Month: July 2021

Enlarge (credit: Dish Network)

Dish Network has agreed to pay AT&T at least $5 billion over 10 years for network access amid a feud between Dish and T-Mobile.

Dish is in the early stages of building a 5G network and in the meantime is serving customers as a reseller using network capacity that it purchases from T-Mobile. But Dish and T-Mobile are fighting over T-Mobile's plan to shut down its 3G CDMA network earlier than it originally intended, with Dish accusing T-Mobile of anticompetitive behavior.

Against that backdrop, Dish today announced "the signing of a transformative, long-term strategic Network Services Agreement with AT&T, making AT&T the primary network services partner for Dish MVNO [mobile virtual network operator] customers."

What do the remarkably complex songs of the mockingbird have in common with Tuvan throat singing, Beethoven's FIfth Symphony, the song "Show Yourself" from Frozen 2, and Kendrick Lamar's "Duckworth"? According to a recent paper published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology, the mockingbird follows similar musical rules to those used in human music when composing its songs.

"When you listen for a while to a mockingbird, you can hear that the bird isn't just randomly stringing together the melodies it imitates," said co-author Tina Roeske, a neuroscientist at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics. "Rather, it seems to sequence similar snippets of melody according to consistent rules. In order to examine this hunch scientifically, however, we had to use quantitative analyses to test whether the data actually supported our hypotheses."

Mockingbirds are known for their ability to mimic other birds and certain sounds from their surrounding environment, provided those sounds fall into the mockingbird's acoustic range. For example, the birds can mimic blue jays but not ravens, tree frogs but not bullfrogs. Over half of the mockingbird's songs are mimicry, and the species boasts an impressive repertoire comprised of hundreds of types of phrases.

Enlarge / Anthony Church says goodbye through glass windows to his daughter, who is recovering from COVID-19 at Johnston Memorial Hospital's ICU on June 16, 2021, in Abingdon, Va. (credit: Getty | The Washington Post)

With the rapid rise of the highly transmissible delta variant and national vaccination efforts largely stalled, the COVID-19 pandemic continues to rage among the unvaccinated in the US—and things are looking grim.

Cases of COVID-19 are rising in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Right now, the states with the highest averages for daily new cases per 100,000 people are Arkansas, Missouri, Florida, Louisiana, and Nevada, which all have below-average vaccination rates. Nationwide, average daily cases are up 140 percent over the past two weeks. Hospitalizations and deaths, which lag behind increases in cases by weeks, are also up 34 percent and 33 percent, respectively.

Relative to the rest of the pandemic, the nationwide numbers of cases, hospitalizations, and deaths are low—they're matching or are below numbers seen back in April of 2020. But rates of cases among the unvaccinated in some places rival those seen at the heights of the pandemic. And areas with low vaccination coverage are seeing surges.