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Who will get the vaccinne first ?

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Wildfires have ravaged Napa Valley. Will California’s wine industry survive?

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2 large pieces of space junk have a 'high risk' of colliding

#Science

Who will get the vaccine f irst? Here's where you might land in line.

WHENEVER A NEW vaccine gets approved, health officials have to tackle the difficult question of who should be first in line to receive it. Typically health-care workers are first, and in previous outbreaks, such as the H1N1 swine flu in 2009, people whose health was most vulnerable got priority, too.

With the widely anticipated COVID-19 vaccine, there’s a new factor being considered: fairness. On October 2, the National Academy of Medicine revealed its recommendations for COVID-19 vaccine distribution in an influential 237-page framework commissioned by the National Institutes of Health and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The report proposes distributing a vaccine in four phases as it becomes available. The first recipients are obvious picks: health-care workers, emergency responders, people with underlying conditions, and older adults living in group settings. This mirrors similar recommendations by the World Health Organization, and it is a foundational principle for the COVAX collaboration, a global effort to improve poorer countries’ access to a vaccine, which 171 nations have pledged to join. (The U.S. is not one of them, and a small group of scientists question the wisdom of putting some health-care workers at the top.)

But for the first time in history, the report also recommends that priority be given to people who score high on the CDC’s Social Vulnerability Index, which identifies factors such as poverty, lack of access to transportation, or crowded housing that are linked to poor health outcomes. The committee of virologists, epidemiologists, economists, and other health researchers who wrote the report said the goal is to rectify the pandemic’s disproportionate burden on minorities and poor people and “work toward a new commitment to promoting health equity.”

The disparities are stark: Compared with white people, African Americans, Hispanics, and Native Americans are nearly three times more likely to contract the coronavirus. Blacks are twice as likely to die. “This approach allowed us to embrace a notion of equal regard for all people, and address the underpinnings of social inequity and factors that have landed African Americans, Hispanics, and Native Americans in situations and occupations in which they are less healthy,” committee member Jewel Mullen, associate dean for health equity at Dell Medical School at the University of Texas at Austin, tells National Geographic. Despite the report’s nuanced guidelines, it’s not clear how they will be practiced or enforced, nor how they will play out as the country prepares for an unprecedented vaccine rollout.

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2 large pieces of space junk have a 'high risk' of colliding

A dead satellite and an old rocket part, each roughly the size of a small car, have about a 10 percent chance of smashing into each other soon.

TWO PIECES OF space junk, each about the weight of a compact car, are predicted to have a close encounter tonight some 620 miles above Earth. If they collide—and experts are putting the odds at greater than 10 percent—the smashup would create a cloud of debris that could jeopardize other satellites and spacecraft for decades.
The two objects are a defunct Russian navigation satellite launched in 1989 and a spent Chinese rocket part from a 2009 launch. Calculations by LeoLabs, a California-based company that tracks objects in low-Earth orbit, peg the moment of closest approach at 8:56 p.m. ET on October 15 above the southern Atlantic Ocean, just off the coast of Antarctica.

The combined mass of the two objects is about 6,000 pounds, and their relative speed will be about 33,000 miles an hour, according to LeoLabs. If the two objects don’t collide it will be another near-miss—one of a handful that happen every year—with the objects likely getting within about 40 feet of one another, by LeoLabs’ estimate. These two pieces of space junk are particularly large, however. The third stage of the rocket—the upper part that separates from lower stages and flies all the way into orbit—measures about 25 feet long. The satellite measures 16 feet long, with a boom used to stabilize the spacecraft extending almost 56 feet.

If they smash head-on, it would create two big clouds “that will spread out into a shell of debris around the Earth,” says LeoLabs CEO Daniel Ceperley. And because of the objects’ altitude, the debris would “be up there for centuries” before burning up in the atmosphere.
The long boom on the Russian satellite also raises the possibility of a glancing blow rather than a head-on collision. The results of an impact like that are harder to predict, says Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts.Still, “there’s no threat to the Earth,” McDowell says. “These will be small debris pieces that will completely burn up in the atmosphere. Most of them aren’t going to come down for decades anyway, and when they do, they’ll completely burn up.”

The International Space Station (ISS) is also in no immediate danger. The ISS orbits at an altitude of about 250 miles, “safely below” the altitude where the debris would potentially be unleashed. There would “probably not be a big risk to the ISS in the near term,” McDowell says. But over many years, bits of debris could drift down to the space station’s orbit. “It would increase the amount of ‘rain’ failing on it,” he says. The ISS has had to maneuver out of the way of space debris to avoid damage on three occasions this year, including a near miss less than a month ago. The potential debris field would pose a danger to any craft passing through, including satellites on their way up to a higher geosynchronous orbit (about 22,000 miles above Earth), or any satellites above that are being deorbited into the atmosphere to burn up.

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#Travel

Wildfires have ravaged Napa Valley. Will California’s wine industry survive?

IN LATE SUMMER, Napa Valley was forced to confront a harsh reality: Harvest season in this world-famous wine region is now also fire season.

The unprecedented fire events of 2020 have left little doubt that California’s wine country has entered a new, dangerous era. First, in August, came a lightning siege that sparked fires throughout the state. One of the lightning strikes touched down in Napa. The resulting fire would ultimately grow to over 360,000 acres, resulting in five deaths. Then, in late September, a separate blaze known as the Glass Fire erupted in Napa Valley. It would soon become the most destructive wildfire in the history of this valley—worse, even, than the record-setting fires of 2017. This time, 1,235 buildings have been destroyed, including nearly 300 homes.

Northern Napa Valley, reliably verdant and lush at this time of year, became an eerie landscape of charred earth and white ash. Grapevines were blackened, wineries reduced to rubble. Napa is America’s most celebrated and important wine region, the figurehead of California’s $40 billion statewide industry. But the disasters of 2020, compounded by the serial devastation of recent years, have thrown it into existential crisis. Climate change, which was already threatening to alter the taste of Napa’s prized Cabernet Sauvignons, is now fueling fires that seem to turn more destructive each time.

The implications ripple through every facet of life here. The perennial presence of wildfire threatens the farmworkers who must choose whether to work in oppressively smoky air or not work at all. It imperils the local economies of wine country’s towns, which have grown heavily dependent on tourism—to the tune of $2.23 billion in visitor spending in a typical Napa Valley year. And it endangers the viability of the wine itself: By one estimate, complications from fire and smoke may prevent as much as 80 percent of Napa Valley’s 2020 Cabernet Sauvignon grapes being made into wine.