Tension between police and protesters flares in front of the White House for the second night
Crowds protesting the killing of George Floyd clashed with U.S. Secret Service and Park Police officers in the nation’s capital Saturday afternoon and evening, the second outburst of violent confrontations in less than 24 hours between federal law enforcement and activists decrying police brutality.
By nightfall, nearly 1,000 protesters were circling the perimeter of the White House grounds, which was fortified with law enforcement vehicles, metal barriers and rows of armored Secret Service, D.C. police and U.S. Park Police. […]
The confrontations came after an extraordinary scene outside the White House in the early hours of Saturday captured the anger and divisions that have gripped the nation. More than 1,000 demonstrators massed along Pennsylvania Avenue, throwing bricks and rocks and dispersing only after 3 a.m., when the Secret Service began to fire chemical agents. No similar scene has unfolded within view of the North Portico of the president’s home in recent memory.
Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder
‘We Don’t Know These Folks’: Leaders say majority of destruction not caused by Minnesotans
State leaders gathered Saturday morning for an hour-long conference to address destruction in the wake of protests following George Floyd’s murder by former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. […]
Gov. Tim Walz, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, and St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter were among leaders reporting the damage was caused primarily by non-residents looking to incite violence. Walz estimated upwards of 80 percent were from out of state. […]
Carter echoed those sentiments. “Every single person we arrested last night was from out of state,” he said. “As I talk to my friends who have been in this movement for a very long time, I hear them say, ‘We don’t know these folks. We don’t know these folks who are agitating. We don’t know these folks who are inciting violence.’”
Minneapolis Star Tribune
Swift show of force follows curfew in Minneapolis
A state-imposed curfew took effect at 8 p.m. Saturday and brought with it swift enforcement meant to prevent yet another night of violent and destructive unrest that scarred Minneapolis and neighboring St. Paul following George Floyd’s death after being detained by police.
Within the first hour, security forces moved aggressively as the situation went from peaceful to tense to confrontational in multiple parts of Minneapolis. […]
State transportation officials late Saturday afternoon used large maintenance trucks to close interstates at 7 p.m., ahead when state officials want people to be home. Moments before the curfew’s first minute, many smartphones in Minneapolis sounded an emergency alert signaling the curfew was imminent.
Louisville Courier Journal
Protests heat up as curfew passes; tear gas unleashed downtown
A third night of protests, as expected, has erupted in Louisville.
The demonstrations are part of a national movement and in Louisville have taken place over the police shooting of Breonna Taylor, an African American who was unarmed when police executed a "no-knock" search warrant at her apartment and returned fire when her boyfriend fired on them. He has said he thought they were intruders.
While much of what's occurred at the two protests has been peaceful, Thursday night's demonstration was marred by a shooting that injured seven people and Friday night saw looting and widespread damage throughout downtown as police fired tear gas at several groups. On Saturday, Mayor Greg Fischer and Gov. Andy ] called for the National Guard to assists in the city.
New York Amsterdam News
Obama shows leadership while Trump calls for ‘Shooting’ of Protestors
Derek Chauvin, the officer who was seen on video pressing his knee into the neck of a handcuffed George Floyd, was arrested on Friday, May 29.
The arrest comes as protests take place in many places around the nation, including in Los Angeles, where a crowd of pedestrians blocked the busy 101 Freeway, and in Minneapolis where Floyd was killed. “Chauvin (who, along with four other officers, was fired after the incident) was taken into custody,” Minneapolis Public Safety Commissioner John Harrington said in a news release.
… Donald Trump reached back to the Civil Rights era to quote an alleged racist former Miami police chief.
At the same time, his predecessor, Barack Obama, offered the kind of leadership not seen since he left office nearly four years ago.
“This shouldn’t be ‘normal’ in 2020 America,” Obama wrote in a statement regarding the death of Floyd, an African American Minneapolis resident, and the ensuing protests where a few citizens have resorted to looting stores and burning buildings.
Vox
Violent protests are not the story. Police violence is.
The protests over George Floyd’s killing by a white police officer have spread from Minneapolis across the country, revealing the pent-up anger over institutional racism nationwide.
In a way, this is not anything new. For all of America’s history, black people have been subjected to violence at the hands of the state, or agents of the state, or members of the white majority. Mass demonstrations against state violence have also been a fixture of US politics, from the civil rights movement to Ferguson, Missouri, to today. The scenes from Minneapolis, Atlanta, and Brooklyn last night are just the latest chapter in that story.
And yet, already, the protesters’ legitimate grievances are being subsumed by political leaders and others questioning whether they are registering their anger appropriately. This is also a pattern in these moments: the demonstrations, so visible and visceral in the news coverage, become the story. The structural problems being protested start to fade into the background.
What was your first reaction when you saw the video of the white cop kneeling on George Floyd’s neck while Floyd croaked, “I can’t breathe”?
If you’re white, you probably muttered a horrified, “Oh, my God” while shaking your head at the cruel injustice. If you’re black, you probably leapt to your feet, cursed, maybe threw something (certainly wanted to throw something), while shouting, “Not @#$%! again!” Then you remember the two white vigilantes accused of murdering Ahmaud Arbery as he jogged through their neighborhood in February, and how if it wasn’t for that video emerging a few weeks ago, they would have gotten away with it. And how those Minneapolis cops claimed Floyd was resisting arrest but a store’s video showed he wasn’t. And how the cop on Floyd’s neck wasn’t an enraged redneck stereotype, but a sworn officer who looked calm and entitled and devoid of pity: the banality of evil incarnate. […]
The black community is used to the institutional racism inherent in education, the justice system and jobs. And even though we do all the conventional things to raise public and political awareness — write articulate and insightful pieces in the Atlantic, explain the continued devastation on CNN, support candidates who promise change — the needle hardly budges.
But COVID-19 has been slamming the consequences of all that home as we die at a significantly higher rate than whites, are the first to lose our jobs, and watch helplessly as Republicans try to keep us from voting. Just as the slimy underbelly of institutional racism is being exposed, it feels like hunting season is open on blacks. If there was any doubt, … Trump’s recent tweets confirm the national zeitgeist as he calls protesters “thugs” and looters fair game to be shot.
Los Angeles Times
New era of spaceflight dawns as SpaceX sends NASA astronauts into orbit
Riding a crackling flame out of Earth’s atmosphere, two NASA astronauts on Saturday became the first to reach orbit in a craft designed and owned by a private company — marking a new era in spaceflight.
Astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley rocketed to space Saturday afternoon inside a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule, en route to the International Space Station, where they’re set to dock Sunday at 10:29 a.m. EDT.
Saturday’s launch from Kennedy Space Center in Florida was the first time NASA astronauts have launched to orbit from U.S. soil in nine years.
“This has been a long time coming,” NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said after the launch during the webcast. “I’m breathing a sigh of relief. I’ve heard that rumble before, but it’s a whole different feeling when you’ve got your team on that rocket.”
Nature
What a US exit from the WHO means for COVID-19 and global health
[…] Trump has announced that he is “terminating” the country’s relationship with the World Health Organization (WHO), and that the US will redirect funds intended for the agency to other global health projects. During the announcement at a news briefing 29 May, Trump reiterated accusations that the WHO is too lenient with China.
Because the United States became a member of the WHO through a joint resolution in 1948, Trump may need Congressional approval to exit the agency, says Jennifer Kates, the director of global health & HIV policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation in Washington, D.C. But she adds that previous presidents were able to withdraw from treaties without Congress stepping in. “This is murky legal territory,” she says. […]
Now, experts in health policy are contending with repercussions that could range from a resurgence of polio and malaria, to barriers in the flow of information on COVID-19. Scientific partnerships around the world would also be damaged, and the United States could lose influence over global health initiatives, including those to distribute drugs and vaccines for the new coronavirus as they become available, say researchers. “This will hurt,” says Kelley Lee, a global health-policy researcher at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, Canada.
Coronavirus research updates: The nose could be the body’s entry point to infection
The nose is the probable starting point for COVID-19 infections.
Richard Boucher and Ralph Baric at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and their colleagues tracked the ease with which the new coronavirus infects various cell types in the respiratory tract. The researchers found a gradient of infectivity that decreases from the upper to the lower respiratory tract: the most easily infected cells are in the nasal cavity, and the least easily infected deep in the lungs… That gradient mapped neatly onto the distribution of cells that express ACE2, a protein that SARS-CoV-2 uses to enter cells.
The authors speculate that the virus gets a foothold in the nose, then sneaks down the respiratory tract when breathed into the airways. They say the results support the use of masks and preventative measures such as nasal cleansing.
Science
Shuttered natural history museums fight for survival amid COVID-19 ‘heartbreak’
A few months ago, retirement was the furthest thing from David Thomas’s mind. “Then the world went upside down,” recalls the archaeologist from the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. In March, the coronavirus pandemic forced the museum to close its doors. No more school groups thronging the interactive exhibit on color, no more corporate dinners or lines of international tourists waiting to pay $23 a head to marvel at gems and fossils. The museum’s income plummeted 60%.
Leaders first asked for early retirements. By early May, they had sliced the staff of 1100 by 20% and furloughed an additional 250 staff. All other full-time employees now work 3 days a week, mostly from home. Thomas opted to retire early, along with four of the other 38 curators. “It was the right thing to do,” he says.
Around the world, natural history museums are shuttered and reeling. On Tuesday, the California Academy of Sciences announced it was furloughing or laying off 40% of its staff. “We will recover, but there is no doubt that we will be in some ways a different institution,” says Peter Roopnarine, a paleontologist there.
No asteroids needed: ancient mass extinction tied to ozone loss, warming climate
The end of the Devonian period, 359 million years ago, was an eventful time: Fish were inching out of the ocean, and fernlike forests were advancing on land. The world was recovering from a mass extinction 12 million years earlier, but the climate was still chaotic, swinging between hothouse conditions and freezes so deep that glaciers formed in the tropics. And then, just as the planet was warming from one of these ice ages, another extinction struck, seemingly without reason. Now, spores from fernlike plants, preserved in ancient lake sediments from eastern Greenland, suggest a culprit: The planet’s protective ozone layer was suddenly stripped away, exposing surface life to a blast of mutation-causing ultraviolet (UV) radiation.
Just as the extinction set in, the spores became misshapen and dark, indicating DNA damage, John Marshall, a palynologist at the University of Southampton, and his co-authors say in a paper published today in Science Advances. It’s evidence, he says, that “all of the ozone protection is gone.”
Phys.org
Making matter out of light: high-power laser simulations point the way
A few minutes into the life of the universe, colliding emissions of light energy created the first particles of matter and antimatter. We are familiar with the reverse process—matter generating energy—in everything from a campfire to an atomic bomb, but it has been difficult to recreate that critical transformation of light into matter.
Now, a new set of simulations by a research team led by UC San Diego's Alexey Arefiev point the way toward making matter from light. The process starts by aiming a high-power laser at a target to generate a magnetic field as strong as that of a neutron star. This field generates gamma ray emissions that collide to produce—for the very briefest instant—pairs of matter and antimatter particles.
A rising tide of marine disease? How parasites respond to a warming world
Warming events are increasing in magnitude and severity, threatening many ecosystems worldwide. As the global temperatures continue to climb, it also raises uncertainties as to the relationship, prevalence, and spread of parasites and disease.
A recent study from the University of Washington explores the ways parasitism will respond to climate change, providing researchers new insights into disease transmission. The paper was published May 18 in Trends in Ecology and Evolution.
The Guardian
Allosaurus dinosaur suspected to be scavenging cannibal
About nine metres long, with grasping claws and a skull it used like a hatchet, Allosaurus was among the most fearsome dinosaurs of the Jurassic period. Now, it seems, the animal could also have been a cannibal.
Fossil researchers have revealed that bite marks found in a cache of dinosaur bones from the Mygatt-Moore quarry, western Colorado, were made by dinosaur-on-dinosaur dining. And the marks on Allosaurus bones had potentially been made by dinosaurs of their own kind.
Dr Stephanie Drumheller-Horton, first author of the research, from the University of Tennessee, said the findings shed new light on the predators.
Improve water supply in poorer nations to cut plastic use, say experts
Focusing on improving the water supply in developing nations could be a powerful way to fight the scourge of plastic waste in the oceans, experts have said, highlighting that the issue has received little attention.
People in developing countries, and many middle-income countries, often rely on plastic bottles of water as their piped water supply can be contaminated or unsafe, or perceived as such.
Hundreds of billions of plastic water bottles are produced each year. In rich countries, they are a thoughtless luxury, but in many poor and emerging economies people have few alternatives.
“It is an issue, as the water supply system has problems with water quality in many countries,” said Brajesh Dubey, professor of civil engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, co-author of a new “blue paper” on the problem of plastic waste in the oceans.
Science Daily
World's oldest bug is fossil millipede from Scotland
A 425-million-year-old millipede fossil from the Scottish island of Kerrera is the world's oldest "bug" -- older than any known fossil of an insect, arachnid or other related creepy-crawly, according to researchers at The University of Texas at Austin.
The findings offer new evidence about the origin and evolution of bugs and plants, suggesting that they evolved much more rapidly than some scientists believe, going from lake-hugging communities to complex forest ecosystems in just 40 million years.
"It's a big jump from these tiny guys to very complex forest communities, and in the scheme of things, it didn't take that long," said Michael Brookfield, a research associate at UT Austin's Jackson School of Geosciences and adjunct professor at the University of Massachusetts Boston.
Astronomers discover new class of cosmic explosions
Astronomers have found two objects that, added to a strange object discovered in 2018, constitute a new class of cosmic explosions. The new type of explosion shares some characteristics with supernova explosions of massive stars and with the explosions that generate gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), but still has distinctive differences from each.
The saga began in June of 2018 when astronomers saw a cosmic blast with surprising characteristics and behavior. The object, dubbed AT2018cow ("The Cow"), drew worldwide attention from scientists and was studied extensively. While it shared some characteristics with supernova explosions, it differed in important aspects, particularly its unusual initial brightness and how rapidly it brightened and faded in just a few days.
Mongabay
When the world’s rarest primate couples up, it’s a win for the species
The Hainan gibbon was once teetering and tottering at the precipice of extinction. In the 1950s, there were about 2,000 individuals living in Hainan, a tropical island at the southernmost tip of China, but 20 years later, poaching and habitat destruction nearly wiped the species out, leaving only seven to nine individuals. With conservation efforts, the world’s rarest primate has been making a gradual comeback. More than 30 Hainan gibbons currently inhabit the island, and conservationists have recently made a big discovery: a male and female just formed a new family, which means the population might grow even more.
Until recently, the entire Hainan gibbon (Nomascus hainanus) population was isolated within a 1,600-hectare (4,000-acre) fragment of forest in the Hainan Bawangling National Nature Reserve. But in October 2019, villagers first reported seeing a male and female gibbon 8 kilometers (5 miles) outside of their typical range. In November 2019, community rangers heard the shrill, flute-like call of the male gibbon, and two months later, they heard the female hooting alongside the male in what researchers call a “duet.”
Live Science
Fiery meteor that doomed the dinosaurs struck at 'deadliest possible' angle
The flaming space rock that slammed into Earth and wiped out the dinosaurs, struck at the worst possible angle (for the dinosaurs, that is), new research suggests.
Colliding with an enormous, fast-moving cosmic projectile would have been disastrous under just about any circumstances. But this giant space rock also hit the planet at a steep angle, causing the "deadliest possible" outcome by releasing much more gas and pulverized rock than it would have with a shallower approach, researchers recently discovered.
Gizmodo
Ancient Antarctic Ice Sheet Loss Dwarfs Modern Melting, Study Finds
More than a year ago, researcher Julian Dowdeswell boarded a research vessel at the edge of the Fimbul ice shelf to the east of the Antarctic Peninsula. He and six other scientists with the University of Cambridge were setting off as part of an expedition to study the ancient patterns of ice sheet retreat along the peninsula, what is one of today’s most vulnerable ice shelves.
The team analyzed the data gathered on that trip and has published a study in Science on Thursday. They have found that ice sheet retreat rates 10,000 years ago make today’s rate of retreat look like baby steps. This period saw ice shelves retreat more than 10 kilometers (6 miles) each year along the Larsen C shelf. That’s three to five times greater than the rates we’ve seen via satellite data over the last 25 years. These findings can improve how scientists’ model the future of ice and what it means for sea level rise.
Trees are Getting Shorter and Younger
The world’s collective forests have become shorter and younger overall in the past 50 years, according to a study published in the journal Science on Friday. This means that forests have less capacity to remove carbon from the atmosphere and are less hospitable to the many species that rely on them for shelter. Oh, and it’s going to get worse.
The team of researchers reviewed more than 160 previous studies, analyzed satellite imagery, and created models to examine how forests changed between 1900 and 2015. They found that over that 115 year period, the world has lost 14 percent of its forests to tree harvesting alone. That includes 30 percent of old growth forests, which are home to trees more than 140 years old and are generally tall and biodiverse.
The Atlantic
How Loners Are an Evolutionary Insurance Policy
Dense clouds of starlings dip and soar, congregating in undulating curtains that darken the sky; hundreds of thousands of wildebeests thunder together across the plains of Africa in a coordinated, seemingly never-ending migratory loop; fireflies blink in unison; entire forests of bamboo blossom at once. Scientists have studied these mesmerizing feats of synchronization for decades, trying to tease apart the factors that enable such cooperation and complexity.
Yet there are always individuals that don’t participate in the collective behavior—the odd bird or insect or mammal that remains just a little out of sync with the rest; the stray cell or bacterium that seems to have missed some call to arms. Researchers usually pay them little heed, dismissing them as insignificant outliers.
But a handful of scientists have started to suspect otherwise. Their hunch is that these individuals are signs of something deeper, a broader evolutionary strategy at work. Now new research validating that hypothesis has opened up a very different way of thinking about the study of collective behavior.
SpaceX Pulled It Off
For nearly a decade, if Americans wanted to leave the planet, they had to do so from a launchpad in Kazakhstan. Now they need only go as far as Florida.
Two astronauts launched into space this afternoon, departing from the sandy shores of Cape Canaveral, from the same launchpad where the space shuttles and Apollo missions once took off. The astronauts work for NASA, but for the first time in spaceflight history, they’re flying on a truly private spacecraft, designed from top to bottom by SpaceX, Elon Musk’s aerospace company.
Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken made the journey wearing SpaceX suits, inside a SpaceX capsule, atop a SpaceX rocket, from a SpaceX-operated launchpad.
Ars Technica
135-year-long streak is over: US renewable sources topped coal in 2019
Two weeks ago, we covered a US Energy Information Administration (EIA) projection that renewable wind, solar, and hydroelectric power would top coal for total electricity generation in 2020. That was particularly believable given that renewables had beat coal in daily generation every day going back to March 24. As it happens, that daily streak finally came to an end this week, as coal picked up amid rising demand and a couple low days for wind. Coal likely topped renewables on Tuesday, although it’s possible that rooftop solar generation (not included in EIA’s daily data) extended the run until Wednesday.
But the EIA also released some numbers Thursday that highlight a related and interesting piece of trivia: if you include energy use beyond the electric sector and all types of renewable energy, renewables actually beat out coal last year. And to find the last time that was true, you have to go all the way back to the 1880s.
This comparison includes biofuels (like ethanol and biodiesel), wood-burning, and waste incineration or landfill gas. And beyond electricity, it adds in energy used by industry, residential and commercial buildings, and transportation—uses where coal plays little or no role.