Who wants to be a 401(k) millionaire?

the risks of virtual-money-related investments. The animated video homes in on what NASAA says are the three major issues with investing in electronic cash: It’s untraceable, uninsured and unregulated. Watch: Last week I asked: Have you considered investing in bitcoin? "No, I am not tempted to join in the bitcoin frenzy,” Thomas J. Druitt of Paducah, Ky., a regular commenter who does financial markets research and analysis. “For anyone thinking about speculating in bitcoin, I suggest that they read a book written in 1841 by a Scottish journalist named Charles Mackay titled ‘Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.’ They might find after reading Mackay’s book that the current bitcoin mania has much more in common with the Dutch tulip bulb mania of the early 1600s than with anything that might be called an investment vehicle. Like bitcoin, tulip bulbs had no underlying rate of return and nothing to financially support their ever-increasing price other than the hope that they could be sold a little later on at a higher price to some poor sucker who bought in to the madness closer to its end than to its beginning. Anyone buying into the bitcoin popular delusion should be made aware that they are buying into a high-stakes game of musical chairs in which the only certain outcome is that when the music stops playing there will be a lamentable acute shortage of chairs available to accommodate the vast hordes of bitcoin owners desperately seeking any landing spot where they might ditch off their now rapidly depreciating bitcoin assets.” Color of Money columns this week Knowledge isn’t power. The right knowledge is power. Stay informed about your money. In addition to this newsletter, please read and share my weekly personal finance columns. — You, too, can join the 401(k) millionaire’s club — The best and worst 529 plans, according to Morningstar Newsletter comments policy Please note it is my personal policy to identify readers who respond to questions I ask in my newsletters. I find it encourages thoughtful and civil conversation. I want my newsletters to be a safe place to express your opinion. On sensitive matters or upon request, I’m happy to include just your first name and/or last initial. But I prefer not to post anonymous comments (I do make exceptions when I’m asking questions that might reveal sensitive information or cause conflict.) Have a question about your


A pillar of the cosmic community

As we age, so does the Hubble Telescope. The telescope, which NASA launched into space aboard the shuttle Discovery in 1990, is nearing the end of a long career, Post reporter Sarah Kaplan wrote this week, crippled by a gyroscope failure. Hubble has made more than a million observations and, by 2014, generated 800 gigabytes of data every month. The telescope may be one of the most successful, and most influential, astronomical instruments humans created. Which makes choosing a favorite Hubble observation a bit tricky. Astronomer and science communicator Neil deGrasse Tyson, when asked this question in 2015, told the New York Times it was “like picking your favorite child." But, if push came to shove, I’d go with the Pillars of Creation, a gas formation 6,500 light-years away in the Eagle Nebula. The Pillars of Creation, which looks in Hubble images like the fingers of a titanic hand rising out of space, is a swirl of dust and molecular hydrogen gas. Each column is 6 trillion miles in length, where, at the densest points, new suns coalesce into being. Those swirls are the signposts of a star nursery. Hubble took the first image of the Pillars of Creation in 1995 and again in 2014. Of the images, Jennifer Wiseman, a Hubble scientist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, told Nature: “You see the columns of gas that signify a region where stars have recently formed and are still forming. We have a marvelous newer image with a newer camera, which gave us a visual clue as to how young stars that have recently formed are interacting with the dense gas remaining behind.” — Ben


The Hubble Space Telescope is hobbled after a mechanical failure

head Rachel Osten said on Twitter. All astronomy work is on hold while a technical review board attempts to figure out what is wrong. The news prompted an outpouring of concern from scientists online. One Twitter account posted a “Hubble Prayer”: “Give us this day a fix for our broken gyroscope, and boot us out of safe mode operation. Thy vision come, space exploration be done, in Goddard Space Flight Center as it is in LEO.” (LEO is a commonly used acronym for low earth orbit.) But NASA astrophysicist Jennifer Wiseman, the senior project scientist for the mission, said her team is hopeful it will be able to “reawaken” the malfunctioning gyro. If scientists aren’t able to get the device up and running again, Hubble will revert to reduced gyro mode, using only one of its two remaining gyroscopes at a time. That mode would limit where Hubble can point but prolong the overall mission. “It just takes a little finesse,” Wiseman said of this mode. “But we will be able to achieve excellent science with Hubble quite a few years into the future.” NASA had planned for Hubble to stay in the sky long enough to observe in concert with the James Webb Space Telescope, a gold-plated Goliath built to capture the oldest light in the universe. But repeated budget problems and human failures have delayed the Webb telescope’s launch by more than a decade; it is now not expected to launch until at least 2021. NASA’s operations contract for Hubble ends that year, though optimists say the spacecraft could last into the 2030s. Many of NASA’s top space telescopes are more than 10 years old. The Chandra X-ray Observatory, Spitzer Space Telescope, Swift Observatory and Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope have all exceeded the planned duration of their original missions by at least five years. The end for Kepler is even nearer. The spacecraft has already operated for more than double the length of its original 3½-year mission — functioning even after the second of four reaction wheels that keep it oriented was lost in 2013. It has long been expected to run out of propellant sometime this year, but zero gravity makes it hard to measure how much fuel is left in the spacecraft’s tank. “It’s like trying to decide when to gas up your car. Do you stop now? Or try to make it to the next


The Pentagon is studying an insect army to defend crops. Critics fear a bioweapon.

The Pentagon is studying whether insects can be enlisted to combat crop loss during agricultural emergencies. The bugs would carry genetically engineered viruses that could be deployed rapidly if critical crops such as corn or wheat became vulnerable to drought, a natural blight or a sudden attack by a biological weapon. The concept envisions the viruses making genetic modifications that protect the plants immediately, during a single growing season. The program, funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), has a warm and fuzzy name: Insect Allies. But some critics find the whole thing creepy. A team of skeptical scientists and legal scholars published an article in the journal Science on Thursday arguing that the Insect Allies program opens a “Pandora’s box” and involves technology that “may be widely perceived as an effort to develop biological agents for hostile purposes and their means of delivery.” A website created by the critics puts their objection more bluntly: “The DARPA program is easily weaponized.” DARPA’s program manager for Insect Allies, Blake Bextine, pushed back on the Science article, saying the program is solely for peaceful purposes, has been reviewed by government agencies responsible for agricultural safety and has multiple layers of safeguards built into the research protocols, including total containment of the insects. “I don’t think that the public needs to be worried,” Bextine told The Washington Post. “I don’t think that the international community needs to be worried.” He acknowledged that Insect Allies involves new technologies that potentially could be “dual use” — deployed, in theory, for defensive or offensive purposes. But that is true for almost any advanced technology, he said. “I think anytime you’re developing a new and revolutionary technology, there is that potential for dual-use capability,” Bextine said. “But that is not what we are doing. We are delivering positive traits to plants. We’re focused on that positive goal. We want to make sure we ensure food security, because food security is national security in our eyes.” The program envisions three types of pestiferous insects as allies: aphids, leafhoppers and whiteflies. In nature, these bugs routinely spread viruses among plants. Recent advances in gene editing, including the relatively cheap and simple system known as CRISPR (for “clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats”), could potentially allow researchers to customize viruses to achieve a specific goal in the infected plant. The engineered virus could switch on or off certain


Jagged ice spikes cover Jupiter’s moon Europa, study suggests

been largely unchanged for 50 million years, “they’ve got a nice long time to do it.” Europa’s penitentes, the authors calculated, could be almost 50 feet long. “They have a pretty solid case,” said astronomer William Grundy, an expert on icy solar system objects at Arizona’s Lowell Observatory who was not involved with this work. To be clear, though, this work is a prediction. The conditions are right, but a future observation is required to confirm the penitentes. Grundy noted that the spatial resolution of Europa images, taken by uncrewed spacecraft like Galileo, are just slightly too fuzzy to make out these features. “Who knows what dragons lurk down there?” Supporting this argument are radar and temperature imagery. Europa’s midsection absorbs radar, in the way that resembles the “eggcup-shaped sound baffles on recording walls,” Hobley said. Which happens to be the shape of penitentes. What’s more, blades of methane ice exist on Pluto. It’s also possible, Grundy speculated, that the moons of Uranus — much farther from the sun than Europa — could have bladed terrain of solid carbon dioxide. As for a landing hazard, the danger is not that a spike will impale a robot. But a probe could very well be lost in one of the pits between the blades, Hobley warned. Space probes that have attempted landings on asteroids and comets have flipped like flailing beetles or gotten wedged in cracks. It’s not an insurmountable problem, just one of engineering and astronomy. Future landers could aim at a younger region of Europa’s surface, where the ice has not had time to form such deep pits. Higher latitudes, too, should not be covered so thickly in ice blades. There are two planned orbiter missions to examine Europa: NASA is preparing to launch the Europa Clipper at some point in the 2020s; the European Space Agency’s Jupiter Icy moons Explorer (JUICE), is planned to launch in 2022. Their sensors could confirm or reject the penitente prediction. Even if Europa’s ice blades are too threatening for a lander, a spacecraft might not have to land on Europa to test the hidden ocean. Strong evidence indicates the moon spits plumes of water into space, which an orbiter could swoop up. Read more: Astronomers discover 12 more moons of Jupiter, including an oddity Jupiter is oldest planet in solar system, ancient meteorites show The monster storm on Jupiter is 200 miles deep


Nobel Prize in chemistry goes to three scientists who harnessed ‘the power of evolution’

phage, Smith could evolve new types of proteins on that virus capsule. Because the phages produce, or display, proteins on the outside of their shells, scientists can easily screen and harvest the molecules called peptides. Smith predicted that phage display of peptides could help develop new vaccines. His 1997 review paper on the phage display method has been cited more than 1,000 times and has influenced at least 10 times that many papers, according to Matthew Toussant, senior vice president of the American Chemical Society’s CAS database division. The big pharmaceutical breakthrough with phage display came in 1990, when Winter and his colleagues reported they had developed a fully functional antibody on a bacteriophage. Antibodies are the molecules that our immune cells use to recognize other cells. Winter applied the phage display technique to create antibodies that could be used to treat disease. These antibodies have been used to neutralize toxins, treat metastatic cancer and fight inflammatory bowel disease and other autoimmune diseases, the academy said. In 2002, the Food and Drug Administration approved the first human-antibody-based drug, adalimumab, sold as a rheumatoid arthritis treatment called Humira by pharmaceutical company AbbVie. Winter, in an interview Wednesday with the Associated Press, said that few breakthroughs are truly novel — his work expanded upon the research of many other scientists. “It’s happenstance. That was certainly the case with my work,” he said. This was the 110th Nobel Prize awarded for chemistry since 1901, and this year was the first that women have been included in both the chemistry and physics Nobel Prizes. Arnold is the fifth woman to win a chemistry Nobel. Arnold was "first, stunned. Then thrilled. Then eager to share a celebration with my students, friends, and family. I’m on a plane home to LA at this very minute,” she wrote in an email to The Post on Wednesday afternoon. “I hope that science and technology capture the imaginations of your readers and their children. It’s so important for the well being of our planet and all its inhabitants. And it’s a wonderful expression of our human creativity and curiosity.” She will get half of the award of 9 million kronor (that’s about $1 million). Winter and Smith will split the remainder of the money. The next Nobel, the Peace Prize, will be announced Friday. This post has been updated. Read more: Nobel Prize in physics awarded for ‘tools made


Scientists think they’ve found the first moon outside our solar system

In flickering light of a distant sun, scientists may have discovered the first moon outside our solar system. Writing in the journal Science Advances, two Columbia University astronomers using the Kepler and Hubble space telescopes say they’ve found signs of a large gassy “exomoon” orbiting an even larger exoplanet around a star 8,000 light-years away. It’s an “extraordinary” find that “defies easy explanation” said co-author Alex Teachey — nothing like it exists in our own solar system. He and his colleague David Kipping are careful to call their discovery a “candidate moon,” noting that more studies are required to confirm its existence. But planetary scientist Kip Hodges, a deputy editor at Science Advances who was not involved in the study, called the Columbia astronomers' finding “compelling.” “If this finding stands up to further observational scrutiny, it represents a major milestone in the field of astronomy,” Hodges said. The possible moon was documented by Kepler, the powerhouse planet-hunting space telescope, when it cast a shadow by crossing in front of a star. Kipping and Teachey discovered it among 300 exoplanets in Kepler’s catalogue, all producing predictable dips in starlight that occur as an orbiting body passes in front of its sun — a phenomenon called a “transit.” Just one star, Kepler 1625, looked promising. An aging sun-like star in the constellation Cygnus is known to host a huge, gas giant planet the size of Jupiter, known as Kepler 1625b. Yet there were weird signatures in the flicker of this far-flung star system. So Kipping and Teachey asked for 40 hours of observing time with the Hubble Space Telescope, which is four times as precise as Kepler. These observations have to be done from space; the rotation of Earth means that ground-based telescopes spin away from their targets before they can capture a whole event. The star’s light appeared to fade more than an hour before its Jupiter-like planet transited. And it remained dim for a while after the planet’s passing. They determined it wasn’t a result of activity on the star’s surface, and there was no evidence that another planet was tugging on Kepler 1625b and messing with its orbit. Instead, it looked as if Kepler 1625b was orbited by a second body the size of Neptune — roughly four times the diameter of Earth. “A moon is an excellent explanation to the data at hand,” Kipping said. “We are unable


She made the discovery, but a man got the Nobel. A half-century later, she’s won a $3 million prize.

times before. To Bell Burnell's admirers, the prize is richly deserved and somewhat overdue. In 1974, when a Nobel Prize in physics was awarded for the discovery of pulsars, Bell Burnell's adviser Antony Hewish was one of the recipients. Bell Burnell was not. No woman has won the Nobel Prize in physics since 1963. "She represents something very important in our recent history,” said Janna Levin, an astrophysicist at Barnard College of Columbia University. “She has tenacity, and ingenuity, and originality of thought, and a long legacy as an astronomer . . . that reaches into all branches of physics. I'm absolutely thrilled." Bright enough Like the stars of “Hidden Figures” and DNA researcher Rosalind Franklin, Bell Burnell’s personal story embodies the challenges faced by women in scientific fields. Bell Burnell, who was born in Northern Ireland in 1943, had to fight to take science classes after age 12. “The assumption was that the boys would do science and the girls would do cookery and needlework,” she said. “It was such a firm assumption that it wasn’t even discussed, so there was no choice in the matter.” But Bell Burnell would not be denied. She had read her father's astronomy books cover to cover, teaching herself the jargon and grappling with complex concepts until she felt she could comprehend the universe. She complained to her parents, who complained to the school, which ultimately allowed her to attend lab along with two other girls. At the end of the semester, Bell Burnell ranked first in the class. By her junior year at the University of Glasgow, she was the only woman enrolled in honors physics. Men would whistle and heckle her when she walked into the lecture hall. Blushing only made them louder, so she trained herself to be stoic. When she arrived at Cambridge University for graduate school, Bell Burnell was certain someone had made a mistake admitting her. She was one of two women in her graduate program, and Cambridge was far more affluent than anywhere she had lived before. Both factors, she said, probably contributed to her impostor syndrome — doubts about her accomplishments and a persistent fear of being exposed as a fraud — “although, of course, we didn’t know that term then.” "Surely they're going to realize I'm not bright enough,” she recalled thinking. “But until they throw me out, I’m going to work my very


hardest." Bell Burnell joined Cambridge's radio astronomy department, where her adviser, Hewish, was on the hunt for quasars — incredibly bright objects in the distant sky whose origins were then unknown. Hewish had designed his own telescope for the task: a four-acre network of copper wires dubbed “Interplanetary Scintillation Array.” The wires would pick up the energy of radio waves streaming down from the cosmos and send an electric pulse to a pen recorder, which marked the signals on rolls of chart paper. The resulting plots resembled the dips and peaks on a cardiogram; studying them was like monitoring the heartbeat of the universe. After construction on the telescope was completed, Hewish assigned Bell Burnell to retrieve and analyze the information it collected. Just before lunch one day in the summer of 1967, the young physicist noticed an “unclassifiable squiggle” on one of her data sheets. It was the kind of detail that others might have disregarded or overlooked; indeed, Hewish initially insisted it was merely interference. But Bell Burnell's fear of flunking made her meticulous, and a lifetime of feeling like an outsider had opened her mind. She remained focused on the squiggle until she could figure it out. The signal was remarkably regular, pulsing every 1⅓ seconds. And rather than keeping to a 24-hour schedule — as would be expected if it was produced by “Joe Doke driving home every day in a badly suppressed car,” Bell Burnell said — it followed “sidereal time,” which governs the movement of the stars. Estimates of its distance pegged it to a spot in the constellation Vulpecula, about 2,000 light-years away. Hewish and Bell Burnell jokingly christened their discovery “LGM-1" or “Little Green Man.” They couldn't come up with any explanation for a signal so regular. Why not aliens? Then, on a frigid morning just before Christmas, Bell Burnell noticed a second pulsing signal coming from another part of the cosmos. Seeing the faint smudge on the telescope readout filled her with elation. "When you get a second one of something it makes the first one so much more believable,” she said. “This begins to look like a new kind of star of which there’s probably a whole lot in the sky." 'It was my stars' Soon Bell Burnell discovered her third and fourth LGM signals, and in February 1968, the finds were announced via a paper in Nature, one of


Climate change could render many of Earth’s ecosystems unrecognizable

After the end of the last ice age — as sea levels rose, glaciers receded and global average temperatures soared as much as seven degrees Celsius — the Earth’s ecosystems were utterly transformed. Forests grew up out of what was once barren, ice-covered ground. Dark, cool stands of pine were replaced by thickets of hickory and oak. Woodlands gave way to scrub, and savanna turned to desert. The more temperatures increased in a particular landscape, the more dramatic the ecological shifts. It’s about to happen again, researchers are reporting Thursday in the journal Science. A sweeping survey of global fossil and temperature records from the past 20,000 years suggests that Earth’s terrestrial ecosystems are at risk of another, even faster transformation unless aggressive action is taken against climate change. “Even as someone who has spent more than 40 years thinking about vegetation change looking into the past … it is really hard for me to wrap my mind around the magnitude of change we’re talking about,” said ecologist Stephen Jackson, director of the U.S. Geological Survey’s Southwest Climate Adaptation Science Center and the lead author of the new study. “It is concerning to me to think about how much change and how rapidly the change is likely to happen, and how little capacity we have to predict the exact course,” he said, “which creates very large challenges for all of us out there who are trying to manage wildfire, fish, water, soil, endangered species — all those different ways in which natural ecosystems affect us.” Jackson has spent most of the past four decades studying ecological changes as the Earth transitioned from an ice age to the current “interglacial” period between 20,000 and 10,000 years ago. His experience suggested that no corner of the planet made it through that upheaval unchanged, but being a scientist, he wanted actual evidence. So Jackson brought together a group of more than three dozen ecology experts from around the globe to assess how vegetation in various regions had been altered after the last ice age. The scientists analyzed preserved bits of plant pollen from nearly 600 sites on every continent except Antarctica. For each metric, they ranked the change at their site as “low,” “moderate” or “large.” Quickly, “a clear relationship appeared,” said Connor Nolan, the University of Arizona graduate student who led the analysis. Regions that experienced large temperature increases — especially North


A glimpse beyond the borders of the known world

Nearly 4 billion miles from Earth, where the sun looks like just another star, and space is scattered with frozen fragments left over from the birth of distant planets, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft just caught a glimpse of the unknown. These images, captured by New Horizons’s Long Range Reconnaissance Imager, show a small, peanut-shaped inhabitant of the Kuiper Belt known as Ultima Thule. New Horizons is scheduled for a close encounter with the far-flung space rock just after midnight on New Year’s Day, 2019. The moniker “Utima Thule," which was bestowed by NASA after a naming contest earlier this year, comes from an ancient expression for the distant north. But in literature, the term has a metaphorical meaning, summoning up a place beyond the borders of the known world, as the Roman writer Virgil put it, where the sun rarely sets, and humankind’s greatest ambitions are waiting to be grasped. The idea persisted, captivating writers across continents and throughout the centuries. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow dedicated an entire book of poetry to the subject, writing of a “land of dreams ... of fiction and of truth, the Lost Atlantis of our youth.” “A wild weird clime that lieth, sublime," Edgar Allan Poe described it, "out of space . . . out of time!” For now, the real life Ultima Thule is almost as mysterious as the mythological version. It is so distant and small that none but the most powerful telescopes can see it, and even then they only get a vague sense of its faint, fuzzy form. Scientists weren’t sure about its size or shape until they spotted it passing in front of another star last summer; by measuring the object’s shadow, they determined it is likely composed of two bodies roughly the size of Manhattan orbiting one another. Alan Stern, the New Horizons mission’s principal investigator, wrote that Ultima Thule is probably a “primodial relic” of the planet forming processes that produced the Kuiper Belt’s bigger bodies, like Pluto, Sedna and Eris. New Horizons’s Jan. 1, 2019 flyby will take it within 2,200 miles of Ultima Thule, making it the most distant body ever explored by humans. During that encounter, the spacecraft’s instruments will measure the object’s mass and attempt to discern its composition. Then, scientists hope, Ultima Thule will no longer be a mystery. New Horizons will have expanded the borders of the known world. -- Sarah


Firefly twinkles are a sweet reminder that they taste like trash, study says

visual signs. “This is, to my knowledge, the first work to show that a three-dimensional flight pattern is information that bats can associate with bad taste,” Barber said. In a follow-up test to examine the role of firefly light, the researchers painted fireflies red or black, carefully applying brushstrokes to block out the light organ on the firefly abdomen. The bats that previously learned not to hunt fireflies had to relearn to avoid them. Without the fireflies' flashes, this process took longer, but the predators eventually recognized the flight patterns of the darkened beetles and stopped pursuing them. Kathrin F. Stanger-Hall, a firefly expert at the University of Georgia who was not involved with the research, noted that the paint-blocking tests were particularly elegant. Bats use echolocation to sense the wing beats of the fireflies, which have characteristically lazy flight patterns. The authors called it the “nonchalance of a chemically protected insect." Barber likened it to the unhurried waddle of a prickly porcupine. The study presents "convincing evidence that bats of this particular species learned to avoid fireflies more quickly when they received information through two different sensory channels,” said Sara M. Lewis, a biologist at Tufts University and the author of “Silent Sparks: The Wondrous World of Fireflies.” Lewis was not involved with the research. It was the combination of the flight pattern and the blinking light that drove the message to the bats, Lewis said. "Flying plus bioluminescence was the magic combination that really enhanced bats’ avoidance learning.” Barber, Branham and their co-authors conclude that these anti-bat signals might be why adult fireflies evolved the ability to flash at night. The oldest known firefly ancestor communicated with mates using pheromones, which is a chemical scent akin to perfume; its descendants later evolved the ability to court mates with light. The scientists make a bold prediction in their paper, suggesting that “bats may have invented fireflies.” Branham said the family tree of fireflies and bats both branch around the same time. The timing is not conclusive, but it is suggestive, he said. “With all of the data that is currently available, it certainly appears as though the first bioluminescent fireflies first arose around the same time as bats,” Branham said. Stanger-Hall, however, wasn’t convinced by this possible ancient bat-and-firefly tango. “Any discussion on how bats may have impacted the evolution of firefly bioluminescence is pure speculation,” she said, “and


United in the shadow of the moon

the phenomenon, interviewing eclipse chasers about the feeling that compelled them to follow the moon’s shadow across the globe. Now, right before my eyes, the sun was shrinking to a sliver, the air was turning cool, and stars began to light up the violet sky. And then, two minutes of totality. I have no words for the feeling. It was an instant, all-encompassing awareness of two seemingly contradictory truths: I am nothing, just a fleeting collection of carbon atoms on an unimportant rock in a far-flung wing of a run-of-the-mill galaxy. And at the same time, I am here, bearing witness to the universe at work. “I feel shivers,” I told my co-workers on a live stream The Washington Post produced for the event. “We’re seeing it! And you can see... you can..." I gasped. “Sorry, I’m really overwhelmed.” Later, my dad, who was watching the live stream, texted me: “I thought it was going to be another Minnie Mouse moment. But you held it together." “Just barely,” I laughed. “Next time,” (the U.S. will see another eclipse in 2024, FYI) “I want you to come, too.” I didn’t tell him that as soon as the live stream was over, I hugged the video journalist who was helping produce it and cried as I thanked her for being there with me. I wanted to hug everyone else I’d talked to that day — the couple who drove all the way from Baltimore to be there, the two sisters who showed me how they made pinhole projectors from cereal boxes — but figured it was probably not the professional thing to do as a journalist. I’ve been thinking about that day a lot lately. Tuesday, I wrote about a survey that found a staggering 88 percent of U.S. adults watched last year’s eclipse, either in person or electronically. That means some 200 million people shared a piece of my experience. I know at least some of them responded just as emotionally as I did; when the sun re-emerged over Illinois, I saw plenty of people exchanging hugs and wiping away tears. “It was a shared experience, it was really cool,” one of my neighbors at the eclipse watching event told me. “You hope that maybe someone has better thoughts about humanity after seeing that.” It’s a cliche, but I really do believe there is something about awareness of the cosmos that


2017 solar eclipse was one of most-watched events in American history, survey finds

“We’re all together” during a total solar eclipse. That was Mike Kentrianakis’s promise. It was July 2017, just over a month before the moon was due to pass between the sun and the Earth and cast its long shadow across the width of the continental United States. Kentrianakis, who had already witnessed 20 solar eclipses, from every continent except Antarctica, was working on behalf of the American Astronomical Society to ensure that his fellow citizens saw the next one. “Everyone is on the same page,” he said, attempting to describe the indescribable. “There’s no differences. There’s no rich guy, there’s no poor guy, there’s none of that. It’s gone. Ripped and stripped away from every single one of us.” For a few minutes on Aug. 21 — at the end of a scorching summer marked by the shooting of Republican lawmakers practicing for a charity baseball game; the killing of a counterprotester at a white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville; showdowns over health care, immigration and Russian interference; conflict over who gets to be called “American” — Kentrianakis was proved right. The nation stood united in the shadow of the moon, and we were transformed. At least a little bit. According to a new survey from the University of Michigan, a stunning 88 percent of American adults — some 216 million people — watched the “Great American Eclipse” in person or electronically. This estimated audience, based on a national probability sample of 2,915 people over 18, was greater than that for the 1969 Apollo 11 landing and each Super Bowl since the contest began. (A 1999 poll found that 7 out of 10 Americans who were age 5 or older on the day of the moon landing recalled watching the event on television. The most-watched Super Bowl, in 2015, had about 114 million viewers.) “It’s definitely one of the largest ever,” Jon D. Miller, the survey’s organizer and director of Michigan’s International Center for the Advancement of Scientific Literacy, said of the eclipse. He and his colleagues sifted through years of television viewership data and other records and couldn’t find evidence of any other event in history witnessed by so many Americans. Miller has been surveying scientific literacy in the United States for more than 30 years. The results can sometimes be sobering. In 1987, he found that fewer than half of all Americans knew that the Earth orbits the sun and


Scientists are unraveling the Chinese coronavirus with unprecedented speed and openness

Just 10 days after a pneumonia-like illness was first reported among people who visited a seafood market in Wuhan, China, scientists released the genetic sequence of the coronavirus that sickened them. That precious bit of data, freely available to any researcher who wanted to study it, unleashed a massive collaborative effort to understand the mysterious new pathogen that has been rapidly spreading in China and beyond. The genome was posted on a Friday night on an open-access repository for genetic information. By Saturday morning, Andrew Mesecar, a professor of cancer structural biology at Purdue University, had redirected his laboratory to start analyzing the DNA sequence, which bore a striking resemblance to that of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), the 2002 viral outbreak that sickened more than 8,000 people and killed nearly 800. Scientists at the National Institutes of Health’s Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Montana asked a company to turn the information from a string of letters on a computer screen into actual DNA they could study in lab dishes. At unprecedented speed, scientists are starting experiments, sharing data and revealing the secrets of the pathogen — a race that is made possible by new scientific tools and cultural norms in the face of a public health emergency. “The pace is unmatched,” said Karla Satchell, a professor of microbiology-immunology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. “This is really new. Lots of people [in science] still try to hide what they’re doing, don’t want to talk about what they’re doing, and everybody out there is like: This is the case where we don’t worry about egos, we don’t worry about who’s first, we just care about solving the problem. The information flow has been really fast.” Purdue University scientists are preparing to scale up production of experimental drugs that they were initially developing to fight SARS, to see if they show promise against the new coronavirus. Twelve days after the genome was posted, NIH scientists published their first analysis, showing that the coronavirus used the same door to get into human cells as SARS. About 12 hours later, a Chinese team of scientists who had isolated the virus from patients showed, using the actual virus, that the team was correct. Meanwhile, a team at Northwestern recently ordered about a dozen pieces of the viral genome to be synthesized by a company to enable research that will help lead to drugs, vaccines


Pentagon nixes proposal to toughen limits on U.S. sales to Huawei

significant long-term impact on Huawei, since other companies would fill the gaps,” Douglas Jacobson, a Washington trade attorney, wrote via email. Huawei spends about $11 billion annually on U.S. parts, including computer chips, which are far superior to what Chinese fabrication facilities can produce. U.S. chip makers claim about half of the global market, a dominance that is sustained by heavy research spending. Limiting U.S. companies’ ability to sell into the Chinese market “will erode the competitiveness of the U.S. semiconductor industry,” John Neuffer, president of the Semiconductor Industry Association, said last year. The Pentagon objections scuppered the Commerce Department proposal, but they have not ended the debate. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross is determined to try again, according to several people following the discussions. Cabinet-level debate over the next steps is expected soon, they added. “We’ve got to make sure that policy changes like this are done in a way that cushions the impact on U.S. companies,” said David Hanke, a partner at Arent Fox and a former Senate Intelligence Committee aide. “We need to make sure there’s a level playing field for U.S. companies and not make policies that gave an upper hand to their competitors.” The debate is taking place in the aftermath of Trump’s Jan. 15 signing of a “phase one” trade deal with China, which requires Chinese purchases of an additional $200 billion worth of American goods and services over the next two years. Officials on both sides of the debate are trying to gauge the president’s willingness to toughen the punishment for a key Chinese company even as he seeks to cultivate warmer trading ties. “We’re all expecting the White House to quash everything so long as the Chinese are buying,” said Derek Scissors, a resident scholar specializing in China at the American Enterprise Institute, who supports a tougher stance. On Capitol Hill, a bipartisan group of lawmakers last week introduced legislation that would provide $1.25 billion to develop an alternative to Huawei’s 5G technology. Sens. Mark R. Warner (D-Va.), vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and Rubio, a vocal critic of China, want the government to subsidize development of an open-architecture software application called O-RAN. Administration officials for months have been trying to persuade U.S. allies to bar Huawei from their next-generation telecommunications networks. Those efforts would have a better chance of succeeding if the United States could offer an alternative, lawmakers said.


Do we have the courage to stop anti-Semitism’s rise once again?

The plan was for no one to be there. In mid-January of 1945, as winter raked and froze the Polish countryside, German commanders ordered one last ruthless culling of prisoners at the Auschwitz death factory and the slave camps surrounding it. With Soviet troops advancing furiously from the east, slaves who might still be of use to their Nazi tormentors were marched westward in rags under some of the worst conditions of that unspeakable time. The rest —those judged too weak to begin the death march, the tortured twins and other subjects of Josef Mengele’s sadistic medical experiments and so on — were to be shot. But by then all the ghoulish efficiency of Auschwitz was gone. There had been flowers in the window boxes of buildings on the way to the gas chambers, because the blooms tended to calm the fears of the doomed. There had been teams of prisoners trained — it was this or be killed — to drag corpses from the kill rooms to the crematoria. There had been officers to assure their soldiers that savagery in wartime is glorious, or at least mandatory. In other words, there had been a machinery of slaughter to deal with such orders from on high. But with the Red Army’s guns booming ever closer, the Auschwitz death machine broke down. The remaining Germans scattered without finishing their work. And on Jan. 27, soldiers from the First Ukrainian Front marched up to find some 7,000 prisoners alive to tell the story of the more than 1 million murders. The liberation of Auschwitz is the first of many important 75th-anniversary milestones the world will mark in the coming months. Seventy-five years is not just a momentous number. It is the horizon of living memory. The burning of Dresden and of Tokyo, the Battle of Iwo Jima, the death of Roosevelt, the suicide of Hitler, the surrender of Germany, the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the capitulation of Japan’s emperor-god. The ranks of people old enough to have witnessed the final throes of the world’s deadliest catastrophe are dwindling daily, marching into the past. When the last of them cross into history, these memories, and the meaning of these events, will be kept alive only by acts of will and conscious choices. Who will choose to spend time with such ugliness and sorrow? To confront what happened, to admit


How the new coronavirus differs from SARS, measles and Ebola

Global health officials have almost as many questions as answers about the mysterious, pneumonia-like virus that originated in China last month and has spread to at least five other countries, including the United States. How exactly is it transmitted? How infectious is it and, most critically, how deadly? They do know that the new virus is believed to have come from animals sold in a Wuhan market and that it shares many similarities with SARS, the coronavirus that also originated in an animal-to-human transmission in China in 2002, though it does not appear to be as deadly. Similar to SARS, or severe acute respiratory syndrome, which infected more than 8,000 people and killed nearly 800 before it was mostly contained in 2003, the new virus spreads through close person-to-person contact. Each infected person seems to spread the virus to about two others, through coughing or sneezing or by leaving germs on a surface that is touched by non-infected people who touch their faces, said Colleen Kraft, who is associate chief medical officer for Emory University Hospital and helped treat the first U.S. Ebola cases in 2014. The latest report from Chinese health authorities put the death toll from the new coronavirus at 25, with 830 confirmed cases nationwide. Still, it is not nearly as infectious as the measles virus, which can live for up to two hours in the air after an infected person coughs or sneezes. Nor does it appear to be anywhere near as deadly as Ebola, which is also much harder to transmit. Ebola is passed largely through direct contact with an infected person’s blood or bodily fluids. Yet Kraft and global health officials from the World Health Organization cautioned that understanding of the novel virus is still evolving and that the way it spreads and infects people could also change over time. “The transmission is going to be the same as other respiratory viruses,” Kraft said. “Whether it’s more severe in a person or lasts longer on the surface, those are things that can change. As we learn those things, we can gauge what our panic mode needs to be.” The WHO on Thursday said it was still too early to declare the outbreak an international public health emergency — a step the international body ultimately took for Ebola in 2014 and Zika in 2016. Coronaviruses range from the common cold to more-severe diseases such as


coronavirus at 25, with 830 confirmed cases nationwide. Still, it is not nearly as infectious as the measles virus, which can live for up to two hours in the air after an infected person coughs or sneezes. Nor does it appear to be anywhere near as deadly as Ebola, which is also much harder to transmit. Ebola is passed largely through direct contact with an infected person’s blood or bodily fluids. Yet Kraft and global health officials from the World Health Organization cautioned that understanding of the novel virus is still evolving and that the way it spreads and infects people could also change over time. “The transmission is going to be the same as other respiratory viruses,” Kraft said. “Whether it’s more severe in a person or lasts longer on the surface, those are things that can change. As we learn those things, we can gauge what our panic mode needs to be.” The WHO on Thursday said it was still too early to declare the outbreak an international public health emergency — a step the international body ultimately took for Ebola in 2014 and Zika in 2016. Coronaviruses range from the common cold to more-severe diseases such as SARS and Middle East respiratory syndrome, or MERS. Some coronaviruses, including this new one, can cause severe symptoms and illnesses, including pneumonia. Yet because there are still so many unknowns, there are many scenarios of how this virus could spread, said Tom Frieden, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. An unlikely possibility is that it can be transmitted as readily as the common cold and cause severe pneumonia in a small fraction of people, Frieden said. “That seems quite unlikely, but it would be alarming because it could become like a circulating strain of flu all over the world,” Frieden said. Another possibility: The virus spreads like SARS — in other words not as readily as the flu — but causes less severe illness than that sister virus. “That would be concerning but not as alarming, and potentially more controllable,” he said. There is no vaccine or treatment for this coronavirus, but the National Institutes of Health said human trials for a coronavirus vaccine could begin within three months. It is spreading in health-care settings, which officials say is also cause for concern. “Many things are giving us an advantage, but our disadvantage is the unknown


the air after an infected person coughs or sneezes. Nor does it appear to be anywhere near as deadly as Ebola, which is also much harder to transmit. Ebola is passed largely through direct contact with an infected person’s blood or bodily fluids. Yet Kraft and global health officials from the World Health Organization cautioned that understanding of the novel virus is still evolving and that the way it spreads and infects people could also change over time. “The transmission is going to be the same as other respiratory viruses,” Kraft said. “Whether it’s more severe in a person or lasts longer on the surface, those are things that can change. As we learn those things, we can gauge what our panic mode needs to be.” The WHO on Thursday said it was still too early to declare the outbreak an international public health emergency — a step the international body ultimately took for Ebola in 2014 and Zika in 2016. Coronaviruses range from the common cold to more-severe diseases such as SARS and Middle East respiratory syndrome, or MERS. Some coronaviruses, including this new one, can cause severe symptoms and illnesses, including pneumonia. Yet because there are still so many unknowns, there are many scenarios of how this virus could spread, said Tom Frieden, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. An unlikely possibility is that it can be transmitted as readily as the common cold and cause severe pneumonia in a small fraction of people, Frieden said. “That seems quite unlikely, but it would be alarming because it could become like a circulating strain of flu all over the world,” Frieden said. Another possibility: The virus spreads like SARS — in other words not as readily as the flu — but causes less severe illness than that sister virus. “That would be concerning but not as alarming, and potentially more controllable,” he said. There is no vaccine or treatment for this coronavirus, but the National Institutes of Health said human trials for a coronavirus vaccine could begin within three months. It is spreading in health-care settings, which officials say is also cause for concern. “Many things are giving us an advantage, but our disadvantage is the unknown — not fully understanding the disease, its severity and its transmission,” Michael Ryan, executive director of the WHO’s health emergencies program, said at a news conference Thursday. yasmeen.abutaleb@washpost.com


Coronavirus claims 15 more lives in China; first three cases reported in Europe; first case reported in Australia; 2 cases confirmed in U.S.

its authenticity and there were many others like it that emerged from the quarantined city. Together, they provide a window into the extreme levels of stress in the overburdened hospitals of Wuhan as they battle a new pneumonia-like coronavirus. Read the full story here. By: Anna Fifield 2:50 PM: France confirms two cases of coronavirus, marking the first diagnoses in Europe WASHINGTON — French Health Minister Agnes Buzyn told reporters Friday that two cases of coronavirus had been diagnosed in France, one case in the southwestern city of Bordeaux and another in Paris. Both patients were recently in China, she said, adding she suspects more cases will emerge. Those diagnoses mark the first known cases of the virus in Europe, amid concerns that people may be contagious with the virus even before they exhibit any symptoms. The Associated Press reported that Buzyn said she believes the virus was detected in France before any other European country in part because it has already developed a rapid test for patients exhibiting symptoms of the virus. By: Siobhán O’Grady 2:30 PM: How public health officials are fighting coronavirus panic WASHINGTON — Panic over the new coronavirus has spread along with the disease. But reactions based on misinformation or partial information can make matters worse, underscoring the need for governments to be open from the start, say public health experts. “It is very critical that [governments] are and appear to be honest and transparent with people,” said Vish Viswanath, a professor of health communication at Harvard University’s school of public health. Such transparency builds trust among the public and curtails unwarranted, unproductive fear, experts say. Viswanath described the new coronavirus as “an emerging infectious disease crisis” because its source and exactly how it spreads remain uncertain, as well as other unknowns. “In such a crisis, when you have incomplete information, the question is how do you communicate risk,” he said. “You have to just go out and say this is what we know so far and this is what we don’t know.” This works best, he said, when a government has one or two designated spokespeople to provide the public with continuous, credible information about what’s fact, fiction or still an open question. Without clear updates from official sources, misinformation and rumors spread even more easily on social media. Such crises are best managed by “public health officials working through community leaders in a


they returned on flights from the Wuhan area. In both cases, they began feeling unwell and reached out to health-care providers. Chicago health officials declined to identify the hospital where the Chicago patient is being evaluated. The woman had limited close contacts, who are also being monitored. She did not take public transportation and did not attend any large gatherings. “She has not had any extended close contact with anyone outside her home since returning, and that should be very reassuring to the public,” Allison Arwady, Chicago’s public health commissioner, told reporters Friday. Officials said they do not know how the woman became infected. By: Lena H. Sun 10:45 AM: Science is moving with lightning speed to keep up with the emerging coronavirus threat WASHINGTON — A cluster of pneumonia cases was reported from people who attended a seafood market in Wuhan on Dec. 31, and 10 days later, a full genomic sequence of the virus was made public, “exemplifying prompt datasharing in outbreak response,” Fauci, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) director, wrote in the medical journal JAMA this week. Early studies of the viral genome suggest a molecular similarity to severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), the 2002 viral outbreak that sickened more than 8,000 people and killed 774. “The extent, if any, to which such transmission might lead to a sustained epidemic remains an open and critical question,” Fauci wrote. The new coronavirus is from a family of pathogens that were long thought to be relatively benign, typically causing the common cold. But in recent years, global health threats have emerged from different types of coronavirus, which include SARS and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), which has caused a slow-burning outbreak since 2012. Fauci noted that antiviral treatments that showed promise against MERS are being tested in animal models to see if they could be used as a treatment for the new coronavirus. Vaccines are also being pursued at the NIAID. During the SARS outbreak, the time from getting the genome of the virus to a clinical trial of a vaccine took 20 months — a timeline that Fauci said now takes about 3.25 months for other viral diseases. Now, using a different vaccine strategy, they hope to bridge the gap from genome to vaccine even more quickly. By: Carolyn Johnson 10:30 AM: Second coronavirus case confirmed in United States WASHINGTON — The Centers for


First U.S. case of potentially deadly Chinese coronavirus confirmed in Washington state

case was confirmed Monday as the coronavirus that has sickened close to 300 people in China and others in Thailand, Japan, Taiwan and South Korea. CDC officials said Tuesday that they are expanding screening to international airports in Atlanta and Chicago. More than 1,200 travelers have already been screened since Friday, with no one yet referred to a hospital or discovered to be ill with the virus. Federal officials will also direct travelers arriving in the United States on direct and indirect flights from Wuhan to those five airports for screening. That process is getting worked out in the coming days. For example, if a passenger was originally scheduled to fly from Wuhan to Shanghai and then Boston, that flight would most likely be rerouted to JFK for screening, and then Boston, CDC officials said. Screenings are being conducted in English and Mandarin. The Washington state man’s case originated several days before airport screening began, but local, state and federal officials said they were on alert and quickly collaborated to test him and put precautions in place. A small number of health-care workers and patients who may have been exposed to him have been told to watch for symptoms and are being monitored, Washington state health officials said. Officials are tracing the people he may have come into contact with in both China and the United States. Officials praised the man for taking the initiative to reach out to his health-care provider. “He was a very astute gentleman,” said Scott Lindquist, Washington state’s epidemiologist. “He was looking at the Internet actively” and saw information about the virus and its spread, Lindquist said in a news briefing on Tuesday. Nancy Messonnier, director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Disease, said the risk posed by the virus to the general American population is low but that older adults with underlying health conditions may be at increased risk. She said federal officials are prepared to respond quickly. “This is an evolving situation and, again, we do expect additional cases in the United States and globally,” she said. The CDC and officials from homeland security and transportation agencies are working out how future travelers arriving in the United States from Wuhan will be redirected to the five airports. U.S. officials want to make sure every time someone books a flight from Wuhan to the United States, their first point of entry


China reporting confirmed cases in multiple cities as hundreds of millions of people in China and elsewhere in Asia are on the move in the run-up to the Lunar New Year, the biggest travel event in the world. The infection is believed to have begun among people who shopped or worked at an animal market in Wuhan. But its rapid spread led officials to conclude that people, as well as animals, could transmit the infection. The Washington state man did not visit that market and did not know anyone who was ill, Washington state officials said. The source of the man’s infection raises more questions and concerns about human-to-human transmission of the disease. Chinese officials have confirmed that phenomenon is taking place. To control this outbreak, health officials are trying to determine whether new cases being reported in other cities in China and elsewhere can be traced back to Wuhan, said Tom Inglesby, director of the Center for Health Security at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. If the disease has been circulating independently in other parts of the country, that information would affect not only how China contains it, but also how other public health agencies in the world seek to prevent its spread, he said. Coronaviruses are a large family of viruses ranging from the common cold to much more serious diseases and can infect both humans and animals, according to the World Health Organization. The strain spreading in China is related to two other coronaviruses that have caused major outbreaks in recent years: Middle East respiratory syndrome, also known as MERS, and severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS. “Since this is a respiratory virus, it is spread easier than Ebola, so it brings with it more fear of easily being transmitted between people,” said Matthew Frieman, a virologist and associated professor at the University of Maryland School of Medicine who studies coronaviruses. The WHO is meeting Wednesday to decide whether to declare the outbreak a public health emergency. Symptoms of a coronavirus infection include respiratory problems, difficulty breathing, fever and cough, and can lead to severe cases of pneumonia, kidney failure, acute respiratory syndrome (when fluid builds up in the lungs) and death. The elderly, young and those with an already weakened immune system are at a higher risk of developing severe lower respiratory tract diseases, such as bronchitis and pneumonia, according to the CDC.


George Takei: The ‘Star Trek’ vision was hopeful. Trump’s is the mirror image.

off the logo for Starfleet Command from “Star Trek.” Indeed, with the two logos placed side by side, the resemblance is so remarkable that I had to wonder whether Melania Trump was part of the design committee: Apparently, the new logo is just another iteration on the former Air Force Space Command logo, which also featured an upward pointing delta, but the final product with its concentric rings and swooping orbits looks so much like Starfleet’s, I fear it could easily confuse any Vulcans and Klingons who see it. This somewhat comical appropriation of “Star Trek” imagery carries a certain irony. The universe of “Star Trek” has always provided a hopeful, near-utopian vision for humanity, where we have finally learned to set aside things like racial prejudice and gender inequality, and we all work together toward a common purpose and quest. Money is a thing of the past because no one wants for any material need, and we have united much of the galaxy in a peaceful assembly of sovereign worlds. Contrast that for a moment with the current administration’s values and practices: racial resentments and fear stoked for cynical political purposes, the wealthy made even more obscenely so through grift and political influence, coarse and bullying behavior masquerading as diplomacy, to name but a few. Even the notion of a “Space Force” seems patently absurd coming from an administration where science is mocked and disregarded. At times it truly feels like the past three years have had us beamed into a parallel universe, where instead of a president we have a mendacious thug, and where notions like the U.S. Senate being a deliberate, serious body that serves as a vital check on presidential power now seem quaint and naive. True to the “Star Trek” vision, “Mirror, Mirror” has a hopeful ending. The “evil” version of Spock, having Vulcan-mind-melded with Dr. McCoy to understand why someone would spare the life of his enemy, has an epiphany. After listening to an impassioned Kirk argue that the overthrow of the empire is inevitable, the evil Spock helps the “good” bridge crew escape. The optimism and message is unmistakable: The nightmare will end if we work to end it. Normalcy can be restored if we believe in the goodness of humankind. This year seems like a good time to test that lesson. We have not slipped so far into the mirror universe that


China restricts travel for 35 million people to halt spread of deadly virus

Beijing — China locked down more than 35 million people in an increasingly urgent effort to halt the spread of the deadly coronavirus Friday, as the United States confirmed a second infected person and the respiratory illness found its way to Europe, where the first three cases were announced in France. The pneumonia-like disease has claimed 42 lives — all in China — and infected more than 1,200 people there. An official at the World Health Organization told reporters that his agency has begun planning for an outbreak that will last for months. Infections have been confirmed in South Korea, Japan, Nepal, Thailand, Singapore, Vietnam and Taiwan, as well as France, Australia and the United States as the disease spreads outside Asia. At least 50 people are under observation for the illness in 22 U.S. states, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The second U.S. patient is a woman, a Chicago resident, who traveled to Wuhan, China — where the virus originated — in late December and returned Jan. 13, the CDC announced Friday. A few days later, she began to feel ill and saw a doctor. She was asked about her travel history, then referred to a hospital, which isolated her and arranged for testing. The woman is in stable condition but will remain in the hospital mainly to ensure she does not spread the virus. On Tuesday, authorities revealed the first U.S. case, a man in his 30s from Snohomish County, Wash., who had recently returned from a visit to Wuhan. Authorities said they are monitoring 50 of the man’s contacts for signs of infection. The CDC deployed a team to help with the Chicago case. The woman “has not had any extended close contact with anyone outside her home since returning, and that should be very reassuring to the public,” Allison Arwady, Chicago’s public health commissioner, told reporters Friday. Health officials briefed about two dozen senators Friday. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said he “wouldn’t be surprised if there are additional cases.” But he said public-health authorities acted quickly in Illinois, where they “identified, isolated and did contact tracing on the people with whom that person came into contact. That’s how you get your handle on an outbreak.” After the briefing, Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) called on President Trump to declare the outbreak a public-health emergency. Although


A little ‘civility’ can be a dangerous thing. Even in the impeachment trial.

did he offer a response when Cipollone falsely claimed Republicans were denied access to the sensitive compartmented information facility, or SCIF, during the House inquiry. About these matters the chief justice was silent. His only interruption, however heartfelt, gave the appearance that the leader of the nation’s highest court was more interested in maintaining the status quo than serving justice and truth. An emphasis on civility plays another role, historically. The history of racism and civil rights, for example, shows that the tension created by an expectation of civility served to suppress black voices and keep a lid on the possibility of violence. The current demand for civility, while not only about this, also reflects a fear of violence: Lurking under the surface and occasionally bubbling up online and on cable TV is the threat of civil war if Democratic opponents go too far; this often includes a reminder of how well-armed Trump devotees are (and might explain why many Americans are reluctant to take to the streets in protest, as they were at a gun-rights rally in Richmond last week). Civility deployed this way is not about improving the quality of our body politic and public discourse, but aimed at keeping critics quiet. It is worth noting that Trump, throughout his career, has exploited the civil process of U.S. courts and the general civility of those who refuse to assume the worst. The societal expectation of civility (and the disbelief toward the utter lack of it) has made it easier for him to get away with so much — tearing apart migrant families and losing track of the children’s whereabouts, for example, or covering for Saudi Arabia Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salman and the Saudis after the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. There is no question the use of uncivil language by politicians, commentators and journalists has escalated. I count myself among those who have felt reluctantly obliged to choose increasingly vivid words to accurately capture and respond to a growing picture of criminality and corruption and an increasing awareness that the president of the United States acts with a level of anti-democratic malignancy and cruelty I fear puts our institutions, global alliances and vulnerable populations in increasing danger. But if you believe your house is on fire and your family faces death and destruction, is it appropriate to engage in pleasant and polite tones when speaking to the


We can’t recall the planet if we mess up: Climate change is risky business

If we handled climate risk the way that businesses manage risk every day, we would have tackled climate change a long, long time ago. But that’s not how we as a society are responding — even though the potential consequences are a lot worse than most business risks. Consider how climate change risk is expressed in key reports like those from the U.S. National Climate Assessment (NCA) and the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The NCA says there is at least a two-thirds chance that your asthma or hay fever will get worse because of climate change. There’s a more than 90 percent probability that extreme precipitation (think flooding) will increase in frequency and intensity. What about heat waves increasing? There’s a 99 percent probability. In fact, heat waves kill more people than any other weather-related event in the United States. What about rising sea level? Under our current emissions trajectory, the NCA says there is a 2 in 3 chance that between $66 billion and $106 billion of real estate will be underwater by 2050. And we mean literally underwater. How do we handle these risks from climate change? Not very well. We want more data, more proof that the risks are real before acting. Let’s contrast that with how businesses handle risks. Companies would not be content with a 66 percent chance that a fire will start in their building, or a 66 percent chance that the wheels will fall off a new car they release to production. That’s an untenable level of risk. How do we know this? Because we know of the tools companies use and the level of risk they are willing to tolerate. One tool used extensively is a Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA). An FMEA is used to assess the risk of failure of every component in a product (like every bolt), and the consequences of that failure to the overall product (like the car). The FMEA scale goes from 1 to 10, with 10 being worst case and one being what the engineers and designers shoot for. A 10 rating corresponds to a 10 percent or greater probability, a nine to a 5 percent probability and a two rating corresponds to a 0.0001 percent probability or lower. A one rating corresponds to zero probability. So the automotive designers strive for a 0.0001 percent probability of failure, or better. Wow!


Metro’s next-generation rail cars will not be made in China

rail-car manufacturers in the United States, and under the new congressional order, Metro can purchase only from domestic companies or companies based in countries sanctioned by the Tariff Act and Trade Act, both of which govern imports and trade to protect U.S. interests. Though fewer than 20 U.S. cities have subway or “heavy rail” systems, it’s big business. Out of all public transportation spending in 2017, heavy rail investments accounted for nearly $7 billion, the largest capital expenditures out of all modes of public transportation, according to the most recent figures available from the American Public Transportation Association. Metro’s newest rail cars, the 7000 series, cost $2 million apiece, including design, parts, training and warranty, the transit agency said. More than 700 have been delivered. Metro is ordering more than 250 rail cars for its next series and has options to buy up to 800 as it phases out older-model cars and modernizes its fleet. The 8000 series will replace its 2000-series cars, which were built in 1982, and the 3000-series, which were built in 1987. The first shipment of 8000-series cars should arrive in 2024, Metro said. The 8000-series cars will be Metro’s eighth model since the rail system opened four decades ago. Three of its first four models were made by Breda, a company that has since been sold to Hitachi Rail Italy. Kawasaki Heavy Industries Rolling Stock Company of Japan built the 7000 series at a plant in Lincoln, Neb. Canada’s Bombardier has a $600 million contract to build rail cars for the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Other companies known to have shown interest in building Metro’s 8000 series include France-based Alstom, another former Metro rail-car maker that is building cars for Amtrak, and South Korea’s Hyundai Rotem. CRRC has said that only the shells for its rail cars are built in China, while assembly is done at U.S. plants. At least 60 percent of the rail cars’ parts at its Chicago plant come from U.S. companies, it said. It was three months after 11 CRRC representatives made a Metro-sponsored visit to the transit agency’s Greenbelt rail yard in January 2019, that Warner and Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), as well as Sens. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) and Ben Cardin (D-Md.), proposed legislation that added as a condition to Metro’s important federal subsidy that it never buy from China. The Rail Security Alliance, a five-year-old group funded


China’s leader warns of ‘accelerating spread’ of coronavirus

new information brings the number of confirmed cases worldwide to more than 1,700 and the number of deaths to 55. By: Marisa Iati 3:50 PM: Coronavirus patients are spreading disease to two to three people each, researchers say WASHINGTON — Those infected with coronavirus are transmitting the disease to two to three people each, two studies have found, helping to explain the virus's rapid spread. Officials must stop more than 60 percent of the virus's transmission to control the outbreak, the scientists said, which will be a challenge because it is clear the disease is being passed human to human. China has taken a series of drastic steps in recent days to try to contain the outbreak, including a quarantine of 48 million citizens, halting inter-province buses to and from Beijing and suspending all tour groups from journeys outside the country. More than 1,400 people have become infected with the virus and 42 have died. Scientists still have many questions about the virus, which they are working to understand as quickly as possible. The severity spectrum of the disease remains unclear, and it is not clear whether people with mild symptoms are able to transmit the virus, researchers said. By: Yasmeen Abutaleb 2:40 PM: China says medical center to be transformed into hospital with more than 1,000 beds WASHINGTON — Construction workers were rushing to transform a medical center in Huanggang, a city also under quarantine about 30 miles from Wuhan, into a hospital with more than 1,000 beds within 48 hours, according to Chinese state media. More than 500 construction workers were helping to reconstruct the medical center so it can quickly treat the growing number of patients with symptoms of coronavirus. There are more than 1,400 confirmed cases and 42 deaths. Workers in Wuhan are also racing to build a 1,000-bed hospital to treat victims of the disease. Hospitals in that city have struggled to deal with the outbreak, with accounts emerging of shortages of just about everything. One exhausted doctor died of a heart attack on Thursday while tending patients. By: Yasmeen Abutaleb 1:40 PM: U.S. is exploring options to help U.S. citizens in Wuhan, but no confirmed plans yet WASHINGTON — The U.S. Embassy in Beijing is exploring options to help U.S. citizens in Wuhan, but reports that a charter flight was being arranged to bring citizens and diplomats back to the United States are false,


well as in traditional medicine. The SARS outbreak claimed more than 750 lives in China and other countries. A study published in the Lancet medical journal Friday confirmed the current outbreak is a new form of coronavirus, which is closest to the SARS-related coronaviruses found in Chinese horseshoe bats. Some scientists believe another species was involved in transmitting the disease to humans, but no consensus has yet emerged on which animal, with theories ranging from snakes to mink. By: Simon Denyer 11:30 AM: China tour groups blocked from overseas trips China is suspending all tour groups from journeys outside the country, state media reported, in another attempt to keep the virus from possibly spreading to new regions and countries. The order could have a wide impact across China. The Lunar New Year holiday, which began Friday, is the busiest time in China for travel and package tour vacations. Tour groups in the middle of their trips will be able to continue their itineraries, state media reported, but cautioned that travelers’ health should be closely monitored. Earlier Saturday, authorities announced plans to temporarily halt inter-province buses to and from Beijing beginning Sunday. By: Yasmeen Abutaleb 10:30 AM: Olympic qualifiers moved from Wuhan by IOC The International Olympic Committee has moved some Summer Games qualifying events from Wuhan after the coronavirus outbreak. From March 3-11, Amman, Jordan, will host boxing qualifier matches for Asia and Oceana that were originally set for Wuhan next month. A women’s soccer qualifying match beginning Feb. 3 that was also planned for Wuhan has been shifted to Nanjing, China. By: Miriam Berger 10:10 AM: China suspends inter-province bus services to and from Beijing Chinese authorities announced a halt to all inter-province bus services to and from Beijing in an effort to contain the growing coronavirus outbreak, according to local news reports. The move was part of wider measures by China to limit movement around the country. Beijing has more than 30 confirmed cases of the virus. By: Yasmeen Abutaleb 9:55 AM: U.S., France, Russia evacuating citizens from Wuhan France and Russia were working to evacuate their citizens from Wuhan despite a lockdown on the city as fears about the coronavirus’s rapid spread grew. France has confirmed three cases of the virus, and the United States has confirmed two, saying at least 50 people are under observation for the illness in 22 states, according to the Centers for


Year travel season, has infected more than 1,200 people worldwide so far and posed the biggest public health challenge to the Chinese government in more than a decade. Xi instructed China’s highest ruling council, the Politburo Standing Committee, to “comprehensively mobilize” resources and manpower to provide medical aid, guarantee security and order in hospitals and provide markets with supplies for the strained city of Wuhan, the epidemic’s epicenter. “As long as we are resolute … we can win the battle of controlling the epidemic,” he told top party leaders, according to state broadcaster CCTV. The ruling party’s central leadership has formed working groups to directly manage the crisis following reports suggesting that local authorities in Wuhan and the Hubei province did not respond as quickly as possible during the early stages of the outbreak last month. Officials have announced the emergency construction of two hospitals to treat patients in Wuhan, where existing facilities have been overfilled and medical personnel have been collapsing from exhaustion. More than a dozen cities in Hubei have been effectively locked down, and flights have been restricted at Wuhan, the regional hub. By: Gerry Shih 9:15 AM: Japan steps up health measures as China tourists pour in TOKYO — Fears of the deadly coronavirus spreading further are mounting as millions of Chinese tourists fan out throughout Asia at the start of the week-long Lunar New Year holiday, when resorts and hotels are typically packed. In Japan, 400,000 Chinese tourists are expected this week, NHK reported, out of 10 million expected to visit the country over the entire year. At airports and shops, staff have been advised to wear face masks while serving customers, something usually considered inappropriate for customer-facing employees. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said airlines coming into Japan had been asked to distribute health surveys and advise customers to report symptoms, while checks had also been stepped up for customers arriving by cruise ship. Some politicians and commentators worried the virus might disrupt the Tokyo 2020 Olympics in the summer, but the organizers tried to downplay concerns. “We consider taking measures against infectious diseases constitutes an important part of our plans to host a safe and secure games,” the Olympic organizers said in a statement, vowing to work closely with the authorities to discuss necessary measures. One candy store owner in the town of Hakone, which is west of Tokyo, isn’t taking any chances, putting


How to mark Brexit Day? Boris Johnson is searching for the right tone.

LONDON — At the strike of 11 p.m. local time on Jan. 31 — a.k.a. midnight in Brussels — Britain will leave the European Union, more or less. Brexit champion Boris Johnson will have won. But, as Britain’s new prime minister, Johnson is struggling to get his victory celebration just right. He doesn’t want to gloat. No, no, no. In fact, he is begging Britain to move on and forget the unpleasantness of the past three years. Out: “remainers” vs. “leavers.” In: healing. Johnson’s staff at 10 Downing Street is pledging, half-seriously, to ban the word “Brexit” from their briefings — to emphasize that they’ve delivered on their pledge to “Get Brexit done,” but also, perhaps, because the word remains toxic. According to pollsters, the country is as divided as ever, between those who love Brexit, those who hate it, and those who are so sick of it they can’t stand to hear another word. Some Brits are thrilled at the prospect of a “Global Britain,” freed from the constraints of the E.U. and empowered to forge lucrative trade deals around the world. Others fear a smaller, more isolated, middling Britain, sucking the fumes of other nations roaring ahead. Stay tuned. Regardless of what comes next, Exit Day marks the beginning of the end for a long, ugly divorce that has truly torn Britain apart and posed some of the greatest challenges to its institutions, politics and economy since World War II. The government has been searching for the right tone to mark such a profound moment — without further aggravating divisions. Johnson aides concede that getting the commemoration right is a tricky business. The challenge is what American political consultants call “optics.” Fireworks? The government has nixed fireworks. Too in-your-face. They’re going with a light show. Not a huge one. Think: discreet lasers. The display will stress the union of the four nations — England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland — of the United Kingdom. Alas, there will be no bonging by Big Ben. The iconic bell is temporarily in mothballs, and its home, Elizabeth Tower, is covered in scaffolding, as the Palace of Westminster gets a $5 billion refurbishment. The idea of getting the Great Bell going again for Brexit was born and embraced, but then withered and died very quickly. This has upset fervent Brexiteers. Iain Duncan Smith, a big Brexit booster, member of Parliament and former


Coronavirus outbreak underscores potential health risks in China’s wild animal trade

but no consensus has yet emerged on which animal, with theories ranging from snakes to mink. “Wild animal markets are a petri dish for an epidemic and an unacceptable risk that should be consigned to history as soon as possible,” said Peter Knights of WildAid, a San Francisco-based group that works to end wildlife trade. “Stress, dehydration, malnourishment, filthy conditions, mixing of species, wild and domestic, are the perfect cocktail to create a new deadly disease, and basing them in urban centers ensures a quick and wide dispersal to a wider world,” he said. The trade represents a massive risk to human health and economies in parts of Asia as well as in Africa, he said. “After SARS and now this, China urgently needs a strictly enforced ban on these markets and a massive awareness campaign to reduce demand for bushmeat,” he said. China has shown it is capable of regulating the illegal wildlife trade when it wants to, banning the ivory trade at the end of 2017 and enforcing a customs crackdown on ivory smuggling. But a strong lobby within the government, led by the State Forestry Administration, sees wild animals not as something to be protected but generally as a resource that can be utilized. The Wuhan city government closed the seafood market at the beginning of January after the first cases of coronavirus emerged in people working there. On the Weibo social media platform, a user posted that the market sold live cats, dogs, wild chickens, snakes and marmots. “There was even a signboard saying that they have live monkeys and deer for sale,” the post said, according to China Daily. This provides “ideal conditions for the emergence of new viruses that threaten human health, economic stability, and ecosystem health,” Christian Walzer, executive director of health for the Wildlife Conservation Society, said in a statement. “The re-assortment and exchange of viral components between species at live animal markets is seen as the major source of new viruses.” Walzer cited avian influenza, swine influenza, SARS and MERS, or Middle East respiratory syndrome, as examples of diseases originating in animals and subsequently transmitted between humans, “creating the conditions for a rapid global pandemic spread.” simon.denyer@washpost.com CORRECTION: An error during the editing process meant that an earlier version of this article stated the SARS crisis was eight years ago, the article has been corrected to show that it was 17


A virus, fires and protests: The perils confronting college study-abroad programs

A novel, potentially lethal virus in China. Bush fires in Australia. Political protests in Hong Kong. Amid turmoil in different corners of the world, universities that send students to far-flung destinations have temporarily curtailed some programs while closely monitoring others. Nine American University students studying in Beijing are hundreds of miles from the center of a coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, China. But they have been encouraged to wear surgical masks, wash their hands frequently and avoid large crowds, said Mark Hayes, director of the school’s study-abroad programs. “None of them are in the affected areas that have been quarantined,” Hayes said. “We have been working to give them information.” Three students from Georgetown University are studying in Beijing, said Meghan Dubyak, a spokeswoman. The school issued a campuswide advisory in recent days urging students and faculty to get flu shots and to rely on International SOS, a platform that provides medical alerts and evacuation services for students and faculty abroad. Authorities in Wuhan have halted regional travel, and hundreds of flights from the city’s international airport were canceled Thursday. In Beijing, officials have canceled mass Lunar New Year celebrations, hoping to limit the spread of the airborne illness. China’s leader, Xi Jinping, warned Saturday of an “accelerating spread” of the virus that has claimed at least 56 lives. Infections have been confirmed in cities throughout China — including Beijing — and in Japan, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, Nepal, Australia, France and the United States. The response to the coronavirus has been rapidly evolving: On Saturday, Hong Kong announced schools would be closed until mid-February. Leaders at George Washington University have shared safety information with students studying in China and other countries, Crystal Nosal, a spokeswoman, said in an email. “Students were encouraged to stay aware and seek the most up-to-date information from their programs about the changing conditions while in the country or traveling through the region,” Nosal said. “The health and welfare of our community members is our utmost priority.” But even before the emergence of a new coronavirus was widely recognized, several campuses in the District — American, Catholic, George Washington and Georgetown universities — were suspending academic programs for another reason: explosive protests in Hong Kong that have gained international attention. The demonstrations were triggered by legislation that would have allowed the extradition of criminal defendants to mainland China. Hong Kong’s government formally withdrew


How Virginia’s $3.7 billion rail plan fits Amtrak’s long-term vision

Amtrak trains in Virginia carried nearly a million passengers last year, a record in the state’s decade-long rail program. Virginia’s pledge to invest $3.7 billion in rail over the next decade promises even more growth for the passenger railroad. With new routes and faster and more efficient service, the number of Amtrak trains operating in Virginia is expected to double by 2030. In fact, Virginia is turning into a model for intercity train service, observers and railroad officials say. The state exemplifies Amtrak’s growth strategy of focusing on adding short-haul trips that compete with car rides and flights in dense urban corridors, they say. “This really is the perfect example of what we think America needs more of,” said Stephen Gardner, senior executive vice president and chief operating and commercial officer for Amtrak. “We will be connecting a whole number of cities in Virginia to the major population centers in the Northeast.” In recent years, Amtrak has been beefing up short-distance service across the country, advancing its vision to connect major metropolitan areas in regions undergoing significant growth and where there is little to no rail service, while fulfilling Americans’ growing desire for cost-efficient and more environmentally friendly travel options. In the past fiscal year, Amtrak added a new state-supported service in Western Massachusetts, adjusted the San Joaquins schedules in California’s Central Valley to be more convenient for weekend travelers and added a Northeast Regional train in Norfolk. The company is pitching routes from Nashville to Atlanta, and Memphis to Chicago, and advocating to revive the route from New Orleans to Mobile, Ala., that was discontinued after Hurricane Katrina. In the Midwest, plans call for more trains on the popular 90-mile line between Chicago and Milwaukee. And projections for the West Coast include more trains between Los Angeles and San Diego, and between Portland, Ore., and Seattle, two routes where demand for passenger service is growing. The company also is exploring opportunities in the southern United States, including growing metropolitan areas in Florida, North Carolina and Texas that are not served by Amtrak. In Virginia and North Carolina, a Richmond-Raleigh route is in sight for the area now served by an Amtrak long-distance train that suffers from chronic delays. “There is an inevitability that intercity short-haul passenger rail is going to have to grow in America,” Amtrak chief executive Richard Anderson told reporters in November, during a discussion about ridership


Trump reveals Space Force logo, and ‘Star Trek’ fans aren’t happy

Service members — to show how they serve, not where they serve,” the post read, noting that Roddenberry and Justman had served in World War II. “In the 1960s, the Starfleet delta had far more in common with the golden pin awarded to a NASA astronaut than a simple mission patch, and it was intended to equal that proud emblem in both use and sentiment.” The NASA pins, first awarded in 1963, feature “a trio of trajectories merging in infinite space, capped by a bright shining star and encircled by an elliptical wreath denoting orbital flight,” as described by NASA at the time. A similar shooting star appears in the Starfleet insignia. NASA’s original seal, rolled out in 1959, also contains some of the same design elements. The red delta-like shape in the agency’s famed “meatball” logo represented an air foil, surrounded by white stars and a white orbital path. In the fictional Star Trek universe, the Starfleet insignia is meant to be a “direct descendant” of the logo, according to the Star Trek website. The Pentagon’s space units make use of similar imagery. When the U.S. Air Force created Space Command in 1982, Pentagon leaders had only a few months to create all the paraphernalia, according to a history on the Air Force’s website. So the final Space Command emblem ended up drawing heavily from the Air Force’s space operator’s badge, depicting a globe with two orbital ellipses, satellites, stars, and a delta. According to the Air Force, the design was loaded with meaning. “The slight tapering of the orbital ellipses represents the characteristic eastward motion,” the Air Force’s history read. “The centrally superimposed deltoid symbolizes both the Air Force upward thrust into space and the launch vehicles needed to place all satellites in orbit. The distinctive dark blue background shading, small globe, and stars symbolize the space environment.” That emblem was in use until December, when the Space Force became a its own branch. In what may be the biggest testament to the artistic overlap between Star Trek and the government’s space efforts, NASA in the early 2000s hired Okuda, the Star Trek designer, to work on logos for a series of missions and programs. Over several years, Okuda created program emblems for the Constellation, Ares, Orion and Altair programs, as well as the emblem for the final servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope. In 2009, NASA


Saudi Arabia has had complete access to my private life. So now I’m suing.

The Post know this too well: Contributing columnist Jamal Khashoggi, a critic of the Saudi royal family, was murdered in the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul in 2018. The news this week that the Saudis had reportedly hacked the smartphone of Post owner and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos sounded familiar. I learned two years ago that spyware had been secretly installed on my smartphones, feeding information to a Saudi-controlled server. Deciding that, at last, I had found a way to try to hold the Saudi government accountable, I filed a lawsuit in Britain in November. I couldn’t have imagined reaching this point when I left my homeland in 2003. I was simply seeking freedom. In Saudi Arabia, the royal family controls every aspect of life. If you want to go to university, open a business or get an eye operation, you will need a letter from the governor of your province — a member of the royal family. Freedom of speech is out of the question. Expressing an unpopular opinion can mean being arrested, tortured or killed. With thousands of members, the House of Saud doesn’t want the state to function independently from it. It’s how the royal family maintains complete control. I had to find a way out. At age 23, I moved to Britain to study at the Meridian School of English in Portsmouth. When I arrived, I was shocked. In Saudi Arabia, Britain is portrayed as being a place of nonbelievers, where people are no better than animals. Instead, I found many good and decent people, who can live and speak freely. I began to wonder what other lies I had been told while growing up. At first, I kept my opposition to the Saudi regime quiet, but as time passed, I felt the need to speak up for those who still suffered inside the kingdom. In 2012, during the Arab Spring, Saudi citizens on social media began demanding their rights. That took courage. I supported the campaign and featured in a widely viewed YouTube video speaking directly to the king at the time, Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz, telling him that he — and not the regime’s critics — should be in prison. After that, I started a YouTube channel called “GhanemTube,” criticizing the royal family. YouTube quickly shut it down after the Saudis complained. I then set up the “Ghanem Show.” It, too, was shut down, but


The Technology 202: These scientists are trying to help Congress get smarter about tech

and experts don't think the GAO's initiative is enough to bridge the chasm between Congress's understanding and the complex tech challenges of our time — especially as election interference on social media, a national privacy debate and new technologies such as quantum computing and 5G are increasingly top of mind for lawmakers. Momentum is growing on Capitol Hill to revive the Office of Technology Assessment, a long-defunct agency that was tasked with helping Congress get up to speed with tech issues. Reps. Mark Takano (D-Calif.) and Bill Foster (D-Ill.) and Sens. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii) and Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) last year introduced legislation that would enhance the OTA in a manner that complements the existing team within the GAO. Alex Howard, an open-government advocate who previously served as deputy director of the nonprofit Sunlight Foundation, agrees that a new organization is needed. The GAO’s effort “is a valuable addition and is well on its way to doing tremendous work informing Congress, but the long-range vision that a rebooted and reformed OTA would provide is not an optimal cultural fit for the GAO,” he told me. “Every report on this issue has identified a gap that the GAO is not addressing and has recommended a new entity to bridge it.” “That doesn’t mean just refunding the OTA as it was in the 20th century, but rebooting it as it should be in this young millennium, with significant changes and updates,” he added. “The bill from Takano and Tillis is a starting point for the debate about how to improve the capacity of Congress to legislate and oversee technology at a time when doing so has never been more important.” But others think it's unlikely that an OTA or similar agency would be able to coexist productively with the current initiatives. “I’d like to see a new authorizing bill to give STAA more autonomy and independence,” said Zach Graves, head of policy at the Lincoln Network, an advocacy group for conservatives and libertarians in the tech sector. Persons says the push to bring back the OTA reflects the magnitude of the problem -- and that “There’s just so much to do,” he said. “Whatever Congress decides it needs to do to fulfill its needs, we’re going to support that.” Persons says there’s growing demand among lawmakers to get ahead on issues coming down the pike in tech so that they’re not constantly playing


At Lunar New Year parade in D.C., festivities mix with face masks and fear of coronavirus

the most important holiday on the Chinese calendar. Beijing and other large Chinese cities canceled their celebrations in a bid to help contain the virus. In the District, the parade went on. As Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) led the way, dancing dragons, children spinning Chinese yo-yos and a man dressed as a panda marched down H Street NW to the beat of snare drums and the cry of red vuvuzelas, inspiring cheers and selfies — some featuring face masks. Changdae Kim struggled to stay focused on the festivities. As he sold tickets to upcoming events behind a table in the community center, his thoughts drifted to his girlfriend, who is earning a business degree in China. A week ago, after reading about the coronavirus online, Kim, a Korean American resident of the District, broached the topic during the couple’s daily FaceTime call. He told his girlfriend to stay inside, and she said she would, promising to stock up on food. Kim, 28, asks her regularly for updates about the virus. Though his girlfriend lives far from Wuhan, everyone around her is freaking out, she’s told him. Whenever someone offers surgical masks for sale online, she said, the masks are gone within minutes. “She’s constantly afraid about it,” Kim said. As he puffed on a cigar and eyed passing parade-goers, Kit Lee said he also fears for loved ones in China. Relatives on both his mother’s and father’s sides of the family still live in the country, Lee said, though none are near Wuhan. Lee, a 51-year-old Fairfax resident, emigrated from China in 1979. His mother, who also immigrated to the United States, called her family in China on Sunday morning. All are healthy and coronavirus-free so far, Lee said — and all of them vowed never to go outside without face masks. Halfway around the world, Lee’s son is following a similar doctrine. Brandon Lee first learned about the coronavirus during AP Biology class at Falls Church High School last week, he said. The lesson lingered. Biting into chasu bao — a golden-brown bun filled with pork — on Sunday, the 17-year-old pointed to his pocket. “I’ve got a mask right here,” he said, “and I’m putting it on the minute I finish eating this.” Others took different precautions. Sue Hsu, 73, and her daughter Susan Hsu, 40, were determined to bring Susan’s 2-year-old son to see the special


Man dies in shooting in Northwest Washington

A man was fatally shot Sunday afternoon in Northwest Washington, police said. Andy Bonilla, 19, of Northwest was shot a few minutes before 1 p.m. in the 2900 block of Sherman Avenue NW, D.C. police said. He died at a hospital. No information was available about suspects or a motive. Sherman is often regarded as a boundary line between the Columbia Heights and Park View neighborhoods. Bonilla was one of three people slain Sunday in separate incidents. martin.weil@washpost.com