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Javier E

Streaming Shakes Up Music Industry's Model for Royalties - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Even for an under-the-radar artist like Ms. Keating, who describes her style as “avant cello,” the numbers painted a stark picture of what it is like to be a working musician these days. After her songs had been played more than 1.5 million times on Pandora over six months, she earned $1,652.74. On Spotify, 131,000 plays last year netted just $547.71, or an average of 0.42 cent a play. “In certain types of music, like classical or jazz, we are condemning them to poverty if this is going to be the only way people consume music,” Ms. Keating said
  • Spotify, Pandora and others like them pay fractions of a cent to record companies and publishers each time a song is played, some portion of which goes to performers and songwriters as royalties. Unlike the royalties from a sale, these payments accrue every time a listener clicks on a song, year after year.
  • “No artist will be able to survive to be professionals except those who have a significant live business, and that’s very few,”
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  • Spotify has 20 million users in 17 countries, with five million of them paying $5 to $10 a month to eliminate the ads seen by freeloaders.
Javier E

The Slow Death of the American Author - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • the global electronic marketplace is rapidly depleting authors’ income streams. It seems almost every player — publishers, search engines, libraries, pirates and even some scholars — is vying for position at authors’ expense.
  • Authors practice one of the few professions directly protected in the Constitution
  • a diverse literary culture, created by authors whose livelihoods, and thus independence, can’t be threatened, is essential to democracy.
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  • That culture is now at risk. The value of copyrights is being quickly depreciated, a crisis that hits hardest not best-selling authors like me, who have benefited from most of the recent changes in bookselling, but new and so-called midlist writers.
  • instead of using the savings to be more generous to authors, the six major publishing houses — five of which were sued last year by the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division for fixing e-book prices — all rigidly insist on clauses limiting e-book royalties to 25 percent of net receipts. That is roughly half of a traditional hardcover royalty.
  • search engines that point users to these rogue sites with no fear of legal consequence, thanks to a provision inserted into the 1998 copyright laws. A search for “Scott Turow free e-books” brought up 10 pirate sites out of the first 10 results on Yahoo, 8 of 8 on Bing and 6 of 10 on Google, with paid ads decorating the margins of all three pages.
  • writers whose works sell less robustly find their earnings declining because of the new rate, a process that will accelerate as the market pivots more toward digital.
  • For many academics today, their own copyrights hold little financial value because scholarly publishing has grown so unprofitable. The copyrights of other authors, by contrast, often inhibit scholars who want to quote freely from those works or use portions in class. Thus, under the cri de coeur that “information wants to be free,” some professors and others are calling for copyright to be curtailed or even abandoned. High-minded slogans aside, these academics are simply promoting their own careers over the livelihoods of other writers.
  • No one calls our public library system socialistic, though it involves free distribution of the goods authors produce, and even though in many Western nations, authors get a tiny fee when libraries lend their works.
  • Now many public libraries want to lend e-books, not simply to patrons who come in to download, but to anybody with a reading device, a library card and an Internet connection. In this new reality, the only incentive to buy, rather than borrow, an e-book is the fact that the lent copy vanishes after a couple of weeks.
  • An even more nightmarish version of the same problem emerged last month with the news that Amazon had a patent to resell e-books. Such a scheme will likely be ruled illegal. But if it is not, sales of new e-books will nose-dive, because an e-book, unlike a paper book, suffers no wear with each reading. Why would anyone ever buy a new book again? Consumers might save a dollar or two, but the big winner, as usual, would be Amazon. It would literally own the resale market and would shift enormous profits to itself from publishers as well as authors, who would lose the already meager share of the proceeds they receive on the sale of new e-books.
  • Last October, I visited Moscow and met with a group of authors who described the sad fate of writing as a livelihood in Russia. There is only a handful of publishers left, while e-publishing is savaged by instantaneous piracy that goes almost completely unpoliced. As a result, in the country of Tolstoy and Chekhov, few Russians, let alone Westerners, can name a contemporary Russian author whose work regularly affects the national conversation.
anonymous

DR Congo signs new mining law despite companies' opposition - BBC News - 0 views

  • The Democratic Republic of Congo has moved to increase taxes on mining firms and increase government royalties from the industry despite fierce opposition from international mining companies. President Joseph Kabila signed a new mining code into law on Friday.The country is Africa's biggest producer of copper and cobalt, a vital component in mobile phone batteries.
  • Its mining industry - which also produces diamond, tantalum, tin and gold - is the country's largest source of export income. The law, which was passed by parliament in January, will double government royalties on all minerals.
  • The impoverished yet mineral-rich nation provides more than 60% of the world's cobalt. Prices for it more than doubled last year thanks to an increased demand for electric cars, which require cobalt for batteries.
krystalxu

British Culture: Facts & Customs | Study.com - 0 views

  • The most culturally recognized aspect of British tradition is their monarchy. When people say 'The Queen,' it's a pretty safe bet that they're referring to the Queen of England. Royalty is a significant part of British culture and the many ceremonies surrounding royalty has been a celebrated custom for over 1000 years.
hannahcarter11

U.S. senators introduce bipartisan oil and gas leasing reform bill | Reuters - 0 views

  • Two U.S. senators on Wednesday said they have introduced a bipartisan bill aimed at boosting taxpayer returns from federal oil and gas leasing, the latest in a string of moves in Washington seeking to reform drilling on public lands.
  • The bill, authored by Senators Jacky Rosen, a Democrat from Nevada, and Chuck Grassley, a senior Republican from Iowa, would increase the minimum bid price per acre during lease auctions and raise the royalty rate companies must pay on oil and gas produced from the leases.
  • The Biden administration said on Tuesday it would launch a review of federal oil and gas leasing later this month to address widespread criticism that the program is not yielding adequate public revenue as well as contributing to climate change.
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  • While the bill proposed on Wednesday would not deliver on President Joe Biden’s campaign promise to stop issuing new leases to fight global warming, it could be applied to existing leaseholders if passed into law.
  • Like the House bills, the Senate bill would increase royalty rates for onshore development for the first time in a century to 18.75% from 12.5%, bringing them in line with those paid by offshore drillers. It would also raise the minimum bid for federal acreage to $5 an acre from $2 and lift other fees and costs.
  • Oil and gas production on public lands accounts for nearly a quarter of all U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.
malonema1

Billy Graham, Dead at 99, Reshaped Evangelicalism - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • Billy Graham, the famous preacher who reached millions of people around the world through his Christian ministry, died on Wednesday at 99. Over the course of more than six decades, he reshaped the landscape of evangelism, sharing the gospel from North Carolina to North Korea and developing innovative ways to communicate the message of the Bible. He influenced generations of pastors and developed friendships with presidents, prime ministers, and royalty around the world. His death marks the end of an era for evangelicalism, and poses a fundamental question: Will his legacy of bipartisan, ecumenical outreach be carried forward?
  • Although the term “evangelical” is now commonly used to refer to Christians who focus on personal salvation and outreach about the gospel, it wasn’t always so common. “Billy was sort of the original evangelical,” argued Jack Graham, the pastor of Prestonwood Baptist Church in Plano, Texas, who serves with Laurie on President Trump’s unofficial evangelical advisory council. (He’s not related to Billy Graham.) The North Carolina preacher was focused on evangelism, or sharing the good news of the gospel. As he grew more popular, he became the face of the movement to many around the United States and the world.
  • He was also firmly committed to remaining bipartisan, proudly claiming that he provided spiritual counsel to 12 sitting presidents and participated in events surrounding nine inauguration ceremonies. “Billy had great influence on people from every side of the aisle, politically,” said Jack Graham. “To me, he reminds us always that more important than partisan politics, more important than the political divisions that we have today, that Christ can unite us.” Even President Trump met Graham, before he won the White House: Laurie said the now-president sat with the preacher at Graham’s 95th birthday party.
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  • Still, Graham was far more sympathetic towards civil rights than many other white Christian pastors of his generation, and he pushed for non-segregated crusades early in the 1950s. That legacy left him beloved across different groups of American Christians. “Our generation owes this giant of the Christian faith a debt of gratitude for paving the way for sharing the Gospel with the world with humility, graciousness, and integrity,” wrote Gabriel Salguero, the president of the National Latino Evangelical Coalition, in a statement on Wednesday.
knudsenlu

In Sudan, Archaeologists Are Fighting the Sands of Time - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • In 1905, British archaeologists descended on a sliver of eastern Africa, aiming to uncover and extract artifacts from 3,000-year-old temples. They left mostly with photographs, discouraged by the ever-shifting sand dunes that blanketed the land. “We sank up to the knees at every step,” E. A. Wallis Budge, the British Egyptologist and philologist, wrote at the time, adding: “[We] made several trial diggings in other parts of the site, but we found nothing worth carrying away.”
  • The land was inhospitable, and some archaeologists of the era subtly or explicitly dismissed the notion that black Africans were capable of creating art, technology, and metropolises like those from Egypt or Rome. Modern textbooks still treat ancient Nubia like a mere annex to Egypt: a few paragraphs on black pharaohs, at most. Articles republished from Undark MagazineRead more Today, archaeologists are realizing how wrong their predecessors were—and how little time they have left to uncover and fully understand Nubia’s historical significance.
  • “Only now do we realize how much pristine archaeology is just waiting to be found,” says David Edwards, an archaeologist at the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom.“But just as we are becoming aware it’s there, it’s gone,” he adds. Within the next 10 years, Edwards says, “most of ancient Nubia might be swept away.”
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  • The first traces of the Nubian kingdom called Kush date to roughly 2,000 B.C. Egyptians conquered parts of the Kushite Kingdom for a few hundred years, and around 1,000 B.C., the Egyptians appear to have died, left, or mixed thoroughly with the local population. At 800 B.C., Kushite kings, also known as the black pharaohs, took over Egypt for a century—two cobras decorating the pharaohs’ crowns signified the unification of kingdoms. And somewhere around 300 A.D., the Kushite empire began to fade away.
  • A woman’s skull half coated with termite-riddled dirt rests on a wooden table. Smith beams and locates an amulet the size of his fist that he found beside this skeleton. The amulet is shaped like a scarab beetle, a common symbol of rebirth in Egypt, but the insect bears a man’s head. “This is very unusual,” Smith says. He laughs as he paraphrases hieroglyphics etched into the scarab’s underside: “On the day of judgment, let my heart not testify against me.”
  • “This period has been burdened by racist colonial interpretations assuming that Nubians were backwater and inferior and now we can tell the story of this remarkable civilization,” he adds
  • When ancient Egyptians conquered the region, they identified Jebel Barkal as the residence of the god Amun, who was believed to help renew life each year when the Nile flooded. They carved a temple into its base, and illustrated the walls with gods and goddesses. And when ancient Nubians regained control, they converted the holy mountain into a place for royal coronations, and constructed pyramids for royalty beside it.
manhefnawi

The Welshness of the Tudors | History Today - 0 views

  • The fortunes of the Tudor dynasty were laid by the most romantic mésalliance in English history, the secret betrothal of a Welsh attendant at the Court of Henry VI to the dowager queen
  • Henry V, the hammer of the Welsh, had continued his father's proscription of the whole nation in punishment for the rebellion
  • Owain's marriage to Katherine of Valois, although hubristic, was not annulled when discovered, and the fruit of its consummation, the two sons, Edmund and Jasper, were not declared illegitimate.
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  • While Henry's mother, Margaret Beaufort, was an indispensable agent of his interests in England, Jasper was his political mentor in the years spent in exile
  • Henry VI bestowed the English honour of Richmond on Edmund, while the younger brother, Jasper, was endowed with a title and estates in Wales
  • After the death of Gloucester, and after several mishaps, they recovered favour under the indulgent protection of the young Henry VI
  • His Welshness was thus of crucial importance in easing Henry's path to the throne, for quite literally no other route was feasible than that which took him through Wales. It was also to be an essential ingredient in the success of Tudor policy in Wales
  • As a landless exile, Jasper's most common point of con- tact continued to be Wales: most of his incursions during the reign of Edward IV
  • In the reign of Richard III, as events were to show, Wales and the Marches were the most vulnerable parts of his dominions
  • Edward IV himself, as a descendant through the Mortimer connection of Llywelyn Fawr (the Great), could be regarded by Guto'r Glyn and Lewis Glyn Cothi as the potential deliverer of the Welsh and the heir to the kings of Britain
  • He had been a patron of the bards since the 1450s, and was praised as a faithful supporter of Henry VI and as the man who would unite Wales under the Lancastrians.
  • He predicted a victory for Henry as the last of the triumphant line of Brutus and Cadwalader, kings of the Britons
  • The route of the march from Milford Haven avoided the south eastern Marches, which were dominated by the lords loyal to Richard III
  • How Welsh was Henry Tudor? In blood he was a quarter Welsh, a quarter French and half English (or at least Platagenet). In so far as place of birth and residence could determine his nationality, he was certainly Welsh
  • Nothing daunted, the resourceful author dedicated it instead to King James and his son Prince Henry, whom he addressed as the future Prince of Wales. The adaptation was plausible enough, in all senses of that word, for James, after all, was descended from Henry VII and his forebears, the Welsh Tudors; and with this reminder Holland's readers in Wales could the more readily transfer their loyalty to the Scottish Stuarts
  • Unless he had been presented at Henry VI's court in his youth (and there is no evidence for this), Henry was a stranger to England before his ar6val at Shrewsbury on August 17th, 1485
  • In his first proclamation, on August 25th, 1485, Henry announced his titles to be, besides King of England and of France, 'Prince of Wales and lord of Ireland'. This was the first time any King who had not himself been invested with the principality as heir apparent to a reigning monarch had appropriated the title to himself
  • Whereas letters of denizenship conferred English status upon individuals, charters of privileges were granted between 1504 and 1508 to the ancient principality and five marcher lordships in North Wales, dispensing the inhabitants from various civic disabilities imposed by the penal laws of Henry IV and Henry V
  • The inhabitants of North Wales were released not only from the prohibitions of Lancastrian penal laws but from those of the Edwardian settlement of 1284, which had excluded the Welsh from the plantation boroughs.
  • Edward IV had used motifs from the British Legend in his court rituals and had fostered an Arthurian cult in celebration of his own descent from British kings and the princes of Gwynedd
  • By marrying Elizabeth, Henry thus enhanced his connection with British as well as English kingship, and their son and heir personified both traditions
  • Richard III had referred disparagingly in two proclamations to the rebel 'Henry Tydder'; this may well have stung, so that the new King was all the more concerned to establish an honourable lineage for his family. A commission of Welsh genealogists was therefore set up to trace his pedigree. Only the report has survived, to show Henry's descent from medieval Welsh and British rulers. However fantastic its remoter claims, there is no sound reason to doubt its authenticity as an official document. Even Sir Edward Coke in his Fourth Institutes of the Laws of England (1644) accepted its validity and gave as his source for the original commission the patent rolls for Henry VII, though no-one else has found any trace of it there. (The great champion of the common law who set such store by precedents was notoriously careless in his scholarship.) Henry did not draw on this pedigree to confirm the legitimacy of his monarchy, only to embellish it. What was important for him was the historical associations with British, rather than Welsh, royalty. That these also proved to be flattering to the Welsh nation was an incidental and inexpensive form of propaganda.
  • His beneficence was a distinct policy that culminated in Henry VIII's measure of incorporation of 1536-43
  • This consolidated and elaborated upon a form of administration that had existed in its essentials in the principality of North Wales since Edward I's Statute of Wales of 1284
  • Owen spoke for his own class of prosperous Protestant gentry, but the very fact that Welsh commentators thought of the extension of English law as a boon and an act of grace ensured the success of Tudor rule in Wales
  • There was no tacit acknowledgement of their Welsh identity by Henry VII's son and grandchildren – it was something claimed for them by the Welsh
  • In 1603 Hugh Holland published the first (and only) book of his Pancharis, which related the love between Owen Tudor and Katherine of Valois
  • Henry VI had commissioned both his half-brothers to represent and defend the crown's interests in Wales against the Yorkist enemies, the Vaughans, the Herberts and the Earl of March, later Edward IV.
  • The family of monarchs who ruled England and Wales from 1485 to 1603 did indeed form a dynasty, but they do not seem to have called themselves the 'Tudor' dynasty: the only con- temporaries who regarded them as such were the Welsh
manhefnawi

France - Recovery and reunification, 1429-83 | Britannica.com - 0 views

  • The coronation of Charles VII was the last pivotal event of the Hundred Years’ War.
  • The popular devotion to monarchy that had produced Joan was undermining English positions almost everywhere in France
  • The Truce of Tours (1444) provided for a marriage between Henry VI and the niece of Queen Mary of France; extensions of the truce gave Charles time to strengthen his military resources.
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  • with the son of Charles VII, the monarchy was to be tested yet again
  • The fiscal reorganization facilitated equally significant military reforms. The Peace of Arras, rather than pacifying France
  • the monarchy recovered much of the authority it had lost during the early stages of the Hundred Years’ War. Although its influence in Burgundy and Flanders (now united in a formidable dynastic association) had declined, its definitive recovery of Aquitaine consolidated a direct domain, again extensive enough to free the Valois royalty from anxiety about landed resources.
  • Louis XI (reigned 1461–83) was shamelessly impatient for his father’s death.
  • No French king had ever imposed himself so totally and so tyrannically as did Louis XI.
manhefnawi

France - Charles V | Britannica.com - 0 views

  • Under the former dauphin, now Charles V (reigned 1364–80), the fortunes of war were dramatically reversed. Charles had a high conception of royalty and a good political sense. While he shared the house of Valois’s taste for luxury and festivity, he reverted to the Capetian tradition of prudent diplomacy.
  • Edward III did not press to conclude the renunciations; but he reserved his authority in Aquitaine by inserting in his coronation oath a clause prohibiting the alienation of rights attached to the crown
  • Charles the Bad once again revolted unsuccessfully, his dynastic claim to Burgundy running afoul of the king’s; the succession to Brittany was settled by arms
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  • The war with England soon broke out again. Two new factors worked in favour of France. First, Charles’s alliance with Henry II of Trastámara, king of Castile, cost the English their naval supremacy; a Castilian fleet destroyed English reinforcements off La Rochelle in 1372, which effectively secured the success of French operations in the west. Second, Charles abandoned the defective policy of massive engagement with the enemy.
  • Although he had reestablished the political unity of France, Charles V left an uncertain future.
g-dragon

An Overview of the Declaration of Pillnitz - 0 views

  • The Declaration of Pillnitz was a statement issued by the rulers of Austria and Prussia in 1792 to try and both support the French monarchy and forestall a European war as a result of the French Revolution. It actually had the opposite effect, and goes down in history as a terrible misjudgement.
  • most of Europe, who were monarchies less than pleased about citizens organising.
  • Concerned about both the welfare of his sister Marie Antoinette and the status of brother in law King Louis XVI of France, Emperor Leopold of Austria met with King Frederick William of Prussia at Pillnitz in Saxony. The plan was to discuss what to do about the way the French Revolution was undermining royalty and threatening family.
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  • French aristocracy who had fled the revolutionary government, for armed intervention aimed at restoring the full powers of the French king and the whole of the ‘old regime’.
  • He had followed events in France, but was afraid intervention would threaten his sister and brother in law, not help them (he was completely right). However, when he thought they had escaped he rashly offered all his resources to aid them. By the time of Pillnitz he knew the French royals were effectively prisoners in France.
  • Austria and Prussia were not natural allies given recent European history, but at Pillnitz they reached agreement and put out a declaration.
  • While it stated that the fate of the French Royals was of “common interest” to Europe’s other leaders, and while it urged France to restore them and made threats if harm came to them, the subtext was in the section saying Europe would only take military action with the agreement of all the major powers. As everybody knew Britain would have nothing to do with such a war at that point, Austria and Prussia were, in practice, not tied to any action. It sounded tough, but promised nothing of substance. It was a piece of clever word play. It was a total failure.
  • The Declaration of Pillnitz was thus designed to assist the pro-royal faction in the revolutionary government against the republicans rather than threaten a war.
  • France had developed a culture that did not recognise subtext: they spoke in moral absolutes, believed that oratory was a pure form of communication and that cleverly written text was disingenuous.
krystalxu

Chinese Silk - Silk History, Production, and Products - 0 views

  • This is much more than the rest of the world combined producing 78% of the world's silk.
  • Cities such as Suzhou, Hangzhou, Nanjing, and Shaoxing are well known for their silk industries.
  • Silk cloth manufacture was well advanced during the Shang Dynasty (1600-1046 BC) era.
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  • Thus, an industry was born. She taught her people how to raise silkworms and later invented the loom.
  • It refracts incoming light at different angles and so produces different colors. 
  • Silk garments were worn by emperors and royalty, and it was a status symbol.
  • Silk is a delicately woven product made from the protein fibers of the silkworm cocoon. Silk production is a lengthy process that requires close monitoring.
  • Anyone found smuggling silkworm eggs, cocoons, or mulberry seeds was put to death. 
  • Avoid storing them in plastic since this might trap moisture and cause yellowing or mildew.
  • Touring the sights along the ancient Silk Road trade routes,
  • The Hangzhou National Silk Museum is the largest of its kind in the world. It is a showcase for the origin, evolution and technique of silk production.
Javier E

Researchers Are Hatching a Low-Cost Covid-19 Vaccine - The New York Times - 0 views

  • First, however, clinical trials must establish that NDV-HXP-S actually works in people. The first phase of clinical trials will conclude in July, and the final phase will take several months more
  • “It’s a home run for protection,” said Dr. Bruce Innis of the PATH Center for Vaccine Innovation and Access, which has coordinated the development of NDV-HXP-S. “I think it’s a world-class vaccine.”
  • They wanted to use the spike protein as a target. But they had to reckon with the fact that the spike protein is a shape-shifter. As the protein prepares to fuse to a cell, it contorts from a tulip-like shape into something more akin to a javelin.
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  • Scientists call these two shapes the prefusion and postfusion forms of the spike. Antibodies against the prefusion shape work powerfully against the coronavirus, but postfusion antibodies don’t stop it.
  • they discovered a way to keep the protein locked in a tulip-like prefusion shape. All they had to do was change two of more than 1,000 building blocks in the protein into a compound called proline.
  • All three of the vaccines that have been authorized so far in the United States — from Johnson & Johnson, Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech — use the 2P spike.
  • Other vaccine makers are using it as well. Novavax has had strong results with the 2P spike in clinical trials and is expected to apply to the Food and Drug Administration for emergency use authorization in the next few weeks. Sanofi is also testing a 2P spike vaccine and expects to finish clinical trials later this year.
  • Dr. McLellan’s ability to find lifesaving clues in the structure of proteins has earned him deep admiration in the vaccine world. “This guy is a genius,” said Harry Kleanthous, a senior program officer at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. “He should be proud of this huge thing he’s done for humanity.”
  • The potency of the vaccine brought an extra benefit: The researchers needed fewer viruses for an effective dose. A single egg may yield five to 10 doses of NDV-HXP-S, compared to one or two doses of influenza vaccines.
  • In March, he joined forces with two fellow University of Texas biologists, Ilya Finkelstein and Jennifer Maynard. Their three labs created 100 new spikes, each with an altered building block. With funding from the Gates Foundation, they tested each one and then combined the promising changes in new spikes. Eventually, they created a single protein that met their aspirations.
  • The winner contained the two prolines in the 2P spike, plus four additional prolines found elsewhere in the protein. Dr. McLellan called the new spike HexaPro, in honor of its total of six prolines.
  • The structure of HexaPro was even more stable than 2P, the team found. It was also resilient, better able to withstand heat and damaging chemicals. Dr. McLellan hoped that its rugged design would make it potent in a vaccine.
  • the University of Texas set up a licensing arrangement for HexaPro that allows companies and labs in 80 low- and middle-income countries to use the protein in their vaccines without paying royalties.
  • The first wave of authorized Covid-19 vaccines require specialized, costly ingredients to make. Moderna’s RNA-based vaccine, for instance, needs genetic building blocks called nucleotides, as well as a custom-made fatty acid to build a bubble around them. Those ingredients must be assembled into vaccines in purpose-built factories.
  • The way influenza vaccines are made is a study in contrast. Many countries have huge factories for making cheap flu shots, with influenza viruses injected into chicken eggs. The eggs produce an abundance of new copies of the viruses. Factory workers then extract the viruses, weaken or kill them and then put them into vaccines.
  • once Dr. McLellan and his colleagues handed off the 2P spike to vaccine makers, he turned back to the protein for a closer look. If swapping just two prolines improved a vaccine, surely additional tweaks could improve it even more.
  • PATH then connected the Mount Sinai team with influenza vaccine makers. On March 15, Vietnam’s Institute of Vaccines and Medical Biologicals announced the start of a clinical trial of NDV-HXP-S. A week later, Thailand’s Government Pharmaceutical Organization followed suit. On March 26, Brazil’s Butantan Institute said it would ask for authorization to begin its own clinical trials of NDV-HXP-S.
  • n vaccine maker Avi-Mex as an intranasal spray. The company will start clinical trials to see if the vaccine is even more potent in that form.
pier-paolo

The Silk Road | National Geographic Society - 0 views

  • refers to a network of routes used by traders for more than 1,500 years, from when the Han dynasty of China opened trade in 130 B.C.E. until 1453 C.E., when the Ottoman Empire closed off trade with the West.
  • The Silk Road extended approximately 6,437 kilometers (4,000 miles) across some of the world’s most formidable landscapes, including the Gobi Desert and the Pamir Mountains.
  • With no one government to provide upkeep, the roads were typically in poor condition. Robbers were common. To protect themselves, traders joined together in caravans with camels or other pack animals. Over time, large inns called caravanserais cropped up to house travelling merchants.
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  • An abundance of goods traveled along the Silk Road. Merchants carried silk from China to Europe, where it dressed royalty and wealthy patrons.  Other favorite commodities from Asia included jade and other precious stones, porcelain, tea, and spices. In exchange, horses, glassware, textiles, and manufactured goods traveled eastward.
  • One of the most famous travelers of the Silk Road was Marco Polo
  • The horses introduced to China contributed to the might of the Mongol Empire, while gunpowder from China changed the very nature of war in Europe and beyond.  Diseases also traveled along the Silk Road. Some research suggests that the Black Death, which devastated Europe in the late 1340s C.E., likely spread from Asia along the Silk Road
  • The Age of Exploration gave rise to faster routes between the East and West, but parts of the Silk Road continued to be critical pathways among varied cultures
anonymous

History's deadliest pandemics: Plague, smallpox, flu, covid-19 - Washington Post - 0 views

  • But history shows that past pandemics have reshaped societies in profound ways. Hundreds of millions of people have died. Empires have fallen. Governments have cracked. Generations have been annihilated. Here is a look at how pandemics have remade the world.
  • Many historians trace the fall of the Roman empire back to the Antonine Plague, which swept Rome during the reign of Marcus Aurelius. Nobody has ever nailed down the exact cause, but symptoms recorded by a physician named Galen — gruesome skin sores, high fever, diarrhea and sore throats — strongly suggest it was smallpox and measles.
  • Thought to be the world’s first episode of bubonic plague, its namesake was the Byzantine emperor who was in power when it hit, likely arriving in the form of infected fleas hitching rides across the world on the backs of rodents.
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  • Frank M. Snowden, a Yale historian who studies pandemics, wrote in his book “Epidemics and Society” that definitive accounts of this plague have largely vanished.
  • History Today, a monthly magazine of historical writing published in London, calls this pandemic “the greatest catastrophe ever.” The number of deaths — 200 million — is just astounding. Put it this way: That would be like wiping out roughly 65 percent of the current U.S. population. (Covid-19 disease modeling predicts U.S. deaths to potentially reach 240,000.)
  • Like the Plague of Justinian, the Black Death was caused by the bubonic plague.
  • Explorers arrived to the New World bearing more than just turnips and grapes. They also brought smallpox, measles and other viruses for which New World inhabitants had no immunity.
  • There were no treatments. If you caught it, you had roughly two weeks to live. This caused people to become desperate.
  • Again, blame the rats with those pesky fleas on their backs: “They were attracted by city streets filled with rubbish and waste, especially in the poorest areas,” according to the National Archives in England. While doctors, lawyers and royalty fled town, the poor were ravaged by the disease
  • it is estimated that upwards of 80–95 percent of the Native American population was decimated within the first 100–150 years following 1492
  • The epidemic that swept London in 1854 spawned the sort of epidemiological investigations that take place in disease outbreaks today. That’s thanks to John Snow, an English physician who almost single-handedly took on the bacteria. While some scientists suspected cholera was transmitted through the air, Snow thought otherwise. “Through carefully mapping the outbreak, he finds that everyone affected has a single connection in common: they have all retrieved water from the local Broad Street pump,”
  • according to a CDC history. He ordered the pump-handle turned off, and people stopped getting sick.
  • In 1793, yellow fever swept through Philadelphia, then the nation’s capital, killing roughly 10 percent of the population. President George Washington and Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson high-tailed it out of town, ultimately settling on Washington as the nation’s capital.
  • It wasn’t until 1900 that U.S. Army researchers “pinpointed mosquitoes as the transmission vector for the disease,” according to a vaccine history project at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia.
  • The covid-19 pandemic has inspired lots of comparisons to the 1918 flu, sometimes called the Spanish flu, which got its name not because it originated in Spain but because it was World War I, and Spain was the only country being honest about the toll the pandemic took on the country.
  • The flu came in two waves, starting in 1918 and ending in 1920. The number of infected is staggering —as many as 500 million, with estimates of 50 million deaths worldwide, according to the CDC.
  • One man saw it coming: Maurice Hilleman. The doctor later regarded as the godfather of vaccines was working at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in 1957 when he read a New York Times article about a nasty flu outbreak in Hong Kong that mentioned glassy-eyed children at a clinic.
  • Hilleman requested samples of the virus be shipped to U.S. drugmakers right away so they could get a vaccine ready. Though 70,000 people in the United States ultimately died, “some predicted that the U.S. death toll would have reached 1 million without the vaccine that Hilleman called for,” according to the Philadelphia vaccine history project. “Health officials widely credited that vaccine with saving many lives.”
  • Before covid-19, this was the world’s most recent pandemic, infecting as much as 21 percent of the world’s population. Swine flu was a hodgepodge of several different flu strains that had never been collectively seen together
Javier E

Opinion | A Big TV Hit Is a Conservative Fantasy Liberals Should Watch - The New York T... - 0 views

  • Pop culture says a lot about the hopes we have for politics. And in a politically polarized and unequal society, we express our political identities as tastes
  • We aren’t just divided into red and blue America. We divide ourselves into Fox people versus CNN people, country music versus hip-hop people and reality TV versus prestige drama people. The lines are not fixed — there is always crossover — but they are rooted in something fundamental: identity. Our imagined Americas are as divided as our news cycles.
  • a working paper by two sociologists, Clayton Childress at the University of Toronto and Craig Rawlings at Duke University. The paper is titled “When Tastes Are Ideological: The Asymmetric Foundations of Cultural Polarization.” It is part of the subfield of sociology that studies how culture reflects and reproduces inequality. Childress and Rawlings draw out several asymmetries in how liberals and conservatives consume cultural objects like music and television.
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  • Liberals aren’t watching “Yellowstone” for cultural reasons, and conservatives love it for ideological ones, he said.
  • I watched all four seasons of “Yellowstone” through the lens of these asymmetries. The show is compelling but not groundbreaking. It is too easy to call it a conservative show. Like its audience counterpart, “Yellowstone” thinks it is at war with progress when it is really at war with itself.
  • when it comes to identity and tastes, Childress said it is a “mark of social status for liberals to be culturally omnivorous.”
  • In contrast, conservative audiences do not consider reading, watching or listening around a mark of status or identity. And they are more likely to dislike what liberals like than liberals are to dislike what conservatives like.
  • “People on the left like more pop culture than people on the right,’’ Childress said. “And people on the left don’t dislike what people on the right dislike.
  • The rejection of cosmopolitanism as a desirable attribute is more subtle, but present
  • The West of “Yellowstone” is multiethnic, multiracial and multi-class. There are Black cowboys and complex Native American characters. A pair of lesbians even makes an appearance in Season 2 (although there are no gay cowboys,
  • Regardless of whether you agree with the classification, you have an idea of what other people mean by “elite”: urban, sophisticated and educated. In short, the things that “Yellowstone” skewers at every opportunity. The characters despise California and San Francisco in particular
  • It accommodates feminism by making women the most vicious capitalist actors.
  • The slow dialogue of “Yellowstone” also rejects sophistication. The narrative plods even as the show’s many horses run. And the mood is dour; there aren’t many jokes
  • Those aesthetic choices implicitly argue for simplicity as a moral virtue, something John Dutton telegraphs when he tells a field hand that sometimes the world really is simple.
  • “Yellowstone” sidesteps Westerns’ romanticization of the white imaginary. At dinner last week with my family, my 30-something Black lesbian cousins gushed about the show, although they prefer its Native American characters to the Duttons.
  • There are few strivers in the world of “Yellowstone.” The show’s royalty grudgingly accept higher education as a strategic tool to beat the liberal do-gooders. The poor and disenfranchised don’t dream of going to college at all.
  • the show’s revenge is how well it exposes the material conditions of elitism. Its worldview resembles fantasy but it is brutally realistic about how power operates.
  • Whatever brings its audience to the show, once they arrive, they are playacting within the vision of America that “Yellowstone” holds. The show suggests that elitism and power can be reconciled with our need to be both moral and self-interested. It is a seductive fantasy because it does not ask the audience to give up anything.
  • The nominal diversity of the show’s cast implies that conservatives don’t hate anyone, as long as everyone is willing to conform to their way of life
  • It acknowledges white land theft and Native American grievance, but it does not make a case for reparations.
  • It accepts that Christopher Columbus was a colonizer but implies that the Duttons’ good-enough ends justify the means.
  • If the show rejects sophistication, it takes a hammer to education
  • And it depicts the police as feckless, but it does not want to abolish cops. It wants to choose the cops. That means a lot of guns.
  • “Yellowstone” does not just have gunfights. It has all-out wars. There are military-grade weapons, aerial assaults, night-vision goggles and automatic rifles. When John Dutton cannot win, he starts shooting.
  • “Yellowstone” isn’t ideologically driven, even if ideology is what makes it so comforting for conservative audiences.
  • in the end, the show shares a problem with Republican Party electoral politics: Neither offers a compelling vision of the future.
  • Republicans don’t solve problems like climate change or economic inequality or water rights or housing costs or stagnant wages. With Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell’s leadership, the G.O.P. does not even bother to sell a conservative story for America. Audiences looking for that vision in “Yellowstone” might find that cosmetic diversity needn’t be scary, but they won’t find much else.
  • Like Republicans, the Dutton dynasty has one defense against demography and time: Buy guns and hoard stolen power.
Javier E

J. D. Vance and the Collapse of Dignity - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • Americans once expected politicians to carry themselves with a seriousness that indicated their ability and willingness to tackle problems, whether poverty or war, that were too difficult for the rest of us. We elected such people not because we wanted them to be like us but because we hoped that they were better than us: smarter, tougher, and capable of being leaders and role models.
  • ven some of the most flawed people we elevated to high office at least pretended to be better people, and thus were capable of inspiring us to be a better nation.
  • Today, we no longer expect or even want our politicians to be better than we are.
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  • The new American right, however, has blown past the relatively innocuous populism of the past 40 years and added a fetid cynicism about almost everything related to public life.
  • Not only are the MAGA Republicans seemingly repelled by the idea of voting for someone better than they are; they support candidates who are often manifestly worse people than the average citizen, so that they may slather their fears about their own shortcomings and prejudices under a sludgy and undifferentiated hatred about almost everyone in public office.
  • These populists not only look past the sins of their candidates but also defend and even celebrate them
  • The same Republicans who claim to venerate the Founders and the Constitution have intentionally turned our politics into a scuzzy burlesque.
  • consider how many people cheer on unhinged cranks such as Marjorie Taylor Greene or allow themselves to be courted by smarmy opportunists such as Vance and Ted Cruz.
  • This new populism, centered in the modern Republican Party, has no recognizable policy content beyond the thrill of cruelty and a juvenile boorishness meant largely to enrage others.
  • The GOP’s goals now boil down to power for its elected royalty and cheap coliseum pleasures for its rank and file.
  • Republicans, therefore, are forced to lower their—and our—standards for admission to public office, because the destruction of dignity is the only way they can find the candidates who will do what decent men and women will not, including abasing themselves to Donald Trump.
  • Let us leave aside the cult around Trump, which has now reached such levels of weirdness that the specter of Jim Jones is probably pacing about the netherworld in awe.
  • I’m an adult. I get it. Our elected officials aren’t saints, and only rarely are they heroes. But must they now be a cavalcade of clowns and charlatans, joyously parading their embrace of vice and their rejection of virtue? The Republican Party seems to think so.
criscimagnael

Biden Administration to Cut Costs for Wind and Solar Energy Projects - The New York Times - 0 views

  • The Biden administration said on Wednesday it would cut in half the amount it charges companies to build wind and solar projects on federal lands, a move designed to encourage development of renewable energy.
  • “Clean energy projects on public lands have an important role to play in reducing our nation’s greenhouse gas emissions and lowering costs for families,”
  • The new policy would cut those costs by about 50 percent,
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  • The decision comes as the Biden administration also seeks to raise the royalty fees it charges oil and gas companies to drill on federal land and in federal waters. Last month, the administration canceled three oil and gas lease sales in the Gulf of Mexico and off the coast of Alaska, prompting Republican lawmakers to criticize the new renewable energy policies as harmful to energy producing states.
  • The federal Bureau of Land Management also announced that it would strengthen its ability to handle a growing number of applications by wind, solar and geothermal developers by creating five new offices across the West to review proposed projects.
  • “Here is Biden‘s energy policy: wind, solar and wishful thinking,”
  • President Biden has pledged to cut greenhouse gases generated by the United States roughly in half by 2030.
  • Last year, for example, the administration gave a green light to two major solar projects on federal lands in California that it said would generate about 1,000 megawatts, enough electricity to power about 132,000 homes.
  • The reduction in fees and rental rates comes at a challenging time for the solar industry. A Commerce Department investigation into whether Chinese companies are circumventing U.S. tariffs by moving components for solar panels through four Southeast Asian countries has held up hundreds of new solar projects across the country.
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