LONDON (Reuters) - Losing your sense of smell and taste may be the best way to tell if you have COVID-19, according to a study of data collected via a symptom tracker app developed by British scientists to help monitor the pandemic caused by the new coronavirus.
FILE PHOTO: A poster in the window of a pharmacy is pictured in Royal Wharf as the spread of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) continues, in London, Britain, March 31, 2020. REUTERS/Steven Watt
Almost 60% of patients who were subsequently confirmed as positive for COVID-19 had reported losing their sense of smell and taste, the data analyzed by the researchers showed.
That compared with 18% of those who tested negative.
These results, which were posted online but not peer-reviewed, were much stronger in predicting a positive COVID-19 diagnosis than self-reported fever, the researchers at King’s College London said.
Of 1.5 million app users between March 24 and March 29, 26% reported one or more symptoms through the app. Of these, 1,702 also reported having been tested for COVID-19, with 579 positive results and 1,123 negative results.
Using all the data collected, the research team developed a mathematical model to identify which combination of symptoms - ranging from loss of smell and taste, to fever, persistent cough, fatigue, diarrhoea, abdominal pain and loss of appetite -was most accurate in predicting COVID-19 infection.
“When combined with other symptoms, people with loss of smell and taste appear to be three times more likely to have contracted COVID-19 according to our data, and should therefore self-isolate for seven days to reduce the spread of the disease,” said Tim Spector, a King’s professor who led the study.
Spector’s team applied their findings to the more than 400,000 people reporting symptoms via the app who had not yet had a COVID-19 test, and found that almost 13% of them are likely to be infected.
This would suggest that some 50,000 people in Britain may have as yet unconfirmed COVID-19 infections, Spector said.
Official figures showed confirmed cases rose 14% in Britain between Monday and Tuesday to 25,150 as of Tuesday at 0800 GMT. The government said 1,789 people have died in hospitals from coronavirus as of 1600 GMT on Monday.
Reporting by Kate Kelland, editing by Grant McCool
WASHINGTON — Stratolaunch, the company founded by the late billionaire Paul Allen as an air-launch company, announced March 30 it is developing a reusable hypersonic vehicle designed to be launched from the company’s giant aircraft.
Stratolaunch said it is pursuing development of a vehicle called Talon-A. That vehicle, powered by a liquid-propellant rocket engine, will launch from the company’s aircraft and fly to speeds of Mach 5 to Mach 7 before gliding back to a runway landing. It will also be able to take off on its own from a runway under rocket power.
“The Stratolaunch Talon-A is a flexible, high-speed testbed built for offensive hypersonics, hypersonic defense and hypersonic R&D,” the company said in a fact sheet about the program. That document emphasizes the vehicle’s ability to provide “here-to-fore unobtainable measurement access to the hypersonic flight environment on a recurring basis.”
“Our hypersonic testbeds will serve as a catalyst in sparking a renaissance in hypersonic technologies for our government, the commercial sector and academia,” Jean Floyd, chief executive of Stratolaunch, said in a statement on the company’s updated website.
The company said it expects an initial operating capability for the Talon-A in 2022. By 2023, Stratolaunch plans to support multiple Talon-A missions on a single flight of its aircraft, with as many as three Talon-A vehicles carried by the plane at once. “This unique capability enables multiple hypersonic flight opportunities on a single day or the near-simultaneous launch of three Talon vehicles, which may support specific operational scenarios,” the company said.
The vehicle will be 8.5 meters long with a wingspan of 3.4 meters and a total mass of about 2,720 kilograms at launch. Stratolaunch did not disclose details about the vehicle’s propulsion system, including whether the engine will be developed internally or purchased from another company. The company also did not disclose the estimated cost to develop the vehicle.
The announcement confirms Stratolaunch’s pivot from a launch services company to one that will provide high-speed flight test services. Allen founded Stratolaunch in 2011 to serve as an air-launch company, cycling through a series of different rocket designs before deciding to use the existing Pegasus XL rocket from Northrop Grumman.
After Vulcan, Allen’s holding company, sold Stratolaunch to private investors led by Cerberus Capital Management in October, the company suggested a shift in focus to hypersonics research. In January, the company confirmed it was interested in hypersonics testing using its aircraft after a conference paper from 2018 outlining some designs for hypersonic testbed vehicles resurfaced online.
“Our business plan is built around the operation of a fleet of vehicles with both government and industry customers,” Mark Bitterman, vice president for government relations and business development at Stratolaunch, said March 4 at a conference in Colorado. “What we’re looking at essentially are customizable, reusable and affordable rocket-powered testbed vehicles, and associated flight services.”
Bitterman said at the conference that Stratolaunch was not planning to pursue orbital launch opportunities for at least several years. “Our near-term plan — say, five to eight years — is not to launch satellites to LEO,” he said.
The company, though, is leaving the door open for future launch services. Besides Talon-A and a second hypersonic vehicle, Talon-Z, about which the company says is only “in development,” Stratolaunch’s website also includes a spaceplane called Black Ice, a holdover from the company’s earlier launch vehicle development plans.
“Black Ice is a fully reusable space plane that enables advanced on-orbit capabilities and cargo return,” the company said, initially designed for cargo but with “a follow-on variant capable of transporting crew.” The company offered no timetable for developing Black Ice.
All those vehicles will depend on Stratolaunch’s aircraft, which made its first, and to date only, test flight nearly a year ago. Bitterman said at the conference that Stratolaunch plans to resume test flights of the plane in September as part of work to win certification from the Federal Aviation Administration.
Air Force Secretary Barbara Barrett is expected to sign off on the report this week
WASHINGTON — A report due to Congress on March 31 recommending changes to the acquisition process and organization for Space Force programs has been completed but is awaiting final reviews by senior leaders before it goes to Capitol Hill.
Shawn Barnes, a member of the senior executive service with the assistant secretary of the Air Force for space acquisition and integration, said in a statement to SpaceNews on March 31 that Air Force Secretary Barbara Barrett is in the final stages of reviewing the report and is expected to sign the document this week before it goes to the office of the Secretary of Defense and the White House for final approval.
Barnes said he could not discuss the specific recommendations. In a March 18 interview, he said the report proposes changes in how requirements for future systems are defined and approved, and how those systems are funded. He said the report will recommend ways to simplify the acquisition process and to eliminate layers of bureaucracy.
The commander of the Space and Missile Systems Center Lt. Gen. John Thompson told SpaceNews last week that the acquisition recommendations are in line with the idea that space procurement programs have to be leaner and more agile.
“I think it’s a bold report,” said Thompson. “I think many people across the defense industrial base and stakeholders will be very happy with this report.”
The 2020 National Defense Authorization Act directs the secretary of the Air Force to nominate an assistant secretary for space acquisition and integration to oversee all space acquisitions. Implementing this language would require the Air Force to break up the office of Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition Will Roper and create a co-equal separate office to oversee space programs. Roper has argued that it makes more sense to keep air and space acquisitions under a single authority because of the tight linkages between air and space programs.
The issue of whether there should be a single acquisition executive for the Department of the Air Force or separate acquisition executives for air and space remains a sticking point in the reorganization, according to multiple sources.
A common fixture in refrigerators, furniture and footwear, polyurethane plastic is pretty much always in high demand. Humans worldwide cycle through millions of tons of the durable substance each year, sending the bulk of what’s not recycled to garbage dumps, where it leaks toxic chemicals into the environment as it very slowly breaks down.
For most creatures, a build-up of polyurethane plastic, which can harm the health of wild animals and humans alike, means only bad news. But at least one of Earth’s organisms sees the stuff as a boon: a bacterial strain called Pseudomonas sp. TDA1 that appears to love chowing down on some of the components of this problematic substance.
Described last week in the journal Frontiers in Microbiology, this polyurethane-munching microbe seems to thrive in waste dump sites. Studying the Pseudomonas strain and the chemical strategies it deploys could someday help researchers put a small dent in the world’s plastic problem, which has cumulatively saddled the planet with more than 8 billion tons of slow-degrading synthetic material.
“While there is still much work to be done, this is exciting and necessary research that demonstrates the power of looking to nature to find valuable biocatalysts,” John McGeehan, the director of the Centre for Enzyme Innovation at the University of Portsmouth who wasn’t involved in the study, tells Damian Carrington at the Guardian. “Understanding and harnessing such natural processes will open the door for innovative recycling solutions.”
Polyurethane’s durability has made it a desirable ingredient in many industries that rely on its flexibility and lightweightness to mass-produce everything from diapers to building insulation. But the substance’s longevity is a double-edged sword, making it extremely difficult to break down or recycle into new products. As such, many tons of polyurethane plastic ends up destined for landfills, where it piles up for decades. Because the substance is flammable, manufacturers often coat it in flame retardants that are suspected to be carcinogenic, Rolf Halden, an engineer at Arizona State University’s Biodesign Center for Environmental Health Engineering who wasn’t involved in the study, tells Scottie Andrew at CNN.
Other plastic-chomping bacteria have been discovered before, but each seem to have their own taste in types of chemicals they prefer to break down. A hardy strain by nature, Pseudomonas sp. TDA1 is one of only a few microbes known to be tolerant to polyurethane plastic’s typically toxic properties. What’s more, the bacteria doesn’t just withstand the plastic’s harsh ingredients: it uses some of them as a food source. After severing chemical bonds that hold the plastic together, Pseudomonas sp. TDA1 uses their energy to further fuel its polyurethane-degrading powers, reports George Dvorsky for Earther.
“The bacteria can use these compounds as a sole source of carbon, nitrogen and energy,” study author Hermann J. Heipieper of Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research-UFZ in Leipzig says in a statement. “This finding represents an important step in being able to reuse hard-to-recycle PU products.”
Mass microbial clean-ups of plastic aren’t necessarily in our future, however. While the bacterium can metabolize a subset of the chemicals in polyurethane plastic, it doesn’t seem able to break down these products completely.
But Heipieper hopes that in-depth studies of Pseudomonas sp. TDA1 will reveal the genes crucial to these plastic-attacking abilities. Understanding how these genes and their products work could help scientists engineer synthetic approaches to tackling plastic in the future, according to Earther.
In the meantime, Heipieper stresses the importance of not worsening the plastic issue. As he tells the Guardian, “The main message should be to avoid plastic being released into the environment in the first place.”
About two years ago, a nor’easter struck York Beach, Maine, revealing the skeleton of a centuries-old shipwreck beneath the sand. This was far from the first time the mysterious ruin had surfaced, only to disappear again: In fact, the wreck first appeared on the state’s sandy shores in 1958. Now, after decades of anonymity, marine archaeologist Stefan Claesson has found evidence linking the vessel to a colonial-era cargo ship called the Defiance.
Claesson presented his findings to the local Board of Selectmen earlier this month, reports Erin Hayes for Seacoast Online. To identify the wreck, he sent pieces of its hull to the Cornell University Tree-Ring Laboratory, which analyzed the samples to determine their age, and visited the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem to do some “good old-fashioned historical research”—namely, looking through nearly 50 years of notary records kept by one Daniel Moulton.
The Cornell lab analysis found that the trees used to build the ship were felled in 1753. Though 18th-century sailors often abandoned old, leaky ships on sandbars, the researchers suspect the York Beach ship met its demise under different circumstances.
“We think it was probably driven ashore during a storm,” Leith Smith, historic archaeologist for the Main Historic Preservation, tells Dialynn Dwyer of Boston.com, “and it was pushed so far up onto the beach so that it couldn’t be pulled back in the water.”
The wreck measures about 50 feet long, but the Defiance itself—a narrow cargo boat known as a pinky—would have stood closer to 60 feet long in its heyday. Claesson identified the vessel after searching notary records for mentions of a shipwreck matching the find’s age, construction style and location.
Initially, the archaeologist thought a ship called the Industry was a possible match, but he later realized it had sunk in a different location than the wreck. The Defiance, meanwhile, “fit every description,” as Claesson tells Seacoast Online.
A group of people climb on the skeleton of a shipwrecked sloop at Short Sands Beach in Maine.
(Photo by Ben McCanna / Portland Portland Press Herald via Getty Images)
The cargo ship, bound for Portland’s Casco Bay, left Salem in 1769. Caught in a storm, it crashed into the rocks along Cape Neddick Cove.
“There was a crew of four and they were carrying flour, pork and other supplies,” says Claesson.
When the ship hit the rocks, he adds, “[T]hey attempted to save it and bilged the ship. The crew survived, but they couldn’t save it.”
The Defiance’s ruins are normally buried under five to six feed of sand, reported Deborah McDermott for Seacoast Onlinein March 2018. But strong storms occasionally push this sand out of the way, revealing the bottom of the colonial-era hull. Reports of the wreck first appeared in newspapers in 1958; it resurfaced again in 1978, 2007 and 2013. If the ship isn’t reburied by natural shifts in the weather, locals cover it in sand as a protective measure.
The pinky-style ship was a common design in the mid-1700s, and with only the bottom of the Defiance’s hull remaining, it proved challenging to identify.
“It’s difficult because a ship like that is kind of like the 18-wheeler of today,” Smith tells Boston.com. “Basically, it loads up with all kinds of goods, whatever was being traded, going from port-to-port-to-port. And there were hundreds, if not thousands, of boats doing this.”
When the ship was uncovered in 2018, the York Beach police department shared photographs of the scene on Facebook. Then, tourists swarmed the scene, sometimes taking bits of the ship’s rib-like woodwork home with them.
Smith says it would be tricky and expensive to try to remove the ship’s remains from its current location. In truth, its sandy resting place actually represents one of the best options for preservation.
Moving forward, Claesson hopes to have netting and sand bags set up around the wreck to protect it. He tells Seacoast Online that he’s also searching for additional artifacts and photographs that can build out more of the ship’s story.
“I’m not trying to be the archaeology police,” says Claesson. “But people have been interacting with the site for decades. I’d love to see photos or learn anything else about it to be able to tell the full story of the site.”
WASHINGTON — A startup that seeks to create refueling facilities in orbit for satellites has received a government grant to develop one essential technology for that system.
San Francisco-based Orbit Fab received an award from America’s Seed Fund, a grant program run the National Science Foundation’s (NSF), the company announced March 31. The company plans to use the $250,000 grant to test a docking system that will allow satellites to be refueled.
“What we’re trying to do here is develop a cooperative docking system,” said Daniel Faber, chief executive of Orbit Fab, in an interview. “We’re trying to define a low-cost solution for both the active and the passive side for a refueling docking system. That way, our refueling ecosystem becomes a lot more viable.”
The NSF award will allow Orbit Fab to refine the requirements for the system by talking with potential customers, along with performing modeling and simulations. That will be followed by tests of the technology on an air-bearing table, which the company hopes to carry out this summer.
The award is similar to Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) programs by other agencies, such as NASA and the U.S. Air Force, and includes an option for a second phase that would be worth between $1 million and $1.5 million. “That lets us take those requirements and implement them with a whole lot more testing,” he said, such as six-degree-of-freedom tests of the system. “Ultimately, getting to orbital flight testing is the goal.”
The company has good relationships with the Air Force and NASA, but went with the NSF award because of its emphasis on supporting technologies that can become commercially viable. “The thing that really surprised me about the NSF is the focus on commercialization,” he said. “The NSF has a huge push to make sure that this is a product.”
Faber likened the America’s Seed Fund program to startup accelerators like the Techstars Starbust Space Accelerator, which Orbit Fab participated in last year. “Half their assessment for phase 2 is your commercialization plan, which is not something I’ve ever heard of for a NASA SBIR,” he said. “They’re pushing us to talk to customers and think about product design.”
The docking system technology funded by the NSF will build upon previous work by Orbit Fab, including testing of fluid transfer technology on the International Space Station and development of a replacement for satellite fill/drain valves that enables in-space refueling. All that will support a fuel tanker the company plans to develop to refuel spacecraft.
“There was an aspect of market risk when we started this company,” he said, that has been eliminated by the successful MEV mission. “I expect that will create even more interest.”
Work is continuing, he added, despite the stay-at-home orders in California enacted in response to the coronavirus pandemic. “It slowed us down a little,” he said, as the company seeks to find new machine shops to perform work. The classification of aerospace manufacturing as a critical industry has helped mitigate those effects.
“Everything looks good now,” he said, including discussions with potential partners. “Whether that holds up is a good question. We’ll have to see how long this lasts and what it does to the industry.”
Resolving the COVID-19 pandemic quickly hinges on a crucial factor: how well a person’s immune system remembers SARS-CoV-2, the virus behind the disease, after an infection has resolved and the patient is back in good health.
This phenomenon, called immune memory, helps our bodies avoid reinfection by a bug we’ve had before and influences the potency of life-saving treatments and vaccines. By starving pathogens of hosts to infect, immune individuals cut off the chain of transmission, bolstering the health of the entire population.
Scientists don’t yet have definitive answers about SARS-CoV-2 immunity. For now, people who have had the disease appear unlikely to get it again, at least within the bounds of the current outbreak. Small, early studies in animals suggest immune molecules may stick around for weeks (at least) after an initial exposure. Because researchers have only known about the virus for a few months, however, they can’t yet confidently forecast how long immune defenses against SARS-CoV-2 will last.
“We are so early in this disease right now,” says C. Brandon Ogbunu, a computational epidemiologist at Brown University. “In many respects, we have no idea, and we won’t until we get a longitudinal look.”
A memorable infection
When a pathogen breaches the body’s barriers, the immune system will churn out a variety of immune molecules to fight it off. One subset of these molecules, called antibodies, recognizes specific features of the bug in question and mounts repeated attacks until the invader is purged from the body. (Antibodies can also be a way for clinicians to tell if a patient has been recently infected with a given pathogen, even when the microbe itself can no longer be detected.)
Though the army of antibodies dwindles after a disease has resolved, the immune system can whip up a new batch if it sees the same pathogen again, often quashing the new infection before it has the opportunity to cause severe symptoms. Vaccines safely simulate this process by exposing the body to a harmless version or piece of a germ, teaching the immune system to identify the invader without the need to endure a potentially grueling disease.
From the immune system’s perspective, some pathogens are unforgettable. One brush with the viruses that cause chickenpox or polio, for instance, is usually enough to protect a person for life. Other microbes, however, leave less of an impression, and researchers still aren’t entirely sure why. This applies to the four coronaviruses known to cause a subset of common cold cases, says Rachel Graham, an epidemiologist and coronavirus expert at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Immunity against these viruses seems to wane in a matter of months or a couple of years, which is why people get colds so frequently.
Because SARS-CoV-2 was only discovered recently, scientists don’t yet know how the human immune system will treat this new virus. Reports have surfaced in recent weeks of people who have tested positive for the virus after apparently recovering from COVID-19, fueling some suspicion that their first exposure wasn’t enough to protect them from a second bout of disease. Most experts don’t think these test results represent reinfections. Rather, the virus may have never left the patients’ bodies, temporarily dipping below detectable levels and allowing symptoms to abate before surging upward again. Tests are also imperfect, and can incorrectly indicate the virus’ presence or absence at different points.
Because the COVID-19 outbreak is still underway, “if you’ve already had this strain and you’re re-exposed, you would likely be protected,” says Taia Wang, an immunologist and virologist at Stanford University and the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub. Even antibodies against the most forgettable coronaviruses tend to stick around for at least that long.
COVID-19 packs a stronger punch than the common cold, so antibodies capable of fending off this new coronavirus may have a shot at lingering longer. Broadly speaking, the more severe the disease, the more resources the body will dedicate to memorizing that pathogen’s features, and the stronger and longer lasting the immune response will be, says Allison Roder, a virologist at New York University. Previous studies have shown that people who survived SARS, another coronavirus disease that resulted in a 2003 epidemic, still have antibodies against the pathogen in their bloodyears after recovery. But this trend is not a sure thing, and scientists don’t know yet whether SARS-CoV-2 will fall in line.
Earlier this month, a team of researchers posted a study (which has yet to be published in a peer-reviewed journal) describing two rhesus macaques that could not be reinfected with SARS-CoV-2 several weeks after recovering from mild bouts of COVID-19. The authors chalked the protection up to the antibodies they found in the monkeys’ bodies, apparently produced in response to the virus—a result that appears to echo the detection of comparable molecules in human COVID-19 patients.
But the mere presence of antibodies doesn’t guarantee protection, Wang says. Reinfections with common cold coronaviruses can still happen in patients who carry antibodies against them. And a bevy of other factors, including a person’s age and genetics, can drastically alter the course of an immune response.
An evolving virus?
Complicating matters further is the biology of SARS-CoV-2 itself. Viruses aren’t technically alive: While they contain genetic instructions to make more of themselves, they lack the molecular tools to execute the steps, and must hijack living cells to complete the replication process for them.
After these pathogens infect cells, their genomes often duplicate sloppily, leading to frequent mutations that persist in the new copies. Most of these changes are inconsequential, or evolutionary dead ends. Occasionally, however, mutations will alter a viral strain so substantially that the immune system can no longer recognize it, sparking an outbreak—even in populations that have seen a previous version of the virus before. Viruses in the influenza family are the poster children for these drastic transformations, which is part of why scientists create a new flu vaccine every year.
When flu viruses copy their genomes, they often make mistakes. These errors can change the way their proteins look to the immune system, helping the viruses evade detection.
Some viruses have another immunity-thwarting trick as well: If a person is infected with two different strains of the flu at the same time, those viruses can swap genetic material with each other, generating a new hybrid strain that doesn’t look like either of its precursors, allowing it to skirt the body’s defenses.
Researchers don’t yet know how quickly similar changes could occur in SARS-CoV-2. Unlike flu viruses, coronaviruses can proofread their genomes as they copy them, correcting mistakes along the way. That feature reduces their mutation rate, and might make them “less of a moving target” for the immune system, says Scott Kenney, an animal coronavirus expert at Ohio State University. But coronaviruses still frequently trade segments of their genetic code with each other, leaving the potential for immune evasion wide open.
So far, SARS-CoV-2 also doesn’t appear to be undergoing any extreme mutations as it sweeps across the globe. That may be because it’s already hit on such a successful strategy, and doesn’t yet need to change its tactic. “Right now, it’s seeing a completely naive population” that’s never been exposed to the virus before, Graham says. The virus “doesn’t seem to be responding to any kind of pressure,” she adds.
Should SARS-CoV-2 get a second infectious wind, it may not come for some time. Even fast-mutating influenza strains can take years to reenter populations. And if or when that day comes, future COVID-19 outbreaks could be milder. Sometimes viral success means treading gently with the host, says Catherine Freije, a virologist at Harvard University.
“Viruses that causes severe disease actually tend to die out faster because a host that’s feeling ill can’t spread it as well.” In those cases, she says, sometimes, “the outbreak just sort of fizzles out.”
But we can’t rule out the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 could change in a way that bumps up its virulence instead, Kenney says. To steel the population for what’s ahead, sometimes, he adds, “We just have to be the ultimate pessimist when it comes to this type of outbreak.”
Protection without disease
Although much about COVID-19 remains unknown, researchers are racing through vaccine development to boost the world’s collective immunity—something that would stem the spread of the virus through the human population.
“Vaccine development is going to be critical to controlling this outbreak,” says Wang. That’s especially true if SARS-CoV-2 returns for an encore act. “If it’s an ever-present pathogen, we’ll certainly need vaccines to be part of our arsenal.”
Researchers have managed to concoct partially effective vaccines to combat other coronavirus infections in animals, such as pigs. In these creatures, immunity lasts “at least several months, possibly longer,” says Qiuhong Wang, a coronavirus expert at Ohio State University. (Because many of the subjects are livestock, they often don’t live long enough for researchers to test them further.) These vaccines may be reason for hope, she says, pointing out that “humans are animals, too.”
Two flu viruses can sometimes infect the same host cell. When they spill their contents into the cell, their genetic material can recombine, generating new hybrid viruses that are mixtures of their precursors.
Several research teams are designing human vaccines that trigger the production of antibodies that attack SARS-CoV-2’s spike protein—the molecular key the virus uses to unlock and enter human cells. Because the spike protein is crucial for viral infection, it makes an excellent target for a vaccine, says Benhur Lee, a virologist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. But Lee also points out that the spike protein, like other parts of the virus, is capable of mutating—something that could compromise the ability of a vaccinated individual to ward off the virus.
If mutation regularly occurs to that extent, scientists may need to frequently reformulate COVID-19 vaccines, like they do with pathogens in the flu family, Wang says. “We’d be starting over to some degree if there is a new outbreak.”
However, Wang cautions that it’s too soon to tell whether that will be the case. As research worldwide proceeds at breakneck speed, scientists may instead be able to brew up a universal vaccine that’s active against multiple forms of SARS-CoV-2.
But vaccines, which require rigorous testing and retesting to ensure efficacy and safety, take a long time to develop—typically more than a year, Qiuhong Wang says. In the meantime, researchers are turning their attention to treatments that could save those who have already been infected.
Some solutions will inevitably require antiviral drugs that tackle active SARS-CoV-2 infections after they’ve already begun, usually by interfering with the virus’ infection cycle.
But another approach, based on a time-tested technique, also taps into the immune response: transferring blood plasma—and the disease-repelling antibodies it contains—from recovered patients into infected ones. Though new to the current pandemic, the treatment has been deployed in various forms since the 1890s, and saw modest success during outbreaks of SARS in 2003 and Ebola in 2014. Ongoing trials in New York are now recruiting carefully screened, healthy volunteers who no longer have symptoms or detectable virus in their bodies to donate plasma. Importantly, this doesn’t diminish donors’ own resistance to SARS-CoV-2, since their immune systems have already learned to manufacture more antibodies.
Antibodies degrade over time, and won’t protect the people who receive these transfusions forever. The plasma treatments also can’t teach their recipients’ immune systems to make new antibodies after the first batch disappears. But this stopgap measure could ease the burden on health care workers and buy time for some of the outbreak’s most vulnerable victims.
Even as the pandemic evolves, researchers are already looking ahead. Just as the response to this outbreak was informed by its predecessors, so too will COVID-19 teach us about what’s to come, Qiuhong Wang says. The entry of other coronavirus strains into our species “is inevitable.”
“We don’t know when or where that will happen,” she says. But hopefully by the time the next pandemic comes around, the world will be more ready.
Researchers in the US and China reported Monday they have developed an artificial intelligence tool that is able to accurately predict which newly infected patients with the novel coronavirus go on to develop severe lung disease.
Once deployed, the algorithm could assist doctors in making choices about where to prioritize care in resource-stretched health care systems, said Megan Coffee, a physician and professor at New York University's Grossman School of Medicine who co-authored a paper on the finding in the journal Computers, Materials & Continua.
The tool discovered several surprising indicators that were most strongly predictive of who went on to develop so-called acute respiratory disease syndrome (ARDS), a severe complication of the COVID-19 illness that fills the lungs with fluid and kills around 50 percent of coronavirus patients who get it.
The team applied a machine learning algorithm to data from 53 coronavirus patients across two hospitals in Wenzhou, China, finding that changes in three features -- levels of the liver enzyme alanine aminotransferase (ALT), reported body aches, and hemoglobin levels –- were most accurately predictive of subsequent, severe disease.
Using this information along with other factors, the tool was able to predict risk of ARDS with up to 80 percent accuracy.
By contrast, characteristics that were considered to be hallmarks of COVID-19, like a particular pattern in lung images called "ground glass opacity," fever, and strong immune responses, were not useful in predicting which of the patients with initially mild symptoms would get ARDS.
Neither age nor sex were useful predictors either, even though other studies have found men over 60 to be at higher risk.
"It's been fascinating because a lot of the data points that the machine used to help influence its decisions were different than what a clinician would normally look at," Coffee told AFP.
Using AI in medical settings isn't a brand new concept -- a tool already exists to help dermatologists predict which patients will go on to develop skin cancer, to give just one example.
What makes this different is that doctors are learning on the fly about COVID-19, and the tool can help steer them in the right direction, in addition to helping them decide which patients to focus on as hospitals become overwhelmed, said co-author Anasse Bari, a computer science professor at NYU.
The team is now looking to further refine the tool with data from New York and hope it is ready to deploy sometime in April.
How are we staying sane during this Coronavirus lockdown? We discussed this on Orbital, our weekly technology podcast, which you can subscribe to via Apple Podcasts or RSS, download the episode, or just hit the play button below.
Around the world, museums filled with artworks that offer millions of people inspiration and serenity now sit empty, shuttered as part of global efforts to stymie COVID-19. Unable to welcome visitors in person, many cultural institutions have begun sharing snapshots of works on social media, encouraging art lovers to engage with their collections through virtual tours, audio guides and other digital offerings.
Last week, museums started showing love to one another by posting photos of floral artwork labeled with the hashtag #MuseumBouquet, reports Noor Brara for artnet News.
The New-York Historical Society and the Smithsonian Institution’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden kicked off the trend by sending digital bouquets to other art institutions. The former shared its first petaled missive—a cluster of apple blossoms painted by American artist Martin Johnson Heade—with the Smithsonian American Art Museum, while the latter sent Tate Britain “a little cheer” in the form of an Andy Warhol bouquet.
Dear @americanart, we wanted to brighten your day with these apple blossoms by American painter Martin Johnson Heade.
From there, the hashtag blossomed, with more than 300 museums, libraries, galleries and other cultural organizations participating. Institutions from the Metropolitan Museum of Art to the Guggenheim, the Frick Collection, the MassArt Museum, the Field Museum and the MCA Chicago all joined in the uplifting social media trend, according to artnet News. See additional examples of posts from the New Museum, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Field Museum and the Cleveland Museum of Art in this featured Twitter Moment.
Per a New-York Historical Society blog post, some 3,500 Twitter users ended up sharing more than 7,000 posts labeled with the #MuseumBouquet hashtag. The campaign garnered attention in dozens of countries, including Chile, Cyprus, Nepal, New Zealand and Latvia.
The cultural institutions sharing and receiving these works of art weren’t the only ones who appreciated the colorful digital bloom, reports Danielle Garrand for CBS News. Twitter users also welcomed the break from news of COVID-19’s deadly progression.
“#MuseumBouquet is sparking such joy and [brightness],” wrote user @ShamonPR.
@Watt_Ever_008, meanwhile, wrote, “Brilliant idea to bring some beauty into the lives of those Self Isolating during these difficult times.”
In the weeks before the bouquets started flying on Twitter, cultural institutions had already started using social media to reach the public in hopes of providing some tranquility, reports Sarah Rose Sharp for Hyperallergic.
Through images of artwork, animals and artifacts, museums, zoos and galleries alike offered oases of calm distinguished by the hashtag #MuseumMomentofZen.
The Museum of the City of New York appears to have started the #MuseumMomentofZen trend on social media by tweeting out Herbert Bolivar Tschudy’s serene The Turtle Tank on March 11.
We know there’s a lot of stressful news in your timeline, so here’s a #MuseumMomentofZen.
— Museum of the City of NY (@MuseumofCityNY) March 11, 2020
“Remember, art began in caves, and … [i]t has carried us through evolution, plague, and modernity,” Sharp writes. “We can and should feel encouraged to rely on its power to do so today!”
WASHINGTON — NASA announced March 30 it will fund the development of a cluster of six cubesats that will fly in formation above geostationary orbit to study solar storms.
NASA said it selected for development the Sun Radio Interferometer Space Experiment (SunRISE) mission as a “mission of opportunity” for its heliophysics program. The mission, with a total cost of $62.6 million, will launch by July 2023.
SunRISE will consist of six cubesats, each six units in size, just above geostationary orbit. The six cubesats, flying in a formation about ten kilometers across, will form a virtual radio telescope to detect and pinpoint emissions from the sun associated with solar storms. Those radio waves can’t be detected on Earth because of interference from the Earth’s ionosphere.
Scientists believe such observations can help them better understand what solar activity can lead to major solar storms. “We can see a solar flare start, and a coronal mass ejection (CME) start lifting off from the sun, but we don’t know if it is going to produce high energy particle radiation, and we don’t know if that high energy particle radiation is going to reach Earth,” said Justin Kasper, principal investigator for SunRISE at the University of Michigan, in a university statement.
“It turns out the various theories about particle acceleration correspond to different parts of coronal mass ejections,” he continued. “So, if we can see which part of the CME is glowing in radio, we figure out which acceleration model is right.”
That can, in turn, help scientists identify those events that could produce high-energy particles that can result in hazardous space weather activity at Earth. “It could also result in a unique warning system for whether an event will both produce radiation and release that radiation towards Earth or spacefaring astronauts,” Kasper said.
NASA selected SunRISE as one of four mission of opportunity candidates in 2017. In February 2019, NASA selected another of those proposals, an International Space Station experiment called Atmospheric Waves Experiment (AWE), for development. However, the agency provided additional study money for SunRISE, concluding that while it was not yet ready to proceed into development then, “the proposed concept represents a compelling use of new NASA-developed technology.”
SunRISE will get to orbit flying on a commercial satellite built by Maxar. A system called the Payload Orbital Delivery System, attached to the satellite, will release the SunRISE cubesats once in orbit. Maxar spokesman Omar Mahmoud said March 30 that the company hasn’t identified the mission that will carry SunRISE, although the company said in a tweet it will be a satellite based on its 1300-series bus used for geostationary missions.
People continuously exposed to air pollution are at increased risk of dementia, especially if they also suffer from cardiovascular diseases, according to a study at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden published in the journal JAMA Neurology. Therefore, patients with cardiovascular diseases who live in polluted environments may require additional support from care providers to prevent dementia, according to the researchers.
The number of people living with dementia is projected to triple in the next 30 years. No curative treatment has been identified and the search for modifiable risk and protective factors remains a public health priority. Recent studies have linked both cardiovascular disease and air pollution to the development of dementia, but findings on the air pollution-link have been scarce and inconsistent.
In this study, the researchers examined the link between long-term exposure to air pollution and dementia and what role cardiovascular diseases play in that association. Almost 3,000 adults with an average age of 74 and living in the Kungsholmen district in central Stockholm were followed for up to 11 years. Of those, 364 people developed dementia. The annual average level of particulate matter 2.5 microns or less in width (PM2.5) are considered low compared to international standards.
"Interestingly, we were able to establish harmful effects on human health at levels below current air pollution standards," says first author Giulia Grande, researcher at the Department of Neurobiology, Care Sciences and Society at Karolinska Institutet. "Our findings suggest air pollution does play a role in the development of dementia, and mainly through the intermediate step of cardiovascular disease and especially stroke."
For the last five years of exposure, the risk of dementia increased by more than 50 percent per interquartile range (IQR) difference in mean PM2.5 levels and by 14 percent per IQR in nitrogen oxide. Earlier exposures seemed less important. Heart failure and ischemic heart disease both enhanced the dementia risk and stroke explained almost 50 percent of air pollution-related dementia cases, according to the researchers.
"Air pollution is an established risk factor for cardiovascular health and because CVD accelerates cognitive decline, we believe exposure to air pollution might negatively affect cognition indirectly," says Giulia Grande. "In our study, virtually all of the association of air pollution with dementia seemed to be through the presence or the development of CVD, adding more reason to reduce emissions and optimize treatment of concurrent CVD and related risk factors, particularly for people living in the most polluted areas of our cities.
Avid stargazers and newcomers to the nighttime hobby can look forward to a lunar event next month: A super “pink” moon will rise into the night sky on April 7th, the brightest supermoon of 2020.
A supermoon occurs when a full moon happens on the same night the moon reaches perigee, or the closest point to Earth in its orbit. (Apogee is its furthest point from Earth in its orbit.) In April, the full moon peaks at 10:35 EDT. Though the moon is called a “pink” moon, its color won’t be any different than normal. It will be golden orange when low in the sky, and brighten to white as it rises. The name comes from pink wildflowers called creeping phlox that bloom in early spring, under April’s full moon, per Catherine Boeckmann at the Old Farmer’s Almanac.
Supermoons are only about seven percent bigger and 15 percent brighter than the average full moon, so the difference may not be obvious. The slight change in size happens because the moon follows an eccentric orbit around Earth that isn’t perfectly circular. On March 24, for example, Earth’s lunar companion reached its furthest apogee of the year, about 252,707 miles away. On April 7th, it will be about 30,000 miles closer, only 221,772 miles from Earth. That’s only a few hundred miles further than the closest supermoon in recent history, which occurred in November 2016.
Supermoon isn’t a scientific term for the astronomical event—that term is “perigee-syzygy.” Rather, the term supermoon was introduced by astrologer Richard Noelle in 1979.
“It didn't have much science behind it, except that he coined a term for when the moon was full, when it was 90 percent of the closest distance it could be to Earth. And a couple of years ago, it just caught on,” Jackie Faherty, an astronomer at the American Museum of Natural History, told NPR’s Rachel Martin in 2016. “I think it's just because someone took the word 'super' and put it in front of the word 'moon.'”
Other names for an April full moon include Sprouting Grass, Egg, and Fish moon, all names that evoke thoughts of early spring. This year’s super pink moon is also a paschal moon because of its closeness to Easter, which is April 12.
For those staying at home, April will bring a number of other moon- and stargazing events to see outside at night. This Friday, Venus will be visible near a cluster of stars called the Pleiades or the Seven Sisters, according to Alan MacRobert at Sky & Telescope. And as Brian Lada writes for AccuWeather, the Lyrids meteor shower peaks on April 22 and 23.
Michelle Nichols, director of public observing at Chicago’s Adler Planetarium, tells WBEZ’s Katherine Nagasawa that people can easily stargaze near their home, even in a city. Both light pollution and air pollution can impact how stars appear in the sky, but lately, air pollution has fallen as there are fewer cars on the road and fewer factories at work.
“There’s no one best spot to observe the sky,” Nichols says. “The best place to observe the sky is wherever you currently are. So you don’t have to find that perfect location — it doesn’t exist. There are some sites that are better than others, but truly get to know the sky where you are.”
Faced with the rapid spread of coronavirus and the challenges that hospitals are facing around the world, a team at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has developed a low-cost ventilator design that could help meet the worldwide shortage of these life-saving devices. The team called MIT E-Vent was formed on March 12 in response to the rapid spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, and they designed a simple ventilator device that could be built with about $100 (approximately Rs. 7,530) worth of parts.
Ventilators are extremely expensive medical equipment which cost around $30,000 (approximately Rs. 22,66,000) per unit. They are used to keep the patients breathing in times when they are no longer capable of doing so on their own.
According to the report by MIT News, the low-cost ventilator design includes a key component called bag-valve resuscitator or the Ambu bag, which is an inexpensive alternative to a ventilator and is a manually-operated hand-held pouch. Hospitals already have Ambu bags in huge quantities and they are designed to be operated by hand, by a medical professional or emergency technician, to provide breaths to a patient in situations like cardiac arrest, until an intervention such as a ventilator becomes available.
For this to work, a tube is inserted in the airway of the patient, and the air is pumped into the lungs by squeezing and relaxing the pouch.
The team of students have added a mechanical system to the Ambu bag because this is not a process that a person could be expected to do for an extended period. Additionally, the team has also made sure that the device must be very reliable since an unexpected failure of the device could be fatal. And if in case it does fail then the bag can be immediately operated manually.
The MIT E-Vent team, which is an all-volunteer team of students working without funding have made it clear that this is not something to be taken as a do it yourself (DIY) project since it requires specialized understanding of the clinical-technical interface. In a short amount of time, a working prototype of the equipment is being tested and feedback has been sought from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
Satellite jamming and spoofing incidents will only increase, says CSIS analyst Todd Harrison
WASHINGTON — Only a handful of countries — notably the United States’ military rivals China and Russia — are developing space weapons that could physically take down U.S. military satellites. But many nations and non-state actors increasingly are able to interfere with satellite signals using low-cost technologies, experts warn in a study released March 30.
Satellite jamming and spoofing devices that broadcast fake GPS signals from the ground are “becoming part of the every-day arsenal of many countries,” says a new report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
“These adverse activities could gradually become normalized,” says the report. “The fact that Russian President Vladimir Putin appears to travel with GPS jamming devices in his motorcade and that China appears to be spoofing GPS signals to conceal illicit activities in its own ports demonstrate how important and integrated these capabilities have become at all levels,” writes CSIS senior fellow Todd Harrison, who co-authored the study with three other analysts.
“One should expect that the rate of satellite jamming and spoofing incidents will only increase as these capabilities continue to proliferate and become more sophisticated in the coming years,” Harrison says.
“Threat Assessment 2020” is CSIS’ third annual assessment of global anti-satellite weapons. The report is based on open-source information about developments by space powers China and Russia, as well as rising ones like France, India and Japan.
One of the takeaways from the research is that the United States military has to take action to protect satellites from a growing array of threats, Harrison said March 30 during a video call with reporters.
“We’re pretty weak against direct ascent anti-satellite weapons,” he said. “Laser blinding is difficult to defend against.”
Most concerning are jamming and GPS spoofing, said Harrison. “That’s a big problem. Even the encrypted military signals can be spoofed.”
SWF counterspace weapons study
In tandem with the CSIS report, the Secure World Foundation on Monday released of its third annual “Global Counterspace Capabilities: An Open Source Assessment,” edited by SWF director of program planning Brian Weeden and Washington office director Victoria Samson.
The report looks at counterspace developments in Russia, China, the United States, India, Iran, and North Korea, as well as cyber warfare capabilities aimed at satellites.
“The evidence shows significant research and development of a broad range of kinetic (destructive) and non-kinetic counterspace capabilities in multiple countries,” said the SWF report. “However, only non-kinetic capabilities are actively being used in current military operations.”
Hundreds of cultural institutions around the world—including the Smithsonian Institution’s 19 museums, galleries, gardens and National Zoo—have closed amid the COVID-19 pandemic. But thanks to a growing array of digital offerings, museum lovers have plenty of options for experiencing world-class institutions from home. (See Smithsonian magazine’s roundups of museums you can remotely visit, collections available for perusal online and ways to virtually explore the Smithsonian for additional inspiration.)
The Smartify mobile app, popularly dubbed “Shazam for the art world,” is the latest luminary to join the growing wave of readily accessible, digital-first museum content.
Now through the end of 2020, reports Mark Brown for the Guardian, the app—home to a database of some two million artworks from more than 120 venues—has made all of its audio tours available free of charge. Selected exhibits that were unable to open due to museum and gallery closures (including the Watts Gallery Artists’ Village’s John Ruskin retrospective) will launch on the app instead.
Launched in 2017 with a database of 30 museums, according to Smithsonian’s Ben Panko, Smartify models itself on Shazam, a mobile app that identifies songs based on snippets of audio. To use the art world version of Shazam, users simply scan an artwork, bringing up a blurb detailing the piece’s name, artist and history.
Smartify also hosts visual and audio tours of such institutions as the British Library, the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Hermitage. Previously, some were paid, while others were free; now, all are available at no cost.
“Obviously we have seen a change in the way the app is used,” Anna Lowe, one of the company’s co-founders, tells the Guardian. “We started the app from a love of visiting museums and galleries and seeing and connecting with art.”
Smartify allows museum lovers to browse art from institutions in Europe, the United States, Iran, Egypt and Singapore, among other locales. Users can take hour-long audio tours of such venues as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth and the London National Portrait Gallery, or simply tune in for short snippets on specific works. Tours are led by curators, historians and artists themselves.
The Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery Smartify collection features a digital gallery of more than 1,000 artworks, as well as a one-hour “visual description tour” of select presidential portraits. The Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art, meanwhile, boasts an in-app digital collection of more than 650 works.
Other Smartify offerings include a guided tour of the National Gallery of Art; a descriptive walk through the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art’s sculpture park, as narrated by artist Juliana Capes; and an American Sign Language tour of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri.
The app’s new role as a virtual tour guide represents a shift from its original purpose of supplementing in-person museum visits. But the change still adheres to Smartify’s original mission.
“At times like this, really strange times, people look to art and music and culture for inspiration, solace … a sense of normal,” Lowe tells the Guardian, “Anything we can do to help that and help people access art and culture is important at a time like this.”
For nearly 30 years, Alaskan Ahtna Athabascan elder Katie John awaited resolution to her peaceful battle over Native subsistence rights. The legal dispute—centering on her family’s right to fish in Batzulnetas, a historic village and fish camp in Wrangell-St. Elias National Park—made it all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court. The Court's ruling cleared the way for the subsistence fishing rights of many Alaska Native to be included under federal subsistence protection. Although John died in 2013 before litigation was complete, her 2014 win was a victory for Native Americans everywhere.
Today, the fish camp remains a testament to John's life work, and it represents just one of the many sites where women's history and achievements happened, often with no official sign or record recognizing their importance.
Since mid-January, the National Trust for Historic Preservation has been crowdsourcing places like the fish camp for its 1,000 Places Where Women Made History, and the process to submit is simple. Anyone can log an online entry, which consists of a photo, as well as a short paragraph about the U.S.-based property and its location. “This is our way of bringing people together to tell us what are the places and stories that matter to them,” says Chris Morris, a National Trust senior field officer who's spearheading the campaign. Through submissions from local preservation societies, community organizations, and everyday people, they've already compiled more than 750 sites. Some, like the fish camp, may not have much recognition of their role in history while others have been named National Historic Landmarks.
“Although 2020's 100th anniversary of women's suffrage is the impetus for this work,” says Morris, “we also wanted to use the project to fully honor those many female leaders related to American history and culture.”
According to Morris, the 1,000 Places project is part of a larger mission of the Trust’s to preserve women’s history. The Trust encourages local organizations to take direct action in preserving buildings and homes where women have “made a stand, raised their voice, and found the courage to change the world,” she says, and identifies historic sites that recognize women as part of its annual 11 Most Endangered Historic Places list, which in 2019 included the Excelsior Club in Charlotte, North Carolina—a once-thriving hub of the city's African American social scene—and Nashville's Music Row. The National Trust also operates 27 of its own historic sites at which they're working to bring to light the many amazing women associated with these places. The Farnsworth House in Plano, Illinois, for instance, was designed by famed modernist architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, but it was native Chicagoan and doctor Edith Farnsworth who commissioned it. “So this year Farnsworth House is shifting its perspective to tell the story of the house from her point of view,” says Morris.
The ever-growing list of 1,000 Places Where Women Made History currently includes everything from homes where pioneering women once lived, buildings where specific events that involved them occurred, and where women-led accomplishments happened. It includes spots like the former home of prominent investigative journalist Ida Tarbell in Titusville, Pennsylvania; the historic Auditorium Theatre in Chicago, saved through a fundraising campaign led by Beatrice Spachner; and Trumpet Records in Jackson, Mississippi, the former work site of a young record producer named Lillian McMurry, who recorded both black and white artists during the height of Mississippi segregation.
“We want to reveal those sort of lesser-known and untold stories, because we recognize that women's history is America's history,” says Morris. “This crowdsourcing effort has been very successful in revealing such underappreciated tales, ones of women’s vision, courage and leadership countrywide. They make up the majority of our entries. They’re tales of thinkers, artists, scientists, entrepreneurs...those women who have really shaped the nation that we are today, and who continue to help us to move forward.”
One of the Trust’s main goals with this project is to help a new generation of Americans, especially young women, see their own potential in the history of these places, says Morris. “We also will encourage everyone who submitted an entry to consider applying for funding from our many grant programs,” she says, “to support the broader interpretation and long-term preservation of these places where women made history.”
Five Sites Where Women Made History
Here are six lesser-known sites in the U.S. where women made history. Most of them are recognized in the 1,000 Places project, and all are on the Trust’s radar for renovation and reuse in some capacity. Though each is in various stages of preservation and redevelopment, they're all moving forward as a testament to women's achievements and inspiration for new stories to come.
Marjory Stoneman Douglas House
(National Trust for Historic Preservation)
Located on a residential block in Miami's upscale Coconut Grove neighborhood, this uninhabited wood-framed and T-shaped cottage has a special place in American history, as the former home of Marjory Stoneman Douglas, a journalist, author and conservationist known as the “Grand Dame of the Everglades.” (She may sound familiar, too, as the namesake of the high school in Parkland, Florida, where 17 people were killed in a mass shooting in 2018.) Douglas published her seminal book, The Everglades: River of Grass, highlighting Florida's endlessly diverse subtropical wilderness and its need for ongoing preservation, in 1947. A month later, 20 percent of the Everglades’ southernmost portion became a national park. Douglas also founded the still-thriving Friends of the Everglades—an activist organization dedicated to protecting the landscape—in 1970, and often held meetings for conservationists at her Coconut Grove home, where she lived from 1926 until 1998. The Land Trust of Dade County currently oversees the property, which became a National Historic Landmark in 2015, and is working with other local and national preservation organizations for a reuse plan that continues Stoneman's legacy as an environmentalist, while also being respectful of the community that surrounds it. One possibility, says Morris, is to use the property as a residency where scientists can come to continue their research on environmental issues and climate change.
Pauli Murray House
(National Trust for Historic Preservation)
Pauli Murray was both a civil rights and women's rights activist, an author, lawyer and member of the LGBTQ community, as well as the first African American woman to be ordained as an Episcopal priest. She spent her formative years in this one-and-a-half-story home, built by her grandfather, alongside her grandparents and aunts—all of whom helped raise Murray. In 1944, this descendent of both enslaved laborers and slave holders graduated first in her class at Howard University. Murray later received a Masters of Law degree from U.C. Berkeley in 1945, and in 1947 was named one of 10 “Young Women of the Year” by Mademoiselle magazine. She was also a founding member of the National Organization for Women (NOW) Foundation, which tackles a wide range of women's rights issues, from economic justice to reproductive rights.
Murray's Durham childhood home has been a National Historic Landmark since 2016, and is both an entry on the National Trust's crowdsourcing campaign as well as one of its National Treasures. The Duke Human Rights Center at the Franklin Humanities Institute runs the Pauli Murray Project, which oversees the property, renovated it and is preparing to open it to the public as the the Pauli Murray Center for History and Social Justice later this year.
Harada House
(National Trust for Historic Preservation)
In 1915, Japanese immigrants Jukichi and Ken Harada wanted to purchase a home in Riverside, but the California Alien Land Law of 1913 prevented them from doing so. Instead, the couple acquired their modest Lemon Street property by putting it in the name of their three young children—a move that soon became a focal point for the groundbreaking legal case California v. Harada. Under the 14th Amendment, the Haradas won the right to keep their 1884 home, though their lives would never be the same. In 1942, the entire family was relocated to Japanese internment camps where both Jukichi and Ken died. However, their youngest daughter Sumi returned to the Riverside home in the wake of World War II, taking in as boarders other Japanese families who'd lost their properties. Sumi resided at what's now known as Harada House until 1998, during which time she preserved many of the home's furnishings and fixtures, and kept a wealth of family heirlooms, including kimonos featuring the Harada family crest, personal letters and kitchenware. She also saved a message that her brother scribbled on a bedroom wall on the day his family was forced into a relocation center.
Today the Riverside Metropolitan Museum oversees the home, which Jukichi had transformed from a single-story saltbox into a multi-story space, and is working to both restore it and turn it into an interpretive center highlighting the Harada story—one of lost city rights, a fight against racial discrimination, and immigrants. The property has been a National Historic Landmark since 1990.
Doolan-Larson Residence and Storefronts
(Scott Hahn/SF Heritage)
On the famous San Francisco corner of Haight and Ashbury streets—the heart of the 1960s counterculture movement—stands the Doolan-Larson building, a mixed-use, multi-story property built in the 20th century. This Colonial Revival-style structure, which survived the city's 1906 earthquake before being elevated to add storefronts, became home to San Francisco's first-ever hippie boutique. Twenty-four-year-old Peggy Caserta opened this mod clothing store, called Mnasidika (its name a shout-out to The Songs of Bilitis, a French book of lesbian poetry from the late 19th century), in 1965 and ran it until 1968, during which time it was a pivotal part of the Haight-Ashbury's counterculture scene. Caserta herself was bisexual—she was Janis Joplin's lover until Joplin's death in 1970—and according to Levi Strauss & Co., it was at Mnasidika that Jimi Hendrix developed his iconic Flower Child style. Caserta is also credited with convincing Levi Strauss to create bell-bottom jeans, which she then sold at Mnasidika and became a seminal part of '60s fashion.
When the property's owner Norman Larson died in 2018, he donated the Doolan-Larson building to San Francisco Heritage. Mnasidika’s original storefront—now a T-shirt shop—remains largely as it was during the Summer of Love. Though not yet on the list of places “Where Women Made History,” it is a part of the Trust's National Treasures. San Francisco Heritage and other preservation groups are currently looking at ways to reuse the structure in telling the stories of San Francisco's counterculture movement, including those of women like Caserta, as well as to highlight both its overall impact and continued relevance today.
Another addition to the National Trust's 100 National Treasures list, Villa Lewaro was the summer home of Madam C.J. Walker (born Sara Breedlove), an early 20th century entrepreneur who made a fortune in developing hair products for African American women. Walker, who is considered the first African American female millionaire in the U.S., is the subject of the new Netflix TV series, “Self Made,” starring Octavia Spencer as Walker. Along with being a businesswoman, Walker was a philanthropist and political and social activist. She occupied the 34-room, Italianate-style Villa Lewaro from 1918 to 1919, and though it's not currently open to the public, visitors can take a virtual tour of the estate led by Walker's great-great granddaughter, A'Lelia Bundles. The New Voices Foundation—created to empower entrepreneur women of color— acquired the property in 2018 and is working toward turning it into a “think tank,” according to New Voice's founder Richelieu Dennis, “to foster entrepreneurship for present and future generations.”
