it was and it's speeding up. And what...
NANCE: That's right.
SOFIA: And the explanation for that is dark energy?
NANCE: You killed it. That's right.
SOFIA: I nailed it. OK. So yes, we have finally gotten to the point where I can ask you - Sarafina, what is dark energy? (Laughter).
NANCE: So I think the only answer to that question is we don't know.
SOFIA: Oh, come on, Sarafina. You brought me all the way here. You told me Einstein's story, and we don't know.
NANCE: I know. It's really uncomfortable to sit with.
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NANCE: We can see dark energy through its effects on the expansion of the universe, but we don't actually know what it is.
SOFIA: Wow. I don't even know - I don't even know what to say about that. That's - so - 'cause it's wild. We don't know what dark energy is, but we know it exists.
NANCE: Yes.
SOFIA: And - so what are you doing over there, astronomers?
NANCE: (Laughter).
SOFIA: This is what we've got - 4% to 5%? No, I'm just teasing you. So that - I mean, that's wild. And the amount of dark energy is staying the same, right?
NANCE: So that's an interesting question. So I like to kind of describe dark energy and the expansion of the universe in - the way that I think about it is sort of picture a loaf of bread and picture a bunch of raisins in the bread. And the raisins are like our universe's galaxies. And the bread itself is like space-time.
SOFIA: OK.
NANCE: And so as you bake the bread, the bread rises and the raisins get farther and farther apart. They're sort of carried along the fabric of space-time, which means that the distance between galaxies increases with time.
SOFIA: OK. I'm with you. I'm with you.
NANCE: And the introduction of dark energy is like - imagine you have this special type of yeast that you can put into a bread and the bread starts to rise with yeast. And then all of a sudden, it starts to rise a lot, and it gets bigger and bigger and bigger over time. And that's dark energy.
SOFIA: So dark energy is the weird yeast that causes...
NANCE: Exactly.
SOFIA: ...Our universe to grow and push our galaxies farther and farther apart from each other.
NANCE: Exactly. And it causes it to grow exponentially.
SOFIA: Well, I totally get it now.
NANCE: (Laughter) Great. We'll...
SOFIA: Now that we put...
NANCE: We'll publish a paper.
SOFIA: Now that we started talking about carbs, I'm starting to understand.
NANCE: (Laughter).
SOFIA: OK. OK. So we actually figured a lot of this out by studying a particular type of exploding star - a supernova.
NANCE: Right.
SOFIA: Tell me about that.
NANCE: So when dark energy was first basically discovered, it was discovered through a specific type of supernova that forms when you have a binary system of a really big star or a really small star and another small star, which is called a white dwarf. And basically, the white dwarf accretes matter from the companion star - the binary star - and ignites an explosion. And the really interesting thing about this particular type of supernova is that all of them blow up with the same brightness.
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NANCE: And that makes them what we call standard candles. So if you can imagine a lightbulb and you have a lightbulb right next to you and you have a lightbulb a hundred feet away from you, the one that's right next to you seems to be way brighter. And the one that's farther away from you is way fainter. And so by using the intrinsic brightness of the sort of lightbulb or, in the universe, of the supernova and comparing it to what is observed, we can determine the distance to the supernova and determine how fast that galaxy that hosts the supernova is expanding away from us.
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SOFIA: Wild. That's wild. That's your job.
NANCE: Yes, it's really cool.
SOFIA: I mean, it's very cool. That is very cool. OK. So basically studying these supernovae help us understand how fast the universe is expanding because we can kind of try to calculate how far those explode-y stars are away from us. Is that fair?
NANCE: Yeah, that's exactly right.
SOFIA: OK. And tell me if I'm overselling this, but all of this potentially gives us clues into how the universe could end.
NANCE: That's exactly right.
SOFIA: So what is our best guess as far as, like, how the universe could end?
NANCE: So right now, we think that dark energy stays constant with time, which means that the universe is going to continue to accelerate its expansion. Distances between galaxies are going to get further and further apart with time. And so it's going to accelerate forever, and it's going to be a cold, dark universe.
SOFIA: I mean, that sounds about right to me, you know?
NANCE: (Laughter) You know, it's kind of where we're at right now.
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SOFIA: So what's the coolest thing about all of this to you, Sarafina? Because this is objectively very cool.
NANCE: Well, thanks. I love it. I think it kind of goes back to what drew me to astronomy in the first place, which is we are trying to understand some of the most fundamental aspects of our universe and human existence. And we can derive some sort of meaning about, you know - how did we get here? what is the fate of the universe? how does that change with time? - and learn some really profound things about what it means to exist here.
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SOFIA: Sarafina Nance studies supernova and cosmology at UC Berkeley.
This episode was produced by Rebecca Ramirez, edited by Geoff Brumfiel and was fact-checked by Emily Vaughn I'm Maddie Sofia, and we are all in awe of our universe. Thanks for listening to SHORT WAVE from NPR. See you tomorrow.
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SEE 
https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=DARK+ENERGY
https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=ETHER
https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=DARK+MATTER