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Enlarge / T-cells attacking a cell recognized as foreign. (credit: NIH)

Ultimately, the only way for societies to return to some semblance of normal in the wake of the current pandemic is to reach a state called herd immunity. This is where a large-enough percentage of the population has acquired immunity to SARS-CoV-2—either through infection or a vaccine—that most people exposed to the virus are already immune to it. This will mean that the infection rate will slow and eventually fizzle out, protecting society as a whole.

Given that this is our ultimate goal, we need to understand how the immune system responds to this virus. Most of what we know is based on a combination of what we know about other coronavirus that infect humans and the antibody response to SARS-CoV-2. But now, data is coming in on the response of T-cells, and it indicates that their response is more complex: longer-lasting, broadly based, and including an overlap with the response to prior coronavirus infections. What this means for the prospect of long-lasting protection remains unclear.

What we know now

SARS-CoV-2 is one of seven coronaviruses known to infect humans. Some of these, like SARS and MERS, have only made the jump to humans recently. While more lethal than SARS-CoV-2, we are fortunate that they spread among humans less efficiently. These viruses seem to provoke a long-lasting immune response following infections. That's a sharp contrast to the four coronaviruses that circulate widely with humans, causing cold-like symptoms. These viruses induce an immunity that seems to last less than a year.

Enlarge / NEW YORK, NEW YORK - MAY 25: The Statue of Liberty is seen behind refrigeration trucks that function as temporary morgues at the South Brooklyn Marine Terminal during the coronavirus pandemic. (credit: Getty | Noam Galai)

Officials in Texas and Arizona have requested refrigerated trucks to hold the dead as hospitals and morgues become overwhelmed by victims of the raging COVID-19 pandemic.

“In the hospital, there are only so many places to put bodies,” Ken Davis, chief medical officer of Christus Santa Rosa Health System in the San Antonio area, said in a briefing this week. “We're out of space, and our funeral homes are out of space, and we need those beds. So, when someone dies, we need to quickly turn that bed over.

“It’s a hard thing to talk about,” Davis added. “People's loved ones are dying."

Enlarge / The James Webb Space Telescope is now due to launch in October 2021. (credit: NASA)

NASA officials announced Thursday they are now targeting a launch date of October 31, 2021, for the James Webb Space Telescope. This represents a seven-month delay from the previously announced March 2021 date for the $10 billion telescope that will allow scientists to observe deeper into the universe than ever before.

In a teleconference, NASA scientists explained that the latest delay has been driven primarily by the COVID-19 pandemic. Not only have employees at NASA and the telescope's primary contractor, Northrop Grumman, lost work time—they were working two shifts prior to the onset of the pandemic—the new schedule factors in the potential for additional lost time due to the virus.

Because of the additional margin in the schedule, the NASA officials expressed confidence in the new date. "We're not expecting to go beyond October 31st," said Gregory Robinson, NASA's Webb program director.

Always watching. Top to bottom: PlayStation Eye (PS3), Playstation Camera (PS4), Xbox 360 Kinect, Xbox One Kinect. (credit: Kyle Orland)

Roughly one year ago, Microsoft revealed the Xbox Series X (then referred to as "Project Scarlett") in part by highlighting the system's extensive backward compatibility: "Your games, your achievements, your progression, your accessories, your console experience with Xbox: it all comes forward with Scarlett." Today, though, the company emphasized one slight exception to that general backward-compatibility rule: Kinect hardware and the games designed for it.

"It's our intent for all Xbox One games that do not require Kinect to play on Xbox Series X at the launch of the console [emphasis added]," Microsoft Head of Xbox Phil Spencer wrote in a sentence buried in an extensive blog post about the company's Xbox plans (including coming xCloud integration with Game Pass). Spencer later confirmed and clarified that statement to The Verge, saying point-blank that "[t]here's no way for Kinect to work" on the Series X.

In a sense, today's confirmation isn't a big surprise. We've known for months that the Series X is missing the proprietary Kinect port found on the original Xbox One (which was also removed from 2016's Xbox One S and 2017's Xbox One X). But Microsoft offered a USB adapter for the Xbox One edition of the Kinect until 2018, and third-party accessory makers still offer similar USB solutions for the hardware (the Xbox 360 version of Kinect was designed for USB but required an included power adapter to work with older versions of the console).

Enlarge / EU Commissioner for Values and Transparency - Vice President Vera Jourova (L) and the EU Commissioner for Justice Didier Reynders (R) are talking to media during the EU Commission press conference on data protection at International Level on July 16, 2020 in Brussels, Belgium. (credit: Thierry Monasse | Getty Images )

Europe's highest court today struck down the agreement by which companies operating in the EU are allowed to transfer data to the United States. The court ruled that the agreement leaves European customers' data too exposed to US government surveillance.

The agreement, known as Privacy Shield, has been in place since 2016, and more than 5,000 companies operate under its terms. Boiled down, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) basically ruled that US law is too weak to protect EU citizens' data to the extent EU law demands. As the court put it in a press release (PDF):

The limitations on the protection of personal data arising from the domestic law of the United States, on the access and use by US public authorities of such data transferred from the European Union... are not circumscribed in a way that satisfies requirements that are essentially equivalent to those required under EU law.

As a result of the case, US companies doing business in Europe or handling data from European clients will either have to negotiate new individual data-handling arrangements, called Standard Contract Clauses (SCC), with the EU or stop porting data from European operations into the US. The ruling applies to data that companies such as Facebook move around to US servers for internal reasons, but it does not affect "necessary" data transfers, such as take place when someone in Europe sends an email to a recipient in the US, books a flight or a hotel on a US website, or does something equally mundane.