More than two-thirds of cases of the Omicron variant of COVID-19 are among people who have been reinfected with the virus, a new study said Wednesday.

Imperial College London researchers reported that around 3,582 people — or about 66% of participants in the study — who tested positive in January had already been infected with the virus, CNBC reported. //

In December, UK health officials also estimated that the risk of reinfection with the Omicron variant was about 5.4 times greater than with Delta.

In some cases, producing one tonne of aluminum can result in 14 to 16 metric tons of CO2. //

In 2020, the World Bank released an oft-cited analysis called "Minerals for Climate Action: The Mineral Intensity of the Clean Energy Transition.” In this report, the authors identified aluminum as one of the minerals that would need to have its production scale by a large amount for the world to meet its climate goals. “PV was a large contributor,” Lennon said. “[This] made me think about the problem a bit more.”

However, Lennon said that the World Bank report assumed an early International Energy Agency clean energy roadmap, which predicted that only 4 TW of photovoltaics would need to be installed by 2050. This is a small sum compared to what many updated roadmaps are now predicting.

In Lennon’s paper, she and her team used the target of 60 TW, set by the most recent International Technology Roadmap for Photovoltaics (ITRPV). This would mean that the world would need to produce 4.5 TW of additional capacity each year until 2050 to reach net-zero emissions and limit global warming to under 2°C. For context, by the end of 2020, just over 700 GW were installed. //

From this data analysis, the team was able to predict the amount of aluminum the world would need by 2050.

The total came to 486 million metric tons to be used for frames, mountings, and inverter casings. To put this number into context, the world bank had calculated around 100 million metric tons. “Our estimate is a lot larger than the World Bank’s estimates,” Lennon said. “The amount of aluminum we’re going to have to produce is going to have to increase an awful lot from what we have now.”

The problem is not that there’s not enough aluminum in the world—as it is both quite common and fairly easy to extract. Rather, the required extraction and production could lead to a lot of greenhouse gas emissions. Producing one tonne of aluminum from bauxite—a common source of the element—results in between 14 and 16 metric tons of CO2 or equivalent (the paper assumes the process is done in China), Lennon said. “That’s really high,” she said, adding that the smelting process can be quite energy-intensive. “If your electricity is sourced by coal-fired power or fossil fuels in general, the emissions intensity [can be] huge.”

“Maus” is an interesting work of art that uses cartoons and text to make a valid point. But as an avid reader and cartoonist, and as a parent who once had children in 8th grade, I don’t think “Maus” is the best literary source to tell the story of the Holocaust — whether as history or as language art. Would I have objected to its use as a parent? Probably not, but McMinn County made the call to remove it from one grade’s curriculum, as age inappropriate. That is all it did. It didn’t ban Spiegelman’s graphic novel.

But a good and useful lie was launched, and McMinn became a lightning-rod for the left and the “twitterverse.”

Never let a good lie go to waste.

On Christmas morning of 2021, the James Webb Space Telescope successfully launched from Earth. Thomas Zurbuchen, now NASA's associate administrator for science, had made the call. If Webb was going to fail, he would take the blame.

Not only did Webb launch, but its Ariane 5 rocket performed the flight with such precision that the spacecraft was able to save precious fuel for maneuvering, thereby extending its lifetime. Over the next two weeks, engineers and scientists executed hundreds of steps to unfold and fully extend the telescope and its massive sunshield. And then, finally, on Monday, the spacecraft performed one final major burn of its thrusters, falling into a halo orbit around the L2 point.

This means that the Webb space telescope has reached its final destination, a 180-day orbit around this L2 point, which keeps the telescope in line with the Earth as both the instrument and planet orbit around the Sun. Here, while using a minimum amount of fuel to hold its position, Webb can use its sunshield to keep the infrared telescope and its instruments cold.

The work is not done. The telescope has 18 primary mirror segments, which are moved by 132 actuators. These actuators have already been tested and shown to work. Now, over the next three months, telescope operators will fine-tune the alignment of these mirrors. During this process, scientists will use a Sun-like star named HD84406 to focus the mirrors. This star is located about 240 light years from Earth and can be found in Ursa Major near the bowl of the Big Dipper.

At the same time, in the wake of the sunshield, these mirrors and their scientific instruments will continue to cool in order to be able to detect the weak, ultra-distant signals of heat from the Universe's oldest galaxies. //

What is it about HD84406 that makes it the one to use for focusing the mirrors?

There are probably lots of criteria, but I only know two of them:

1. It's in the same 1/3 of space that JWST can see (i.e. the telescope doesn't have to look towards the Sun to see it)
2. It has to be relatively bright (HD84406 is not visible to the naked eye but can be seen with binoculars).

I can't find a reference now, but IIRC it was also selected because it's isolated with nothing behind it that's close (in interstellar terms), so it's easier to determine if the focus is good because there's less background light.

Oil is the largest source of foreign income for Russia. Every dollar per barrel increase is a windfall Putin can spend on the Russian military and foreign adventures. In October 2020, with President Donald Trump’s energy independence policy, the price of crude was $39.90 a barrel. Today, with Biden’s anti-American energy policy, the price of crude has jumped to $85.43 a barrel.

So, despite Biden’s strong words about sanctions, the effect of his policies has been a $45.53 a barrel increase in profit (or 114.11 percent) for Putin to pay off his oligarchs, buy better military equipment, and engage in foreign adventures. Any supposed sanctions Biden imposed would have to overcome this windfall—and then go much deeper—for Putin to even feel it.

he sought to make the public case against the conservative doctrine of "originalism." He wrote two books arguing for a different interpretation of the Constitution and often debated conservative Justice Antonin Scalia in public. Scalia's often-repeated view was that the Constitution, as he put it, "is not living but dead," and it must be interpreted as the Founding Fathers would have. Breyer's view was that the founders understood perfectly well that nothing is static, citing for example, the Constitution's ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

"Flogging might have been fine in the 18th century," Breyer said in a 2010 interview with NPR. "That doesn't mean that it would be OK and not cruel and unusual punishment today."

What's more, he observed, even historians don't agree on what the founders meant at the time they wrote the Constitution.

"History is very often in these matters a blank slate or a confused slate, and if you want to govern the country by means of that history, then you better select nine historians and not nine judges to be on the court," Breyer told NPR. "And I'll tell you, those nine historians will very often disagree with each other."

The job of a Supreme Court justice, Breyer said, is to apply the Constitution's values to modern circumstances, using the tools of judging — precedent, text and the purpose of the constitutional provision at issue.

You can think of the Constitution as laying down certain frontiers or borders, he said. "And we're the border patrol."

"Life on the border is sometimes tough, and whether a particular matter — abortion or gerrymandering or school prayer — whether that's inside the boundary and permitted or outside the boundary and forbidden, is often a very, very difficult and close question," he said.