NASA’s Parker Solar Probe is still zipping around the sun making history, and it’s gearing up for another record-setting approach this week. On December 24 at 6:53AM ET, the spacecraft’s orbit will take it just 3.8 million miles from the solar surface, according to the space agency. That’ll be the closest it — or any other probe — has ever come to the sun. The milestone will mark the completion of the Parker Solar Probe’s 22nd orbit around our star, and the first of the three final closest flybys planned for its mission. The craft, which launched in 2018, is expected to complete a total of 24 orbits.
“No human-made object has ever passed this close to a star, so Parker will truly be returning data from uncharted territory,” Nick Pinkine, Parker Solar Probe mission operations manager at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, said in a statement on NASA’s blog. “We’re excited to hear back from the spacecraft when it swings back around the Sun.”
The Parker Solar Probe will be traveling at about 430,000 miles per hour at the time of its closest-ever pass. It’ll ping the team to confirm its health on December 27, when it’ll be far enough from the sun to resume communications.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/science/space/nasas-parker-solar-probe-will-fly-closer-to-the-sun-than-ever-on-christmas-eve-225338918.html?src=rss
With big cash prizes at stake—and AI supercharging research—interspecies translation is closer than ever. But what, if anything, would animals want to tell us?
Charlotte, a green sea turtle, was hit by a boat back in 2008. This left it with an affliction colloquially referred to as the “bubble butt,” a kind of floating syndrome that makes it impossible for a turtle to dive. Most sea turtles suffering from issues like this simply die at sea, since the condition leaves them stranded at the surface where they can’t forage, sleep, and avoid predators like sharks. But fate had other plans for Charlotte.
Charlotte didn’t end up as a shark’s lunch and didn’t starve to death floating helplessly in the ocean. Instead, it got rescued shortly after the boat accident and eventually found a home at Mystic Aquarium in Stonington, Connecticut, where it received professional care. That was the first time Charlotte got lucky. The second time came when a collaboration formed: Adia, a company specializing in 3D-printing solutions; Formlabs, one of the world’s leading manufacturers of 3D printers; and New Balance Athletic, a sportswear giant based in Boston. This team chose Charlotte as a technology showcase, which basically turned the turtle into an Oscar Pistorius of the sea—just without the criminal conviction.
Weights and diet
Sea turtles are marine reptiles, which means they don’t have gills like fish—they need air to breathe. The lungs also play a key role in their buoyancy regulation system, which allows them to rest for extended periods of time at the sea floor or float at a precisely chosen depth. A sea turtle can precisely choose the depth at which it achieves neutral buoyancy by inhaling the exactly right volume of air.
On May 2, 2008, the Chaitén volcano in Chile awoke with unexpected fury after more than 9,000 years of dormancy. The eruption blasted rocks and ash a dozen miles into the air, and then heavy rainfall swept the fallen debris up in immense mudflows. A river of rubble carved a destructive path through the nearby town of Chaitén before surging into the sea. The town, practically split in two by the torrent that cut through its middle, was evacuated as ash blanketed over 200,000 square kilometers of surrounding land.
While the terrestrial aftermath was plain to see, captured by both the local media and satellites, the impact on the sea was unknown.
Mists shroud the hillsides at the entrance to Chaitén Bay, as seen from aboard the Schmidt Ocean Institute’s <em>Falkor (too)</em> research vessel.
Credit:
Alex Ingle / Schmidt Ocean Institute
The eruption released over 750 billion liters of lava—enough to fill more than 300,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools—mainly in the form of rock fragments. The debris flowed through rivers into the Northern Patagonian Sea, just six miles away.
Welcome to Edition 7.24 of the Rocket Report! This is the last Rocket Report of the year, and what a year it's been. So far, there have been 244 rocket launches to successfully reach orbit this year, a record for annual launch activity. And there are still a couple of weeks to go before the calendar turns to 2025. Time is running out for Blue Origin to launch its first heavy-lift New Glenn rocket this year, but if it flies before January 1, it will certainly be one of the top space stories of 2024.
As always, we welcome reader submissions. If you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.
Corkscrew in the sky. A Japanese space startup said its second attempt to launch a rocket carrying small satellites into orbit had been terminated minutes after liftoff Wednesday and destroyed itself again, nine months after the company’s first launch attempt in an explosion, the Associated Press reports. The startup that developed the rocket, named Space One, launched the Kairos rocket from a privately owned coastal spaceport in Japan's Kansai region. Company executive and space engineer Mamoru Endo said an abnormality in the first stage engine nozzle or its control system is likely to have caused an unstable flight of the rocket, which started spiraling in mid-flight and eventually destroyed itself about three minutes after liftoff, using its autonomous safety mechanism.
Oropouche virus has posed little threat outside South America in the past, but land-use change, the climate crisis, and international travel all appear to be spreading this insect-borne disease to new places.
Elon Musk attends the launch of a SpaceX rocket with astronauts on board.
Joe Raedle/Getty Images
SpaceX employees worked grueling hours and gritty conditions in the company's early days.
Elon Musk offered workers SpaceX stock options to poach top talent and keep them motivated.
One expert said that for stocks to work, companies have to give employees chances to cash in.
Working at SpaceX in the company's earliest days was intense, but it may pay off for some hires.
Tough working conditions might tank some businesses, but not SpaceX. On December 11, Bloomberg reported that the Elon Musk-founded company was valued at $350 billion, making it the most valuable private startup worldwide.
The value comes after SpaceX and some of its approved investors struck a deal to buy up to $1.25 billion of employees' shares, offering $185 a share. Therein lies a partial key to SpaceX's overwhelming success.
Like many tech startups, SpaceX offered its early employees stock options as a financial incentive to keep them invested in the company's success — even when they were exposed to Musk's strict standards, his bouts of shouting when things went wrong, and his near-impossible timelines, space journalist Eric Berger reported.
In his new book "Reentry," Berger shares current and former employees' accounts of working 36-hour days, sleeping under their desks, urinating in buckets, dodging rattlesnakes, and injuring themselves on the job.
Stock options are a toss-up. They don't always end up being valuable. SpaceX was proving its value early, though.
"Even as far back as 2010, you could see that that had real value if you stayed there," Berger told Business Insider.
How equity pushes employees
Offering stock options is a common strategy, especially for early-stage companies that don't have much cash for salaries, said Jorge Martin, head of the employee-equity plan provider North American branch of JP Morgan Workplace Solutions.
"When they are working these grinding hours, when they are traveling all over the world, when they're under high pressure," Martin said, "then all of that is worth it when you have an equity grant that can grow as the company grows and as the company succeeds."
Martin said he's occasionally seen startup employees become millionaires off their equity.
The promise of those stock options gave SpaceX a competitive edge in recruiting top engineering talent. In the scramble for new hires fresh out of college in the 2010s, SpaceX, Berger said, often competed with Blue Origin, a similarly ambitious rocket company founded by Jeff Bezos.
"They would poach people back and forth," Berger said.
Cashing in on company equity
Workers can turn shares into cash when a company gets sold or goes public — which SpaceX has not done — or when it does a "tender offer," allowing employees to sell their shares to other investors.
Blue Origin has a stock ownership program too, Berger said, but it's "considered virtually worthless because Bezos is probably never going to sell a significant chunk of the company. So those shares can never really be sold."
SpaceX, meanwhile, has given its employees multiple opportunities to cash in on their shares, including through the deal it struck this month.
Musk's Mars vision helped
SpaceX offered some of its early employees more than stock. Some truly believed in Musk's plans to build a human settlement on Mars.
Unlike a regimented job at NASA or a legacy aerospace corporation, a gig at SpaceX meant working hands-on with multiple ambitious rockets, spaceships, or engines — back to back or simultaneously.
"You're going to work super hard, but you're also going to get to work on cutting-edge stuff, stuff that's actually going to fly," Berger said. "After a few years there with that on your résumé, you can basically write your ticket anywhere in the industry you want to go."
For some employees, Berger found, the stock was icing on the cake.
Their investigative report—based on interviews with multiple health department employees who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation—revealed that employees were told of the startling policy change in meetings in October and November and that the policy would be implemented quietly and not put into writing.
Ars Technica has contacted the health department for comment and will update this post with any new information.
The end of the Cretaceous period saw disastrous geological and astronomical events, but researchers say that one in particular is to blame for the mass extinction.
Mirror cells, if created, would probably multiply in a host organism without much resistance.
BSIP/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Some scientists trying to create "mirror life" have stopped in their tracks.
A mirror microorganism could end up being a major pathogen since our immune systems wouldn't notice it.
Mirror-image biology inverts a fundamental property of life on Earth: which way molecules point.
Creating "mirror life" could be one of science's greatest breakthroughs, but some researchers who began the effort are now calling for it to stop.
No mirror-life microorganisms exist yet. However, 38 scientists warned in a paper published in the journal Science on December 12 that if someone created one and it escaped the lab, it could cause a catastrophic multi-species pandemic.
"We're basically giving instructions of how to make a perfect bioweapon," Kate Adamala, a co-author of the paper and a chemist who leads a synthetic biology lab at the University of Minnesota, told Business Insider.
As the risks became clear, Adamala ended her lab's efforts toward building a mirror cell. Her multi-year grant for that facet of their research expired and she decided not to apply for renewal, she said.
Now she's urging other scientists to do the same, along with the 37 other researchers.
"Although we were initially skeptical that mirror bacteria could pose major risks, we have become deeply concerned," they wrote in the paper.
What is mirror life?
Mirror biology takes a fundamental rule of life on Earth, called chirality, and flips it.
Chirality is the simple fact that molecules — like sugars and amino acids — point in one of two directions. They are either right-handed or left-handed.
For some reason, though, life will only use one chiral form of each molecule. DNA, for example, only uses right-handed sugars for its backbone. That's why it twists to the right.
In mirror biology, scientists aim to create living cells where all the chirality is flipped. Where natural life uses a right-handed peptide, to build proteins, mirror life would use the same peptide in its left-handed form.
Adamala's research was focused on making mirror peptides, which can help create longer-lasting pharmaceuticals.
A full mirror cell was the long-term goal of that research. Mirror cells could help prevent contamination in bioreactors that use bacteria for green chemical manufacturing because, in theory, they wouldn't interact with natural microorganisms.
"You could have this perfect bioreactor that can just sit there and you can stick your finger into it and you're not going to contaminate it," Adamala said. "That's also precisely the problem."
A mirror bacteria could bypass the natural checks and balances of life, like competing with other bacteria or battling our immune systems.
Immune systems would ignore mirror cells
Adamala said "the death sentence" for her mirror-cell research came when she spoke to immunologists. They explained that for humans, other animals, and plants, immune system activation depends on chirality.
Immune cells recognize pathogens' proteins, but they wouldn't detect the inverse versions of those proteins that mirror cells would use.
A mirror pathogen "doesn't interact with the host. It just uses it as a warm incubator with a lot of nutrients," Adamala said.
If a mirror bacteria escaped the lab, it could cause slow, persistent infections that can't be treated with antibiotics (because those, too, rely on chirality).
Because they wouldn't face any immune resistance, mirror bacteria wouldn't need to specialize in infecting corn, or goats, or birds.
"It would be a disease of anything that lives that can be infected," Adamala said.
In the worst-case scenario, a mirror bacteria would multiply endlessly, unfettered. It would take over its hosts and eventually kill them. It would destroy crops. It would have no predators. It would overwhelm entire ecosystems, swapping out portions of our natural world for a new mirror world.
A long way away
Ting Zhu, one of the leading researchers trying to make a mirror cell, told BI in an email that he supports being cautious but doesn't think "a complete mirror-image bacterium can be synthesized in the foreseeable future."
Zhu leads a mirror-image biology lab at Westlake University in China. He was not involved in the Science paper.
Adamala estimates that the world's first mirror bacteria is still about a decade away. She argues that's exactly why the research should stop now before it builds all the tools that someone could use to make that final leap.
"No one can do it on their own right now," Adamala said. "The technology is not mature enough, which means we're pretty well safeguarded against someone crazy enough to say, 'I'll just go do it.'"
In the meantime, Adamala and the other paper authors invited more research and scrutiny on the risks they've identified.
"If someone does prove us wrong, that would make me really happy," she said.
On December 16, Clarivate—a scholarly publication analytics company—removed the journal Chemosphere from its platform, the Web of Science, which is a key index for academic journals. The indexing platform tracks citations and calculates journal "impact factors," a proxy for relevance in its field. It's a critical metric not only for the journals but for the academic authors of the journal's articles, who use the score in their pursuit of promotions and research funding.
To be included in the Web of Science, Clarivate requires journals to follow editorial quality criteria. In an email to Ars Technica, Clarivate confirmed that Chemosphere was removed for "not meeting one or more of the quality criteria." According to Retraction Watch, Chemosphere has retracted eight articles this month and published 60 expressions of concern since April.
When the Sun is blazing and the wind is blowing, Germany’s solar and wind power plants swing into high gear. For nine days in July 2023, renewables produced more than 70 percent of the electricity generated in the country; there are times when wind turbines even need to be turned off to avoid overloading the grid.
But on other days, clouds mute solar energy down to a flicker and wind turbines languish. For nearly a week in January 2023, renewable energy generation fell to less than 30 percent of the nation’s total, and gas-, oil- and coal-powered plants revved up to pick up the slack.
Germans call these periods Dunkelflauten, meaning “dark doldrums,” and they can last for a week or longer. They’re a major concern for doldrum-afflicted places like Germany and parts of the United States as nations increasingly push renewable-energy development. Solar and wind combined contribute 40 percent of overall energy generation in Germany and 15 percent in the US and, as of December 2024, both countries have goals of becoming 100 percent clean-energy-powered by 2035.
Author Kylie Mohr joined a training group this fall to learn how to set fires.
Courtesy of Kara Karboski
Puffs of smoke rose above a meadow in northeastern Washington as a small test fire danced in the grass a few feet away from me. Pleased by its slow, controlled behavior, my crew members and I, as part of a training program led by the nonprofit organization The Nature Conservancy and the Washington State Department of Natural Resources, began to light the rest of the field on fire. The scene had all the trappings of a wildfire — water hoses, fire engines, people in flame-resistant outfits. But we weren't there to fight it; we were there to light it.
It might sound counterintuitive, but prescribed fires, or intentionally lit fires, help lessen fire's destruction. Natural flames sparked by lightning and intentional blazes lit by Indigenous peoples have historically helped clean up excess vegetation that now serves as fuel for the wildfires that regularly threaten people's homes and lives across the West and, increasingly, across the country.
For millennia, lighting fires was common practice in America. But in the mid-to-late 1800s, the US outlawed Indigenous burning practices and started suppressing wildfires, resulting in a massive buildup of flammable brush and trees. That combined with the dry, hot conditions caused by the climate crisis has left much of the country at a dangerously high risk of devastating wildfires. The top 10 most destructive years by acreage burned have all occurred since 2004.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, federal land managers reevaluated their approach to fire and did the first prescribed burns in national parks. We're still making up for lost time: Scientists and land managers say millions more acres of prescribed burns are necessary to keep the country from burning out of control.
But the scale of the task doesn't match that of the labor force, whose focus is often extinguishing fires, not starting them. Responding to the increase in natural disasters has left America with few resources to actually keep them from happening. As Mark Charlton, a prescribed-fire specialist with The Nature Conservancy, told me, "We need more people, and we need more time."
This fall, I outfitted myself in fire-resistant clothing and boots, donned a hard hat, and joined a training program called TREX to better understand how prescribed burns work. TREX hosts collaborative burns to provide training opportunities in the field for people from different employers and backgrounds. The hope is that more people will earn the qualifications they need to lead and participate in burns for the agencies they work for back home.
Our team would walk across the area we planned to burn to collect data on weather and fire behavior.
Courtesy of Kara Karboski
The program's emphasis on learning, coupled with the support of the University of Idaho's Artists-in-Fire Residency (which helped pay my way), is why I, a journalist with no fire jobs on my résumé, could join a prescribed-fire module of about two dozen more experienced participants. I had to pass a fitness test — speed walking three miles with a 45-pound backpack in under 45 minutes — take 40 hours' worth of online coursework, and complete field-operations training to participate as a crew member. While hundreds of people have participated in TREX burns across the country since the program's inception in 2008, the dramatic growth of wildfires is outpacing the number of people being trained to reduce their impact.
The Forest Service manages 193 million acres of forests and grasslands across the country, burning an average of about 1.4 million acres, roughly the size of Delaware, each year with prescribed burns. It burned a record 2 million acres in fiscal 2023. But it's still not enough preparation, considering wildfires have burned over 10 million acres in recent years and people continue building and living in wildfire-prone areas. "It's a huge workload we have, and we know it," said Adam Mendonca, a deputy director of fire and aviation management for the Forest Service who oversees the agency's prescribed-fire program. The agency plans to chip away at the problem with the roughly 11,300 wildland firefighters it employs each year who squeeze the work in during the offseason, when there are fewer fires to fight.
But relying on wildland firefighters can be problematic. "We only have those resources for a short time," said Charlton, who served as the incident commander on the Washington burns I joined this fall. "After a long fire season, people are exhausted. It's hard to get people to commit." Plus, wildfires are increasingly overlapping with the ideal windows to do prescribed burns — often the spring and the fall, when conditions are cooler and wetter, making fires easier to tame.
That was especially true this year: Multiple large fires burned across the West into October. These late-season wildfires, coupled with two hurricanes that firefighters helped respond to, strained federal resources. That month, the nation's fire-preparedness level increased to a 5 — the highest level — indicating the country's emergency crews were at their maximum capacity and would've struggled to respond to new incidents.
In response to the elevated preparedness level, the National Multi-Agency Coordinating Group urged "extreme caution" in executing new prescribed fires, saying backup firefighters or equipment might not be available. "We get to the point where we're competing for resources," said Kyle Lapham, the certified-burner-program manager for the Washington State Department of Natural Resources and the burn boss on the Washington burns.
There's also a qualification shortage. Prescribed burns require a well-rounded group with a variety of expertise and positions — including a burn boss, who runs the show and must have years of training. Charlton estimated that hundreds more qualified burn bosses are necessary to tackle nationwide prescribed-burn goals.
A lot of planning — and trained expertise — is required before any burning can begin.
Courtesy of Adam Gebauer
Just as concerning is an interest shortage. The Forest Service has struggled to hire for and maintain its federal firefighting force in recent years, in large part because of poor pay (federal firefighter base pay was raised to $15 an hour in 2022) and other labor disputes over job classifications, pay raises, staffing, and more. The agency is also expecting budget cuts next year and has already said it won't be able to hire its usual seasonal workforce as a result.
Legislation inching its way through Congress could help, though its fate under a new administration is unclear. The National Prescribed Fire Act of 2024 would direct hundreds of millions of dollars to the Forest Service and the US Department of the Interior for prescribed burns, including investment in training a skilled workforce — but it hasn't progressed past a Senate subcommittee hearing in June.
Without a boost in funding, the agency will continue relying heavily on partnerships with nonprofits like The Nature Conservancy and the National Forest Foundation to staff prescribed burns. The Forest Service also recently expanded its Prescribed Fire Training Center to host educational opportunities out West. Critically, though, time is of the essence.
During my TREX training in October, about 20 foresters and firefighters from as far south as Texas and as far north as British Columbia worked beside me. Our group included employees of the Washington Department of Natural Resources and two citizens of the nearby Spokane Tribe of Indians, who have a robust prescribed-fire program of their own.
Over two weeks I got a front-row seat to how much planning (sometimes years) and time a single prescribed burn takes. We conducted several burns in the mountains north of Spokane on the property of a receptive landowner who'd hosted TREX in previous years. He provided the training ground and, in exchange, got work done on his property. This isn't a common scenario — burning on private land can be more complicated, and so more burns happen on state or federal property.
When I arrived, the burn's incident-management team had already put together a burn plan detailing our objectives — reducing wildfire risk to the landowner's house, thinning small tree saplings, knocking down invasive weeds, opening up more wildlife habitat — and the exact weather conditions, like wind speed, relative humidity, and temperature, we needed to safely burn. Prescribed burns on federal lands also go through an environmental review.
At the site, we scouted contained areas we would burn, called units, with trainees making additional plans for how to ignite and control fires. Keeping a fire in its intended location, called "holding," meant lots of prep work, like digging shallow trenches to box the fire in. During the burn, teams monitored smoke and occasionally sprayed the larger trees we wanted to preserve with water when flames threatened their canopies; others poured fuel on the ground, igniting bushes, grass, and smaller trees to slowly build the fire.
Those nights, I went to bed dreaming of smoke. I left with a deeper appreciation for those who set fires for a living.
Courtesy of Kara Karboski
Managing the fire didn't end when we finished burning the 30 or so acres. In some cases, it can involve days of monitoring and cleanup. To make sure the fire was out, my crew and I combed through areas we'd burned the day before for smoke or heat. If we discovered something still smoking, we'd churn up the ground with a shovel or pickax, douse the hot spot with water, and repeat. Just when we thought we were done, we'd find another spot we'd missed.
I went to bed those nights dreaming of little puffs of smoke and woke up with small flakes of ash embedded behind my ears. The work was rewarding and exhausting — I left with a deeper appreciation for the workers who do it for a living.
While every prescribed burn is different, it's always a careful equation. Everything needs to line up: supportive communities, the right weather, and, of course, the workers necessary to plan, burn, and extinguish. Only then can you light the match.
Kylie Mohr is a Montana-based freelance journalist and correspondent for the magazine High Country News.
Health officials reported the first "severe" human case of the H5N1 virus on December 18.
MATTHEW HATCHER/AFP via Getty Images
A bird flu outbreak has ravaged the world's birds since 2020 and infected cattle earlier this year.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency over the virus this week.
Health officials also confirmed the first "severe" case of and hospitalization for the H5N1 virus.
The burgeoning global bird flu outbreak continued its flight path across the country this week, with two major developments that point to the virus's increasingly concerning spread.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency over the virus on Wednesday, citing a worrying number of infected herds throughout the state in recent months and a need for more resources.
Since the state first identified the H5N1 avian influenza virus in cattle in late August, California's agriculture department has confirmed 645 infected dairy herds.
Newsom's announcement, meanwhile, came just hours after health officials confirmed the first severe case of bird flu in Louisiana, saying a person was hospitalized with an infection after being exposed to sick birds in his backyard.
In recent months, infectious disease experts have grown more and more nervous about the possibility of a human pandemic linked to the virus, even as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has maintained that the public health risk for humans is low.
Here's where things stand.
Bird flu outbreak
The H5N1 virus first reemerged in Europe in 2020 and has since become widespread in birds around the world. The outbreak has killed tens of millions of birds and tens of thousands of sea lions and seals in recent years.
Birds carry the disease while migrating and can expose domestic poultry to the virus while never showing signs themselves, according to the CDC.
The virus jumped to cattle herds for the first time ever earlier this year in a major escalation. Then, in October, a pig in Oregon tested positive for the virus, an especially concerning case as swine can host both bird and human flu viruses.
There has been no known human-to-human transmission yet. Still, the growing pattern of mammal-to-mammal transmission has infectious disease experts on guard against the possibility that H5N1 could eventually become a human pandemic.
"If it keeps spreading in animals, then it is eventually going to cause problems for humans, either because we don't have food because they've got to start exterminating flocks, or because it starts to make a jump in humans," Dr. Jerome Adams, a former surgeon general and the director of health equity at Purdue University, told Business Insider in April.
"The more it replicates, the more chances it has to mutate," he added.
The ongoing multi-state dairy cattle outbreak, which is believed to have started in Texas, has infected 865 herds across 16 states, according to the CDC, and has led to a growing number of human cases among US dairy and poultry workers.
The CDC has thus far confirmed 61 reported human cases and seven probable cases across the US, though some scientists estimate that the real number of infections is higher.
More than half of the human cases are tied to interaction with sick cattle. The remaining infections have been traced to exposure to sick poultry or have an unknown origin, the CDC said.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture this month issued a federal order that requires the testing of the nation's milk supply.
Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
State of emergency
California's Wednesday announcement will give state and local authorities increased resources to study and contain the outbreak, Newsom said.
"This proclamation is a targeted action to ensure government agencies have the resources and flexibility they need to respond quickly to this outbreak," the governor said in a statement.
Earlier this month, the Agriculture Department said it would start testing the nation's milk supply for traces of the virus, requiring dairy farmers to provide raw milk samples upon request. Up until then, cattle testing for potential infections had been almost entirely voluntary.
Dr. Monica Gandhi, a professor of medicine and associate chief of the Division of HIV, Infectious Diseases, and Global Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, said the declaration will likely give California a greater ability to surveil dairy farms for signs of the virus.
But declaring a state of emergency could be a double-edged sword.
Phrases "like 'state of emergency,' given that we've just been through a pandemic, can induce panic," Gandhi said.
And it's not time to panic yet, she said.
Gandhi praised the CDC's "very measured" messaging around the virus thus far and said health officials are closely monitoring the spread.
