Daily Archives: March 5, 2020

Dive Brief:

Researching ones own family can be a fascinating venture that inspires interested students to learn new skills. Educators know making lessons relevant is more likely to keep students focused, and companies like Ancestry are offering resources that grant students access to historical records and data to help map out family histories. AncestryK12, for instance, has grants that give a year of access to Ancestry Classroom, Fold3 and Newspapers.com.

The Indiana State Libraryalso features a resource guide for K-12 educators and parents in the state. It provides age-appropriate activities and includes a list of online resources like the National Genealogy Societyand The Indiana Junior Historian special issue, "Collecting Your History."

Not only can educators guide students through online research, but also introduce them to library and city hall documents, as well as helping them brainstorm resources. This type of teaching is designed to empower students, as project-based learning combines content mastery with meaningful work to connect with students on a personal level.

Genealogy lessons can also be adapted for all ages and cross a range of subject areas. Students in younger grades can learn about the world through exploration and comparison, with maps used to show where students families came from. The subject can demonstrate the importance of cultural diversity when students realize that, at one point, everyones ancestors were immigrants. It also teaches students how to research, using computers and the internet effectively while developing organizational skills.

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Project-based learning opportunities are in genealogy's DNA - Education Dive

Genetic data suggests that Washington state is facing an already substantial outbreak that has gone undetected for weeks because of testing failures.

Last updated on March 3, 2020, at 4:53 p.m. ET

Posted on March 3, 2020, at 2:19 p.m. ET

Health care workers transport a patient on a stretcher into an ambulance in Kirkland, Washington.

As the coronavirus touches down in the US, Washington state has so far been the hardest-hit, with at least 27 confirmed cases, including nine deaths, as of Tuesday.

Many more are likely to follow. If a new genetic analysis is to be believed, the virus has been circulating undetected throughout the state for weeks.

Preliminary analysis of a pair of cases, conducted late last week by the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, supports the increasing likelihood that some people are now becoming infected within the US, as opposed to while abroad or from a known case.

The findings also underscore how badly diagnostic testing has lagged nationwide, allowing the pathogen to spread in American communities largely undetected. In the latest sign of just how unclear the scope of the outbreak is, the earliest known death in the US occurred in the Seattle area last week, but its connection to the coronavirus was not reported until Tuesday afternoon.

Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, said that what is happening in the Seattle area may be happening elsewhere, too. California has reported at least four cases spread by community transmission. There were more than 100 cases across the US as of Tuesday.

We should be thinking of this as our first warning, or an early warning, that we are starting to see a new chapter in the US outbreak, Rivers told BuzzFeed News.

And Columbia University virologist Angela Rasmussen said by email, This indicates that there are likely foci of community spread in other states, which means that it is going to be a lot harder, if not impossible, to contain this virus.

On Saturday, Trevor Bedford, a scientist at Fred Hutchinson, revealed that his team had sequenced the genomes of two coronavirus cases in Washington. One of them, reported Jan. 19, was the first case in the US: a man who had recently traveled back from Wuhan, China, the epicenter of the virus, to Snohomish County, Washington.

The second, reported last Friday, was that of a high school student, who was also in Snohomish County but had not traveled to a country affected by the outbreak, according to local public health officials.

Bedford said on Twitter that the second case turned out to be genetically similar to the first, with the two sharing a rare variant that made the similarity highly unlikely to be a coincidence. More likely was that the first infection had spread in the community before spawning the second.

This strongly suggests that there has been cryptic transmission in Washington State for the past 6 weeks, he wrote, adding that he believed the state was facing an already substantial outbreak. His initial models projected that the number of infections in the state was likely around a few hundred, and a blog post including updated case counts on Monday estimated that it was closer to 600. Bedford wrote that this matched his projections of the number of infections in Wuhan on January 1.

Outside experts stressed that the models, based on the small amount of data currently available, were preliminary. Bedford was not available for further comment.

Washington Gov. Jay Inslee declared a state of emergency over the weekend. The nine deaths due to coronavirus in the state included elderly residents of the Life Care Center nursing facility in Kirkland.

Jamie Nixon, a spokesperson for the states Department of Health, said that the agency was evaluating the Fred Hutchinson teams findings. It is definitely possible that COVID-19 has been circulating, with people experiencing mild symptoms just like the flu, Nixon said by email.

Only now are those cases starting to be caught, in Washington and elsewhere.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has been widely accused of failing to make testing broadly available during the initial, crucial weeks when the disease entered the US. Critics blame the agency for shipping hundreds of faulty diagnostic test kits to local and state laboratories and imposing strict criteria on who could be tested.

The CDC widened the criteria last week, and has said it's come up with a fix for its original test, tossing out a defective part of the DNA test. On Tuesday, the agency said it would be sending out 75,000 tests to labs across the country by the end of the week. And the head of the FDA said that total will come closer to 1 million with tests from commercial providers. But only about 500 Americans had been tested as of Sunday, and many scientists believe these efforts are too late.

Everyone in public health has asked for more testing for like a month now, said Tara Smith, an epidemiologist at Kent State University. Weve been slow to roll that out, and thats a big problem.

As the tests roll out, a spike in cases will likely mean that more existing infections are being confirmed, not necessarily that new infections are happening.

Its not like were having some crazy explosion in the next few days, Rivers said. Were just catching up to understand the current picture. The early numbers might feel alarming, but you have to interpret them knowing that were now just getting visibility on things that have already been happening.

Azeen Ghorayshi contributed reporting to this story.

Mar. 03, 2020, at 21:53 PM

This story has been updated to include more information about Trevor Bedford's projected number of cases in the Washington coronavirus outbreak.

Mar. 03, 2020, at 21:00 PM

This story has been updated to include coronavirus case counts in Washington as of Tuesday afternoon.

Mar. 03, 2020, at 19:46 PM

This story has been updated to include more up-to-date numbers about coronavirus cases spread through community transmission in California.

See the rest here:
The Coronavirus Has Likely Been Spreading Through Washington For Weeks, Scientists Said - BuzzFeed News

Universal's The Invisible Man hit theaters last week and is doing gangbusters, earning nearly $50 million on a $7 million budget. While this current incarnation of the 1897 sci-fi novel by H.G. Wells takes a more modern spin on what it means to disappear, the notion of transparency is one that's dominated the sci-fi landscape for generations.

While Universal's current film offers a technological solution for going covert, without having to actually modify your body, previous incarnations relied on chemistry that literally imbued an individual incapable of interacting with light. While that might satisfy some of our baser desires to slink through the world under a blanket of subterfuge, there are some pretty serious physical consequences you might not have considered.

In the original story, The Invisible Man's primary character, Griffin, accomplishes his incredible scientific breakthrough by way of chemical magic. After successfully utilizing his chemical on a laboratory cat, he makes the reckless decision to test his novel compound on himself.

Soon he discovers himself entirely transparent and, even worse, unable to render himself visible again. While, through the course of the novel, Griffin suffers serious consequences as a result of his experiments, he escapes largely unscathed by the real-world physical impacts.

First and foremost

BLINDED TO THE TRUTH

Invisibility seems like an incredible superpower until you think about it for more than a minute. See, vision is a two-way street. Light likes to bounce around between objects. Without that interaction, vision doesn't work.

In an ordinary scenario, light races across the cosmos, coming primarily from our parent star. As it nears, it interacts with objects around us. Photons collide with the atmosphere, with plants and animals, with earth and sea, and bounce away. Those photons, having been altered either by absorption or reflection, then reach our eyes where they are taken in. Our minds paint a picture of the world around us, based entirely on the interaction of modified light entering our eyes.

Those of us who are sighted experience the world largely through these interactions. Our other senses, while important, take a backseat to our sense of sight. But, like the proverbial ostrich with its head in the sand, believing that if it can't see a predator, that predator can't see it, our relationship with light is mutual.

If Griffin were to introduce into his body a compound that made his cells transparent, he might enjoy a momentary celebration at the success of his invisibility. But pretty quickly he would realize his mistake.

True invisibility, the type wherein the body itself is actually rendered transparent (unlike the kind portrayed in the recent movie, which utilizes an advanced suit) can only succeed by interrupting the interaction of light with those cells.

While that might succeed in making you disappear, it will also result in immediate blindness. Those modified photons, the ones you rely on to paint a picture of the world, will fail to interact with your eyes, fail to travel along your optic nerve, fail to be received by the vision centers of your brain.

Instead, they will travel straight through you and land on the ground, where they will then bounce off onto another object, or into space, is if you weren't there at all.

Whatever your plans for your invisibility, whether it was harmless people watching, or spying on your neighbors, will fall apart when you realize you've lost the ability to see.

To be fair, Wells considered this problem when he wrote his novel. When we first see Griffin employ his serum on a laboratory cat, the result is an invisible feline, with visible eyes. We're meant to believe that the cat could continue to see, though, without visible optic nerves, or visual brain centers, that light would have nowhere to go, scattering into infinity. In fact, if were to ignore all of the necessary components of sight, relying only on the external eyes, that cat would likely be overwhelmed by visual stimuli, taking in light from 360 degrees.

Either it's sight doesn't work at all, or the signal gets blown out by too much information. In any event, that poor cat would be incapable of experiencing the world in the way it was used to.

BODILY INTERACTIONS

The human body operates only by maintaining equilibrium. Part of that is the way we interact with light. When light hits our skin, it scatters, some of it is absorbed and converted into heat, while the rest is reflected off, creating the image of who we are.

To be sure, much of our internal body temperature is regulated from the inside; it's one of the benefits of being warm-blooded. But some of that energy arrives externally. Whether it's from the sun or from artificial light, some of the energy that keeps you warm, especially on your body's surface, comes from external sources.

Removing your body's ability to react with external light changes the way it maintains that equilibrium, requiring that you expend more internal energy keeping yourself at an acceptable temperature. In short, if you made yourself invisible, you'd likely have to eat more, just to keep yourself at a happy medium.

Even more frightening, research indicates that if your internal cells are exposed to light, all sorts of terrible things happen. Most importantly, your DNA starts to break down. Considering the way chemicals react with our bodies, it's unlikely that invisibility would happen all at once.

Instead, you'd probably end up with a sort of reverse-Doctor-Manhattan situation wherein you disappeared a little bit at a time.

In the interim, the various layers of your body would be exposed to light, both visible and non-visible. It might not seem like such a big deal, but the large majority of your body is accustomed to being shrouded in darkness.

If you've ever had a sunburn, you understand the damage light is capable of levying on your tissues. Exposing those protected layers to external forces, even for a little while, could result in untold effects on your overall body.

At the end of the day, whatever nefarious plans you might have for becoming invisible probably aren't worth the impact your body would suffer. It's very likely better that we keep invisibility in the realm of fiction, at least until we can develop technological solutions to counteract these biological hurdles.

In the meantime, you can see all the ways invisibility would be terrible on the big screen.

The Invisible Man is in theaters now.

Read more:
How invisibility would wreck your body and destroy your DNA - SYFY WIRE

DNA-generated picture gives face to man found murdered in Cape Cod dunes 6 years ago

Updated: 6:40 PM EST Mar 4, 2020

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LET YOU KNOW ABOUT THE WEEKEND IN A FEW MINUTES. >> A 5 INVESTIGATES "CASE FILES" EXCLUSIVE TONIGHT. A PHOTO THATS FINALLY PUTTING A FACE ON A MAN WHO WAS FOUND MURDERED IN THE DUNES OF CAPE COD ALMOST SIX YEARS AGO. >> KATHY CURRAN HAS THE DEVELOPMENT INVESTIGATORS HOPE CAN FINALLY I-D THE VICTIM, AND FIND HIS KILLE >> AFTER ALMOST SIX YEARS, THIS IS A POSSIBLE BREAK TO HELP IDENTIFY THE VICTIM OF A GRUESOME CRIME. A COMPOSITE PHOTO DEVELOPED FROM HIS DNA. UNTIL NOW, INVESTIGATORS HAD LITTLE TO GO ON ONLY A TORSO OF THE VICTIM WAS FOUND WRAPPED INSIDE LAYERS A PLASTIC AND A TARP DUMPED IN THE DUNES. THE CRIME SHATTERING THIS SERENE SETTING ON JUNE 4 2014. LAST YEAR, WE OPENED THE CASE FILE ON THE VICTIM KNOWN ONLY AS THE MAN IN THE DUNES. WE SPOKE WITH A POLICE SERGEANT WHO WAS THE LEAD DETECTIVE. >> THE LIMBS WERE REMOVED AND SUCH A WAY TO HINDER IDENTIFICATION PROBABLY TO GET RID OF TATTOOS. A HEAD WAS REMOVED AND WE RAN THE DATA -- DNA THROUGH THE NATIONAL DATABASE ADDED THERE WERE NO HITS. >> WITH NO LEADS, INVESTIGATORS TURNED TO HIGH-TECH LABS IN VIRGINIA. THEY CREATED THIS IMAGE TO HELP IDENTIFY HIM. HE IS BELIEVED TO BE BETWEEN FIVE FOOT EIGHT AND 60 TALL. 230 POUNDS WITH A SURGICAL SCAR ON THE RIGHT SIDE OF HIS STOMACH. TH TORSO WAS ON THIS BLUE DOLLY AND WAS ON HIS T-SHIRT FROM ONE -- INDUSTRIAL SUPPLY COMPANY. UNTIL NOW, INVESTIGATORS HAD NO IDEA WHAT THE VICTIM LOOKED LIKE. HIS KILLER HAS EVER BEEN FOUND. >> BY GETTING EFFECTIVE POLICY, WE CAN FIND OUT WHERE THEY ARE FROM, WHAT KIND OF LIFE THEY LEAD AND WHO THEY DONT WITHIN A PERSONAL LIFE AND MAYBE GET A SUSPECT. >> THIS TECHNOLOGY HAS BEEN USED ACROSS THE COUNTRY AND HERE IN MASSACHUSETTS TO IDENTIFY AND CATCH SUSPECTS. DETECTIVES WILL BE PUT TO KEEP IN MIND THAT THE VICTIM MAY HAVE LOOKED A BIT DIFFERENT THAN A COMPOSITE PHOTO. IF YOU HAVE ANY INFORMATION, PLEASE REACH OUT TO THE STATE POLICE DETECTIVES ON THE CAPE.

DNA-generated picture gives face to man found murdered in Cape Cod dunes 6 years ago

Updated: 6:40 PM EST Mar 4, 2020

Until now, investigators only had the victim's torso to work with in their attempt to catch his killer.

Until now, investigators only had the victim's torso to work with in their attempt to catch his killer.

Link:
DNA gives face to man found murdered in Cape Cod dunes 6 years ago - WCVB Boston

A DNA generated photo has finally put a face on a mans torso found in the dunes of Cape Cod almost six years ago.Investigators hope distribution of the composite photo developed from the mans DNA will help identify the victim and lead them to his killer.On June 4, 2014, only the torso of the victim was found, wrapped inside layers of plastic and a tarp, and dumped in the dunes of Town Neck Beach in Sandwich.Last year, 5 Investigates opened the case file on the victim known only as the man in the dunes. We spoke then with State Police Sgt. Matt Lavoie, who is the lead detective."The limbs were removed in such a way to hinder identification, probably to get rid of tattoos, Lavoie said. We ran the victim's DNA through the national databases, there were no hits. There wasn't much of a description to work on." With no new leads to follow, detectives turned to the high-tech crime fighting tools of Parabon Labs in Virginia, which used DNA from the torso to create the image of the mans face. The victim is believed to have been between 5-feet, 8-inches and 6-feet tall, 230 pounds with a surgical scar on the right side of his stomach, police said. The torso was found on a blue dolly and was dressed in a T-shirt from Windustrial Supply company in Cranston, Rhode Island.Until now, investigators had no idea what the victim even looked like and his killer has never been found. It is a critical first step in any murder investigation to identify the victim, Lavoie said."We can find out where they were from, what kind of life they led, who they dealt with in their personal life and hopefully try and track down the last people they dealt with, if possible, and maybe get a suspect from that," he said. The technology that produced the composite photograph of this victim has been used in Massachusetts and across the country to help identify and catch suspects.Detectives want people to keep in mind that the victim in this case may have looked a bit different than the composite photo. Anyone with information about the case is urged to call state police detectives on Cape Cod at 508-790-5799.

A DNA generated photo has finally put a face on a mans torso found in the dunes of Cape Cod almost six years ago.

Investigators hope distribution of the composite photo developed from the mans DNA will help identify the victim and lead them to his killer.

On June 4, 2014, only the torso of the victim was found, wrapped inside layers of plastic and a tarp, and dumped in the dunes of Town Neck Beach in Sandwich.

Last year, 5 Investigates opened the case file on the victim known only as the man in the dunes. We spoke then with State Police Sgt. Matt Lavoie, who is the lead detective.

"The limbs were removed in such a way to hinder identification, probably to get rid of tattoos, Lavoie said. We ran the victim's DNA through the national databases, there were no hits. There wasn't much of a description to work on." With no new leads to follow, detectives turned to the high-tech crime fighting tools of Parabon Labs in Virginia, which used DNA from the torso to create the image of the mans face.

DNA composite of murder victim

The victim is believed to have been between 5-feet, 8-inches and 6-feet tall, 230 pounds with a surgical scar on the right side of his stomach, police said. The torso was found on a blue dolly and was dressed in a T-shirt from Windustrial Supply company in Cranston, Rhode Island.

Until now, investigators had no idea what the victim even looked like and his killer has never been found. It is a critical first step in any murder investigation to identify the victim, Lavoie said.

"We can find out where they were from, what kind of life they led, who they dealt with in their personal life and hopefully try and track down the last people they dealt with, if possible, and maybe get a suspect from that," he said. The technology that produced the composite photograph of this victim has been used in Massachusetts and across the country to help identify and catch suspects.

Detectives want people to keep in mind that the victim in this case may have looked a bit different than the composite photo. Anyone with information about the case is urged to call state police detectives on Cape Cod at 508-790-5799.

Excerpt from:
DNA-generated photo gives face to torso found in dunes on Cape Cod beach - WCVB Boston

Detectives in Northern California say they have solved a decades old killing after using the same genealogy tool credited with the arrest of the alleged Golden State killer.

Vallejo police said Thursday they identified the suspect accused of raping and strangling Naomi Sanders inside her apartment in February 1973. The 57-year-old divorcee lived alone and was the apartment building's manager when she was attacked,the San Francisco Chronicle reported.

The suspect, identified as Robert Dale Edwards, died in 1993 from a drug overdose. Edwards had a lengthy criminal history, including convictions for assault, theft, DUI, domestic violence, assault with a deadly weapon and attempted murder, police said.

Police at the time of the killings said robbery did not appear to be a motive. An autopsy determined she was strangled and was a victim of sexual assault, according to the Vallejo Police Department.

A DNA profile was developed in 2014 from semen found in Sanders' clothes but there were no matches in the FBIs national database and various state-run data banks.

In 2018, detectives started researching an emerging investigative tool known as genetic genealogy. The practice came to prominence in April of that year, when detectives announced they had made an arrest in the decades-old Golden State killer case by tracing DNA left at crime scenes back to a suspect through his relatives.

By April 2019, they had narrowed the list of suspects in the Sanders killing to two. Investigators ruled out a man living in Louisiana by testing his discarded DNA.

Edwards' remains had been cremated, but detectives were able to make contact with his son and collect his DNA.

Sanders may have known Edwards, who was 22 at the time of her killing. His father was Sanders former coworker.

The woman's nieces said in a statement the family was grateful to everyone who worked to solve the cold case. They said most of those who knew Sanders have died and unfortunately they cannot be afforded the truth about what happened.

Continue reading here:
DNA Leads to Deceased Suspect in Decades-Old Rape and Killing - NBC Southern California