The study has also shown changes in an area of the brain related to motivation for drug intake, and in a second experiment they have shown that the kappa-type opioid receptor (a protein) is key to causing these animals to relapse.

Research by the Department of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Technology and Parasitology of the University of Valencia (UV) has shown in a preclinical experiment with rats that physical pain induces relapsing with alcohol consumption. The study, published in journal PAIN, has also shown changes in an area of the brain related to motivation for drug intake, and in a second experiment they have shown that the kappa-type opioid receptor (a protein) is key to causing these animals to relapse.

Several studies have emphasized that suffering physical pain can trigger relapses in alcohol consumption and that it can be a key reason for initiating a compulsive consumption that leads to addiction. Along the same lines, the UV research group led by Lucía Hipólito has shown in a study that pain induces relapse when it develops during alcohol withdrawal in female rats.

"We have discovered one of the neurobiological bases that can explain the relationship between the relapse of alcohol consumption and physical pain, thanks to alterations that occur in the kappa opioid receptors in the nucleus accumbens, an area of the brain closely related to the motivation for taking drugs," explains the researcher.

The study has also concluded that this increase in alcohol consumption is related to anxiety or depression. This negative affective state induced by forced abstinence from alcoholic beverages causes it, in combination with pain, to become stronger and persist after reintroducing addiction in female rats. This is how the research team has shown that aggravation due to anxiety pain is a key factor in the increase in alcohol intake after a period of abstinence. As Hipólito indicates, "it can be said that pain increases the effects of not ingesting alcohol or accelerates those that can lead to a relapse."

In a second line of research, the authors –among them Jesús Lorente, Javier Cuitavi and Yolanda Campos, also from the same research group– have not only studied these alterations, but have also verified that when they blocked the opioid receptor kappa with a drug, called Norbinaltrophimine, relapse does not occur. Thus, the author states that they have studied the functionality of the drug for these cases, but it could have uses for other pathologies. "The problem is that they are causing some adverse effects in the early stages of clinical research that are difficult to manage. Our research group is now focused on how we could improve the pharmaceutical form, that is, how to administer it to avoid its side effects," she emphasizes.

On the other hand, Hipólito also points out the interest of the differences based on the sex of the rats, since the results have only been verified in females. In observational clinical studies, although there are women, their presence is usually lower than that of men, causing the representative sample to often not be valid. "We believe that there may be some bias when studying the events that can lead people to relapse, because there are studies that show that men tend to enter treatment programs more than women. Luckily now, interesting data are being published about this in terms of gender, but it is still too early for the sample to be equitable," argues the researcher.

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Millions of Sydney residents will spend another month in lockdown, authorities announced Wednesday, citing a still-fast-growing coronavirus outbreak and stubbornly low vaccination rates.

Australia's biggest city had been due to exit five weeks of lockdown on July 30, but the restrictions will now remain in place until August 28 as case numbers continued to climb.

"I appreciate personally what we're asking people do for the next four weeks but it is because we want to keep our community safe and want to make sure we can bounce back as quickly as possible," New South Wales state premier Gladys Berejiklian said.

Officials announced 177 new cases linked to the Sydney outbreak, which began mid-June when a driver for an international flight crew contracted the virus.

People living in hotspots have been urged not to leave their neighbourhoods, but those living alone will be allowed to create a "singles bubble" with another person.

During the lockdown, Sydney residents can leave their homes only for exercise, essential work, shop for necessities such as food, and medical reasons.

In recent weeks, police have doled out fines to those violating the restrictions.

Berejiklian said police would step up compliance efforts, while imploring Sydneysiders to report others breaking the rules.

"We really need people to do the right thing at all times. Do not let your guard down," she said.

Melbourne lifts lockdown

The announcement came as Melbourne awoke to the end of its fifth virus lockdown, after beating the Delta variant for the second time in recent months.

It was a victory won through "determination and hard work", according to Victoria state premier Dan Andrews.

They were among the roughly eight million people in Victoria and South Australia states who exited lockdown overnight after local outbreaks of the highly contagious variant were contained.

Johnny Sandish, who owns a cafe in central Melbourne, said his business was under major financial pressure and the first morning of post-lockdown trade was quieter than expected.

"We're losing a lot of money, almost going broke," he told AFP.

"There's no money coming in the business, only going out."

Australia was lauded for its early pandemic success, after slamming shut its international borders and moving quickly to quash COVID-19 clusters.

But with a largely unvaccinated population, it has struggled to respond to the Delta variant, which has repeatedly sent cities into lockdown.

Melbourne musician Dante Zawadzki-Colliton said he was happy to be out and about after two weeks stuck at home, but the city's frequent shutdowns had taken their toll.

"Having to adapt to being locked inside and quickly assimilating to the outside is a struggle and very exhausting," he told AFP.

About 13 percent of Australians have been vaccinated, with low supplies of Pfizer-BioNTech shots and scepticism about the AstraZeneca jab slowing the rollout.

The country has recorded more than 33,000 infections and 921 COVID-related deaths in a population of 25 million.

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The global economy's business-as-usual approach to climate change has seen Earth's "vital signs" deteriorate to record levels, an influential group of scientists said Wednesday, warning that several climate tipping points were now imminent.

The researchers, part of a group of more than 14,000 scientists who have signed on to an initiative declaring a worldwide climate emergency, said that governments had consistently failed to address the root cause of climate change: "the overexploitation of the Earth".

Since a similar assessment in 2019, they noted an "unprecedented surge" in climate-related disasters, including flooding in South America and Southeast Asia, record-shattering heatwaves and wildfires in Australia and the US, and devastating cyclones in Africa and South Asia.

Of 31 "vital signs"—key metrics of planetary health that include greenhouse gas emissions, glacier thickness, sea-ice extent and deforestation—they found that 18 hit record highs or lows.

For example, despite a dip in pollution linked to the pandemic, levels of atmospheric CO2 and methane hit all-time highs in 2021.

Greenland and Antarctica both recently showed all-time low levels of ice mass, and glaciers are melting 31 percent faster than they did just 15 years ago, the authors said.

Both ocean heat and global sea levels set new records since 2019, and the annual loss rate of the Brazilian Amazon reached a 12-year high in 2020.

Highlights of a landmark Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) draft report on the effects of a warming planet on nature.

Echoing previous research, they said that forest degradation linked to fire, drought and logging was causing parts of the Brazilian Amazon to now act as a source of carbon, rather than absorb the gas from the atmosphere.

Livestock such as cows and sheep are now at record levels, numbering more than four billion and with a mass exceeding that of all humans and wild land mammals combined, they said.

Tim Lenton, director of the University of Exeter's Global Systems Institute and study co-author, said the recent record-breaking heatwave in the Western United States and Canada showed that the climate had already begun to "behave in shocking, unexpected ways".

"We need to respond to the evidence that we are hitting climate tipping points with equally urgent action to decarbonise the global economy and start restoring instead of destroying nature," he said.

'Address the root cause'

The researchers said there was "mounting evidence that we are nearing or have already crossed" a number of climate tipping points.

These include melting of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets, which may now be irreversible on a centuries-long time scale, regardless of how or if humankind slashes its emissions.

Highlights of a landmark Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) draft report on the effects of a warming planet on people.

They said increasing ocean deoxygenation and warming waters were threatening warm-water coral reefs, upon which half a billion people rely for food, income and storm protection.

"Given these alarming developments, we need short, frequent, and easily accessible updates on the climate emergency," said the study, published in the journal BioScience.

The authors echoed previous calls for transformative change in six areas: eliminating fossil fuels, slashing pollutants, restoring ecosystems, switching to plant-based diets, moving away from indefinite growth models, and stabilising the human population.

They also called for climate change education to be included in school core curriculums globally in order to raise awareness.

In the immediate term, they proposed a trio of emergency responses to the climate emergency.

These consisted of "a significant carbon price", a global phase-out and ban of fossil fuels, and the development of strategic climate reserves such as restoring and maintaining carbon sinks and biodiversity hotspots.

"We need to stop treating the climate emergency as a stand-alone issue -– global heating is not the sole symptom of our stressed Earth system," said William Ripple, distinguished professor of ecology at Oregon State University's College of Forestry.

"Policies to combat the climate crisis or any other symptoms should address their root cause: human overexploitation of the planet."

Source

Mergers, twists, and pentagons: The architecture of honeycombs

Most honeycombs are perfect hexagons—but bees manage complex exceptions. 

Mergers, twists, and pentagons: The architecture of honeycombs

< Watch the video at the source page. >

PARIS, July 26 (Reuters) - "Robot, stand up" - Oscar Constanza, 16, gives the order and slowly but surely a large frame strapped to his body lifts him up and he starts walking.

Fastened to his shoulders, chest, waist, knees and feet, the exoskeleton allows Oscar - who has a genetic neurological condition that means his nerves do not send enough signals to his legs - to walk across the room and turn around.

"Before, I needed someone to help me walk ... this makes me feel independent," said Oscar, as his father Jean-Louis Constanza, one of the co-founders of the company that makes the exoskeleton, looks on.

"One day Oscar said to me: 'dad, you're a robotic engineer, why don't you make a robot that would allow us to walk?'" his father recalls, speaking at the company Wandercraft's headquarters in Paris.

"Ten years from now, there will be no, or far fewer, wheelchairs," he said.

< View the images at the source page. >

Other companies across the world are also manufacturing exoskeletons, competing to make them as light and usable as possible. Some are focused on helping disabled people walk, others on a series of applications, including making standing less tiring for factory workers.

Wandercraft's exoskeleton, an outer frame that supports but also simulates body movement, has been sold to dozens of hospitals in France, Luxembourg and the United States, for about 150,000 euros ($176,000) a piece, Constanza said.

It cannot yet be bought by private individuals for everyday use - that is the next stage the company is working on. A personal skeleton would need to be much lighter, Wandercraft engineers said.

Just outside Paris, 33-year-old Kevin Piette, who lost the ability to walk in a bike accident 10 years ago, tries one on, walking around his flat, remote controller in hand.

"In the end it's quite similar: instead of having the information going from the brain to the legs, it goes from the remote controller to the legs," he said, before making his dinner and walking with it from the kitchen to the living room.

Reporting by Yiming Woo Writing by Ingrid Melander; Editing by Janet Lawrence

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(HealthDay)—Even if they're fully vaccinated against COVID-19, certain people may need to take extra precautions to prevent "breakthrough" infections with the highly transmissible Delta variant, experts say.

The Delta variant is causing most of the new COVID cases in the United States, and older people and those with immune-compromising conditions may be at greater risk than others, say researchers.

For the general public, they stressed, "breakthrough infections" among fully vaccinated people can happen—but they are rarely severe.

"The end game is most people who get breakthrough infections either have very mild symptoms or no symptoms. They rarely end up in the hospital, and they don't die," said Dr. Robert Murphy, executive director of the Institute for Global Health at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.

"The big question is how infectious are they? That's what we are trying to find out," he said in a Northwestern news release.

Murphy and other U.S. scientists are assessing the infectiousness of vaccinated students who developed COVID-19. They expect to have results in one to two months.

The two-dose vaccine is still about 90% effective against the Delta variant, he noted. Of course, that means 1 person in 10 who gets vaccinated and is exposed to the coronavirus could have a breakthrough infection.

"Anybody is at risk for it, not just the immune-compromised. It's athletes. It's totally healthy people. Certainly, the immune-compromised are at a higher risk because they can't mount a strong enough immunologic response to the vaccine. Older people may also have a weaker response to the vaccine," Murphy said.

The researchers say they aren't sure why the rate of new and breakthrough Delta infections is picking up.

"We are seeing breakthrough infections and while we know that no vaccine is 100% effective, it feels frightening, said Mercedes Carnethon, vice chair of preventive medicine at Feinberg.

"One concern is the Delta variant is evading the vaccines. Another concern is any virus that causes a high viral load would break through vaccine protection," Carnethon said in the release. "There is evidence that the Delta variant does cause higher viral loads earlier in the course of infection."

She added, "The virus will continue to mutate itself into new variants so long as it circulates in the population, and the biggest space it has to circulate is among the unvaccinated."

But since the vaccines aren't 100% foolproof, some who've gotten the jab wonder if they should change their behavior to avoid COVID. One common question: Should you mask up after vaccination?

That depends, said Carnethon, who follows local mask-wearing guidelines and has not yet returned to mask wearing indoors in public spaces.

However, if you're in an area with low vaccination rates and high transmission, she recommended masking up.

Moreover, "At this time, I would not choose to travel to a hot spot. But if I had to go, I would wear my mask and try to avoid large groups of people," Carnethon said.

"I would not take unvaccinated family members to a current hot spot or family members who are vaccinated but who remain vulnerable due to age or other conditions," she continued.

Carnethon added that anyone who is vulnerable because of age or preexisting conditions should take precautions "because if they are infected or reinfected it may not be a mild illness."

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The poorest 10 percent of Indians face a risk of dying from air pollution that is nine times higher than for the richest 10 percent, according to research released Monday.

Fine particles (PM2.5) generated from burning fossil fuels, farming practices and wood-burning stoves contribute to a host of health problems and are behind most of the eight million air pollution-related deaths worldwide each year.

Previous research has shown that the richest individuals bear an outsized responsibility for air pollution due to their consumption-heavy lifestyles.

Researchers based in Europe and the US wanted to see how wealth is linked to air pollution exposure in Earth's second most populous nation.

They examined data expenditure for different income groups and used a sophisticated computer model to estimate the pollution that such spending habits were likely to have produced.

They produced a map of anticipated air pollution then used it to generate the estimates of related health impacts.

Unsurprisingly, the team found that while higher net-worth individuals contributed most to air pollution levels, it was poorer individuals who suffered the most from it.

The study, published in the journal Nature Sustainability, estimated that air pollution from outside and inside sources contributed to the deaths of 1.19 million people in 2010, the last year for which emissions and expenditure data were directly comparable.

They also defined a new pollution inequity index, which measured the ratio of premature deaths against the amount of ambient air pollution each income group contributed.

For the highest-earning 10 percent, the index predicted an estimated 6.3 premature deaths per unit of pollution it contributed. For the poorest 10 percent, that figure was 54.7 deaths—nearly nine times higher.

To test the best ways of reducing air inequality, the team examined two scenarios: one in which clean technology was applied to all pollution sources except cooking stoves, and one in which solid-fuel stoves were replaced with electric ones.

Perhaps unexpectedly, the modeling showed the second scenario—simply doing away with wood- and coal-burning stoves—had the greatest reduction in air pollution-linked deaths.

"A single intervention that would effectively address air pollution-related deaths, especially for the poor: offering cheap, clean cooking stoves and fuels," Fabian Wagner, lead study author from the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Austria, told AFP.

With millions of Indians moving from rural areas to cities in search of work since 2010, Wagner said it was hard to quantify the net effect air pollution was having on that migration.

"Urbanization leads to higher population densities—i.e. more people getting exposed to the same bad air," he said.

"Hence, total exposure may go up."

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Heatwaves that obliterate temperature records as in western Canada last month and Siberia last year are caused by the rapid pace, rather than the amount, of global warming, researchers said Monday.

The findings, reported in Nature Climate Change, suggest that humanity is likely to see a lot more deadly scorchers in the coming decades.

"Because we are in a period of very rapid warming, we need to prepare for more heat events that shatter previous records by large margins," head author Erich Fischer, a senior scientist at ETH Zurich and a lead author of the UN climate science assessment currently under review, told AFP.

The heatwave that ravaged British Columbia saw temperatures hit 49.6 degrees Celsius (121 Fahrenheit), more than five degrees above the hottest day recorded in Canada up to that point.

Current rates of warming—about 0.2 degrees Celsius per decades—are likely to continue for at least another 10 to 20 years no matter how quickly humanity reduces the carbon pollution that drives global heating, the study warns.

But efforts to curb greenhouse gases over the next decade will pay off later.

"The future probability of record-shattering extremes depends on the emissions pathway that gets us to a given level of warming," Fischer said.

Up to now, research on how global warming will affect heatwaves has focused mostly on how much temperatures have risen compared to some reference period rather than on how quickly.

That is, of course, critically important, and the science has shown without a doubt that a warmer world will produce more and hotter heatwaves.

But not taking into account how quickly temperatures rise fails to capture a key part of the picture.

"The climate currently behaves like an athlete on steroid," said Erich Fischer, a senior scientist at ETH Zurich.

Climate on steroids

"Without climate change, one would expect record temperatures to become rarer the longer we measure," Fischer explained.

Likewise, if average global temperatures stabilize—at, say, 1.5 degrees Celsius above mid-19th century levels, the aspirational target of the Paris Agreement—dramatic new records would progressively become less frequent.

Fischer compares it to track and field, where the longer a discipline exists, the harder it is top a world record. The long and high jump records, for example, have stood for decades, or are only ever surpassed by a centimeter or two.

But if athletes start taking performance-enhancing drugs, as happened in US baseball during the late 1990s, records are suddenly broken often and by a lot.

"The climate currently behaves like an athlete on steroids," Fischer said.

At current rates of greenhouse gas emissions, the world is on track to continue warming at current rates to more than 3C by 2100.

"This is a very important study," commented Tim Palmer, a research professor at the University of Oxford who was not involved in the findings.

But climate models with far higher resolution—like a camera with 64 mega-pixels rather than 16—are needed to simulate the monster heatwaves observed the world over the last 20 years.

"This new study shines a valuable spotlight on the high potential for record-shattering extremes," including the kind of extreme rainfall that ravaged Germany and China earlier this month, noted Rowan Sutton, a professor at the University of Reading's National Centre for Atmospheric Science, in Britain.

"Whilst it may not seem rapid to us, Earth is warming at a rate that is unprecedented in the history of human civilisation."

Source

If you’re not much of a holiday goer you mightn’t have realised that Google shows you flight and hotel information if you search for it.

According to a Reuters report, the European Commission knows all about this functionality and, as you can probably guess, isn’t very happy with Google's implementation and its threatening possible sanctions if it doesn’t rectify the concerns that were raised.

The EU has said that Google should explain to users how it has ranked the search result and it should also include the final prices of services, factoring in things such as fees and taxes. It also said that any discounts offered in Google Flights or Google Hotels should clearly highlight which prices were used to make the calculation.

In response to the EU’s requested changes, Google said:

“We welcome this dialogue and are working closely with consumer protection agencies and the European Commission to see how we can make improvements that will be good for our users and provide even more transparency.”

Going forward, Google needs to get back in contact with the EU with its proposals in hand. If the EU is not happy with the changes Google recommends, the web search firm will have to enter further discussions with the EU and face sanctions from the bloc.

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People over the age of 60 living in the UK and the US who had more virtual contact during the pandemic actually experienced a greater increase in loneliness, new research finds.

The study showed a notable increase in loneliness in the US and a decline in general mental well-being in the UK following the outbreak of COVID-19.

The research also found that virtual interaction—such as phone calls, texting, online audio and video chat, and social media—which largely replaced, where possible, in-person contact during the pandemic was not helpful on its own as an alternative for face-to-face interaction, and virtual interaction was associated with greater loneliness.

In both countries, older adults who admitted to having more frequent in-person interaction with families and friends between households during the pandemic had better general mental well-being, but virtual interactions, through telephone and digital media, were not associated with general mental well-being in either the UK or the US.

The research, "COVID-19, Inter-household Contact and Mental Well-being among Older Adults in the US and the UK," is published in Frontiers in Sociology today.

The study was undertaken by Sociologists Dr. Yang Hu, of Lancaster University, and Dr. Yue Qian, at the University of British Columbia in Canada.

They analyzed national data from the UK's Economic and Social Research Council-funded Understanding Society COVID-19 Survey and the U.S. Health and Retirement Survey.

The data was collected from 5148 older people aged 60 or over in the UK and 1391 in the US who were surveyed both before (2018–2019) and during (June 2020) the pandemic.

This study is among the first to comparatively assess the association between social interactions across households and mental well-being in the COVID-19 pandemic.

"Our findings show that despite rapid digitisation in the UK and elsewhere, virtual means of social interaction cannot replace in-person contact in supporting older people's mental health," explains Dr. Hu.

"This has to do with a complex set of factors, such as digital access, device affordance, tech know-how, and potential digital stress among the aging population."

The pandemic severely curtailed face-to-face contact between households, particularly for older adults (aged 60 and above), due to their high risk of falling severely ill if infected by COVID-19.

This research examines how different forms of interactions between family and friends living in different households related to older adults' mental well-being during the pandemic.

The research showed:

• Face-to-face contact between family and friends living in different households was important for the over 60s' mental well-being in both the UK and the US.

• Although virtual communication has increased considerably during the pandemic, it was not a 'qualitatively equivalent alternative' for in-person contact.

• Virtual contact, when used on top of face-to-face contact, helped bolster mental well-being.

• Patterns were very similar in both the UK and the US, despite the different contexts and pandemic responses.

These findings provide an important evidence base for informing policy developments and for supporting the mental health of older people during the pandemic.

The study suggests that public health policymakers and practitioners should address the looming mental health crisis cascading from the pandemic into the aging population.

The findings also outline the limitations of a digital-only future and the promise of a digitally-enhanced future in response to population aging in the longer term.

"Policymakers and practitioners need to take measures to pre-empt and mitigate the potential unintended implications of household-centered pandemic responses for mental well-being," said Dr. Qian.

"Beyond the context of the pandemic, the findings also indicate the need to enable strong inter-household ties to bolster public mental health in the long run."

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BEIJING (Reuters) - Antibodies triggered by Sinovac Biotech's COVID-19 vaccine decline below a key threshold from around six months after a second dose for most recipients, although a third shot could have a strong boosting effect, according to a lab study.

Chinese researchers reported the findings from a study of blood samples from healthy adults aged between 18-59 in a paper published on Sunday, which has not been peer reviewed.

For participants receiving two doses, two or four weeks apart, only 16.9% and 35.2% respectively still had a level of neutralising antibodies above the threshold six months after the second dose, the paper said.

Those readings was based on data from two cohorts involving more than 50 participants each, while the study gave third doses to a total of 540 participants.

When participants in some cohorts were given a third dose, about six months after the second, neutralising antibody levels after a further 28 days had increased around 3-5 fold from the levels seen four weeks after the second dose, the study showed.

The study was conducted by researchers at disease control authorities in Jiangsu province, Sinovac, and other Chinese institutions.

Researchers cautioned the study did not test the antibodies' effect against more transmissible variants, and that further research was needed to assess antibody duration after a third shot.

(Reporting by Roxanne Liu and Ryan Woo; Editing by Mark Potter)

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• New South Wales reports 145 new coronavirus cases on Monday, up from 141 on pvs day, and two deaths
• Thousands marched in Sydney anti-lockdown protest on weekend
• Police warn similar behaviour "won't be tolerated again"
• The authorities have said they want that number near zero before lifting the city's most restrictive lockdown of the pandemic at a July 30 target date.

SYDNEY, July 26 (Reuters) - Australia's most populous state reported a rise in new COVID-19 cases on Monday despite a weeks-long stay-at-home order, while police vowed to crack down on any repeat of a anti-lockdown protest which turned violent at the weekend.

New South Wales, which has had more than 5 million people in Sydney city under lockdown for a month, reported 145 new cases of the virus, from 141 a day earlier, as it struggles to contain an outbreak of the highly contagious Delta variant.

The state also reported two new deaths, a man and a woman both in their 80s, taking its total fatalities to 10 since the flare-up began a month ago and the national total to 920 since the start of the pandemic.

Of particular concern, 51 of the newly diagnosed were active in the community before testing positive, raising the risk of transmission. The authorities have said they want that number near zero before lifting the city's most restrictive lockdown of the pandemic at a July 30 target date.

"We might need to go harder in some areas and release some settings in others," state premier Gladys Berejiklian said at a televised news conference, apparently referencing five government areas of Sydney's suburbs at the epicentre of the outbreak.

Berejiklian added that she would give an update on movement restrictions in the next few days.

At the weekend, thousands of people marched in an anti-lockdown protest which turned violent in central Sydney, an event that state chief health officer Kerry Chant called "distressing".

As images and videos of the protest circulated on social media, including one image of a man apparently punching a police horse in the head, state police commissioner Mick Fuller said some 10,000 people had called the police hotline to report people suspected of breaking lockdown orders.

The calls to police were "an amazing outcry by the community, not just in terms of their disgust at the protest but at the way the police were treated", said Fuller.

Police knew of plans for a repeat protest and similar behaviour "won't be tolerated again", he added.

Victoria state, also under lockdown, reported 11 new cases, although all were in quarantine during their infectious period. Authorities said they would decide the next day whether to lift restrictions as hoped.

Neighbouring South Australia said it was on track to exit its snap one-week lockdown on Wednesday, after reporting one new local case, also in quarantine through their infectious period.

VACCINE RUSH

The outbreak, sparked by an infected airport transit driver in Sydney, has resulted in thousands of new cases of the fast-moving Delta variant and reimposed lockdown on more than half the country's 25 million population.

With only about 16% of Australians aged over 16 years so far fully vaccinated, the country's main drug regulator on the weekend changed its recommendation to encourage wider takeup of the AstraZeneca Plc (AZN.L) vaccine.

The Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation (ATAGI) had previously recommended restricting the AstraZeneca shot, the main vaccine in the country's immunisation arsenal, to people aged over 60 due to an extremely rare risk of blood clots in younger people.

Many Australians including those over 60 had opted to wait for an alternative made by Pfizer Inc (PFE.N) which has had its use restricted to people aged 40 to 60 due to supply constraints.

ATAGI on the weekend recommended that all adults in Sydney should now "strongly consider the benefits of earlier protection" with the AstraZeneca jab.

The move was supported by lawmakers, with Federal Treasurer Josh Frydenberg telling reporters that "getting vaccinated is our ticket out of this crisis".

AstraZeneca welcomed the change, saying regulators around the world had "stated that the benefit(s) of using our vaccine significantly outweigh the risks".

With about 32,900 cases and less than 1,000 deaths, Australia has kept its coronavirus numbers relatively low although the Delta strain and low vaccination numbers among developed economies have worried residents.

Source

Said to be using gift cards to incentivise buildings to install its Key for Business system

Amazon’s Key for Business, a system that allows its delivery drivers to gain access to apartment buildings without having to be buzzed in, has been installed in thousands of buildings across the US, according to the Associated Press. The company is reportedly pushing to get the system installed in more buildings, using a combination of free installations and $100 gift cards as incentives.

The system is designed to make it easier for Amazon’s drivers to make deliveries to apartment buildings. Rather than having to be buzzed in by residents or a concierge, a driver can use the system to gain temporary access to lobbies via the Amazon Flex app. Then packages can be delivered directly to residents or safely left behind in a mail room or with a doorman. In a technical breakdown of the system published in 2019, Amazon says in a pilot program the system increased the success of first time deliveries from 96 to around 98 percent.

The technology arrived as a pilot in 2018 before getting an official launch the following year. But unlike a similar system from Amazon for homeowners to install in private properties, Key for Business is installed by building managers who reportedly aren’t under any obligation to tell their tenants when the system is in use. This raises potential security concerns for residents about an internet-connected entry device that gives drivers, vetted by Amazon, easy access to their buildings.

Amazon is reportedly pushing hard to expand the number of buildings the system is installed in. According to the Associated Press, it’s pitching Key for Business to building managers and partnering with locksmiths to offer installations, sometimes free of charge. A spokesperson from Amazon was not immediately available to respond to a request for comment from The Verge, and declined to confirm a total number of installations to AP.

As well as making deliveries easier and potentially quicker, the system may give Amazon’s delivery drivers a competitive advantage over its rivals. Buildings are unlikely to install similar systems for multiple delivery companies, ultimately incentivizing their residents to use Amazon.

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Coronavirus lockdowns are likely to be lifted in two major Australian cities this week, authorities said Monday, as outbreaks of the Delta variant were brought under control.

Around half of Australia's 25 million largely unvaccinated residents are currently under stay-at-home orders.

But while the largest city Sydney struggled to bring its outbreak to heel, the states of Victoria and South Australia reported progress.

South Australia premier Steven Marshall said Monday that a week of stay-at-home orders would "most likely be lifted" in the early hours of Wednesday.

The state, which includes the city of Adelaide, reported one new infection on Monday, a case already in isolation.

Some restrictions will remain in place.

"We won't be going directly back to where we were," said Marshall, outlining lingering rules on social distancing and mask-wearing.

Restaurants will be seated-only and a ban on shisha pipes, dancing and singing will remain.

Similarly, authorities in Victoria—which includes Australia's second city Melbourne—said the state was "on the right track" to also lift its lockdown early Wednesday.

Victoria reported 11 new cases on Sunday, but all were in quarantine.

But the state's Health Minister Martin Foley cautioned that a final decision had yet to be made and the situation has been fast-changing.

Melbourne began its fifth lockdown earlier this month.

In Sydney, the picture was less rosy.

The city is struggling with its most serious COVID-19 outbreak to date, recording 145 new cases Monday as the outbreak grew to 2,226 cases.

Sydney's month-long lockdown is almost certain to be extended on Friday.

Last week, the New South Wales state premier suggested restrictions could remain in place for another month or more, fuelling a thousands-strong protest on Saturday that was widely condemned.

Since the pandemic began, Australia has recorded about 33,000 infections and 918 COVID-related deaths.

Just 13 percent of Australians have been vaccinated, with poor supplies of Pfizer-BioNTech shots and scepticism about the AstraZeneca jab.

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The center of this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope is framed by the tell-tale arcs that result from strong gravitational lensing, a striking astronomical phenomenon which can warp, magnify, or even duplicate the appearance of distant galaxies.

Gravitational lensing occurs when light from a distant galaxy is subtly distorted by the gravitational pull of an intervening astronomical object. In this case, the relatively nearby galaxy cluster MACSJ0138.0-2155 has lensed a significantly more distant inactive galaxy—a slumbering giant known as MRG-M0138 which has run out of the gas required to form new stars and is located 10 billion light-years away. Astronomers can use gravitational lensing as a natural magnifying glass, allowing them to inspect objects like distant dormant galaxies which would usually be too difficult for even Hubble to resolve.

This image was made using observations from eight different infrared filters spread across two of Hubble's most advanced astronomical instruments: the Advanced Camera for Surveys and the Wide Field Camera 3. These instruments were installed by astronauts during the final two servicing missions to Hubble and provide astronomers with superbly detailed observations across a large area of sky and a wide range of wavelengths.

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Social media is rife with posts disparaging the vaccine hesitant – but these reactions to a complex and nuanced issue are doing more harm than good.

There should be no doubt about it: Covid-19 vaccines are saving lives.

Consider some recent statistics from the UK. In a study tracking more than 200,000 people, nearly every single participant had developed antibodies against the virus within two weeks of their second dose. And despite initial worries that the current vaccines may be less effective against the Delta variant, analyses suggest that both the AstraZeneca and the Pfizer-BioNTech jabs reduce hospitalisation rates by 92-96%. As many health practitioners have repeated, the risks of severe side effects from a vaccine are tiny in comparison to the risk of the disease itself.

Yet a sizeable number of people are still reluctant to get the shots. According to a recent report by the International Monetary Fund, that ranges from around 10-20% of people in the UK to around 50% in Japan and 60% in France.

The result is becoming something of a culture war on social media, with many online commentators claiming that the vaccine hesitant are simply ignorant or selfish. But psychologists who specialise in medical decision-making argue these choices are often the result of many complicating factors that need to be addressed sensitively, if we are to have any hope of reaching population-level immunity.

The 5Cs

First, some distinctions. While it is tempting to assume that anyone who refuses a vaccine holds the same beliefs, the fears of most vaccine hesitant people should not be confused with the bizarre theories of staunch anti-vaxxers. "They're very vocal, and they have a strong presence offline and online," says Mohammad Razai at the Population Health Research Institute, St George's, University of London, who has written about the various psychological and social factors that can influence people's decision-making around vaccines. "But they’re a very small minority."

The vast majority of vaccine-hesitant people do not have a political agenda and are not committed to an anti-scientific cause: they are simply undecided about their choice to take the injection.

The good news is that many people who were initially hesitant are changing their mind. "But even a delay is considered a threat to health because viral infections spread very quickly," says Razai. This would have been problematic if we were still dealing with the older variants of the virus, but the higher transmissibility of the new Delta variant has increased the urgency of reaching as many people as quickly as possible.

Fear of needles is a leading reason why many are reluctant to take the vaccine, research suggests (Credit: Jasmine Merdan/Getty Images)

Fortunately, scientists began studying vaccine hesitancy long before Sars-Cov-2 was first identified in Wuhan in December 2019, and they have explored various models which attempt to capture the differences in people's health behaviour. One of the most promising is known as the 5Cs model, which considers the following psychological factors:

• Confidence: the person's trust in the vaccines efficacy and safety, the health services offering them, and the policy makers deciding on their rollout

• Complacency: whether or not the person considers the disease itself to be a serious risk to their health

• Calculation: the individual's engagement in extensive information searching to weigh up the costs and benefits

• Constraints (or convenience): how easy it is for the person in question to access the vaccine

• Collective responsibility: the willingness to protect others from infection, through one's own vaccination

In 2018, Cornelia Betsch at the University of Erfurt in Germany and colleagues asked participants to rate a series of statements that measured each of the 5Cs, and then compared the results with their actual uptake of relevant procedures, such as the influenza or the HPV vaccine. Sure enough, they found that the 5Cs could explain a large amount of the variation in people's decisions, and consistently outperformed many other potential predictors – such as questionnaires that focused more exclusively on issues of trust without considering the other factors.

It is useful to examine the various cognitive biases that are known to sway our perceptions

In currently unpublished research, Betsch recently used the model to predict people's uptake of the Covid-19 vaccines, and her results so far suggest that the 5Cs model can explain the majority of the variation in people's decisions.

There will be other contributing factors, of course. A recent study from the University of Oxford suggests that a fear of needles is a major barrier for around 10% of the population. But the 5Cs approach certainly seems to capture the most common reasons for vaccine hesitancy.

Confirmation bias

When considering these different factors and the ways they may be influencing people's behaviour, it is also useful to examine the various cognitive biases that are known to sway our perceptions.

Consider the first two Cs – the confidence in the vaccine, the complacency about the dangers of disease itself.

Most people hesitant about taking the vaccine do not have anti-scientific views like the small minority of anti-vaccine protesters (Credit: Tolga Akmen/AFP/Getty Images)

Jessica Saleska at the University of California, Los Angeles points out that humans have two seemingly contradictory tendencies – a "negativity bias" and an "optimism bias" that can each skew people’s appraisals of the risks and benefits.

The negativity bias concerns the way you appraise events beyond your control. "When you're presented with negative information, that tends to stick in your mind," says Saleska. The optimism bias, in contrast, concerns your beliefs about yourself – whether you think you are fitter and healthier than the average person. These biases may work independently, meaning that you may focus on the dangerous side effects of the vaccines while simultaneously believing that you are less likely to suffer from the disease, a combination that would reduce confidence and increase complacency.

It is easy to dismiss someone else's decisions if you don't understand the challenges they face in their day-to-day lives

Then there's the famous confirmation bias, which can also twist people's perceptions of the risks of the virus through the ready availability of misinformation from dubious sources that exaggerate the risks of the vaccines. This reliance on misleading resources means that people who score highly on the "calculation" measure of the 5Cs scale – the people who actively look for data – are often more vaccine hesitant than people who score lower. "If you already think the vaccination could be risky, then you type in 'is this vaccination dangerous?', then all you are going find is the information that confirms your prior view," says Betsch. 

Remember that these psychological tendencies are extremely common. Even if you have accepted the vaccine, they have probably influenced your own decision making in many areas of life. To ignore them, and to assume that the vaccine hesitant are somehow wilfully ignorant, is itself a foolish stance.

Health authorities need to produce simple, easy to understand information which shows the vaccine is safe (Credit: Tang Ming Tung/Getty Images)

Nor should we forget the many social factors that might influence people's uptake – the "constraints/convenience" factor in the 5Cs.

Quite simply, the perception that a vaccine is difficult to access will only discourage people who are already sitting on the fence. When we spoke, Betsch suggested that this might have slowed the uptake in Germany, which has a very complicated system to identify who is eligible to receive the vaccine at any one time. People would respond much more quickly, she says, if they received automatic notifications.

Razai agrees that we need to consider the question of convenience, particularly for those in poorer communities who may struggle with the time and expense of the journey to a vaccination centre. "Travelling to and from that may be a huge issue for most people who are on minimum wage or unemployment benefits," he says. That's why it's often best for the vaccines to be administered in local community centres. "I think there has been anecdotal evidence of it being more successful in places of worship, mosque, gurdwaras, and churches."

Finally, we need to be aware of the context of people's decisions, he says – such as the structural racism that might had led certain ethnic groups to have lower overall trust in medical authorities. It is easy to dismiss someone else's decisions if you don't understand the challenges they face in their day-to-day lives.

Opening a dialogue

So what can be done?

There is no easy solution, but health authorities can continue to provide easy-to-digest, accurate information address the major concerns. According to a recent report by Imperial College London's Institute of Global Health Innovation (IGHI), the major barriers continue to be patient's concerns about the side effects and the fears that the vaccines haven’t been adequately tested.

I would urge governments to stop thinking they can reach the mass of niches out there with one mass-market vaccine message – Sarah Jones

For the former, graphics showing the relative risks of the vaccines, compared to the actual disease, can provide some context. For the latter, Razai suggests that we need more education about the history of the vaccines' development. The use of mRNA in vaccines has been studied for decades, for instance – with long trials testing its safety. This meant the technique could be quickly adapted for the pandemic. "None of the technology that has been used would be in any way harmful because we have used these technologies in other areas in healthcare and research," Razai says.

Sarah Jones, a doctoral researcher who co-led the IGHI report, suggests a targeted approach will be necessary. "I would urge governments to stop thinking they can reach the mass of niches out there with one mass-market vaccine message, and work more creatively with many effective communications partners," she says. That might involve closer collaborations with the influencer role models within each community, she says, who can provide "consistent and accurate information" about the vaccines' risks and benefits.

Making vaccine centres easy for locals to get too - like this one in India - makes them more likely to be used (Credit: Sunil Ghosh/Hindustan Times/Getty Images)

However they choose to deliver the information, health services need to make it clear that they are engaging in an open dialogue, Razai says – rather than simply dismissing them out of hand. "We have to listen to people's concerns, acknowledge them, and give them information so they can make an informed decision."

Saleska agrees that it's essential to engage in a two-way conversation – and that's something that we could all learn as we discuss these issues with our friends and family. "Being respectful and recognising their concerns – I think that could actually be more important than just spitting out the facts or statistics," she says. "A lot of the time, it's more about the personal connection than it is about the actual information that you provide."

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All life on Earth rests on the same foundation: a four-letter genetic alphabet spelling out a repertoire of three-letter words that specify 20 amino acids. These basic building blocks—the components of DNA and their molecular interpreters—lie at biology’s core. “It’s hard to imagine something more fundamental,” said Floyd Romesberg, a synthetic biologist at the pharmaceutical company Sanofi.

 

Yet life’s foundational biochemistry can be full of surprises. A few decades ago, researchers found viruses that had swapped one of the four bases in their DNA for a novel fifth one. Now, in a trio of papers published in Science in April, three teams have identified dozens of other viruses that make this substitution, as well as the mechanisms that make it possible. The discoveries raise the thought-provoking possibility that this kind of fundamental genomic change could be much more widespread and important in biology than anyone imagined.

 

“Here was this wonderful validation that right under our noses, nature has been expanding,” said Stephen Freeland, a biologist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

 

“It really speaks to the adaptability of the genetic alphabet,” Romesberg said.

 

Researchers have long been intrigued by the possibility that evolution could have gone in a different direction with DNA’s four bases: adenine (A), thymine (T), cytosine (C), and guanine (G). Perhaps there could have been more than four of them, or they could have had very different chemical or binding properties, or they could have used a different set of rules to represent information. Synthetic biologists like Romesberg have explored this by engineering artificial base pairs and additional amino acids to produce novel proteins. Even so, because an organism’s survival depends on keeping its genetic alphabet and code intact, the precise ingredients in DNA’s recipe are thought to have been largely locked in by evolution for billions of years—making them “frozen accidents,” in the words of Francis Crick.

 

But some exceptions have cropped up. In 1977, for instance, researchers in the Soviet Union found something peculiar while looking at a virus that infects photosynthetic bacteria: All the A’s in the genome had been replaced with an alternative base, 2-aminoadenine, which was later dubbed Z. Usually, C pairs with G and T pairs with A to form double-stranded DNA. But in this virus, with no A’s to be found, T paired with Z. (During gene transcription, T-Z was still treated as though it were T-A.)

 

The Z base looks like a chemical modification of A; it’s an adenine nucleotide with an extra attachment. But that modest change allows Z to form a triple hydrogen bond with T, which is more stable than the double bond that holds together A-T.

 

The finding was intriguing but seemed like an isolated case. “It came as a kind of curiosity, something really weird and of no general significance,” said Philippe Marlière, a geneticist at the University of Evry in France and one of the leaders of the new research on Z genomes. “And so it settled into oblivion, more or less.”

 

But since the alterations were “at the deepest level of chemical organization,” he said, “my instinct told me this is not just an anecdote. This is a profound violation.”

 

In the early 2000s, Marlière and his colleagues sequenced the genome of the bacteriophage that the Russian team had studied, and they pinpointed a genetic sequence associated with production of the Z base. For the next 15 years, they searched for matches in databases of other viral genomes. Another group, led by researchers in Illinois and China, independently joined the effort.

 

The scientists have now reported finding the Z substitution in more than 200 phages. Further analysis of the viral genomes allowed the research groups to uncover a key enzyme for making Z, as well as an enzyme that degrades free-floating A nucleotides, making Z more likely to be taken up during DNA synthesis.

But the biggest surprise was that the viruses had a polymerase enzyme dedicated to pairing Z bases with T’s during DNA replication. “It was like a fairy tale,” said Marlière, who had been hoping to find such a polymerase. “Our wildest dreams came true.”

 

That’s because while scientists have uncovered other examples of bacteriophages making nucleotide substitutions, this “is the first polymerase that is really shown to selectively exclude a canonical nucleotide,” said Peter Weigele, a researcher at New England Biolabs who studies the biosynthesis of noncanonical bases. The system evolved to allow “a reprogramming,” Romesberg said—one that could potentially provide new insights into how polymerases function, and how to engineer them.

 

Z and other modified DNA bases seem to have evolved to help viruses evade the defenses with which bacteria degrade foreign genetic material. The eternal arms race between bacteriophages and their host cells probably provides enough selection pressure to affect something as seemingly “sacrosanct” as DNA, according to Romesberg. “Right now, everyone thinks the modifications are just protecting the DNA,” he said. “People almost trivialize it.”

 

But something more may be at work: The triple bond of Z, for instance, might add to DNA’s stability and rigidity, and perhaps influence some of its other physical properties. Those changes could carry advantages beyond hiding from bacterial defenses and could make such modifications more broadly significant.

 

After all, no one really knows how many viruses may have played with their DNA like this. “Standard [genome sequencing] methods for looking for biological diversity in nature would fail to find these,” said Steven Benner, a chemist at the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution in Florida who has synthesized several artificial base pairs, “because we are looking in a way that assumes a common biochemistry that is not present.”

 

These kinds of overlooked substitutions might even turn up in more than viruses. “Maybe we missed some of this in the bacterial world, right?” said Chuan He, a chemical biologist at the University of Chicago.

 

Synthetic biology has (again) shown that this is possible. For years, Marlière’s team has been evolving E. coli that use a modified base instead of T nucleotides. Huimin Zhao, a chemist at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and a leader of some of the recent Z genome work, is trying to get E. coli and potentially other cells to incorporate Z as the viruses do.

 

Romesberg thinks that these findings could raise questions about modifications of bacterial DNA that were thought to be epigenetic—that is, changes made to nucleotides after the DNA was synthesized, usually to influence gene expression. The Z substitution, he said, “shows that things that you might have thought were epigenetic might not be.”

 

“I think people need to look under rocks that were thought to be understood,” he added. “That’s where surprises come from.”

 

But there’s also plenty of room for surprises in less well-studied places, because “we can’t cultivate most of Earth’s microbes,” said Carol Cleland, a philosopher of science at the University of Colorado, Boulder. “Is there other stuff out there that we just aren’t able to recognize?”

 

Marlière wonders, for example, if scientists might one day stumble on more than one kind of base modification in a single genome. Or perhaps they’ll find a change to the molecular backbone of DNA, in which case “it would no longer be DNA,” he said. “It would be something else.”

 

We need to “stop taking the components of molecular biology as we know them for granted,” Freeland said. “Purely because our instrumentation has gotten better and we’ve looked harder, everything that we thought was standard and universal is just falling away.”

DNA Has Four Bases. Some Viruses Swap in a Fifth

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OSLO, July 25 (Reuters) - An "unusually large meteor" briefly lit up southern Norway on Sunday, creating a spectacular sound and light display as it rumbled across the sky, and a bit of it may have hit Earth, possibly not far from the capital, Oslo, experts said.

There were no immediate reports of injuries or damage.

Reports of sightings started arriving around 1 a.m. with the phenomena being seen as far north as Trondheim.

A web camera in Holmestrand, south of Oslo, captured a fireball falling from the sky and erupting into a bright flash lighting up a marina.

The Norwegian Meteor network was analysing video footage and other data on Sunday to try to pinpoint the meteor's origin and destination.

Preliminary data suggested a meteorite may have hit Earth in a large wooded area, called Finnemarka, just 60 km (40 miles) west of the capital, Oslo, the network said.

"This was crazy," the network's Morten Bilet, who saw and heard the meteor, told Reuters.

By Sunday afternoon no debris had been found and given the "demanding" location, one could take "some 10 years" searching for possible meteorites, Bilet said.

The meteor travelled at 15-20 km per second and lit up the night sky for about five to six seconds, Bilet said. The summer sky was dark, with the days starting to get shorter from the end of June.

Some eyewitnesses also said they felt a stronger wind blow with the event also causing a pressure wave, Bilet said.

"What we had last night was a large rock travelling likely from between Mars and Jupiter, which is our asteroid belt. And when that whizzes in, it creates a rumble, light and great excitement among us (experts) and maybe some fear among others," Bilet said.

There were no reports of damage or people being particularly frightened, Bilet said, adding that for those nearest it was likely more of a "spooky" event.

A meteor that exploded over the central Russia near the city of Chelyabinsk in 2013 rained fireballs over a vast area and caused a shock wave that smashed windows, damaged buildings and injured 1,200 people.

Reporting by Nora Buli Editing by Nick Macfie and Frances Kerry

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Virus-wracked Indonesia said Sunday that small businesses and some shopping malls could reopen despite warnings that loosening curbs could spark another devastating COVID-19 wave, even as it moved to extend a web of restrictions launched last month.

President Joko Widodo said measures imposed in early July would continue until August 2 as the highly infectious Delta variant tears across the Southeast Asian archipelago, which has been overtaking battered India and Brazil as the world's virus epicentre.

But he added that "adjustments" would be made to a shutdown that closed malls, restaurants, parks and offices including in the capital Jakarta, hard-hit Java and on holiday island Bali.

Traditional markets, roadside vendors and ubiquitous open-air restaurants known as warungs would be among businesses allowed to reopen Monday with restrictions, even in the worst-affected areas.

Shopping malls and mosques in less hard-hit parts of the Muslim majority country would also get the green light to swing open their doors to limited crowds and hours.

Offices would remain subject to shutdown orders, the government said.

However, there have been widespread reports of employers forcing non-essential employees to work even under the current lockdown.

Widodo, pointing to falling daily infection and hospital occupancy rates, said any loosening would be done "gradually and carefully".

Official case rates are down from more than 50,000 a day. But testing rates have also declined at the same time, while the number of positive results remains high—suggesting that the virus was still spreading quickly.

The announcement came after Indonesia saw its 24-hour death toll hit a record 1,566 on Friday.

The World Health Organization has called on Indonesia to impose tighter virus curbs.

Widodo's government has been widely criticised over its handling of the pandemic and policies that appeared to prioritise Southeast Asia's biggest economy over public health.

"The government faces a dilemma because it has seen countries that focused on the economy risked their public health, while others that prioritised public health had their economies battered," said Arya Fernandes, a political analyst at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies.

"So they're trying to find a win-win solution by imposing restrictions but still keeping the economy open."

Indonesia's vaccination levels remain far below the government's one-million-a-day target for July and only about six percent of its nearly 270 million people have been fully inoculated.

"Lifting restrictions will bring more infections and deaths," Dicky Budiman, an Indonesia epidemiologist at Australia's Griffith University, told AFP before Sunday's announcement.

"Restrictions must be in place for a minimum of four weeks and (the government) needs to increase testing, tracing and treatment to have maximum results. Otherwise, it's just the same as having no restrictions."

Indonesia has reported more than 3.1 million cases and 83,279 deaths since the pandemic began, but those official figures are widely believed to be a severe undercount.

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The United States is in an "unnecessary predicament" of soaring COVID-19 cases fueled by unvaccinated Americans and the virulent delta variant, the nation's top infectious diseases expert said Sunday.

"We're going in the wrong direction," said Dr. Anthony Fauci, describing himself as "very frustrated."

He said recommending that the vaccinated wear masks is "under active consideration" by the government's leading public health officials. Also, booster shots may be suggested for people with suppressed immune systems who have been vaccinated, Fauci said.

Fauci, who also serves as President Joe Biden's chief medical adviser, told CNN's "State of the Union" that he has taken part in conversations about altering the mask guidelines.

He noted that some local jurisdictions where infection rates are surging, such as Los Angeles County, are already calling on individuals to wear masks in indoor public spaces regardless of vaccination status. Fauci said those local rules are compatible with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommendation that the vaccinated do not need to wear masks in public.

Nearly 163 million people, or 49% of the eligible U.S. population, are vaccinated, according to CDC data.

"This is an issue predominantly among the unvaccinated, which is the reason why we're out there, practically pleading with the unvaccinated people to go out and get vaccinated," Fauci said.

Fauci said government experts are reviewing early data as they consider whether to recommend that vaccinated individuals to get booster shots. He suggested that some of the most vulnerable, such as organ transplant and cancer patients, are "likely" to be recommended for booster shots.

He also praised Republicans, including Govs. Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas and Ron DeSantis of Florida, and the second-ranking House leader, Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana, for encouraging their constituents to get vaccinated. Their states have among the lowest vaccination rates in the country.

"What I would really like to see is more and more of the leaders in those areas that are not vaccinating to get out and speak out and encourage people to get vaccinated," Fauci said.

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MELBOURNE (Reuters) -Australia's New South Wales logged its second-highest daily increase of the year in locally acquired COVID-19 cases on Sunday amid fears of a wave of new infections after thousands of people joined an anti-lockdown protest.

"In relation to yesterday's protests, can I say how absolutely disgusted I was. It broke my heart," Gladys Berejiklian, the premier of the country's most populous state, told reporters.

"I hope it won't be a setback, but it could be," she said.

There were 141 COVID-19 cases reported, down from 163 a day earlier. The outbreak, which began in June, is being driven by the highly contagious Delta variant of the virus, and has now infected 2,081 people in New South Wales. There are 43 people in intensive care, up from 37 a day earlier.

Under fire for a slow vaccine rollout, Prime Minister Scott Morrison said more vaccine supply was not going to ensure New South Wales gets out of lockdown, but what was needed was an effective, properly enforced lockdown.

"Let me be clear - there's not an alternative to the lockdown in New South Wales to get this under control. There is no other magic bullet that's going to do that," Morrison told reporters at a televised media conference.

He called the anti-lockdown protests in Sydney reckless and self-defeating.

While Berejiklian and other state leaders have blamed Canberra for the slow vaccine rollout, critics have said NSW did not enforce its stay-at-home orders, which has led to Delta variant leaks to other states.

At least 38 of the new cases in NSW had spent time in the community while infectious, state health authorities said. Numbers of such cases have stayed stubbornly high even after four weeks of lockdown in Sydney, now expected to be extended beyond July 30.

The state reported two deaths overnight, including a woman in her 30s with no pre-existing conditions.

Despite its struggle with spikes of infections, Australia has managed to keep its epidemic largely under control with a total of about 32,600 cases and 918 deaths.

To help speed up vaccinations in Sydney, the government's official adviser, the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation (ATAGI), on Saturday changed its advice on the AstraZeneca vaccine, urging anyone in the city under the age of 60 to strongly consider getting vaccinated with it.

ATAGI had previously advised against the AstraZeneca vaccine for people under 60 due to concerns about blood clots.

"In the context of the current risk of COVID-19 in NSW and with the ongoing constraints on Comirnaty (Pfizer) vaccine supplies, all adults in greater Sydney should strongly consider the benefits of earlier protection with COVID-19 Vaccine AstraZeneca rather than waiting for alternative vaccines," ATAGI said in a statement.

Morrison said on Sunday the government has secured an additional 85 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine, but they will only be delivered in 2022 and 2023.

"To have those booster shots pre-ordered means we can go into 2022 with confidence," he said.

Australia's Victoria state reported 11 locally acquired COVID-19 cases on Sunday, down from 12 a day earlier, raising hopes the state will end a hard lockdown imposed 10 days ago.

State Premier Daniel Andrews said it was too early to say whether restrictions will be eased on Tuesday, but: "At this stage, though, things are going well."

All of the cases were linked to the current outbreak clusters and all of them were in isolation throughout their infectious period, the state's health department said.

South Australia reported three new cases on Sunday.

(Reporting by Sonali Paul; Editing by Edwina Gibbs and Christian Schmollinger)

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The international scheme to obtain a coveted Twitter handle ended on a sleepy, country road in Tennessee when police surrounded the home of Mark Herring and ordered him to come out with his hands up.

Authorities were called to the Sumner County address in April 2020 in response to a report that a woman had been fatally shot and pipe bombs would go off if officers arrived, according to court records.

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In the hours before, Herring, 60, and his family had been harassed by several people aiming to acquire and then resell lucrative social media handles through a range of intimidation - from phone calls and text messages to false reports of fires and unexpected, cash-only pizza deliveries at their homes.

But Herring's refusal to give up his @Tennessee handle, federal prosecutors say, led to a night in which the shocking and confusing sight of police with their guns drawn outside his home caused the computer programmer to suffer a massive heart attack that killed him. His death in Bethpage, Tenn., was triggered by "swatting" - the illegal practice of calling in fake life-threatening emergencies to provoke a heavily-armed response from police.

"I didn't understand how this happened," Corinna Fitch, his eldest daughter, told The Washington Post. "We saw all this news coming out about these people wanting his Twitter handle and how this was the reason he died. It was just mind-boggling to know the man who forever preached Internet safety died this way."

On Wednesday, Shane Sonderman was sentenced in Memphis federal court to five years in prison for one count of conspiracy.

Sonderman, 20, of Lauderdale County, Tenn., pleaded guilty to the conspiracy charge in March in exchange for several other charges to be dropped.

Federal prosecutors say Sonderman targeted at least five people and attempted to pressure them to sell him their social media handles, according to court documents obtained by The Post. Herring, a father of three and grandfather of six, is the only person targeted who died as a result.

Sonderman posted Herring's contact information online on April 27, 2020, and a co-conspirator, a minor in the United Kingdom, falsely reported to police of a murder at Herring's home shortly thereafter, court documents say. The British minor, identified as "C.B." in the indictment, was not extradited to the United States for charges.

Bryan Huffman, Sonderman's attorney, said he thought his client's sentencing was fair and emphasized that Sonderman has expressed remorse for actions that helped lead to Herring's death.

"He has expressed his regret regarding Mr. Herring's death," Huffman said to The Post. "He further was able to convey his sincere remorse to the other victims as well."

This week's sentencing is the latest example of how people have escalated online disputes or harassment into real-world consequences ending with tense scenes involving heavily-armed police or SWAT teams.

"Swatters" have been arrested and sentenced in recent years over plots that eventually ended in death.

Several people have been sentenced this year for committing what one prosecutor described as "the most widespread swatting conspiracy in the country" known to federal law enforcement. In that case, journalists and government officials were targeted by the leader of a violent neo-Nazi group.

Fitch, 37, recalled how smart her father was in grabbing the @Tennessee handle when he joined Twitter in March 2007. Herring, who loved technology, wanted the Twitter name because he loved his home state, especially the mountains and the University of Tennessee Volunteers, she said. The daughter was always surprised when he would tell her about the offers he would get for the handle, some worth thousands of dollars.

"Several times a year, he'd be like, 'I got another offer,' " she said. "It was unreal."

The @Tennessee name was a clear target for Sonderman, who joined several other suspects in creating fake accounts to target people in multiple states - New York, Virginia, Michigan - with interesting social media names, prosecutors say. If people did not hand over their social media handles, which could be resold for thousands of dollars, then Sonderman and his associates would barrage them in a variety of ways.

One victim in Oregon reported how Sonderman's co-conspirators falsely reported a fire at her parents' house last year.

"did your parent's enjoy the firetrucks?" they wrote to Oregon victim in a text message with grammatical errors, according to the indictment. "i plan on killing your parents next if you do not hand the username on instrgam over to me."

Neither Fitch nor the rest of Herring's family could have expected what happened next in Bethpage, an unincorporated community about an hour outside Nashville.

Multiple family members were befuddled when they received cash-only pizza deliveries in Herring's name. Thinking it was a joke, Fitch tried to reach out to her father over Facebook after he did not respond to calls or text messages. It wasn't until Greg Hooge, Herring's son-in-law, got a hold of Herring's girlfriend that they knew this was no joke: "She said, 'Everything is not okay.'"

"That was the first indication that something was wrong," Fitch said.

The family would later learn that Herring refused to give up the @Tennessee handle to an anonymous caller who had reached out on April 27, 2020, to demand the name, according to court documents. After this unfolded, Sonderman went on the video game chat platform Discord to share the names and addresses of Herring and his family members, prosecutors say.

Then, as the pizza situation was happening, police responded to a call from someone with a British accent about an alleged murder and bomb threat - and "arrived prepared to take on a life and death situation," according to the indictment.

"Emergency responders were dispatched, and when they arrived at Herring's home, guns drawn, they called for Herring to walk toward them, keeping his hands visible. As he did so, Herring appeared to lose his balance and fell to the ground, unresponsive," prosecutors wrote. "Mr. Herring died of a heart attack at gunpoint."

Fran Herring, his ex-wife, said the timing of his death was no coincidence.

"I believe he was scared to death, and that is what caused his heart attack," she told WKRN.

Investigators later determined Sonderman played a role in the fatal "swatting." Prosecutors said it was clear he "was part of a chain of events" that "led [to] a juvenile halfway across the globe calling for emergency responses to a non-emergency."

After Sonderman pleaded guilty in March, Huffman argued his client deserved a shorter sentence because he did not have a criminal record and came from a family with a "history of severe mental illness."

"Shane is a very young man at the beginning of his life. He fell into the online gaming community and began communicating over the chat functions," Huffman told The Post. "Unfortunately he succumbed to the mischievous and criminal elements which exist on these platforms."

A spokesperson for video game chat platform Discord said in a statement that the company takes safety matters "incredibly seriously" and does engage with authorities when suspicious activity arises.

"We have zero-tolerance for illegal activity on our service, including cases like this that involve swatting," the official said.

Fitch said she and her family are angry over a sentence that she described as "a slap on the wrist." Mark Herring's relatives are pushing for better education surrounding "swatting" for police and hope to meet with elected officials to help stiffen the punishment for the illegal practice, especially in cases where people end up dead.

She remains grateful for the last time she saw her dad. At a neighborhood parade in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, Herring showed up to the parade and kept his distance, waving at her and his grandson, who had just turned 7.

"He said, 'I wish I could hug you,' " Fitch said. "Days later, he was gone."

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Months before the megachurch Hillsong opened its new outpost in Atlanta, its pastor sought advice on how to build a church in a pandemic.

From Facebook.

The social media giant had a proposition, Sam Collier, the pastor, recalled in an interview: to use the church as a case study to explore how churches can “go further farther on Facebook.”

For months Facebook developers met weekly with Hillsong and explored what the church would look like on Facebook and what apps they might create for financial giving, video capability or livestreaming. When it came time for Hillsong’s grand opening in June, the church issued a news release saying it was “partnering with Facebook” and began streaming its services exclusively on the platform.

Beyond that, Mr. Collier could not share many specifics — he had signed a nondisclosure agreement.

“They are teaching us, we are teaching them,” he said. “Together we are discovering what the future of the church could be on Facebook.”

Facebook, which recently passed $1 trillion in market capitalization, may seem like an unusual partner for a church whose primary goal is to share the message of Jesus. But the company has been cultivating partnerships with a wide range of faith communities over the past few years, from individual congregations to large denominations, like the Assemblies of God and the Church of God in Christ.

Now, after the coronavirus pandemic pushed religious groups to explore new ways to operate, Facebook sees even greater strategic opportunity to draw highly engaged users onto its platform. The company aims to become the virtual home for religious community, and wants churches, mosques, synagogues and others to embed their religious life into its platform, from hosting worship services and socializing more casually to soliciting money. It is developing new products, including audio and prayer sharing, aimed at faith groups.

Virtual religious life is not replacing in-person community anytime soon, and even supporters acknowledge the limits of an exclusively online experience. But many religious groups see new opportunity to spiritually influence even more people on Facebook, the world’s largest and arguably most influential social media company.

The partnerships reveal how Big Tech and religion are converging far beyond simply moving services to the internet. Facebook is shaping the future of religious experience itself, as it has done for political and social life.

The company’s effort to court faith groups comes as it is trying to repair its image among Americans who have lost confidence in the platform, especially on issues of privacy. Facebook has faced scrutiny for its role in the country’s growing disinformation crisis and breakdown of societal trust, especially around politics, and regulators have grown concerned about its outsize power. Over the past week, President Biden has criticized the company for its role in the spread of false information about Covid-19 vaccines.

“I just want people to know that Facebook is a place where, when they do feel discouraged or depressed or isolated, that they could go to Facebook and they could immediately connect with a group of people that care about them,” Nona Jones, the company’s director for global faith partnerships and a nondenominational minister, said in an interview.

Last month, Facebook executives pitched their efforts to religious groups at a virtual faith summit. Sheryl Sandberg, the company’s chief operating officer, shared an online resource hub with tools to build congregations on the platform.

“Faith organizations and social media are a natural fit because fundamentally both are about connection,” Ms. Sandberg said.

“Our hope is that one day people will host religious services in virtual reality spaces as well, or use augmented reality as an educational tool to teach their children the story of their faith,” she said.

Facebook’s summit, which resembled a religious service, included testimonials from faith leaders about how Facebook helped them grow during the pandemic.

Imam Tahir Anwar of the South Bay Islamic Association in California said his community raised record funds by using Facebook Live during Ramadan last year. Bishop Robert Barron, founder of an influential Catholic media company, said Facebook “gave people kind of an intimate experience of the Mass that they wouldn’t normally have.”

The collaborations raise not only practical questions, but also philosophical and moral ones. Religion has long been a fundamental way humans have formed community, and now social media companies are stepping into that role. Facebook has nearly three billion active monthly users, making it larger than Christianity worldwide, which has about 2.3 billion adherents, or Islam, which has 1.8 billion.

There are privacy worries too, as people share some of their most intimate life details with their spiritual communities. The potential for Facebook to gather valuable user information creates “enormous” concerns, said Sarah Lane Ritchie, a lecturer in theology and science at the University of Edinburgh. The goals of businesses and worshiping communities are different, she said, and many congregations, often with older members, may not understand how they could be targeted with advertising or other messages based on their religious engagement.

“Corporations are not worried about moral codes,” she said. “I don’t think we know yet all the ways in which this marriage between Big Tech and the church will play out.”

A Facebook spokeswoman said the data it collected from religious communities would be handled the same way as that of other users, and that nondisclosure agreements were standard process for all partners involved in product development.

Many of Facebook’s partnerships involve asking religious organizations to test or brainstorm new products, and those groups seem undeterred by Facebook’s larger controversies. This year Facebook tested a prayer feature, where members of some Facebook groups can post prayer requests and others can respond. The creator of YouVersion, the popular Bible app, worked with the company to test it.

Facebook’s outreach was the first time a major technology company wanted to collaborate on a development project, said Bobby Gruenewald, YouVersion’s creator and a pastor at Life.Church in Oklahoma, recalling how he also worked with Facebook on a Bible-verse-a-day feature in 2018.

“Obviously there are different ways they ultimately, I am sure, will serve their shareholders,” he said. “From our vantage point, Facebook is a platform that allows us to build community, and connect with our community and accomplish our mission. So it serves I think everybody well.”

The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) was invited to be a Facebook faith partner in December, said Melody Smith, a spokeswoman for the denomination’s missions agency. The denomination agreed in a contract that it would have no ownership of any products it helps Facebook design, she said.

Leaders of the Church of God in Christ, a largely African American Pentecostal denomination of roughly six million members worldwide, recently received early access to several of Facebook’s monetization features, offering them new revenue streams, said the denomination’s social media manager, Angela Clinton-Joseph.

They decided to try two Facebook tools: subscriptions where users pay, for example, $9.99 per month and receive exclusive content, like messages from the bishop; and another tool for worshipers watching services online to send donations in real time. Leaders decided against a third feature: advertisements during video streams.

The pandemic accelerated existing dynamics, packing years of technology development into one, said Bob Pritchett, who founded Faithlife, a Christian ministry platform with a suite of online services.

But spiritual life is different from the personal and professional spaces occupied by Facebook and LinkedIn, he said.

It is dangerous to have your community anchored “on a tech platform that is susceptible to all the whims of politics and culture and congressional hearings,” he said.

Facebook created its faith partnerships team in 2017 and began courting religious leaders, especially of evangelical and Pentecostal groups, in earnest in 2018.

“Facebook basically said, hey, we want to be the It, we want to be the go-to,” said the Rev. Samuel Rodriguez, a Sacramento pastor who leads a large coalition of Hispanic churches.

Minister groups for the Assemblies of God, the Pentecostal denomination with 69 million members worldwide, were early adopters of a Facebook tool allowing users to call in to a livestream. The Potter’s House, T.D. Jakes’s megachurch of 30,000 in Dallas, also tested various features before they were rolled out.

For some pastors, Facebook’s work raises questions about the broader future of church in a virtual world. So much of religious life remains physical, such as sacraments or the laying on of hands for healing prayer.

Online church was never meant to replace the local church, said Wilfredo De Jesús, a pastor and the general treasurer for the Assemblies of God. He was grateful for Facebook, but ultimately, he said, “we want everyone to put their face in another book.”

“The technology has created in the lives of our people this quickness, this idea that I can call and just show up at Target and park my car and they open my truck,” he said. “The church is not Target.”

For churches like Hillsong Atlanta, the ultimate goal is evangelism.

“We have never been more postured for the Great Commission than now,” Mr. Collier said, referring to Jesus’ call to “make disciples of all nations.”

He is partnering with Facebook, he said, “to directly impact and help churches navigate and reach the consumer better.”

“Consumer isn’t the right word,” he said, correcting himself. “Reach the parishioner better.”

The post Facebook Wants You to Connect With God. On Facebook. appeared first on New York Times.

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In more and more of the country Amazon acts like an employer in a company town, sucking up whole communities and shaping public goods and services to fit its profit-making needs.

A thesis: Amazon’s warehouse zones are “the major working-class space of suburban and exurban socialization. So even if you’re building a tenant union or a political party, this is a major social space. It has a broader importance.” This comes courtesy of organizer and geographer Spencer Cox, quoted in the New York Times.

The author of the Times article, labor reporter E. Tammy Kim, follows Cox’s quote with a congruent assertion from socialist Seattle city councilor Kshama Sawant. “If you look at the consciousness of Amazon workers, it’s a guide to where the working class is as a whole,” says Sawant.

If class is a social relation and the working class is made and remade daily, that formation is increasingly happening inside the massive structures that house Amazon’s warehouses, where workers face capital embodied in the whir of machinery and barking managers and the beeps of the scanner in their hands, prodding them to pick up the pace. It is happening in the parking lots outside, where people smoke and linger and chat and dread. Whether Amazon is really the major space of socialization, or merely a major one, is less important than grasping the degree to which Amazon is operating as a near force of nature in working-class life.

The extreme geographic bifurcation of Amazon’s operations complicates the matter: some communities are vacuumed up almost completely by Amazon, while in others, people don’t know anyone who works for the company. Such unevenness is of further importance given that the warehouse worker is neither seen nor heard by the customer; at least at Walmart, you go to a store and you see the workers — you know they exist.

Here’s how it plays out in many communities near one of the warehouses. Amazon’s application process is, often, perfunctory. You apply, you get a job. Doing away with interviews or much conversation at all between potential employer and potential employee enables the company to beef up during “peak,” which consists of the holiday season as well as the time around Prime Day, the company’s holiday that exists to break up the summer lull. During these periods, Amazon’s already immense workforce cannot keep up with surging demand, so the company brings in armies of “seasonal associates,” temporary workers who enlist for quick cash — $15 an hour, Amazon’s starting wage, is below the average for the warehousing industry, but it’s still a hell of a lot more than our $7.25 federal minimum wage. Almost all of these temps are let go when the surge in sales recedes. This process has only intensified over the past year as Amazon, buoyed by increased sales during the pandemic, has gone on a hiring spree almost unprecedented in history, adding nearly five hundred thousand people to its payroll in a matter of months.

The result is that whole communities are absorbed into the warehouse. For an example of what that looks, take this reporting about JFK8, an Amazon warehouse on Staten Island, New York, that has been a particular site of ferment:

As dusk settled and trucks rolled by, Tiara Mangroo, a high school student just off her shift, embraced her boyfriend. He worked for Amazon on Staten Island too, as did her father, uncle, cousins and best friend. Keanu Bushell, a college student, worked days, and his father nights, sharing one car that made four daily trips between Brooklyn and JFK8. A mother and daughter organized containers of meals for their middle-of-the-night breaks; others packed Red Bull or Starbucks Frappuccinos in the clear theft-prevention bags that workers carried. Most said they were grateful just to be employed.

These are entire families employed by Amazon. Many of them will be let go within weeks, though many others will quit even sooner, unable to endure the stress and strain of the job. This churn is a concern for the higher-ups at the company, who are increasingly busing people in from farther and farther away to maintain the staffing levels required during peak. As Paul Stroup, who led Amazon corporate teams in analyzing the warehouses, tells the New York Times,“Six to seven people who apply equals one person showing up and actually doing work. . . . You need to have eight, nine, 10 million people apply each year.” As the newspaper notes, that’s about 5 percent of the US workforce.

Look to the other coast and you find a similar dynamic playing out. Zoom in on certain locales and you get glimpses into one possible future: a company town, in which a monopsony employer effectively becomes the governing structure for public goods and services. That this description increasingly applies to Seattle, where Amazon has as much office space as the next forty largest employers combined, has long been true. But the way this applies to areas near the company’s warehouses is less understood.

Take the Inland Empire, a rural and exurban region in California saturated with warehouses because of its proximity to Los Angeles. At Cajon High School, a public high school in San Bernardino, students — many of whom have family members employed at Amazon — can take classes in the Amazon Logistics and Business Management Pathways career track.

Writer Erika Hayasaki visited Cajon High. Here’s what she found:

A dozen students sat clustered at work tables inside an air-conditioned classroom, which was designed to emulate the inside of an Amazon facility. On one wall, Amazon’s giant logo grinned across a yellow and green banner. The words “CUSTOMER OBSESSION” and “DELIVER RESULTS” were painted against a corporate-style yellow backdrop. On a whiteboard, a teacher had written the words “Logistics Final Project,” and the lesson of the day was on Amazon’s “14 Leadership Principles.” Each teenager wore a company golf shirt emblazoned with the Amazon logo.

Students and staff members expressed pride in being associated with the company. Amazon partnered with the school as part of its five-year anniversary in the Inland Empire, donating $50,000 to start the pilot program, the giant sweepstakes-style Amazon check displayed prominently at the classroom entrance. The students had already taken field trips to tour the nearby Amazon warehouse.

A public high-school classroom designed to resemble an Amazon facility, with students wearing Amazon logos on their clothing as they memorize Amazon’s leadership principles (which, it is worth noting, also include “Ownership” and “Think Big,” injunctions that hold merit for readers of this magazine when imagining how we might solve the problems exemplified by Amazon). Such a relationship between the company and public goods like a high school is part of what it means to consider Amazon as “the major working-class space of suburban and exurban socialization.”

The behemoth is here, producing not only profit but people, too. That entails corporate indoctrination, social estrangement, and profound alienation from one’s labor, which is particularly meaningless as one breaks one’s body to get so many goods to people’s doors.

But were a culture of resistance and organization to emerge, it could become something quite different: the warehouse as site of struggle and contestation and solidarity, and Amazon as object of scrutiny, an enemy. There are currently people, both inside and outside the warehouses, working toward the latter outcome, and even the likes of Jeff Bezos can’t stop them. As a noted historian of a different era put it, “The working class did not rise like the sun at an appointed time. It was present at its own making.” It still is, and with each shift it is remade anew. Whether that will lead to despair, militant enthusiasm, or something entirely different remains to be seen.

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As the world reeled, Silicon Valley supplied the tools that made life and work possible. Now tech companies are awash in money — and questions about what it means to win amid so much loss.

SAN FRANCISCO — In April 2020, with 2,000 Americans dying every day of Covid-19, Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s chief executive and the world’s richest man, announced he was focusing on people rather than profits. Amazon would spend about $4 billion in the next few months “providing for customers and protecting employees,” he said, wiping out the profit the retailer would have made without the virus.

It was a typically bold Amazon announcement, a shrewd public relations move to sacrifice financial gain at a moment of misery and fear. Mr. Bezos said this was “the hardest time we’ve ever faced” and suggested the new approach would extend indefinitely. “If you’re a shareowner in Amazon,” he advised, “you may want to take a seat.”

At the end of July 2020, Amazon announced quarterly results. Rather than earning zero, as Mr. Bezos had predicted, it notched an operating profit of $5.8 billion — a record for the company.

The months since have established new records. Amazon’s margins, which measure the profit on every dollar of sales, are the highest in the history of the company, which is based in Seattle.

After stepping aside as chief executive early this month, Mr. Bezos flew to suborbital space for 10 minutes this week. Upon returning, he expressed gratitude to those who had fulfilled this lifelong dream. “I want to thank every Amazon employee and every Amazon customer, ’cause you guys paid for all this,” he said.

Mr. Bezos, who was not available for comment for this article, was the only chief executive of a tech company to enter zero gravity in his own spaceship in the past year. But Amazon’s pandemic triumph was echoed all over the world of technology companies.

Even as 609,000 Americans have died and the Delta variant surges, as corporate bankruptcies hit a peak for the decade, as restaurants, airlines, gyms, conferences, museums, department stores, hotels, movie theaters and amusement parks shut down and as millions of workers found themselves unemployed, the tech industry flourished.

The combined stock market valuation of Apple, Alphabet, Nvidia, Tesla, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook increased by about 70 percent to more than $10 trillion. That is roughly the size of the entire U.S. stock market in 2002. Apple alone has enough cash in its coffers to give $600 to every person in the United States. And in the next week, the big tech companies are expected to report earnings that will eclipse all previous windfalls.

Silicon Valley, still the world headquarters for tech start-ups, has never seen so much loot. More Valley companies went public in 2020 than in 2019, and they raised twice as much money when they did. Forbes calculates there are now 365 billionaires whose fortunes derive from tech, up from 241 before the virus.

Silicon Valley made the tools that allowed Americans, and the American economy, to survive the pandemic. People got their jigsaw puzzles, air purifiers and digital thermometers delivered by Amazon instead of picking them up two blocks or two miles away. The consumer economy swerved from local to national.

Tech is triumphant in a way that even its most evangelical leaders couldn’t have predicted. No single industry has ever had such power over American life, dominating how we communicate, shop, learn about the world and seek distraction and joy.

What will Silicon Valley do with this power? Who if anyone might restrain tech, and how much support will they have? Wealth and the ability to command and control tend to produce hubris more than modesty. As algorithms and artificial intelligence rearrange people into marketing groups, it’s uncertain — to put it politely — how aware the tech industry is of the potential for abuse, especially when it generates profits.

With the House Judiciary Committee’s recent vote to advance a series of bills that aim to reduce the power of the most dominant tech companies, and with President Biden appointing regulators who have sharp views of Big Tech, these issues are finally set for a wider debate.

It has been a tumultuous 18 months, and even the tech companies are having trouble absorbing what happened.

PayPal, the digital payments company, had 325 million active accounts before the pandemic. It reported 392 million in the first quarter. “The winds were blowing in our direction, but we had to set the sails,” said Dan Schulman, the chief executive.

The wind was so strong it blew tech into another universe of wealth and influence.

The Pandemic’s Tailwind

On March 13, 2020, Glenn Kelman, the chief executive of the online real estate broker Redfin, was biking to work when he got a call from Henry Ellenbogen, a longtime investor in Redfin who had started his own fund.

At Harvard, Mr. Ellenbogen majored in the history of technology. One big thing he learned, he has said, was that technology is developed well in advance of people’s ability and willingness to use it.

“Tell me something,” Mr. Ellenbogen asked Mr. Kelman, according to an account the chief executive posted on Redfin’s website.

“When people start touring homes via an iPhone, won’t a lot of them decide, even after this whole pandemic ends, that this is just a better way to see houses? And if this whole process of buying and selling homes mostly goes virtual, how will other brokerages compete with you?”

Mr. Kelman, a little preoccupied by how Seattle’s normally bustling streets were eerily empty, said he didn’t know.

“I do,” Mr. Ellenbogen said. “The world is changing in your favor.”

This was not a general view then, and it certainly was not what Mr. Kelman was experiencing. The first confirmed coronavirus death in the United States was a nursing home resident in a Seattle suburb on Feb. 29. Within hours, home sellers decided that maybe they did not want strangers breathing in their living room and bedrooms. Buyers began to pull out as well.

For Redfin, that was the beginning of a crisis. Within a few days, it shut down its 78 offices around the country. Its stock plunged, losing two-thirds of its value.

“The magnitude of the decline was increasing every day,” Mr. Kelman said. He agreed to sell Mr. Ellenbogen more stock for $110 million, thinking Redfin might need cash to make it through a long drought. In early April, Mr. Kelman furloughed 41 percent of the company’s agents, who were salaried employees. More than 1,000 people were affected.

By that point, real estate was already turning around. Instead of killing demand for housing, the pandemic fueled it.

“The economy split in two on about April 7, 2020,” Mr. Kelman said. “One part of the economy suffered greatly, but another did just fine — the people who said, ‘If the world is going to end in the virus-filled streets of New York, I’m going to Connecticut or Vermont or Maine and I need a house there.’ What we thought was a headwind was a tailwind.”

The pandemic as a whole, it became clear, was a tailwind for tech in very basic ways.

When tens of millions of people were urged and sometimes ordered to stay put in their homes, naturally companies whose very existence involves facilitating virtual lives benefited. The rise of the teleconferencing company Zoom as both a verb and stock market winner was perhaps the easiest call of the year.

“Call it half luck — being in the right place at the right time — and half strategic tactics by companies recognizing this was going to be a once in a lifetime opportunity,” said Dan Ives, a managing director at Wedbush Securities. “What for most industries were hurricane-like headwinds was a pot of gold for tech.”

Even companies that might have seemed vulnerable to stay-at-home mandates did well. Airbnb is a company whose whole existence was about going to stay in strangers’ homes. The pandemic should have killed the buzz for its long-awaited public offering in December. But its stock price doubled on the first day of trading, giving the company a value of $100 billion.

Tech companies like Redfin that reacted defensively in March risked being left out of the recovery in April. The 2020 housing market, pushed by pandemic demand and negligible interest rates, turned out to be the best since 2006.

Those furloughed at Redfin were soon hired back. Mr. Ellenbogen’s deal proved extremely lucrative. But an estimated 10 million people are behind on the rent even as eviction moratoriums start to expire.

Mr. Kelman, more introspective than most tech executives, feels a little queasy.

“Tech used to be delivering these wonders to the world, and all of us in the industry felt the human uplift of general progress,” he said. “With the pandemic, fortunes have really diverged and at least some people in tech are really uncomfortable about that.”

Pushing Back

The biggest, and perhaps the only, threat to tech now is from government.

Tech antitrust reformers say the government response to the pandemic, including the national eviction moratorium, repudiated decades of entrenched belief in a hands-off economic approach. Now, the activists say, they will have their moment.

“When the government moved in a robust way to keep everybody afloat, free-market ideologies died,” said Stacy Mitchell, co-director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, a research and advocacy organization that fights corporate control. “People now appreciate that the government can either make choices that centralize power and wealth or it can structure markets and industries in ways that deliver benefits more broadly.”

There are signs of pushback against tech that would have been unimaginable a few years ago, beyond the House bills. Ohio sued Google, saying it should be regulated like a public utility. The Teamsters, one of the biggest labor unions, passed a resolution to supply “all resources necessary” to help organize workers at Amazon. Lina Khan, who made her reputation as a critic of Amazon, was appointed Federal Trade Commission chair. On Tuesday, the White House said it would nominate Jonathan Kanter, a tech critic, to be the Justice Department’s top antitrust official.

But there are signs of movement in the other direction, too. The F.T.C. and a coalition of state attorneys general saw their antitrust lawsuits against Facebook dismissed by a Washington judge last month. The F.T.C. can refile an improved suit by the end of this month.

Any measures restricting tech will ultimately need public sentiment behind them to succeed. Even some of tech’s biggest supporters see the potential for worry here.

“We went from being pirates to being the Navy,” Marc Andreessen, a central figure in Silicon Valley for a quarter-century, told the Substack writer Noah Smith in a recent interview. “People may love pirates when they’re young and small and scrappy, but nobody likes a Navy that acts like a pirate. And today’s technology industry can come across a lot like a Navy that acts like a pirate.”

Beyond the threat of misuse of tech lurks an even darker possibility: a misplaced confidence in the ability of one loosely regulated sector to run so much of the world.

Weeks before the pandemic, the RAND Corporation published a study on systemic risk and how a problem with one company can imperil others in its network. Systemic risk was a big issue in the 2008 financial collapse, when the government propped up some companies because their downfall might imperil the whole system. They were too big to fail.

The research group investigated whether tech companies had supplanted financial firms as a key node in the economy, and if the economy was growing too dependent on them. Amazon, whose AWS cloud division has millions of customers, was highlighted.

In December, RAND’s point was made when SolarWinds, which makes software that allows other companies to manage their networks, was revealed to have been infiltrated by Russian hackers. Since SolarWinds had so many clients, including Fortune 500 companies and federal agencies, the breach became one of the worst on record.

Tech’s dominance means the risks are more concentrated than ever. There were problems at the security firm Cloudflare in July 2020, at Amazon in November, at the cloud provider Fastly last month and at the content distribution network Akamai on Thursday, all of which took down other sites at least briefly.

These outages caused little concern.

That’s typical of systemic issues, said Jonathan Welburn, a lead author on the RAND study. “Before 2008, when house prices kept rising and rising, no one wanted to hear how they were being artificially propped up and why that could be a problem,” he said.

The pandemic gave tech companies the power and the cash to make aggressive bets on their individual destinies. Buying another company was one way to do this. Global deal values in tech soared 47.3 percent in 2020 from a year ago.

Zillow, a digital real estate company in Seattle, spent $500 million in February to buy ShowingTime, a scheduling platform for home showings. A few weeks later, Zillow said it would hire 2,000 people, increasing its work force by 40 percent.

But its biggest bet will take longer to play out. Before the pandemic, Zillow discouraged working from home, like most companies. Then last summer, it said 90 percent of its employees could work remotely forever if they chose.

At the time, Zillow was in the vanguard of a movement. Now the idea of the non-virtual office is re-exerting its pull with managers.

Amazon says its plan “is to return to an office-centric culture as our baseline.” Google asserted the same thing, although it backed off after workers rebelled. IBM says 80 percent of its employees will be in the office at least three days a week.

“When people are remote, I worry about what their career trajectory is going to be,” IBM’s chief executive, Arvind Krishna, told the BBC.

Zillow is something of an outlier. Even after a year of working from home, 59 percent of its employees told the company they planned to go into the office once a month or less.

This may be the pandemic’s ultimate tailwind: not just the future coming much faster to your company, but actively pushing your company faster into the future. It is a risk that might be easier to undertake if your market value has suddenly tripled the way Zillow’s did.

If Zillow is wrong about the future and employees are less bound to an office they visit only virtually, the company will stumble. If it is right, it will increase its workers’ loyalty and outdistance earthbound competitors.

“The pandemic forced change on all of us,” said Jeremy Wacksman, Zillow’s chief operating officer. “We didn’t wish for it but now we’re learning from it.”

More than a third of Zillow employees moved in the year that began in March 2020. Many moves were from one part of Seattle’s metro area to another, indicating a desire to stay within driving distance to the office. But other employees dispersed to New Mexico, Mississippi and Alabama. Nine moved to Hawaii.

“They liked their job but wanted to go somewhere else. That used to be a problem. Now it’s not,” said Viet Shelton, a Zillow spokesman who, as it happens, just moved to Manhattan from Seattle because he always wanted to live in New York.

Now that employees no longer have to live where Zillow has an office, interest has swelled. More than 55,000 applied to work at Zillow in the first quarter, up 51 percent from the prepandemic level and about 10 applicants for every person employed there. Zillow has hired more recruiters to deal with the onslaught.

Over at Redfin, the stock is up 400 percent from its pandemic bottom. Redfin paid $608 million in February to acquire a publisher of rental listings, its biggest deal ever. But while the company seems so rich, so successful, so lucky from the outside, it feels different within. Managing growth is almost as hard as managing a downturn.

“Customers are clamoring for service and we can’t hire fast enough,” said Mr. Kelman. “Redfin never had a moment when it was absolutely and totally killing it, but I always imagined when we did that it would be more fun than this.”

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