Which is too bad because we really need to understand how the immune system reacts to the coronavirus. There’s a joke about immunology, which Jessica Metcalf of Princeton recently told me. An immunologist and a cardiologist are kidnapped. The kidnappers threaten to shoot one of them, but promise to spare whoever has made the greater contribution to humanity. The cardiologist says, “Well, I’ve identified drugs that have saved the lives of millions of people.” Impressed, the kidnappers turn to the immunologist. “What have you done?” they ask. The immunologist says, “The thing is, the immune system is very complicated …” And the cardiologist says, “Just shoot me now.” The thing is, the immune system is very complicated. Arguably the most complex part of the human body outside the brain, it’s an absurdly intricate network of cells and molecules that protect us from dangerous viruses and other microbes. These components summon, amplify, rile, calm, and transform one another: Picture a thousand Rube Goldberg machines, some of which are aggressively smashing things to pieces. Now imagine that their components are labeled with what looks like a string of highly secure passwords: CD8+, IL-1β, IFN-γ. Immunology confuses even biology professors who aren’t immunologists—hence Metcalf’s joke.

The Army's esports team, facing a potential First Amendment lawsuit, has unbanned commenters and returned to Twitch. After a pause from streaming, the U.S. Army esports team is returning to Twitch and reinstating accounts it had previously banned. "The U.S. Army eSports Team is reinstating access for accounts previously banned for harassing and degrading behavior on its Twitch stream,” the Army told Motherboard in an email. “The team is reviewing and clarifying its policies and procedures for the stream and will provide all who have been banned the opportunity to participate in the space as long as they follow the team's guidelines.” The U.S. Army’s esports team got into trouble last month when it began banning people in its Twitch chat who were asking questions about American war crimes. That’s a possible violation of the first amendment and the Knight First Amendment Institute has asked it to stop and demanded an answer by August 5. Today is August 5.

Facebook and Twitter have penalised US President Donald Trump and his campaign for posts in which he claimed children are "almost immune" to coronavirus. Facebook deleted the post - a clip from an interview he gave to Fox News - saying it contained "harmful Covid misinformation". Twitter followed up by saying it had frozen a Trump campaign account until it removed a tweet of the same clip. US public health advice makes clear children have no immunity to Covid-19.

ON TUESDAY AFTERNOON, with Congress still failing to agree on an urgent pandemic relief package, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, brought together a Senate Judiciary Subcommittee to propagandize. Instead of helping the pandemic-stricken, Cruz chaired an hourslong spectacle of a hearing designed to peddle misleading narratives about anarchists and anti-fascists. If the propagandistic title of the hearing — “The Right of the People Peaceably to Assemble: Protecting Speech by Stopping Anarchist Violence” — wasn’t enough to show his aims, Cruz’s own comments made clear the proceedings’ purpose as political theater. In a telling moment, Cruz twice chastised his Democratic colleagues for praising peaceful Black Lives Matter protesters while failing to condemn “antifa” and the “terrorists” who killed a federal security officer, Dave Patrick Underwood, during a May protest in Oakland. Cruz’s implication was clear: The left killed Underwood. Right-wing extremists have carried out 329 murders since 1994. In the same period, a grand total of zero murders have been attributed to antifa participants. Yet Underwood was killed by a member of the far right — one of 329 murders carried out by right-wing extremists since 1994.

Accusations of stalking, prostitution, and racism are merely the appetizer. The main course features Jacob Wohl and claims of falsified tweets and stolen phones. The federal agency primarily responsible for the distribution of foreign aid has been roiled in recent days by the most Trumpian of dramas, one involving an anti-LGBT political appointee, blundering conservative operative Jacob Wohl, accusations of stalking, prostitution, and the potential hiring of a young conservative with past racist writings. The chaos seemed set to crest with a slap-dash press conference scheduled for this Thursday. But within a day of the presser’s announcement, the main protagonist was apparently recanting her accusations and insinuating that Wohl had stolen her phone and signed into her Twitter account to send the offending messages that set off the fireworks that got her fired.

Donald Trump’s unsubstantiated claim that the massive explosion in Beirut was a bomb attack has revived fears of the president’s potential to foment international crises. In off-the-cuff remarks at the White House on Tuesday, Trump called the blast a “terrible attack”. “I’ve met with some of our great generals and they just seem to feel that this was not some kind of a manufacturing explosion type of event,” the president told reporters. “It was a bomb of some kind.”

Moral panics emerge when people perceive an existential threat to themselves, society or the environment. When in the grip of a moral panic, the ability to think clearly and act responsibly is compromised. While the moral panic over cats arises from valid concerns over threats to native species, it obscures the real driver: humanity’s exploitative treatment of the natural world. Crucially, errors of scientific reasoning also underwrite this false crisis.

Officials in Florida say cases of the coronavirus are continuing to decline, an indication that efforts to halt the spread of the disease are working. In Miami-Dade County, Mayor Carlos Gimenez told commissioners Tuesday, "I am pleased to announce it appears we have leveled off." Miami-Dade County has been responsible for 25% of the state's nearly 500,000 coronavirus cases. Gimenez said hospitalizations have been trending downward in the county for two weeks. "We've had a decrease of about 400 patients in the hospital," he said. Another encouraging trend is the decline in the number of people testing positive for the virus. "We were hovering above 20% for a long time," Gimenez said. "Yesterday's rate was 12 1/2%."

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is leading his Democratic opponent, Amy McGrath, by a commanding 17 points in a new poll that shows the GOP leader ahead 53 percent to 36 percent.

Gov. Ron DeSantis is acknowledging or the first time that the state unemployment system was deliberately designed to frustrate people, making it so difficult for them to apply for benefits that they would give up and just not get paid.

Police in Italy have identified a 50-year-old Austrian man who broke three toes off a statue at a museum as he posed for a photo with the artwork. The 200-year-old plaster cast model of Antonio Canova's statue of Paolina Bonaparte was damaged in the incident on July 31 at the Gipsoteca Museum in Possagno, northern Italy, Treviso Carabinieri, the local law enforcement agency, told CNN. The man, whose name has not yet been released, was caught on a surveillance camera jumping up onto the statue's base to get a picture when the maneuver inadvertently snapped its toes. The damaged statue is the original plaster cast model from which Canova carved a marble statue that is housed in the Borghese Gallery in Rome. Canova was a revered sculptor who lived from 1757-1822 and was famous for his marble statues.

Joe Biden will no longer accept the Democratic presidential nomination in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, officials said Wednesday, in the latest and strongest sign that the Democratic National Convention will be almost entirely virtual due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.

Young people must curb their party instincts to help prevent new outbreaks of the COVID-19 disease, officials at the World Health Organization (WHO) pleaded on Wednesday.

The school year is looming on the horizon, despite the fact that the coronavirus pandemic is still raging out of control in almost every state, and most schools do not have one tenth of the resources and preparation necessary to operate safely. Still, American politicians across the country are pushing to get schools back open. It's yet more evidence of the utter void at the heart of the American leadership class. Few people in positions of authority are willing or capable of governing, and especially not Republicans. They are either deranged maniacs like President Trump, or they are avoiding unpopular decisions in a way guaranteed to fuel the pandemic, simply so that they can shift blame away from themselves. Getting schools open is obviously a matter of great urgency. The current situation is wearing American families to the bone. Parents report having to juggle work, child care, and distance learning over Zoom is driving them to the breaking point. It follows that being able to open up the schools would be a godsend for both parents, who could go back to work and get a little rest, and kids, who could go back to actually learning, and seeing their friends (even at a distance). But insofar as schools actually are reopened, it's a virtual certainty that in most cases there will be outbreaks and they will close right back down again. We have already seen multiple outbreaks at summer camps, where both children and staff were infected. Indeed, Israel threw months of pandemic control work in the trash by jumping the gun on schools. The country had new cases down to just a handful per day by early May, and had been carefully experimenting with limited school openings. But in mid-May the Israeli government abruptly reopened the whole school system, and touched off a galloping outbreak across the country. Israel is now in a much worse position than it was in April.

Liberal challenger Cori Bush defeated Rep. Lacy Clay (D-Mo.) in a primary for Clay’s St. Louis-based House seat on Tuesday — a seismic loss for the Congressional Black Caucus, which has tried to snuff out challenges from younger candidates. Bush’s victory came two years after her first challenge to Clay, which the incumbent won by 20 percentage points. The Black Caucus had successfully defended two other incumbents from progressive opponents earlier this year.

Piloting an ocean exploration ship or Martian research shuttle is serious business. Let’s hope the control panel is up to scratch. Two studs wide and angled at 45°, the ubiquitous “2x2 decorated slope” is a LEGO minifigure’s interface to the world. These iconic, low-resolution designs are the perfect tool to learn the basics of physical interface design. Armed with 52 different bricks, let’s see what they can teach us about the design, layout and organisation of complex interfaces. Welcome to the world of LEGO UX design. Organised chaos At a glance, the variety of these designs can be overwhelming, but it’s clear that some of these interfaces look far more chaotic than others. Most interfaces in our world contain a blend of digital screens and analog inputs like switches and dials. These LEGO panels are no different. Plotting the panels across these two axes reveals a few different clusters. Screens...

LONDON -- Three men have been rescued from a remote, uninhabited island in the Micronesia archipelago after writing "SOS" in the sand, authorities said. The unnamed sailors had been missing in the western Pacific Ocean for nearly three days when their giant message outlined on the beach of tiny Pikelot Island was spotted from above by searchers in Australian and U.S. aircraft on Sunday. All three men were found in "good condition," according to a press release from the Australian government's Department of Defense.

The Oakland Zoo reopened to the public on July 29 after being closed for more than four months, the longest closure since it first opened almost 100 years ago. Visitors can now see new members of the zoo’s animal family, including a baby baboon named Aluna. Born in June, Aluna is never too far from her mother’s sight. Also new to the zoo’s family are seven new bison calves and a two-year-old giraffe. “Just a few weeks ago, we were at great risk of losing a lot of money and potentially even closing,” said Nik Dehejia, the zoo’s executive vice president. “With the opening, we’ve moved beyond the surviving phase and we’re now looking at a long-term recovery over the next several years.”

I just learned that Ellen DeGeneres is in the news again. I learned this by my editor asking me if I had a take on all of it. I had to google what “it” was, because quite frankly, I have no strong feelings about anything involving Ellen because I’ve had a day job for the past 20 years. I’ve seen maybe an hour of her show, cumulatively in my entire life. Her existence, one way or another, bears absolutely no impact on my life. I’m not going to say, “Sorry, but not sorry,” because truth be told, I have absolutely nothing to be sorry for. And if you want an honest take on all of the Ellen drama, this is all just a weird hypocritical hate-on we developed for the lady because, honestly, I don’t know why. I’ve gone through this summary of Ellen’s fall from grace, and I seriously don’t get it. First off, apparently what got under everyone’s craw was that Ellen isn’t as nice as she pretends to be on television. Well, no shit. I’m sorry, what’s the problem here? A daytime TV host best known for entertaining the captive audience of dentist’s waiting rooms isn’t that saccharine sweet when the cameras are off? It’s literally her job to be nice on camera. Slap me down an eight figure a year salary and I’ll dance the floor with kids who say the darndest things and fawn over the vacuous lives of celebrities who are telling the same story they’ve told 50 times as they promote their latest direct to streaming movie co-starring post-peak Channing Tatum. And the second that camera turns off I’ll march my ass straight to my dressing room and god help the stage hand that’s distracted by DMing one of the soulless wraiths at TMZ a hot insider tip who accidentally knocks my drink out of my hand. [It goes on and on like this for 6 or 7 more paragraphs]

After repeatedly seeking to discredit mail-in voting, President Donald Trump on Tuesday claimed Florida's election system is "safe and secure" and encourages Floridians to vote by mail. Trump's change in attitude over the swing state's use of mail-in ballots undermines an argument he'd maintained throughout the coronavirus pandemic -- that mail-in ballots pose a distinct election security risk that absentee ballots do not. But elections experts have repeatedly underscored that mail-in voting and absentee voting are essentially the same thing, and that there are strict measures in place to verify the authenticity of all ballots cast by mail. "Whether you call it Vote by Mail or Absentee Voting, in Florida the election system is Safe and Secure, Tried and True. Florida's Voting system has been cleaned up (we defeated Democrats attempts at change), so in Florida I encourage all to request a Ballot & Vote by Mail! #MAGA," he tweeted.