HOW MANY WILL DIE FROM THE CORONAVIRUS IN THE US? TWO INTERACTIVE CALCULATORS TO SEE FOR YOURSELF

The math is simple. Plug in what percentage of US citizens will eventually catch the virus and what percent of those will die. The New York Times provides a convenient--and very sobering--calculator so you you can see for yourself. Just click here.

This is the enemy--Novel Coronavirus SARS-CoV-2

Credit: NIAID//RML

If 40 percent get the disease and just 1 percent or them die, the coronavirus will kill more Americans this year than heart disease and cancer--the two leading causes of death--combined.

At least to some extent both variables are under our control. The number of people who contract the disease can be limited by our personal behavior and by mandated closures and quarantines. Having tests available to quickly identify carriers of the disease and their contacts is crucial. Unfortunately, the US lags far behind other countries on this critical factor. The percentage of infected people who die depends on the availability and quality of health care for them, and, in particular, keeping the number of cases at any given time within the capacity of the health care system.

We can only hope that we, as individuals and through our local, state and federal governments, will rise to this enormous challenge. If not, many of us will fall.

A sobering and urgent note: In the extremely important article here, you'll find a more detailed interactive calculator. You can see that in the United States, the difference between doing nothing to stop the pandemic and a strict and effective nationwide intervention NOW could mean the difference between 10,000,000 deaths and 4,000 deaths! Before you decide that that sounds crazy, read the article.

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Note 3/30/20:  In this comparison of coronavirus cases in New York vs California, you can see what difference even a few days lag in imposing strict stay-at-home orders makes. California--population 39.5 million, first state to impose strict controls: current # of cases 6358, deaths 132. New York--population 19.5 million, delayed a week before imposing controls: current # of cases 60,679, deaths 1063. The number of cases per population in NY is 19 times greater than in California, and the number of deaths per population 17 times greater. What a tragic difference a week's delay makes.

ANIMATED GRAPH OF ATMOSPHERIC CO2 OVER THE LAST 800000 YEARS AND INTO THE FUTURE

The animated graph linked to below is well worth watching--several times, slowing it down at the end:

https://mobile.twitter.com/OceansClimateCU/status/1237069561364545537?s=20&utm_source=NSDAY&utm_campaign=19fa2fe1ef-NSDAY_110320&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1254aaab7a-19fa2fe1ef-373908631

Credit for the above goes to Kris Karnauskas, who leads the Oceans and Climate Lab at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

If we follow the steepest two curves, it really will be the end.

This graph credit: Wikimedia Commons

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HOW GOOD IS EXERCISE FOR SENIORS? LET ME COUNT THE WAYS!

A new review of reviews of the benefits of exercise tells us that exercise is as close as we're likely to get to a panacea.

Seniors exercising

Credit: Asahia/Wikimedia Commons

Writing in the Scandanavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports, an international team of researchers reviewed all of the highest quality reviews and meta-analyses to date on the relationship between exercise and health in people in their sixties or older. The smallest group studied comprised 855 individuals, while the largest study tracked more than 400,000. The results are impressive:

If you're 60 or more and physically active, compared to your less-active peers, you're:

     22 percent less likely to die from any cause during a comparable time period

     25 to 40 percent less likely die from cardiovascular disease

     12 percent less likely to develop breast or prostate cancer

     29 to 39 percent less likely to fracture a bone

     50 percent less likely to become disabled (unable to perform basic activities              of daily living)

     26 to 38 percent less likely to experience cognitive decline or impairment

     32 to 42 percent less likely to develop Alzheimer's Disease

     14 to 21 percent less likely to develop some other kind of dementia

     17 to 21 percent less likely to suffer from depression

      and significantly more likely to experience healthy aging, a better
      quality of life and more years spent in good mental and physical health.

To some extent, the range of outcomes comes from different studies using different criteria. However, for most of these relationships, more exercise produced better outcomes. The researchers conclude that any amount of physical activity has some benefit, but recommend at least 75 minutes per week of moderate to vigorous physical activity.

"Physical activity plays a key role in the 'compression of morbidity,'" the authors write, "decreasing the time spent in ill-health as people age and ensuring that an increase in life expectancy is also an increase in life-time spent in good health."

Not a bad payoff for investing at 10 to 15 minutes a day exercising.

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TRUMP TO ATTACK SANCTUARY CITIES

The New York Times reported today that the Trump administration is planning to deploy heavily armed border patrol tactical units to hunt down and capture undocumented people in sanctuary cities.

In normal times, these highly trained, heavily armed units are used near the border to deal with equally heavily armed, highly dangerous individuals or groups, such as gangs of drug or arms smugglers.

Coming soon to a sanctuary city near you

Credit: James Tourtellotte

Now, cities such as New York, Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles that have defied Trump by declaring themselves to be sanctuaries for undocumented people, will see these tactical units working side by side with ICE to enforce Trump and Stephen Miller's draconian immigration policies.

There's no doubt that this will play well with Trump's base. Images of uniformed, armored squads "taking down" immigrants whom Trump's true believers have been conditioned to fear and hate will provide visceral proof that tough guy Trump is making America great again.

For me, it brings to mind the aphorism, attributed to psychologist Abraham Maslow, that if the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail. These special tactical units are hammers, trained and primed to strike. When they are deployed against ordinary people in the heart of our cities, innocent people will die. It's just a matter of time.

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EARTH'S VITAL SIGNS: THREE VERY SCARY GRAPHS

For anyone who is not being paid or propagandized to deny global heating, these three graphs say everything that needs to be said:

 Atmospheric CO2 over the last 800,000 years

Credit: NASA

Atmospheric CO2 over the last 60 years

Note that the rate of increase is speeding up!

Credit: ESRL

 Credit: NASA GISS

By the way, today--2/12/20--the Mauna Loa CO2 observatory clocked the highest ever concentration of carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere--416.08 parts per million (ppm). Scientists tell us that the safe level is 350 ppm or less.

And the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced that Earth just experienced the hottest January on record.

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A SPOT OF GOOD ENVIRONMENTAL NEWS FROM THE UK

Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced this week that the UK will ban the sale of all gas- or diesel-burning cars by 2035--5 years earlier than previously planned, and just 15 years from now.

UK going green

Credit: NRMA

It's a bold goal, but, as critics point out, implementation will require major improvements in the UK's power generation and distribution system, as well as specific rules and regulations to encourage what remains a huge transition.

Still, supporters explain, every step towards this impressive target will provide significant environmental and health benefits.

We need all the good news we can find, environmental or otherwise, so kudos to Boris and the UK.

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BEWARE A WOUNDED NARCISSIST

Back in May, 2017, I posted an essay entitled "L'etat c'est moi--Trump's identity problem." In it I pointed out that, as a narcissist, Trump would be unable to distinguish between himself and the nation.

I wrote, "It's safe to assume that to a narcissistic ruler, there are no boundaries between himself and his realm. The poster child for this, at least until now, has been Louis XIV of France. He's famous for proclaiming, 'L'etat? L'etat c'est moi,'--The State? I am the State.'"

Beware a wounded narcissist

Credit: Flickr

Under the stress of impeachment, this enormous flaw in Trump's character could not have been clearer. Here's what he said at the National Prayer Breakfast just after the Senate found him not guilty: "As everybody knows, my family, our great country, and your president have been put through a terrible ordeal by some very dishonest and corrupt people. They have done everything possible to destroy us and by so doing, very badly hurt our nation."

In his mind, to criticize him is to criticize the nation. And of course, anyone who dares to criticize him is necessarily dishonest and corrupt. I suspect that it will not be long before he labels his critics as traitors. And, among his millions of devoted followers, there will be many who will take this not just as permission, but as a call to action.

As I wrote in that essay, the safest way to deal with a wounded and enraged narcissist is to walk away, get as far away as possible from their black-hole-like sphere of influence. Unfortunately, with Trump as president and with a Senate that has now told him that he can do no wrong, that's no longer an option for any of us.

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A SOBERING STATISTIC: ALCOHOL-RELATED DEATHS IN US HAVE DOUBLED SINCE 1999

By analyzing death certificates, researchers at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) in Bethesda, Maryland, found that the rate of alcohol-related deaths in the US increased by 50 percent between 1999 and 2017 and the number of alcohol-related deaths per year doubled. This new research adds to the growing body of evidence that the mental, physical and social well-being of Americans is deteriorating.

 Alcohol-related deaths in US have doubled since 1999

Photo credit: Pixabay

Neuroscientist Aaron White and colleagues at the NIAAA analyzed data taken from all death certificates filed in the US between 1999 and 2017. Using listed causes of death and contributing factors they found that the rate of alcohol-related deaths of Americans 16 years old or older rose from 16.9 to 25.5 per 100,000 and the number of deaths per year doubled, from 35,914 to 72,558. Alcohol caused or contributed to the death of 944,880 Americans during that 18-year span. Their findings were published in Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research.

"Rates increased for all age-groups except 160 to 20 and 75+," the researchers write, "and for all racial and ethnic groups except for initial decreases among Hispanic males and [Non-Hispanic] Blacks followed by increases."

Almost every group was impacted. The sharpest increase was among Non-Hispanic White women. Rates of acute alcohol-related deaths rose most among people aged 55 to 64, while death rates from chronic alcohol use surged most in younger people, aged 25 to 34, and accounted for the majority of alcohol-related deaths.

As worrisome as these documented trends are, the authors point out that previous research has shown that death certificates understate what's really happening; the actual number of alcohol-related deaths is likely significantly higher than they were able to document.

The authors of this paper don't speculate about the causes of this trend. We know that they are part of the growing number of "deaths from despair" that have characterized the US for the past decades. Other researchers cite both economic and social disparities and declines  as at least part of the cause. Needless to say, it's a multifaceted problem and requires an equally multifaceted set of solutions. However, until the current political balance shifts in Washington, the dislocations and inequities that underline this tragic slide are not likely to be acknowledged or addressed.

CLIMATE CHANGE "FINGERPRINTS" NOW VISIBLE IN GLOBAL WEATHER EVERY DAY

Talk about thinking outside the box--

For decades now, climate scientists have worked to detect and measure the signal of human-caused climate change over time. They've revealed and warned us about changes in important variables such as atmospheric CO2, sea level and global average temperature; profound changes, but ones that take place over decades.

Climate change deniers, up to and including President Trump, have jumped on the fact that these incremental changes are swamped by much larger local daily and seasonal variability, making it difficult to link climate change to the weather people actually experience--with the fairly recent exception of super-storms or other extreme weather events that would have been extremely unlikely in the absence of global warming.

Now, a team of Swiss and Norweigian researchers has broken the mold. What would they see, they wondered, if they looked at variables such as temperature and humidity across space--the whole Earth--rather than over time. They were prompted to pursue this question by one of Trump's tweets using a major cold spell that hit much of the US to try to ridicule global warming.

"This lead to a lively debate about whether a single day could be informative at all about climate change," says climate scientist Reto Knutti, part of the Swiss-Norwegian research team. "Weather is not climate, yet we are seeing the imprint of climate change now in some single events, e.g. in the frequency of strong heatwaves. But what about the weather on an average day? Could we detect climate change in a single year, a month, a day?"

The answer they found is astonishing. Just by analyzing weather patterns across the globe they were able to detect the fingerprints of climate change on every day's weather since 2012.

Climate scientists can now detect signals of global warming in any day's weather

Image credit: NASA/MODIS

"Global weather is now in uncharted territory," says Knutti. "While locally of course we need a few decades for a signal to emerge from variability, the global information allows us to now detect climate change for any single day since early 2012."

The team used artificial intelligence (AI) to extract indicative patterns from the enormous mass of daily weather data around the globe. They could then test for the probability that the pattern for any given day could have appeared in the absence of climate change.

The daily weather patterns that most powerfully reveal the impact of climate change involve the global distribution of air temperature and humidity. Both variables were more pronounced over oceans than over land masses, and in the tropics compared to higher latitudes.

In retrospect, it may not be surprising that the cumulative heating effect of many decades of climate change is visible in the day-to-day distribution of temperatures across the globe. However, the researchers also found that they could still detect a strong climate change fingerprint in any given day's weather even without looking at temperature--simply from the pattern of atmospheric moisture around the world. "If we include humidity," says Knutti, "we can even detect climate change when we remove the global mean [temperature] signal for every single day, i.e. just by looking at the patterns."

If there was still any legitimate doubt that we humans have changed and are continuing to change the climate and the weather, this new way of charting the relationship between climate and weather should erase it.

Knutti writes, "In the last full IPCC report in 2013 we have shown that humans are the dominant cause of the long-term warming." We now demonstrate that since then we haven't had a single day of 'normal' weather globally. Yesterday was climate change, today is climate change, and tomorrow will be as well. We think this is a powerful message."

We couldn't agree more. The question is, is it powerful enough to get through to the deliberately deaf ears of our leaders?

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You can access the Nature Climate Change article describing this research here.

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NEW EVIDENCE: EXERCISE BOOSTS YOUR BRAIN

We all know that exercise is good for us, and if done right can build muscles, physical strength and cardiovascular fitness. Now new evidence is emerging that physical exercise is good for our brains as well.

Publishing in the Mayo Clinic Proceedings, a group of physicians and epidemiologists at the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases detail a large study measuring and comparing the cardiorespiratory fitness (CRF) and brain volume of 2103 German women and men between the ages of 21 and 84. The researchers found that fitter participants had significantly greater brain volume than their less-fit peers.

Physical fitness may also boosts brain fitness
Photo credit: Michael (Mike) L. Baird

Interestingly, highly detailed magnetic resonance images (MRIs) of the participant's brains showed that the parts of the brain that benefitted most from increased fitness were not areas associated with movement or coordination, but instead areas involved in thinking and--seniors take note--memory. The effects on the hippocampus, crucial for memory, were especially strong in older participants.

"This is another piece of the puzzle showing physical activity and physical fitness is protective against aging-related cognitive decline," says Michael Joyner, a Mayo Clinic anesthesiologist. He and two Mayo Clinic colleagues wrote an editorial to accompany the research report. They note that while previous research has linked exercise, physical fitness, blood flow to the brain, and cognitive functioning, this is the first research to show beneficial changes to the grey matter of the brain.
". . . these data are encouraging," says Clifford Jack Jr., a neuroradiologist at Mayo Clinic. "The findings regarding cardiorespiratory fitness and certain brain structures are unique."

You can read an earlier zerospinzone post about research linking exercise and brain connectivity here.

The new study's authors point out that while their cross-sectional research clearly showed that CRF and brain volume and structure are correlated, it can't prove cause and effect-- ". . . reverse causation (i.e., individuals with greater brain volumes have higher CRF) cannot be excluded," they write.

Even with that caveat, the researchers and the Mayo Clinic commentators conclude that these findings justify large-scale studies that follow participants over time to see if exercise and improved physical fitness actually help preserve grey matter in aging brains, or possibly even stimulate growth in regions of the brain such as the frontal lobes or hippocampus.

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You can access the full research paper and editorial commentary at this link. 

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ONE MORE DEGREE COULD TRIGGER A COLLAPSE OF GREENLAND'S ICE SHEET

The latest and best reconstruction of temperatures near Greenland over that last 450,000 years shows that much of Greenland's vast ice sheet could melt from sustained warming of less than one degree. That means that the world risks triggering a devastating 7 meters (23 feet) of sea-level rise before the end of this century.

 Greenland Ice Sheet at Risk

Credit: cake@cake0

Writing in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), researchers at the University of Bergen, Norway, and at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey, analyze 450,000 years of sea surface temperatures off the coast of Greenland. They were able to track four interglacial (warm) periods, during one of which Greenland's southern ice sheet completely disappeared. During that 30,000-year-long warm period centered around 400,000 years ago, temperatures were only slightly higher than they are today--within one degree C--and well within the projections of climate models for the end of this century--if we continue on a business-as-usual trajectory.

Comparing the four warm periods it became clear that the amount of warming was not the only factor impacting how much of Greenland's ice melted. The other key was the duration of the warming. Even with temperatures just 0.8 degrees C warmer than today, the longer duration of the warm period centered around 400,000 years ago led to almost complete melting of Greenland's southern ice sheet.

According to the authors, their findings support climate models that find a tipping point somewhere between 0.8 and 3.2 degrees C warmer than today, beyond which melting of Greenland's ice sheet is inevitable even if temperatures go back down. Paleoclimatologist Nil Irvali, at the University of Bergen, explains that the tipping point occurs when melting reduces the altitude of the ice surface to the point where the even-warmer temperatures at the lower elevation guarantees runaway melting. "The elevation effect becomes dominant over time," she says, "melting accelerates, and may even continue even though the climate cools again."

The risk, she clarifies, is not that the Greenland Ice Sheet will melt before the end of the century, but that by the end of the century atmospheric warming caused by a continuation of current policies and emissions could easily trigger irreversible melting and an eventual, and devastating, 7-meter sea-level rise.

Actually, Irvali points out, it's even worse than that, since both atmospheric carbon dioxide and warmer ocean waters have extremely long lifetimes. "It is also important to note that CO2 we put into the atmosphere will have a long lifetime even if we cut emissions, and as more and more heat accumulates in the ocean it commits us to a longer timescale of warming," she says, "So our current activities will impact climate for millennia to come."

The authors conclude, "Notably, the critical temperature threshold for past [Greenland Ice Sheet] decay will likely be surpassed this century. The duration for which this threshold is exceeded will determine Greenland's fate."

To which we must add, and the fate of millions of Americans and hundreds of millions of people worldwide.**

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**In case this paleo-historical study seems too theoretical, recent observations by a completely different set of researchers show that Greenland is losing ice 7 times faster than it was two decades ago, in line with the IPCC's worst-case scenario, putting some 400 million people at risk of coastal flooding by 2100.

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POLIO STRIKES BACK--ERADICATION ENDGAME SURPRISINGLY DIFFICULT

This has been a very mixed year for the global polio eradication campaign.

What the global polio eradication campaign

wants never to happen again

The good news is that two of the three strains of wild poliovirus have been conquered; they no longer exist except in laboratories.

The mixed news is that the remaining wild poliovirus only exists in two countries, Afghanistan and Pakistan. However, the number of cases in both countries, especially in Pakistan, has been higher than in 2018. The two countries suffered 125 cases of polio compared to just 33 last year, 101 of those in Pakistan. In both countries, strife, insecurity and anti-vacccination propaganda and rumors have enabled the virus to hold on.

The bad news is that the number of people--mostly children--sickened by poliovirus that has mutated back to a virulent form from the live-but-attenuated polio vaccine has more than doubled since 2018. This back-mutation only occurs in one person out of an estimated 2.8 million, but since 450 million children are getting the attenuated vaccine every year, a significant number of cases are inevitable as long as the oral vaccine remains in wide use--unless the surrounding population has a very high rate of "herd immunity." There were 241 such cases in 2019 vs. just 104 in 2018.

The solution is complex, but at hand. In part, it depends on the rapid release of an oral vaccine against the type 2 poliovirus, which is expected to be less likely to mutate to a virulent form. You can read about the global polio endgame strategy here. Plans and resources are in place to make this transition, and the intense, decades-long global campaign to wipe out this deadly disease once and for all will succeed, even if not quite as quickly as hoped.

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A BIT OF GOOD NEWS FOR THANKSGIVING

If you've been following the escalating climate crisis, you know that decarbonization of the global economy is a crucial part of achieving a sustainable world. The good news is that the U.S. is moving in the right direction. The latest assessment of how much carbon was injected into the atmosphere from US electricity generation shows that the carbon intensity--pounds of carbon dioxide per MW-hour--dropped 9 percent since this time last year. Total generation fell by 4 percent in the same period. Even better, that's a 40 percent reduction in carbon intensity of power generation in just the last 15 years. 

Carbon emissions per MW-hour in U.S. 2001-2019

Credit: Power Sector Carbon Index, 

Scott Institute for Energy Innovation 

"The U.S. electricity sector is continuing to get cleaner, and both carbon intensity and overall emissions are dropping," said Costa Samaras, assistant professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University and co-director of Carnegie Mellon's Power Sector Carbon Index.

The researchers say that this encouraging and continuing trend is due to the decline of coal-powered electricity generation, the increase in power from natural gas, and from renewables such as wind and solar. "We're in the middle of an energy transition right now, and the biggest part of that story in the U.S. is how swiftly coal has been declining over the past decade," said Samaras. "The decline of coal can be attributed to the rise of natural gas, the continued improvement of renewables, and energy efficiency efforts."

There's lots of room for improvement, however. Wind, solar and hydropower still account for less than 20 percent of U.S. electricity, just about equal to nuclear, the other zero-emissions source of power.

The goal, the experts point out, is to continue to produce abundant power while emitting less and less carbon, and also to grow the use of zero- or low-emission electricity in transportation, buildings and industry.

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NOW SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT--A NEW AND BETTER WAY TO CALCULATE YOUR DOG'S AGE

Have you ever noticed how inaccurate the conventional idea that one year in a dog's life equals 7 human years is? Well so did Trey Ideker at UC San Diego and his colleagues. You can read about the details of their study--based on changes to DNA over time--here. The bottom line is that dogs age much more quickly than humans for the first few years, but then their rate of ageing slows down.

It turns out that for dogs one year old or older, a more accurate formula is:

Equivalent human age =16 * ln (dog's age in years) + 31.

That's 16 times the natural logarithm of the dog's age in years, plus 31. 

 Ruff, age 12, or 70.8 using the new formula

Credit: Carol Von Canon/Creative Commons

The link above has a convenient calculator you can use to see how well you think the formula works.

It certainly seems to make more sense for older dogs, for whom the age-times-seven formula makes 12-year-old Ruff 84, and any dog over 14 a centenarian. The logarithmic calculation produces much more reasonable ages for older dogs. See for yourself.

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WANT TO LIVE LONGER? GET A DOG.

Two recent studies show that owning a dog can significantly extend one's life, especially after a major health setback such as a heart attack or stroke. The researchers chalk up the health benefits of dog ownership to reduced social isolation, more exercise and lowered blood pressure.

 Two studies show that dog ownership

provides significant health benefits

Photo credit: Airman 1st Class Isaiah J. Soliz

Tove Fall, a professor at Uppsala University, in Sweden, explains the striking results of a study following nearly 340,000 Swedes aged 40 to 85 after a stroke or heart attack. Heart-attack survivors who lived alone but owned a dog were a remarkable 33 percent less likely to die during the study period than similar patients without a dog. Dog-owning stroke patients living alone were 27 percent less likely to die. The life-extending benefits of dog ownership were somewhat less for people living with others, but still substantial.

"We know that social isolation is a strong risk factor for worse health outcomes and premature death. Previous studies have indicated that dog owners experience less social isolation and have more interaction with other people. Furthermore, keeping a dog is a good motivation for physical activity, which is an important factor in rehabilitation and mental health."

A separate piece of research melded together ten separate studies involving a total of 3.8 million people. This meta-analysis showed that dog owners were 24 percent less likely to die from any cause than non-dog owners. Dog ownership proved especially protective for people recovering from a heart attack--they experienced a huge 65 percent reduction in mortality risk.

The authors of these studies point out that these results don't prove a cause-and-effect relationship between owning a dog and a longer, healthier life. However, they clearly show a powerful correlation and add a new data-supported dimension to the old saw that dogs really are our best friends.

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DONALD TRUMP IS OUR ID MONSTER

I saw the sci-fi movie Forbidden Planet when it came out in 1956. Even though I was just ten years old, it made a huge impression on me.

In it, a team from Earth lands on Altair IV, a planet where aging scientist Morbius and his daughter Altaira are the only survivors of an earlier expedition. Morbius warns that the planet is haunted by a monster with incredible powers. I still recall a scene in which the raging, previously invisible monster is outlined in sparks as it penetrates a force field protecting the visiting spacecraft, and another in which it melts its way through a supposedly impenetrable door.

The Id Monster from Forbidden Planet

Credit: Joshua Meador/United Artists

We eventually learn that the monster isn't real; it's a projection of Morbius' id, amplified and made incredibly powerful by an enormous machine that is all that remains of the Krell, a race of hyper-intelligent beings that disappeared suddenly 200,000 years earlier. 

We eventually learn that it was the machine's unleashing of the Krell's own unconscious fears and hatreds that led to their extinction.  In turn, it was Morbius' inner demons, manifested by the Krell machine, that destroyed everyone in the previous expedition except for him and his daughter. 

Not surprisingly, Morbius strenuously denies the possibility that he is the source of the monster. But finally, when the monster melts through a supposedly impenetrable door and threatens Altaira and him, he confronts it. The confrontation proves fatal, but the moment Morbius dies the monster vanishes.

In retrospect, Forbidden Planet was one of many films--science fiction and otherwise--that gave us a glimpse beneath the shiny surface of America in the 1950s. Movies like Rear Window, On the Waterfront, Strangers on a Train, Rebel Without a Cause, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Them, High Noon and many more expressed the fears, darkness and delusions of postwar American life and culture. On the surface, Ike's America seemed buoyant and optimistic, but those films exposed the hidden fault lines and mounting pressure that lay beneath.

Fast forward five decades, and we find ourselves grappling with our very own id monster in the form of Donald Trump. In his race-baiting campaign, his slimy, hate-fueled rallies, his fox-in-the-henhouse appointments and his draconian immigration policies he voices and acts out the inner demons of our nation--racism, xenophobia, authoritarianism, greed, narcissism, religious intolerance, white nationalism; in fact just about every kind of fear and hatred. And as head of state and commander in chief he controls the mighty Krell machine that amplifies those ugly, destructive drives and makes them dangerously real.

We have a President who demonizes Muslims and Hispanics and would lock them out of the US, who repeatedly labels the press the enemy of the people, who smears and demeans his adversaries, incites violence, has assaulted and is contemptuous of women, lies constantly and shamelessly, embraces conspiracy theories, scorns our allies but loves dictators and uses the office of President and US foreign policy for his own personal and political gain. He's an arrogant, nasty and dangerous bully, now wielding world-shaking power.

There's no doubt that Trump as President and Commander in Cheif amplifies our nation's dark drives and turns them into dangerous and destructive real-life events. There's also no doubt that the darkness was always there, lurking in the shadows and biding its time. As progressives have been pointing out for decades, we as a nation need to acknowledge and confront our history of slavery, genocide, patriarchy, and imperialism--not to mention our current rush towards ecocide--if we are ever to live up to the ideals of liberty and equality that comprise our conscious self-image and that we have at times shown the world.

As Einstein famously pointed out, "We cannot solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them." Trump's world is one of towers and walls, with him, his family, and those who are absolutely loyal to him high in their real or imagined castles and protected by walls from what they see as the dirty and dangerous rabble below. If we dream of a different world, we can't hide in our own towers and behind our own walls, physical, emotional or intellectual. As Morbius showed us, unless we accept and confront our own id-monsters, they will break through whatever walls we build. 

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POLIO ERADICATION--TWO STRAINS GONE, ONE TO GO

The three-decade-long campaign to eradicate polio--not long ago a worldwide scourge--passed an important milestone this month. The Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI) announced the eradication of wild poliovirus type 3 (WPV3). Type 2 was declared eradicated in 2015. That leaves only one type of wild polivirus, WPV1, still in circulation.

 Somali child receiving an injection of inactivated poliovirus

Credit: PV2 Andrew W. McGalliard

Public Domain

That good news is augmented by the fact that WPV1 only exists in two countries, Afghanistan and Pakistan. This allows resources to be focused on those last two remaining reservoirs of the deadly virus.

However, the goal of finally eradicating polio remains elusive. There have been more cases of wild-virus-caused polio in those two countries (18 and 76 respectively) this year than in 2018. And, there have been a significant number of cases caused when the weakened virus used for oral inoculation mutates back to a disease-causing form. Although very rare, when millions of children are given the oral vaccine, mutation back to a virulent form is enough to keep the disease alive.

To address this problem, GPEI has now shifted into its Polio Endgame Strategy. This is a multifaceted campaign involving continued mass inoculations, rapid response teams to quickly contain and snuff out any flareups, and a shift from oral live attenuated immunization to inoculation by injection of completely inactivated virus. The endgame campaign is estimated to cost $4.2 billion and take four years. If it succeeds, humanity will have eliminated a second deadly disease (smallpox was the first) and no child will ever again be killed or paralyzed by polio.

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You can read an executive summary of the endgame strategy here.

GOOGLE CLAIMS QUANTUM SUPREMACY--THIS IS BIG!

Just six weeks ago I posted about Google quantum AI guru Hartmut Neven predicting that quantum computing would grow at an unheard-of doubly exponential rate, and that the long-sought benchmark of quantum supremacy would be reached sometime this year.

Quantum computer core

Credit: Flickr

True to Neven's predictions, word has filtered out that Google has submitted a scientific paper reporting the first demonstration of a quantum computer solving a problem that even the most powerful classical computer can't manage--the hallmark of quantum supremacy. Reportedly, the problem Google's 54-qubit computer solved in 200 seconds would have taken a supercomputer 10,000 years to do.

One caveat--the problem was a very specific task known to be particularly well suited to a quantum computer. Much more work is needed before quantum computers will be able to tackle a full range of real-world problems. However, those developments will almost certainly happen much sooner than most people imagine.

This milestone is important in itself, meaning that scientists in every field, cryptographers, AI researchers, etc., will soon be able to tackle tasks that were previously impossible. However, what really demands everyone's attention is that easily-missed prediction, now known as Neven's law, that progress in quantum computing is going to unfold at a doubly exponential rate.

"To our knowledge," the Google team writes, "this experiment marks the fi rst computation that

can only be performed on a quantum processor. Quantum processors have thus reached the regime of quantum supremacy. We expect their computational power will continue to grow at a double exponential rate."

You can get a sense of what this astonishing rate of change means in my earlier post, "Forget Moore's Law. Neven's Law Rules Now." The bottom line is that we can expect as much progress in quantum computing in the next five or six years as we've seen in the digital world over the past five or six decades. After that point, all bets are off. If you think that the digital revolution has been earth shaking, just wait for the quantum revolution.

As Nevens says, "It looks like nothing is happening, nothing is happening, and then whoops, suddenly you're in a different world."

Well, we're in that new world now. It's going to make words to describe the rate of change, such as "breathtaking," "jet propelled" or "explosive" seem far too slow.

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Robert Adler

IS IT NARCISSIISM, CORRUPTION, OR BOTH?

In my post of May 19, 2017 entitled "L'etat c'est moi--Trump's identity problem," I argued that given Trump's blatant narcissim, he would inevitably come to see the presidency and the government as extensions of himself, with which he could do as he wished:

"It's no secret that our current president has the same proclivity [narcissim]. From his point of view, it's his country, his military, his secrets to share or withhold as he wishes, his realm to do with as he pleases. The Constitution, the rule of law, checks and balances, Congress and the courts are irrelevancies that had best get out of his way."

 Donald Trump

Nothing could illustrate this more clearly than the unfolding whistleblower scandal involving Ukraine. If what's being reported turns out to be true, Trump used the office of President and the coercive power of the United States to attempt to strong-arm a foreign government into an investigation to dig up dirt on Joe Biden and his son.

Joe Biden, of course, is Trump's most likely opponent in the 2020 elections, an opponent who, even according to polling by Fox News, leads Trump 52 to 38.

The fate of Ukraine is of importance to the United States. It would be totally appropriate for the President to negotiate forcefully with it, for example, to get it to reduce corruption and strengthen it's democratic institutions. However, using it as a cat's paw to dredge up dirt on a political opponent is not just inappropriate and possibly illegal, it is, or should be, an impeachable offense.

It's also worth noting, that Trump appears to be a repeat offender in such matters, having just dodged a bullet by Attorney General Barr's mealy-mouthed interpretation of the Mueller Report, which was  the result of a multi-year investigation into Trump's use of political ammunition provided by, and possibly coordinated with Russia, targeting Trump's previous opponent, Hillary Clinton.

What isn't clear is whether this pattern represents pure corruption--the conscious, willful breaking of laws and norms for his own political gain--or pathological narcissim, a narcissism so profound as to blind Trump even to the possibility of separating his own needs from our nation's priorities. It would still be corrupt, but might represent the kind of distinction that criminal law makes between, for example, premeditated murder and vehicular manslaughter.

My bet is that Trump, in his narcissism, feels 100 percent justified in using the Presidency and the powers of the United States any way he pleases.

Unfortunately, that doesn't make what he has done or is likely to do any less dangerous to all of us.

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Robert Adler

DID RAY BRADBURY FORESEE DONALD TRUMP?

Ever since election day, 2016, I've joked about how I (and everyone reading this now) were bumped into an alternative universe, one where Trump became president instead of Clinton. Here's how it happened:

Credit: ABE  Books

A group of us were vacationing in San Luis Potosi, Mexico on election day, 2016. I got permission from the management of the hotel we were staying in to connect my laptop to the large-screen television in their breakfast room so that we could livestream US channels and watch the election results come in.

We settled in with some drinks and were chatting happily as we watched the first returns get posted. As you remember, the polsters and pundits were quite sure that Hillary Clinton would win, and those early returns seemed to point the same way.

Then, without warning, a huge storm blew up. Rain was pouring down, a blast of wind smashed open an outside door and sheets of water blew in, flooding the floor. The downpour continued along with blasts of thunder and lightning, and within a few minutes the electricity and the wifi feed went off.

The hotel staff lit some candles to give us light, and we hunkered down for the next hour or so until the storm gradually abated and the power and the internet came back on.

You guessed it. By the time we could tune into the election results again, the votes from the midwest were coming in and Trump was winning. The storm, it seemed, had blown us into a different universe.

Now I realize that my feeling of having been transported into an alternate world may have been seeded by a science fiction story that I read nearly 60 years ago.

With the help of the internet, it didn't take long to find the story, called "A Sound of Thunder," wirtten by Ray Bradbury and first published in Collier's Magazine on June 28, 1952. I read it a few years later in a collection of Bradbury's short stories, The Golden Apples of the Sun, published in 1953.

The story is set sometime after the year 2055, one day after a US presidential election in which Keith,  a man who " . . . will make a fine President of the United States," defeated the dangerous Deutscher,

"If Deutscher had gotten in," Bradbury writes, "we'd have the worst kind of dictatorship. There's an anti everything man for you, a militarist, anti-Christ, antihuman, anti-intellectual."

We learn that time travel is now possible, and that Eckels, the story's protagonsit, has contracted with  a company that will take him on a  hunting excursion back to the age of the dinosaurs with the aim of bagging a Tyrannosaurus Rex. It's explained that the company has targeted a particular T. Rex that would have died by natural causes seconds later, so as not to change anything in the past. His hunting guides also emphasize that Eckels absolutely must stay on a floating metal pathway, again to avoid making an inadvertent change to the past that could reverberate in unpredictable ways back to the future.

Unfortunately, when confronted by the actual tyrannosaur, Eckels panics and stumbles off the metal path back to the safety of the time machine.

When they get back to the present, things are subtly, subliminally different. In particular, a sign that had been written in good English before the trip back in time is now written in a crude pidgin. Eckels scrapes the mud off his boots and finds a single crushed butterfly. Bradbury writes:

"It fell to the floor, an exquisite thing, a small thing that could upset balances and knock down a line of small dominoes and then big dominoes and then gigantic dominoes, all down the years across Time. Eckels' mind whirled. It couldn't change things. Killing one butterfly couldn't be that important! Could it?"

Eckels fearfully asks who won yesterday's election. The company representative laughs and says, "You joking? You know very well. Deutscher, of course! Who else? Not that fool weakling Keith. We got an iron man now, a man with guts!"

For me, it took a huge thunderstorm. For Bradbury, all that was needed was a butterfly.*

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*For a discussion of how Bradbury's story may have contributed to the famous "butterfly effect," from chaos theory, check out this Wikipedia entry.

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Robert Adler

WANT TO KEEP YOUR BRAIN HEALTHY? STAY PHYSICALLY FIT

As the ancient Romans already knew (remember "a sound mind in a healthy body"?), physical and mental fitness are connected.  Now, two millenia later, new research may tell us why.

Dr. Jonathan Repple, at the University of Muenster, in Germany, and his colleagues were able to study over 1000 MRI brain scans of healthy volunteers, with an average age of 29. They supplemented the scans with a test of physical endurance and a dozen cognitive tests.

 High contast brain scan

Credit: Nevit Delmin/Wikimedia

As has been shown in previous research studies, the researchers found that physical fitness and cognitive functioning were strongly correlated.  What was new was their finding that this correlation was mediated by the integrity and connectivity of the white matter of the subjects' brains.

White matter consists of long, insulated nerve fibers that transmit information rapidly from one part of the brain to another.  Fitter subjects had better brain connectivity, and those with better brain connectivty scored better across the board on cognitive tests.

(This finding makes subjective sense if you consider how much of our thinking consists of making connctions.)

The researchers didn't expect to find such a strong relationship between physical fitness, brain health and cognition in healthy young people. "To see this happening in 30 year olds is surprising," Repple says. "This leads us to believe that a basic level of fitness seems to be a preventable risk factor for brain health."

Still, this correlative study could not determine is whether improving people's fitness will improve the health of their white matter and/or boost their cognitive performance. "We see that fitter people have better brain health," says Repple. "So we now need to ask whether actually making people fitter will improve their brain health. Finding this out is our next step."

Stay tuned. And in the meantime, just in case, stay fit.

Robert Adler

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You can find the research paper, White matter microstructure mediates the association between
physical fitness and cognition in healthy, young adults; at:https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-49301-y 1

TRUMP'S MASTERSTROKE

Today’s headlines (NYT August 25) about President’s Trump’s ‘fantastic’ new trade pact with Boris Johnson reveals what last week’s flap about Trump’s effort to ‘purchase’ Greenland may have really been about:  It was, in fact, a brilliantly conceived deception for the truly historic action being negotiated behind the scenes for the purchase of post-Brexit England!

We all fell for the ‘fake news’, as expected, since nothing the President tweets or demands from day to day is beyond belief. The advantages of a fire-sale rescue of Great Britain just as its economic value reaches rock-bottom after a likely ‘no deal’ exit from the EU could not have escaped the calculating mind of our Deal-maker-in-chief. Imagine--‘Fortress Americans’ and ‘Little Englanders’ together again, reuniting their Anglo-Saxon heritage. Such a deal!

Les Adler

FORGET MOORE'S LAW -- NEVEN'S LAW RULES NOW

Moore's law has had a pretty impressive run. For more than 40 years, Gordon Moore's prediction that the density of components in integrated circuits would double roughly every two years has held true. The result is that the microchips that run our digital world are 2-to-the-20th power, or several million times more powerful than anything that was available back then.

(In the late '60s, I wrote programs for the CDC 6600, then the most powerful supercomputer in the world. It churned out 3 million operations per second. The processor in a current iPhone performs more than 3 billion operations per second, and today's fastest supercomputer 122 quadrillion.)

By way of putting this exponential growth of computing power into perspective, imagine if you were a million times richer or a million times smarter than you were a few decades ago, and could expect to keep doubling your wealth or your smarts every two years. Not too shabby.

IBM Q Quantum Computer*

Credit: Lars Plougmann

But that's all so yesterday. Now, as the era of quantum computing surges into view, there's a new sheriff in town--Hartmut Neven--bringing us Neven's law.

Earlier this year, Neven, an economist, physicist and current head of Google's Quantum Artificial Intelligence lab, made the stunning observation that the power of quantum computers is growing not at an exponential rate, but at a doubly exponential rate. Rather than, for example, doubling ever two years, their power is doubling at a rate that itself doubles every two years.

That may not sound like a big difference. But to get a sense of what it means, check out the following table:

Step (n)       Exponential Growth               Doubly Exponential Growth
                    (2 to the n'th power)               (2 to the 2 to the n'th power)

    1                             2                                                         4
    2                             4                                                       16
    3                             8                                                     256
    4                           16                                                65,536
    5                           32                                    4,294,967,296
    6                           64                                       1.8  x 10^19 = 1,800,000,000,000,000,000

If Neven is right, the amount of progress that classical computing made over the last 40 years will be compressed into the next six years of quantum computing development. Or, as he describes it, "It looks like nothing is happening, nothing is happening, and then whoops, suddenly you're in a different world."

The tipping point that will notify us that we're in that different world will be quantum supremacy--the point at which a quantum computer can out-perform the most powerful classical computer. Since quantum computers are still in their infancy, you might think that will take a long time. Not so. Based on the explosive rate of progress in his lab and those of his competiors, Nevens thinks that will happen this year.**And, if progress in quantum computing does follow a doubly exponential curve as Nevens predicts, quantum computers will not just gradually outstrip classical computers; they will almost immediately leave them in the dust.

And it may not only be classical computers that are left wondering what just happened. As those of you who have been following developments in artificial intelligence (AI) know, some very smart people have been warning us about the risks of runaway AI--the emergence of a superhuman artificial intelligence (AGI) that could quickly build an even more intelligent system that could build a still more intelligent system etc. The result could be the emergence of an immensely powerful machine-or internet-based intelligence that might well not have our interests at heart.

Those dire warnings didn't take into account quantum AI which, as you recall, is the raisin d'etre of Neven's lab. If the exponential growth of AI based in classical computers presents us with a looming existential threat, what about the doubly exponential growth of quantum AI?

Remember that sequence: 4, 16, 256, 65536, 4294967296 . . .

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*To help keep track of the pace of progress in quantum computing, here's a milestone as of September, 2019, IBM's soon-to-be-available 53-qubit quantum computer:
https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/18/ibm-will-soon-launch-a-53-qubit-quantum-computer/ 

**And just to emphasize the rate of change Neven predicted, in mid-September, 2019, well before the end of the year, his lab has published a paper demonstrating quantum supremacy. A 54-qubit quantum computer in their lab took just 200 seconds to solve a problem that would take a supercomputer 10,000 years to do. You can read about it here.

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Robert Adler

RENEWABLES BEAT COAL IN US FOR THE FIRST TIME

Every so often there's a bit of good news about the race to replace fossil fuels with renewables before time runs out for a habitable planet Earth. Today's ray of light is the news that renewable energy capacity--the amount of power that can be generated from solar, wind and water--beat out the combined capacity of all the coal-fired power plants in the US for the first time.

We need more windmills and less CO2!

This milestone appears in the latest Energy Infrastructure Update from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. It was a photo finish, with renewable generating capacity now 21.56 percent of the total while coal dropped to 21.55 percent. Not a huge difference, but with renewables rapidly growing and coal shrinking, it's a moment worth noting.

Of course, if we are to maintain a livable climate, we need a lot more of such wins, and soon, and not just in the US, but worldwide.