• Astrophysicists anxiously await the upcoming launch of the James Webb Space Telescope, slated for December 18. Things can go wrong.
• This spectacular giant will be the most powerful space telescope ever built, opening new windows to nascent galaxies and stars from billions of years ago, as well as to planets circling other stars in our cosmic neighborhood.
• It will help us refine our own story � a story of our origins and how similar and different we are to the rest of the universe.

The history of science could be written as a history of instrumentation. From particle accelerators and microscopes to fMRIs and telescopes, as instruments become more powerful, they act as reality amplifiers: they magnify our view of the very small and the very large, allowing us a glimpse of what is invisible to the human eye.

It is hard to imagine that, up to 1609, all we knew about the skies depended on what we can see with the naked eye. When Galileo Galilei had the insight to aim his telescope at the night sky, he saw what no human had seen before: a new sky, full of surprises and possibility. This new sky would reveal a new world order: out with the Aristotelian view of an Earth-centered cosmos, a frozen sky where celestial objects were perfect and unchangeable, and in with a marvelously imperfect heaven � a moon full of craters and mountains, Jupiter with four orbiting moons (now we know there are about 79 and counting), a Saturn with "ears" (that is, the rings that his telescope could not yet resolve), and a Milky Way made of a countless number of stars. New instruments hold the promise of a worldview transformation: as we look deep into nature, our vision of reality and us in it changes.

It is then no surprise that the astrophysics community is nervously awaiting the launch of a new marvel of instrumentation, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Even if often called the successor of the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), the JWST is a different kind of machine. The HST is, perhaps, the most successful instrument in astronomical history. Beyond its optical capability that reveals to us parts of the universe we could in principle see with our limited human vision (that is, the colors of the visible spectrum), it has additional infrared and ultraviolet instruments that have revolutionized the way we understand the cosmic history and the stunning wealth of galaxies spread throughout space. But the Hubble was launched in 1990, and it is time for a new instrument to step up and expand upon its groundwork, deepening our understanding of the universe near and far.

Two big missions for James Webb Space Telescope

The JWST is designed to capture mostly infrared light, which is of a longer wavelength than what our eyes can see. The focus on infrared comes from the two main missions for the telescope.

The first is to look into the very young universe by observing very far away objects, nascent galaxies and stars born about 13 billion years ago, which was only a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. (In cosmology, the science of our cosmic history, hundreds of millions of years is not a long time.) Contrary to Hubble, which had a near-Earth orbit, the JWST will be stationed far away, at 1.5 million kilometers from Earth at a spot known as a Lagrange point, where the gravitational attractions of sun and Earth cancel out � a peaceful cosmic parking spot.

After taking off inside an Ariane 5 rocket from the European Space Agency, the JWST will continue for another twenty-nine days until it gets to its final destination. The good thing about the Lagrange point is its remoteness and thus distance from interfering infrared sources near Earth. To make the shielding even more effective, the telescope comes with five layered sheets of Kapton foil, a sort of space umbrella to stop radiation interference. At the size of a tennis court, the shields are programmed to open during the telescope's migration to its final position. The bad thing about being stationed so far away from Earth is that if something goes wrong, we cannot go there to fix it, as we had to with the Hubble Space Telescope. Anxiety rises.

The "eyes" of the telescope are made of 18 hexagonal, gold-coated, beryllium mirrors, making up a giant honeycomb the size of a large house. The mirrors will capture and focus light from distant sources that will then be sent off to the telescope's four different instruments. The mirrors must also unfurl in space, another nerve-wracking step before astrophysicists can start to gather data.

The second big mission is to aim its sights on exoplanets, planets orbiting stars in our galactic neighborhood, for signs of life. A little over 20 years ago, astronomers detected the first alien worlds outside our solar system. Since then, the list has grown steadily to over four thousand confirmed exoplanets today. The essential question, of course, is whether some of these worlds may harbor life. We may not be able to travel across interstellar distances to see for ourselves, but our machines can scrutinize these worlds by detecting the chemical composition of their atmospheres in the hope of finding the telltale signs of life: mainly oxygen, water, carbon dioxide, and methane. Thus, JWST aims to map out other worlds that may resemble our own, addressing the age-old question of whether we are alone in the universe.

An early Christmas present

The current launch date is December 18, a week before Christmas. As with any space launch of a complex instrument, there are many things that could go wrong, although extensive testing has built up confidence that all will go smoothly. Regardless, we only will succeed in stretching the boundaries of knowledge by taking risks. The launch will be a gripping moment for humanity. What will a new window opening to the sky reveal about our story?

Unless you are lost to the power of wonder, a mission like this must capture your imagination. We all want this spectacular mission to succeed, astrophysicists and non-astrophysicists alike. We care about worlds so far away from us because the story this machine will tell is a mirror of our own. As we witness stars and galaxies being born, we learn about our galaxy and how our solar system emerged a little under five billion years ago. We learn about the myriad ways that gravity and chemistry conspired to bake matter into worlds, each different, some potentially thriving with life like our own. And with each discovery, we dive a little deeper into the mystery of who we are and of what makes us both alike and different from what is out there in the universe.

• If there is one thing that Russia scholars can agree on, it is the poor quality of leadership that has plagued the country since its inception.
• Though some could have become the posthumous victims of inflated rumors or political propaganda, others may have been even crueler than we thought.
• People like Anna Ivanovna (Russia's ice queen) and Lavrentiy Beria (Stalin's secret police chief) continue to strike fear in the hearts of modern readers.

A popular joke among American students majoring in Slavic Studies is that you can pretty much sum up the entirety of Russian history by saying things have gone from "bad to worse." It is a gross oversimplification, ignoring important periods of peace and prosperity during which Russian art, culture, and commerce could flourish.

At the same time, there seems to be an underlying truth to this joke that has caused it to stick. As the Russian political scientist Vladimir Gelman put it in a 2019 article he wrote for Riddle, "Practically all analysts and observers of Russia today, regardless of their political leanings, tend to agree about the country's poor quality of governance."

From czars that commanded respect by virtue of their lineage rather than the contents of their character to bloodthirsty Bolsheviks that leveraged communist ideals for personal gain, Russia knows no shortage of leaders that have left the country worse off than they found it. The following list takes a closer look at some of them.

However, take note: when reading about the characters on this list, it is important to look at their stories with a critical eye. Some could have become the subjects of posthumously inflated rumors, others the victims of propaganda campaigns. Others still might have well been even crueler than historians have come to believe. Also, we intentionally did not include Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin, whose crimes against humanity are well-known.

Ivan the Terrible: The First Czar (1530-1584)

Like all czars on this list, Ivan was elected ruler of Russia at a young age by a council of politicians who mistakenly thought they would be able to control him. While "The Terrible" turns out to have been an accurate title, the words did not have the same negative connotation when Ivan was alive. Instead, "terrible" meant "formidable" or "awe-inspiring."

That isn't to say he wasn't terrible, though. In 1552, the czar and his armies besieged Kazan. The siege hardly lasted a week, owing in part to Ivan's tactics: he would impale his Tatar prisoners and position them around the city walls so that their comrades could hear their agonizing cries to surrender.

Ivan's wrath was not restricted to the battlefield or even the realm of politics. According to a popular story, he blinded the architect that designed St. Basil's Cathedral so he would never create something as beautiful again. He also killed his unborn grandson by beating the mother until she miscarried and then killed his son when he complained about it.

Last but not least, Ivan is thought to have kept some seriously questionable company in the form of Malyuta Skuratov, a henchman who � according to the 18^th century historian Nikolay Karamzin � was in charge of organizing "rape trips" where he would round up beautiful wives around Moscow and present them to the czar to do with as he pleased.

Anna Ivanovna: The Ice Queen (1693-1740)

While Anna Ivanovna was revered for modernizing (and Europeanizing) Russia, her extreme jealousy and vindictive temper left a dark cloud over her legacy. These two qualities stemmed, in part, from her less than fortunate love life, which took a turn from bad to worse when her sickly husband � the Duke of Courland � died as they were traveling home from their own wedding.

Fancying herself an expert "matchmaker," Anna took an interest in arranging marriages between the members of her court and would become outraged when they did not involve her in their sex lives. When one of her princes, Mikhail Golitsyn, returned from Italy having fallen in love with a Catholic Italian girl, Anna stripped him of his wealth and titles and made him her new fool.

In a series of events typically encountered only in fantasy novels, Ivanovna found Golitsyn a new bride and organized an extravagant wedding to take place inside a life-size palace made entirely of ice hauled from the frozen banks of the river Neva. After a ceremonial parade that was led by an Asian elephant, the couple was chained to their ice-beds.

They would have frozen to death had Golitsyn's wife not managed to trade the pearl necklace she received from the czarina for one of the guard's fur cloaks. Against all odds, the two survived the night and � according to a number of historians � chose to stay together. Ivanovna, however, would die next fall, having spent the preceding summer watching her ice palace melt in the sun.

Trofim Lysenko (1898-1976)

From a distance, Lysenko's life looks like a straightforward success story. Born a poor, uneducated Ukrainian peasant who did not learn to read until he was 13 years old, he died a director of the Institute of Genetics at the Academy of Sciences in Novosibirsk, where his job was to reinforce the Soviet Union's agricultural policies with the latest in biological research.

What spins this story on its head is the fact that Lysenko did not end up with this prestigious and hugely important position thanks to his skills or knowledge. Instead, he had been randomly selected by the state in an effort to promote "average men" to leadership positions that, in capitalist countries, were reserved only for the trained elite.

Needless to say, this policy ended up backfiring in a catastrophic manner. Not only did Lysenko know nothing about biology, but the scientific concepts he did understand were molded by political ideology rather than impartial research � including the belief that plants, like the Soviet people, could grow bigger and taller if they were exposed to the right stimuli.

This belief ran contrary to the tried-and-true principles of genetics, namely, that the growth of crops could only be manipulated through selective breeding. That is not to say Lysenko was an innocent victim of indoctrination, though; he imprisoned the Mendelian geneticist Nikolai Vavilov, and his biased practices led to the starvation of millions of Russians.

Lavrentiy Beria: Stalin's Himmler (1899-1953)

Lavrentiy Beria, whom Joseph Stalin had reportedly once introduced to Hitler as "our Himmler," was the chief of the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs, otherwise known as the NKVD. During World War II, fear of Beria's secret agents kept a country on the brink of destruction from surrendering to Nazi invaders.

For this, Beria paid a price few would be willing to pay. At the front, soldiers who even remotely questioned Stalin's military decisions were shipped off to the gulags. In this string of prison systems, located in the icy outskirts of Siberia and constructed under direction of Vladimir Lenin, they would spend anywhere from five to ten years doing forced labor.

Beria's measures consistently exceeded their political justifications, even by the standards of the Red Terror. When the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, the Soviets � who had signed a non-aggression pact with them one week prior � came in as well. On orders of Beria, the NKVD murdered as many as 22,000 members of the Polish army and bourgeoisie.

Though Beria almost succeeded Stalin after his death, he was ultimately ousted by Nikita Khrushchev. Today, he is not only remembered as a mass murderer but a serial rapist as well. According to bodyguards, he would habitually lure young women into his mansion before giving them a bouquet on the way out. If they accepted, the sex had been consensual. If not, they were arrested.

• Compared to other Big Tech companies, Apple has been the poster child of privacy protection.
• Unfortunately, a recent announcement has breached that trust.
• How much power do we want Big Tech to have? And what sort of society do we want?

Apple has built a reputation as the "least evil" Big Tech giant when it comes to privacy. All these companies � Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon � collect our data and essentially spy on us in a multitude of ways. Apple, however, has cultivated a reputation as by far the least invasive of our mainstream technology options. Their recent dramatic reversal on this issue has caused an uproar. What is going on, and what should we do about it?

I personally use and appreciate Apple products. Their software and hardware blend together, making smartphones and computers simpler, easier, and more enjoyable. More important (to me, anyway), Apple has conspicuously maintained much better privacy policies than other tech giants, who log every place you visit, calculate and sell your religion and politics, and store every single search you have ever made (even the "incognito" ones). Apple's privacy policies are imperfect but less terrifying. The general consensus is that most Apple products and services spy less on you and send much less of your personal data to third parties. That matters to many users and should matter to all of us.

Now, the bad news. All the major cloud storage providers have for some time been quietly scanning everything you upload. That is no conspiracy theory: you agree to it when you accept their privacy policies. They do this for advertising (which is what is meant by the phrase "to help us improve our services" in the user agreement). They also look for and report illegal activity. A big part of monitoring for criminal activity is looking for "CSAM," a polite acronym for something horrific. In August, Apple announced that it would take a drastic step further and push a software update for iPhones that would scan and analyze all of the images on your iPhone, looking not just for known CSAM but for any images that a computer algorithm judges to be CSAM.

There are two enormous red flags here. First, the software does not operate on Apple's cloud servers, where you are free to choose whether to park your data and allow Apple to scan it for various purposes. The scanning is performed on your phone, and it would scan every picture on your phone, looking for content that matches a database of bad images.

Image recognition tech is still bad

Why is this a problem for people who do not keep illegal images on their phones? The second red flag is that the software does not look for a specific file � horrifying_image.jpg � and ignore all of your personal photos. Rather, it uses what Apple calls "NeuralHash," a piece of computer code that looks for features and patterns in images. You can read their own description here.

Computer image recognition is much better than it once was. Despite the hype surrounding it the past few years, however, it is still extremely fallible. There are many ways that computer image recognition can be baffled by tricks that are not sophisticated enough to fool toddlers. This fascinating research paper covers just one of them. It finds that a 99 percent confident (and correct) image identification of a submarine can be made into a 99 percent confident (but wrong) identification of a bonnet by adding a tiny area of static noise to one corner of the image.

Credit: D. Karmon et al., ArXiv, 2018.

Other researchers fooled image recognition by changing a single pixel dot in an image. Hackers know this too. It is extremely easy to add an undetectable pattern to a cute cat picture, triggering algorithms to flag it as something sinister.

Let's imagine for a moment that this algorithm never mistakes baby bath pictures or submarines or cats or dots for illicit material. This could make things worse. How?

The NeuralHash algorithm is trained by scanning examples of the target images it seeks. This collection of training material is secret from the public. We do not know whether all the material in the database is CSAM or if it also includes things such as: political or religious images, geographic locations, anti-government statements, mis-information according to whoever has the power to define it, material potentially embarrassing to politicians, or whistleblowing documents against powerful authorities. There are many things that tech companies, federal agencies, or autocratic regimes around the world would love to know if you have on your phone. The possibilities are chilling.

Reaction to Apple's plan was immediate and overwhelmingly negative. Outcry came from international groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation that specialize in privacy rights all the way down to everyday people in Mac user forums. Apple initially stood its ground and defended the decision. Their weak justifications and reassurances failed to smother the fire. Just last week, the company relented and announced a delay to implementing the program. This is a victory for privacy, but it is not the end of the story.

iSpy with my little eye

It would be very easy for Apple to wait out the uproar and then quietly go ahead with the plan a few months from now. The other tech giants likely would follow suit. But remember that Big Tech already tracks our movements and records our private conversations. If the public does not stay vigilant, Big Tech can keep invading what most of us consider to be our private lives. How much more power over us do we want Big Tech to have? And is this the sort of society that we want?

But humanity is plagued by many respiratory viruses, such as influenza A (IAV) and respiratory syncytial viruses (RSV), which cause hundreds of thousands of deaths every year. Most of these viruses – apart from influenza and SARS-CoV-2 – have no vaccines or effective treatments.

A recent study from the University of Glasgow has discovered what happens when you get infected with some of these viruses at the same time, and it has implications for how they make us sick and how we protect ourselves from them.

For many reasons, respiratory viruses are often found during winter in the temperate regions of the world, or the rainy season of equatorial regions. During these periods, you'll probably be infected with more than one virus at any one time in a situation called a “co-infection".

Research shows that up to 30% of infections may harbour more than one virus. What this means is that, at some point two different viruses are infecting the cells that line your nose or lungs.

We know that co-infection can be important if we look at a process called “antigenic shift" in influenza viruses, which is basically caused by virus “sex". This sometimes occurs when two different influenza strains meet up inside the same cell and exchange genes, allowing a new variant to emerge.

Co-infection can create a predicament for viruses when you consider that they need to compete for the same resource: you. Some viruses appear to block other viruses, while some viruses seem to like each other. What is driving these positive and negative interactions during co-infections is unknown, but animal studies suggest that it could be critical in determining how sick you get.

The University of Glasgow study investigated what happens when you infect cells in a dish with two human respiratory viruses. For their experiments, they chose IAV and RSV, which are both common and cause lots of disease and death each year. The researchers looked at what happens to each virus using high-resolution imaging techniques, such as cryo-electron microscopy, that their labs have perfected over the years.

They found that some of the human lung cells in the dish contained both viruses. And, by looking closely at those co-infected cells, they found that the viruses that were emerging from the cell had structural characteristics of both IAV and RSV. The new “chimeric" virus particles had proteins of both viruses on their surface and some even contained genes from the other. This is the first evidence of this occurring from co-infection of distinct respiratory viruses.

Follow-up experiments in the same paper showed that these new chimeric viruses were fully functional and could even infect cells that were rendered resistant to influenza, presumably gaining access using the RSV proteins could even get into a broader range of human cells than either virus alone could. Potentially, this could be happening during natural co-infections during the winter.

Why we need to study chimeric viruses

Studying disease-causing pathogens is extremely important and helpful for creating vaccines and treatments, yet safety is still paramount. It's important to point out that the researchers in this study did not perform any genetic engineering between two viruses and only modelled what is already happening in the real world, but using safer laboratory strains of viruses under lab conditions.

We know about the significant role co-infection can play in a virus's life, such as during influenza antigenic shift or the curious case of hepatitis D virus borrowing bits of the other viruses, such as hepatitis B, to spread. Nevertheless, the work by the University of Glasgow researchers has significant implications for our understanding of how other very different respiratory viruses might interact, antagonise and even promote each other's infections in the ecosystem of our nose and lungs. Together, this work shows the complex and often messy interactions between viruses during the winter.

Undoubtedly, future work will explore how this co-infection affects transmission, disease and immunity – things that aren't easy to determine in a dish.

Connor Bamford, Research Fellow, Virology, Queen's University Belfast

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.