OK, concentrate: How much of your brain are you using right now—or at any moment in time?

If you said 10%, you’ve repeated a popular, but inaccurate, myth.

The origin of the tale is murky but might be rooted in an outdated theory about the structure of the brain that was repeated in a bestselling self-help book more than 80 years ago.

Today, the trope is still trotted out in cartoons, books and movies.

In the 2014 thriller “Lucy,” a scientist repeats the 10% claim while speculating about the promise of accessing a larger portion of the mind. The 2011 film “Limitless,” about a struggling writer, pegs the fraction at a slightly more encouraging 20%. And the 1991 comedy “Defending Your Life,” about a deceased man’s efforts to prove his worth in the afterlife, lowers it to a demoralizing 3% to 5%.

Sorry, Hollywood. Science doesn’t buy it.

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Five times a day, tens of millions of phones buzz with notifications from an app called Muslim Pro, reminding users it’s time to pray. While Muslims in Los Angeles woke Thursday to a dawn notification that read, “Fajr at 5:17 AM,” users in Sri Lanka were minutes away from getting a ping telling them it was time for Isha, or the night prayer.

The app’s Qibla compass quickly orients devices toward the Kaaba in Mecca, Saudi Arabia — which Muslims face when praying. When prayers are done, the in-app Quran lets users pick up reading exactly where they left off. A counter tallies the days of fasting during the holy month of Ramadan. Listings guide users to halal food in their area.

These features make it easier to practice the many daily rituals prescribed in Islam, turning Muslim Pro into the most popular Muslim app in the world, according to the app’s maker, Singapore-based BitsMedia.

But revelations about the app’s data collection and sales practices have left some users wondering if the convenience is worth the risk.

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⚡️ Muslims reel over a prayer app that sold user data: ‘A betrayal from within our own community’https://t.co/8vCe8xDPLO

— Los Angeles Times (@latimes) November 24, 2020

A group in France, led by veterinary scientist Dominique Grandjean at the National Veterinary School of Alfort near Paris, posted its work3 on the preprint server bioRxiv in June. The researchers, who included Sarkis, trained 8 dogs to detect COVID-19 in 198 sweat samples, around half of which were from people with the disease. When these were hidden in a row of negative samples, the dogs identified the positive samples 83–100% of the time. The paper does not say how well the dogs identified negative test results. The research is now under review at a journal, but Grandjean says the process has not been easy. “To publish papers on detection dogs is very difficult because most reviewers do not know anything about working dogs,” he says.

The data in that study look promising, says Fyodor Urnov, a gene-editing scientist who is working on COVID testing at the University of California, Berkeley. But he would like to see larger data sets on how well dogs identify positive and negative samples. He also notes that there is variation in how well individual dogs perform. In Grandjean’s study, for example, 2 dogs identified 68 out of 68 positive samples, whereas one missed 10 out of 57 cases.

Groups need to boost their sample sizes before the wider scientific community can evaluate how useful the dogs might be, agrees James Logan, an infectious-disease researcher at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine who is training and studying COVID-19 dogs, including Storm, Maple and Asher. “It’s important not to go out too early with grand claims and small data sets,” he says.

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Can dogs smell COVID? Here’s what the science says

Canines seem to detect coronavirus infections with remarkable accuracy, but researchers say large-scale studies are needed before the approach is scaled up.https://t.co/0XgMmjdzRf pic.twitter.com/td34nAxJKW

— Rahim Azizian (@AzizianRahim) November 23, 2020

The call was tense, the message discouraging. Moncef Slaoui, the head of the Trump administration’s effort to quickly produce a vaccine for the coronavirus, was on the phone at 6 p.m. on Aug. 25 to tell the upstart biotech firm Moderna that it had to slow the final stage of testing its vaccine in humans.

Moderna’s chief executive, Stéphane Bancel, a French biochemical engineer, recognized the implication. In the race to quell the pandemic, he said, “every day mattered.” Now his company, which had yet to bring a single product to market, faced a delay of up to three weeks. Pfizer, the global pharmaceutical giant that was busy testing a similar vaccine candidate and promising initial results by October, would take the obvious lead.

“It was the hardest decision I made this year,” Mr. Bancel said.

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Your Sunday must-read is this thriller about the US government, a multinational, and start-up racing to make a COVID-19 vaccine.

It totally shot adrenaline and pride into my American veins and is a crazy-exciting read https://t.co/Ek5JxO3vNe

— Morgan Lee (@Mepaynl) November 22, 2020

The latest coronavirus problem in sports isn’t that far from the problem that a lot of Americans have: How can you tell if that’s a cold, or Covid? Is that sniffle allergies, or a sign of a deadly pathogen? Is that headache just a headache, or…?

One of the things that makes coronavirus a wily foe for epidemiologists is that it has a really long list of possible symptoms—including none at all.

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Your nose is runny, you're tired, your head hurts.

It's a problem facing both NFL teams and everyday Americans deciding if they should go to work or send a child to school. Is it a cold? Flu? Allergies? Or Covid? With @louiseradnofsky: https://t.co/CSGc8TCpIc

— Andrew Beaton (@andrewlbeaton) November 20, 2020

We weren’t set up well to deal with this virus in Missouri. We have the worst funding in the country for public health, and a lot of the things we’ve needed to fight the spread of covid are things we should have had in place 10 years ago. We don’t have an emergency manager. We don’t have anyone to handle HR, public information, or IT, so that’s all been me. We didn’t get extra funding for covid until last month. I’m young and I’m motivated, and I took this job in January because public health is my absolute love. It doesn’t pay well, but would I rather be treating people who already have a disease or helping to prevent it? That’s what we do. We help take care of people. At one point this summer, I worked 90 days straight trying to hold this virus at bay, and my whole staff was basically like that.

We hired 10 contact tracers to track the spread, starting in August, but the real problem we keep running into is community cooperation. We call everyone that’s had a positive test and say: “Hey, this is your local health department. We’re trying to interrupt disease transmission, and we’d love your help.” It’s nothing new. We do the same thing for measles, mumps, and tick-borne diseases, and I’d say 99 percent of the time before covid, people were receptive. They wanted to stop an outbreak, but now it’s all politicized. Every time you get on the phone, you’re hoping you don’t get cussed at. Probably half of the people we call are skeptical or combative. They refuse to talk. They deny their own positive test results. They hang up. They say they’re going to hire a lawyer. They give you fake people they’ve spent time with and fake numbers. They lie and tell you they’re quarantining alone at home, but then in the background you can hear the beeping of a scanner at Walmart.

I’ve stayed up a lot of nights trying to understand where this whole disconnect comes from. I love living in this county. I know in my heart these are good people, but it’s like we’re living on different planets. I have people in my own family who believe covid is a conspiracy and our doctors are getting paid off. I’ve done press conferences and dozens of Facebook Live videos to talk about the real science. Even with all the other failures happening, that’s the one thing we should be celebrating: better treatments, nurses and doctors on the front lines, promising news about vaccines. But the more I talk about the facts, the more it seems to put a target on my back.

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“I do have an agenda. I want disease transmission to go down. I want to keep this community safe. I want fewer people to die. Why is that controversial?” https://t.co/nbEhwgEK4P

— Colby Itkowitz (@ColbyItkowitz) November 18, 2020

Ask climate scientists how fast the world’s oceans are creeping upward, and many will say 3.2 millimeters per year—a figure enshrined in the last Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, from 2014. But the number, based on satellite measurements taken since the early 1990s, is a long-term average. In fact, the global rate varied so much over that period that it was hard to say whether it was holding steady or accelerating.

It was accelerating, big time. Faster melting of Greenland’s ice has pushed the rate to 4.8 millimeters per year, according to a 10-year average compiled for Science by Benjamin Hamlington, an ocean scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and head of the agency’s sea level change team. “The [Greenland] mass loss has clearly kicked into higher gear,” agrees Felix Landerer, a JPL sea level scientist. With the help of new data, new models of vertical land motion, and—this month—a new radar satellite, oceanographers are sharpening their picture of how fast, and where, the seas are gobbling up the land.

Hamlington and colleagues first reported signs of the speedup in 2018 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Since then, they and others have become more confident about the trends. In a 2019 study in Nature Climate Change, a group led by Sönke Dangendorf, a physical oceanographer at Old Dominion University, used tide gauge readings that predate satellite records to show seas have risen 20 centimeters since 1900. The team’s data show that, after a period of global dam building in the 1950s that held back surface water and slowed sea level rise, it began to accelerate in the late 1960s—not the late 1980s, as many climate scientists assumed, Dangendorf says. “That was surprising,” because the main drivers of sea level rise—the thermal expansion of ocean water from global warming, together with melting glaciers and ice sheets—were thought to have kicked in later.

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Seas are rising even faster than scientists previously believed. With the help of new data, new models, and—this month—a new radar satellite, oceanographers are sharpening their picture of just how fast. https://t.co/YYPI2kLMKb

— News from Science (@NewsfromScience) November 18, 2020

The promising news that not just one but two coronavirus vaccines were more than 90 percent effective in early results has buoyed hopes that an end to the pandemic is in sight.

But even if the vaccines are authorized soon by federal regulators — the companies developing them have said they expect to apply soon — only a sliver of the American public will be able to get one by the end of the year. The two companies, Pfizer and Moderna, have estimated they will have 45 million doses, or enough to vaccinate 22.5 million Americans, by January.

Industry analysts and company executives are optimistic that hundreds of millions of doses will be made by next spring. But the companies — backed with billions of dollars in federal money — will have to overcome hurdles they’ve encountered in the early days of making vaccines. Moderna’s and Pfizer’s vaccines use new technology that has never been approved for widespread use. They are ramping up into the millions for the first time. Other challenges include promptly securing raw vaccine ingredients and mastering the art of creating consistent, high-quality batches.

“The biology of scaling manufacturing is a very temperamental activity, and there were many, many different attempts over the months until we cracked it,” said Paul Mango, deputy chief of staff for policy at the Department of Health and Human Services.

Read it all.

The federal government once set a goal of 300 million vaccine doses by the end of the year. But the tricky nature of manufacturing vaccines means they are nowhere near that goal. https://t.co/QH5fvoqJsj

— NYT Business (@nytimesbusiness) November 18, 2020

Western nations face a big challenge in fighting the Covid-19 pandemic: Ten months into the health crisis, they still know little about where people are catching the virus.
The problem is becoming more acute as new cases are breaking records in the U.S. and Europe and pressure grows on authorities to impose targeted restrictions on places that are spreading the virus, rather than broad confinement measures that are wreaking havoc on the economy.

In Germany, authorities say they don’t know where 75% of people who currently test positive for the coronavirus got it. In Austria, the figure stands at 77%. In Spain, the health ministry said that it was able to identify the origin of only 7% of infections registered in the last week of October. In France and Italy, only some 20% of new cases have been linked to people who previously tested positive.

Jay Varma, senior adviser for public health in the New York City mayor’s office, said 10% of the city’s infections are due to travel, 5% from gatherings, and another 5% from institutional settings such as nursing homes.

“The vast majority of the remainder—somewhere probably around 50% or more—we don’t have a way to directly attribute their source of infection,” Mr. Varma said. “And that’s a concern.”

Read it all.

Western nations face a big challenge in fighting the Covid-19 pandemic: Ten months into the health crisis, they still know little about where people are catching the virus https://t.co/FBQyXUnYjd

— The Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) November 16, 2020

How long might immunity to the coronavirus last? Years, maybe even decades, according to a new study — the most hopeful answer yet to a question that has shadowed plans for widespread vaccination.

Eight months after infection, most people who have recovered still have enough immune cells to fend off the virus and prevent illness, the new data show. A slow rate of decline in the short term suggests, happily, that these cells may persist in the body for a very, very long time to come.

The research, published online, has not been peer-reviewed nor published in a scientific journal. But it is the most comprehensive and long-ranging study of immune memory to the coronavirus to date.

“That amount of memory would likely prevent the vast majority of people from getting hospitalized disease, severe disease, for many years,” said Shane Crotty, a virologist at the La Jolla Institute of Immunology who co-led the new study.

Read it all.

People who have recovered from the coronavirus may have immunity that lasts years, maybe even decades, according to a new study — the most hopeful answer yet to a question that has shadowed plans for widespread vaccination. https://t.co/9k6uPS3vfo

— The New York Times (@nytimes) November 17, 2020

With a third surge of the Covid-19 pandemic hitting the U.S., many public-health authorities are warning the coronavirus is now so widespread that it will take pervasive new measures to contain it.

New infections surpassed 177,224 on Friday, setting a daily record that eclipsed the highest daily case counts of previous peaks in the spring and summer. The number of new infections was lower Saturday at 166,555, while new deaths numbered nearly 1,300, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. The number of people hospitalized with Covid-19, meanwhile, reached 69,455 on Saturday, according to the Covid Tracking Project.

In earlier surges, infections were concentrated in cities such as New York and Chicago, or populous states like Florida and Texas. Many of the outbreaks then were linked to travelers returning from overseas or so-called superspreading events such as conferences, weddings and rallies.

Now, it is everywhere. People are becoming infected not just at big gatherings, but when they let their guard down, such as by not wearing a mask, while going about their daily routines or in smaller social settings that they thought of as safe—often among their own families or trusted friends.

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In the third Covid surge, people are becoming infected not just at big gatherings but during daily routines or in smaller social settings they thought of as safe. https://t.co/5IGEZdkNeG via @WSJ

— David Luhnow (@davidluhnow) November 15, 2020

As churches rose to the challenge of moving services online amid Covid-19 restrictions this year, one curate has gone step further in efforts to engage with young members of her congregation – by taking worship inside a video game.

The Revd Jo Burden, who recently joined West Hereford Team Ministry, in the Diocese of Hereford, came up with the idea of reaching out to children on a platform they were familiar with – Minecraft.

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A @WestHereford church has brought worship to where children are – inside a video game.

Rev Jo Burden has asked young people to create something in @Minecraft that reflects the theme of each Sunday service.https://t.co/w4rHp3ov7X

— The Church of England (@churchofengland) November 12, 2020

With a COVID-19 vaccine drawing closer, public health officials across the country are gearing up for the biggest vaccination effort in U.S. history — a monumental undertaking that must distribute hundreds of millions of doses, prioritize who’s first in line and ensure that people who get the initial shot return for the necessary second one.

The push could begin as early as next month, when federal officials say the first vaccine may be authorized for emergency use and immediately deployed to high-risk groups, such as health care workers.

“The cavalry is coming,” Dr. Anthony Fauci said Thursday on ABC’s “Good Morning America.” He said he hopes shots will be available to all Americans in April, May and June.

Read it all.

With a COVID-19 vaccine drawing closer, public health officials across the country are gearing up for the biggest vaccination effort in U.S. history. It will be an undertaking to distribute hundreds of millions of doses and determine who’s first in line. https://t.co/pPXGiRtJqc

— The Associated Press (@AP) November 12, 2020

Results from a new Cleveland Clinic-led study suggest that melatonin, a hormone that regulates the sleep-wake cycle and is commonly used as an over-the-counter sleep aid, may be a viable treatment option for COVID-19.

As COVID-19 continues to spread throughout the world, particularly with cases rising during what some have termed the “fall surge,” repurposing drugs already approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for new therapeutic purposes continues to be the most efficient and cost-effective approach to treat or prevent the disease.

According to the findings published today in PLOS Biology, a novel artificial intelligence platform developed by Lerner Research Institute researchers to identify possible drugs for COVID-19 repurposing has revealed melatonin as a promising candidate.

Analysis of patient data from Cleveland Clinic’s COVID-19 registry also revealed that melatonin usage was associated with a nearly 30 percent reduced likelihood of testing positive for SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19) after adjusting for age, race, smoking history and various disease comorbidities. Notably, the reduced likelihood of testing positive for the virus increased from 30 to 52 percent for African Americans when adjusted for the same variables.

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Lerner Research Institute News – Cleveland Clinic Researchers Use “Big Data” Approach to Identify Melatonin as Possible COVID-19 Treatment https://t.co/dljLfmHJEg via @CCLRI

— Feixiong Cheng (@FeixiongCheng) November 10, 2020

Vaccines work by stimulating a person’s immune system. One traditional approach is to inject a weakened version of the dangerous virus. That’s the way we now fend off measles, mumps, rubella and chickenpox. Another method is to use a version of the virus or a part of the virus that has been totally killed.

The success of the Pfizer vaccine means that the plague year of 2020 will be remembered as the time when traditional vaccines began to be supplanted by genetic vaccines. Instead of delivering tiny and safe doses of the virus itself, these new vaccines deliver a piece of genetic coding that will instruct human cells to produce, on their own, components of a targeted virus. These safe components can then stimulate the patient’s immune system.

It is another wondrous miracle from a biotech revolution in which knowledge of genetic coding will become as important as digital coding and molecules will become the new microchips.

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“It is another wondrous miracle from a biotech revolution in which knowledge of genetic coding .. as important as digital coding & molecules will become the new microchips.” ⁦@washingtonpost⁩ ⁦@pfizer⁩ #COVID19 #Vaccine ⁦@BioNTech_Group⁩ https://t.co/AcBu40iSPS

— Christina Ayiotis (@christinayiotis) November 10, 2020

Pfizer and partner BioNTech said Monday that their vaccine against Covid-19 was strongly effective, exceeding expectations with results that are likely to be met with cautious excitement — and relief — in the face of the global pandemic.

The vaccine is the first to be tested in the United States to generate late-stage data. The companies said an early analysis of the results showed that individuals who received two injections of the vaccine three weeks apart experienced more than 90% fewer cases of symptomatic Covid-19 than those who received a placebo. For months, researchers have cautioned that a vaccine that might only be 60% or 70% effective.

The Phase 3 study is ongoing and additional data could affect results….

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BREAKING: Covid-19 vaccine from Pfizer and BioNTech is strongly effective, early data from large trial indicate https://t.co/mPdGZj8OpE

— STAT (@statnews) November 9, 2020

Colleagues quietly scoffed when Alessandra Devoto, a plant biologist, started dedicating her time to researching the medicinal properties of a roadside weed. After years of study, however, she appears to have proved them wrong.

Scientists have found that Arabidopsis thaliana, also known as mouse-ear cress or thale cress, stops the growth of breast cancer without damaging the healthy cells. It could help the development of chemotherapy treatments without side-effects.

“The plant is very much like the Cinderella of the medicinal plant world — no one thought it was so special, but it has shown its true colours,” Professor Devoto, from Royal Holloway, University of London, said. “Everyone knows someone who has gone through chemotherapy and the severe side-effects it causes. This skinny little weed is a bit of a superhero, it stops the cancer cells but causes no other damage.”

It is about 20cm high and belongs to the cabbage family, though bears little resemblance.

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Plant biologist Alessandra Devoto and a group of scientists have found that thale cress stops the growth of breast cancer without damaging the healthy cells. It could help the development of chemotherapy treatments without side-effects https://t.co/SRYt1v6uzB

— The Times (@thetimes) October 30, 2020

Asymptomatic people who are infected with Covid-19 exhibit, by definition, no discernible physical symptoms of the disease. They are thus less likely to seek out testing for the virus, and could unknowingly spread the infection to others.

But it seems those who are asymptomatic may not be entirely free of changes wrought by the virus. MIT researchers have now found that people who are asymptomatic may differ from healthy individuals in the way that they cough. These differences are not decipherable to the human ear. But it turns out that they can be picked up by artificial intelligence.

In a paper published recently in the IEEE Journal of Engineering in Medicine and Biology, the team reports on an AI model that distinguishes asymptomatic people from healthy individuals through forced-cough recordings, which people voluntarily submitted through web browsers and devices such as cellphones and laptops.

The researchers trained the model on tens of thousands of samples of coughs, as well as spoken words. When they fed the model new cough recordings, it accurately identified 98.5 percent of coughs from people who were confirmed to have Covid-19, including 100 percent of coughs from asymptomatics — who reported they did not have symptoms but had tested positive for the virus.

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"A user could log in daily, cough into their phone, and instantly get information on whether they might be infected & therefore should confirm with a formal test."https://t.co/IUfYDtNZ4E#COVID19 #CovidCollab #coronavirus #SARSCoV2 #AI #ML #MedTwitter #HealthTech #crowdsource

— Polyplexus.com (@polyplexors) October 29, 2020

In Dawkins’s grand vision the world faced a dualistic split between the party of enlightened liberal atheism and backward authoritarian theism. His call was for a public movement of atheists to rally and mobilize into an open political bloc against religion. This suggested that the War on Terror should more rightly be reconceived as a War on Religion. In this way, scientific liberalism became for Dawkins a way to crusade against multiculturalism in favor of a liberal, scientific monoculture. Once religion had withered away and disappeared, humans would be free to enjoy freedom defined not as serious religious or spiritual pluralism, but as exercising various banal market freedoms.

Dawkins never seriously grappled with the tension between his avowals of the triumph of liberalism and his decidedly illiberal views on the religions constituting nearly every traditional human culture. Instead, for Dawkins the advent of a liberal, materialist atheism would mean a decline in world violence and a rise in social harmony. After all, Dawkins noted, “individual atheists may do evil things” but “they don’t do evil things in the name of atheism” and thus no war had been “fought in the name of atheism.”[5]

In other words, a liberal, atheist perpetual peace was on the horizon. At the same time the pages of The God Delusion expressed a unique, implicit justification for the War on Terror being waged all around Dawkins as he wrote. While he had believed he was popularizing the Darwinian science of memes, he had in fact joined in the construction of a culture for his fellow humans to inhabit. This was the varied scientistic culture of the War on Terror—truly a house with many rooms in it.

Read it all.

Scientism and Civilizational Rallying: Dawkins and the New Atheists
by Jason Blakelyhttps://t.co/SYrPvQr3ps

— Church Life Journal (@ChurchLifeND) October 28, 2020

The experimental COVID-19 vaccine codeveloped by the U.S.’s Pfizer, Germany’s BioNTech, and China’s Fosun Pharmaceuticals may reach market as early as this December, according to the chairman of Fosun Group.

“Once the vaccine is proved to be safe and effective [after trial results are posted in November], the vaccine will be made available in the market by December [2020] or January next year,” Guo Guangchang, chair of the parent company of Fosun Pharmaceuticals, said Tuesday at the Fortune Global Forum.

Read it all.

Chinese partner says Pfizer COVID vaccine may reach market by December https://t.co/XHkav6eJXf pic.twitter.com/faAMwRD5Wh

— WBMN Groovin' 24/7 (@RadioBlackOn) October 27, 2020

The starring role that China plays in this drama makes understanding its general trajectory—from the economy to domestic politics and technology development to energy policy—of immense interest and import to the world, and particularly for its peer competitor the United States.

So what kind of China should be expected by 2025? That singular question animated this effort to forecast the country’s path forward over the medium term.

Our simple answer: A China that will be near-majority middle class for the first time, with increasing technological parity with Silicon Valley and a less carbon-intensive energy landscape, all under the aegis of a stronger Xi Jinping and his vision of governance. Achieving these outcomes will require trade-offs, in this case a China that will likely redouble on domestic priorities and moderate its appetite for global adventurism.

This view of a more capable yet more outwardly cautious China is based on a composite of four scenarios across specific functional areas, bounded by the timeframe through 2025. It is also predicated on several macro assumptions and key factors that are likely to determine China’s behavior over that time period. In other words, this forecast exists within a defined scope, the elements of which are explained below.

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Over the last half a decade, Russian state-sponsored hackers have triggered blackouts in Ukraine, released history’s most destructive computer worm, and stolen and leaked emails from Democratic targets in an effort to help elect Donald Trump. In that same stretch, one particular group of Kremlin-controlled hackers has gained a reputation for a very different habit: walking right up to the edge of cybersabotage—sometimes with hands-on-the-switches access to US critical infrastructure—and stopping just short.

Last week the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency published an advisory warning that a group known as Berserk Bear—or alternately Energetic Bear, TEMP.Isotope, and Dragonfly—had carried out a broad hacking campaign against US state, local, territorial, and tribal government agencies, as well aviation sector targets. The hackers breached the networks of at least two of those victims. The news of those intrusions, which was reported earlier last week by the news outlet Cyberscoop, presents the troubling but unconfirmed possibility that Russia may be laying the groundwork to disrupt the 2020 election with its access to election-adjacent local government IT systems.

In the context of Berserk Bear’s long history of US intrusions, though, it’s much harder to gauge the actual threat it poses. Since as early as 2012, cybersecurity researchers have been shocked to repeatedly find the group’s fingerprints deep inside infrastructure around the globe, from electric distribution utilities to nuclear power plants. Yet those researchers also say they’ve never seen Berserk Bear use that access to cause disruption. The group is a bit like Chekhov’s gun, hanging on the wall without being fired through all of Act I—and foreshadowing an ominous endgame at a critical moment for US democracy.

“What makes them unique is the fact that they have been so focused on infrastructure throughout their existence, whether it’s mining, oil, and natural gas in different countries or the grid,” says Vikram Thakur, a researcher at security firm Symantec who has tracked the group over several distinct hacking campaigns since 2013.

Read it all.

The US gov called out a lot of Russian hackers' cyberattacks in the past week. But most puzzling are the warnings about those who *haven't* attacked. What are we to make of a group that's dug into US infrastructure for years but never pulled the trigger? https://t.co/q0hGqDWzl8

— Andy Greenberg (@a_greenberg) October 27, 2020

A vaccine considered a frontrunner in the race to protect the global population from Covid-19 has produced a robust immune response in elderly people, the group at highest risk from the disease, according to two people familiar with the finding.

The discovery that the vaccine being developed by the University of Oxford, in collaboration with AstraZeneca, triggers protective antibodies and T-cells in older age groups has encouraged researchers as they seek evidence that it will spare those in later life from serious illness or death from the virus.

Age has emerged as the principal risk factor for a severe bout of Covid-19. However, the immune system weakens with age, raising concerns that the very group that most needs the protection of a vaccine may generate the least effective response to one.

Read it all.

Oxford Covid vaccine trials offer hope for the elderly https://t.co/YfbxIL0jyu

— Financial Times (@FT) October 26, 2020

Listen to it all.

Two new peer-reviewed studies are showing a sharp drop in mortality among hospitalized COVID-19 patients. The drop is seen in all groups, including older patients and those with underlying conditions, suggesting that physicians are getting better at helping patients survive their illness.

“We find that the death rate has gone down substantially,” says Leora Horwitz, a doctor who studies population health at New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine and an author on one of the studies, which looked at thousands of patients from March to August.

The study, which was of a single health system, finds that mortality has dropped among hospitalized patients by 18 percentage points since the pandemic began. Patients in the study had a 25.6% chance of dying at the start of the pandemic; they now have a 7.6% chance.

That’s a big improvement, but 7.6% is still a high risk compared with other diseases, and Horwitz and other researchers caution that COVID-19 remains dangerous.

Read it all.

Two new peer-reviewed studies show a sharp drop in mortality among hospitalized Covid patients. The drop is seen in all groups, including older patients and those with underlying conditions, suggesting providers are getting better at treating the illness. https://t.co/tAMGC5OsPM

— Scott Gottlieb, MD (@ScottGottliebMD) October 20, 2020

In a new Apple ad, a man on a city bus announces he has just shopped for divorce lawyers. Then a woman recites her credit card number through a megaphone in a park. “Some things shouldn’t be shared,” the ad says, “iPhone helps keep it that way.”

Apple has built complex encryption into iPhones and made the devices’ security central to its marketing pitch.

That, in turn, has angered law enforcement. Officials from the F.B.I. director to rural sheriffs have argued that encrypted phones stifle their work to catch and convict dangerous criminals. They have tried to force Apple and Google to unlock suspects’ phones, but the companies say they can’t. In response, the authorities have put their own marketing spin on the problem. Law enforcement, they say, is “going dark.”

Yet new data reveals a twist to the encryption debate that undercuts both sides: Law enforcement officials across the nation regularly break into encrypted smartphones.

Read it all.

With more tools in their arsenal to unlock phones, the authorities have used them in an increasing range of cases, from homicides to shoplifting https://t.co/mKNHsDGc2T

— NYT Business (@nytimesbusiness) October 21, 2020

Earlier this month, a storm front swept across the Great Plains of the United States, plowing up a wall of dust that could be seen from space, stretching from eastern Colorado into Nebraska and Kansas. It was a scene straight from the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, when farmers regularly saw soil stripped from their fields and whipped up into choking blizzards of dust.

Better get used to it. According to a new study, dust storms on the Great Plains have become more common and more intense in the past 20 years, because of more frequent droughts in the region and an expansion of croplands. “Our results suggest a tipping point is approaching, where the conditions of the 1930s could return,” says Gannet Haller, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Utah who led the study.

The dust storms not only threaten to remove soil nutrients and decrease agricultural productivity, but also present a health hazard, says Andy Lambert, a co-author on the study and a meteorologist at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in Monterey, California. The dust contains ultrafine particles that can penetrate cells in the lungs and cause lung and heart disease.

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Dust levels in the Great Plains brings concern for another Dust Bowl.https://t.co/rjluVIUZfM

— The YEARS Project (@YEARSofLIVING) October 21, 2020

Scientists have developed, for the first time, a score that can accurately predict which patients will develop a severe form of Covid-19.

The study, led by researchers at RCSI University of Medicine and Health Sciences, is published in The Lancet’s translational research journal EBioMedicine.

The measurement, called the Dublin-Boston score, is designed to enable clinicians to make more informed decisions when identifying patients who may benefit from therapies, such as steroids, and admission to intensive care units.

Until this study, no Covid-19-specific prognostic scores were available to guide clinical decision-making. The Dublin-Boston score can now accurately predict how severe the infection will be on day seven after measuring the patient’s blood for the first four days.

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Could be good news. "New Blood Test Accurately Predicts Which COVID-19 Patients Will Develop Severe Infection – https://t.co/UkOVD3x2On

— Kay Hymowitz (@KayHymowitz) October 19, 2020

Pfizer Inc.laid out a timetable for reaching key milestones in the development of its Covid-19 vaccine that could mean the shots start becoming available in the U.S. before year’s end.

Chief Executive Albert Bourla said Friday the company could start to see from a large study whether the vaccine works by the end of this month and would have data on its safety by the third week of November. If the preliminary results indicate the vaccine can work safely, Pfizer could ask U.S. health regulators to permit use by late November, Mr. Bourla said.

The timetable, which Mr. Bourla provided in a letter posted to Pfizer’s website, suggests the shots could start going into use in late November, or more likely in December, since regulators would probably need some time to review the study data as well as Pfizer’s manufacturing operations.

New York-based Pfizer is developing its vaccine candidate with German partner BioNTech SE.

It is far from certain the vaccine would prove to work safely in the trial now enrolling some 44,000 volunteers. And the timetable could be pushed back for a number of reasons, including if it takes longer than Pfizer expects for study subjects to get exposed to the virus.

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Drug giant Pfizer said it could be ready to apply for emergency-use authorization of its Covid-19 vaccine by late November, assuming it receives positive efficacy and safety data from late-stage human trials https://t.co/qrffJBBO7S

— The Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) October 16, 2020

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Researchers @MIT and elsewhere have significantly boosted the output from a system that can extract drinkable water directly from the air even in dry regions https://t.co/xaoVXO9skX

— AAU (@AAUniversities) October 14, 2020