April 28th, 2020

The group’s work has been described as a COVID-19 "Manhattan Project," in a nod to the famous effort to develop the atomic bomb. It is led by 33-year-old physician-turned venture capitalist Thomas Cahill... Cahill, the managing partner at Boston-based life sciences venture capital firm Newpath Partners, has set up the eclectic group that includes Nobel Prize winner Michael Rosbash, a neuroscientist and professor of biology at Brandeis University.

Called the Unified Geological Map of the Moon, it marries decades of surveys of the moon’s surface going as far back as Armstrong and Aldrin’s Apollo mission, with more recent data from NASA and JAXA. The digital map is available here for the public to download at 1:5,000,000 scale.

"Germany’s looking at things, and we’re looking at things, and we’re talking about a lot more money than Germany’s talking about."

Maybe the ordinary people will say 'Why should we drink Australian wine? Eat Australian beef?'

Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital-rights group... These are real worries, since, as the foundation notes, “life-saving programs such as these, and their intrusions on digital liberties, [tend] to outlive their urgency”... The practices that American tech platforms have undertaken during the pandemic represent not a break from prior developments, but an acceleration of them... As surprising as it may sound, digital surveillance and speech control in the United States already show many similarities to what one finds in authoritarian states such as China.
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We are about to find out how this trade-off will be managed in the United States. The surveillance and speech-control responses to COVID-19, and the private sector’s collaboration with the government in these efforts, are a historic and very public experiment about how our constitutional culture will adjust to our digital future.

You wouldn't know it, but if you read the rest of the article by The Atlantic, they seem to somehow justify China-style digital authoritarianism.

He doesn’t want anyone – beyond those in Congress and the Intelligence Community – to have access to the closed door transcripts of witnesses that have been already been declassified regarding the FBI’s Russia probe.

Under guise of virus support, the Fed Will Buy Junk Bonds, Lend to States to the tune of an additional $2.3 trillion in additional aid. Dear Jerome Powell, please tell the truth. This is not virus support, it's stock market support.

Central to a lot of scientific research into aging are tiny caps on the ends of our chromosomes called telomeres. These protective sequences of DNA grow a little shorter each time a cell divides, but by intervening in this process, researchers hope to one day regulate the process of aging and the ill health effects it can bring. A Harvard team is now offering an exciting pathway forward, discovering a set of small molecules capable of restoring telomere length in mice.

They’re being represented by prominent attorney Mark Geragos, who is asking a federal judge to strike down the orders and have state and county governments pay for losses.

“Just because you can cite that people have died from this does not mean you get to suspend the constitution,” Geragos said.