71-year-old Hugh Pickens (Slashdot reader #49,171) is a physicist who explored for oil in the Amazon jungle, commissioned microwave communications systems in Saudi Arabia, and built satellite control stations for Goddard Space Flight Center around the world including Australia, Antarctica, and Guam.

After retiring in 1999, he wrote over 1,400 Slashdot posts, and in the site's 23-year history still remains one of its two all-time most active submitters (behind only long-time Slashdot reader theodp). Today theodp shares an article by Hugh Pickens: I am a Covid Survivor," writes former Slashdot contributor extraordinaire Hugh Pickens (aka pickens, aka Hugh Pickens writes, aka Hugh Pickens DOT Com, aka HughPickens.com, aka pcol, aka ...). "I got the Covid six weeks ago and yesterday I was declared virus free. I had what was called a moderate case of Covid. I was never hospitalized. I was never in any real danger of death. But I was in bed for three weeks.

"It knocked me on my ass. I have been talking about my Covid when I go out and a lot of people are interested in what it really means to have a moderate case of Covid. I don't claim to speak for every Covid patient. I certainly can't speak for the ones who went into the hospital and are on ventilators. But I think the majority of people have a moderate case of Covid so I thought I would write this up for people that were interested."
During those three consecutive weeks in bed, "I guess I ate Jell-O for about two weeks..." Pickens writes. "I was laying in bed all day long. I was sleeping 12 to 14 hours a day..." He lost 25 pounds — and vividly describes having nightmares "every night like clockwork." But the essay ends with him committed to making the most of his second chance. "I'm only going to do what's important from now on...

"I'm 71 years old and I may have five more years or ten but I am going to live every day like it's my last."

"An enormous black hole keeps slipping through astronomers' nets..." reports Space.com: The big galaxy at the core of the cluster Abell 2261, which lies about 2.7 billion light-years from Earth, should have an even larger central black hole — a light-gobbling monster that weighs as much as 3 billion to 100 billion suns, astronomers estimate from the galaxy's mass. But the exotic object has evaded detection so far. For instance, researchers previously looked for X-rays streaming from the galaxy's center, using data gathered by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory in 1999 and 2004. X-rays are a potential black-hole signature: As material falls into a black hole's maw, it accelerates and heats up tremendously, emitting lots of high-energy X-ray light. But that hunt turned up nothing.

Now, a new study has conducted an even deeper search for X-rays in the same galaxy, using Chandra observations from 2018... But the Chandra data didn't reveal any significant X-ray sources, either in the galactic core or in big clumps of stars farther afield. So the mystery of the missing supermassive black hole persists.

That mystery could be solved by Hubble's successor — NASA's big, powerful James Webb Space Telescope, which is scheduled to launch in October 2021. If James Webb doesn't spot a black hole in the galaxy's heart or in one of its bigger stellar clumps, "then the best explanation is that the black hole has recoiled well out of the center of the galaxy," NASA officials wrote.

"Axiom Space has announced that it is creating an office park and manufacturing center at the Houston SpacePort at Ellington Field," notes an opinion piece for The Hill by Houston-based space writer Mark R. Whittington.

"The development is a hopeful sign that, despite foot dragging by Congress, a commercial replacement for the International Space Station may well happen." The United States has a chance to avoid a "space gap" when the ISS reaches the end of its operational life, like the one that happened between the end of the space shuttle program and the first launch of the SpaceX commercial crew Dragon mission. When Jim Bridenstine became NASA administrator, one of the questions confronting him was what to do about maintaining a presence in low Earth orbit after the ISS. The idea that he and experts at NASA have been pushing is to encourage private companies to build their own space station.

NASA would provide needed support by pledging to become an anchor tenant for such orbiting facilities. However, the commercial space stations would also have to find private customers. The problem is that Congress has been remarkably stingy when it comes to putting up real money for this approach. The fiscal 2020 budget request included $150 million for commercial space stations. Congress funded support for private orbiting labs for a grand total of $15 million...

Axiom Space has won the nod to attach one of its own modules to the ISS. Not waiting for Congress to cough up funding for NASA, Axiom has announced a facility to manufacture space station modules at the Ellington SpacePort in Houston. The company will also have private astronaut training facilities. Besides employing 1,000 people, the new Axiom facility represents a commitment to creating a commercial space station industry... It is also likely no accident that the Axiom facility is about a five-hour drive from the growing SpaceX spaceport in Boca Chica near the southern tip of Texas. No doubt SpaceX CEO Elon Musk would be pleased to launch finished modules to space, using the mighty Starship rocket, and later crews and cargo.

In the midst of a pandemic, part of a space future is taking shape in South Texas. This time it's being driven by the private sector. NASA had best jump on board or risk being left behind.

"When you do computer programming, what sort of mental work are you doing?" asks science/tech journalist Clive Thompson: For a long time, folks have speculated on this. Since coding involves pondering hierarchies of symbols, maybe the mental work is kinda like writing or reading? Others have speculated it's more similar to the way our brains process math and puzzles. A group of MIT neuroscientists recently did fMRI brain-scans of young adults while they were solving a small coding challenge using a textual programming language (Python) and a visual one (Scratch Jr.). The results?

The brain activity wasn't similar to when we process language. Instead, coding seems to activate the "multiple demand network," which — as the scientists note in a public-relations writeup of their work — "is also recruited for complex cognitive tasks such as solving math problems or crossword puzzles."

So, coding is more like doing math than processing language?

Sorrrrrrt of ... but not exactly so. The scientists saw activity patterns that differ from those you'd see during math, too.

The upshot: Coding — in this (very preliminary!) work, anyway — looks to be a little different from either language or math. As the note, in a media release...

"Understanding computer code seems to be its own thing...."

Just anecdotally — having interviewed hundreds of coders and computer scientists for my book CODERS — I've met amazing programmers and computer scientists with all manner of intellectual makeups. There were math-heads, and there were people who practically counted on their fingers. There were programmers obsessed with — and eloquent in — language, and ones gently baffled by written and spoken communication. Lots of musicians, lots of folks who slid in via a love of art and visual design, then whose brains just seized excitedly on the mouthfeel of algorithms.

Since 1976 "Project Censored," a U.S.-based nonprofit media watchdog organization, has been identifying "the news that didn't make the news," the most significant stories it believes are being systematically overlooked. Slashdot ran stories about its annual list of the year's most censored news stories in 1999, 2003, 2004, and in 2007, when they'd presciently warned that the media was ignoring the issue of net neutrality.

But their latest list of underreported stories includes this disturbing headline: "Antibiotic Abuse: Pharmaceutical Profiteering Accelerates Superbugs." Pharmaceutical giants Abbott and Sun Pharma are providing dangerous amounts of antibiotics to unlicensed doctors in India and incentivizing them to overprescribe. In August 2019 the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (BIJ) reported that these unethical business practices are leading to a rise in superbugs, or bacterial infections that are resistant to antibiotic treatment. Bacteria naturally evolve a resistance to antibiotics over time, but the widespread and inappropriate use of antibiotics accelerates this process. Superbugs are killing at least 58,000 babies each year and rendering a growing number of patients untreatable with all available drugs.

India's unlicensed medical practitioners, known as "quack" doctors, are being courted by Abbott and Sun Pharma, billion-dollar companies that do business in more than one hundred countries, including the United States. The incentives these companies provide to quack doctors to sell antibiotics have included free medical equipment, gift cards, televisions, travel, and cash, earning some doctors nearly a quarter of their salary. "Sales representatives would also offer extra pills or money as an incentive to buy more antibiotics, encouraging potentially dangerous overprescription," a Sun Pharma sales representative revealed to an undercover BIJ reporter... [P]atients without access to better care often turn to quack doctors for treatment, and many are unaware that their local medical "professionals" have no formal training and are being bribed to sell unnecessary antibiotics.

In September 2019, the BIJ reported on similar problems with broken healthcare systems, medical corruption, and dangerous superbugs in Cambodia. Their account describes how patients often request antibiotics for common colds, to pour onto wounds, and to feed to animals. Illegally practicing doctors and pharmacists in Cambodia admitted that they would often prescribe based on customer requests rather than appropriate medical guidelines. As the BIJ noted, "This kind of misuse speeds up the creation of drug resistant bacteria, or superbugs, which are predicted to kill 10 million people by 2050 if no action is taken...."

Although superbugs have attracted some attention, their cause and importance remain poorly understood by the public. The Independent and BuzzFlash republished the Bureau of Investigative Journalism's report; otherwise, the role of pharmaceutical companies in the rise of dangerous superbugs has been drastically underreported.
The site's list of the top 25 censored stories of 2019 - 2020 also includes:

• Growing interest in so-called "public" banks, "not legally obligated to maximize profits, as private banks are; instead, public banks are mandated to serve their communities."

• How rising sea levels and warmer waters will impact nuclear power plants, "posing increased risks of nuclear disasters."

• Proposals to revitalize journalism through public funding.

• How the U.S. military represents "a massive, hidden contributor to the climate crisis."

Writing in Time magazine, two neuroscientists share a surprising new theory on exactly how dreaming protects our brains: Neuroscience used to think that different parts of the brain were predetermined to perform specific functions. But more recent discoveries have upended the old paradigm. One part of the brain may initially be assigned a specific task; for instance, the back of our brain is called the "visual cortex" because it usually handles sight. But that territory can be reassigned to a different task... Recent decades have yielded several revelations about livewiring, but perhaps the biggest surprise is its rapidity...

In the ceaseless competition for brain territory, the visual system has a unique problem: due to the planet's rotation, all animals are cast into darkness for an average of 12 out of every 24 hours... So how did the visual cortex of our ancestors' brains defend its territory, in the absence of input from the eyes? We suggest that the brain preserves the territory of the visual cortex by keeping it active at night. In our "defensive activation theory," dream sleep exists to keep neurons in the visual cortex active, thereby combating a takeover by the neighboring senses. In this view, dreams are primarily visual precisely because this is the only sense that is disadvantaged by darkness. Thus, only the visual cortex is vulnerable in a way that warrants internally-generated activity to preserve its territory...

REM sleep is triggered by a specialized set of neurons that pump activity straight into the brain's visual cortex, causing us to experience vision even though our eyes are closed... The anatomical precision of these circuits suggests that dream sleep is biologically important — such precise and universal circuitry rarely evolves without an important function behind it... We suggest that dream sleep exists, at least in part, to prevent the other senses from taking over the brain's visual cortex when it goes unused. Dreams are the counterbalance against too much flexibility.

Thus, although dreams have long been the subject of song and story, they may be better understood as the strange lovechild of brain plasticity and the rotation of the planet.

A marine biologist's ideas for singling out sharks that attack humans have prompted objections from other shark scientists. From a report: The war on sharks has been waged with shock and awe at times. When a shark bit or killed a swimmer, people within the past century might take out hundreds of the marine predators to quell the panic, like executing everyone in a police lineup in order to ensure justice was dispensed on the guilty party. Eric Clua, a professor of marine biology at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris, said the rationale behind shark culls in the past was simple: fewer sharks, fewer attacks. That reasoning also drives methods such as shark nets and baited hooks, which are currently in use at a number of Australian and South African beaches that are frequently visited by sharks. Nature, he notes, pays too great a price. "They are killing sharks that are guilty of nothing," said Dr. Clua, who studies the ocean predators up close in the South Pacific.

Dr. Clua said he has found a way to make precision strikes on sharks that have attacked people through a form of DNA profiling he calls "biteprinting." He believes it's usually just solo "problem sharks" that attack humans repeatedly, analogizing them to terrestrial predators that have been documented behaving the same way. Instead of culling every bear, tiger or lion when only one has serially attacked people, wildlife managers on land usually focus their ire on the culprit. Dr. Clua said that problem sharks could be dispatched the same way. This summer, Dr. Clua and several colleagues published their latest paper on collecting DNA from the biteprints of large numbers of sharks. Once a database is built, DNA could be collected from the wounds of people who were bitten by sharks, and matched to a known shark. The offending fish would then need to be found and killed. Critics have taken issue with every facet of this plan.

An anonymous reader shares a report: A ten-year longitudinal study published in the Journal of Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking on a group in early adolescence from as young as ten years old, investigated how playing violent video games at an early age would translate into adulthood behavior (23 years of age). Titled "Growing Up with Grand Theft Auto: A 10-Year Study of Longitudinal Growth of Violent Video Game Play in Adolescents" the study found no correlation between growing up playing video games and increased levels of aggression ten years later. This particular study utilized a more contemporary approach for analyzing its data, known as the person-centered approach. Traditional studies use a variable-centered approach whereby researchers treat each variable, or characteristic, as related to another variable. An example would be that exercising is related to a reduced incidence of heart disease. This has been particularly valuable when comparing groups. In a person-centered approach researchers combine various algorithms across variables to determine how these variables compare among individuals. This approach provides a more accurate depiction of how variables relate to the individual.

Japan's Mitsubishi Heavy Industries will soon complete in Austria the world's largest steel plant capable of attaining net-zero carbon dioxide emissions. Mitsubishi Heavy, through a British unit, is constructing the pilot plant at a complex of Austrian steelmaker Voestalpine. Trial operation is slated to begin in 2021. From a report: The plant will use hydrogen instead of coal in the reduction process for iron ore. The next-generation equipment will produce 250,000 tons of steel product a year. The global steel industry generated about 2 billion tons of CO2 in 2018, according to the International Energy Agency -- double the volume in 2000. The steel sector's share among all industries grew 5 percentage points to 25%. Iron ore reduction accounts for much of the CO2 emissions in steelmaking. Japanese steelmakers including Nippon Steel are developing hydrogen-consuming reduction processes based on the conventional blast furnace design. Mitsubishi Heavy's plant adopts a process called direct reduced iron, or DRI. New blast furnaces require trillions of yen (1 trillion yen equals $9.6 billion) in investment. Although DRI equipment produces less steel, the investment is estimated at less than half of blast furnaces. For DRI to attain the same level of cost-competitiveness as blast furnaces, low-cost hydrogen will be key. Market costs for hydrogen now stand at around 100 yen per normal cu. meter, estimates the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry.

SpaceX will try a significantly different approach to landing its future reusable rocket boosters, according to CEO and founder Elon Musk. It will attempt to 'catch' the heavy booster, which is currently in development, using the launch tower arm used to stabilize the vehicle during its pre-takeoff preparations. From a report: Current Falcon 9 boosters return to Earth and land propulsively on their own built-in legs -- but the goal with Super Heavy is for the larger rocket not to have legs at all, says Musk. The Super Heavy launch process will still involve use of its engines to control the velocity of its descent, but it will involve using the grid fins that are included on its main body to help control its orientation during flight to 'catch' the booster -- essentially hooking it using the launch tower arm before it touches the ground at all. The main benefits of this method, which will obviously involve a lot of precision maneuvering, is that it means SpaceX can save both cost and weight by omitting landing legs from the Super Heavy design altogether. Another potential benefit raised by Musk is that it could allow SpaceX to essentially recycle the Super Heavy booster immediately back on the launch mount it returns to -- possibly enabling it to be ready to fly again with a new payload and upper stage (consisting of Starship, the other spacecraft SpaceX is currently developing and testing) in "under an hour." The goal for Starship and Super Heavy is to create a launch vehicle that's even more reusable than SpaceX's current Falcon 9 (and Falcon Heavy) system.

Eric Bangeman, writing for ArsTechnica: Despite over 82 million cases and over 1.75 million deaths due to COVID-19, many people are bound and determined to carry on with normal life. For some, that includes attending Saturday night ragers, just like they did in the Before Times. Reports of yet another secret party being broken up by law enforcement have become distressingly common. Getting guests for these secret parties is at least slightly more difficult now that Apple has pulled Vybe Together -- an app with a tagline that invited users to "get their party on" -- from the App Store. The Verge pointed out that the app had largely been flying under the radar until a tweet from Taylor Lorenz of the New York Times brought some unwelcome, but much-needed scrutiny to the app. One of Lorenz's tweets highlighted Vybe Together's TikTok account, which had posted videos of unmasked people partying indoors while advertising New Years Eve parties. According to Business Insider, TikTok has since removed Vybe Together's account for violating community guidelines.

Joe2020 shares a report: A Japanese company and Kyoto University have joined forces to develop what they hope will be the world's first satellites made out of wood by 2023. Sumitomo Forestry said it has started research on tree growth and the use of wood materials in space. The partnership will begin experimenting with different types of wood in extreme environments on Earth. Space junk is becoming an increasing problem as more satellites are launched into the atmosphere. Wooden satellites would burn up without releasing harmful substances into the atmosphere or raining debris on the ground when they plunge back to Earth. "We are very concerned with the fact that all the satellites which re-enter the Earth's atmosphere burn and create tiny alumina particles which will float in the upper atmosphere for many years," Takao Doi, a professor at Kyoto University and Japanese astronaut, told the BBC. "Eventually it will affect the environment of the Earth. The next stage will be developing the engineering model of the satellite, then we will manufacture the flight model."

Neptune boasts some of the strangest weather in the solar system. The sun's eighth planet holds the record for the fastest winds observed on any world, with speeds cutting through the atmosphere upward of 1,100 miles per hour, or 1.5 times the speed of sound. Scientists still don't know exactly why its atmosphere is so tumultuous. Their latest glimpse of Neptune provided even more reason to be confused. From a report: The Hubble Space Telescope identified a storm in 2018, a dark spot some 4,600 miles across. Since that time, it appears to have drifted toward the equator but then swooped back up north, according to the latest Hubble observations. It also has a smaller companion storm, nicknamed Dark Spot Jr., that scientists think might be a chunk that broke off the main storm. These inky vortexes stand out against the dizzying cerulean blue of the planet, but while they're dazzling to see, their life spans are short, making them even more challenging to study.

This is not the first time Neptune's dark spots have behaved so strangely. When the Voyager 2 spacecraft flew past the planet in 1989, (still the only spacecraft to do so) it observed two storms. One was the original Dark Spot, a large vortex about the size of the Earth. It too had a companion, a smaller, fast moving storm nicknamed Scooter. The first observed Dark Spot also seemed to move south and then back to the north. "When we were tracking the great dark spot with Voyager, we saw it oscillating up and down in longitude," said Heidi Hammel, a member of the imaging team of the Voyager 2 space probe and currently the vice president for science at the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy. "We had enough time on Voyager, that we were able to track the feature for something like four to five months leading up to the flyby. That storm was huge, a big monster," as big as planet Earth.

Siobhan Roberts, writing for The New York Times: In March of 1970, Martin Gardner opened a letter jammed with ideas for his Mathematical Games column in Scientific American. Sent by John Horton Conway, then a mathematician at the University of Cambridge, the letter ran 12 pages, typed hunt-and-peck style. Page 9 began with the heading "The game of life." It described an elegant mathematical model of computation -- a cellular automaton, a little machine, of sorts, with groups of cells that evolve from iteration to iteration, as a clock advances from one second to the next. Dr. Conway, who died in April, having spent the latter part of his career at Princeton, sometimes called Life a "no-player, never-ending game." Mr. Gardner called it a "fantastic solitaire pastime." The game was simple: Place any configuration of cells on a grid, then watch what transpires according to three rules that dictate how the system plays out.

Birth rule: An empty, or "dead," cell with precisely three "live" neighbors (full cells) becomes live.
Death rule: A live cell with zero or one neighbors dies of isolation; a live cell with four or more neighbors dies of overcrowding.
Survival rule: A live cell with two or three neighbors remains alive.
With each iteration, some cells live, some die and "Life-forms" evolve, one generation to the next. Among the first creatures to emerge was the glider -- a five-celled organism that moved across the grid with a diagonal wiggle and proved handy for transmitting information. It was discovered by a member of Dr. Conway's research team, Richard Guy, in Cambridge, England. The glider gun, producing a steady stream of gliders, was discovered soon after by Bill Gosper, then at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Researchers may have found a way to reduce the environmental impact of air travel in situations when electric aircraft and alternative fuels aren't practical. Wired reports that Oxford University scientists have successfully turned CO2 into jet fuel, raising the possibility of conventionally-powered aircraft with net zero emissions. From a report: The technique effectively reverses the process of burning fuel by relying on the organic combustion method. The team heated a mix of citric acid, hydrogen and an iron-manganese-potassium catalyst to turn CO2 into a liquid fuel capable of powering jet aircraft. The approach is inexpensive, uncomplicated and uses commonplace materials. It's cheaper than processes used to turn hydrogen and water into fuel. There are numerous challenges to bringing this to aircraft. The lab method only produced a few grams of fuel -- you'd clearly need much more to support even a single flight, let alone an entire fleet. You'd need much more widespread use of carbon capture. And if you want effectively zero emissions, the capture and conversion systems would have to run on clean energy.

America's next president takes office in three weeks and two days. What changes should he make to America's space program? An opinion writer at Bloomberg tackles the question: Donald Trump badly wanted to be the president who sent Americans back to the moon. Instead, his administration has presided over Artemis, a lunar-landing program plagued by "uncertain plans, unproven cost assumptions, and limited oversight," according to a new watchdog report. Pieces of the program, including the SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft, are billions of dollars over budget, years past deadline and poised to eat into NASA's more promising projects. As a result, the U.S. space agency will almost certainly miss its goal of landing Americans on the moon again by 2024. President-elect Joe Biden inherits the task of deciding what to do next.

- He should focus on what has made the U.S. space program distinctive in recent years: the power of private competition...

- The government bears all the risk of missed deadlines and rising costs. A more efficient alternative is fixed-price contracts, in which a company keeps as profit whatever's left over after it completes its assigned task. Beginning in 2006, NASA has used such contracts to boost the development of private space companies capable of reaching the International Space Station. The initiative has worked far better than anyone could've expected. In a 2011 report, NASA expressed bewilderment that SpaceX, then a young upstart, managed to develop its workhorse Falcon 9 rocket for just $390 million — as opposed to a likely cost of $1.7 billion to $4 billion under traditional cost-plus assumptions. Today, the rocket delivers hardware and astronauts for companies and space agencies around the world. Come January, the Biden administration should take a similar approach to the troubled Artemis system. Step one should be eliminating SLS and Orion altogether in favor of cheaper private-sector alternatives....

Currently, there are a number of Artemis elements being developed under fixed-price contracts, including future lunar landers. The new administration should use a similar approach with as many aspects of the project as possible, thereby harnessing the efficiency and inventiveness of private competition.

Mashable reports: The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency showed off a collection of samples from the asteroid Ryugu on Thursday following the return of the Hayabusa2 probe.

The black, gravelly samples from Ryugu contain a whole bunch of small chips collected from the asteroid's subsurface...

Normally, space rocks like these are collected after they enter Earth's atmosphere at surface-scorching speeds. These samples from Ryugu are the first ever that can be examined without being damaged during entry, which is key to getting a clear look at and better understanding these celestial rocks, according to a report from NPR.

Long-time Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot summarizes an article from LiveScience: There's a giant asteroid somewhere out in the solar system, and it hurled a big rock at Earth.

The evidence for this mystery space rock comes from a diamond-studded meteor that exploded over Sudan in 2008. NASA had spotted the 9-ton (8,200 kilograms), 13-foot (4 meters) meteor heading toward the planet well before impact, and researchers showed up in the Sudanese desert to collect an unusually rich haul of remains. Now, a new study of one of those meteorites suggests that the meteor may have broken off of a giant asteroid — one more or less the size of the dwarf planet Ceres, the largest object in the asteroid belt — that formed in the presence of water under intermediate temperatures and pressures.

The mineral makeup of these space rocks offers clues about the "parent asteroid" that birthed a given meteor, researchers said in a statement.

The New York Times reports on results from a rigorous five-year study in Trondheim, Norway that raises the question: If you increase your heart rate, will your life span follow? The study, one of the largest and longest-term experimental examinations to date of exercise and mortality, shows that older men and women who exercise in almost any fashion are relatively unlikely to die prematurely. But if some of that exercise is intense, the study also finds, the risk of early mortality declines even more, and the quality of people's lives climbs...

Their first step was to invite every septuagenarian in Trondheim to participate... More than 1,500 of the Norwegian men and women accepted... All agreed to start and continue to exercise more regularly during the upcoming five years... The first group, as a control, agreed to follow standard activity guidelines and walk or otherwise remain in motion for half an hour most days. (The scientists did not feel they could ethically ask their control group to be sedentary for five years.) Another group began exercising moderately for longer sessions of 50 minutes twice a week. And the third group started a program of twice-weekly high-intensity interval training, or HIIT, during which they cycled or jogged at a strenuous pace for four minutes, followed by four minutes of rest, with that sequence repeated four times... During that time, the scientists noted that quite a few of the participants in the control had dabbled with interval-training classes at local gyms, on their own initiative and apparently for fun...

After five years, the researchers checked death registries and found that about 4.6 per cent of all of the original volunteers had passed away during the study, a lower number than in the wider Norwegian population of 70-year-olds, indicating these active older people were, on the whole, living longer than others of their age. But they also found interesting, if slight, distinctions between the groups. The men and women in the high-intensity-intervals group were about 2 per cent less likely to have died than those in the control group, and 3 per cent less likely to die than anyone in the longer, moderate-exercise group. People in the moderate group were, in fact, more likely to have passed away than people in the control group.

The men and women in the interval group also were more fit now and reported greater gains in their quality of life than the other volunteers....

Dorthe Stensvold, a researcher at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology who led the new study, believes the study's message can be broadly applicable to almost all of us.. "Adding life to years, not only years to life, is an important aspect of healthy ageing, and the higher fitness and health-related quality of life from high-intensity interval training in this study is an important finding."

The New York Times reports: Ever since the race to develop a coronavirus vaccine began last spring, upbeat announcements were stalked by ominous polls: No matter how encouraging the news, growing numbers of people said they would refuse to get the shot... But over the past few weeks, as the vaccine went from a hypothetical to a reality, something happened. Fresh surveys show attitudes shifting and a clear majority of Americans now eager to get vaccinated. In polls by Gallup, the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Pew Research Center, the portion of people saying they are now likely or certain to take the vaccine has grown from about 50 per cent this summer to more than 60 per cent, and in one poll 73 per cent — a figure that approaches what some public health experts say would be sufficient for herd immunity...

[T]he attitude improvement is striking. A similar shift on another heated pandemic issue was reflected in a different Kaiser poll this month. It found that nearly 75 per cent of Americans are now wearing masks when they leave their homes.

The change reflects a constellation of recent events: the uncoupling of the vaccine from Election Day; clinical trial results showing about 95 per cent efficacy and relatively modest side effects for the vaccines made by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna; and the alarming surge in new coronavirus infections and deaths... The lure of the vaccines' modest quantities also can't be underestimated as a driver of desire, somewhat like the must-have frenzy generated by a limited-edition Christmas gift, according to public opinion experts... A barrage of feel-good media coverage, including rapt attention given to leading scientists and politicians when they get jabbed and joyous scrums surrounding local health care workers who become the first to be vaccinated, has amplified the excitement, public opinion experts say.