David Frum says he's "worried by a judge who'd accept a nomination under these circumstances." Me too. The nominee no doubt knows that the nominator expects the nominee to do his bidding. Every decision she makes will be viewed in that light.

Joe Biden: "When I'm elected..."

The New York Times reports: Vaccine maker Novavax said Thursday that it would begin the final stages of testing its coronavirus vaccine in the United Kingdom and that another large trial was scheduled to begin next month in the United States. It is the fifth late-stage trial from a company supported by Operation Warp Speed, the federal effort to speed a coronavirus vaccine to market, and one of 11 worldwide to reach this pivotal stage. Novavax, a Maryland company that has never brought a vaccine to market, reached a $1.6 billion deal with the federal government in July to develop and manufacture its experimental vaccine, which has shown robust results in early clinical trials. The new study, known as a Phase 3 trial, is expected to enroll up to 10,000 people in the United Kingdom. Half of the volunteers will receive two doses of the experimental vaccine, 21 days apart, and the others will receive a placebo. Although Novavax is months behind the front-runners in the vaccine race, independent experts are excited about its vaccine because its early studies delivered particularly promising results. Monkeys that were vaccinated got strong protection against the coronavirus. And in early safety trials, published early this month in The New England Journal of Medicine, volunteers produced strikingly high levels of antibodies against the virus. It is not possible to make a precise comparison between early clinical studies of different vaccines, but John Moore, a virologist at Weill Cornell Medicine, said that the antibodies from Novavax were markedly higher than any other vaccine with published results. "You just can't explain that away," he said. The Phase 3 trials will determine if Novavax can live up to that promise.

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LWN.net re-visits the emacs-devel mailing list, where the Emacs 28 development cycle has revived discussions about how to make the text editor more "modern" and attractive to new users: A default dark theme may not be in the future, leading one to think that there may yet be hope for the world in general. But there does seem to be general agreement that Emacs could benefit from a better, more centralized approach to color themes, rather than having color names hard-coded throughout various Elisp packages. From that, a proper theme engine could be supported, making dark themes and such easily available to those who want them... Another area where Emacs is insufficiently "modern", it seems, has to do with keyboard and mouse bindings. On the keyboard side, users have come to expect certain actions from certain keystrokes; ^X to cut a selection, ^V to paste it, etc. These bindings are easily had by turning on the Cua mode, but new users tend not to know about this mode or how to enable it. Many participants in the discussion said that this mode should be on by default. That, of course, would break the finger memory of large numbers of existing Emacs users, who would be unlikely to appreciate the disruption. Or, as Richard Stallman put it: It is not an option to change these basic key bindings to imitate other, newer editors. It would create a different editor that we Emacs users would never switch to. It is unfortunate that the people who implemented the newer editors chose incompatibility with Emacs.... The situation with mouse behavior is similar; as several participants in the discussion pointed out, users of graphical interfaces have come to expect that a right-button click will produce a menu of available actions. In Emacs, instead, that button marks a region ("selection"), with a second click in the same spot yanking ("cutting") the selected text. Many experienced Emacs users have come to like this behavior, but it is surprising to newcomers. The right mouse button with the control key held down does produce a menu defined by the current major mode, but that is evidently not what is being requested here; that menu, some say, should present global actions rather mode-specific ones. Stallman suggested offering a "reshuffled mode" that would bring the context menu to an unadorned right-button click, and which would add some of the expected basic editing commands there as well. This would be relatively easy to do, he said, since mouse bindings are separate from everything else. Besides, as he noted, the current mouse behavior was derived from "what was the standard in X Windows around 1990"; while one wouldn't want to act in haste, it might just be about time for an update. Other proposed changes involved "discoverability," including the default enabling of various modes, although to incorporate them into GNU Emacs "would often require the author to sign copyrights over to the Free Software Foundation, which is not something all authors are willing to do..."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: The medal awarded on Friday lauded the "lifesaving bravery and devotion to duty" for work detecting land mines in Cambodia. Its recipient: a rat named Magawa. Magawais the first rat to receive the award -- a gold medal bestowed by the People's Dispensary for Sick Animals, a British charity, that is often called the "animal's George Cross" after an honor usually given to civilians that recognizes acts of bravery and heroism. Not since the fictional Remy of the 2007 Disney-Pixar film "Ratatouille" has a rat done so much to challenge the public's view of the animals as creatures more commonly seen scuttling through sewers and the subway: Magawa has discovered 39 land mines and 28 pieces of unexploded ordnance, and helped clear more than 1.5 million square feet of land over the past four years. More than five million land mines are thought to have been laid in Cambodia during the ousting of the Khmer Rouge and internal conflicts in the 1980s and 1990s. Parts of the country are also littered with unexploded ordnance dropped in United States airstrikes during the Vietnam War, a 2019 report from the Congressional Research Service found. Since 1979, more than 64,000 people have been injured by land mines and other explosives in Cambodia, and more than 25,000 amputees have been recorded there, according to the HALO Trust, the world's largest humanitarian land mine clearance charity. Magawa, the most successful rat to have taken part in the program, was trained to detect TNT, the chemical compound within explosives. The ability to sniff out TNT makes him much faster than any person in searching for land mines, as he can ignore scrap metal that would usually be picked up by a metal detector. He can search an area the size of a tennis court in 30 minutes, whereas a person with a metal detector would usually take four days to search an area of that size. When he finds a mine, he signals to his handler by scratching at the earth above it. Unlike humans, Magawa is too light to detonate a mine, so there is minimal risk of injury.

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misnohmer writes: In 2019, the Australian site of Uluru, formerly known as Ayers Rock, has been closed to tourists "after the Anangu people said it was being trashed by visitors eroding its surface, dropping rubbish and polluting nearby waterholes," according to CNN. Parks Australia has now has asked Google to remove all imagery of the site uploaded by the community, as per the wishes of the Uluru's owners -- the Anangu Aboriginal people. Google agreed. "Google is "supportive of this request and is in the process of removing the content," Parks Australia said in a statement. "Parks Australia alerted Google Australia to the user-generated images from the Uluru summit that have been posted on their mapping platform and requested that the content be removed in accordance with the wishes of Anangu, Uluru's traditional owners, and the national park's Film and Photography Guidelines," the statement added.

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sciencehabit writes: A number of animals, from dogs to chimpanzees, can imitate human behavior. Now scientists have shown that cats can too. Under controlled conditions, a Japanese cat named Ebisu copied the movements of her owner when she touched a cardboard box and rubbed her face against it. Researchers say it's evidence of complex cognition, because the cat must be able to "map" the human's body parts onto her own. The finding may also suggest that the ability to imitate arose earlier in mammalian evolution than previously thought. The study has been published in the journal Science.

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The satellite tag from a bid of prey that disappeared six years ago was found by a walker in Perthshire.

The broadcaster gains a million followers within five hours of joining the platform.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Doctors believe they are closer to a treatment for multiple sclerosis after discovering a drug that repairs the coatings around nerves that are damaged by the disease. A clinical trial of the cancer drug bexarotene showed that it repaired the protective myelin sheaths that MS destroys. The loss of myelin causes a range of neurological problems including balance, vision and muscle disorders, and ultimately, disability. While bexarotene cannot be used as a treatment, because the side-effects are too serious, doctors behind the trial said the results showed "remyelination" was possible in humans, suggesting other drugs or drug combinations will halt MS. "It's disappointing that this is not the drug we'll use, but it's exciting that repair is achievable and it gives us great hope for another trial we hope to start this year," said Prof Alasdair Coles, who led the research at the University of Cambridge. The drug had some serious side-effects, from thyroid disease to raised levels of fats in the blood, which can lead to dangerous inflammation of the pancreas. But brain scans revealed that neurons had regrown their myelin sheaths, a finding confirmed by tests that showed signals sent from the retina to the visual cortex at the back of the brain had quickened. "That can only be achieved through remyelination," said Coles.

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Research unveiled on Thursday in Science finds that crows know what they know and can ponder the content of their own minds, a manifestation of higher intelligence and analytical thought long believed the sole province of humans and a few other higher mammals. STAT reports: "Together, the two papers show that intelligence/consciousness are grounded in connectivity and activity patterns of neurons" in the most neuron-dense part of the bird brain, called the pallium, neurobiologist Suzana Herculano-Houzel of Vanderbilt University, who wrote an analysis of the studies for Science, told STAT. "Brains can appear diverse, and at the same time share profound similarities. The extent to which similar properties present themselves might be simply a matter of scale: how many neurons are available to work." The study shows that neurons in the most complex part of the crows' brain, the pallium, "do have activity that represents not what was shown to them, but what they later report," said Herculano-Houzel. Neurons "represent what the animals next report to have seen -- whether or not that is what they were shown," she said. The neurons figure this out, so to speak, during the time lapse between when Nieder tells the birds the rule and when they peck the target to indicate their answer. "That's exactly what one would expect from neurons that participated in building the thoughts that we later report," she said, suggesting that corvids "are as cognitively capable as monkeys and even great apes." A second study, also in Science, looked in unprecedented detail at the neuroanatomy of pigeons and barn owls, finding hints to the basis of their intelligence that likely applies to corvids', too. STAT reports: Specifically, the pigeons' and owls' neurons meet at right angles, forming computational circuits organized in columns. "The avian version of this connectivity blueprint could conceivably generate computational properties reminiscent of the [mammalian] neocortex," they write. "[S]imilar microcircuits ... achieve largely identical cognitive outcomes from seemingly vastly different forebrains." That is, evolution invented connected, circuit-laden brain structure at least twice. "In theory, any brain that has a large number of neurons connected into associative circuitry ... could be expected to add flexibility and complexity to behavior," said Herculano-Houzel. "That is my favorite operational definition of intelligence: behavioral flexibility." That enables pigeons to home, count, and be as trainable as monkeys. But for sheer smarts we're still in the corvid camp.

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"On Friday, a coalition of academics and legal experts announced the formation of the 'Real Facebook Oversight Board,' an informal group that will publicly call out Facebook's slow action in advance of the election, including early Facebook investor Roger McNamee and Harvard professor Shoshana Zuboff," reports The Verge. The only problem is that it won't launch in time to hear cases related to the U.S. election. From the report: The group plans to hold regular "board meetings" to discuss failures of platform policy, with the first scheduled to be hosted by Kara Swisher on October 1. In a statement, Zuboff described Facebook as "a roiling cauldron of lies, violence and danger destabilizing elections and democratic governance around the world." The group also include Guardian journalist Carole Cadwalladr, known for her work on the Cambridge Analytica story. "This is an emergency response," Cadwalladr told NBC News this morning. "We know there are going to be a series of incidents leading up to the election and beyond in which Facebook is crucial." The board will hold no power and is largely meant as a symbolic gesture. Still, it has placed new pressure on Facebook's Oversight Board, which was initially scheduled for launch this summer. Oversight Board members now estimate that the project will launch in October. That will be too late to hear cases related to the US election, given the months-long process for fully adjudicating a case. "We are currently testing the newly deployed technical systems that will allow users to appeal and the Board to review cases," the Oversight Board said. "Assuming those tests go to plan, we expect to open user appeals in mid to late October. Building a process that is thorough, principled and globally effective takes time and our members have been working aggressively to launch as soon as possible."

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"Every musician knows that when the performers can hear one another, the performance is always better than otherwise," writes Slashdot reader nightcats. "This principle applies in nature as well, and has been anecdotally witnessed amid the quiet imposed by COVID-19 on cities around the world. In San Francisco, behavioral ecologist Liz Derryberry has been able to deliver a dramatic scientific demonstration of the changes to the songs of the white-crowned sparrow amid the quiet of 2020." National Geographic reports: With most San Franciscans staying at home due to the coronavirus pandemic, she decided to seize an unprecedented opportunity to study how this small, scrappy songbird responded when human noises disappeared. By recording the species' calls among the abandoned streets of the Bay Area in the following months, Derryberry and colleagues have revealed that the shutdown dramatically improved the birds' calls, both in quality and efficiency. The research, published today in Science, is among the first to scientifically evaluate the effects of the pandemic on urban wildlife. It also adds to a burgeoning field of research into how the barrage of human-made noise has disrupted nature, from ships drowning out whale songs to automobile traffic jamming bat sonar.

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