COVID-19 means a shorter MCAT: What aspiring med students must know – American Medical Association

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For aspiring medical students preparing for the Medical College Admission Test (MCAT), the COVID-19 pandemic has thrown a curveballas it has for the entire medical school admissions process.

Administrations of the exam are on hold until May 29. In response to losing more than a month of prime test-taking time, the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) is making changes to the exam that will accommodate additional test times.

What are those changes, and should they alter your preparation? One expert on the exam offered his opinion.

The single biggest change to the exam is that for the remainder of the 2020 testing cycle, it will be reduced in length. The typical MCAT test-taker is given seven hours and 30 minutes of test-taking time. Under the abridged format, the exams seat time is five hours and 45 minutes.

All the exams sections will feature fewer questions, and some passages will be removed. Still, the breadth of required knowledge remains the same, so its best to stick to your initial study plan.

The exam itself is going to be shorter, said Petros Minasi, senior director of prehealth programs at Kaplan Test Prep. But what hasnt changed is the proportionality in terms of the amount of time a student has per question. It isnt as though the exam has gotten harder or gotten easier. Even though it is a shorter exam, it is relatively the same difficulty as far as pacing.

To accommodate the need for more test takers to be able sit for the exam in a shorter window, the AAMC has moved from one administration of the exam per test day to three. The three times are 6:30 a.m., 12:15 p.m. and 6 p.m. None of those time frames include a meal break, which differs from the typical exam day schedule.

The spread on times means that students should identify their ideal time and test-taking location and register for it as soon as possible, according to Minasi.

The main thing for a student to really be considering is not just when they are selecting their testing time, but how they are going to incorporate the when of the exam into their overall preparation plannot in terms of the studying of questions and content, but as far as making sure they are physically and mentally ready to test at their exam time, Minasi said.

One recommendation Minasi offered to account for changes in exam times is to study and take practice exams during the window in which you will take the exam.

For the most part, Minasi said students should proceed as if they were taking the full-length MCAT exam. The one possible exception is taking practice exams. Doing that, a student should shorten the test-taking time and cut the number of questions in the exam to match the breakdown of the shortened exam.

Kaplan has suggestions on how to alter your practice exam to best fit the format you will encounter when you take it in the coming weeks.

Beyond that, the only thing a student should be altering is the mindset that they are going to be taking a shorter exam than the full-length exam that they have been preparing for, Minasi said. The content topics that would normally be tested are all still fair game.

Medicine can be a career that is both challenging and highly rewarding but figuring out a medical schools prerequisites and navigating the application process can be a challenge in itself. TheAMA premed glossary guidehas the answers to frequently asked questions about medical school, the application process, the MCAT and more. Prospective applicants should also be reassured that admissions offices are acutely aware of recent disruptions to historical processes and will be making adjustments to account for the realities of the current situation.

Have peace of mind andget everything you need to start med school off strongwith the AMA.

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COVID-19 means a shorter MCAT: What aspiring med students must know - American Medical Association

UT Health Austin and Dell Medical School looking for volunteers interested in helping with COVID-19 contact tracing – KVUE.com

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The goal is to help prevent the spread of COVID-19. Volunteers would work a minimum of 24 hours per week for four weeks.

Since March, UT Health Austin and Dell Medical School have had a program where volunteers can sign up to be contact tracers. The program partnered with Austin Public Health so they can cover different segments of Austin's population.

From making calls to taking down the data of COVID-19 cases, Dr. Darlene Bahvnani, an MPH epidemiologist with the Dell Medical School, said contact tracing can be effective in preventing the spread of COVID-19.

"What if you could cut off that chain of transmission by following that first case very carefully and trying to understand who they came into contact with and making sure that those contacts never spread the infection?" Dr. Bahvnani said. We started off with just a handful of medical students volunteers, and weve now grown to 76 active volunteers and 200 and some in [the] queue."

Anyone can sign up to volunteer, but it's noted that being a public health, social work, clinical or having bilingual experience is a plus.

I think this can be [a] very very effective approach to opening up Austin and opening up the rest of Texas. I think this is absolutely necessary if were going to start walking around and going about, Dr. Bahvnani said. I think it will be important to have volunteers sign up and come and do their part."

For the contact tracing program, a minimum of 24 hours per week for at least four weeks is expected, and there's also a home monitoring program.

According to UT Health Austin's website, volunteers must meet the following expectations:

Addison Allen, a UT Health Austin volunteer in the program, said she's been doing it for several weeks now. According to Allen, somewhere between 45 and 60 calls are made every day, but the weekends are a bit slower.

Allen said volunteers wil ask for things like the daily routine of the people they call.

"Go through their day, what did they do, who did they see did they go anywhere and just try to figure out if they had close contact with anyone before they started to self isolate," Allen said. "Seeing that a contact that became a contact had less contacts potentially because we reached out and I think that's really big."

The program is exploring possibly paying people for the work in the future but as of right now, it is all volunteer.

"If you do get a call from a contact tracer, please pick up and please try to cooperate because we're doing out best to keep you safe," Dr. Bahvnani said.

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UT Health Austin and Dell Medical School looking for volunteers interested in helping with COVID-19 contact tracing - KVUE.com

Doctors In Training Learn Hard Lessons During The Pandemic – NPR

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Dr. Max Lazarus, a medical resident at a hospital on Long Island, N.Y., is one of some 130,000 medical residents in the U.S., many of whom have found themselves on the front lines of the COVID-19 pandemic. Max Lazarus hide caption

Dr. Max Lazarus, a medical resident at a hospital on Long Island, N.Y., is one of some 130,000 medical residents in the U.S., many of whom have found themselves on the front lines of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The coronavirus is leaving a lasting impression on a generation of young doctors.

In the U.S., there are some 130,000 medical residents doctors in their final years of training after medical school who make up a vital part of the workforce.

Now a global pandemic has become the centerpiece of their training.

Many are pulling long hours in emergency departments and intensive care units treating patients infected with the coronavirus, all while witnessing the health care system under unprecedented stress.

Their schedules are transformed. Family members must keep their distance. And some of the hallmarks of their clinical training suddenly feel tenuous.

Many recognize the pandemic as a formative moment, both for health care and their own careers. Some say it's also magnifying existing concerns about labor and mental health among doctors in training.

'Nothing is working'

Before the coronavirus crisis, Dr. David Lin, a second-year medical resident at the Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City, felt comfortable working in the intensive care unit.

Lin already knew how to manage a patient on a ventilator, when to adjust the settings, what to do if the person's kidneys needed help.

So much changed for him the day that coronavirus patients first streamed into his hospital, though.

"Every person that rolled in: tubed, unstable, respiratory failure, COVID ... anyone, young, old," he says. "It was just a deluge."

From then on, Lin was treating these critically ill patients all the time, week after week, as New York City hospitals saw a crush of coronavirus patients in March and April.

Lin soon discovered that some of the clinical know-how he had accumulated over years of training no longer applied in the same way to COVID-19. Instead of improving, patients would linger in the ICU for weeks, their recovery uncertain.

"You are trying to do something, and nothing is working," he says. "Now whenever I see someone intubated, you just know, 'Oh my God, they are probably going to die.' "

Day after day, Lin had the unsettling experience of leaving the hospital unsure of whether his efforts to help patients actually made a difference. "It has just been incredibly disheartening," he says.

Another challenge is that even Lin's attending physicians the seasoned doctors who train him don't have all the answers either.

"These leaders in critical care who I respect so much, they're telling me like, 'We don't know,' " he says. "That's terrifying."

"It reminds you there are always going to be things in medicine that you will never know," Lin says.

In Baltimore, Dr. Martha Frances Brucato, a second-year resident in pediatrics and internal medicine, says much of her education has emphasized that family members should be closely involved in a patient's care. But now hospitals generally bar visitors because the coronavirus is so contagious.

Dr. Martha Frances Brucato is a second-year resident in pediatrics and internal medicine in Baltimore. Martha Frances Brucato hide caption

"The really hard part of our jobs right now is how alone our patients are by necessity," she says.

The pace is different too. She can't rush to a patient's bedside without first putting on layers of protective gear: "That immediacy is such a part and parcel of ICU care, typically."

For many residents, the risk to their own health has never felt so immediate either.

Before working in the ICU with COVID-19 patients, Brucato made sure to remind her husband of her own medical wishes.

"Remember that I have a living will," she told him. "I would want to be ventilated as long as there was a chance for meaningful recovery."

That does not mean Brucato hesitated to be on the front lines of the pandemic.

In fact, she volunteered for the assignment.

Dr. Brendan McEvoy, an emergency medicine resident in Chicago, also jumped at the chance to work on COVID-19 in the ICU.

Then he caught the virus.

"There were a lot of people that were very concerned for me," he says.

It was nerve-wracking initially, he says, because he had seen otherwise healthy young people on ventilators during his shifts.

Soon after his recovery, he was put on a dedicated intubation team in the hospital.

"I hope we are going to look back at this like, 'How were we all not better prepared?' "

Pandemic magnifies labor concerns

For some residents, the pandemic is amplifying long-standing concerns about working conditions.

"It is really bringing to light a lot of the ways that residents have been mistreated for years," says Dr. Amy Plasencia, executive vice president of the Committee of Interns and Residents, a union representing more than 17,000 doctors in training.

Before the pandemic, the Committee of Interns and Residents was pushing for a bill of rights that focused on better pay, sick-time policies and other protections for residents.

"Now is the time that we most need those protections," says Plasencia, a resident at a hospital in Brooklyn, N.Y. "Because residents are really at the forefront doing so much of this work, they are in very large numbers becoming ill."

Generally, residents are reluctant to speak publicly out of concern that doing so could jeopardize their job and professional future. Since the pandemic began, more are taking to social media to air concerns about working conditions.

Medical residency is essentially a prolonged apprenticeship that generally stretches from three to seven years. Residents are expected to put in long hours as part of their education. The average salary is about $60,000 per year.

At the University of Washington, the union representing doctors in training is wrestling over a contract with the hospital system in an effort to get better pay and benefits.

"People can't work 80 hours a week, see really horrible things all day [and] not have access to mental health care, without having some sort of burnout," says Dr. Zoe Sansted, who is vice president of the University of Washington Housestaff Association.

Sansted, a family medicine resident in her third year, was assigned to work in the ICU as the pandemic spread in Seattle.

She says many residents are eager to work extra hours and be on the front line.

"These are wonderful instincts," she says. "Doctors are obsessed with professionalism, but it's also ripe for exploitation."

COVID-19 takes emotional toll

Before the pandemic, Dr. Murad Khan was already a bit nervous about his internal medicine rotation.

Khan is a psychiatry resident in his first year, known as an internship, at Yale New Haven Hospital. Suddenly his rotation coincided with a surge of COVID-19 patients.

Rules were changing constantly. At first, he says, it wasn't clear what residents would be asked to do or whether there would be enough personal protective equipment.

Dr. Murad Khan is a first-year psychiatry resident at Yale New Haven Hospital. Yvonne Uyanwune hide caption

"Initially, things were pretty frantic," Khan says. "I actually spent a lot of the first couple weeks having a hard time sleeping before going into work."

Khan says he found himself on edge, concerned that a COVID-19 patient would crash and he wouldn't know how to respond.

"There is something traumatic just about not knowing how sick a patient might get at any moment," he says.

Khan is much more comfortable working with coronavirus-infected patients since those early days of the pandemic in Connecticut. But he recognizes the psychological toll of caring for these sick patients, often being the only connection between them and their families.

"You are having these conversations on a regular basis. Do we want to focus on comfort care? Or do we want to focus on trying to make them live more?" he says.

Khan says the coronavirus has only underscored existing problems in American health care, from racial health disparities to the demands placed on medical residents.

"There was already an issue around how much residents work and how much they are supervised and whether or not that's good for their mental health," he says. "That's even worse now."

For many residents, the legacy of the coronavirus may be the emotional weight of so much unmitigated loss.

Dr. Max Lazarus, a resident at a hospital on Long Island, N.Y., went into emergency medicine exactly so he could respond to crises.

He remembers pushing stretchers around the lobby of Bellevue Hospital as a volunteer in the emergency room during Hurricane Sandy.

"This is what I signed up for," he says. "It forces you to grow in a way that I don't think anything else could."

Dr. Max Lazarus, a medical resident at a hospital on Long Island, N.Y., went into emergency medicine so he could help during crises. "This is what I signed up for. ... It forces you to grow in a way that I don't think anything else could." Max Lazarus hide caption

But Lazarus says nothing could fully prepare him to watch patients call their family members before going on a ventilator.

"You tell them that hopefully they will wake up but there is a chance they may not," he says. "It's not the way anyone should die, alone on a ventilator."

Lazarus, 29, still thinks about two patients he treated early in the pandemic one was a bit younger than he is, the other a bit older.

"And they died," he says. "They really stick out."

This story comes from NPR's reporting partnership with Kaiser Health News.

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Doctors In Training Learn Hard Lessons During The Pandemic - NPR

Harvard Medical School Professor Burton ‘Bud’ Rose, the ‘Steve Jobs of Medicine,’ Dies at 77 | News – Harvard Crimson

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Burton Bud D. Rose had already written a textbook that his colleagues referred to as the nephrology bible. Still, he wasnt satisfied.

Rose knew his book could only stay accurate for so long before hed have to update it which, for most volumes, happened every five years.

But Rose wanted to keep his textbook up to date constantly. So he asked his publisher if theyd assist him in transferring the textbook to a computerized format, which could be regularly updated. They refused so he decided to do it himself.

In 1992, aided by his wife, Gloria, Rose created a computerized database of medical information called UpToDate from their home. Today, the digital platform is used by over 1.5 million clinicians worldwide.

Aside from his online pursuits, Rose worked as a professor at Harvard Medical School and a nephrologist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. He died on April 24, from Alzheimers disease complicated by COVID-19, at the age of 77.

Theodore I. Steinman, a professor at Harvard Medical School and a senior physician at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, called UpToDate the first living textbook.

He was probably the most influential person ever in the world with regards to medical information and education, Steinman said.

Mark L. Zeidel, a professor at Harvard Medical School and physician in chief and chair of the Department of Medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, often calls Rose the Steve Jobs of Medicine.

In part, that moniker stems from the fact that Rose created UpToDate with a piece of technology from Apple, the hypercard. But Zeidel also saw UpToDate as an example of disruptive technology like the computers and phones Jobs created.

Both Steinman and Zeidel said that Rose could have been in contention for a Nobel Prize in Medicine, which cannot be awarded posthumously.

He really was deserving of the Nobel Prize in Medicine because of his worldwide impact on medical education and medical information technology, Steinman said.

I regret that it never occurred to me, but we could have actually put him up for the Nobel Prize in Medicine and he might have won it because of the significance of this contribution, because people around the world are using it constantly, Zeidel said.

Zeidel said that most of the 170 interns and fellows at Beth Israel Deaconess regularly use UpToDate.

When I come in and do rounds, they don't quote the textbook, he said. They quote UpToDate. Because at two in the morning, they can call it up on a computer right at the point of attack where they're working, and they can look up what they need to find, find it quickly, and get the authoritative information.

Isaac Kohane, the chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School, said Roses creation revolutionized medicine.

Rose had a unique mix of vision and pragmatism that allowed him to create such an impactful technology, he added.

That resource was so singular, and the editorial process that was put together was so rigorous and so strongly academic, yet because of his leadership, so determinately practical and focused, that it became the unquestioned standard, Kohane said.

Despite the fact that UpToDate took more and more of his time, Rose remained active as a clinician and professor.

He always took time to be an attending physician on the renal service at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and he was always a wonderful one on one teacher, Steinman said.

Martin Pollak, a professor at Harvard Medical School and chief of the Division of Nephrology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, called Rose a beloved teacher.

He just had a very clear, concise way of breaking down complicated concepts, Pollak said, and he used his skills to teach medical students and patients alike.

He taught an annual course at the Medical School on kidney disease that people from all over the world flocked to, Pollak said. In 2009, the American Society of Nephrology granted him the Robert G. Narins Award, the highest award for education in nephrology.

Gloria Rose, his wife, said he approached pursuits outside the hospital with the same verve.

She recalled that, while at work, he was looking at the names of their immediate family members, and created the acronym Badgers short for Bud, Ann, Daniel, Gloria, and Emily Rose.

So then he started calling us the Badgers, Gloria said with a laugh. He was just always thinking outside the box, he was very funny in that way.

Rose was also a romantic, Gloria said. One day, he surprised her with flowers and a cake, announcing that it was the 10,000th day since they had met.

He was goofy in a good way, she said. He was very spontaneous.

He loved basketball and tennis, and spent hours at a time bettering his technique.

With everything that he did, it wasn't that he wanted to be the best. He wanted to improve his game. Always, Gloria said. He would go out on the driveway and keep shooting, until he just got it.

With UpToDate, Rose refined medicine, too.

Denise Basow, the CEO of Clinical Effectiveness at Wolters Kluwer, the company that currently runs UpToDate, wrote in a statement that his work changed the medical field over the last three decades.

Once he had the idea for UpToDate, he wouldnt let anything get in the way of pursuing it, Basow wrote. That pursuit has impacted the practice of medicine and the lives of patients for almost 30 years.

Staff writer Camille G. Caldera can be reached at camille.caldera@thecrimson.com. Follow her on Twitter @camille_caldera.

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Harvard Medical School Professor Burton 'Bud' Rose, the 'Steve Jobs of Medicine,' Dies at 77 | News - Harvard Crimson

Ode to Burton ‘Bud’ Rose, MD – Renal and Urology News

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Likemany of my colleagues, I was very saddened to hear of the passing of Dr BurtonBud Rose on April 24, 2020 at the age of 77 years. There were two importantsides of Dr Rose: First, he was well known in the nephrology community asan extremely modest, brilliant nephrologist who published 2 important textbookson nephrology. Second, and more importantly, he was the founder and editor ofUpToDate.

DrRose was born in Brooklyn NY in 1942.He attended Princeton University,where he majored in history. He then attended New York University School ofMedicine, where he also completed his residency and fellowship.Afterserving in the US Navy as a nephrologist, he moved to Wellesley, Massachusettsand began his academic career, with positions at the University of MassachusettsMedical School in Worcester, Massachusetts, and Brigham and Womens Hospitaland Harvard Medical School in Boston.

Dr Rose seems to have touched everynephrologist of my generation.I first came across his work Pathophysiologyof Renal Disease, when I was a student on the nephrology rotation at BaylorCollege of Medicine in Houston.This book, as well as Clinical Physiologyof Acid-Base and Electrolyte Disorders, provided me with my foundation andinterest in nephrology. Dr Rose was known for his clear style, and especiallyhis ability to express complex nephrologic concepts in a way that a student,resident, and fellow like myself could understand.

When I was a fellow, 2 of his articles werealso of great importance to me.New approach to disturbances in theplasma sodium concentration, published in the American Journal of Medicine (1986;81:1033-1040), still helps me tounderstand pathophysiologic changes that occur with hypernatremia.His Kidney International Nephrology Forum ondiuretics (Diuretics, Kidney International (1991;39:336-352) was also well-readby me and many of my colleagues.It was a great privilege to have afellows lunch with Dr Rose when he visited the University of Pennsylvania in1991. He was extremely approachable and charismatic.During lunch, hedescribed his idea for UpToDate. Several fellows at the dinner were quite enthusiastic,but others thought it was not such a great idea.

In 1992, Dr Rose started his flagshipUpToDate.Like many of my colleagues, I would see him at American Societyof Nephrology annual meeting in his at first very small booth. Nephrology wasthe first component of UpToDate, and I was fortunate to be an author of severaltopic cards.UpToDate was not successful just because it was the firstcomputer access program for medical doctors.There were several thingsthat Dr Rose did to make it special:Topic cards were directed to busypractitioners and provided expert advice; Topic cards were updated regularly,at least annually; UpToDate was established without industry funding or support,which must have been quite hard early on when there were few subscriptions andvery little income; and UpToDate has an international outreach program that hasdonated subscriptions to clinicians and organizations providing care to poor orunderserved populations.

You know the rest: There are now 25specialties covered in depth, with more than 7,100 authors and editors. Some1.9 million doctors and 38,500 institutional sites worldwide use UptoDate.Thereare more than 50 million topic views per month.The median time to obtaininformation needed during a search is a little over a minute.It isestimated that UpToDate changes physician practices one-third of the time. Whatan impact!

I consider Dr Rose to be the most influentialclinical educator in the history of medicine, with an unsurpassed impact onphysician education and patients lives. While we keep alive the memories ofgreat historical figures like Hippocrates, Galen, and Osler, their impactlessens over time as medicine changes. In contrast,Dr Rosesaccomplishments will live on and his impact will become even more substantialwith each passing day and each new click leading a clinician to learn more atUpToDate.

While (thanks to Dr Rose) I may not be able toeffectively teach students about medical conditions like deep venous thrombosisor Hashimotos thyroiditis because they get to UpToDate before me, I can tellthem the history of UpToDate and how a kind, modest, brilliant nephrologist wasresponsible for much of the learning that occurs in medicine today. I hope thatwe will all keep alive the memory of Dr Rose and that someday he will berecognized for his unparalleled contribution to medicine and patient care.

I encourage you to watch the following youtubevideo, in which Dr. Rose discussed the origins of UpToDate https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4nQWM6U298

Anthony J. Bleyer, MD, MS, is Professor of Internal Medicineat Wake Forest University School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, North Carolinaand a member of Renal & Urology News editorial advisory board.

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Ode to Burton 'Bud' Rose, MD - Renal and Urology News

Wisconsin medical students are graduating onto the front lines of coronavirus – Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

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Ali Jandal was the student speaker for the medical school graduation at UW-Madison.(Photo: Courtesy of Ali Jandal)

As he approached graduation and a move to the University of Vermont for the start of his career in medicine, Ali Jandal acknowledged that he was afraid.

"How I feel about it changesday by day," said Jandal, who is from La Crosse."I think I've always been a little scared, because viruses are easy to spread and it's really hard to keep yourself safe from them."

In their final weeks of medical school at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Jandal and his peers had seen the world turned upside down.

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"I want to argue that the end of our medical school careers is poetic," Jandal said in an addressduring the school's virtual graduation. "And if any class was made for this challenge, it was us."

They were the first to navigate the medical program's new curriculum. They spent the last weeks of school at home, as thedoctors they knewfoughtCOVID-19 on the front lines. They celebrated Match Day the day they learn where they'll work their residencies and graduation from behind computer screens.

Now, they'll put their training to use.Working ininternal medicine, Jandalexpectsto see COVID-19 patients who aren't sick enough to be in an intensive care unit boththose who are getting better and those who mayget worse.

He'll be joined by the Class of 2020's newly-minted nurses, public health professionals and other health care workers as he wadesinto largelyuncharted territory. He knows that work comes with risk.

"I think the scariest part is I haven't actually worked with these people in the hospital yet. I haven't seen the people around me get sick," he said."To go from being a citizen, civilian, to being a front line workeris going to be dramatic and scary."

University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health Dean Robert Golden participates in the school's first virtual graduation ceremony held during the COVID-19 pandemic.(Photo: Todd Brown, Courtesy of UWMadison)

Wisconsin graduates of medicine, nursing and public healthsaid they're ready to get to work. They've been reading up on everything they can about an unpredictable disease.

The Class of 2020s educational experience has been capped by a global public health and medical crisis unlike any other we have experienced in the past 100 years," Robert Golden, dean of UW-Madison's school of medicine and public health, told medical school graduates.

Brianna Stankey, a senior nursing student at Alverno College, has yet to graduate, butshe's already hard at work.

When her school moved online and her clinical at Froedtert Hospital was canceled, Stankey, 22, started working full time in her training programas a certified nursing assistantat a local hospital, working primarily with cancer patients.

She plans to stay on as a nurse after graduation. Stankey, ofTrempealeau, has applied to work as a "grad nurse," working ona temporary permit that would allow her to work before she passes herlicensing exam. She'll stay in the same cancer unit.

RELATED: 'We need all hands on deck': Wisconsin considering emergency measures to put more nurses in the field

"I'm excited. I feel like there is no better time for me to get into this profession and to be working with these people," Stankey said. "It's hard being a new nurse because I don't know everything ... but it's exciting in the sense that I'm able to jump in and I'm able to help now."

It's also a bit scary, she said, and her life has changed significantly.Instead of kissing her boyfriendas she walks through the door, she runs straight tothe shower.

Work has changed, too. A mask hides the smiles she once loved to share withher patients and co-workers. Her patients arrive for treatments alone. She tries to take more time to sit with them and talk, knowing there's more to nursing than caring for people's physical needs.

"I can't imagine being a patient right now, and being at the hospital alone," she said.

There is an understandable fear in coming to the hospital during a pandemic,John Kopriva, a UW-Madison medical school graduate, said. Hospitals will need to work to reassure patients that they can seek treatment safely.

John Kopriva, center in cap and gown, is graduating from UW-Madisons medical school as an MD. At home with his family in Wauwatosa, they will be watching the graduation speeches on a laptop on the kitchen island while having brunch and celebrating the event. From left to right are his girlfriend Hailey Rowen, mother Angela, graduate John, father John, brother Joe, sister Katherine and brother David.(Photo: Michael Sears / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel)

This is true for the patients Kopriva anticipates seeing in orthopedic surgery at Emory University in Atlanta this summer. He expects he'll be busy with the backlog of elective surgeries postponed early in the outbreak. He knows there's a chance he'll run into COVID-19 as well, especially if there's a localsurge in cases.

"I think it's something that's going to define the time that I graduated," Kopriva said. "Hopefully when I'm an older attendingand looking back and giving advice to a younger medical student, I can tell them that 'Hey, that was the time when COVID was a problem. Look at all we've done since.' "

For recent graduateswho hope to find work in other areas less touched bythe pandemic response, the search is proving to be tough.

Kelly Hackett, ofWaukesha, graduated from UW-Madison with her master's degree in public health. But she's still struggling to find work formonths amid hiring freezes.

"I keep saying it's like I'm in a fragmented reality where everything around me all the news, social media, friends, family people are constantly talking about public health, whether or not they realize they're talking about public health," said Hackett.

"And yet, I'm looking at not having a job at the end of this, at a time when public health is critical."

Kelly Hackett and her family celebrate her graduation from UW-Madison.(Photo: Courtesy of Kelly Hackett)

She's still applying to jobs and interviewingwithin her expertise, which includes researchingsocial causes of health disparities factors that experts say have allowed the pandemic to affect some communities worse than others.

Ajay Sethi, an associate professor of population health sciences, said he's seen his students adapt and answer the call to help however they can.

"There is this national call to address this pandemic and public health departments everywhere are thinking of how to scale up contact tracing," Sethi said."And our students, even if they have otherinterests, many of them are eager to do that, just to answer that call."

Hackett acknowledgescontact tracing is not off the table.

"If contact tracing is what's needed and it's what is available, at least it's work and it's a way that Ican contribute," she said.

Geoffrey Watters, 50, earned his doctorate in nursing practice from UW-Madison this spring. He's feeling confident about job prospects, but others in his specialty ofpsychiatric nursingare struggling, especially in outpatient care. One of his classmates got a job, only to lose it when her employerfolded.

"There's a lot of uncertainty," Watters, of Milwaukee,said."It seems counter-intuitive that health care workers would be losing their jobs in the middle of a pandemic, but it's happening."

It shows how medical careextends beyondemergency rooms and ICUs, even in a pandemic.Mental health care remainsimportant for patients and health care providers alike, Watters said.

"Everyone is under a lot of stress and especially people who work in health care," he said.

Like so many members of the Class of 2020, there is a disappointment that comes with missing major milestones in theirfinal semesters. As is true forso many, the pandemic has exacted a personal toll.

For Stankey, missing out on the chance to celebrate the end of her senior year wasparticularly painful. Her undergraduate career was not without struggle: She spent most of it working two to three jobs to pay for school. She lost loved ones, including herfather. But she also made lifelong friends, who she's now separated from.

"As things were getting canceled, I was just whiting them out in my planner, like this is just so sad," she said. "I'm not getting that closure, of being done with school."

Jandal's wedding plans were canceled.He and his fiancee, also a new physician, will now marry in a small ceremony before they move to Vermont to start their residencies.

Hackett's father-in-lawdied the day before her graduation. He tested negative forCOVID-19. But thepandemic meant they had been unable to visit in recent weeks.

Still, each acknowledged the need for everyone to do their part to protect thosemost vulnerable to the virus.

"As talented and as smart and as many resources as you have, in a public health emergency, if you still have people who aren't convinced and won't be a part of the effort, the entire effort could fall apart," Jandal said.

Contact Devi Shastri at 414-224-2193 or DAShastri@jrn.com. Follow her on Twitter at @DeviShastri.

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Wisconsin medical students are graduating onto the front lines of coronavirus - Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Using the power of peer support to positively impact medicine – American Medical Association

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The COVID-19 pandemic has placed a tremendous burden on physicians and other health professionals. It is a burden that is cognitive, physical and emotional. One way to address this ongoing burden is through a peer support program, which can positively impact and shape the culture of medicine during the pandemic and moving forward.

Peer support is an organizational approach and an individual approach to being there for each other, Jo Shapiro, MD, FACS, an associate professor of otolaryngology-head and neck surgery at Harvard Medical School in Boston, said in an AMA webinar. When we think about our organizations and when we think about the way we practice medicine, we need to remind ourselves that the culture of medicine is very strong.

Much of the culture is wonderful, like the fact that we're healers and we put our patients first. That is beautiful, and no one will ever take that from us, but there is a dark side to this, said Dr. Shapiro. The culture has in some ways let us down over the years. Its been increasing our workload without actually increasing the support to front-line clinicians, and its minimized the emotional and physical well-being of physicians and other health care providers

Asking the question, How are we expected to sustain our work if we dont address these challenges to our well-being? Dr. Shapiro emphasized the importance of peer support. By implementing peer support in a health system or physician practice, it can help doctors and other health professionals open up about what is causing them stress.

Here are six fundamental elements for how to use peer support to provide guidance during a pandemic and beyond.

Peer support should be proactive, without waiting for peers to show signs of stress. It is important to put the invitation out there in a way that is destigmatizing, said Dr. Shapiro. Were checking in on you and offering peer support because thats what we do.

This is a routine part of what we do now, so the invitation needs to be given in that way, she said. Its not like were just calling people who we know are really not handling things well.

If youve ever been supported by anybody and that person is really giving their full caring attention to you in and of itself, that feels incredibly wonderful, said Dr. Shapiro. That is the basis of peer support. Being able to do that."

Once a peer support conversation has begun, it is important to practice empathic listening. This is because it shows that someone is really hearing what the peer is going through, she said.

Then, based on whatever they say, reflecting with the peer about what theyre feeling, what theyre experiencing and reflecting in terms of normalizing their emotions, because you wont be surprised to hear that most of the things that people say, many of us have experienced, said Dr. Shapiro.

The other part of reflecting is to validate and say, Its totally understandable that given what you just told me you were asked to do or you had to witness, that you would feel that way. That really makes sense.

And then sharing your experience when its relevant, said Dr. Shapiro. Theres this tension between you dont want to overshare because youre really there to support the peer, but sometimes if youve had a similar experience or had some kind of way to connect with the peer, it is perfectly appropriate to share to a degree.

When helping a peer, it is important to practice reframing. This allows the peer to put their emotions in context.

It also helps them to weave their emotions into the positive part of what they do, said Dr. Shapiro. The tricky part of this is you dont want to minimize their emotions, but you do want to help them see all the good that theyre doing.

Reframing is extremely important and while it can be difficult to do at times, it is key to guiding peer support.

Its helpful to encourage learning and teaching so people are learning and growing every day, pandemic or not, said Dr. Shapiro. But especially now where theres so much new information.

Im encouraging people to share what theyve learned and helping their colleagues not just get through this, but actually take better care of patients, she said. That feels good for us anytime something is learned and shared.

Encouraging learning and teaching benefits not only the individual, but the group as well. It allows the team to move through a problem together.

A key part of peer support is helping the peer reconnect to any positive coping mechanisms that they have used in the past so they can use these strategies in their current circumstances. Identifying these can help the peer work through emotions or problems blocking their path.

Interestingly or paradoxically, we often find that the coping mechanisms that the peer uses normally theyve stopped using during this especially stressful time, said Dr. Shapiro. There should be a gentle help for the peer to realize that this is such an important time to care for themselves.

It is also a time for peers to use their support systems, rely on their friends and family, and their colleagues to help them through, she said. We all need support. We all deserve support.

Connecting physicians and other health professionals to appropriate resources as needed is also vital to the success of a peer support program. Sometimes peer support is absolutely not enough, said Dr. Shapiro. We know health care providers, especially physicians, do not usually access mental health or other kinds of support.

One of the wonderful aspects of peer support is offering those resources to any of our peers, she said, adding that it can help to emphasize that sometimes a particular circumstance or environment at the moment is causing them to be especially stressed, and they may want further support

In that case, "you areas a peer supporterhappy to connect them with someone who can help them further, said Dr. Shapiro.

The AMA offers resources to help physiciansmanage their own mental healthand well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic and provides practical strategies for health system leadership to consider in support of theirphysicians and care teams during COVID-19.

The peer supporter should close with an expression of appreciation for the work the peer does and for sharing their thoughts with you. Because of the pandemic, peer support actually helps us reconnect and gives us back this feeling of solidarity, said Dr. Shapiro. We're in this together, and it's really important for us to remind ourselves that we are.

There's a lot we can do and are doing for each other, she said, adding that this is a very positive way of thinking about how we can support each other.

The AMA is offering afree survey to help health care organizations monitor the impact COVID-19has on their workforce during this pandemic. The survey can be used to track trends in stress levels, identify specific drivers of stress, and develop supportive infrastructures based on these drivers. Organizations that usethe surveywill receive free-of-charge support from the AMA in launching the surveys and access to data through an easy-to-use reporting dashboard.

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Using the power of peer support to positively impact medicine - American Medical Association

Global study to test malaria drug to protect health workers from COVID-19 – Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis

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COVID-19 Therapeutics Accelerator to fund international trial of chloroquine

Clare Ridley, MD, an assistant professor of anesthesiology at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, works in the intensive care unit at Barnes-Jewish Hospital during the COVID-19 pandemic. Researchers at the university are helming a global study of an estimated 30,000 health-care workers to establish whether the antimalaria drug chloroquine might prevent or reduce the severity of COVID-19 infections in such workers.

With $9 million in philanthropic support, an international group of physicians and scientists is establishing a research network to evaluate promising therapies for COVID-19. The group, called the COVID-19 Research Outcomes Worldwide Network (CROWN) Collaborative, is testing whether the antimalaria drug chloroquine can prevent COVID-19 infection or decrease its severity in front-line health-care workers. An estimated 30,000 such workers from across the globe will participate in the clinical trial, which the collaborative is calling the CROWN CORONATION trial.

The collaborative and the trial are funded by the COVID-19 Therapeutics Accelerator, an initiative with contributions from an array of public and philanthropic donors, intended to support research and development to bring effective, accessible COVID-19 treatments to market as quickly as possible.

Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis is the clinical coordinating center for this ambitious international trial. The investigators comprising the CROWN Collaborative are from prominent research organizations in African, European, North American and South American countries, including Cameroon, Canada, Ireland, Ghana, Peru, South Africa, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Zambia.

Because of their repeated close contacts with infected patients, front-line health-care workers in all parts of the world have a higher risk of contracting COVID-19 than most members of the general public, said one of the studys principal investigators, Michael S. Avidan, MD, the Dr. Seymour and Rose T. Brown Professor and head of the Department of Anesthesiology at Washington University. In some places, more than 10% of those who have become infected are health-care workers. There is an urgent need to identify drugs that are effective at preventing infection or mitigating its severity.

The study will recruit front-line health-care workers globally, including those from lower- and middle-income countries. Thats important because in many such countries there are relatively few health-care workers per capita, and protecting them from severe COVID-19 infection would provide a substantial public health benefit.

An important way to protect the public at large is to do our best to protect the health-care workers, Avidan said It is very important that there is a global effort to protect health-care workers because when it comes to COVID-19, were all in this together. Finding ways to keep health-care workers from getting seriously ill is one of the most important ways to protect vulnerable people everywhere.

This new trial will be important because of its immense size and global reach, as well as its use of three different but well-established chloroquine dose schedules in healthy people. Health-care workers in the trial will be divided randomly into four groups. Three of the groups will receive chloroquine at various doses. The fourth group will receive an inactive placebo. The researchers want to learn whether the drug can prevent health-care workers from developing COVID-19 disease or decrease the severity of illness for those who do become infected.

The researchers also want to determine the lowest dose required to provide a benefit. Health-care workers in the study will receive lower doses of chloroquine than have been given in most other trials that have focused on treating patients already sick with COVID-19. That is important because lower doses of chloroquine should have fewer side effects. Plus, with a limited supply of chloroquine globally, if a lower dose turns out to be just as effective as a higher dose, many more people could benefit from the drug.

When people have to travel to parts of the world where malaria is a problem, they often take low doses of chloroquine to help prevent infection, said Avidan, also a professor of psychiatry and of surgery. We want to learn whether this drug might work in a similar fashion in the case of COVID-19, or at the very least, whether low-dose chloroquine might help prevent the severe and life-threatening complications associated with the illness.

Charge nurse Caroline Becker adjusts her face shield before entering a patients room at Barnes-Jewish Hospital.

The study will last five months. Health-care workers who participate will take chloroquine or a placebo for the first three months and will be monitored for another two months. Those previously infected with COVID-19 or those who have underlying medical problems that might make it unsafe to take chloroquine, such as heart ailments, will not be eligible to participate.

Data from the trial sites will be compiled at University College London. Laurence Lovat, MD, PhD, a professor of gastroenterology and biophotonics, is the study leader in the United Kingdom.

Our hypothesis is that chloroquine may decrease the COVID-19 burden by decreasing entry of the novel coronavirus into host cells and by inhibiting viral replication, Lovat said. Furthermore, with its anti-inflammatory properties, chloroquine might dampen the exaggerated and unregulated immune response in the host, which often is responsible for the unpredictable and severe complications of COVID-19.

The CROWN CORONATION trials other principal investigators are Ramani Moonesinghe, MD, a professor of perioperative medicine at University College London, and Helen Rees, MD, executive director of the Wits Reproductive Health and HIV Institute in Johannesburg.

In the African region, the health-care workforce is under-resourced and overstretched, and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic will make this situation worse, Rees said. If an inexpensive drug such as chloroquine could help protect our health workers, it would provide important insurance for many countries whose health-care systems could collapse if large numbers of health-care workers were to become infected and could not care for others who were sick with COVID-19.

The investigative team at Washington University includes Avidan, Mary Politi, PhD, a professor of surgery in the Division of Public Health Sciences; Erik Dubberke, MD, and Elvin Geng, MD, both professors of medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases; and Graham Colditz, MD, DrPh, the Niess-Gain Professor of Surgery and director of the Division of Public Health Sciences; George Kyei, MD, PhD, an assistant professor of medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases; Victor Davila-Roman, MD, a professor of medicine, of anesthesiology and of radiology and associate director of the Center for Global Health in the Institute for Public Health.

There is quite a bit of interest in chloroquine for both the prevention and treatment of COVID-19 infection, Avidan said. It has shown promise treating patients with COVID-19, but the only way to determine accurately whether this drug actually works is to conduct rigorous, large-scale, randomized trials in multiple locations.

Politi, a leader in health decision-making, said she is particularly enthusiastic about the design of the study.

The trial will be focused on health-care workers and their safety so that they can continue to care for patients around the world, she said. In addition to helping us study whether chloroquine works, and at what dose, all participants will receive education about COVID-19 and will be screened for evidence of infection. The trial has an adaptive design to learn from early study results. After a certain time period, if at least two of the chloroquine doses are demonstrating a benefit, we could stop assigning people to take placebo.

COVID-19 Therapeutics Accelerator donors include the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Wellcome, Mastercard, U.K. Department for International Development, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Michael & Susan Dell Foundation, Avast, Zhang Yiming, Alwaleed Philanthropies, EQT and Madonna.

Washington University School of Medicines 1,500 faculty physicians also are the medical staff of Barnes-Jewish and St. Louis Childrens hospitals. The School of Medicine is a leader in medical research, teaching and patient care, ranking among the top 10 medical schools in the nation by U.S. News & World Report. Through its affiliations with Barnes-Jewish and St. Louis Childrens hospitals, the School of Medicine is linked to BJC HealthCare.

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Global study to test malaria drug to protect health workers from COVID-19 - Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis

Sarah Peyre named dean of Warner School – University of Rochester

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May 18, 2020

Sarah Peyre

Sarah E. Peyre, associate dean for innovative education at the University of Rochester Medical Center and executive director of its Institute for Innovative Education, has been appointed dean of the Warner Graduate School of Education and Human Development. University Provost Rob Clark announced Peyres appointment, which will begin on July 1 with a five-year term.

This is a great appointment for Warner, said Clark. Out of an exceptionally strong pool of candidates, Sarah distinguished herself with her experience working in complex and fast-paced environments and with her commitment to both research and practice. She knows the University well, and will strengthen productive relationships across campus and in the Rochester community. I am thrilled to welcome her to the Deans Council. I would also like to thank Brian Brent for his service as acting dean. When Warner needed him, he stepped in to lead the school with resourcefulness and commitment.

A search committee led by Wendi Heinzelman, professor and dean of the Hajim School of Engineering & Applied Sciences, and including faculty members and leaders in education and human development, conducted a national search to identify the schools new dean and successor to Brian Brent, Earl B. Taylor Professor and senior associate dean for graduate studies, who has served as acting dean since October. The Warner School dean is a senior academic leader at the University who shapes the vision and objectives for the school, generates resources in support of those priorities, and effectively manages its operations. The dean develops the schools strategic plan that ensures its financial sustainability, builds community both within and beyond the school, fosters interdisciplinary collaborations, and maximizes its impact on the fields of education and human development.

University President Sarah Mangelsdorf commented, I have been impressed with Sarahs contributions to our Medical Center, and Im delighted that she will be now be bringing her energy and strategic vision to the important work of the Warner School.

Peyre joined the University in 2011 and also holds faculty appointments as professor of surgery, nursing, medical humanities, and bioethics. She is a national expert in the field of simulation and the development of educational innovations that support collaborative health-care models. Her work in interprofessional education includes curriculum development on disparities in health care, leadership, and technology. Her educational research has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, Josiah Macy Foundation, Burroughs Welcome Foundation, and others.

As executive director of the Institute for Innovative Education (IIE), she leads advances in health professions education through simulation, adaptive technology, team science, and novel approaches to information and education delivery. The IIE is a centralized matrix of services that includes the Miner Library and the Center for Experiential Learning, and is supported by IT and educational specialists with expertise in instructional design, simulation, and program development. The IIE supports the educational mission of the School of Medicine and Dentistry, School of Nursing, Eastman Institute of Oral Health, Strong Hospital, and the Faculty Practice Group.

Peyre serves on several committees that help advance the educational mission of the Medical Center. In 2014, she was awarded a Macy Faculty Scholar position, supporting her efforts to develop and implement an interprofessional education program addressing the communication needs at the intersection of electronic health records and patient- and family-centered care.

I am thrilled to be joining the Warner community, said Peyre. I have long admired the passion and dedication of the faculty, the robust and meaningful partnerships with the Rochester community and beyond, and the schools commitment to advancing the fields of education and human development. Together, we can help lead the way through these challenging times that are being experienced throughout the spectrum of education in our society.

Prior to joining the University, Peyre served as the director of education and research for the STRATUS Center for Medical Simulation at the Brigham and Womens Hospital, and as assistant professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School.

She received her bachelors degree in sociology from the University of California at Berkeley, and her masters degree in medical education and doctorate in educational psychology from the Rossier School of Education at the University of Southern California.

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Sarah Peyre named dean of Warner School - University of Rochester

How Much Federal Aid Will US Aerospace Sector Get, And What Strings Will Be Attached? – Aviation Week

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Ask the Editors: The Aviation Week Network invites our readers to submit questions to our editors and analysts. Well answer them, and if we cant well reach out to our wide network of experts for advice.

How much federal aid will the U.S. aerospace sector get and what strings will be attached?

Senior Business Editor Michael Bruno responds:

The prospect of Boeing and reams of aerospace and defense (A&D) suppliers getting bailed by U.S. taxpayers seemed a real possibility just weeks ago after short-term corporate lending froze due to COVID-19. By mid-March, Boeing had pitched a $60 billion-plus package, with ostensibly $45 billion or so going to its roughly 17,000 suppliers, shocking Wall Street.

Not anymore. By April 30, Boeing was able to tap regular debt markets for $25 billion, one of the largest single corporate-debt issuances in modern time. As a result of the response . . . we do not plan to seek additional funding through the capital markets or the U.S. government options at this time, the Chicago OEM declared.

On May 6, Spirit AeroSystemsBoeings leading supplier and the Wichita, Kansas, giant responsible for most of Boeings aerostructures and airliner segmentsechoed the sentiment. Weve evaluated all the government programs, but we dont see the need to access those directly, the ones that are in place, Spirit CEO and President Tom Gentile says.

What happened? Two things seemed to push the top end of A&D manufacturing back from pursuing straight federal injections of funds. First, the Trump administration stuck to its proverbial guns about wanting a government stake in any corporation that received aid under the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act. That was a big disincentive, and no less than Boeing CEO and President David Calhoun says so.

But more importantlyand less well knownis that the U.S. Federal Reserve volunteered to become the financial guarantor of Corporate America. By early April, the central bank separately had created and extended at least nine programs providing $2 trillion to backstop lending to large companies. The Fed umbrella spread so far as to cover so-called fallen angels, or those no longer investment-grade companies.

Knowing they could resell corporate bonds at least to the government, short-term lenders became interested again in Boeing, Spirit and others. That allowed the liquidity crunch to ease for the top of the A&D food chain. Meanwhile, at least 60% of eligible small A&D businesses applied to tap the Paycheck Protection Program under CARES, according to the Aerospace Industries Association (AIA).

Other federal actions bolstered the A&D industry, too. The administration pushed formal guidance to state governors to declare that A&D companies are essential parts of the nations critical infrastructure and, ergo, that they should remain on the job despite shelter-at-home mandates. At the same time, roughly $3 billion of bill payments were accelerated into defense primes and some of their suppliers as well as several sped-up contract awards to provide cash.

So is that it? No. Top A&D providers acknowledge they still could tap current or future fed aid programs that they are lobbying for now. They include a proposed Main Street Lending Program that has a lot of potential for some of our mid-size companies that didnt meet the criteria for small business support, AIA chief Eric Fanning testified on May 6. Industry also wants broader definitions of who is able to tap the $17 billion account in CARES for national security businesses to include unclassified work.

We have been in discussions with our trade associations as well as talking with lots of people in Washington, Gentile says. There are some programs being proposed that would provide more specific targeted support to aerospace companies, and those are very interesting to us. Weve been evaluating those, and we could access them in the future if they take the shape that we expect them to do.

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How Much Federal Aid Will US Aerospace Sector Get, And What Strings Will Be Attached? - Aviation Week

3D Printing Titanium in Aerospace Manufacturing Applications – AZoM

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Titanium superalloys are highly beneficial to the aerospace industry, helping companies to reduce their carbon footprint by making planes more fuel-efficient. 3D printing of components constructed from titanium superalloys has become popular in this sector for its convenience, speed, and production of lightweight components.

A recent partnership between Titomic and Ascent Aerospace is likely to further drive 3D printing of titanium in the aerospace industry.

Additive manufacturing (AM) has moved on from producing expensive, one-off prototypes to being adopted to revolutionize entire industries, changing the way their essential products are manufactured. One of the largest adopters of AM is the aerospace industry. Both sectors are being driven by innovation, with developments feeding into each other.

Over the past few years, the cost of implementing AM has significantly reduced, with 3D printers costing roughly $50,000 just several years ago, to being available for around $1,800 today.

Aerospace is under increasing pressure to reduce fuel use to cut costs and reduce its carbon footprint. Each long-haul flight generally produces more carbon emissions than a person is likely to cause in an entire year.

Air travel is increasingly popular, with a 300% growth from 1990 to 2019. With the world scrambling to reduce emissions in a bid to reverse the detrimental impact of climate change, the industry is looking for innovative ways to reduce their carbon footprint.

Reducing the weight of the aircraft is an essential strategy for making flying more fuel-efficient, as lighter planes require less fuel to carry them the same distance. Therefore, research into developing lightweight materials that work just as well or better than current materials has been a focus of technological development in aircraft design.

Titanium superalloys offer the aviation industry an excellent opportunity to reduce the weight of critical components. The material is highly resistant to corrosion, has superior strength to weight ratio, and performs well at extremely high temperatures, making it suitable for use in creating parts for planes.

As a result of switching components of aircraft to those made from titanium, the weight of the craft is lighter, making it more fuel-efficient. Companies in both the aviation and space sectors are shifting from using aluminum alloys to manufacturing aircraft and spacecraft components from titanium alloys.

Using titanium in place of conventional materials has proven to significantly reduce the weight of crucial aircraft components. For example, the average turbine for a jumbo jet weighs roughly 6350 kg. However, the same engine constructed in part from titanium weighs around 340 kg less.

Rolls-Royce has been exploring the potential of using titanium in fan blades and fan cases to reduce the weight of their engines.

The chief engineer at UTC Aerospace Systems, Geoff Hunt, reports that the weight of the landing gear can be reduced by thousands of kilograms by switching to lighter metal alloys such as titanium.

Titanium has also emerged as an incredibly useful material in the space industry, with many vehicles manufactured by NASA being constructed from the material.

Over recent years, 3D printing in the aerospace industry has rapidly grown in popularity. It is this manufacturing technique that has helped to enhance the reputation and adoptability of titanium manufacturing in the aerospace industry.

The use of titanium in 3D printing is predicted to grow rapidly over the coming years, increasing from a market value of $518 million in 2022 to over $1 billion by 2026. While several markets will be driving this growth, such as the dental and medical sectors, aerospace will also be a major industry adopting titanium manufacturing.

Titanium has many properties that make it beneficial to the aerospace sector. However, its ability to be used in 3D printing is another factor fueling its widespread adoption in aerospace manufacturing.

Find out more about 3D printing technology.

3D printing is a very advantageous manufacturing technique for aerospace, especially now costs related to set-up and running have significantly reduced. 3D printing can produce one-off items on-site. This means that large production runs are no longer required, so components can be created as and when they are needed, reducing waste and wait times. As they can be printed on-site, not only does this allow the necessary components to be instantly available, it further reduces the emissions related to the industry by removing the need to courier aircraft parts.

Titomic is an Australian company known for leveraging advanced materials and 3D printing technology. It has successfully demonstrated that aircraft components, including the airframe, blades, castings, discs, fastenings, and landing gear, can be manufactured using titanium together with 3D printing.

The aviation industry is the perfect landscape to grow and develop the process of 3D-printing parts. This is because incredibly high safety measures must be met by all parts used in planes, forcing 3D printing to create components to the highest levels of accuracy, reliability, and quality. Approved components manufactured from titanium alloys for the aviation industry are likely to be suitable for use in other sectors that also operate in highly demanding environments.

An agreement was recently signed between Titomic and Ascent Aerospace, a US aerospace and defense tooling and automation provider, to manufacture aerospace tooling using the Titomic Kinetic Fusion method.

Video Credit: Titomic/YouTube.com

The partnership will operate over two phases, the first being the validation phase, where Titomic will use the TKF9000 system to create an approved Invar36 tool for an Ascent customer. The process will undergo testing to determine its feasibility as a process on a larger scale.

The second phase of the project will see Titomic and Ascent devise a joint-sales strategy to supply aerospace tooling in shorter turnaround times.

If successful, the project will likely lead to the growth of 3D printing of titanium components within the aerospace industry, with companies benefitting from shorter lead times, high-quality components, and a reduction in carbon emissions.

Aerospace, titanium and 3D printing in upward spiral. 3D Fab + Print. James Chater. https://3dfabprint.com/aerospace-titanium-and-3d-printing-in-upward-spiral/

Airlines bid to beat their weight problem. The Financial Times. Peggy Hollinger. https://www.ft.com/content/6ce66d16-bd6a-11e6-8b45-b8b81dd5d080

Ascent Aerospace to employ Titomic metal 3D printing for aerospace tooling. TCT Magazine. https://www.tctmagazine.com/3d-printing-news/titomic-metal-3d-printing-tooling-ascent-aerospace/

Aviation and aerospace industry. GE Additive. https://www.ge.com/additive/additive-manufacturing/industries/aviation-aerospace

Aviation and Space. Titomic. https://www.titomic.com/aviation-space.html

How your flight emits as much CO2 as many people do in a year. The Guardian. Niko Kommenda. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2019/jul/19/carbon-calculator-how-taking-one-flight-emits-as-much-as-many-people-do-in-a-year

SmarTech Publishing: Revenues from 3D-Printed Titanium to Reach Almost $520 Million by 2022. SmarTech. https://www.smartechanalysis.com/news/revenues-3dp-titanium-2022/

3D printing reaches new heights. Aerospace Manufacturing. https://www.aero-mag.com/3d-printing-reaches-new-heights/

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are those of the author expressed in their private capacity and do not necessarily represent the views of AZoM.com Limited T/A AZoNetwork the owner and operator of this website. This disclaimer forms part of the Terms and conditions of use of this website.

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Aerospace Industry Semi-Finished Rubber Materials Market Research, Recent Trends and Growth Forecast 2025 – ZZReport

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Latest Market Research Report onAerospace Industry Semi-Finished Rubber Materials Market size | Industry Segment by Applications (Aircraft, Guided Missiles, Space Vehicles and Others), by Type (Roll, Plate, Sheet and Others), Regional Outlook, Market Demand, Latest Trends, Aerospace Industry Semi-Finished Rubber Materials Industry Share & Revenue by Manufacturers, Company Profiles, Growth Forecasts 2025.Analyzes current market size and upcoming 5 years growth of this industry.

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Aerospace Grade Aluminum Alloys Market Share Analysis and Research Report by 2025 – ZZReport

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Growth Analysis Report onAerospace Grade Aluminum Alloys Market size | Industry Segment by Applications (Single Aisle Aircraft, Wide Body Aircraft, Cargo Aircraft and Military Aircraft), by Type (2000 Series, 6000 Series, 7000 Series and Foundry Alloy Ingots), Regional Outlook, Market Demand, Latest Trends, Aerospace Grade Aluminum Alloys Industry Share & Revenue by Manufacturers, Company Profiles, Growth Forecasts 2025.Analyzes current market size and upcoming 5 years growth of this industry.

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Report Scope:

Aerospace Grade Aluminum Alloys market competition by top Manufacturers:

Aerospace Grade Aluminum Alloys Market Outlook by Applications:

Aerospace Grade Aluminum Alloys Market Statistics by Types:

An Outline of Aerospace Grade Aluminum Alloys Market report covers:

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Executive Summary

Market Drivers, Challenges and Trends

Marketing, Distributors and Customer

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Insight: Liebherr-Aerospace working hand-in-hand with Boeing – Aerospace Manufacturing

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In 2007, the Liebherr-Aerospace office in Seattle started as a core team of three people to support the 747-8 Environmental Control System. This year the team counts 11 highly specialised team members and is celebrating the first flight of Boeings latest aircraft, the Boeing 777X.

Despite the fact that the office is called Liebherr Seattle office, the location is de facto in Everett, WA. Since 2009, the team is led by general manager Dietmar Klauber.

Our liaison office functions as an interface between Boeing and Liebherr-Aerospace OEM sites in Lindenberg and Toulouse, explains Klauber the mission and vision of this office. We are thus ensuring a high proximity between both companies during on-going as well as possible future aircraft programs. We are able to provide Boeing with a high level of support and reactivity, meeting the requirements of all present programs.

Today, the office hosts a team of 11 employees, who interact daily with Boeing engineers. Bernhard Bauer works for Liebherr since 1999 and in Seattle since 2009. He is one of the liaison engineers and leading the engineering team in the Liebherr office.

Not only do we need to have the necessary technical and product knowledge, we also need to master soft skills such as understanding cultural differences, effective problem solving, ability to prioritize tasks, and interact with all levels of stakeholders, states Bauer.

With each product having its own dedicated liaison engineer, this office structure yields vast product knowledge and expertise. For example, there is a dedicated engineer to the 747-8 air conditioning and Environmental Control Systems (ECS), there is another engineer dedicated to the 777X folding wing tip, and the list goes on. With each engineer responsible for specific systems, accountability, problem resolution and communications between Boeings staff and Liebherr-Aerospaces OEM facilities staff become very effective and streamlined.

While having the future in mind, the team is preparing to master the latest quality methodologies, such as APQP (Advanced Product Quality Planning) and MBSE (Model Based Systems Engineering). Our aim is to constantly strive to even better support our customer and meet their expectations, comments Klauber. Expanding our business from the civil aviation sector into the military arena could be a possibility.

Liebherr-Aerospace & Transportation SAS, Toulouse (France), is one of 11 divisional control companies within the Liebherr Group and coordinates all activities in the aerospace and transportation systems sectors.

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Thornton Tomasetti Targets Aerospace Sector with New VP – ConnectCRE

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May 13, 2020

Islam Hussein has joined Thornton Tomasetti as a VP in the international engineering firms Applied Science practice. Hussein, who has more than 19 years of aerospace engineering experience, is charged with the launch of the firms new Space Systems group, an advanced science and technology research and development program targeting the space systems industry.

The newly-formed group will provide solutions to government and commercial entities working in the aerospace field. Operating out of Lower Manhattan-based Thornton Tomasettis Washington, D.C. office, Hussein will look to identify opportunities for leveraging the firms existing capabilities and exploring new areas for growth.

The global space economy is predicted to surpass the $1-trillion mark in the next 20 years, and Thornton Tomasetti currently has the expertise and tools for serving many of this industrys complex needs, said Hussein.

Hussein joins the firm from global aerospace and defense technology company L3Harris.

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Leading Aerospace and Defense Contractor Amentum Partners With IFS to Optimize Technology Offerings for Mission-Critical Customers – AviationPros.com

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IFS, the global enterprise applications company, announces a new partnership with Amentum, a premier global technical and engineering services firm. Amentum will integrate IFS Applications into its solutions for its clients in the government and aerospace and defense sectors, including the U.S. Department of Defense, U.S. Air Force, U.S. Army, U.S. Navy, U.S. Department of State, U.S. Department of Energy, U.S. Department of Treasury, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Federal Aviation Administration, and its many commercial clients.

Amentum supports critical programs of national significance in areas including nuclear and environment; mission support and sustainment; threat mitigation; mission assurance; and strategic capabilities engineering in critical infrastructures, both in the U.S. and abroad. IFS capabilities will be integrated within the Amentum SupplyTRACSM offering and will provide Amentum customers with leading-edge functionality for supply chain optimization, asset management, predictive maintenance, and procurement. Amentum SupplyTRACSM is currently being leveraged as a comprehensive, integrated platform with numerous opportunities with the U.S. Government.

Amentum, based in Maryland and with a 20,000-strong workforce, was recently formed as an independent company following AECOMs sale of its Management Services business to a private equity partnership. Amentum has been using IFS Applications internally since 2018 for supply chain management.

As extensive users of the IFS suite, we are excited to offer our customers this advanced platform for supply chain management to help them realize similar transformational business benefits, said Ron Hahn, Amentums Executive Vice President of Strategic Growth. Through our strategic partnership with IFS, we are bringing new solutions to our government customers in defense and energy, as well as our commercial customers at locations around the world. These capabilities will differentiate us in the marketplace and enable our customers to achieve new efficiencies by applying this powerful technology to solve their unique and complex challenges.

Scott Helmer, President, IFS Aerospace & Defense, added, This new relationship with Amentum will bring the capabilities of IFS and SupplyTRACSM to federal government and private clients globally. IFS has a long and successful track record of supporting organizations to meet stringent industry requirements such as sensitive and classified information handling in a broad set of areas including procurement, asset management and maintenance, repair and overhaul, while managing complex government contracting vehicles.

Learn more about how IFS supports companies in the aerospace and defense industry here: http://www.ifs.com/us/industries/aerospace-and-defense/.

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Leading Aerospace and Defense Contractor Amentum Partners With IFS to Optimize Technology Offerings for Mission-Critical Customers - AviationPros.com

Girls Scouts of Northern Illinois receives $2900 grant from Collins Aerospace – Northwest Herald

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Girl Scouts of Northern Illinois received a $2,900 grant from Collins Aerospace to fund the completion of Project Wetlands, the organization announced in a news release.

Project Wetlands used the grant funds to provide and install a solar pond aerator at the Girls Scouts of Northern Illinois' Mary Ann Beebe Center in Harvard. The project launched April 28.

The updated pond will support the local wildlife community as a natural filtering system, along with nourishing migrating birds, waterfowl and cranes. Through use of the pond, campers are taught how to use less energy, conserve water, the need for aquatic ecosystems and how water is a resource. Campers examine Leave No Trace principles, including water management and how doing math behind a project can save money and reduce environmental impact.

Mary Ann Beebe Center also offers additional programming sponsored by the Community Foundation for McHenry County, which features an interactive model demonstrating water systems at work in the local community.

The Girls Scouts of Northern Illinois serve 16 counties, including parts or all of Boone, Carroll, Cook, DeKalb, DuPage, Jo Daviess, Kane, Kendall, Lake, La Salle, Lee, McHenry, Ogle, Stephenson, Whiteside and Winnebago.

To volunteer, reconnect, donate or join, visit http://www.girlscoutsni.org, or call 1-844-GSNI-4-ME (844-476-4463).

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To Take or Not to Take – New Ideal

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The CARES Act has created a moral dilemma for those Americans who value freedom. The pandemic has cost them their jobs, their savings, their businesses. And they blame a significant part of this loss on the government. But because they oppose government handouts, they worry that accepting CARES money would be a breach of integrity.

At the Ayn Rand Institute, we are dedicated to philosophic principle. And because we are, we will take any relief money offered us. We will take it unapologetically, because the principle here is: justice.

To see why, focus on a fact that everyone seems determined not to know: government has no wealth of its own. Private philanthropists like Jeff Bezos and the Bill Gates Foundation can and do own wealth that they give in charity. But the government has no funds of its own. It can only redistribute the wealth of others. Government cannot provide help, it can only force others to provide it.

What the government would giveth, the government must first taketh away.

The $2.3 trillion in relief going to some people means $2.3 trillion ultimately drained from savings their own and the savings of others. The government doesnt run farms or factories. Its not a producer. Thus rather than being mesmerized by its shower of checks and paper dollars, consider the actual goods and services the government funds will be spent on.

Take eggs as the symbol. You can spend the newly created money to buy a dozen eggs, but the government is not adding to the egg supply, only to the supply of dollars. The government has no hens; but the Treasurys Bureau of Printing and Engraving does have printing presses. And the Fed has more sophisticated means of inflating the supply of money and credit. The effect of that new money created out of thin air entering the economy will be to put upward pressure on the price of eggs, and disrupt the price system that helps coordinate all business activity.

If ARI gets government relief money, it will be, for us, partial restitution for government-inflicted losses.

Austrian economics teaches that inflation enriches those who get the new money first at the expense of impoverishing those who get it later, after prices have been bid up. Inflation is not neutral: it benefits some by victimizing others.

For advocates of freedom, individual rights, and limited government to turn down these relief funds means choosing to play only the victims role in the governments bizarre game of loot and be looted. Embracing victimhood doesnt show integrity, only submissiveness. The times call not for timid deference but confident self-assertion.

It would be a terrible injustice for pro-capitalists to step aside and leave the funds to those indifferent or actively hostile to capitalism. It is anti-capitalist, statist polices that have turned this nature-made storm into a made-in-DC cataclysm.

Americas unpreparedness, the slowness of our response, and the byzantine maze of regulations now blocking the production and sale of new tests and new treatments are the tragic legacy of this nations century-long descent from capitalism into the entitlement-regulatory state.

As is well known, but seldom publicized, the growth of state power has enmeshed doctors, pharmaceutical companies, and biomedical firms in an ever-tightening web of regulations. Their every move is held suspect. Commercial test developers were prevented from getting early access to samples of the novel coronavirus, while the government bungled its own testing. Even when private hospitals want to add more hospital beds, they have to plead with government overlords for permission to do so.

And now weve seen what statism means for the general population: the placing of the entire nation under house arrest.

READ ALSO: Is It Moral to Accept Government Money During Covid-19?

You cant achieve the good of all by robbing everyone and then distributing the booty to some.

In this context, it would be morally wrong for pro-capitalists to humbly step aside and watch the new money go only to anti-capitalists. That would turn justice upside down.

Ayn Rand wrote an article arguing that it is proper to take government money from programs like Social Security and unemployment insurance on the condition that the recipient regards it as restitution and opposes all forms of welfare-statism. Those who support such government handouts, she added, have no right to them; those who oppose them have. If this sounds like a paradox, the fault lies in the moral contradictions of welfare statism, not in its victims.

She based her position on this trenchant analysis of statism:

Since there is no such thing as the right of some men to vote away the rights of others, and no such thing as the right of the government to seize the property of some men for the unearned benefit of othersthe advocates and supporters of the welfare state are morally guilty of robbing their opponents, and the fact that the robbery is legalized makes it morally worse, not better. The victims do not have to add self-inflicted martyrdom to the injury done to them by others; they do not have to let the looters profit doubly, by letting them distribute the money exclusively to the parasites who clamored for it. Whenever the welfare-state laws offer them some small restitution, the victims should take it.

The $2.3 trillion emergency stimulus will be paid for by extracting wealth from everyone, including the Ayn Rand Institute and its contributors, many of whom have already been damaged financially. Since raising taxes is not politically viable, the stimulus will be paid for by deficit financing a euphemism for raiding everyones savings.

If ARI gets government relief money, it will be, for us, partial restitution for government-inflicted losses.

Our contributors need to be sure that such payments wont function as bribes, weakening our dedication to laissez-faire capitalism and softening our denunciations of statism. But they need not worry. Our whole reason for being is to promote not just the political ideal of laissez-faire capitalism or the moral ideal of rational selfishness. Rather, our defining mission is to promote the entire, integrated, philosophic system that Ayn Rand created: Objectivism.

Whether or not ARI receives some restitution for damages suffered, that is not about to change.

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Analysis: What happened to Elon Musk? – WICZ

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By Michael Ballaban and Peter Valdes-Dapena, CNN Business

Elon Musk truly entered the public consciousness just over a decade ago, when Tesla was a quirky upstart putting batteries in the chassis of a little Lotus sports car. Musk grew it into an electric powerhouse, building cars that he promised would one day drive themselves, with doors that swung upward much like the time machine from Back to the Future.

Musk deftly played the part of a new kind of CEO, one who made jokes on Twitter, engaged with fans, and even sought to re-define the very idea of what "fun" could be in a car. Then things began to change. Increasingly, the risks Musk has been taking are not with his own money, or even his own life, but with the money, careers, reputations and lives of others. And the boundaries that once held him back are caving under the pressure.

This week, the fun CEO from the past has become something different. What that is exactly may depend on your view of him and the current pandemic. Maybe he's a figure out of an Ayn Rand novel standing up against "sweeping, authoritarian and undemocratic restrictions on individual liberty" that are holding back business and the public, working for the greater good and ensuring that his workers can keep earning a living. Or maybe he's just another old-school executive (albeit one who's very attached to Twitter) demanding that he be allowed to send his non-unionized factory workers back to assemble cars at potential risk to their health and in violation of orders from the local health department in service of no greater purpose than his company's profits.

Musk's public persona today could not be more different from its beginnings. Once there was an entrepreneurial executive, helpfully cheering on popular cartoonists, urging on workers and mocking the established investors who doubted the company could survive.

Tesla and Musk promised big things that car companies had never done before, and when critics doubted those promises could ever be met, the company exceeded them. Musk promised an SUV that could go more than 300 miles on a charge and accelerate faster than a Porsche, seemingly impossible feats but soon enough, customers were driving them. Tesla cars could do the seemingly miraculous. They could be updated over the air in real time, even getting reminders to recharge when their electricity supply was threatened by wildfires. Tesla's market capitalization grew and grew in ways that looked just as miraculous.

Musk entertained notions of flights to Mars, and at the same time denied that it was his home planet. He behaved unlike any other car company CEO before him, and legions of adoring fans fell in line, giving his Twitter account a level of attention rivaling that of President Donald Trump. When Elon Musk tweets a vague hint about an upcoming product reveal or reports of potential planetary destruction, news outlets pick it up immediately. Even Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has asked Musk's advice on how to improve the service.

Ford's CEO, Jim Hackett, doesn't have a Twitter account.

Everything seemed great until it didn't.

In the summer of 2018, a boys' soccer team in Thailand became trapped in a cave that was quickly filling with water. As the 12 boys and their coach waited desperately for rescue, Musk stepped in to offer his services. His team could use much of the same capsule technology developed by Musk's rocket company, SpaceX, to build a submarine capsule to aid in the rescue, he said at the time.

But after one of the rescuers involved in the life-saving effort criticized the vessel, Musk lashed out, baselessly calling the rescuer a "pedo," which is often shorthand for "pedophile," but which Musk maintained merely meant "creepy."

It was the first time that Musk's apparent belief that he can do anything, that he knows better than the traditional experts, brought a wide public backlash down on him.

The rescuer sued Musk for defamation. Musk won, and the civil victory only seemed to embolden him and appeared to defuse the effect any criticism had had on him. Whereas Musk was once the rebellious leader of a scrappy upstart, he was now the wealthy tycoon who had crushed a lone emergency responder in court after publicly calling him, at best, "creepy."

Even before the lawsuit victory, however, Musk's Twitter account veered in another expensive direction. On August 7, 2018, Musk tweeted that he was taking Tesla private at a price of $420 per share, and that the funding for the deal was "secured." An announcement like that would send shockwaves through the business world however it was made. That it was tweeted out with such relative nonchalance was either the hallmark of an unconventional executive getting deals done or, perhaps, of something going off the rails.

It quickly emerged that the deal was far from done, and the would-be funding from Saudi Arabia never materialized. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission stepped in, saying that "in truth and in fact, Musk had not even discussed, much less confirmed, key deal terms, including price, with any potential funding source."

Surely this would be the straw that broke the back of Musk's Twitter feed. It's one thing to target a cave diver without Musk's own vast resources. It's entirely different to take on the regulators of the American federal government. Shareholders filed lawsuits alleging that he was intentionally manipulating Tesla's stock price.

The SEC wanted to prohibit Musk from acting as an officer or director of a publicly traded company, effectively demanding that he be removed from Tesla entirely.

But it didn't stick. Musk spent the next few weeks mocking the SEC from, of course, his Twitter account. After months of negotiations, the SEC agreed to a weakened settlement, the only significant result of which was that Tesla would appoint a new chairman, and Musk's tweets on some topics -- largely limited to the company's financial well-being and production numbers -- would now be reviewed by "an experienced securities lawyer."

It didn't seem to matter to investors. Tesla's share price soared ever-higher, soon totaling a market capitalization greater than the former "Big Three" of Ford, General Motors and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles combined.

Then the coronavirus pandemic began.

In a county that is one of the hardest hit by coronavirus in the area, Tesla workers are returning to the company's factory in Fremont, California. Despite an order from local health authorities prohibiting the manufacture and assembly of non-essential goods, the Tesla factory began churning out vehicles once more over the weekend.

Musk, as usual, took to Twitter, saying that if anyone was to be arrested for violating the order, it should be him.

The local health department capitulated, acceding to Musk's demands that the factory reopen next week, even though production has already re-started.

It is a situation that has been months in the making. Musk has long questioned the actual risk from the coronavirus. As early as January he tweeted that the coronavirus was no more dangerous than other common viruses despite expert opinions that it is, in fact, far more deadly.

By March, when there were just over 15,000 confirmed Covid-19 cases nationally he was tweeting that the U.S. would have "close to zero" new cases by the end of April.

"The coronavirus panic is dumb," he wrote.

Also in March, when Alameda County, California, where Tesla's headquarters and a manufacturing facility are located, put in place stay-at-home orders, Tesla delayed its shutdown for a week.

But by the end of April, the country was fast approaching the 1 million cases mark. By the time Musk forced his factory to reopen, more than 80,000 Americans had died.

On a recent conference call with investors Musk took time to rail against stay-at-home restrictions that, he said, were hampering his business, likening them to "forcibly imprisoning people in their homes."

In re-opening the factory, Musk and Tesla have said that steps are being taken to ensure workers' safety. County health officials have said they would be monitoring those efforts to ensure that workers are, as much as possible, protected from infection.

Musk and Tesla are not known for erring entirely on the side of caution even when it comes matters of safety. This is, after all, the company that provides Autopilot semi-autonomous driving software for its cars that comes with the warning that it is still in "beta test" mode. Musk and Tesla have insisted that the software is, on balance, safer than an unaided human driver when used as intended. Other automakers that offer such technology, though, have said that they would not ask driver to "beta test" the software on public roads.

Tesla's way is not to wait, though. While other automakers wait until lockdown orders have been lifted to even begin reopening their plants Tesla pushes ahead. For better or worse, that is what Tesla and Musk do. But now, with seemingly nothing in government or his company holding back Musk's impulses, the well-being and the lives of their workers rest on that decision.

And for better or worse, the barriers that are set up by society are dependent on the institutions that maintain them to ensure their strength. But those barriers were not designed to withstand an assault from an aggressive CEO backed by vast personal wealth, workers faced with a soaring unemployment rate, and a regulatory framework that crumbles when faced with a genuine, calamitous test. With an Elon Musk-sized hole smashed in those barriers, it's unclear that anything is holding Musk back.

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Analysis: What happened to Elon Musk? - WICZ

Litecoin, Stellars Lumen, and Trons TRX Daily Analysis 14/05/20 – Yahoo Finance

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Litecoin

Litecoin rose by 2.41% on Wednesday. Following on from a by 1.83% gain on Tuesday, Litecoin ended the day at $43.26.

Bullish throughout the day, Litecoin rallied from an early morning intraday low $41.99 to a late intraday high $43.82.

Steering clear of the major support levels, Litecoin broke through the first major resistance level at $42.98.

In spite of a late pullback, Litecoin avoided a return to sub-$43 levels to deliver the upside on the day.

At the time of writing, Litecoin was down by 0.60% to $43.00. A mixed start to the day saw Litecoin rise to an early morning high $43.41 before falling to a low $42.86.

Litecoin left the major support and resistance levels untested early on.

Litecoin would need to move through to $43.10 levels to support a run the first major resistance level at $44.06.

Support from the broader market would be needed, however, for Litecoin to break out from Wednesdays high $43.82.

Barring an extended crypto rally, the first major resistance level, and Wednesdays high would likely limit any upside.

Failure to move through to $43.10 levels could see Litecoin struggle later in the day.

A fall back through the morning low $42.86 would bring the first major support level at $42.23 into play.

Barring an extended crypto sell-off, however, Litecoin should steer clear the second major support level at $41.19.

Major Support Level: $42.23

Major Resistance Level: $44.06

23.6% FIB Retracement Level: $62

38.2% FIB Retracement Level: $78

62% FIB Retracement Level: $104

Stellars Lumen fell by 0.71% on Wednesday. Following a 12.16% rally on Tuesday, Stellars Lumen ended the day at $0.069707.

A mixed start to the day saw Stellars Lumen rise to an early morning high $0.070639 before visiting the red.

Falling short of the major resistance levels, Stellars Lumen fell to a mid-morning intraday low $0.068157.

Steering clear of the first major support level at $0.06482, Stellars Lumen rallied to a late intraday high $0.070736.

Falling well short of the first major resistance level at $0.07274, Stellars Lumen slid back to sub-$0.070 and into the red.

At the time of writing, Stellars Lumen was down by 0.39% to $0.069437. A mixed start to the day saw Stellars Lumen rise to an early morning high $0.070037 before falling to a low $0.069437.

Stellars Lumen left the major support and resistance levels untested early on.

Story continues

Stellars Lumen would need to move back through to $0.06955 levels to bring the first major resistance level at $0.07091 into play.

Support from the broader market would be needed, however, for Stellars Lumen to break out from Wednesdays high $0.070736.

Barring an extended crypto rebound, the first major resistance level would likely limit any upside.

Failure to move through to $0.06955 levels could see Stellars Lumen fall deeper into the red.

A fall through to sub-$0.06900 levels would bring the first major support level at $0.06833 into play.

Barring an extended crypto sell-off, however, Stellars Lumen should steer clear of the second major support level at $0.06695.

Major Support Level: $0.06833

Major Resistance Level: $0.07091

23.6% FIB Retracement Level: $0.1051

38% FIB Retracement Level: $0.1433

62% FIB Retracement Level: $0.2050

Trons TRX rallied by 3.41% on Wednesday. Following on from a 3.23% gain on Tuesday, Trons TRX ended the day at $0.015091.

A choppy start to the day saw Trons TRX rally from an intraday low $0.014593 to an early morning intraday high $0.015319.

Trons TRX broke through the first major resistance level at $0.01501 and second major resistance level at $0.01547 before pulling back.

The pullback saw Trons TRX return to sub-$0.015 levels before revisiting $0.01520 levels late in the day.

While breaking back through the first major resistance level, Trons TRX failed to retest the second major resistance level.

A late pullback limited the upside on the day, though Trons TRX managed to wrap up the day at $0.015 levels.

At the time of writing, Trons TRX was down by 0.85% to $0.014963. A mixed start to the day saw Trons TRX rise to an early morning high $0.015098 before falling to a low $0.014946.

Trons TRX left the major support and resistance levels untested early on.

Trons TRX would need to move back through to $0.015 levels to support a run at the first major resistance level at $0.01541.

Support from the broader market would be needed, however, for Trons TRX to break out from the Wednesdays high $0.015319.

Barring an extended crypto rebound, the first major resistance level, and Wednesdays high would likely limit any upside.

Failure to move through to move back through to $0.015 levels could see Trons TRX slide deeper into the red.

A fall through the morning low to sub-$0.014900 levels would bring the first major support level at $0.01468 into play.

Barring another crypto meltdown, however, Trons TRX should steer clear of the second major support level at $0.01428.

Major Support Level: $0.01468

Major Resistance Level: $0.01541

23.6% FIB Retracement Level: $0.0322

38.2% FIB Retracement Level: $0.0452

62% FIB Retracement Level: $0.0663

Please let us know what you think in the comments below

Thanks, Bob

This article was originally posted on FX Empire

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Litecoin, Stellars Lumen, and Trons TRX Daily Analysis 14/05/20 - Yahoo Finance