They are finally coming in and they do not disappoint. The telescope seems to be functioning well, providing crisp, sharp images of the most disant parts of the universe and hence of its earliest times, over 13 billion years ago, i.e. about 700,000 years after the Big Bang.
You can see more of the images here.
As a grandfather, I am well aware that the conventional wisdom is that I have outlived my usefulness as far as evolutionary theory goes. Once you have had offspring and raised them to an age where there are independent and capable to having offspring of their own, you have pretty much exhausted your biological usefulness. This leads to one speculation as to why our bodies, after a certain age, tend to fall apart. It is because there is no selection pressure to develop mechanisms keep it going.
But the fact remains that people do live longer than is strictly necessary for evolution to function and this article argues that older people can still serve an evolutionary purpose.
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The current pandemic has reached a strange state. On the one hand, people are still getting infected in large numbers. In the US, on average there are 100,000 cases per day and the true number is likely to be greater since so many people are now testing at home and may not be reporting positive results to the CDC.
Becoming old is no picnic but it does provide one advantage, at least as far as I am concerned. I do not worry much anymore about taking major efforts to prolong life, since any precautionary steps I take are likely to have only a small effect. It is not that I now live recklessly. It is just that I can be more relaxed about what is worth doing and what is not. One liberating area is food. What I care most about now when it comes to food is that as long as I eat a balanced diet and not too much junk, what matters is whether it is tasty and enjoyable, and I pay little attention to factors like its cholesterol or fat or sugar content. I figure that whatever damage I have done to my body because of past consumption of those items is too late to rectify. The one thing I do do is take daily walks because it is enjoyable to get out and about and meet and chat with my neighbors. The reputed health benefits are a bonus.
But I do read the occasional article about health tips and found the results of this study to be intriguing because even if the results are replicated and robust, it does not seem actionable.
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It is scandalous that the richest country in the world has such a high mortality rate of women giving birth. While politicians and religious people on the right loudly pontificate about how they value life, their words are exposed as hollow when it comes to how little they do to curb the massive number of avoidable deaths that occur when women, especially Black women, give birth and the number who die due to the easy availability of guns.
Samantha Bee discusses how the high rates of childbirth deaths could be easily reduced.
This is one area where having a single payer health care system could make a huge and immediate difference. Spared from the waste and profit motive that plagues the current private health care system, one could easily build small birthing and pre-natal care centers in local communities that provide check ups to pregnant women and doulas and midwives in their neighborhoods that aid in the actual birth. These centers would be much cheaper to run than big hospitals, which is why of course the current system does not do it. There is little profit to be made from providing basic health care to underprivileged groups.
David Leonhardt writes about an unexpected recent trend. When it comes to almost any issue in America, the data for people of color, especially Blacks and Hispanics, are worse than for whites. And in the early days of Covid, that dreary pattern emerged once again.
During Covid’s early months in the U.S., the per capita death rate for Black Americans was almost twice as high as the white rate and more than twice as high as the Asian rate. The Latino death rate was in between, substantially lower than the Black rate but still above average.
Minority and marginalized communities tend to have less access to health care and thus the initial trend was regrettable but not unexpected. But recently, there has been a surprising reversal.
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On his show Last Week Tonight, John Oliver discussed how four companies (Apple, Google, Facebook, and Amazon) are each monopolies in one area and how that works against innovations and makes us unable to escape their clutches, and they use their power to suppress any new company that might hope to compete with them.
He argues that we need to invoke anti-trust legislation to break them up. Those companies warn us, as they always do, that they provide good products and services and forcibly breaking them up would harm consumers. Oliver reminds us that AT&T made that same argument when they were a telephone monopoly but that breaking it up resulted in a flood of innovations that we cannot imagine being without now. He makes the point that consumers may have been happy with AT&T because they had no idea what was out there in terms of possible innovations until the monopoly was broken up.
A tiny meteoroid has hit one of the 18 mirrors of the Webb telescope. But engineers had taken this possibility into account since there are so many tiny particles flying around in space.
The damage inflicted by the dust-sized micrometeoroid is producing a noticeable effect in the observatory’s data but is not expected to limit the mission’s overall performance.
James Webb was launched in December to succeed the revolutionary – but now ageing – Hubble Space Telescope.
Astronomers are due to release its first views of the cosmos on 12 July.
The US space agency Nasa said these images would be no less stunning because of what’s just happened.
…The speed at which things move through space means even the smallest particles can impart a lot of energy when colliding with another object. Webb has now been hit five times with this latest event being the most significant.
…The possibility of micrometeoroid hits was anticipated and contingencies like this were incorporated into the choice of materials, the construction of components and the different modes of operating the telescope.
…Engineers will adjust the positioning of the affected mirror segment to cancel out a portion of the introduced distortion, but they can’t remove it all.
July 12 will be a big day in astronomy.
In my trip to Boston recently, I distinctly got the impression that many people have decided that the pandemic is effectively, if not officially, over. While there was sporadic wearing of masks, most people were not doing so, nor did they seem to be making any effort to sit away from others on the airplanes, in the airport waiting areas, or the museums and other indoor venues I attended. While I usually wore my mask and tried to stay away from people, even I occasionally forgot. A friend of mine who just returned from a trip to Hungary and Poland said that masks were nowhere to be seen and people acted as if they were living in pre-pandemic times.
So is it over? Should we continue to wear masks? David Leonhardt discusses the issue.
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This image was published just this past week and revealed at a press conference.
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