Month: May 2020

Enlarge (credit: Roland Birke | Getty Images)

Crawling along the world’s river bottoms, the larvae of the caddis fly suffer a perpetual housing crisis. To protect themselves from predators, they gather up sand grains and other sediment and paste them all together with silk, forming a cone that holds their worm-like bodies. As they mature and elongate, they have to continuously add material to the case—think of it like adding rooms to your home for the rest of your life, or at least until you turn into an adult insect. If the caddis fly larva somehow loses its case, it’s got to start from scratch, and that’s quite the precarious situation for a defenseless tube of flesh. And now, the microplastic menace is piling onto the caddis fly’s list of tribulations.

Microplastic particles—pieces of plastic under 5 millimeters long—have already corrupted many of Earth’s environments, including the formerly pristine Arctic and deep-sea sediments. In a study published last year, researchers in Germany reported finding microplastic particles in the cases of caddis flies in the wild. Then, last month, they published the troubling results of lab experiments that found the more microplastic particles a caddis fly larva incorporates into its case, the weaker that structure becomes. That could open up caddis flies to greater predation, sending ripple effects through river ecosystems.

Some examples of caddis fly cases. Image A was collected from the wild, and B was built from sand by a larva in the lab. In image C, the larva has incorporated black PVC particles. And in D, it's blue PET particles. (credit: Tamara Al Najjar)

You may wonder why one insect species matters. But caddis flies are critical actors in these ecosystems, and their struggles could well have consequences. Caddis fly larvae work an important gig hoovering up aquatic vegetation, keeping a river from getting overgrown. As flying adults, they serve as a critical food source for bats, frogs, and spiders. This study is also helping open up a new front in microplastic science: Researchers have been massively ramping up their work to understand how ingested microplastic particles might affect the physiology and behavior of animals, but relatively little has been done to determine how those particles might affect the structures that insects like caddis flies, bees, and termites build.

Enlarge / US President Donald Trump speaks about COVID-19 after signing a Proclamation in honor of National Nurses Day in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC, May 6, 2020. (credit: Saul Loeb | AFP | Getty Images)

The poor federal response to the COVID-19 crisis has become even lighter on details in recent days as the Trump administration pushes hard on a message of "reopening" while leaving out any data or expertise that might conflict with that focus.

The White House has done everything possible to minimize messaging that might scare Americans into staying home and instead "relies on tightly controlling information" about the novel coronavirus disease, the Washington Post reports.

A source the Post described as a senior administration official told the paper that the task force addressing the crisis was already meeting less often before President Donald Trump said Wednesday its focus would be shifting away from emergency management and toward economic reopening. Public health warnings are scaring people, the source added, so the administration has been downplaying them.

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  In 1980, Volkswagen built the ARVW concept car, the most aerodynamic vehicle it has ever created. It achieved a drag coefficient (Cd) of just 0.15. By contrast, most road cars have a Cd of between 0.3-0.4. [credit: Volkswagen ]

With no car launches to work on thanks to COVID-19, some automakers' press offices are filling the gap by digging into the archives to share interesting stuff with the rest of us. On Thursday, Volkswagen North America reached out to tell us about the company's most aerodynamic car ever. It was called the Aerodynamic Research Volkswagen, and it was built in 1980 as a demonstration of how to make a vehicle as slippery as possible, with a drag coefficient (Cd) of just 0.15. Powered by a 177hp (132kW) 2.4L inline-six cylinder engine, the ARVW reached a speed of 225mph (362km/h) at the Nardo test track in southern Italy. But the ARVW isn't the lowest-drag vehicle ever built, just the lowest-drag VW. So what is the most aerodynamic car of all time?

Production cars

When Tesla revealed its Model 3 sedan a few years ago, it was justifiably proud of the car's Cd of 0.23, which bettered the Models S and X by 0.01. Tesla didn't optimize the Model 3's aerodynamics just for bragging rights. The lower a car's drag, the further it can go per unit of energy because it doesn't have to work as hard to push its way through the air. However, a Model 3 is only this slippery through the air when the car's 18-inch wheels are fitted with the aero wheel covers, something Car and Driver put to the test late last year. (If you're a Model 3 owner and into hypermiling, you can cut your car's drag—and thereby boost its range—even further by fitting aftermarket front- and rear spoilers.)

But the Model 3 isn't the lowest-drag car to have gone into production. Porsche's Taycan battery EV bested Tesla's best when it went on sale last year. Both the Taycan Turbo and Taycan 4S manage a Cd of 0.22, although again, only with the most aerodynamic wheels fitted. The Taycan Turbo S uses a different design and in the wind tunnel, that adds 0.03 to the Cd.

Enlarge / After her research career effectively ended, Dr. Judy Mikovits has re-emerged as an anti-vaccine activist. (credit: YouTube)

Back in 2011, we covered the strange story of biochemist Judy Mikovits, who co-authored a controversial (and subsequently retracted) paper in the journal Science and eventually lost her prestigious position with a research institution. Now Mikovits is back in the news, having spent the ensuing years reinventing herself as a staunch anti-vaccine crusader.

The COVID-19 pandemic has given her a new conspiracy to tout, this time targeting Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at NIH, who has become a prominent public spokesperson during the outbreak. Two interviews in particular have been spreading rapidly on social media, prompting YouTube and Facebook to remove both video clips for spreading medical misinformation during a global pandemic—a violation of their current policies

In 2007, Mikovits met Robert Silverman at a conference. Silverman had co-discovered a retrovirus known as XMRV, closely related to a known virus from mice. He told her he had found XMRV sequences in specimens from prostate cancer patients, although other labs, using different sets of patients, could find no evidence of a viral infection. Nonetheless, this prompted Mikovits to use the same tools to look for XMRV in samples from patients suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS)—a disorder some had claimed was purely psychosomatic. 

Enlarge / The 12.9-inch 2020 iPad Pro with the Smart Keyboard and Magic Trackpad peripherals. (credit: Samuel Axon)

Reports from The Verge and TechCrunch both say that trackpad and mouse support is coming to Office for iPad. The update should be out by the end of the year. Both reports point to the fall as a possible release window, but Microsoft is still working out the exact details.

Trackpad and mouse support is the hot new thing for the iPad; the feature arrived in March with the release of iPadOS 13.4 and the new iPad Pro. It lets you pair a mouse or trackpad to an iPad, and you'll get a round mouse cursor on the display. Since this is an iPad, Apple has tried to re-imagine mouse input a bit, with fancy hover effects that change the mouse cursor shape, trackpad swipe gestures, and mouse movement that automatically snaps to the nearest button. Apps that use the standard iOS and iPadOS widgets get a lot of this functionality for free, but the custom elements in Microsoft's apps need a bit of special work to blend in with the new mouse functionality.

At first, the focus will be on Microsoft's new all-in-one Office app for the iPad, which combines Word, Excel, and Powerpoint into a single app. Mouse support will arrive on this app first, and The Verge says mouse support for the standalone office apps is "likely."