Featured Links - July 29, 2024

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

Marina sunset 

• Detecting Warp Drives. "The pre-print of a rather dry, but fun – with a sprinkling of Star Trek references – “What no one has seen before: gravitational waveforms from warp drive collapse” — looks as to whether a warp drive would be detectable. The way to do it would be to use a gravity wave detector, and here a lot has happened the past decade or so."
• Covid surges in US as unequal access plagues vaccination and treatment rates. "Covid is surging across the US, with levels of the virus on track to exceed last summer’s wave nationally and approaching the peak of last winter’s wave in the west, according to wastewater data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Yet vaccination and antiviral uptake, plagued by inequitable access, have remained low, and other precautions like mask-wearing are being met with increasing resistance." This also applies to Canada though for somewhat different reasons, see the next article for more.
• What a rising summer wave says about Canada’s long-term future with COVID. A rising COVID signal in July is a clue to how the virus is different than other diseases we think of as seasonal illnesses.
• Shuttle Columbia's near-miss: Why we should always expect the unexpected in space. "The eventful launch of STS-93 and the Chandra X-Ray Observatory." I had not heard about this until now. It's a remarkable story and shows the fragility of the Shuttle system. 
• The Novel That Tells You How To Survive America. "Some thoughts on Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower." A essay on Butler's eerily prophetic novel (and its sequel) whose story begins on July 20, 2024. 
• New study disputes Hunga Tonga volcano's role in 2023–24 global warm-up. ""Our paper pours cold water on the explanation that the eruption caused the extreme warmth of 2023 and 2024," Dessler explained. "Instead, we need to focus primarily on greenhouse gases from human activities as the main cause of the warming, with a big assist from the ongoing El Niño."
• Could a Conflict-Borne Superbug Bring on Our Next Pandemic? New breeds of drug-resistant bacteria are proliferating in war-torn parts of the globe — and spreading from the battlefield to hospitals and across borders.