Search for Irish chieftain’s skeleton continues in Spain more than 400 years after his death

The hunt for the skeleton of Red Hugh O’Donnell continues

By James Rogers | Fox News

Archaeologists in Spain are continuing their search for the missing bones of “Red Hugh,” a 16th-century Irish chieftain who is said to be buried in the city of Valladolid.

Red Hugh O’Donnell fought English rule in Ireland and died in exile. He was in Valladolid, then the capital of Spain, when he died in 1602.

An excavation began earlier this year to uncover the so-called Chapel of Wonders where O’Donnell was buried. The chapel was once part of a Franciscan monastery that was leveled in the 19th century.

The dig attracted attention when skeletons were discovered at the site, but analysis has revealed they pre-date the century when Red Hugh died, according to Carlos Burgos, a spokesman for the Hispano-Irish Association, which is conducting the excavation. “We are going to try under the bank building that is above the chapel,” he told Fox News on Friday.

THE HUNT FOR RED HUGH: ARCHAEOLOGISTS IN SPAIN SEARCH FOR 16TH-CENTURY IRISH CHIEFTAIN'S BONES

The chapel was also once the burial place of Christopher Columbus.

Picture shows human skeletons found in an archaeological excavation carried out by the Hispano-Irish Association in a ruined chapel in Valladolid, that expects to identify the remains of the Irish rebel lord Red Hugh O'Donnell, on May 28, 2020. (Photo by CESAR MANSO/AFP via Getty Images)

Valladolid mayor Oscar Puente has been documenting the search for Red Hugh on his Twitter account. Earlier this year, the excavation site was also visited by the Irish ambassador to Spain, Síle Maguire.

Born into a noble family, Red Hugh O’Donnell is known as ‘Red Hugh’ as a result of his Irish family name “Ruadh O’Domnhaill” – “Ruadh” is the Irish word for red.

A rebel leader, O’Donnell fought in the Nine Years' War against the English in Ireland, which began in 1593. In 1601 after English forces defeated O’Donnell and allied Spanish troops in the battle of Kinsale, he left Ireland, according to the Ask about Ireland website. The nobleman traveled to Spain to request further help from King Philip III, but, nine months later, he was struck down by illness and died, the website explains. He was 30 years of age.

FACIAL RECONSTRUCTION PROVIDES GLIMPSE OF PRIEST WHO DIED 900 YEARS AGO

A vital clue in identifying the rebel leader is that his skeleton will be missing the big toe on each foot, according to the BBC. O’Donnell lost the toes to frostbite while escaping English forces during the winter of 1591, the Irish Times reports.

Friday marked the 448th anniversary of Red Hugh’s birth, an event marked by a joint Irish and Spanish Zoom press conference.

Oscar Puente

@oscar_puente_

La visita de hoy a la excavaciones en la calle Constitución, junto con la Comisión Territorial de Patrimonio, nos ha mostrado los avances y apuntado las posibilidades de seguir progresando con la indagación.

6:17 AM · May 28, 2020

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Large, Deep Antarctic Ozone Hole in 2020



September 20, 2020

Persistent cold temperatures and strong circumpolar winds supported the formation of a large and deep Antarctic ozone hole in 2020, and it is likely to persist into November, NOAA and NASA scientists reported.

On September 20, 2020, the annual ozone hole reached its peak area at 24.8 million square kilometers (9.6 million square miles), roughly three times the size of the continental United States. Scientists also detected the near-complete elimination of ozone for several weeks in a 6-kilometer (4-mile) high column of the stratosphere near the geographic South Pole.

The map above shows the size and shape of the ozone hole over the South Pole on September 20, the day of its maximum as calculated by the NASA Ozone Watch team. NASA and NOAA monitor the ozone hole via complementary instrumental methods. NASA’s Aura satellite, the NASA-NOAA Suomi NPP satellite, and NOAA’s JPSS NOAA-20 satellite all measure ozone from space. Aura’s Microwave Limb Sounder also estimates levels of ozone-destroying chlorine.

This year brought the 12th-largest ozone hole (by area) in 40 years of satellite records, with the 14th-lowest ozone readings in 33 years of balloon-borne instrumental measurements. However, scientists noted that ongoing declines in the atmospheric concentration of ozone-depleting chemicals (which are controlled by the Montreal Protocol) prevented the hole from being as large as it might have been under the same weather conditions 20 years ago.

“From the year 2000 peak, Antarctic stratosphere chlorine and bromine levels have fallen about 16 percent towards the natural level,” said Paul Newman, an ozone layer expert and the chief Earth scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. “We have a long way to go, but that improvement made a big difference this year. The hole would have been about a million square miles larger if there was still as much chlorine in the stratosphere as there was in 2000.”

This year represented a dramatic turnabout from 2019, when warm temperatures in the stratosphere and a weak polar vortex hampered the formation of polar stratospheric clouds (PSCs). The particles in PSCs activate forms of chlorine and bromine compounds that destroy ozone. Last year’s ozone hole was the smallest since the early 1980s, growing to 16.4 million square kilometers (6.3 million square miles) in early September.

“This clear contrast between last year and this year shows how meteorology affects the size of the ozone hole,” said Susan Strahan, a scientist with NASA Goddard and Universities Space Research Association. “It also complicates detection of long-term trends.”

Atmospheric levels of ozone-depleting substances increased up to the year 2000. Since then, they have slowly declined but remain high enough to produce significant seasonal ozone losses. During recent years with normal weather conditions, the ozone hole has typically grown to a maximum of 20 million square kilometers (8 million square miles).

In addition to the area of the ozone hole, scientists also track the average amount of ozone depletion—how little is left inside the hole. On October 1, 2020, weather balloons launched from NOAA’s South Pole atmospheric observatory recorded a low value of 104 Dobson units of atmospheric ozone. NASA’s Ozone Watch reported a lowest daily value at 94 Dobson Units on October 6. Prior to the emergence of the Antarctic ozone hole in the 1970s, the average amount of ozone above the South Pole in September and October ranged from 250 to 350 Dobson units.

The amount of ozone between 13 to 21 kilometers (8 to 13 miles) in altitude, as measured over the South Pole, has been close to record lows at several points this year. “It’s about as close to zero as we can measure,” said Bryan Johnson, a scientist with NOAA’s Global Monitoring Laboratory. Still, the rate at which ozone declined in September was slower compared with 20 years ago, which is consistent with there being less chlorine in the atmosphere.

NASA Earth Observatory image by Joshua Stevens, using data courtesy of NASA Ozone Watch and GEOS-5 data from the Global Modeling and Assimilation Office at NASA GSFC. Story by Theo Stein, NOAA, and Ellen Gray, NASA Earth Science News Team, with EO Staff.

First drone mission launched to the North Pole analyses global warming

The data collected will be used to understand how warming temperatures are affecting the Arctic

Laura Millan Lombrana

The data collected will be used to understand how warming temperatures are affecting the Arctic
(Bloomberg)



Roberta Pirazzini set out an Arctic expedition to do something no one had ever tried before: fly a drone near the North Pole.

Sensors on the drone would assess sunlight reflected from the ice. This measurement, known as surface albedo, is key to understanding how much solar radiation is absorbed by the Earth and how much is reflected back into the atmosphere. It's one of the scientific puzzles that can help predict how fast sea ice will melt.

But flying a drone over the planet's northernmost reaches is no simple feat. Ms Pirazzini and a colleague, Henna-Reetta Hannula, spent months learning to fly at the Finnish Meteorological Institute, where both are on staff as scientists. Technicians designed and built a sophisticated navigation system capable of handling extreme weather.

The scientists and their drones then joined the largest Arctic expedition in history aboard the Polarstern, an icebreaker carrying dozens of researchers on a year-long mission. The pair had also brought along a smaller practice drone that could fly inside their tiny cabin, the only chance they'd have to keep their skills sharp in the weeks of sailing before finally stepping onto the ice.

Right away, Ms Pirazzini ran into the same problems that have beset Arctic explorers for two centuries: treacherous navigation conditions and technology that buckles in the deep cold.

Drones and helicopters have trouble near the North Pole because global positioning satellites suffer small uncertainties at extreme northern latitudes. This creates mounting confusion for navigation the closer a pilot gets to the North Pole, and Ms Pirazzini's drones would be operating closer than any before.

The navigation nightmare has claimed another drone earlier in the expedition. The drone took off from the ship, went in a completely uncontrolled direction and crashed. Ms Pirazzini was terrified her albedo-measuring drone would fall victim next, and her fears were confirmed as soon as she stepped onto the ice. The navigation system on the main drone wasn't working, meaning she and Ms Hannula would need to manually calculate distances, direction, altitude and wind speed.

“The freezing conditions were our main enemy, not only for the ice in the blade" of the drone's rotors, “but in our fingers,” Ms Pirazzini says, her voice cracking over a satellite phone during the Polarstern's return voyage earlier this month. “You need very delicate, small motions to operate the drone,” she says. “When your hand is freezing you lose sensitivity, your fingers can't control the features anymore.”

Fog would turn into ice around the drone's blades. Wind gusts stronger than eight meters per hour would ground the drone. Still, the two scientists managed to conduct 18 flights over three weeks. Albedo measurements captured by Ms Pirazzini, 49, and Ms Hannula, 33, will now be analyzed as part of multinational effort to understand how warming temperatures are affecting the Arctic-a scientific race against climate change itself.

Earth's northern icecap is heating about three times faster than the rest of the planet, disrupting a fragile ecosystem. Arctic sea ice, which melts during the summer and freezes back in winter months, shrank to the second-lowest level on record in September, the month when ice cover is usually at its lowest. Only in 2012 was Arctic sea ice cover smaller.

Anomalously warm conditions in the Siberian Arctic, which suffered an unprecedented heatwave during the first half of the year, are now making it harder for the ice to reform. Arctic sea ice is currently at the lowest level for this time of the year since satellite monitoring began in 1979-37% below the historical average.

“By this time in 2012 the ice had started to regrow,” says Samantha Burgess, deputy director at Europe's Copernicus Climate Change Service. “It's a little early to tell what implications this will have for the rest of the season but there are likely to be impacts for the marine food web.”

Back in August when Ms Pirazzini's drone flights started, sea ice in the Arctic had dropped to the lowest level on record for that month. These alarmingly low ice levels made it possible for the Polarstern to reach the North Pole from Norway's Fram Strait in just six days. “There were areas of open water everywhere, it was very easy to go there,” Ms Pirazzini says. “That's not nice if you think about the future of the Arctic. It's a very fragile environment that will change without return.”

Measuring albedo becomes more important as the ice shrinks. The white surfaces of Arctic ice reflect solar radiation back into the atmosphere, while the ocean's blue surfaces absorb it. Not all ice is equally reflective, however, and scientists are trying to figure out just how much solar radiation is being absorbed by ice sitting below shallow melt waters that have been spreading as temperatures stay warmer.

While sea-ice area can be monitored by satellites, other measurements that are crucial to understanding the speed of melting can only be obtained closer to the ground. This more granular data is essential to determining other drivers of climate change, such as how heat transfers through ice and into the atmosphere and water.

Traditionally, scientists have taken albedo readings with airplanes and helicopters. But drones are cheaper, can fly under worse weather conditions and below even low clouds. Ms Pirazzini's flights ranged between five and 30 meters over the ice. “Drone technology is making progress every month, every year,” she says. “We are at the infancy of this business, and I believe it will expand very much because these are unique and needed measurements.”

In the Arctic, operating drones far from other scientists sometimes involved risk. Ms Pirazzini and Ms Hannula had to cross a fracture in the ice using a pontoon as a raft. At one point Pirazzini was kneeling on a raft over icy seawater, holding the carefully-wrapped drone, while Ms Hannula helped her moor to safety using a long stick.

The drones at times proved more resilient to the rough Arctic weather than some of the expedition's other flying objects. Two tethered balloons nicknamed Beluga and Miss Piggy would be sent to take cover from hard conditions in bright orange tent known as Balloon Town. “Sometimes Miss Piggy was misbehaving and flying too low," Ms Pirazzini says laughing. “We would need to make sure the drone wasn't in the area.”

The scientific arsenal on the Polarstern included a helicopter and many weather balloons equipped with a radio system that collected and transmitted data on temperature, humidity, wind direction and speed. A total of 1,574 balloons were launched-up eight per day over 12 months-and scientists often decorated them with names and birthday messages for their families.

Hundreds of researchers from 20 countries took turns on the Polarstern for the MOSAiC mission, an acronym for Multidisciplinary drifting Observatory for the Study of Arctic Climate. Led by Germany's Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research, it was the first expedition in modern history to spend a full winter close to the North Pole. The mission, which had a budget of more than 140 million euros (£126.3m ), ended on October 12 after 389 days at sea.

“Climate change will probably force the organization of more expeditions like this one because there will be an urge to do something, to understand the implications,” Ms Pirazzini says. “This expedition has drawn new paths for research. I feel I have the responsibility to make the most out of it.”

Washington Post

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There’s no place like the perfectly sized home for the mighty mantis shrimp

Mantis shrimp will fight longer and harder, and often win, for burrows of ideal size.

JENNIFER OUELLETTE - 10/29/2020



"Nice burrow you have there. I want it." Patrick Green of the University of Exeter filmed this fight between mantis shrimp.

Size matters to the small-but-mighty mantis shrimp, which show a marked preference for burrows in coral rubble with volumes that closely match their own body size or are just a bit larger—in other words, large enough to accommodate their body, but small enough that they can defend the entrance. But according to a new paper published in the journal Animal Behavior, sometimes a mantis shrimp will compromise. If a burrow is already occupied and is close to the ideal size, or a bit smaller, the mantis shrimp will fight longer and harder for that burrow—and be more likely to win the contest.

As we previously reported, mantis shrimp come in many different varieties: there are some 450 known species. But they can generally be grouped into two types: those that stab their prey with spear-like appendages ("spearers") and those that smash their prey ("smashers") with large, rounded, and hammer-like claws ("raptorial appendages"). Those strikes are so fast—as much as 23 meters per second, or 51mph—and powerful, they often produce cavitation bubbles in the water, creating a shock wave that can serve as a follow-up strike, stunning and sometimes killing the prey. Sometimes a strike can even produce sonoluminescence, whereby the cavitation bubbles produce a brief flash of light as they collapse.

A 2018 study found that the secret to that powerful punch seems to arise not from bulky muscles but from the spring-loaded anatomical structure of the shrimp's arms, akin to a bow and arrow. The shrimp's muscles pull on a saddle-shaped structure in the arm, causing it to bend and store potential energy, which is released with the swinging of the club-like claw. And earlier this year, scientists discovered that, counterintuitively, the mantis shrimp punches at half the speed in air, suggesting that the animal can precisely control its striking behavior, depending on the surrounding medium.
“Resource value assessment”

Patrick Green of the University of Exeter and J.S. Harrison of Duke University—authors of the new paper in Animal Behavior—were interested in exploring what's known as "resource value assessment" in mantis shrimp of the smashing variety (Neogonodactylus bredini). Both male and female mantis shrimp in this species are known to compete over coral rubble burrows, which provide protection from predators and a safe space to mate and brood eggs. If a preferred burrow is already occupied, it can trigger a fight over who gets the burrow. Those competitions typically involve a ritualized exchange of high-force strikes (mantis shrimp SMASH!), with the defending mantis shrimp also using its armored tailplate to block the burrow entrance from intruders.

These sorts of animal competitions are quite common in nature, and animals seem to be able to assess the value of such "contested resources" and adjust their behavior accordingly. Such encounters are typically described in terms of a linear or categorical value assessment, in which, for example, males will fight more aggressively in the presence of females. Similarly, female parasitoid wasps will compete over the most desirable hosts in which to lay their eggs. The larger the host, the more food will be available for the offspring when they hatch, for example. Past studies have suggested that a female's egg load seems to be a contributing factor (or selective force) in how aggressively they fight over a potential host and how likely they are to win such a competition.

Enlarge / An intruder potentially assessing a burrow.
Roy Caldwell

Past studies have shown that mantis shrimp pick burrows whose sizes (volume) mesh well with their own body size (mass), as do hermit crabs. In the case of hermit crabs, there seems to be a tradeoff at play when it comes to resource assessment: dragging around a larger shell requires more energy but offers more protection from predators, while the reverse is true for smaller shells. Green and Harrison suggest that, when it comes to competing for a desired shell, hermit crabs may prefer shells that are the preferred size or slightly larger, while placing less value on shells that are much larger or smaller.

This would be an example of quadratic resource value assessment, in which resources are valued most highly at a certain peak level. That value decreases in either direction from that peak. In other words, there is an optimal sweet spot, or "Goldilocks zone," where an asset is deemed to be "just right" and the animal will adapt its behavior accordingly—e.g., by fighting more aggressively when such a desirable asset is contested. Green and Harrison thought a similar quadratic resource value assessment might also apply to mantis shrimp—namely, that mantis shrimp would place a higher value on burrows with an ideal volume and would be more aggressive, and more likely to win, when fighting for control of such burrows.

To test their hypothesis, the researchers conducted two sets of experiments: "choice experiments," where mantis shrimp could freely choose unoccupied burrows of varying sizes, and "staged contests," where "defending" and "intruding" mantis shrimp were randomly matched in a competition over a preferred burrow. Green and Harrison predicted that their experiments would show that competitors would fight longer and harder and would be more likely to win when their body length closely matched the volume of the contested burrow—and that these factors would decrease the further that match deviated from the ideal, in either direction.

“This study is an example of maximum effort being reserved for something that’s ‘just right.’”

The researchers built mock burrows out of clear plastic tubing with a single opening, wrapped in black vinyl, with a clear area at the top to enable them to observe what was happening inside. The mantis shrimp were collected from burrows in seagrass beds along the Caribbean coast of Panama. The researchers also videotaped the staged contests (a total of 36) and intervened if it seemed like one of the fighting shrimp was in danger of significant injury or death.

They found that, overall, the occupying mantis shrimps successfully defended their burrows from intruders in 69 percent of the fights. But those odds changed dramatically in cases where the intruding mantis shrimp were competing for burrows slightly smaller than their ideal size; intruders won 67 percent of the fights in those circumstances, typically by striking first and striking more often.

"We know that animals can assess a variety of factors, including the size of the opponent and the value of the prize, when deciding whether to fight and how hard to fight," said Green of the results. "In this case, as a smaller burrow is probably occupied by a smaller opponent, it seems mantis shrimps will compromise on the size of the home if it means an easier fight. It might be assumed that animals fight hardest for the biggest assets, but this study is an example of maximum effort being reserved for something that's 'just right.'"

There were some caveats, most notably sample-size constraints. Green and Harrison also acknowledged that the mock burrows were standardized, with set lengths and diameters, unlike naturally occurring burrows, which usually have more variable dimensions. And the smooth tubing is markedly different from the natural burrows formed in rock and rubble.

"Mantis shrimp are adept modifiers of natural burrows, using appendage strikes to widen too-narrow burrows and using rock and sand to fill in too-large burrows," they wrote. "While the individuals we tested could not widen mock burrows by striking, perhaps with more time in which to establish residency, individuals would have filled in larger mock burrows."

DOI: Animal Behavior, 2020. 10.1016/j.anbehav.2020.09.014 (About DOIs).

Listing image by Roy Caldwell

Dogs were domesticated once from a lost population of wolves
Our history with dogs is complicated, according to a study of ancient dog DNA.

KIONA N. SMITH - 10/29/2020


Genomics researcher Anders Bergstrom and his colleagues recently sequenced the genomes of 27 dogs from archaeological sites scattered around Europe and Asia, ranging from 4,000 to 11,000 years old. Those genomes, along with those of modern dogs and wolves, show how dogs have moved around the world with people since their domestication.

All the dogs in the study descended from the same common ancestor, but that original dog population split into at least five branches as it expanded in different directions. As groups of people split apart, migrated, and met other groups, they brought their dogs along. Dog DNA suggests that their population history mirrors the story of human populations, for the most part.

“Understanding the history of dogs teaches us not just about their history, but also about our history,” said Bergstrom, of the Francis Crick Institute, in a statement.

We still don’t know who let the dogs out

We still don’t know exactly when or where dog domestication first happened; it already had a pretty complex history by 11,000 years ago. But it looks like it only happened once. The ancient genomes suggest that dogs all share a common ancestor, which they don’t share with modern wolves. According to Bergstrom and his colleagues, that probably means that dogs all descend from one group of wolves, and that group is now extinct.

Modern gray wolves don’t appear to be very closely related to any of the ancient or modern dogs in the study. That suggests that since domestication set them apart, wolves haven’t contributed much DNA to dog bloodlines.

The oldest dog in the study lived with Mesolithic hunter-gatherers about 10,900 years ago in what is now Sweden. Its DNA suggests that most of its ancestors were from an eastern branch of the dog family tree—the branch that gave rise to Siberian dogs, indigenous North American dogs, and even New Guinea singing dogs and Australian dingoes.

But some of the dog’s ancestry also came from the branch that had followed humans into the Levant and Southwest Asia. Those bits of DNA were probably picked up as souvenirs when the dog’s ancestors met dogs from another population. In other words, by 11,000 years ago, dogs had had time to become a species, divide into distinct populations as they moved apart, and then meet again and exchange DNA.

Have dogs, will travel

Bergstrom and his colleagues wanted to know how dogs’ population history lined up with that of humans. They compared their ancient dog data to what ancient human DNA tells us about how groups of people migrated and interacted during the last 12,000 years. Not too surprisingly, the timing of splits, mergers, and movements mostly matched up. That suggests that, as groups of people migrated, they brought their dogs with them, and the dogs got up to much the same things the humans got up to when they met new neighbors.

Ancient human DNA tells us that early farmers from what is now Turkey moved north and west into Europe around 8,000 years ago, and it took just a few centuries for them to completely replace the populations of hunter-gatherers who were already there.

“It’s not clear how these movements happened—whether by disease, or by violence, or by some kind of biased intermarriage process—but what the genetics shows unambiguously is that these changes did happen, and much more dramatically than any archaeologists expected,” said Reich back in 2018.

And DNA from ancient European dogs tells us that very similar things were happening between the Neolithic newcomers’ dogs and the ones (like the 11,000-year-old Swedish dog mentioned above) that were already there. In general, dogs found at archaeological sites in north and western Europe have more eastern ancestry, and less Levantine ancestry, than dogs found in the south and east—and vice versa.

Some dogs were on a very long leash

Dogs’ and humans’ stories match up, at least in the broad strokes. But Bergstrom and his colleagues found a few points where the story of dogs seemed “decoupled” from ours. Those differences are probably the result of disease, trading, preferences for particular dog types, or people moving to a new place without taking the dogs (which sounds awful, honestly). These “decoupled” population histories can tell us about how dogs fit into ancient human societies.

A few thousand years after the Neolithic takeover of Europe, another group of people swept westward from Central Asia. They probably brought along dogs like the 3,800-year-old animal recovered from an archaeological site on the Russian Steppes.

But while the pastoralists from the steppes added their DNA to the mix that makes up modern European populations, their dogs didn’t seem to mingle much with local dogs. Meanwhile, in China, the reverse happened. Steppe pastoralists expanded eastward, but modern people in east Asia don’t carry much of their DNA. Modern East-Asian dogs, however, get quite a bit of their ancestry from dogs like the 3,800-year-old Srubnaya dog.

“Perhaps there is sometimes also an element of chance in these processes, such that if we could replay the tape of human history many times, the outcome for dogs might not always be the same,” Bergstrom told Ars.

Old dogs and new genomes

Part of the reason the earliest years of dogs’ domestication are so fuzzy (not sorry) is that ancient dog DNA has been pretty scarce. Until the recent study, scientists had published just six prehistoric dog and wolf genomes. In case you’re keeping score, we had sequenced more Neanderthal genomes than prehistoric dog genomes—until now, that is.

“Ancient DNA is still a young field, and for most animals there have not yet been many studies of whole genomes,” Bergstrom told Ars. For him and his colleagues to add 27 ancient dog genomes to that list, it took an international effort by archaeologists and museum curators. The collaborators found ancient dog remains in museum and university collections and on lists of material excavated at archaeological sites.

According to Bergstrom, more ancient dog genomes, along with more archaeological evidence about how dogs fit into ancient cultures and economies, could help us understand the origin of dogs and the parts of our shared history that don’t seem to line up.

Perhaps someday we’ll even learn the answer to the most pressing question of all: “Who’s a good dog?”

Science, 2020 DOI: 10.1126/science.aba9572 (About DOIs).

KIONA N. SMITH  is a freelance science journalist at Ars Technica.

Trump admin’s pandemic surrender draws impassioned response from WHO
WHO officials were exasperated by Trump admin’s suggestion to give up on pandemic.

BETH MOLE - 10/27/2020, 

Enlarge / World Health Organization (WHO) Health Emergencies Program Director Michael Ryan (L) speaks past Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus during a daily press briefing on COVID-19 virus at the WHO headquarters in Geneva on March 9, 2020.

Top officials at the World Health Organization on Monday appeared at times exasperated, flabbergasted, and wearied as they confronted comments by White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows suggesting that the United States has given up trying to control the spread of the pandemic coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2.

“We’re not going to control the pandemic,” Meadows said in a CNN interview Sunday. Instead we will focus on “vaccines, therapeutics, and other mitigation areas,” he said. The comments spurred widespread uproar, which Meadows tried to quell Monday. But his clarification only reinforced his earlier comments.

“I mean, when we look at this, we’re going to defeat the virus. We’re not going to control it. We will try to contain it as best we can,” he told reporters outside the White House yesterday. He again emphasized the need for therapeutics and vaccines.
Dangerous

In a WHO press briefing Monday, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus spoke bluntly: “Giving up on control is dangerous.”

While Tedros agreed on the importance of therapeutics and a vaccine, he noted that so far, they are not yet available. As such, “control should also be part of the strategy,” he said. “The government should do its share and the citizens also should do their share. Otherwise, this virus is dangerous. If it’s let go freely, it can create havoc.”Advertisement

WHO officials made the point repeatedly during the press conference Monday, at times in impassioned and strained pleas given the current state of the pandemic. Last week, the WHO recorded the highest number of COVID-19 cases in the pandemic so far. The world is approaching 44 million cases and has recorded over 1.16 million deaths. Though many countries in the world are currently struggling with surges of new cases, the US stands out as one of the most ravaged, with 8.7 million cases and nearly 226,000 deaths.

The US is currently climbing to its third and highest peak in new cases yet. On Friday, the country logged its highest daily number of new cases in the pandemic, with 83,010, according to The COVID Tracking Project. The current seven-day rolling average is at nearly 70,000. As of Monday, nearly 43,000 people in the country were hospitalized with COVID-19, and the seven-day rolling average of daily deaths was nearly 800.
Protection

WHO officials have acknowledged many times that people generally are tired of efforts to try to control the virus—physical distancing, not visiting family, cancelling events. But, to put it frankly, the virus does not care, and ditching control efforts is a recipe for disaster.

What Meadows was basically suggesting—to not control, but to lessen the impacts of the virus—is to essentially allow the virus to spread among the healthy while trying to shield the most vulnerable. Protecting the most vulnerable is an “honorable objective,” WHO Executive Director Michael Ryan noted. But, “the difficulty arises in trying to actually achieve that goal.” This might work if, for instance, you can identify the most vulnerable people and they’re mostly in nursing homes. You might be able to shield them in that hypothetical situation, he says. But that's not the reality:

The vast majority of vulnerable people live amongst us in multigenerational households—the old, the young, the vulnerable people on chemotherapy, people with underlying conditions, people with diabetes and hypertension. They’re mums, they’re dads, they’re brothers, they’re sisters, they’re sons, they’re daughters. So, the best way to protect those individuals is to do as much as possible to reduce the transmission of this disease at community level.

In other words, the best way to protect the most vulnerable is to protect everyone—and control the virus. “We should not give up on trying to suppress transmission and control transmission,” Ryan added.
Tsunami of cases

He also offered a grim caution of what can happen when countries and governments do not try to control the virus. He noted that in April and March many places in the world, including some in the US, used “mitigation”—he used air quotes for this word—as their strategy and “emergency rooms were overwhelmed and we were rolling freezer trucks up to the back of hospitals,” he said. “That’s the reality of mitigating a disease in the face of a tsunami of cases. You run out of capacity to cope and that is the fear right now.”

The US is currently seeing a surge in hospitalizations, with some area hospitals and intensive care units overwhelmed and forced to open field hospitals.

Ryan’s sweeping response to Meadow’s comments was unusually impassioned for the typically steady WHO press conferences. At times, he was clearly frustrated; at times he was energized. At other points, Ryan seemed stunned and tired, letting out defeated sighs. Perhaps the lowest point in his response came when he acknowledged that convincing some people to follow control efforts appeared hopeless.

Not everyone accepts what we need to do to save lives and stop the pandemic, he acknowledged. “They don’t believe in this disease," Ryan said. "They don’t believe that we have a pandemic on our hands. How can you convince someone to do something if they don’t actually believe that there’s a problem. It’s truly impossible to think about this.”


BETH MOLE is Ars Technica’s health reporter. She’s interested in biomedical research, infectious disease, health policy and law, and has a Ph.D. in microbiology.

Trump’s website defaced with claim that Trump admin created coronavirus

Cryptocurrency scam said Trump involved in creating COVID and rigging election.

JON BRODKIN - 10/28/2020

Enlarge / President Trump's campaign website during its brief defacement.

President Trump's website last night was briefly defaced by hackers who pitched a cryptocurrency scam and claimed that Trump has "criminal involvement" with election manipulation and that his administration was involved in creating the coronavirus.

Donaldjtrump.com is back to normal now, seeking donations and urging Trump supporters to register to vote. The defacement reportedly lasted less than 30 minutes on Tuesday evening. Trump-campaign spokesperson Tim Murtaugh issued a statement saying the campaign is "working with law enforcement authorities to investigate the source of the attack. There was no exposure to sensitive data because none of it is actually stored on the site. The website has been restored."

The website during its defacement had Department of Justice and FBI logos above a typo-filled message that said:

this site was seized

The world has had enough of the fake-news spreaded daily by president donald j trump

it is time to allow the world to know truth.

multiple devices were compromised that gave full access to trump and relatives. most internal and secret conversations strictly classified information is exposed proving that the trump-gov is involved in the origin of the corona virus.

we have evidence that completely discredits mr trump as a president. proving his criminal involvement and cooperation with foreign actors manipulating the 2020 elections. the us citizens have no choice

Cryptocurrency scam

The message then asked people to vote, in a sense, by giving money in the form of monero, a cryptocurrency billed as a more private alternative to Bitcoin with "transactions [that] are confidential and untraceable." The Trump-website defacement said people can vote "yes, share the data" by giving to one monero address or "no, do not share the data" by giving to another.

"Today is the day—the whole world can decide if they want to know that truth or not. After the deadline we will compare the funds and execute the will of the world," the message said.

Journalist Gabriel Lorenzo Greschler captured screenshots and video of the website while it was defaced and shared them on Twitter:

"Though the defacement appeared to be part of a common cryptocurrency scam to get people to irreversibly donate money online, the incident took on added urgency one week before the election," The New York Times wrote. "Cybersecurity experts said that the incident could have been caused by tricking a website administrator into turning over their credentials, in what is known as a phishing attack, or by redirecting the campaign website to the hacker's own server. Intelligence agencies have been closely monitoring hacking groups, including teams backed by Iran and Russia, that have tried to break into election-related systems and have been involved in influence operations in recent weeks."

JON BRODKINJon is Ars Technica's senior IT reporter, covering the FCC and broadband, telecommunications, wireless technology, and more.

Someone leaked the COVID hospitalization data taken from the CDC

After a change in reporting procedure, daily updates vanished.

JOHN TIMMER - 10/31/2020

Enlarge

Earlier this year, the federal government made a major change to how data on the pandemic is reported, taking the aggregation of hospital data away from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and shifting it into the CDC's parent organization, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

At the time, there were worries that this represented an attempt to limit the public's ability to see how bad the pandemic was—worries that were reinforced when the data was no longer made public as it came in. But some recent reporting indicated that the change was primarily the work of White House Coronavirus Task Force Coordinator Deborah Birx, who wanted greater control over the data gathering and processing. Still, regardless of the motivation, the data flowing in to HHS only made its way out to the public via weekly summaries.

Until now. Someone has leaked the daily reports to NPR, which found that the reports weren't all that they could be, but they could still be useful for public health experts.

That data the daily reports contain is focused on the hospital's capacity to treat COVID-19 patients. These include things like the availability of hospital beds, ICU capacity, and ventilator use. This can help track the changes in pandemic-driven healthcare needs in real time; for example, NPR notes that ICU bed occupancy has increased by about 15 percent in the past month, tracking a steady rise in positive tests (although it's probably too soon for it to track the current surge in cases). While the weekly summaries would allow a coarse look at how the pandemic is stressing our hospital system, they're probably too coarse to provide the sort of detailed analysis that researchers and public health officials need to study and understand COVID-19's progression.

So who does get access to the daily reports? According to NPR, the circulation is limited to "a few dozen government staffers from HHS and its agencies." Only a single member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, Admiral Brett Giroir, appears to get the material. Oddly, this would seem to indicate that Dr. Birx, who spearheaded the changes due to her desire for the data, doesn't have direct access to it.
States

About 800 state health officials can also access daily reports, but only for their own states by default. HHS indicated to NPR that these officials have to ask for permission to see the data from other states. This creates a potential hurdle for officials in states like New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut, where a large overlapping metropolitan area compels careful coordination.

Health experts shown the reports by NPR indicated there are two issues here. The first is that the report doesn't provide background on different hospitals' capabilities. Some smaller hospitals might strain to care for patients when ICU capacity is down to 10 percent; large ones may be able to handle that with ease. The second issue is that the daily access to changes in hospital availability could help health officials target local behavior, both through targeted limits on activities and simply by using them to motivate the public to take the pandemic more seriously.

Making the daily data available, as mentioned above, would allow researchers to better analyze the pandemic's impact on health resources. And that, obviously, could potentially help HHS itself, as independent researchers could perform analyses that HHS doesn't have the staff for or hasn't considered.

Still, while it's unfortunate that the government isn't making this data available to the public, the data is still being maintained should the policy change in the future.


John became Ars Technica's science editor in 2007 after spending 15 years doing biology research at places like Berkeley and Cornell.

Eta forms, tying Atlantic record for most tropical systems in a season

Eta to produce flooding in Central America, then may turn north

ERIC BERGER - 11/1/2020

Enlarge / Tropical Storm Eta's satellite appearance on Sunday morning, Nov. 1.

Late on Saturday night, the National Hurricane Center upgraded a tropical depression in the Caribbean Sea to become Tropical Storm Eta.

This is the 28th named storm of the 2020 Atlantic hurricane season, and ties 2005 for the most tropical storms and hurricanes to be recorded in a single season. The Atlantic "basin" covers the Atlantic ocean north of the equator, as well as the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean Sea.

Eta poses a distinct threat to land. Although the storm's track remains ultimately uncertain, Eta should move somewhat due west for the next few days, likely strengthening to become a hurricane before landfall in Nicaragua by Tuesday evening or Wednesday. As it will be a slow-moving, meandering storm, Eta will produce a prodigious amount of rainfall, with up to 30 inches possible over parts of Nicaragua and Honduras. This will lead to significant flooding, with landslides and swollen rivers.


FURTHER READING Forecasters predict a busy Atlantic hurricane season

After this time it is unclear whether Eta will dissipate over Central America, or get drawn north or northeast back into the Caribbean Sea. Under this scenario, Eta might perhaps threaten Cuba or Florida in about one week's time. In this bizarre, seemingly unending 2020 hurricane season anything seems possible.
Comparing to 2005

The last named storm of the 2005 season was named Zeta, which is the sixth letter of the Greek alphabet, because only 27 named storms were identified during the season. A 28th tropical storm was characterized after the season, in a subsequent analysis of data.

So far, this season has lacked the extremely high-end impact storms like 2005 produced. That year saw Hurricane Katrina, which is the costliest Atlantic hurricane of all time, with estimated damages of $125 billion. Wilma (7th costliest) and Rita (12th) also formed during the 2005 season. By contrast, this year's costliest storm has been Hurricane Laura, with an estimated $14 billion in damages.


FURTHER READING Science and steely nerves spared Houston from a nightmare hurricane evacuation

Another measure of overall activity is Accumulated Cyclone Energy, which factors in the longevity and overall intensity of storms. The years 1933 and 2005 rank atop this list over the last 150 years, with ACE values above 250. The 2020 season has a value of about 140, nearly 40 percent above a "normal" Atlantic season.

The 2020 season has made up for this with concentrated misery—five named storms made landfall in Louisiana this year. This included the aforementioned Laura, followed by another hurricane, Delta, making landfall about 20 km away only three weeks later.

So is this it? The official end of the Atlantic hurricane season comes on Nov. 30. However, the 2005 season kept on churning out storms, with four more forming after November 1, including Zeta, which formed three days after Christmas in the open Atlantic and persisted through January 6. The next named storm of this year, should it form, would be named Theta as forecasters get deeper into the Greek alphabet.

Climate scientists will be studying this season for some time. Generally, scientists think that although there may not necessarily be more tropical storms and hurricanes in a warmer world, the storms that do form will be more intense, and produce more rainfall. They also expect that with warmer seas, hurricane seasons may expand beyond their traditional start and end dates.

Eric Berger is the senior space editor at Ars Technica, covering everything from astronomy to private space to NASA. A certified meteorologist, Eric lives in Houston.

Virus Hunters makes a strong case that COVID-19 is just the wake-up call

Ecologist/epidemiologist Chris Golden on looking for patterns that cause pandemics.

JENNIFER OUELLETTE - 11/1/2020, 11:52 AM

Enlarge / Scientists around the world are working not just to stamp out the current COVID-19 pandemic, but are also racing to prevent an even worse outbreak in the future.

As much damage as the current coronavirus pandemic has inflicted on the world at large—killing over 230,000 American citizens alone so far, and nearly 1.2 million people worldwide—scientists know there are other viruses lurking out there, one of which could be just as contagious as COVID-19, yet much more deadly. And they know we need to be prepared for such an outbreak.

That's the central message of Virus Hunters, a new documentary special premiering tonight on the National Geographic channel. The documentary follows award-winning ABC News foreign correspondent James Longman and Harvard ecologist and epidemiologist Chris Golden as they travel to hot spots around the world: Liberia, Thailand, Turkey, and (yes) the United States. It's a companion piece to a special issue of National Geographic magazine released in mid-October devoted to COVID-19.

A National Geographic fellow, Golden's interest in studying the ways in which environmental change affects human health dates back to childhood, when he used to go on nature walks with his mother. "I saw the way that she responded to nature, this connection between mental health and the outdoors, and I ended up pursuing this all throughout my educational experience," he told Ars. After earning an undergraduate degree from Harvard—creating his own major out of a mix of courses in ecology, medical anthropology, and development studies—he earned his PhD in epidemiology and ecology from the University of California, Berkeley.

Golden's lifelong obsession with Madagascar—"It all started with a National Geographic issue with lemurs on the cover"—led to that region becoming a central focus of his research and provided the motivation behind creating the nonprofit Madagascar Health and Environmental Research (MAHERY). Living with local communities, "I began seeing the forest through their eyes," he said. "I realized that there was such a strong interconnection between the integrity and health of the surrounding environment and the health of local communities." We sat down with Golden to learn more about his experiences filming Virus Hunters—in the midst of a global pandemic, no less.


Ars: This is an especially timely documentary special, given the current COVID-19 pandemic, but epidemiologists and other scientists like yourself have been warning about these kinds of spillover events for a very long time.

Golden: That's absolutely right. There have been researchers working at the front lines for decades that have really been invested in characterizing and chronicling all of the types of viruses, bacteria, pathogens that exist within wildlife communities, because they know that these are the exact types of things that could spill over into human populations. COVID-19 isn't a surprise because this is the exact same way that SARS, MERS, HIV, Ebola, and swine flu started as well. This kind of mechanism for pathogen transmission is nothing new. Even novel corona viruses are things that the Department of Defense and the USDA in the United States have warned about as threats to national security. It's really just a failure of action and preparation on our side, because we know these threats exist.
Enlarge / Harvard University ecologist and epidemiologist Chris Golden.
National Geographic

Ars: What was it like filming a documentary about deadly viruses during an actual global pandemic?

Golden: It was very uneasy at the beginning. I mean, I had barely left my condo to even go down the street to the grocery store, by the time I was leaving to film this. Travel is a risk factor, although I don't think that is as much the top risk factor that we're facing here in the US. Once we arrived in these places, there were so many better protocols in place. As an example, we arrived in Liberia, and everyone leaving the plane was temperature checked. Everyone was wearing a mask, there were hand-washing stations in front of every building in the entire city, and there was enormous compliance with all of the public health recommendations. This was one of the reasons why they've had less than 200 cases in their country since the beginning of the pandemic: they started acting at the end of January. Because of their tragic past experience with Ebola, they knew to take it seriously and they acted appropriately.

Ars: I was struck by just how many viruses with spillover potential seem to stem from bats in particular. Why are bats such major vectors?

Golden: There are really two factors at play. One is that there is slightly more than 6,000 mammal species globally, and one-fourth of those or more are bat species. So even from a statistical probability standpoint, these viruses are more likely to come from bats than any other animals, because there are more bat species than many other broad types of animals. Secondly, from a physiological and evolutionary standpoint, bats are the only mammals who have evolved flight, and through that evolutionary process, they've also developed really interesting immune systems that are resistant to viruses in many cases. So this allows for viral replication within their own bodies, and to allow viral spillover to happen without actually damaging them in the first place.

Also, because of the way that they roost, because of the way that they live, their disease dynamics are very easy to spread within their own colonies. You can then have modification or even mutation of viruses or diseases within a bat colony. Bats are also unique from an ecological and behavioral standpoint. They are not animals that live exclusively within a forest or within remote areas. They have adapted quite well to urban living, to living in barns, to living in agricultural fields. And so there's quite a bit of human interface there. It makes it more likely that a virus can jump from bats to humans.

Ars: Was there anything that particularly surprised you during your travels?

Golden: One of the most surprising days for me was the day that we visited the bush meat market in Monrovia, Liberia. That is a completely different system from the work that I do in Madagascar. I've been there 20 years. There's really no market for wildlife in that country, and going to Monrovia and seeing this incredibly urban area flooded with meat from all other parts of the country—to see all the sellers providing primates or deer or various forms of ungulates and porcupine and cane rats—it was mind-blowing for me to see the extent of species diversity, the demand of people who really wanted to eat this, and all of this being in urban markets.

Enlarge / Jim Desmond, a disease and wildlife interventionist, is another scientist featured in Virus Hunters.

National Geographic

Ars: Watching that segment, I thought about how human behavior and entrenched cultural traditions—even those born out of necessity—can make it more difficult to control the spread of deadly viruses. How does one address those kinds of variables?

Golden: I think that this question is really important, but it has a nuanced answer. In many areas around the world, these types of markets serve a critical food security function. So to disband them, or outlaw them, will have severe ramifications on the health and well-being of local people, both from an economic standpoint and from a nutritional standpoint. They are driven to these activities out of poverty, not because it is a luxury food item or they are trying to make a buck. So to come down hard on bush meat hunting in that type of location will have severe health consequences that could really make a zoonotic disease pale in comparison, in terms of the number of people who become sick or die from nutritional impacts. However, there are lots of places where it is driven by luxury goods, economic demand. In that case, I think you could ban [such activities] without the same sort of ethical consequences.

Ars: In the final segment, you visit Wisconsin and talk to a deer hunter, among others, about how such diseases are just as likely to emerge in the US. There is a tendency among Americans in particular to assume that such risk is limited to foreign countries.

Golden: The decision to include that segment is really driven by the fact that these viruses do not need to pop up in remote or exotic locations. They could most certainly happen right here on our own soil. If you look at the 1918 flu, the best possible guess for where that originated is actually in Kansas. It just takes one instance of an animal virus spilling over into humans for it to begin. The entire segment on deer to me was fascinating. It's a part of America that I have not often gotten the chance to visit.

In Wisconsin, they kill over 400,000 deer each year. That one hunter that we interviewed said he gets roughly six deer a year there—maybe 50 pounds each, of meat from each, not including entrails, bones, and whatnot. That is 300 pounds of meat, a pound of deer meat a day for his family. That is a major input into his food system. It really mirrors a lot of the work that I'm doing in Madagascar in an almost bizarre alternate universe type of way. It is this cultural connection, this food connection to wildlife. The disease we were looking at wasn't necessarily one that we were majorly concerned about for zoonotic transmission, but "bush meat" isn't something that is just happening elsewhere. There is an enormous market and a strong tradition of hunting in our own country.

Ars: The main message of Virus Hunters is that COVID-19, as bad as it is, functions as a wake-up call. There could be equally contagious, far more deadly viruses lurking out there with the potential to spill over to the human population. Are you optimistic about the future, or does it seem pretty bleak from your perspective?

Golden: I think that in my field, you have to stay hopeful, otherwise you'll get depressed. In the field of conservation biology, you end up writing these obituaries for so many natural systems, pristine systems, and it gets depressing sometimes. So I really try to stay hopeful that events like this can be transformative and that we can reorient our society around the things that matter, that we can focus on the health of the planet and the health of people. And that we can harness technology and research for propelling this reorientation.

Virus Hunters airs on Sunday, November 1, 2020, at 9pm/8pm Central on the National Geographic Channel.

JENNIFER OUELLETTE is a senior writer at Ars Technica with a particular focus on where science meets culture, covering everything from physics and related interdisciplinary topics to her favorite films and TV series. Jennifer lives in Los Angeles.EMAIL jennifer.ouellette@arstechnica.com // TWITTER @JenLucPiquant