Month: April 2020

NBC's Peacock streaming service marked this week's "soft launch" with a short teaser trailer for one of its original programs: Brave New World, an adaptation of the ultimate dystopian science fiction novel by Aldous Huxley. It's short on details but visually striking, so while Peacock is relatively late to the streaming scene, the series looks like it could be a winner for the fledgling service.

Brave New World (the novel) was inspired by H.G. Wells' optimistic utopian novels. Huxley set out to write a parody of them, but eventually "got caught up in the excitement" of creating his own "negative utopia." He also cited D.H. Lawrence as an influence, although George Orwell noted strong similarities to a 1921 Russian science fiction novel, We, by Yevgeny Zamyatin. (Huxley was openly accused of plagiarism by Polish author Mieczyslaw Smolarski, who believed the similarities to two of his novels were too strong to be "accidental analogy.") The fact that Huxley wrote Brave New World as the Great Depression spread from the US to the UK influenced its theme of achieving stability, even at the cost of individual freedoms.

Brave New World is set in the year 2540, in the World State city of London, where people are born in artificial wombs and indoctrinated through "sleep-learning" to fit into their assigned predetermined caste. Citizens regularly consume a drug called soma (part anti-depressant, part hallucinogen) to keep them docile and conform to the strict social laws. Promiscuity is encouraged, but pregnancy (for women) is a cause for shame. Needless to say, both art and science (albeit to a lesser extent) are viewed with suspicion. "Every discovery in pure science is potentially subversive," Resident World Controller of Western Europe Mustapha Mond tells the novel's antihero protagonist, John the Savage. "Science is dangerous; we have to keep it most carefully chained and muzzled."

Enlarge / US President Donald Trump departs from a news conference at the White House in Washington D.C., U.S. on Thursday, April 16, 2020. Some U.S. states and employers may be able to abandon most social distancing practices to curb the coronavirus outbreak within four weeks under guidelines the Trump administration issued to governors on Thursday. (credit: Getty | Bloomberg)

Public health experts are offering mixed reviews of the Trump Administration’s broad, nonbinding guidelines for states to gradually lift social distancing measures currently in place to slow the pandemic spread of COVID-19.

The guidelines, unveiled Thursday, aim to avoid a second, overwhelming wave of disease by easing restrictions in three progressive phases. Each of those phases is gated, meaning that a set of criteria should be met before a state can enter a specific phase. Those gating criteria include states having two-week-long “downward trajectories” of confirmed COVID-19 cases and reports of infections with symptoms similar to COVID-19. States must also have the hospital capacity to treat all patients without “crisis care” and have a “robust” testing program.

The guidelines further lay out core “preparedness responsibilities” that each state should maintain throughout the phases. This criteria includes the ability to test all symptomatic cases and trace their contacts; to set up sentinel surveillance for asymptomatic cases; to have a sufficient supply chain of personal protective equipment (masks, gloves, gowns, etc) for healthcare workers; and to have plans to protect at-risk workers and members of the public, such as healthcare workers, the elderly in living facilities, and workers and members of the public using mass transit.

Enlarge / Dry years are ahead.

As the Colorado River slowly dwindles, groundwater resources are depleted, and wells are being dug ever deeper, the specter of drought looms in the US—particularly, but not exclusively, in the arid Southwest.

Preparing for gradual changes like these is not sexy or popular. But there is a huge amount of crucial work to be done to mitigate the worst possible outcomes of increasing drought, writes environmental politics researcher Megan Mullin in a paper in Science this week. Fragmented water systems across the country have a litany of critical vulnerabilities that will ensure that the worst effects of water scarcity will hit the most vulnerable people in society the hardest.

Crumbling into dust

The Southwest has experienced an abnormally dry period that started back in 2000—an emerging “megadrought” that is due partly to natural climate cycles and partly to anthropogenic climate change. Higher temperatures “increase moisture demand from the land surface,” writes climate risk researcher Toby Ault in a second Science paper on drought this week, “for the same reason that a sauna will dry out a towel faster than a steam room.” Climate driven changes in the patterns of snow and rainfall can also contribute to drought.

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  The Apple Music Web app home page. [credit: Samuel Axon ]

The multi-platform, Web-based interface for the Apple Music streaming service exited beta and officially launched today. It lives at music.apple.com and is accessible through any modern Web browser.

In many respects, the design and layout of the site closely resembles that of the native Mac app. The layout of store pages is similar, and the visual language is the same. It has the same player controls at the top, and it also has the left-aligned navigation bar with "For You," "Browse," and "Radio."

It's interesting, though, that the website prominently features "open in Music" (in Safari on Apple devices) or "open in iTunes," depending on the platform. This suggests that Apple still sees the website as a supplement to the native app experience, not a full replacement for it. Also, the Apple Music Web app lacks some of the personal library features that were grandfathered into Music from iTunes on Macs.