Overnight News Digest: DOJ Wants to Suspend Some Constitutional Rights During COVID-19

ProPublica

A Medical Worker Describes Terrifying Lung Failure From COVID-19 — Even in His Young Patients

“It first struck me how different it was when I saw my first coronavirus patient go bad. I was like, Holy shit, this is not the flu. Watching this relatively young guy, gasping for air, pink frothy secretions coming out of his tube.”

As of Friday, Louisiana was reporting 479 confirmed cases of COVID-19, one of the highest numbers in the country. Ten people had died. The majority of cases are in New Orleans, which now has one confirmed case for every 1,000 residents. New Orleans had held Mardi Gras celebrations just two weeks before its first patient, with more than a million revelers on its streets.

I spoke to a respiratory therapist there, whose job is to ensure that patients are breathing well. He works in a medium-sized city hospital’s intensive care unit. (We are withholding his name and employer, as he fears retaliation.) Before the virus came to New Orleans, his days were pretty relaxed, nebulizing patients with asthma, adjusting oxygen tubes that run through the nose or, in the most severe cases, setting up and managing ventilators. His patients were usually older, with chronic health conditions and bad lungs.

Politico

DOJ seeks new emergency powers amid coronavirus pandemic

The Justice Department has quietly asked Congress for the ability to ask chief judges to detain people indefinitely without trial during emergencies — part of a push for new powers that comes as the coronavirus spreads through the United States.

Documents reviewed by POLITICO detail the department’s requests to lawmakers on a host of topics, including the statute of limitations, asylum and the way court hearings are conducted. POLITICO also reviewed and previously reported on documents seeking the authority to extend deadlines on merger reviews and prosecutions. […]

The move has tapped into a broader fear among civil liberties advocates and Donald Trump’s critics — that the president will use a moment of crisis to push for controversial policy changes. 

Rolling Stone

DOJ Wants to Suspend Certain Constitutional Rights During Coronavirus Emergency

The Trump Department of Justice has asked Congress to craft legislation allowing chief judges to indefinitely hold people without trial and suspend other constitutionally-protected rights during coronavirus and other emergencies, according to a report by Politico’s Betsy Woodruff Swan.

While the asks from the Department of Justice will likely not come to fruition with a Democratically-controlled House of Representatives, they demonstrate how much this White House has a frightening disregard for rights enumerated in the Constitution.

The DOJ has requested Congress allow any chief judge of a district court to pause court proceedings “whenever the district court is fully or partially closed by virtue of any natural disaster, civil disobedience, or other emergency situation,” according to draft language obtained by Politico. This would be applicable to “any statutes or rules of procedure otherwise affecting pre-arrest, post-arrest, pre-trial, trial, and post-trial procedures in criminal and juvenile proceedings and all civil processes and proceedings.” They justify this by saying currently judges can pause judicial proceedings in an emergency but that new legislation would allow them to apply it “in a consistent manner.”

Gizmodo

Hubble Telescope Detects Unthinkable Quasar Tsunamis

Scientists using the Hubble Space Telescope have detected quasars sending outbursts of energy roaring through their galaxies, according to new research.

Researchers at Virginia Tech and the Space Telescope Science Institute are reporting three of the most energetic quasar outbursts ever measured. These outflows not only present a puzzle to astronomers trying to understand how they form and accelerate, but they also provide important data to theorists trying to figure out what forces are driving galaxy formation. These outbursts, like waves ripping through the galaxy, release a truly incomprehensible amount of energy.

“[The Milky Way] is a medium-to-large scale galaxy, and the total amount of radiation coming out of it is basically a number times 1044 ergs per second,” explained lead author Nahum Arav from Virginia Tech. “The outflows we see are producing 100 times more kinetic energy than the whole output of our galaxy in visible light.”

Real Number of U.S. Coronavirus Cases Could Be as High as 150,000, New Estimates Suggest

The official tally of covid-19 in America is climbing steeply as more people are finally being tested, with at least 80,000 people tested and more than 8,000 reported cases as of March 19. But preliminary forecasts created by epidemiologists paint a far grimmer picture of the novel coronavirus’s spread in the U.S.: We may already have tens of thousands of cases and possibly more than 150,000. […]

This week, researcher Alex Perkins, an infectious disease epidemiologist at the University of Notre Dame, and his team released a paper on the preprint server Medrxiv. Using data from local and imported cases in the U.S., along with knowledge gleaned from the outbreaks in China and Singapore, they tried to predict how many undocumented and total covid-19 cases were likely here on March 12, the day before … Donald Trump declared a national emergency over the outbreak.

Phys.org

Curiosity Mars rover takes a new selfie before record climb

NASA's Curiosity Mars rover recently set a record for the steepest terrain it's ever climbed, cresting the "Greenheugh Pediment," a broad sheet of rock that sits atop a hill. And before doing that, the rover took a selfie, capturing the scene just below Greenheugh.

In front of the rover is a hole it drilled while sampling a bedrock target called "Hutton." The entire selfie is a 360-degree panorama stitched together from 86 images relayed to Earth. The selfie captures the rover about 11 feet (3.4 meters) below the point where it climbed onto the crumbling pediment.

Epigenetic inheritance: A 'silver bullet' against climate change?

The current pace of climate change exceeds historical events by 1-2 orders of magnitude, which will make it hard for organisms and ecosystems to adapt. For a long time, it has been assumed that adaptation was only possible by changes in the genetic makeup—the DNA base sequence. Recently, another information level of DNA, namely epigenetics, has come into focus.

Using a fish species from the Baltic Sea, the three-spined stickleback, an international team investigated whether and how epigenetics contributes to adaptation. "Our experiment shows that epigenetic modifications affect adaptation, but also that the changes from one generation to the next are smaller than previously assumed," says biologist Dr. Melanie Heckwolf from GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel. She is one author of the study, which has now been published in Science Advances.

The Guardian

Greenland's melting ice raised global sea level by 2.2mm in two months

Last year’s summer was so warm that it helped trigger the loss of 600bn tons of ice from Greenland – enough to raise global sea levels by 2.2mm in just two months, new research has found.

The analysis of satellite data has revealed the astounding loss of ice in just a few months of abnormally high temperatures around the northern pole. Last year was the hottest on record for the Arctic, with the annual minimum extent of sea ice in the region its second-lowest on record.

One in four Americans under strict stay-home orders to slow coronavirus spread

[…] It is an unprecedented closure of vast parts of the country as the US seeks to get a grip on the rapidly expanding coronavirus outbreak and is dealing a devastating blow to the largest economy in the world by threatening millions of Americans with unemployment.

It is also wreaking havoc on social and cultural life. Americans have shut themselves indoors and businesses, restaurants and cultural institutions like cinemas, theaters and sports events have come to a shuddering halt.

Science Daily

Study reveals how long COVID-19 remains infectious on cardboard, metal and plastic

The virus that causes COVID-19 remains for several hours to days on surfaces and in aerosols, a new study published in the New England Journal of Medicine found.

The study suggests that people may acquire the coronavirus through the air and after touching contaminated objects. Scientists discovered the virus is detectable for up to three hours in aerosols, up to four hours on copper, up to 24 hours on cardboard and up to two to three days on plastic and stainless steel.

"This virus is quite transmissible through relatively casual contact, making this pathogen very hard to contain," said James Lloyd-Smith, a co-author of the study and a UCLA professor of ecology and evolutionary biology. "If you're touching items that someone else has recently handled, be aware they could be contaminated and wash your hands."

Sea otters, opossums and the surprising ways pathogens move from land to sea

A parasite known only to be hosted in North America by the Virginia opossum is infecting sea otters along the West Coast. A study from the University of California, Davis, elucidates the sometimes surprising and complex pathways infectious pathogens can move from land to sea to sea otter.

For the study, published in the journal Scientific Reports, researchers tested sea otters ranging from Southern California to Alaska for the presence of Sarcocystis neurona, a parasite and important cause of death in sea otters.

They were surprised to find several infected sea otters in the northern part of Vancouver Island in British Columbia, where Virginia opossums -- also known as the North American opossum -- are not known to live. They wondered: Could this parasite travel very long distances in water, or is there an additional unknown host for this pathogen?

Nature

How a small nuclear war would transform the entire planet

It all starts in 2025, as tensions between India and Pakistan escalate over the contested region of Kashmir. When a terrorist attacks a site in India, that country sends tanks rolling across the border with Pakistan. As a show of force against the invading army, Pakistan decides to detonate several small nuclear bombs.

The next day, India sets off its own atomic explosions and within days, the nations begin bombing dozens of military targets and then hundreds of cities. Tens of millions of people die in the blasts.

That horrifying scenario is just the beginning. Smoke from the incinerated cities rises high into the atmosphere, wrapping the planet in a blanket of soot that blocks the Sun’s rays. The planet plunges into a deep chill. For years, crops wither from California to China. Famine sets in around the globe.

This grim vision of a possible future comes from the latest studies about how nuclear war could alter world climate. They build on long-standing work about a ‘nuclear winter’ — severe global cooling that researchers predict would follow a major nuclear war, such as thousands of bombs flying between the United States and Russia. But much smaller nuclear conflicts, which are more likely to occur, could also have devastating effects around the world.

Mathematics pioneers who found order in chaos win Abel prize

Two mathematicians who used randomness to cast new light on the certainties of mathematics will share the 2020 Abel Prize — one of the field’s most prestigious awards.

Israeli Hillel Furstenberg and Russian-American Gregory Margulis won “for pioneering the use of methods from probability and dynamics in group theory, number theory and combinatorics”, the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters announced on 18 March. Each of them bridged gaps between diverse areas of maths, solving problems that had seemed beyond reach.

Furstenberg said that he reacted with "total disbelief" when he learnt he had won. "I had known about the prestige of the Abel Prize and knew the list of former laureates,” he told an interviewer during the announcement. “I simply felt that these are people of a certain league, and I was not in that league.” He added that, early on, he did not foresee the impact that his ideas were going to have. “Like any mathematician, I follow my nose and look for what seems to be very interesting."

Science

Why did nearly a million king penguins vanish without a trace?

Where on Earth, wondered Henri Weimerskirch, were all the penguins? It was early 2017. Colleagues had sent the seabird ecologist aerial photos of Île aux Cochons, a barren volcanic island halfway between Madagascar and Antarctica that humans rarely visit. The images revealed vast areas of bare rock that, just a few decades before, had been crowded with some 500,000 pairs of nesting king penguins and their chicks. It appeared that the colony—the world’s largest king penguin aggregation and the second biggest colony of any of the 18 penguin species—had shrunk by 90%. Nearly 900,000 of the regal, meter-high, black, white, and orange birds had disappeared without a trace. “It was really incredible, completely unexpected,” recalls Weimerskirch, who works at the French national research agency CNRS.

Soon, he and other scientists were planning an expedition to the island—the first in 37 years, and only the third ever—to search for explanations. “We had to go see for ourselves,” says CNRS ecologist Charles Bost.

How ‘undertaker’ bees recognize dead comrades

They’re the undertakers of the bee world: a class of workers that scours hives for dead comrades, finding them in the dark in as little as 30 minutes, despite the fact that the deceased haven’t begun to give off the typical odors of decay. A new study may reveal how they do it.

“The task of undertaking is fascinating” and the new work is “pretty cool,” says Jenny Jandt, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Otago, Dunedin, who was not involved with the study.

Wen Ping, an ecologist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’s Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden, wondered whether a specific type of scent molecule might help undertaker bees find their fallen hive mates. Ants, bees, and other insects are covered in compounds called cuticular hydrocarbons (CHCs), which compose part of the waxy coating on their cuticles (the shiny parts of their exoskeletons) and help prevent them from drying out. While the insects are alive, these molecules are continually released into the air and are used to recognize fellow hive members.

The New York Times

What’s Happening to the Monarch Butterfly Population?

Western monarch butterflies spend their winters in Pismo Beach and other sites on the central California coast. A few months later, they breed in the Central Valley and as far north and east as Idaho.

But where they go in between remains an open question.

Now, a group of researchers wants the public’s help to solve that mystery.

They would like anyone who spots a monarch north of Santa Barbara this spring to snap a quick picture. The researchers — from Washington State University, Tufts University, the nonprofit Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation, and the University of California, Santa Cruz — need photographic evidence, a date and a location to confirm where the monarchs might be living. (Photos and information can be emailed to monarchmystery@wsu.edu or uploaded on the iNaturalist app.)

NPR News

Museum's Collection Of Purported Dead Sea Scroll Fragments Are Fakes, Experts Say

A months-long analysis of alleged pieces of the ancient Dead Sea Scrolls that are on display at a privately funded museum in Washington, D.C., has revealed them to be clever forgeries, according to a team of researchers examining the fragments.

Using 3-D and scanning electron microscopes and microchemical testing, a group of independent researchers concluded that all 16 fragments housed at the Museum of the Bible purported to be part of the collection of ancient Hebrew manuscripts were inscribed on leather rather than the ancient parchment used in the authentic scrolls, which date within a few centuries of the birth of Jesus Christ.

BBC News

Diamond samples in Canada reveal size of lost continent

Canadian scientists have discovered a fragment of an ancient continent, suggesting that it was 10% larger than previously thought.

They were studying diamond samples from Baffin Island, a glacier-covered land mass near Greenland, when they noticed a remnant of North Atlantic Craton. Cratons are ancient, stable parts of the Earth's continental crust. 

The North American Craton stretched from present-day Scotland to North America and broke apart 150m years ago. Scientists chanced on the latest evidence as they examined exploration samples of kimberlite, a rock that often contains diamonds, from Baffin Island.

Ars Technica

What is black and gray and far away?

What is black and gray and far away?

The asteroid Bennu is—and on Friday, NASA released an ultra-high resolution image of this planetary body for the first time. Go here to download full-size versions of the mosaic.

Scientists produced the mosaic by stitching together 2,155 images taken by the primary camera on board NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft about one year ago. With a resolution of 5cm per pixel, NASA says this is the highest resolution mapping ever of a planetary body.

And let's be real: this is perhaps the most asteroid-looking asteroid we've ever seen. It is dark, strewn with boulders, and pretty desolate looking.

The Oregonian

Frontline health care workers face pandemic with dwindling protective gear. 'It’s a total insult’

As the deadly pandemic zeros in on Oregon, health care workers are stepping up daily to serve on the frontlines. But some fear they’re going to war with a gun that’s only half-loaded. Portland area nurses and health care workers say the giant health systems and hospitals they work for lack sufficient beds, their infectious disease controls were casual, and perhaps worst, they are already running low on personal protective gear.

Clearly, no one could have anticipated a disaster of this scale four months ago. Back in those days, lean management and reliance on lower-priced Chinese goods seemed like a sound strategy. The Oregonian/OregonLive has interviewed more than a dozen health care workers, their spouses, union leaders and hospital executives to hear their concerns and gauge the industry’s readiness for an expected surge of coronavirus patients. Most would only share their stories anonymously, saying their employers have threatened to fire or sanction anyone who talks to the press.

“It’s a total insult,” said Lynda Pond, president of the Oregon Nurses Association. “None of us became nurses thinking we’d have to dig up our own equipment.”