Kamis, 31 Desember 2020
Photos: The Non-Pandemic Events That Helped Shape 2020 Around The World - NPR
In a year dominated by the global COVID-19 pandemic, the virus' massive disruptions did not signal an end to other major events. Conflicts continued, resumed and broke out. Natural disasters upended lives. Attempts at peace bore some fruit. The Brexit transition continued. And around the world, protesters came into the streets to demand greater freedoms and an end to racial injustice.
Here is a look back at some of the key events that took place outside the United States and helped define this tumultuous year.
Iraq
Protesters demonstrate on Jan. 4 in Tehran over the U.S. airstrike in Iraq that killed Iranian Revolutionary Guard Gen. Qassem Soleimani a day earlier. Ebrahim Noroozi/AP
Australia
A kangaroo jumps in a field amid smoke from a bush fire in Snowy Valley on the outskirts of Cooma, Australia, on Jan. 4. Up to 3,000 military reservists were called up to tackle Australia's bush fire crisis as tens of thousands of residents fled their homes. Saeed Khan/AFP via Getty Images
Venezuela
Opposition leader Juan Guaidó at Maiquetía Airport in February in Caracas. Guaidó returned to Venezuela after traveling to Colombia, Europe, Canada and the United States to try to gain support for his effort to oust President Nicolás Maduro. By year's end, Maduro remained in power and Venezuela near collapse. Carolina Cabral/Getty Images
Juan Guaidó, accompanied by legislators of the opposition parties, fights a military blockade to the National Assembly in January in Caracas. Guaidó and opposition legislators were prevented from joining the sessions. Rafael Briceno Sierralta/NurPhoto via Getty Images
Black Lives Matter
The killing of George Floyd in Minnesota resonated and led to huge demonstrations for racial justice around the world. Top: Protesters hold Portuguese signs reading "Black Lives Matter" in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Left: Residents of Nairobi's Kibera slum work in front of a George Floyd mural in Kenya. Right: A South Korean activist holds a flower during a rally to mourn Floyd's death. Buda Mendes/Getty Images; Chung Sung-Jun/Getty Images; Donwilson Odhiambo/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
Afghanistan
Following a U.S.-Taliban agreement in February, a Taliban delegation attends the opening session of peace talks with Afghan government representatives in Doha, Qatar, on Sept. 12. Karim Jaafar/AFP via Getty Images
Violence continued throughout Afghanistan. One of the year's most horrific attacks took place in a Kabul maternity hospital, killing newborn babies, nurses and young mothers. Left: Smoke rises from the Dasht-e-Barchi maternity hospital after gunmen attacked on May 12. Right: Infants lie in a crib at Kabul's Ataturk Children's Hospital a day after they were rescued from the attack. Rahmat Gul/AP
Kenya
In the worst swarms in decades, tens of billions of locusts descended on Kenya, Somalia and Ethiopia, destroying livelihoods and food supplies. A man chases away a swarm of desert locusts early in the morning on May 21 in Samburu County, Kenya. Fredrik Lerneryd/Getty Images
Hong Kong
After Hong Kong's huge pro-democracy demonstrations in 2019, the Chinese government imposed a new security law this year. Still, protests continued. At a June 4 vigil for victims of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, demonstrators gesture with five fingers, signifying "five demands — not one less," and hold posters reading "Heaven will destroy the CCP," referring to the Chinese Communist Party. Kin Cheung/AP
Riot police detain a man as they clear protesters demonstrating against a new national security law in Hong Kong on July 1, the 23rd anniversary of the city's handover from Great Britain to China. Dale De La Rey/AFP via Getty Images
India
An Indian army convoy moves on the Srinagar-Ladakh highway at Gagangeer, northeast of Srinagar, India, on June 17. China said it was seeking a peaceful resolution with India following the death of 20 Indian soldiers in the most violent confrontation between the two countries in decades. Mukhtar Khan/AP
Lebanon
Smoke rises after a massive blast at the Beirut port on Aug. 4. The explosion killed nearly 200 people, wounded thousands and caused destruction across half the city. The blast was caused by a fire that ignited nearly 3,000 tons of ammonium nitrate stored in the port. Houssam Shbaro/Andalou Agency via Getty Images
Belarus
In Minsk, opposition supporters protest the Belarus presidential election results on Oct. 18. Protests began after longtime President Alexander Lukashenko claimed victory in a disputed Aug. 9 election, and continued through the rest of the year. Lukashenko's regime has jailed opposition leaders and forced others into exile. AFP via Getty Images
Israel
The flags of the U.S., Israel, United Arab Emirates and Bahrain are projected on the ramparts of Jerusalem's Old City on Sept. 15, in a show of support for Israel's normalization deals with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. Menahem Kahana/AFP via Getty Images
Nagorno-Karabakh conflict
Mourners in Yerevan, Armenia, visit the graves of relatives killed during the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia, Dec. 12. Fierce fighting erupted in the fall, a continuation of a war that started 30 years ago. A Russian-backed cease-fire went into effect in November. Karen Minasyan/AFP via Getty Images
Ethiopia's conflict
In November, Ethiopian government forces began fighting a powerful regional government in the country's northern Tigray region, displacing thousands. Members of the Afar Special Forces prepare their weapons on the outskirts of the village of Bisober in the Tigray region on Dec. 9. Several houses in the village were damaged during fighting between Tigrayan forces and the Ethiopian military. Eduardo Soteras/AFP via Getty Images
Newly arrived Ethiopian refugees who fled the Tigray conflict wait to receive aid at Um Raquba refugee camp in Gedaref, eastern Sudan, on Dec. 6. Yasuyoshi Chiba/AFP via Getty Images
Saudi Arabia
Saudi women's rights activist Loujain al-Hathloul, 31, seen in an undated picture, was sentenced in December to nearly six years in prison. She has already been in prison for more than two years, since her arrest in 2018, just weeks before Saudi Arabia lifted its ban on women driving. Her family says she has been tortured and is not allowed phone calls or visits from relatives. Marieke Wijntjes/Reuters
Brexit
Trucks backed up for miles as they waited to enter the Eurotunnel complex on Dec. 16, in Calais, France. Great Britain and the European Union reached a last-minute post-Brexit trade agreement on Dec. 24. Pete Kiehart for NPR
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Vaccines Take a While to Kick In. Experts Say That Means the Body Is Doing Its Job. - The New York Times
Reports of Covid-19 cases that appeared shortly after a single shot of a two-dose vaccine shouldn’t cause concern.
A flurry of headlines this week flooded social media, documenting a seemingly concerning case of Covid-19 in a San Diego nurse who fell ill about a week after receiving his first injection of Pfizer’s coronavirus vaccine.
But experts said the sickness is nothing unexpected: The protective effects of vaccines are known to take at least a couple of weeks to kick in. And getting sick before completing a two-dose vaccine regimen, they said, should not undermine the potency of Pfizer’s product, which blazed through late-stage clinical trials with flying colors.
Reporting that a half-vaccinated person has Covid-19 is “really the equivalent of saying someone went outside in the middle of a rainstorm without an umbrella and got wet,” said Dr. Taison Bell, a critical care physician at the University of Virginia. Dr. Bell received his first dose of Pfizer’s vaccine on Dec. 15, and will be getting his second shot soon.
The California nurse, identified as Matthew W., 45, in an ABC10 News report, received his first dose of Pfizer’s vaccine on Dec. 18. Six days later, according to news reports, he began to feel minor symptoms, including chills, muscle aches and fatigue. He tested positive for the virus the day after Christmas.
Dr. Megan Ranney, an emergency physician at Brown University, said this should not prompt concern. “So what????” she tweeted on Wednesday in response to a Reuters article on the nurse’s illness. “It’s a 2-shot vaccination.” Dr. Ranney received her first dose of Pfizer’s vaccine on Dec. 18.
Framing the nurse’s illness as news, Dr. Ranney said in an interview, implies that it was a departure from the expected — and that there should have been protection about a week after the first vaccine dose. That’s not the case at all.
Vaccines take at least a few days to exert their protective effects. Pfizer’s recipe is designed around a molecule called messenger RNA, or mRNA, which, once injected, enters human cells and instructs them to manufacture a coronavirus protein called spike. None of these components are infectious or capable of causing Covid-19. But they act as coronavirus mimics, teaching the body to recognize the true virus and vanquish it, should it ever come around.
The production of spike is thought to occur within hours of the first shot. But the body needs at least several days to memorize the material before it can unspool its full arsenal of defensive forces against the virus. Immune cells take this time to study up on the protein, then mature, multiply and sharpen their spike-spotting reflexes.
Data from Pfizer’s clinical trials suggests the vaccine might start safeguarding its recipients from disease around one or two weeks after the first injection. A second jab of mRNA, delivered three weeks after the first, helps immune cells commit the virus’s most prominent features to memory, clinching the protective process.
The timeline of the California nurse’s illness falls well within the window of post-vaccination vulnerability, Dr. Ranney said. It’s also very likely he caught the virus right around the time he got the shot, perhaps even before. People can start experiencing the symptoms of Covid-19 between two and 14 days after encountering the coronavirus, if they ever have symptoms at all.
A similar situation appears to have recently unfolded with Mike Harmon, the Kentucky state auditor, who this week tested positive for the virus the day after receiving his first dose of an unspecified coronavirus vaccine.
“It appears that I may have been unknowingly exposed to the virus and infected either shortly before or after receiving the first dose of the vaccine on Monday,” Mr. Harmon said in a statement. Mr. Harmon reaffirmed his “full faith in the vaccine itself, and the need for as many people to receive it as quickly as possible.”
Jerica Pitts, a spokeswoman for Pfizer, noted that vaccine’s protective effects are “substantially boosted after the second dose, supporting the need for a two-dose vaccination series.”
“Individuals may have contracted disease prior to or right after vaccination,” she said.
Pfizer’s vaccine, when administered in its full two-dose regimen, was found to be 95 percent effective at preventing symptomatic cases of Covid-19 — a figure that was hailed as very welcome news amid soaring coronavirus caseloads. Still, that leaves a small percentage of people who won’t be protected after vaccination, Dr. Ranney said. “There’s no vaccine that’s 100 percent effective.”
It’s also unclear how well Pfizer’s vaccine can guard against asymptomatic infections, or if it will substantially curb the coronavirus’s ability to spread from person to person. That means measures like masking and distancing remain essential even after full vaccination.
Data collected by Pfizer during its late-stage clinical trials hinted that the vaccine could confer at least some protection after a single dose. But the study wasn’t intended to specifically test how potent a one-shot regimen would be.
Dr. Krutika Kuppalli, an infectious disease physician at the Medical University of South Carolina, said a couple of her colleagues tested positive shortly after their first shots. “None of this surprises me, given how rampant cases are right now,” she said. Given the expected delay in the vaccine’s effects, “this should not be thought about as vaccine failure.” Dr. Kuppalli, who received her first dose of Pfizer’s vaccine on Dec. 15, added that getting Covid-19 between vaccine doses should not dissuade someone from getting a second shot, with consultation from a health care provider.
In the past few weeks, more than 2.7 million people in the United States have received their first dose of Pfizer’s vaccine, or a similar shot made by Moderna. Both vaccines require a second injection — and as they are rolled out to more and more people, it’s important to maintain clear communication about how vaccines work, and when, Dr. Bell said.
“For the time being, we should stick with doses the way the trials were done,” he said. “That’s what will get you the maximum efficacy.”
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Vaccines Take a While to Kick In. Experts Say That Means the Body Is Doing Its Job. - The New York Times
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Saudi Arabia Bags and Luggage Market Outlook to 2023 - by Type and by Handbag Price Segment - ResearchAndMarkets.com - Yahoo Finance
The "Saudi Arabia Bags and Luggage Market Outlook to 2023 - by Type ; by Handbag Price Segment ." report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.
This report provides a comprehensive analysis on the Bags and Luggage Industry of Saudi Arabia.
The report covers various aspects including market size and market segmentation.
Market Segmentation of Bags Market by Types of Bags (Backpacks, Business Bags, Cross body Bags, Duffel Bags, Handbags, Wallet and Other Bags), by Type of Handbag (Luxury, Premium and Economy), By Retail Format (Multi Brand Outlets (MBOs), Exclusive Brand Outlets (EBOs) and Local Retailers), By Sales Channel (Online Channel and Offline Channel), By Material (Leather (inc faux and Suede leather) and Non Leather), By Region (Central, West, South, East, and North). Market Segmentation of Luggage Market By Price Segment (High (SAR 500<), Medium (SAR 250- SAR 500), and Low (SAR 250>), By Case Type (Hard Case and Soft Case), By Region (Central, West, South, East and North), By Sales Channel (Offline and Online), By Retail Format (MBOs, EBOs and Local Retailers). Industry factors including trends and developments, challenges, trade scenario, Porter's five force analysis, competitive landscape.
The report concludes with future projection and analyst recommendations highlighting the major opportunities and cautions.
Key Topics Covered:
1. Executive Summary
2. Research Methodology
2.1. Market Definitions
2.2. Abbreviations
2.3. Market Sizing and Modeling
3. Value Chain Analysis
4. Overview of Saudi Arabia Fashion Industry
5. Saudi Arabia Bags and Luggage Market
5.1. Saudi Arabia Bags and Luggage Market Overview
6. Saudi Arabia Bags and Luggage Market Size by Revenue, 2013-18
7. Saudi Arabia Bags and Luggage Market Segmentation, 2018
7.1. By Region (Central, West North, South and East), 2018
7.2. By Type of Bags (Backpacks, Business Bags, Cross body Bags, Duffel Bags, Handbags, Wallets and Other Types of Bags), 2018
7.3. By Type of Handbag (Luxury, Premium, and Economy), 2018
7.4. By Sales Channel (EBO, MBO and Local Retailer and Online Retailer), 2018
8. Saudi Arabia Luggage Market Segmentation, 2018
8.1. By Region (Central, West, North, South and East), 2018
8.2. By Price Segment (High, Medium and Low), 2018
8.3. By Case Type (Hard and Soft), 2018
8.4. By Sales Channel (EBO, MBO, Local Retailer and Online Retailers), 2018
9. Growth Drivers in Saudi Arabia Luggage and Luxury Goods Market
10. Issues and Challenges in Saudi Arabia Bags and Luggage Market, 2018
11. Trends in Saudi Arabia Bags and Luggage Market
12. Competition Scenario in Saudi Arabia Bags and Luggage Market, 2018
12.1. Revenue of Major Players, 2018
12.2. Company Profile of Major Players
12.2.1. Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessey
12.2.2. Samsonite International S.A
12.2.3. Nike
12.2.4. Capri Holdings
13. Snapshot of Saudi Arabia Bags and Luggage Online Retailing Market
14. Porter Five Forces Analysis of Saudi Arabia Bags and Luggage Market
15. SWOT Analysis of Saudi Arabia Bags and Luggage Market
16. Future Projections for Saudi Arabia Bags and Luggage Market, 2018-23
16.1. Saudi Arabia Bags and Luggage Market Segmentation, 2018-23
16.1.1. By Bags and Luggage, 2018-2023
16.1.2. Saudi Arabia Bags Market Segmentation, 2018-2023
16.1.3. Saudi Arabia Luggage Market Segmentation, 2018-23
17. Analyst Recommendation
Companies Mentioned
For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/8kc6io
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The New Year’s Resolutions That Don’t Lead to Happiness - The Atlantic
“How to Build a Life” is a biweekly column by Arthur Brooks, tackling questions of meaning and happiness.
If you are someone who follows a traditional religion, you most likely have a day such as Yom Kippur, Ashura, or Ash Wednesday, dedicated to atoning for your sins and vowing to make improvements to your life. But if you are not religious, you might still practice a day of devotion and ritualistic vows of self-improvement each year on January 1. New Year’s Day rings in the month of January, dedicated by the ancient Romans to their god Janus. Religious Romans promised the two-faced god that they would be better in the new year than they had been in the past.
According to the Pew Research Center, historically between one-third and one-half of Americans observe this pagan rite every year by making their own New Year’s resolutions. The most common resolutions are fairly predictable: financial resolutions, like saving more money or paying down debt (51 percent in 2019); eating healthier (51 percent); exercising more (50 percent); and losing weight (42 percent).
Old Janus is pretty annoyed at this point, I imagine, because our resolutions overwhelmingly fail. According to academic research on the topic, fewer than half of resolutions are still continuously successful by June. Other surveys find even lower success rates—as low as 6 percent. One way to corroborate these numbers is with market data. For example, gym memberships spike right after New Year’s Day. In one analysis, gym visits start to decline significantly by the third week of January. After eight months, around half of the new members have stopped going entirely.
This stands to reason, of course: If meeting self-improvement goals were so easy, we wouldn’t need to make resolutions in the first place—we would just change. The reason so many people keep observing this New Year’s rite is because they believe that their lives will be better if they make a transformation requiring some sacrifice. The reason they so often fail is because the resolutions they choose don’t match their true goal of greater happiness.
Anticipating difficulty, people come up with creative ways to help them meet their resolutions. Years ago, a friend who resolved to stop swearing asked me to punch him every time he let a cussword fly. (I declined.) Some self-enforcement mechanisms work better than others, as shown in work by John Norcross, a psychology professor at the University of Scranton. With his colleagues, Norcross has analyzed resolutions that have succeeded and failed, and identified the behaviors most associated with both.
The four habits associated with successful resolutions are mostly positive: practicing self-liberation (that is, strengthening willpower by reinforcing the belief that one can change); rewarding oneself for ongoing success; avoiding situations of temptation; and engaging in positive thinking (envisioning success). Resolution failure is associated with negative thinking, such as focusing on the harm from the old behavior; berating oneself for slipping up; wishing that the challenge didn’t exist in the first place; and minimizing the threat (denying the importance of the resolution). In sum, the key to success is positive motivation.
One big threat to resolution success is sabotage. In one 2000 study covering the mid-1960s through the late 1980s, three scholars found that cigarette manufacturers increased their advertising in January and February, and hypothesized that the companies did this to short-circuit resolutions to quit smoking. This technique is not limited to big tobacco companies, however. Some people report that efforts at self-improvement, such as losing weight, are often sabotaged by loved ones, for all sorts of complex reasons. Keep this in mind if you notice a lot of fresh-baked cookies lying around on January 1.
One piece of advice worth keeping in mind comes from the Stanford behavioral scientist BJ Fogg, in his book Tiny Habits. Fogg shows that to build good new habits—the key to a successful resolution—we need to reduce, implement, and celebrate. That is, reduce new behaviors to something small and manageable, like committing to start by doing two push-ups a day if you are out of shape (not 100); finding where in your routine the new behaviors fit best (do your two push-ups right after breakfast, for example); and then celebrating each day after practicing the behavior (but perhaps not by having a second breakfast).
For my money, though, the most important thing is to go back to first principles, and ask whether your resolutions are the right ones in the first place. When I ask people about the resolutions that fail, they often say that what seemed important in the abstract wasn’t really worth the effort. For instance, losing weight didn’t seem worth it if it meant foregoing family meals. In other words, people imagine the benefits of meeting a resolution without the costs of doing so; when the costs actually present themselves, the resolutions often fail the cost-benefit test, leading the resolution to be abandoned.
To solve this problem, we need to ask what we are really trying to improve. In almost every case, it is happiness. Our failed resolutions are often attempts to gain happiness indirectly—like losing weight or exercising to become more attractive and, we hope, happier. Instead, we need resolutions that bring happiness directly, so the benefits outweigh the costs immediately.
Let me suggest two direct happiness resolutions for 2021: forgiveness and gratitude.
In this difficult period in our history, from the pandemic to the culture of political contempt, there is a lot of potential for bitterness in our lives. Open up social media and you will see nonstop Olympics-level grudge matches. Even worse, estrangement between family members is strikingly common; one study published in 2015—even before the polarizing political period following the 2016 U.S. presidential election—found that about 44 percent of people were estranged from at least one relative, nearly 17 percent from someone in their immediate family.
One of the most frequent questions I get from readers is about how to deal with family conflict and estrangement. My answer is a New Year’s resolution to forgive. In experiments on forgiveness interventions—helping people forgive those who have harmed them—scholars have found clear evidence that forgiveness has direct happiness benefits. Forgiveness increases hope and self-esteem, while lowering anxiety and depression. This astounded me personally, but my wife found it blindingly obvious. “To refuse to forgive is to cling to something unpleasant,” she reminded me. “It is like hugging garbage.” I had to concede that it’s nice to let go of garbage.
Easy to say, hard to do, of course. One project to teach and foster forgiveness comes from the Templeton World Charity Foundation, which produces forgiveness workbooks for people in countries traumatized by violence and injustice. The process they recommend, using the pneumonic device REACH, is useful for all of us: (R) Recall the hurt; (E) Empathize with the offender; (A) Altruistic gift of forgiveness; (C) Commit; and (H) Hold on to forgiveness. You can run your own experiment on forgiveness and happiness by making a list of five people to forgive in the new year, and then using the REACH technique to do so in both word and deed.
Second, resolve to be more grateful. I know it’s hard sometimes to feel gratitude as we struggle through the pandemic. It will still be a while before life is not disrupted for most people, and some will be suffering the consequences of COVID-19 for a long time. But nearly everyone has something to be grateful for, and the happiness rewards of focusing on those things are enormous.
In 2003, researchers writing in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology randomly assigned a group of study participants to keep a short weekly list of the things they were grateful for, while another group listed hassles or simply neutral events. Ten weeks later, the first group enjoyed significantly greater life satisfaction than the second. They also felt better physically, were more optimistic about the upcoming week, and even exercised more. (It seems like it’s more successful to improve your happiness and let that motivate you to exercise, rather than trying to force yourself to exercise and then become happier.)
You can create your own version of this gratitude experiment very simply. Take 15 minutes on New Year’s Day and write down five things you are grateful for. Each evening before retiring, study your list for five minutes. Each week, update the list by adding two items. I personally do this, and I can tell you that the list gets easier and easier to build. Since I do my best thinking while walking, I ponder my list in a 20-minute walk alone after dinner in the cool of the evening. The other night it was 30 degrees and sleeting here in Boston, but I couldn’t bear to miss my gratitude walk. That is an example of a resolution passing the cost-benefit test.
Perhaps this is a new way for you to look at forgiveness and gratitude—as resolutions to work on to raise your happiness, rather than fleeting emotions you can’t control. This is very empowering, which is a good way to start this new year.
We all hope that 2021 will be a year our world emerges from the pandemic, refreshed and reinvigorated. But you don’t have to depend on that to improve your happiness. With the right resolutions—forgive, be grateful (and go ahead, eat a couple of cookies, Janus will forgive you)—your well-being, and that of those you love, will surely rise.
Happy New Year.
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The New Year’s Resolutions That Don’t Lead to Happiness - The Atlantic
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Was That a Dropped Call From ET? - The New York Times
A spooky radio signal showed up after a radio telescope was aimed at the next star over from our sun.
Nobody believes it was ET phoning, but radio astronomers admit they don’t have an explanation yet for a beam of radio waves that apparently came from the direction of the star Proxima Centauri.
“It’s some sort of technological signal. The question is whether it’s Earth technology or technology from somewhere out yonder,” said Sofia Sheikh, a graduate student at Pennsylvania State University leading a team studying the signal and trying to decipher its origin. She is part of Breakthrough Listen, a $100 million effort funded by Yuri Milner, a Russian billionaire investor, to find alien radio waves. The project has now stumbled on its most intriguing pay dirt yet.
Proxima Centauri is an inviting prospect for “out yonder.”
It is the closest known star to the sun, only 4.24 light-years from Earth, part of a triple-star system known as Alpha Centauri. Proxima has at least two planets, one of which is a rocky world only slightly more massive than Earth that occupies the star’s so-called habitable zone, where temperatures should be conducive to water, the stuff of life, on its surface.
The radio signal itself, detected in spring 2019 and reported on earlier in The Guardian, is in many ways the stuff of dreams for alien hunters. It was a narrow-band signal with a frequency of 982.02 MHz as recorded at the Parkes Observatory in Australia. Nature, whether an exploding star or a geomagnetic storm, tends to broadcast on a wide range of frequencies.
“The signal appears to only show up in our data when we’re looking in the direction of Proxima Centauri, which is exciting,” Ms. Sheikh said. “That’s a threshold that’s never been passed by any signal that we’ve seen previously, but there are a lot of caveats.”
Practitioners of the hopeful field of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, also known as SETI, say they have seen it all before.
“We’ve seen these types of signal before, and it’s always turned out to be R.F.I., radio frequency interference,” Dan Werthimer, chief technologist at the Berkeley SETI Research Center, who is not part of the Proxima Centauri study, wrote in an email.
That thought was echoed by his Berkeley colleague Andrew Siemion, who is the principal investigator for Breakthrough Listen. “Our experiment exists in a sea of interfering signals,” he said.
“My instinct in the end is that it will be anthropogenic in origin,” he added. “But so far we can’t yet fully explain it.”
So there’s nothing to see here, folks. Until there is. Notwithstanding claims of biosignature gases on Venus and tales of U.F.O. sightings collected by the Pentagon, the discovery of life, let alone intelligence, out there would be a psychological thunderclap of cosmic and historic proportions.
False alarms have been part of SETI since the very beginning, when Frank Drake, then at Cornell and now retired from the University of California, Santa Cruz, pointed a radio telescope in Green Bank, W.Va., in 1960 at a pair of stars, hoping to hear aliens’ radio waves. He detected what seemed to be a signal. Could it be this easy to discover we are not alone?
It turned out to be a secret military experiment.
Sixty years later we are still officially alone and SETI as an enterprise has been through the wars economically and politically even as technology has enhanced humanity’s ability to comb the nearly infinite haystack of planets, stars and “magical frequencies” on which They might be broadcasting.
Breakthrough Listen was announced with much fanfare by Mr. Milner and Stephen Hawking in 2015, sparking what Dr. Siemion called a renaissance.
“This is the best time to be doing SETI,” he said.
The recent excitement began on April 29, 2019, when Breakthrough Listen scientists turned the Parkes radio telescope on Proxima Centauri, to monitor the star for violent flares. It is a small star known as a red dwarf. These stars are prone to such outbursts, which could strip the atmosphere from a planet and render it unlivable.
In all they recorded 26 hours of data. The Parkes radio telescope, however, was equipped with a new receiver capable of resolving narrow-band signals of the type SETI researchers seek. So in fall 2020, the team decided to search the data for such signals, a job that fell to Shane Smith, an undergraduate at Hillsdale College in Michigan and an intern with Breakthrough.
The signal that surprised the team appeared five times on April 29 during a series of 30-minute windows in which the telescope was pointed in the direction of Proxima Centauri. It has not appeared since. It was a pure unmodulated tone, meaning it appeared to carry no message except the fact of its own existence.
The signal also showed a tendency to drift slightly in frequency during the 30-minute intervals, a sign that whatever the signal came from is not on the surface of Earth, but often correlates with a rotating or orbiting object.
But the drift does not match the motions of any known planets in Proxima Centauri. And in fact the signal, if it is real, might be coming from someplace beyond the Alpha Centauri system. Who knows?
The subsequent nonappearance of the signal has prompted comparisons to a famous detection known as the “Wow! Signal” that appeared on a printout from the Big Ear radio telescope, operated by Ohio State University in 1977. Jerry Ehman, a now retired astronomer, wrote “Wow!” on the side of the printout when he saw it after that fact. The signal never appeared again, nor was it satisfactorily explained, and some people still wonder if it was a missed call from Out There.
Of the Proxima signal, Dr. Siemion said, “There have been some exclamations but ‘wow’ hasn’t been one of them.”
Asked what they were, he laughed.
“Initially there were perplexed reactions from folks, but it settled down quickly,” he said.
Over a period of 24 to 48 hours at the end of this October, he said, the mood shifted from inquisitive and curious to “very serious scientific detective work.”
Ms. Sheikh, who expects to get her doctorate this coming summer, is leading the detective work. She got her bachelor’s degree at the University of California, Berkeley, intending to go into particle physics, but found herself drifting into astronomy instead. She first heard about the Breakthrough Listen project and SETI on Reddit while she was looking for a new undergraduate research project.
“I would say we were extremely skeptical at first, and I remain skeptical,” she said about the putative signal. But she added that it was “the most interesting signal to come through the Breakthrough Listen program.”
The team hopes to publish its results early in 2021.
The Parkes telescope — which once relayed communications to the Apollo astronauts — is notorious for false alarms, Dr. Werthimer says. In one recent example, he said, astronomers thought they had discovered a new astrophysical phenomenon.
“It was very exciting until somebody noticed the signals only appeared at the lunch hour,” he said. They were coming from a microwave oven.
Over the years SETI astronomers have prided themselves on their ability to chase down the source of suspicious signals and eliminate them before word leaked out to the public.
This time their work was reported by The Guardian. “The public wants to know, we get that,” Dr. Siemion said. But, as he and Ms. Sheikh emphasize, they aren’t nearly done yet.
“Frankly, there’s still a lot of analysis that we have to do to be confident that this thing is not interference,” Ms. Sheikh said.
Part of the problem, she explained, is that the original observations were not done according to the standard SETI protocol. Normally, a radio telescope would point at a star or other target for five minutes and then “nod” slightly away from it for five minutes to see if the signal persisted.
In the Proxima observations, however, the telescope pointed for 30 minutes and then moved far across the sky (30 degrees or so) for five minutes to a quasar the astronomers were using to calibrate the brightness of the star’s flares. Such a large swing might have taken the telescope away from whatever the source of the radio interference was.
If all else fails, Ms. Sheikh said, they will try to reproduce the results by replicating the exact movements of the Parkes telescope again on April 29, 2021.
“Because,” she said, “if it’s actually coming from Proxima, then maybe they would like send a hello once a year or something like that.” She went on, “But it’s more likely that there’s some sort of yearly event that happens at the visitor center, or something like that, that causes an environmental effect that doesn’t happen the rest of the year.”
The Proxima signal could be destined to pass into legend like the Ohio State Wow! Signal, but in SETI, there is always another day, another star.
It’s been fun, Ms. Sheikh said, even if the Proxima signal ends up being interference.
“This is extremely exciting, no matter what comes out of it.”
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Vanessa Kirby Has Been Waiting for a Role That Scares Her - The New York Times
For her first lead in a film, the actress wanted a character as challenging as many of those she’s played onstage. She found it in Kornel Mundruczo’s “Pieces of a Woman.”
LONDON — Vanessa Kirby has never given birth, but after shooting her first lead movie role in “Pieces of a Woman,” she kind of feels like she has.
“Whenever I see a pregnant woman now, or someone’s telling me that they’ve just given birth, I smile,” she said in a recent video chat. “I feel with them.”
The two full days she spent shooting a searing scene for the film could explain this psychic confusion, as could the thorough way Kirby, 32, immersed herself in the role.
In “Pieces of a Woman,” which debuts Jan. 7 on Netflix after a limited theatrical release in December, Kirby plays Martha, a pregnant woman whose home birth goes horribly wrong.
This pivotal event at the beginning of the film plays out in a 24-minute, single-take scene that starts with Martha’s first contractions and ends in tragedy. The camera follows Martha, her partner Sean (Shia LaBeouf) and a midwife, Eva (Molly Parker), around the couple’s apartment, condensing the agonies of labor into under half an hour.
In September, the film premiered at the Venice Film Festival, where Kirby won the best actress award, and began to be talked about as an Oscar contender.
Kirby said she wanted to portray Martha’s labor as authentically as possible. “That was terrifying, because I didn’t want to let women down,” she added.
So she got down to research. Watching many onscreen depictions of birth left Kirby no closer to understanding the experience, she said, since they were so censored and sanitized.
“Then I was even more scared, because I realized that I had a responsibility to show birth as it is, not as it’s even edited in documentaries,” Kirby said.
She talked to women who had given birth and women who’d had miscarriages, as well as midwives and obstetrician-gynecologists at a London hospital. While she was there, a woman arrived having contractions, and agreed to let Kirby observe the birth.
The experience of watching that six hour labor “changed me so profoundly,” Kirby said. “Every second of what was happening to her, I just absorbed.”
And she began to understand how to play Martha. The woman in the hospital went into a primal, animal-like state, Kirby said. “Her body was taking over and doing it, so that helped me so much for the scene,” she added.
Over two days, that long take was shot six times. In a phone interview, the director, Kornel Mundruczo, who also works in theater and opera, said that preparing it was like getting a stunt scene ready: “Lots of planning, but you don’t know what’s actually going to happen.”
In the end, each take was different, Kirby said: Martha and Sean’s conversations shifted, the way Martha’s body reacted to the contractions was distinctive each time.
“It was, I think, probably the best career experience I’ve ever had,” Kirby said of those two days of shooting. Inspired by the labor she’d observed, she tried to think as little as possible, she said, and not judge what her body was doing in the scene.
After a decade of work, “Pieces of a Woman” is Kirby’s first time leading a feature film, and it is a bold and memorable role that shows her flexing her acting muscles. Mundruczo said he needed an actor at Kirby’s exact career point: “Where all of the skills are already there, but the fear is not,” he said. “When you are very established, you are more and more careful.”
Kirby has been honing those skills since she was a teenager. She grew up in a wealthy, West London suburb, where she attended a private, all girls’ school and escaped the social pressures of teenage life onstage, in plays and youth drama clubs.
“Every time I walked into that space, I suddenly felt not judged at all, I just felt accepted,” Kirby said. “You didn’t have to be anything, or do anything right.”
After graduating from college, where she studied English literature, Kirby was accepted to the prestigious London Academy of Music & Dramatic Art in 2009. A few months before term began, though, she was offered three stage roles by David Thacker, a former director-in-residence at the Royal Shakespeare Company, who was then the artistic director of the Octagon Theater in Bolton, a town in northern England.
Come to Bolton, he told her, and you will learn more from these roles — which included Helena in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and Ann Deever in “All My Sons” — than you will in three years of drama school. Kirby agreed, and now describes that season as her training.
“I learned everything there,” she said. Working with Thacker taught her to trust herself, to find her own way as an actor, rather than waiting for other people to tell her what to do, she said.
Kirby has been working steadily ever since, with lead roles in the West End, as well as high profile supporting roles in films and British TV costume dramas. She starred as Princess Margaret in the first two seasons of “The Crown,” a performance that earned her a BAFTA award. Her Margaret fizzes with restless energy, an ideal foil for Claire Foy’s restrained Queen Elizabeth.
In 2018’s “Mission Impossible — Fallout,” she played the White Widow, a glamorous black-market broker who carries a knife in her garter, and knows how to use it. She is slated to appear in two further “Mission Impossible” sequels.
Even as these supporting roles brought her critical praise and awards, Kirby wasn’t in a hurry to find her first onscreen lead role, she said. She’s played many complex characters onstage: women like Rosalind, the fiercely intelligent heroine of Shakespeare’s “As You Like It.” She was holding out for an onscreen lead in whom she could feel some of Rosalind’s “magic,” she said, which made performing “like flying when you step onstage.”
“I could never find those roles at all onscreen,” she said. So she waited, using her smaller parts as opportunities to observe and learn, asking Anthony Hopkins about his craft when they worked together on the British TV drama “The Dresser,” and watching how generous Rachel McAdams was onset for the film “About Time,” she said.
It’s fitting, given Kirby’s theatrical background, that “Pieces of a Woman” started life as a play, written by Kata Weber, Mundruczo’s partner, who drew on the couple’s own experience of losing a child. The play “Pieces of a Woman,” which is set in Poland, consists of only two scenes: the birth, and an explosive dinner with Martha’s family that occurs about halfway through the film adaptation. Its 2018 premiere, directed by Mundruczo at the TR Warszawa theater in Warsaw, was a hit, and the production is still in the company’s repertoire.
Around the time Mundruczo turned 40, five years ago, he started wanting a bigger audience for his work, he said, so he switched from working in German, Hungarian and Polish; “Pieces of a Woman” is his first English language film. In adapting the play for the big screen, Mundruczo set it in Boston, he said, because he felt the city’s Irish Catholic culture mirrored Poland’s conservative social landscape.
The loss of a pregnancy is rarely featured in onscreen entertainment. Mundruczo said he hopes watching Martha’s experiences will encourage “people to be brave enough to have their own answer for any loss,” he said.
In recent months, the model Chrissy Teigen and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, (writing in The New York Times), have shared stories of their experiences with pregnancy loss. Kirby said that, while researching for the role before filming, she found that women who had experienced one were “actually really relieved to talk about it,” and appreciated that someone wanted to understand.
“Pieces of a Woman” was shot over just 29 days last winter, but Kirby said it took months for her to shake off the experience of playing Martha. “I knew my job was to feel it, to feel what she felt,” she said. Carrying that degree of empathy was “really difficult and disturbing,” she said, but added that the privilege of spending time inside another’s experience is what she loves about her work.
Kirby’s next project will see her co-starring as Tallie, one of two farmers’ wives who fall in love in the United States in the 19th-century in “The World To Come,” a meditative drama from the Norwegian filmmaker Mona Fastvold slated for theatrical release next month.
And after that? Kirby said she was reading scripts, on the hunt for the next role that will scare her. She’s looking for an “untold story about women,” she said, that will feel as urgent to tell as Martha and Tallie’s did.
“What’s that expression?” she said. “Feel the fear, and do it anyway.”
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Vanessa Kirby Has Been Waiting for a Role That Scares Her - The New York Times
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Look but Don’t Touch: Supercars That Have Barely Been Driven - The New York Times
The power and prestige of cars like a 1990 Lamborghini might compel some owners to take a Sunday drive. But with odometers this low, the investment would take a hit.
Supercars hold their value better the less you play with them, much like collectible children’s toys that are worth more when sealed inside the original packaging. But what’s the fun in that?
On sale in Montreal for $622,000, a 1990 Lamborghini Countach 25th Anniversary model looks brand-new. In effect, it is, with the plastic still on the seats. Over 30 years, it has covered only 83 miles. Powered by a 455-horsepower V-12 and capable of 190 miles an hour, the car has almost never moved under its own power.
The car went through several owners — none who drove it any distance — before it was returned to its original home, said Bernard Durand, who has been in sales at Lamborghini Montréal for 30 years.
“At this price, it’s never going to be driven,” he said. “It’s flat-bedded everywhere.”
Another Countach from that year, but with nearly 11,000 miles on the odometer, is asking $335,000 at the same dealership. Even though supercars are built to be driven, and fast, the market puts a significant premium on specimens with next to no miles on them.
All Ferrari F40s are valuable, but a 1991 example with 1,705 miles (from the Ming Collection of barely driven cars) fetched $1,682,500 in 2019 at an RM Sotheby’s auction in Monterey, Calif. It would be interesting to compare that with results for high-mileage F40s, but with many collectors buying them primarily as investments, those are few and far between.
As Road & Track noted in 2017, “Of the 1,315 built, many F40s remain in storage with not much more than delivery miles on their clocks.”
The market defies the voice of experts, and common sense: that cars were built to be driven, and that high-strung exotics will suffer from inactivity.
“I see no investment logic in owning cars that deteriorate through sitting and are made obsolete by next year’s improved model,” said Keith Martin, publisher of Sports Car Market, which tracks supercar sales. “If you are going to treat your supercars like Grecian urns, why not collect Grecian urns? At least they won’t leak oil.”
Many collectors concur. “Letting cars sit is the worst thing you can do,” said Jay Leno, whose large California collection includes many supercars.
“Cars are like people — they need to be exercised,” he said. “Gravity takes its toll. If the oil pump isn’t circulating the oil, it all drains down, so when you start it up dry you might spin a bearing or worse. And cars with modern electronics will deteriorate very quickly if no electricity goes through them. It’s not like a Model T, which can sit for 50 years and start right up.”
Mr. Leno said he enjoyed maintaining — and driving — his cars. “I don’t mind being owned by my possessions,” he said. “I enjoy it.”
James Glickenhaus of Sleepy Hollow, N.Y., a filmmaker and producer, is also an entrepreneur building race and road supercars under the Scuderia Cameron Glickenhaus banner. A major collector, he has custody of multiple Ferraris, as well as 1930s classics from Stutz and Duesenberg. He’s not too keen on garage queens.
The idea of preserving low-mileage supercars is “a bizarre fetish that has nothing to do with cars and nothing to do with reality,” Mr. Glickenhaus said. “Carburetors get ruined, the brake fluid turns to cement, the rubber rots, the radiators get clogged, and the oil falls apart and releases corrosives.”
He said cars couldn’t be compared to art and sculpture, whose highest purpose is served by staying stationary and being admired. “When cars aren’t driven, they aren’t cars anymore,” he said. Mr. Glickenhaus owns more than 20 cars, but he still tries to drive each at least once a month.
Scott Sherwood, a business executive in northeastern Massachusetts, has McLarens, Ferraris and a Maserati GranTurismo convertible in his collection. He recalls driving his Ferrari F40 to a meet in England, and watching as another owner trailered his car in, unloaded it for display on AstroTurf mats and then trailered it home.
“All he did was polish it,” said Mr. Sherwood, who has used his own F40 for multiple trips across Europe. “If I’d asked him what it was like to drive, he probably wouldn’t have known.
“Some of these cars are owned by people who aren’t actually capable of driving them,” he continued. “So maybe having them sit is safer.”
The F40 reached 197 m.p.h. in a 1991 Car and Driver road test. The magazine said the car “made our knees tremble and our hearts flutter.” But even then, owners were putting F40s away. “One buyer took no chances,” Rich Ceppos wrote in the 1991 article. “Without even driving it, he sealed up his new F40 in the safest place available: his living room.”
Mr. Durand at Lamborghini Montréal said the virgin 1990 Lambo was serviced regularly. So it could be driven off by a buyer, if adding miles wouldn’t instantly reduce its value. It’s possible that “somebody very rich, with no attachment to its unique status, will buy it and drive it,” Mr. Durand said. “Otherwise, 50 years from now it will still be new.”
The situation is amusing to Jas Dhillon, a San Francisco lawyer with a dozen cars, including a rare 1995 Lamborghini Diablo VTTT, a 1991 Ferrari Testarossa and a 1963 Lincoln Continental convertible that once belonged to the jazz trumpeter Chet Baker. He said the anniversary edition Countach was not as collectible as the early “periscope” cars but still highly desirable.
“It’s a game,” Mr. Dhillon said. “There are dealers who focus on this market, locating the cars and connecting them to the special class of owners who want the lowest-mileage Countach or Diablo. Cars make people do crazy things.”
He agrees with Mr. Leno — exercise your cars at least once a month. And when buying, “it’s critical you review maintenance records to ensure the car was started, driven and serviced regularly,” Mr. Dhillon said. “It can be a costly play if you do not do your due diligence.”
Curated, a Miami dealership that specializes in low-mileage supercars, is offering a 1996 Lamborghini Diablo Roadster with 1,200 miles. It recently sold a 2006 Lamborghini Gallardo with 430 original miles. A 1993 Cizeta V16T once owned by the royal family of Brunei, with just over 600 miles, is headed for an RM Sotheby’s auction in Arizona.
John Temerian, a co-founder, said his specialty was cars with their original tires, their original paint and, yes, plastic on the seats. “I can get almost double the usual market price for cars with less than 2,000 miles,” he said.
Mr. Temerian looks for cars that were well preserved and serviced. “If they’ve been neglected and need a total restoration, what’s the point?” he said. “After having all that work done, they’re not original anymore.
“But cars that have been with responsible caretakers are a blueprint for future generations, showing how it was done originally — things like stitching and the coatings on the bolts.”
The recently offered Curated “Time Capsule Collection” featured a 2,600-mile 1989 Countach with an interior that “still smells new.”
Mr. Temerian comes by his interest in low-mileage cars, especially Lamborghinis, naturally. His father, a skilled Lamborghini mechanic, meticulously maintains very low-mileage examples of the Diablo, Miura SV and Countach. He starts them once a month and checks their systems, but never drives them.
“I used to resent him for being such a perfectionist and O.C.D.,” Mr. Temerian said. “I’ve never driven any of his cars. But when I got older I realized that these preservation cars were an important part of history.”
At home, Mr. Temerian has a 1994 Diablo SE30, a special edition he calls “Lamborghini’s F40.” And, well, it’s not a garage queen. There are 8,000 miles on the odometer.
“Personally, I love to drive my cars,” he said.
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