Beyond coronavirus: the virus discoveries transforming biology

Beyond coronavirus: the virus discoveries transforming biology

Nature reports: Mya Breitbart has hunted novel viruses in African termite mounds, Antarctic seals and water from the Red Sea. But to hit pay dirt, she has only to step into her back garden in Florida. Hanging around her swimming pool are spiny-backed orbweavers (Gasteracantha cancriformis) — striking spiders with bulbous white bodies, black speckles and six scarlet spikes that make them look like a piece of medieval weaponry. Even more striking for Breitbart, a viral ecologist at the University…

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Trump was not indicted. But the charges still threaten him

Trump was not indicted. But the charges still threaten him

The New York Times reports: After all the suspicion and anticipation, it was not a conspiracy involving Russia, widespread money laundering or a sweeping allegation of racketeering and corruption. Instead, it was an investigation that uncovered the alleged abuse of run-of-the-mill perks — like car leases, apartments and school tuition — that transformed Donald J. Trump’s family business from real estate branding empire to criminal defendant. On Thursday, prosecutors from the Manhattan district attorney’s office announced charges against the Trump…

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Big oil and gas kept a dirty secret for decades. Now they may pay the price

Big oil and gas kept a dirty secret for decades. Now they may pay the price

Chris McGreal reports: After a century of wielding extraordinary economic and political power, America’s petroleum giants face a reckoning for driving the greatest existential threat of our lifetimes. An unprecedented wave of lawsuits, filed by cities and states across the US, aim to hold the oil and gas industry to account for the environmental devastation caused by fossil fuels – and covering up what they knew along the way. Coastal cities struggling to keep rising sea levels at bay, midwestern…

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I’ve been a critical race theorist for 30 years. Our opponents are just proving our point for us

I’ve been a critical race theorist for 30 years. Our opponents are just proving our point for us

Gary Peller writes: Some 25 states have already enacted or are considering laws to ban teaching what they call “critical race theory” (“CRT”) in public schools, a concept that school officials around the country deny they even teach. A parents’ group in Washoe County, Nevada wants teachers to wear body cams, just to make sure. And Ted Cruz just charged that CRT is “every bit as racist as the klansmen in white sheets.” As a law professor closely associated with…

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The glue that holds the internet together is coming undone

The glue that holds the internet together is coming undone

Jonathan Zittrain writes: The internet’s distinct architecture arose from a distinct constraint and a distinct freedom: First, its academically minded designers didn’t have or expect to raise massive amounts of capital to build the network; and second, they didn’t want or expect to make money from their invention. The internet’s framers thus had no money to simply roll out a uniform centralized network the way that, for example, FedEx metabolized a capital outlay of tens of millions of dollars to…

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The Republican senator who decided to tell the truth

The Republican senator who decided to tell the truth

Tim Alberta writes: Right around the time Donald Trump was flexing his conspiratorial muscles on Saturday night, recycling old ruses and inventing new boogeymen in his first public speech since inciting a siege of the U.S. Capitol in January, a dairy farmer in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula sat down to supper. It had been a trying day. The farmer, Ed McBroom, battled sidewinding rain while working his 320 acres, loading feed and breeding livestock and at one point delivering a distressed…

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Kamala Harris’ office — ‘not a healthy environment’ — is rife with dissent

Kamala Harris’ office — ‘not a healthy environment’ — is rife with dissent

Politico reports: When Vice President Kamala Harris finally made the decision to visit the Mexico border last week, people inside her own office were blindsided by the news. For days, aides and outside allies had been calling and texting with each other about the political fallout that a potential trip would entail. But when it became known that she was going to El Paso, it left many scrambling, including officials who were responsible for making travel arrangements and others outside…

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Calls grow for an investigation into FDA approval of Biogen’s Alzheimer’s drug

Calls grow for an investigation into FDA approval of Biogen’s Alzheimer’s drug

STAT reports: Former health secretary Donna Shalala called for a federal investigation into the Food and Drug Administration’s polarizing approval of a Biogen treatment for Alzheimer’s disease, citing STAT’s revelation Tuesday that regulators were far more closely aligned with the company than previously disclosed. “When you see a report like this, you have to investigate it,” said Shalala, a former member of Congress who led the Department of Health and Human Services under President Clinton. “You cannot hesitate and you…

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Big Tech’s threat to democracy

Big Tech’s threat to democracy

Matthew B Crawford writes: The convenience of the smart home may be worth the price; that’s for each of us to decide. But to do so with open eyes, one has to understand what the price is. After all, you don’t pay a monthly fee for Alexa, or Google Home. The cost, then, is a subtle one: a slight psychological adjustment in which we are tipped a bit further into passivity and dependence. The Sleep Number Bed is typical of…

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The demographic shift isn’t driving white people to the right

The demographic shift isn’t driving white people to the right

Mark R Reiff writes: Why are so many white people throughout the liberal democratic world moving to the illiberal Right? The conventional explanation is that they are being driven by fear of the ‘demographic shift’. That is, because of immigration, both legal and illegal, and differing fertility rates among the relevant groups, white people of specific ethnic and religious backgrounds will soon no longer make up the electoral majority in the regions they currently dominate. Losing their majority status, in…

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Inside the risky bat-virus engineering that links America to Wuhan

Inside the risky bat-virus engineering that links America to Wuhan

Rowan Jacobsen writes: In 2013, the American virologist Ralph Baric approached Zhengli Shi at a meeting. Baric was a top expert in coronaviruses, with hundreds of papers to his credit, and Shi, along with her team at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, had been discovering them by the fistful in bat caves. In one sample of bat guano, Shi had detected the genome of a new virus, called SHC014, that was one of the two closest relatives to the original…

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A lack of coronavirus genomes could prolong the pandemic

A lack of coronavirus genomes could prolong the pandemic

Puja Changoiwala writes: Back at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, before the disease had even drawn the attention of much of the world, researchers in China and Australia mapped the genome of the coronavirus isolated from one of the first patients in the Wuhan outbreak. This first genetic blueprint of the SARS-CoV-2 virus was publicly released soon after, on January 10, 2020. The disclosure of that genome, and others that soon followed, guided the vigorous international scientific response to…

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How the drug industry has exploited reforms started in the fight against AIDS

How the drug industry has exploited reforms started in the fight against AIDS

Robert Bazell writes: Three decades ago, a small group from within the AIDS activist organization ACT UP changed the course of medicine in the United States. They employed what they called “the outside/inside strategy.” The activists staged large, noisy demonstrations outside the Food and Drug Administration and other federal government agencies, demanding an acceleration of the drug-approval process. Others learned the minutiae of the science and worked quietly with receptive bureaucrats, bringing the patient’s perspective to the table toward the…

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The war on Indigenous rights in Brazil is intensifying

The war on Indigenous rights in Brazil is intensifying

Mark Harris and Denise Ferreira Da Silva write: Indigenous peoples in Brazil are under siege by the Brazilian government, which is waging war on two fronts. New legislation in the form of a bill known as PL 490/2007 threatens to cancel legal protections for Indigenous territories, while a landmark Supreme Court case over the so-called marco temporal, a 1988 cut-off date that threatens to strip the Indigenous peoples of existing land rights. Though not as visible as the effects of…

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