scientificamerican--2020-08-24--Democratized Information Is Transforming Society

It is a truism among scientists that our enterprise benefits humanity because of the technological breakthroughs that follow in discovery 's wake .
And it is a truism among historians that the relation between science and technology is far more complex and much less linear than people often assume .
Before the 19th century , invention and innovation emerged primarily from craft traditions among people who were not scientists and who were typically unaware of pertinent scientific developments .
The magnetic compass , gunpowder , the printing press , the chronometer , the cotton gin , the steam engine and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ examples .
In the late 1800s matters changed : craft traditions were reconstructed as “ technology ” that bore an important relation to science , and scientists began to take a deeper interest in applying theories to practical problems .
A good example of the latter is the steam boiler explosion commission , appointed by Congress to investigate such accidents and discussed in Scientific American 's issue of March 23 , 1878 .
Still , technologists frequently worked more in parallel with contemporary science than in sequence .
Technologists—soon to be known as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ different goals , values , expectations and methodologies .
Their accomplishments could not be understood simply as applied science .
Even in the early 20th century the often loose link between scientific knowledge and technological advance was surprising ; for example , aviation took off before scientists had a working theory of lift .
Scientists said that flight by machines “ heavier than air ” was impossible , but nonetheless airplanes flew .
When we look back on the past 175 years , the manipulation of matter and energy stands out as a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ advances .
Techno-scientific innovations have sometimes delivered on their promises and sometimes not .
Of the biggest advances , three really did change our lives—probably for the better—whereas two were far less consequential than people thought they would be .
And one of the overarching impacts we now recognize in hindsight was only weakly anticipated : that by moving matter and energy , we would end up moving information and ideas .
One strong example of science-based technology that changed our lives is electricity .
Benjamin Franklin is famous for recognizing that lightning @ @ @ @ @ @ @ demonstrating in the 1700s that lightning rods can protect people and property .
But the major scientific advances in understanding electricity came later when Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell established that it was the flow of electrons—matter—and that it could be understood in the broader context of electromagnetism .
Faraday showed that electricity and magnetism are two sides of the same coin : moving electrons creates a magnetic field , and moving a magnet induces electric current in a conductor .
This understanding , quantified in Maxwell 's equations—a mathematical model for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for the invention of the dynamo , electricity generation for industries and households , and telecommunications : telegraph , telephone , radio and television .
Electricity dramatically expanded the size of factories .
Most factories had been powered by water , which meant they had to be located close to streams , typically in narrow river valleys where space was tight .
But with electricity , a factory could be erected anywhere and could take on any size , complete with lighting so it could run around the clock .
This innovation broadened @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the growth of consumer society .
Electricity also transformed daily life , powering the subways , streetcars and commuter rail that let workers stream in and cities sprawl out and creating the possibility of suburban living .
Home lighting extended the time available for reading , sewing and other activities .
Entertainment blossomed in a variety of forms , from the “ electrifying ” lighting displays of the 1904 St. Louis World 's Fair to cinema and radio .
Home electricity was soon also powering refrigerators , toasters , water heaters , washing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ prizewinning book More Work for Mother , Ruth Schwartz Cowan argues that these “ labor-saving ” appliances did more to raise expectations for household order and cleanliness than to save women labor , yet there is no question that they changed the way Americans lived .
One of the most significant and durable changes involved information and ideas .
Electricity made the movie camera possible , which prompted the rise of cinema .
The first public movie screening was in Paris , in 1895 , using a device inspired by Thomas Edison 's @ @ @ @ @ @ @ factory workers leaving after a shift . )
Within a few years a commercial film industry had developed in Europe and America .
Today we think of movies primarily as entertainment—especially given the emergence of the entertainment industry and the centrality of Hollywood in American life—but in the early 20th century many ( possibly most ) films were documentaries and newsreels .
The newsreels , a standard feature in cinemas , became a major source of information about world and national events .
They were also a source of propaganda and disinformation , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” film about the Dreyfus affair ( a French political scandal in which a Jewish army officer was framed on spy charges laced with anti-Semitism ) and fake film footage of the 1898 charge up San Juan Hill in the Spanish-American War .
Information drove the rise of radio and television .
In the 1880s Heinrich Hertz demonstrated that radio waves were a form of electromagnetic radiation—as predicted by Maxwell 's theory—and in the 1890s Indian physicist Jagadish Chandra Bose conducted an experiment in which he used microwaves to ignite gunpowder and ring @ @ @ @ @ @ @ could travel without wires .
These scientific insights laid the foundations for modern telecommunications , and in 1899 Guglielmo Marconi sent the first wireless signals across the English Channel .
Techno-fideists—people who place faith in technology—proclaimed that radio would lead to world peace because it enabled people across the globe to communicate .
But it was a relatively long road from Marconi 's signals to radio as we know it : the first programs were not developed until the 1920s .
Meanwhile radio did nothing to prevent the 1914–1918 Great War , later @ @ @ @ @ @ @ early 20th century there was little demand for radio beyond the military and enthusiasts .
To persuade people to buy radios , broadcasters had to create content , which required sponsors , which in turn contributed to the growth of advertising , mass marketing and consumer culture .
Between the 1920s and the 1940s radios became a fixture in American homes as programs competed with and often replaced newspapers as people 's primary source of information .
Radio did not bring us world peace , but it did bring news , music , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Television 's story was similar : content had to be created to move the technology into American homes .
Commercial sponsors produced many early programs such as Texaco Star Theater and General Electric Theater .
Networks also broadcast events such as baseball games , and in time they began to produce original content , particularly newscasts .
Despite ( or maybe because of ) the mediocre quality of much of this programming , television became massively popular .
Although its scientific foundation involved the movement of matter and energy , its technological @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , entertainment and ideas .
World War II tore the world apart again , and science-based technologies were integral .
Historians are nearly unanimous in the belief that operations research , code breaking , radar , sonar and the proximity fuse played larger roles in the Allied victory than the atomic bomb , but it was the bomb that got all the attention .
U.S. Secretary of War Henry Stimson promoted the idea that the bomb had brought Japan to its knees , enabling the U.S. to avoid a costly land invasion and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ know now that this story was a postwar invention intended to stave off criticism of the bomb 's use , which killed 200,000 civilians .
U.S. leaders duly declared that the second half of the 20th century would be the Atomic Age .
We would have atomic airplanes , trains , ships , even atomic cars .
In 1958 Ford Motor Company built a model chassis for the Nucleon , which would be powered by steam from a microreactor .
( Needless to say , it was never completed , but the model @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Museum in Dearborn , Mich. ) Under President Dwight Eisenhower 's Atoms for Peace plan , the U.S. would develop civilian nuclear power both for its own use and for helping developing nations around the globe .
American homes would be powered by free nuclear power “ too cheap to meter.
” The promise of nuclear power was never fulfilled .
The U.S. Navy built a fleet of nuclear-powered submarines and switched its aircraft carriers to nuclear power ( though not the rest of the surface fleet ) , and the government assembled @ @ @ @ @ @ @ But even small reactors proved too expensive or too risky for nearly any civilian purpose .
Encouraged by the U.S. government , electrical utilities in the 1950s and 1960s began to develop nuclear generating capacity .
By 1979 some 72 reactors were operating across the country , mostly in the East and the Midwest .
But even before the infamous accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant that year , demand for new reactors was weakening because capital and construction costs were not falling and public opposition was rising .
In @ @ @ @ @ @ @ more than 50 reactors planned in the U.S. were canceled and others required costly retrofits .
Nuclear anxieties worsened after the 1986 Chernobyl disaster in the former Soviet Union .
Today the U.S. generates about 20 percent of its electricity from nuclear plants , which , though significant , is hardly what nuclear energy 's 1950s boosters had predicted .
While some pundits claimed the 20th century was the Atomic Age , others insisted it was the Space Age .
American children in midcentury grew up watching science-fiction TV programs centered on the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ reading comic books starring superheroes from other planets and listening to vinyl records with songs about the miracle of space travel .
Their heroes were Alan Shepard , the first American in space , and John Glenn , the first American to orbit Earth .
Some of their parents even made reservations for a flight to the moon promised by Pan American World Airways , and Stanley Kubrick featured airplane space flight in his 1968 film , 2001 : A Space Odyssey .
The message was clear : by 2001 we would be @ @ @ @ @ @ @ essential physics required for space travel had been known since the days of Galileo and Newton , and history is replete with visionaries who saw the potential in the laws of motion .
What made the prospect real in the 20th century was the advent of rocketry .
Robert Goddard is often called the “ father of modern rocketry , ” but it was Germans , led by Nazi scientist Wernher von Braun , who built the world 's first usable rocket : the V-2 missile .
A parallel U.S. Army–funded rocket program @ @ @ @ @ @ @ own large ballistic missile shortly after the war .
The U.S. government 's Operation Paperclip discreetly brought von Braun and his team to the states to accelerate the work , which , among other things , eventually led to NASA 's Marshall Space Flight Center .
This expensive scientific and engineering effort , pushed by nationalism and federal funding , led to Americans ' landing on the moon and returning home .
But the work did not result in routine crewed missions , much less vacations .
Despite continued enthusiasm and , recently @ @ @ @ @ @ @ has been pretty much a bust .
Yet the same rockets that could launch crewed vessels could propel artificial satellites into Earth orbit , which allowed huge changes in our ability to collect and move information .
Satellite telecommunications now let us send information around the globe pretty much instantaneously and at extremely low cost .
We can also study our planet from above , leading to significant advances in weather forecasts , understanding the climate , quantifying changes in ecosystems and human populations , analyzing water resources and—through GPS—letting us precisely locate @ @ @ @ @ @ @ space science is that its greatest payoff has been our ability to know in real time what is happening here on Earth .
Like radio and TV , space has become a medium for moving information .
A similar evolution occurred with computational technology .
Computers were originally designed to replace people ( typically women ) who did laborious calculations , but today they are mainly a means to store , access and create “ content.
” Computers appeared as a stealth technology that had far more impact than many of its pioneers @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is often cited as saying , in 1943 , that “ I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.
” Mechanical and electromechanical calculation devices had been around for a long time , but during World War II , U.S. defense officials sought to make computation much faster through the use of electronics—at the time , thermionic valves , or vacuum tubes .
One outcome was Whirlwind , a real-time tube-based computer developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a flight simulator for the U.S. Navy .
During the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ turned Whirlwind into the basis of an air-defense system .
The Semi-Automatic Ground Environment system ( SAGE ) was a continent-scale network of computers , radars , wired and wireless telecommunications systems , and interceptors ( piloted and not ) that operated into the 1980s .
SAGE was the key to IBM 's abandoning mechanical tabulating machines for mainframe digital computers , and it revealed the potential of very large-scale , automated , networked management systems .
Its domain , of course , was information—about a potential military attack .
Early mainframe computers @ @ @ @ @ @ @ part of a room .
They were expensive and ran very hot , requiring cooling .
They seemed to be the kind of technology that only a government , or a very large business with deep pockets , could ever justify .
In the 1980s the personal computer changed that outlook dramatically .
Suddenly a computer was something any business and many individuals could buy and use not just for intense computation but also for managing information .
That potential exploded with the commercialization of the Internet .
When the U.S. Defense Advanced @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a secure , failure-tolerant digital communications network , it already had SAGE as a model .
But SAGE , built on a telephone system using mechanical switching , was also a model of what the military did not want , because centralized switching centers were highly vulnerable to attack .
For a communications system to be “ survivable , ” it would have to have a set of centers , or nodes , interconnected in a network .
The solution—ARPANET—was developed in the 1960s by a diverse group of scientists and engineers funded @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 1980s it spawned what we know as the Internet .
The Internet , and its killer app the World Wide Web , brought the massive amount of information now at our fingertips , information that has changed the way we live and work and that has powered entirely new industries such as social media , downloadable entertainment , virtual meetings , online shopping and dating , ride sharing , and more .
In one sense , the history of the Internet is the opposite of electricity 's : the private sector developed electrical @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to distribute the product widely .
In contrast , the government developed the Internet , but the private sector delivered it into our homes—a reminder that casual generalizations about technology development are prone to be false .
It is also well to remember that around a quarter of American adults still do not have high-speed Internet service .
Why is it that electricity , telecommunications and computing were so successful , but nuclear power and human space travel have been a letdown ?
It is clear today that the latter involved heavy doses @ @ @ @ @ @ @ imbricated with science fiction , with dreams of heroic courage that continue to fuel unscientific fantasies .
Although it turned out to be fairly manageable to launch rockets and send satellites into orbit , putting humans in space—particularly for an extended period—has remained dangerous and expensive .
NASA 's space shuttle was supposed to usher in an era of cheap , even profitable , human space flight .
It did not .
So far no one has created a gainful business based on the concept .
The late May launch of two astronauts @ @ @ @ @ @ @ may have changed the possibilities , but it is too soon to tell .
Most space entrepreneurs see tourism as the route to profitability , with suborbital flights or perhaps floating space hotels for zero-g recreation .
Maybe one day we will have them , but it is worth noting that in the past tourism has followed commercial development and settlement , not the other way around .
Nuclear power also turned out to be extremely expensive , for the same reason : it costs a lot to keep people safe .
The @ @ @ @ @ @ @ never really made sense ; that statement was based on the idea that tiny amounts of cheap uranium fuel could yield a large amount of power , but the fuel is the least of nuclear power 's expenses .
The main costs are construction , materials and labor , which for nuclear plants have remained far higher than for other power sources , mainly because of all the extra effort that has to go into ensuring safety .
Risk is often a controlling factor for technology .
Space travel and nuclear power involve @ @ @ @ @ @ @ military contexts but mostly not in civilian ones .
And despite the claims of some folks in Silicon Valley , venture capitalists generally do not care much for risk .
Governments , especially when defending themselves from actual or anticipated enemies , have been more entrepreneurial than most entrepreneurs .
Also , neither human space travel nor nuclear power was a response to market demand .
Both were the babies of governments that wanted these technologies for military , political or ideological reasons .
We might be tempted to conclude , therefore , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the technology business , but the Internet was not devised in response to market demand either .
It was financed and developed by the U.S. government for military purposes .
Once it was opened to civilian use , it grew , metamorphosed and , in time , changed our lives .
In fact , government played a role in the success of all the technologies we have considered here .
Although the private sector brought electricity to the big cities—New York , Chicago , St. Louis—the federal government 's Rural Electrification Administration brought @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to make radio , electric appliances , television and telecommunications part of everyone 's daily lives .
A good deal of private investment created these technologies , but the transformations that they wrought were enabled by the “ hidden hand ” of government , and citizens often experienced their value in unanticipated ways .
These unexpected benefits seem to confirm the famous saying—variously attributed to Niels Bohr , Mark Twain and Yogi Berra—that prediction is very difficult , especially about the future .
Historians are loath to make prognostications because in our work @ @ @ @ @ @ @ stand up to scrutiny , how no two situations are ever quite the same and how people 's past expectations have so often been confounded .
That said , one change that is already underway in the movement of information is the blurring of boundaries between consumers and producers .
In the past the flow of information was almost entirely one-way , from the newspaper , radio or television to the reader , listener or viewer .
Today that flow is increasingly two-way—which was one of Tim Berners-Lee 's primary goals when he @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
We “ consumers ” can reach one another via Skype , Zoom and FaceTime ; post information through Instagram , Facebook and Snapchat ; and use software to publish our own books , music and videos—without leaving our couches .
For better or worse , we can expect further blurring of many conventional boundaries—between work and home , between “ amateurs ” and professionals , and between public and private .
We will not vacation on Mars anytime soon , but we might have Webcams there showing us Martian sunsets .

It is a truism among scientists that our enterprise benefits humanity because of the technological breakthroughs that follow in discovery’s wake. And it is a truism among historians that the relation between science and technology is far more complex and much less linear than people often assume. Before the 19th century, invention and innovation emerged primarily from craft traditions among people who were not scientists and who were typically unaware of pertinent scientific developments. The magnetic compass, gunpowder, the printing press, the chronometer, the cotton gin, the steam engine and the water wheel are among the many examples. In the late 1800s matters changed: craft traditions were reconstructed as “technology” that bore an important relation to science, and scientists began to take a deeper interest in applying theories to practical problems. A good example of the latter is the steam boiler explosion commission, appointed by Congress to investigate such accidents and discussed in Scientific American’s issue of March 23, 1878.
Still, technologists frequently worked more in parallel with contemporary science than in sequence. Technologists—soon to be known as engineers—were a different community of people with different goals, values, expectations and methodologies. Their accomplishments could not be understood simply as applied science. Even in the early 20th century the often loose link between scientific knowledge and technological advance was surprising; for example, aviation took off before scientists had a working theory of lift. Scientists said that flight by machines “heavier than air” was impossible, but nonetheless airplanes flew.
When we look back on the past 200 years or so, the manipulation of matter and energy stands out as a central domain of both scientific and technical advances. Techno-scientific innovations have sometimes delivered on their promises and sometimes not. Of the biggest advances, three really did change our lives—probably for the better—whereas two were far less consequential than people thought they would be. And one of the overarching impacts we now recognize in hindsight was only weakly anticipated: that by moving matter and energy, we would end up moving information and ideas.
One strong example of science-based technology that changed our lives is electricity. Benjamin Franklin is famous for recognizing that lightning is an atmospheric electrical discharge and for demonstrating in the 1700s that lightning rods can protect people and property. But the major scientific advances in understanding electricity came later when Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell established that it was the flow of electrons—matter—and that it could be understood in the broader context of electromagnetism. Faraday showed that electricity and magnetism are two sides of the same coin: moving electrons creates a magnetic field, and moving a magnet induces electric current in a conductor. This understanding, quantified in Maxwell’s equations—a mathematical model for electricity, magnetism and light—laid the foundation for the invention of the dynamo, electricity generation for industries and households, and telecommunications: telegraph, telephone, radio and television.
Electricity dramatically expanded the size of factories. Most factories had been powered by water, which meant they had to be located close to streams, typically in narrow river valleys where space was tight. But with electricity, a factory could be erected anywhere and could take on any size, complete with lighting so it could run around the clock. This innovation broadened mass production and, with it, the growth of consumer society. Electricity also transformed daily life, powering the subways, streetcars and commuter rail that let workers stream in and cities sprawl out and creating the possibility of suburban living. Home lighting extended the time available for reading, sewing and other activities. Entertainment blossomed in a variety of forms, from the “electrifying” lighting displays of the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair to cinema and radio. Home electricity was soon also powering refrigerators, toasters, water heaters, washing machines and irons. In her 1983 prizewinning book More Work for Mother, Ruth Schwartz Cowan argues that these “labor-saving” appliances did more to raise expectations for household order and cleanliness than to save women labor, yet there is no question that they changed the way Americans lived.
Television became widespread in time to deliver the moon landing. Credit: Getty Images
One of the most significant and durable changes involved information and ideas. Electricity made the movie camera possible, which prompted the rise of cinema. The first public movie screening was in Paris, in 1895, using a device inspired by Thomas Edison’s electric Kinetoscope. (The film showed factory workers leaving after a shift.) Within a few years a commercial film industry had developed in Europe and America. Today we think of movies primarily as entertainment—especially given the emergence of the entertainment industry and the centrality of Hollywood in American life—but in the early 20th century many (possibly most) films were documentaries and newsreels. The newsreels, a standard feature in cinemas, became a major source of information about world and national events. They were also a source of propaganda and disinformation, such as a late-1890s “fake news” film about the Dreyfus affair (a French political scandal in which a Jewish army officer was framed on spy charges laced with anti-Semitism) and fake film footage of the 1898 charge up San Juan Hill in the Spanish-American War.
Information drove the rise of radio and television. In the 1880s Heinrich Hertz demonstrated that radio waves were a form of electromagnetic radiation—as predicted by Maxwell’s theory—and in the 1890s Indian physicist Jagadish Chandra Bose conducted an experiment in which he used microwaves to ignite gunpowder and ring a bell, proving that electromagnetic radiation could travel without wires. These scientific insights laid the foundations for modern telecommunications, and in 1899 Guglielmo Marconi sent the first wireless signals across the English Channel. Techno-fideists—people who place faith in technology—proclaimed that radio would lead to world peace because it enabled people across the globe to communicate. But it was a relatively long road from Marconi’s signals to radio as we know it: the first programs were not developed until the 1920s. Meanwhile radio did nothing to prevent the 1914–1918 Great War, later renamed World War I.
In the early 20th century there was little demand for radio beyond the military and enthusiasts. To persuade people to buy radios, broadcasters had to create content, which required sponsors, which in turn contributed to the growth of advertising, mass marketing and consumer culture. Between the 1920s and the 1940s radios became a fixture in American homes as programs competed with and often replaced newspapers as people’s primary source of information. Radio did not bring us world peace, but it did bring news, music, drama and presidential speeches into our lives.
Television’s story was similar: content had to be created to move the technology into American homes. Commercial sponsors produced many early programs such as Texaco Star Theater and General Electric Theater. Networks also broadcast events such as baseball games, and in time they began to produce original content, particularly newscasts. Despite (or maybe because of) the mediocre quality of much of this programming, television became massively popular. Although its scientific foundation involved the movement of matter and energy, its technological expression was in the movement of information, entertainment and ideas.
World Wide Web blurred the line between producers and consumers of media, a shift with cultural and political consequences that are still unfolding. Credit: Getty Images
World War II tore the world apart again, and science-based technologies were integral. Historians are nearly unanimous in the belief that operations research, code breaking, radar, sonar and the proximity fuse played larger roles in the Allied victory than the atomic bomb, but it was the bomb that got all the attention. U.S. Secretary of War Henry Stimson promoted the idea that the bomb had brought Japan to its knees, enabling the U.S. to avoid a costly land invasion and saving millions of American lives. We know now that this story was a postwar invention intended to stave off criticism of the bomb’s use, which killed 200,000 civilians. U.S. leaders duly declared that the second half of the 20th century would be the Atomic Age. We would have atomic airplanes, trains, ships, even atomic cars. In 1958 Ford Motor Company built a model chassis for the Nucleon, which would be powered by steam from a microreactor. (Needless to say, it was never completed, but the model can be seen at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Mich.) Under President Dwight Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace plan, the U.S. would develop civilian nuclear power both for its own use and for helping developing nations around the globe. American homes would be powered by free nuclear power “too cheap to meter.”
The promise of nuclear power was never fulfilled. The U.S. Navy built a fleet of nuclear-powered submarines and switched its aircraft carriers to nuclear power (though not the rest of the surface fleet), and the government assembled a nuclear-powered freighter as a demonstration. But even small reactors proved too expensive or too risky for nearly any civilian purpose. Encouraged by the U.S. government, electrical utilities in the 1950s and 1960s began to develop nuclear generating capacity. By 1979 some 72 reactors were operating across the country, mostly in the East and the Midwest. But even before the infamous accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant that year, demand for new reactors was weakening because capital and construction costs were not falling and public opposition was rising. In the five years after the accident, more than 50 reactors planned in the U.S. were canceled and others required costly retrofits. Nuclear anxieties worsened after the 1986 Chernobyl disaster in the former Soviet Union. Today the U.S. generates about 20 percent of its electricity from nuclear plants, which, though significant, is hardly what nuclear energy’s 1950s boosters had predicted.
While some pundits claimed the 20th century was the Atomic Age, others insisted it was the Space Age. American children in midcentury grew up watching science-fiction TV programs centered on the dream of interplanetary and intergalactic journeys, reading comic books starring superheroes from other planets and listening to vinyl records with songs about the miracle of space travel. Their heroes were Alan Shepard, the first American in space, and John Glenn, the first American to orbit Earth. Some of their parents even made reservations for a flight to the moon promised by Pan American World Airways, and Stanley Kubrick featured airplane space flight in his 1968 film, 2001: A Space Odyssey. The message was clear: by 2001 we would be routinely flying in outer space.
The essential physics required for space travel had been known since the days of Galileo and Newton, and history is replete with visionaries who saw the potential in the laws of motion. What made the prospect real in the 20th century was the advent of rocketry. Robert Goddard is often called the “father of modern rocketry,” but it was Germans, led by Nazi scientist Wernher von Braun, who built the world’s first usable rocket: the V-2 missile. A parallel U.S. Army–funded rocket program at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory demonstrated its own large ballistic missile shortly after the war. The U.S. government’s Operation Paperclip discreetly brought von Braun and his team to the states to accelerate the work, which, among other things, eventually led to NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center.
This expensive scientific and engineering effort, pushed by nationalism and federal funding, led to Americans’ landing on the moon and returning home in 1969. But the work did not result in routine crewed missions, much less vacations. Despite continued enthusiasm and, recently, substantial private investment, space travel has been pretty much a bust. Yet the same rockets that could launch crewed vessels could propel artificial satellites into Earth orbit, which allowed huge changes in our ability to collect and move information. Satellite telecommunications now let us send information around the globe pretty much instantaneously and at extremely low cost. We can also study our planet from above, leading to significant advances in weather forecasts, understanding the climate, quantifying changes in ecosystems and human populations, analyzing water resources and—through GPS—letting us precisely locate and track people. The irony of space science is that its greatest payoff has been our ability to know in real time what is happening here on Earth. Like radio and TV, space has become a medium for moving information.
A similar evolution occurred with computational technology. Computers were originally designed to replace people (typically women) who did laborious calculations, but today they are mainly a means to store, access and create “content.” Computers appeared as a stealth technology that had far more impact than many of its pioneers envisaged. IBM president Thomas J. Watson is often cited as saying, in 1943, that “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.”
Mechanical and electromechanical calculation devices had been around for a long time, but during World War II, U.S. defense officials sought to make computation much faster through the use of electronics—at the time, thermionic valves, or vacuum tubes. One outcome was Whirlwind, a real-time tube-based computer developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a flight simulator for the U.S. Navy. During the cold war, the U.S. Air Force turned Whirlwind into the basis of an air-defense system. The Semi-Automatic Ground Environment system (SAGE) was a continent-scale network of computers, radars, wired and wireless telecommunications systems, and interceptors (piloted and not) that operated into the 1980s. SAGE was the key to IBM’s abandoning mechanical tabulating machines for mainframe digital computers, and it revealed the potential of very large-scale, automated, networked management systems. Its domain, of course, was information—about a potential military attack.
Early mainframe computers were so huge they filled the better part of a room. They were expensive and ran very hot, requiring cooling. They seemed to be the kind of technology that only a government, or a very large business with deep pockets, could ever justify. In the 1980s the personal computer changed that outlook dramatically. Suddenly a computer was something any business and many individuals could buy and use not just for intense computation but also for managing information.
That potential exploded with the commercialization of the Internet. When the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency set out to develop a secure, failure-tolerant digital communications network, it already had SAGE as a model. But SAGE, built on a telephone system using mechanical switching, was also a model of what the military did not want, because centralized switching centers were highly vulnerable to attack. For a communications system to be “survivable,” it would have to have a set of centers, or nodes, interconnected in a network.
The solution—ARPANET—was developed in the 1960s by a diverse group of scientists and engineers funded by the U.S. government. In the 1980s it spawned what we know as the Internet. The Internet, and its killer app the World Wide Web, brought the massive amount of information now at our fingertips, information that has changed the way we live and work and that has powered entirely new industries such as social media, downloadable entertainment, virtual meetings, online shopping and dating, ride sharing, and more. In one sense, the history of the Internet is the opposite of electricity’s: the private sector developed electrical generation, but it took the government to distribute the product widely. In contrast, the government developed the Internet, but the private sector delivered it into our homes—a reminder that casual generalizations about technology development are prone to be false. It is also well to remember that around a quarter of American adults still do not have high-speed Internet service.
Why is it that electricity, telecommunications and computing were so successful, but nuclear power and human space travel have been a letdown? It is clear today that the latter involved heavy doses of wishful thinking. Space travel was imbricated with science fiction, with dreams of heroic courage that continue to fuel unscientific fantasies. Although it turned out to be fairly manageable to launch rockets and send satellites into orbit, putting humans in space—particularly for an extended period—has remained dangerous and expensive.
NASA’s space shuttle was supposed to usher in an era of cheap, even profitable, human spaceflight. It did not. So far no one has created a gainful business based on the concept. The launch in late May 2020 of two astronauts to the International Space Station by SpaceX may have changed the possibilities, but it is too soon to tell. Most space entrepreneurs see tourism as the route to profitability, with suborbital flights or perhaps floating space hotels for zero-g recreation. Maybe one day we will have them, but it is worth noting that in the past tourism has followed commercial development and settlement, not the other way around.
Nuclear power also turned out to be extremely expensive, for the same reason: it costs a lot to keep people safe. The idea of electricity too cheap to meter never really made sense; that statement was based on the idea that tiny amounts of cheap uranium fuel could yield a large amount of power, but the fuel is the least of nuclear power’s expenses. The main costs are construction, materials and labor, which for nuclear plants have remained far higher than for other power sources, mainly because of all the extra effort that has to go into ensuring safety.
Risk is often a controlling factor for technology. Space travel and nuclear power involve risk levels that have proved acceptable in military contexts but mostly not in civilian ones. And despite the claims of some folks in Silicon Valley, venture capitalists generally do not care much for risk. Governments, especially when defending themselves from actual or anticipated enemies, have been more entrepreneurial than most entrepreneurs. Also, neither human space travel nor nuclear power was a response to market demand. Both were the babies of governments that wanted these technologies for military, political or ideological reasons. We might be tempted to conclude, therefore, that the government should stay out of the technology business, but the Internet was not devised in response to market demand either. It was financed and developed by the U.S. government for military purposes. Once it was opened to civilian use, it grew, metamorphosed and, in time, changed our lives.
In fact, government played a role in the success of all the technologies we have considered here. Although the private sector brought electricity to the big cities—New York, Chicago, St. Louis—the federal government’s Rural Electrification Administration brought electricity to much of America, helping to make radio, electric appliances, television and telecommunications part of everyone’s daily lives. A good deal of private investment created these technologies, but the transformations that they wrought were enabled by the “hidden hand” of government, and citizens often experienced their value in unanticipated ways.
These unexpected benefits seem to confirm the famous saying—variously attributed to Niels Bohr, Mark Twain and Yogi Berra—that prediction is very difficult, especially about the future. Historians are loath to make prognostications because in our work we see how generalizations often do not stand up to scrutiny, how no two situations are ever quite the same and how people’s past expectations have so often been confounded.
That said, one change that is already underway in the movement of information is the blurring of boundaries between consumers and producers. In the past the flow of information was almost entirely one-way, from the newspaper, radio or television to the reader, listener or viewer. Today that flow is increasingly two-way—which was one of Tim Berners-Lee’s primary goals when he created the World Wide Web in 1990. We “consumers” can reach one another via Skype, Zoom and FaceTime; post information through Instagram, Facebook and Snapchat; and use software to publish our own books, music and videos—without leaving our couches.
For better or worse, we can expect further blurring of many conventional boundaries—between work and home, between “amateurs” and professionals, and between public and private. We will not vacation on Mars anytime soon, but we might have Webcams there showing us Martian sunsets.


scientificamerican--2020-08-24--Buried Skeletons Reveal Tsunami Threat in East Africa

The 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake sent a tsunami surging outward from Sumatra , devastating coastlines across Southeast Asia but doing @ @ @ @ @ time it reached Africa .
Many scientists have since considered the tsunami risk in parts @ @ @ @ @ relatively low .
But new research conducted on a 1,000-year-old sand layer full of human @ @ @ @ @ 's Pangani Bay , puts the threat of a monster wave back in the spotlight @

The 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake sent a tsunami surging outward from Sumatra, devastating coastlines across Southeast Asia but doing much less damage by the time it reached Africa. Many scientists have since considered the tsunami risk in parts of East Africa to be relatively low. But new research conducted on a 1,000-year-old sand layer full of human bones, in northeastern Tanzania's Pangani Bay, puts the threat of a monster wave back in the spotlight.
Supplementing years of fieldwork done by archaeologists at the University of Dar es Salaam, an international group of geologists combined its own sand-layer analysis with computer-simulated earthquake scenarios. The group found evidence that an ancient Pangani Bay fishing settlement was wrecked by a tsunami emanating from the Sumatra-Andaman subduction zone—which was also the source of the powerful 2004 tsunami. Lead author Vittorio Maselli of Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia was a National Geographic Explorer for the study, published online in May in Geology. Within the sand layer the researchers found evidence of tiny marine fauna swept in from the sea and broken human bones that could not be attributable to disease, violence or traditional burials. “Taking the analysis together, the tsunami was the best interpretation,” Maselli says.
This study could provide the first in a series of data points needed to understand the extent of tsunami risk along East Africa's vast coastline of unmapped seafloors and buried sand layers. And it matches evidence elsewhere: on the other side of the Indian Ocean, researchers have spotted similar tsunami deposits thousands of years old in many of the coastal areas that suffered the heaviest casualties from the 2004 event. “Perhaps the most interesting part [of this study] is that it correlates well with what some of my colleagues had done on the eastern coast of India,” says Emile Okal, a seismologist at Northwestern University, who was not involved in the new research. “From a geologic standpoint, I think this is a very nice contribution.”
Although more work is needed to fully understand the area's risk, the researchers say their study identifies a very real natural hazard for developers to consider in this rapidly urbanizing region. “To me, the takeaway is for long-term infrastructure projects,” says Andrew Moore, a study co-author and a geologist at Earlham College. “This is a call to arms to go look” for tsunami deposits elsewhere.
Additional research can help future East African megacities mitigate risk, Maselli says: “For the moment our knowledge is just one point for the entire African continent. Our claim is, ‘Look, we found something ... let's go back to East Africa and learn more.'”


scientificamerican--2020-08-24--Penis Size Has Nothing to Do with Masculinity

In this age of open discussion about the penises of a supreme court justice and the nation ’ s president , perhaps it ’ s no surprise that people as freely try to draw parallels between a man ’ s behaviors and the size of his penis .
Many of us have seen—and perhaps had—a similar response to seeing images of a man swaggering around in Starbucks with an AR-15 slung over his back : `` Oh , look at that loser , he must be compensating for something , ha ha . ''
If you 've spent time on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of people who have this reflexive snarky response .
It reduces the target to a penis that 's `` too small , '' instead of grappling with the ominous and dangerous social pressures and thinking that drive the behavior .
What these people , many of whom who likely view themselves as “ progressives , ” do n't seem to realize is that their sexist mockery draws from the same toxic well poisoning the minds of people who carry a semi-automatic to buy overpriced coffee .
Instead of reflexive jeering , we should @ @ @ @ @ @ @ poison , directly addressing the causes of toxic masculinity overload and ways to drain it from our society .
The first step is to acknowledge that a fear of rejection and a need for acceptance—by social groups , romantic interests , people in power—is the main ingredient .
Toting a huge gun or indulging in knee-jerk mockery of penis size all reflect this fear in different ways .
A man carrying a ballistic weapon openly in a coffee shop isn ’ t doing that because he ’ s afraid of the people in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ it to claim bragging rights for his in-group , the people he expects will backslap him and say “ bro ” approvingly when he describes his adventure .
Positive responses that pour in from like-minded strangers on social media , if someone posts about his antics , are even better .
The negative responses ?
Those just reinforce his affiliation with the group that approves .
Speaking of social media , I occasionally hear from men who are not , shall we say , fans of my writing about masculinity—critiques that they invariably @ @ @ @ @ @ @ not like to magnify the voices of people who throw around such slurs , so I don ’ t publicly respond to their comments .
But I will share them occasionally on Facebook , with settings such that only friends can see them .
A gal ’ s got ta have an outlet .
Almost invariably , some of the people who comment—who are , I add , there to bemoan the toxic anger and sexist attacks—will mention something about the critic ’ s penis size and how his behavior suggests compensation for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ also frequently anathematize the fellow , reducing him to a vulgar epithet for a body part .
In doing so , they are letting me and everyone on these comment threads know that they deplore this sexist behavior .
As much as I truly appreciate their support ( I do ! )
, it ’ s inescapable that their comments are sexist , too .
I ’ ve fallen into this language trap , as well , so I work on trying to avoid it .
The motivations and underlying factors are similar @ @ @ @ @ @ @ : a signal of support and for approval , poisoned by the seeping influence of toxic masculinity .
Understanding these motivations and consciously avoiding these sexist traps is one antidote to that poison .
The second step is working to change these rules of acceptance and reduce the accompanying fear of rejection .
Like all effective communication around change , the messaging must come from trusted voices within our social circles and from the blessed younger generations rewriting the rules about what masculinity looks like .
The Western version of swaggering masculinity takes @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Association ( APA ) calls “ masculinity ideology.
” In this construct , expressing masculinity means rejecting any accoutrements or behaviors that might suggest femininity or “ weakness , ” both of which are vague concepts that could use some sociocultural repositioning .
Masculinity ideology also calls on its practitioners to show a willingness to take risks and evince a propensity to violence , both of which , interestingly enough , also could be construed as weaknesses .
In 2018 , after yet another U.S. school shooting , comedian and actor Michael Ian @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of this ideology , the poison of “ toxic masculinity , ” which I think of as “ impossible masculinity.
” He wrote : “ There has to be a way to expand what it means to be a man without losing our masculinity .
I don ’ t know how we open ourselves to the rich complexity of our manhood.
” There is a way .
We dispense with the fearful voices in this society , those who reinforce the idea that achieving impossible masculinity is the grand prize trophy for being @ @ @ @ @ @ @ can join the growing numbers of people who , like the APA , recognize not just a single masculinity , but an array of masculinities .
These new versions of masculinity are bursting through the weak points in the rigid , Westernized iteration .
The real secret for someone wondering who he is or who he should become in the context of masculinity isn ’ t buried in Jordan Peterson ’ s 12 Rules for Life , manifested in Ayn Rand ’ s Howard Roark or delineated in an Esquire profile of a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ or young man doesn ’ t need to follow a predetermined path to finally receive his Certificate of Manhood at the end of the road .
There are many ways to be “ masculine , ” so much so that perhaps the term itself should be packaged up and boxed away , and some fresher array of nouns adopted in its place .
An important final step in the antidote mix against impossible masculinity is to stop conflating human beings with their genitalia .
We use slang terms for penises to slur men @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a performance of this very masculine ideology society imposes on them : violent , risk-taking , “ powerful ” and not feminine .
Reducing their behavior to “ compensation ” for the size of their penises is an easy out , a gambit that lets us look away from the forces that drive these men to perform like this for their in-crowd .
Their audience openly embraces these dictates of masculinity ideology and explicitly celebrates and approves them .
The progressives who attribute the behavior to low self-esteem about the penis are more @ @ @ @ @ @ @ same ideology .
They are reducing to a penis the complex social forces and decision points that drive these men to believe and behave as they do .
This conflation of the person with the body part has never worked out well for society , whether as a Freudian-inspired take that mothers were treating their babies as phalluses or the eternal interest in the fate of a penis detached from a man guilty of partner violence , rather than in the fate and mental health of the abused partner .
We need to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the pelvic region , and use what we have north of that area to dismantle these moldy conceptualizations of masculinity .
Penis size doesn ’ t matter , and it ’ s not the measure of the man .

In this age of open discussion about the penises of a supreme court justice and the nation’s president, perhaps it’s no surprise that people as freely try to draw parallels between a man’s behaviors and the size of his penis.
Many of us have seen—and perhaps had—a similar response to seeing images of a man swaggering around in Starbucks with an AR-15 slung over his back: "Oh, look at that loser, he must be compensating for something, ha ha." If you've spent time on social media, you'll see plenty of people who have this reflexive snarky response. It reduces the target to a penis that's "too small," instead of grappling with the ominous and dangerous social pressures and thinking that drive the behavior.
What these people, many of whom who likely view themselves as “progressives,” don't seem to realize is that their sexist mockery draws from the same toxic well poisoning the minds of people who carry a semi-automatic to buy overpriced coffee.
Instead of reflexive jeering, we should be working on an antidote to this poison, directly addressing the causes of toxic masculinity overload and ways to drain it from our society.
The first step is to acknowledge that a fear of rejection and a need for acceptance—by social groups, romantic interests, people in power—is the main ingredient. Toting a huge gun or indulging in knee-jerk mockery of penis size all reflect this fear in different ways. A man carrying a ballistic weapon openly in a coffee shop isn’t doing that because he’s afraid of the people in the store. He’s doing it to claim bragging rights for his in-group, the people he expects will backslap him and say “bro” approvingly when he describes his adventure. Positive responses that pour in from like-minded strangers on social media, if someone posts about his antics, are even better. The negative responses? Those just reinforce his affiliation with the group that approves.
Speaking of social media, I occasionally hear from men who are not, shall we say, fans of my writing about masculinity—critiques that they invariably express using sexist terms. I do not like to magnify the voices of people who throw around such slurs, so I don’t publicly respond to their comments. But I will share them occasionally on Facebook, with settings such that only friends can see them. A gal’s gotta have an outlet.
Almost invariably, some of the people who comment—who are, I add, there to bemoan the toxic anger and sexist attacks—will mention something about the critic’s penis size and how his behavior suggests compensation for having a smaller-than-average one. They will also frequently anathematize the fellow, reducing him to a vulgar epithet for a body part. In doing so, they are letting me and everyone on these comment threads know that they deplore this sexist behavior. As much as I truly appreciate their support (I do!), it’s inescapable that their comments are sexist, too. I’ve fallen into this language trap, as well, so I work on trying to avoid it.
The motivations and underlying factors are similar for the gunslingers and the size slaggers: a signal of support and for approval, poisoned by the seeping influence of toxic masculinity. Understanding these motivations and consciously avoiding these sexist traps is one antidote to that poison.
The second step is working to change these rules of acceptance and reduce the accompanying fear of rejection. Like all effective communication around change, the messaging must come from trusted voices within our social circles and from the blessed younger generations rewriting the rules about what masculinity looks like.
The Western version of swaggering masculinity takes its cues from what the American Psychology Association (APA) calls “masculinity ideology.” In this construct, expressing masculinity means rejecting any accoutrements or behaviors that might suggest femininity or “weakness,” both of which are vague concepts that could use some sociocultural repositioning. Masculinity ideology also calls on its practitioners to show a willingness to take risks and evince a propensity to violence, both of which, interestingly enough, also could be construed as weaknesses.
In 2018, after yet another U.S. school shooting, comedian and actor Michael Ian Black wrote a lament about the toxicity of this ideology, the poison of “toxic masculinity,” which I think of as “impossible masculinity.” He wrote: “There has to be a way to expand what it means to be a man without losing our masculinity. I don’t know how we open ourselves to the rich complexity of our manhood.”
There is a way.
We dispense with the fearful voices in this society, those who reinforce the idea that achieving impossible masculinity is the grand prize trophy for being a “real” man. We can join the growing numbers of people who, like the APA, recognize not just a single masculinity, but an array of masculinities.
These new versions of masculinity are bursting through the weak points in the rigid, Westernized iteration. The real secret for someone wondering who he is or who he should become in the context of masculinity isn’t buried in Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life, manifested in Ayn Rand’s Howard Roark or delineated in an Esquire profile of a single middle-class white boy. A boy or young man doesn’t need to follow a predetermined path to finally receive his Certificate of Manhood at the end of the road. There are many ways to be “masculine,” so much so that perhaps the term itself should be packaged up and boxed away, and some fresher array of nouns adopted in its place.
An important final step in the antidote mix against impossible masculinity is to stop conflating human beings with their genitalia. We use slang terms for penises to slur men whose behavior is, in fact, a performance of this very masculine ideology society imposes on them: violent, risk-taking, “powerful” and not feminine. Reducing their behavior to “compensation” for the size of their penises is an easy out, a gambit that lets us look away from the forces that drive these men to perform like this for their in-crowd.
Their audience openly embraces these dictates of masculinity ideology and explicitly celebrates and approves them. The progressives who attribute the behavior to low self-esteem about the penis are more slyly using those dictates to embrace the same ideology. They are reducing to a penis the complex social forces and decision points that drive these men to believe and behave as they do. This conflation of the person with the body part has never worked out well for society, whether as a Freudian-inspired take that mothers were treating their babies as phalluses or the eternal interest in the fate of a penis detached from a man guilty of partner violence, rather than in the fate and mental health of the abused partner.
We need to look to the whole person, not the pelvic region, and use what we have north of that area to dismantle these moldy conceptualizations of masculinity. Penis size doesn’t matter, and it’s not the measure of the man.


scientificamerican--2020-08-24--How Birds Evolved Their Incredible Diversity

This past May , when it finally sank in that I was going to be stuck at home for a very long time because of the pandemic , I took up a hobby that had never especially appealed to me before : birding .
I cleaned my neglected bird feeder and filled it with seed , retrieved my binoculars from a gear bag in the basement and started having my morning coffee outside , slowly learning to identify species based on body size , feather colors , beak shape and song .
At last count , I had logged 39 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ backyard .
These hours spent observing birds—the goldfinches congregating at the feeder , the pileated woodpeckers drumming in the trees , the turkeys strutting across the lawn , the ruby-throated hummingbirds hovering above their favorite blooms , the red-shouldered hawks circling overhead—have given me a newfound appreciation for their diversity .
And I ’ m seeing only a sliver of the actual richness of avian forms .
With more than 10,000 species alive today , birds constitute the most diverse group of land vertebrates ( backboned animals ) on Earth .
How did @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ?
Scientists have tended to view modern bird diversity as the result of a burst of evolutionary activity that occurred after the mass extinction that wiped out the nonbird dinosaurs .
( Birds are themselves dinosaurs , the only lineage to survive to the present day . )
The idea was that after the dinosaur-killing asteroid crashed into Earth 66 million years ago , birds had the place largely to themselves .
Free of competition from other dinosaurs ( not to mention a whole bunch of other vertebrates that also perished , including @ @ @ @ @ @ @ had long ruled the skies ) , birds abruptly exploded into a multitude of forms to fill the many newly vacant ecological niches .
Now a new analysis has turned up intriguing evidence that their extraordinary diversity might not have originated that way .
In a study of hundreds of bird and dinosaur skulls , Ryan Felice of University College London , Anjali Goswami of the Natural History Museum in London and their colleagues found that in the aftermath of the mass extinction event , the pace of birds ’ evolution actually slowed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ their dinosaur predecessors , rather than accelerating as expected .
The paper , published on August 18 in PLOS Biology , reveals the rate of evolution during the radiation of a major vertebrate group and hints at factors that may have played a key role determining its course .
“ Birds have incredible diversity in the shape of their skulls , ” Felice observes .
Consider hawks versus hummingbirds , he says , or pigeons versus pelicans .
“ Did birds evolve their highly variable skulls by evolving more rapidly than their nonavian @ @ @ @ @ @ @ That might seem like a narrow question , but “ it gets toward an understanding of how diversity evolves , ” he explains .
“ If a group of organisms is really diverse , do they achieve their diversity really quickly in an explosive burst ?
Or is it slow and steady ?
” To investigate , the team carried out a detailed shape analysis of 391 well-preserved skulls from modern birds and extinct dinosaurs using high-resolution 3-D scans of the specimens and reconstructed their evolution .
Typically skull-shape comparisons rest on the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ bumps—that all of the various species under evaluation share .
But the larger the study group , the fewer the points of correspondence .
As a result , investigations that focus on traditional landmarks lose much of the information about skull shape .
“ Our approach takes those landmarks and uses them as anchors for curves that connect up those landmarks and , in doing so , outline and delimit the individual bones of the skull , ” Goswami says .
“ Our automated approach then takes a generic template of points and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the specimens in our data set by using the landmarks and curves to identify the regions of interest .
So you can get points distributed across the surface of a bone in a consistent way , regardless of whether the bones you are looking at look like the flat , bony structure under the beak of a duck or the tall , biting [ snout ] of a T. rex.
” What the researchers found was that dinosaurs evolved 1.5 to three times faster than birds in all regions of the skull @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the Mesozoic era to a close and ushered in the Cenozoic era , birds diversified .
But they did so far more slowly than their Mesozoic dinosaur forerunners .
“ Their rate of morphological change declines just as they are taking off as a radiation , ” Goswami says .
Why the sudden deceleration ?
Goswami thinks it reflects a shift in priorities for skull function .
Whereas dinosaur skulls have elaborate display and fighting structures and complex feeding mechanisms that require large areas for jaw-muscle attachment , bird skulls are mostly dedicated @ @ @ @ @ @ @ comparatively large brain , she explains .
Bird evolution experts who were not involved in the new research praised the team ’ s methodology and the vast number of species they included in their study .
The finding that dinosaurs had a much faster rate of skull evolution than modern birds “ might seem strange at first glance , ” says Daniel Ksepka of the Bruce Museum in Greenwich , Conn. “ After all , consider the wonderful variety of bill shapes in birds like spoonbills , flamingos and pelicans .
That suggests @ @ @ @ @ @ @ But a closer look reveals that these distinctive bills are the exception rather than the rule , he adds .
“ There are plenty of groups where dozens of related species share a pretty similar skull shape , like warblers or parrots , suggesting relatively little skull evolution , ” Ksepka says .
In contrast , some groups of dinosaurs clearly had sky-high rates of skull evolution .
Among the ceratopsians ( Triceratops and its kin ) , for instance , “ each species had a unique arrangement of horns and crests .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ due to their value for attracting mates , ” Ksepka notes .
“ So many dinosaurs had these elaborate skull ornaments , but they are very rare in birds ( the cassowary is one awesome exception ) , ” he adds .
“ It 's likely that feathers took over the display role , as we have plenty of modern birds with plain-shaped skulls but beautiful feathered head crests .
Just look at your friendly backyard cardinals and blue jays.
” The discovery that bird skulls resulted from relatively low evolutionary rates “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the rest of the skeleton , ” observes Stephen Brusatte of the University of Edinburgh in Scotland , another outside expert .
“ Previous studies , including one of my projects , showed that bird skeletons evolved faster than nonbird skeletons .
What this means , I think , is that the origin of birds was driven by rapid and remarkable changes to the skeleton : particularly turning the arms into wings for flight .
The heads were less important in this transition , and they probably lagged behind the rest of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ evolution , birds seem to hit on a head design that worked for them , with such features as a beak , big eyes and and a large brain , he says .
“ Birds didn ’ t need to radically change any of these things in order to adapt to different niches.
” Instead , Brusatte suggests , “ after birds split off from other dinosaurs and went into the skies , they adapted to new niches by changing their body sizes , wing shapes and flying styles more than their heads.
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ different parts of the body evolve at different rates , is known to have occurred in many organisms , including humans .
Ksepka notes that the ceratopsians ’ high rate of skull evolution contrasts starkly with barely discernable change in their limb bones .
Meanwhile modern warblers , he says , exhibit very little change in skull shape but have evolved “ a kaleidoscope of color patterns.
” But Goswami has a hunch that other parts of the bird skeleton may have also evolved on a relatively leisurely timetable .
Nonbird dinosaurs transition @ @ @ @ @ @ @ times over the course of their evolution and do a lot of different things with their forelimbs , she points out—think of T. rex ’ s puny arms , compared with a titanosaur ’ s tree trunks .
In contrast , once birds specialize for flight , they riff on that theme a lot over their evolutionary history but never really evolve completely new body plans—presumably because of the developmental or functional constraints of being a bird .
“ I expect that future studies with sampling as broad as ours will also start @ @ @ @ @ @ @ frankly , not keeping up with the pace of evolution observed in the other dinosaurs , ” Goswami says .
Of course , the birds are no less spectacular for that downturn .
They survived fire and brimstone , conquered the skies and diversified into the dazzling array of feathered wonders that share the planet with us today .
Slow and steady won the race .

This past May, when it finally sank in that I was going to be stuck at home for a very long time because of the pandemic, I took up a hobby that had never especially appealed to me before: birding. I cleaned my neglected bird feeder and filled it with seed, retrieved my binoculars from a gear bag in the basement, and started having my morning coffee outside, slowly learning to identify species based on body size, feather colors, beak shape and song. At last count I had logged 39 species from the confines of my suburban backyard. These hours spent observing birds—the goldfinches congregating at the feeder, the pileated woodpeckers drumming in the trees, the turkeys strutting across the lawn, the ruby-throated hummingbirds hovering above their favorite blooms, the red-shouldered hawks circling overhead—have given me a newfound appreciation for their diversity. And I am seeing only a sliver of the actual richness of avian forms. With more than 10,000 species alive today, birds constitute the most diverse group of land vertebrates (backboned animals) on Earth. How did they come to be so spectacularly varied?
Birds are dinosaurs, the only lineage to survive to the present day. They arose in the Jurassic period, between 200 million and 150 million years ago, from the theropods, a group of two-legged carnivorous dinosaurs whose members include both the behemoth Tyrannosaurus rex and the daintier Velociraptor. For tens of millions of years birds evolved alongside other dinosaurs, diversifying into a number of small-bodied, fast-growing, feathered fliers, along with a few large-bodied, flightless forms. One group, the so-called neornithines, or new birds—distinguished by their fused foot and anklebones and by certain traits in the bones that support the wings—would eventually give rise to modern avian-kind.
Modern birds exhibit a myriad of forms, with more than 10,000 species alive today. They are found on every major landmass and body of water on Earth and have evolved to exploit a wide variety of ecological niches. Shown here are a red-shouldered hawk (1), a magnificent hummingbird (2), a cassowary (3) and a flamingo (4). Credit: Enrique Aguirre Aves Getty Images (1, 2); Jordan Capitan Getty Images (3); Tashina Van Zwam Getty Images (4)
Scientists have tended to view modern bird diversity as the result of a burst of evolutionary activity that occurred after the fateful day 66 million years ago when a six-mile-wide asteroid struck Earth, dooming 75 percent of plant and animal species, including the nonbird dinosaurs and most bird groups. Exactly why the neornithine lineage alone survived this apocalypse is uncertain, although the recent discovery of a 66.7-million-year-old neornithine bird fossil from Belgium called Asteriornis, a relative of today's ducks and chickens, suggests that being small and living in a shoreline environment may have helped. In any case, the idea was that after the mass extinction, the neornithine birds had the place largely to themselves. Free of competition from other dinosaurs (not to mention a whole bunch of other vertebrates that also perished, including the pterosaurs, those flying reptiles that had long ruled the skies), birds abruptly exploded into a multitude of forms to fill the many newly vacant ecological niches.
Now a new analysis has turned up intriguing evidence that their extraordinary diversity might not have originated that way. In a study of hundreds of bird and dinosaur skulls, Ryan Felice of University College London, Anjali Goswami of the Natural History Museum in London and their colleagues found that in the aftermath of the mass-extinction event, the pace of birds’ evolution actually slowed way down compared with that of their dinosaur predecessors, rather than accelerating as expected. The paper, published in PLOS Biology, reveals the rate of evolution during the radiation of a major vertebrate group and hints at factors that may have played a key role in determining its course.
Skulls of nonbird dinosaurs are more diverse than those of birds. Credit: Ryan Felice
Fossils that preserve the entire skeleton of an animal are extremely rare, so comparative studies of fossil material tend to focus on a particular region of the body. The team looked at skulls because they serve many functions, from supporting sense organs to enabling feeding to attracting mates to defending themselves. “Birds have incredible diversity in the shape of their skulls,” Felice observes. Consider hawks versus hummingbirds, he says, or pigeons versus pelicans. “Did birds evolve their highly variable skulls by evolving more rapidly than their nonavian dinosaur ancestors?” Felice asks. That might seem like a narrow question, but “it gets toward an understanding of how diversity evolves,” he explains. “If a group of organisms is really diverse, do they achieve their diversity quickly in an explosive burst? Or is it slow and steady?”
To investigate, the team carried out a detailed shape analysis of 391 well-preserved skulls from modern birds and extinct dinosaurs using high-resolution 3-D scans of the specimens. The scientists used the results to reconstruct the animals’ evolution. Typically skull-shape comparisons rest on the use of established landmarks—such as sutures and bumps—that all the various species under evaluation share. But the larger the study group, the fewer the points of correspondence. As a result, investigations that focus on traditional landmarks lose much of the information about skull shape. “Our approach takes those landmarks and uses them as anchors for curves that connect up those landmarks and, in doing so, outline and delimit the individual bones of the skull,” Goswami says. “Our automated approach then takes a generic template of points and fits the exact same template to all the specimens in our data set by using the landmarks and curves to identify the regions of interest. So you can get points distributed across the surface of a bone in a consistent way, regardless of whether the bones you are looking at look like the flat, bony structure under the beak of a duck or the tall, biting [snout] of a T. rex.”
What the researchers found was that dinosaurs evolved 1.5 to three times faster than birds in all regions of the skull. After the mass-extinction event brought the Mesozoic era to a close and ushered in the Cenozoic era, birds branched into most of the major modern groups, from hummingbirds and penguins to birds of prey and songbirds. But they evolved this diversity far more slowly than their Mesozoic dinosaur forerunners. “Their rate of morphological change declines just as they are taking off as a radiation,” Goswami says.
Diversity of modern birds—from the pileated woodpecker (1) to the Eurasian spoonbill (2) to the American goldfinch (3) to the great pelican (4)—has been seen as the product of a burst of evolutionary activity that took place in the aftermath of the end-Cretaceous mass extinction. New research, however, suggests birds evolved their astonishing variety slowly. Credit: Brian Lasenby Getty Images (1); Getty Images (2); Gary Carter Getty Images (3); Tashina Van Zwam Getty Images (4)
Why the sudden deceleration? Goswami thinks it reflects a shift in priorities for skull function. Whereas dinosaur skulls have elaborate display and fighting structures, as well as complex feeding mechanisms that require large areas for jaw-muscle attachment, bird skulls are mostly dedicated to housing and protecting the animals’ comparatively large brain, she explains.
Bird-evolution experts who were not involved in the new research praised the team's methodology and the vast number of species they included in their study.
The finding that dinosaurs had a much faster rate of skull evolution than modern birds might seem strange considering the variety of bills in birds such as spoonbills, flamingos and pelicans, says Daniel Ksepka of the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Conn. Their sundry shapes suggest a high rate of evolution in the beak, which is a major component of the skull. But a closer look reveals that these distinctive bills are the exception rather than the rule, he says. “There are plenty of groups where dozens of related species share a pretty similar skull shape, like warblers or parrots, suggesting relatively little skull evolution,” Ksepka observes.
In contrast, some groups of dinosaurs clearly had sky-high rates of skull evolution. Among the ceratopsians (Triceratops and its kin), for instance, “each species had a unique arrangement of horns and crests. And these seem to have evolved rapidly because of their value for attracting mates,” Ksepka says. “So many dinosaurs had these elaborate skull ornaments, but they are very rare in birds—the cassowary is one awesome exception,” he adds. The large, flightless cassowary, a relative of the emu found in the tropical forests of Papua New Guinea and northeastern Australia, has a prominent bony crest atop its head. “It's likely that feathers took over the display role, as we have plenty of modern birds with plain-shaped skulls but beautiful feathered head crests. Just look at your friendly backyard cardinals and blue jays.”
The discovery that bird skulls resulted from relatively low evolutionary rates “is essentially opposite from what we know of the rest of the skeleton,” says Stephen Brusatte of the University of Edinburgh, another outside expert. Previous studies by Brusatte and others have focused on parts of the body other than the skull and found that these regions evolved faster in birds than in other dinosaurs. “What this means, I think, is that the origin of birds was driven by rapid and remarkable changes to the skeleton, particularly turning the arms into wings for flight. The heads were less important in this transition, and they probably lagged behind the rest of the skeleton.” Early on in their evolution, birds seem to have hit on a head design that worked for them, with such features as a beak, big eyes and a large brain, he says: “Birds didn't need to radically change any of these things in order to adapt to different niches.” Instead, Brusatte suggests, “after birds split off from other dinosaurs and went into the skies, they adapted to new niches by changing their body sizes, wing shapes and flying styles more than their heads.”
Such mosaic evolution, in which different parts of the body evolve at different rates, is known to have occurred in many organisms, including humans. Ksepka notes that the ceratopsians’ high rate of skull evolution contrasts starkly with barely discernible changes in their limb bones. Meanwhile modern warblers, he says, exhibit very little change in skull shape but have evolved “a kaleidoscope of color patterns.”
But Goswami has a hunch that other parts of the bird skeleton may have also evolved on a relatively leisurely timetable. Nonbird dinosaurs transitioned between bipedal and quadrupedal body plans several times over the course of their evolution and did a lot of different things with their forelimbs, she points out—think of T. rex’s puny arms compared with a titanosaur's tree trunks. In contrast, once birds became specialized for flight as their forelimbs morphed into wings, among other changes, they never really evolved completely new body plans—presumably because of the developmental or functional constraints of being a bird. “I expect that future studies with sampling as broad as ours will also start to find that birds are, quite frankly, not keeping up with the pace of evolution observed in the other dinosaurs,” Goswami says.
Of course, the birds are no less spectacular for that downturn. They survived fire and brimstone, conquered the skies and diversified into the dazzling array of feathered wonders that share the planet with us today. Slow and steady won the race.


scientificamerican--2020-08-24--Evidence for Convalescent Plasma Coronavirus Treatment Lags Behind Excitement

Update August 24 : The US Food and Drug Administration issued an emergency-use authorization on August 23 to treat COVID-19 with convalescent plasma .
US President Donald Trump has called on COVID-19 survivors to donate their blood plasma as a treatment for the disease , saying that “ it ’ s had tremendous response so far ” .
Meanwhile , rumours have been swirling that US drug regulators are grappling with whether to give the plasma to more people by authorizing it as an emergency therapy .
But researchers and clinicians around the world are concerned that a push to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ trials needed to determine whether it actually works against COVID-19 .
Although some US hospitals already offer the treatment in special cases , an emergency-use authorization from the Food and Drug Administration ( FDA ) would make it easier to obtain and administer convalescent plasma — the yellow liquid that remains after cells are removed from blood .
But so far , there ’ s little evidence that plasma actually helps patients , and the decision could confound efforts to study its effects , says former FDA commissioner Robert Califf , who now @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and Google Health in South San Francisco , California .
The antiviral drug remdesivir and the anti-inflammatory medicine dexamethasone are the only treatments that have been shown to combat COVID-19 in rigorous clinical trials .
Convalescent plasma has been tested only in small trials without the statistical power to provide firm conclusions .
The FDA did n't respond to queries from Nature about where things stand with its decision to authorize convalescent plasma .
But if the FDA issues an authorization , experts say , people with COVID-19 might choose to access the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for a clinical trial and risk being assigned to a control group that does not receive plasma .
“ It ’ s a potential therapy that could work , and I don ’ t think it ’ s out of bounds to make it available ” with an authorization , says Califf .
“ But we ought to be really emphasizing in public-service announcements that participation in randomized trials is a first priority.
” For more than a century , doctors have used the convalescent plasma of donors recovering from infections to treat @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Ebola and Middle East respiratory syndrome ( MERS ) , which is also caused by a coronavirus .
The idea is that plasma contains antibodies and proteins involved in regulating immune responses .
And some of these antibodies might have helped the donor to recover from their infection — so giving it to infected people could kick-start their recovery .
Although there have been few data on whether convalescent plasma definitely improves outcomes for people with other diseases , it was logical to test the treatment against COVID-19 when the outbreak began .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ its effectiveness in the middle of the pandemic , says Michael Joyner , an anaesthesiologist at Mayo Clinic in Rochester , Minnesota .
For one thing , convalescent plasma from different people varies widely in antibody concentration , making it challenging to study .
At first , researchers had no way to measure and standardize the level of antibodies in each batch .
Even now , researchers in some parts of the world are not able to test whether plasma contains powerful ‘ neutralizing antibodies ’ , which can prevent viral replication , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ certain containment procedures , says infectious-disease specialist Fazle Chowdhury at the Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujib Medical University in Dhaka .
Collecting rigorous clinical-trial data has also been difficult because doctors have been administering convalescent plasma to severely ill people on a ‘ compassionate use ’ basis .
In the United States , a special programme funded by the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority ( BARDA ) has provided convalescent plasma on this basis to more than 66,000 people — without running any control groups .
The programme ’ s investigators — including Joyner @ @ @ @ @ @ @ published results from 5,000 people with severe COVID-19 , suggesting that the therapy is broadly safe .
“ We really don ’ t know what is happening when you use it on a compassionate basis , ” says Chowdhury .
“ If we use convalescent plasma , it should be under clinical trial.
” US researchers have complained that the BARDA-funded project has siphoned away potential participants and plasma donors from randomized clinical trials that would produce more rigorous data .
In the absence of a control group , Joyner and his colleagues @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the concentration of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies was not standardized .
The team looked at more than 35,000 plasma recipients , and compared results from those who received plasma with relatively low levels of antibodies with findings from people who got plasma with higher levels .
The study , published on the medRxiv preprint server before peer review , found that participants who received transfusions soon after their diagnosis and got high concentrations of antibodies showed more improvement and were less likely to die in the study period than were those who received later transfusions @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was an extremely important finding , ” says Cassandra Josephson , a paediatrician at Emory University in Atlanta , Georgia , who has been treating children who have COVID-19 .
But the lack of randomization makes it difficult to draw a firm conclusion from the study , cautions Anthony Gordon , an anaesthetist at Imperial College London .
For example , patients who received the treatment soon after diagnosis may have been treated at medical centres that provided better health care , he says , raising their chance of a better outcome .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ association , ” he says .
“ We ’ re not seeing cause and effect.
” In lieu of conventional large clinical trials with statistical power , some researchers are trying to piece together evidence from smaller tests .
Another not-yet peer-reviewed preprint by Joyner and his colleagues , published on medRxiv on 30 July , compiles data from more than 800 participants across a dozen studies — in the hope of boosting statistical power .
The team found that the treatment cut mortality from 26 % to 13 % .
But it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ conclusion from data combined from disparate studies , cautions Josephson .
The trials treated people with varying disease severity , using different doses of plasma and tracking a range of measures of success .
“ There are a lot of things to pick apart ” about the analysis , says Josephson .
At the same time , it ’ s not without value .
“ We had nothing before except for safety data.
” And there are still data to come .
In the United Kingdom , epidemiologist Martin Landray and infectious-disease researcher @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of Oxford , are leading the large RECOVERY trial , which is testing several therapies , including convalescent plasma , in people hospitalized with COVID-19 .
And Gordon and his colleagues are testing convalescent plasma in people in intensive care , in an international trial called REMAP-CAP .
But the first surge of the pandemic in the United Kingdom has largely passed , so Landray says that he does not expect to have results until later in the year , when some epidemiological models predict COVID-19 cases will rise again .
In the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ team is stockpiling plasma from donors , to deploy rapidly if that surge arrives .
Landray cautions against assuming that convalescent plasma works until the data are in .
“ We have seen in this epidemic just how wrong well-meaning scientific hypotheses can be , ” he says , pointing to hydroxychloroquine as an example .
The malaria drug showed promise against COVID-19 in small , early trials and laboratory studies , but was eventually shown not to have an effect on the disease .
“ There is good science behind convalescent plasma @ @ @ @ @ @ @ it may turn out to be an effective treatment , ” Landray says .
“ But the bottom line is that we don ’ t have enough data to know.
” This article is reproduced with permission and was first published on August 19 , 2020 .
Read more about the coronavirus outbreak from Scientific American here .
And read coverage from our international network of magazines here .

Update August 24: The US Food and Drug Administration issued an emergency-use authorization on August 23 to treat COVID-19 with convalescent plasma.
US President Donald Trump has called on COVID-19 survivors to donate their blood plasma as a treatment for the disease, saying that “it’s had tremendous response so far”. Meanwhile, rumours have been swirling that US drug regulators are grappling with whether to give the plasma to more people by authorizing it as an emergency therapy. But researchers and clinicians around the world are concerned that a push to distribute blood plasma could undermine the clinical trials needed to determine whether it actually works against COVID-19.
Although some US hospitals already offer the treatment in special cases, an emergency-use authorization from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) would make it easier to obtain and administer convalescent plasma — the yellow liquid that remains after cells are removed from blood.
But so far, there’s little evidence that plasma actually helps patients, and the decision could confound efforts to study its effects, says former FDA commissioner Robert Califf, who now heads clinical policy and strategy at Verily and Google Health in South San Francisco, California. The antiviral drug remdesivir and the anti-inflammatory medicine dexamethasone are the only treatments that have been shown to combat COVID-19 in rigorous clinical trials.
Convalescent plasma has been tested only in small trials without the statistical power to provide firm conclusions. The FDA didn't respond to queries from Nature about where things stand with its decision to authorize convalescent plasma. But if the FDA issues an authorization, experts say, people with COVID-19 might choose to access the treatment directly, rather than sign up for a clinical trial and risk being assigned to a control group that does not receive plasma.
“It’s a potential therapy that could work, and I don’t think it’s out of bounds to make it available” with an authorization, says Califf. “But we ought to be really emphasizing in public-service announcements that participation in randomized trials is a first priority.”
Data shortage
For more than a century, doctors have used the convalescent plasma of donors recovering from infections to treat others with the same disease, including Ebola and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), which is also caused by a coronavirus. The idea is that plasma contains antibodies and proteins involved in regulating immune responses. And some of these antibodies might have helped the donor to recover from their infection — so giving it to infected people could kick-start their recovery. Although there have been few data on whether convalescent plasma definitely improves outcomes for people with other diseases, it was logical to test the treatment against COVID-19 when the outbreak began. But researchers have struggled to nail down its effectiveness in the middle of the pandemic, says Michael Joyner, an anaesthesiologist at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.
For one thing, convalescent plasma from different people varies widely in antibody concentration, making it challenging to study. At first, researchers had no way to measure and standardize the level of antibodies in each batch. Even now, researchers in some parts of the world are not able to test whether plasma contains powerful ‘neutralizing antibodies’, which can prevent viral replication, because the assay is expensive and requires certain containment procedures, says infectious-disease specialist Fazle Chowdhury at the Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujib Medical University in Dhaka.
Collecting rigorous clinical-trial data has also been difficult because doctors have been administering convalescent plasma to severely ill people on a ‘compassionate use’ basis. In the United States, a special programme funded by the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) has provided convalescent plasma on this basis to more than 66,000 people — without running any control groups. The programme’s investigators — including Joyner — have been gathering data and have published results from 5,000 people with severe COVID-19, suggesting that the therapy is broadly safe.
“We really don’t know what is happening when you use it on a compassionate basis,” says Chowdhury. “If we use convalescent plasma, it should be under clinical trial.” US researchers have complained that the BARDA-funded project has siphoned away potential participants and plasma donors from randomized clinical trials that would produce more rigorous data.
In the absence of a control group, Joyner and his colleagues have taken advantage of the fact that the concentration of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies was not standardized. The team looked at more than 35,000 plasma recipients, and compared results from those who received plasma with relatively low levels of antibodies with findings from people who got plasma with higher levels. The study, published on the medRxiv preprint server before peer review, found that participants who received transfusions soon after their diagnosis and got high concentrations of antibodies showed more improvement and were less likely to die in the study period than were those who received later transfusions with lower antibody concentrations. “This was an extremely important finding,” says Cassandra Josephson, a paediatrician at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, who has been treating children who have COVID-19.
But the lack of randomization makes it difficult to draw a firm conclusion from the study, cautions Anthony Gordon, an anaesthetist at Imperial College London. For example, patients who received the treatment soon after diagnosis may have been treated at medical centres that provided better health care, he says, raising their chance of a better outcome. “We’re just seeing an association,” he says. “We’re not seeing cause and effect.”
Filling in the gaps
In lieu of conventional large clinical trials with statistical power, some researchers are trying to piece together evidence from smaller tests. Another not-yet peer-reviewed preprint by Joyner and his colleagues, published on medRxiv on 30 July, compiles data from more than 800 participants across a dozen studies — in the hope of boosting statistical power. The team found that the treatment cut mortality from 26% to 13%.
But it’s difficult to draw a firm conclusion from data combined from disparate studies, cautions Josephson. The trials treated people with varying disease severity, using different doses of plasma and tracking a range of measures of success. “There are a lot of things to pick apart” about the analysis, says Josephson. At the same time, it’s not without value. “We had nothing before except for safety data.”
And there are still data to come. In the United Kingdom, epidemiologist Martin Landray and infectious-disease researcher Peter Horby, both at the University of Oxford, are leading the large RECOVERY trial, which is testing several therapies, including convalescent plasma, in people hospitalized with COVID-19. And Gordon and his colleagues are testing convalescent plasma in people in intensive care, in an international trial called REMAP-CAP. But the first surge of the pandemic in the United Kingdom has largely passed, so Landray says that he does not expect to have results until later in the year, when some epidemiological models predict COVID-19 cases will rise again. In the meantime, he says, the RECOVERY team is stockpiling plasma from donors, to deploy rapidly if that surge arrives.
Landray cautions against assuming that convalescent plasma works until the data are in. “We have seen in this epidemic just how wrong well-meaning scientific hypotheses can be,” he says, pointing to hydroxychloroquine as an example. The malaria drug showed promise against COVID-19 in small, early trials and laboratory studies, but was eventually shown not to have an effect on the disease.
“There is good science behind convalescent plasma and a good reason for thinking that it may turn out to be an effective treatment,” Landray says. “But the bottom line is that we don’t have enough data to know.”
This article is reproduced with permission and was first published on August 19, 2020.
Read more about the coronavirus outbreak from Scientific American here. And read coverage from our international network of magazines here.


scientificamerican--2020-08-24--Bread Science: A Yeasty Conversation

Bread Science: A Yeasty Conversation

`` Backing is applied microbiology , '' according to the book Modernist Bread .
During pandemic lockdowns , many people @ @ @ @ @ .
Scientific American contributing editor W. Wayt Gibbs talks about Modernist Bread , for which @ @ @ @ @ editor .

Steve Mirsky was the winner of a Twist contest in 1962, for which he received three crayons and three pieces of construction paper. It remains his most prestigious award. Follow Steve Mirsky on Twitter Credit: Nick Higgins