President Joe Biden will unveil the much-anticipated first full-color image from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope on Monday, agency officials confirmed.
The image, known as "Webb's First Deep Field," will be the deepest and highest-resolution view of the universe ever captured, showing myriad galaxies as they appeared up to 13 billion years in the past, according to NASA.
The agency and its partners, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency, are set to release a separate batch of full-color images from the Webb telescope on Tuesday, but Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and the public will get a sneak peek a day early.NASA will brief the president and the vice president on Monday, agency officials said, and the first image will be revealed at an event at 5 p.m. ET at the White House. [snip]
After the White House event, NASA will unveil more images in an event streamed live Tuesday at 10:30 a.m. ET. NASA officials said that batch will include the Webb telescope’s first spectrum of an exoplanet, showing light emitted at different wavelengths from a planet in another star system. The images could offer new insights into the atmospheres and chemical makeups of other exoplanets in the cosmos.
Some images included in the Tuesday release will show how galaxies interact and grow, and others will depict the life cycle of stars, from the emergence of new ones to violent stellar deaths.
America has decided the pandemic is over. The coronavirus has other ideas.
The latest omicron offshoot, BA.5, has quickly become dominant in the United States, and thanks to its elusiveness when encountering the human immune system, is driving a wave of cases across the country.
The size of that wave is unclear because most people are testing at home or not testing at all. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the past week has reported a little more than 100,000 new cases a day on average. But infectious-disease experts know that wildly underestimates the true number, which may be as many as a million, said Eric Topol, a professor at Scripps Research who closely tracks pandemic trends.
Antibodies from vaccines and previous coronavirus infections offer limited protection against BA.5, leading Topol to call it “the worst version of the virus that we’ve seen.”
Other experts point out that, despite being hit by multiple rounds of ever-more-contagious omicron subvariants, the country has not yet seen a dramatic spike in hospitalizations. About 38,000 people were hospitalized nationally with covid as of Friday, according to data compiled by The Washington Post. That figure has been steadily rising since early March, but remains far below the record 162,000 patients hospitalized with covid in mid-January. The average daily death toll on Friday stood at 329 and has not changed significantly over the past two months.
There is widespread agreement among infectious-disease experts that this remains a dangerous virus that causes illnesses of unpredictable severity — and they say the country is not doing enough to limit transmission.
Restrictions and mandates are long gone. Air travel is nearly back to pre-pandemic levels. Political leaders aren’t talking about the virus — it’s virtually a nonissue on the campaign trail. Most people are done with masking, social distancing and the pandemic generally. They’re taking their chances with the virus.
I like Twitter’s odds — its odds of getting specific performance and making [Elon] Musk close the deal — in court, but I don’t think anything is a certainty at this point. And obviously Musk will make this fight as unpleasant as possible; already the attorney general of Texas has opened an investigation of Twitter’s bot numbers in order to harass Twitter and capitalize on Musk’s popularity with Republican voters. I have suggested in the past that Twitter’s best weapon in this dispute would be banning Musk from Twitter, because he is such an addict, but in fact he recently stayed off Twitter voluntarily for nine days, which I assume he did just to prove to Twitter the company that he can survive without Twitter the product. It is all going to be pretty awful and stupid.
Is it fun for him? If he manages to walk away having spent only millions in financing fees, millions in legal fees and say $1 billion in termination fees, was it worth it? What did he get out of this? The guy really seems to like being on Twitter, and he did make himself the main character in Twitter's drama for months on end. That’s nice for him I guess. Also he made the lives of Twitter’s executives and employees pretty miserable; as a fellow Twitter addict I can kind of see the appeal of that? I always assume that “everyone who works at Twitter hates the product and its users,” and I suppose this is a case of the richest and weirdest user getting some revenge on the employees. He also gave himself an excuse to sell a bunch of Tesla stock near the highs. He maybe got an edit button too? Maybe that’s worth a billion dollars to him?
I tell you what though. I have learned my lesson. The next time Elon Musk announces that he is going to buy a public company — and he will do it again! — I will know not to believe him. I will definitely know not to write about it.
BONUS: Et tu, Malignant Loser?
Trump on Elon Musk: "You know, he said the other day, Oh, I've never voted for a Republican. I said, I didn't know that, he told me he voted for me. So he's another bullshit artist." pic.twitter.com/1cBiZsX1BJ
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 10, 2022
