“News Items is the first thing I read every morning”. — David Brooks.
1. US corporate profits have hit a record high while workers’ slice of the pie has sunk to historic lows, fueling discontent among many Americans and a widening political backlash. Pre-tax earnings hit an annualised $4.8 trillion in the second quarter, or 18 per cent of national income, according to Bureau of Economic Analysis data, the highest share since the aftermath of the second world war. Employees’ share from wages and benefits fell to 60 per cent, the lowest level since the 1950s. “Regardless of what measure you look at, workers, in terms of employee compensation, have been receiving an increasingly small share of national income over time,” said Abiel Reinhart, an economist at JPMorgan. (Source: ft.com)
2. A sudden cut to Social Security checks — long seen as a far-off doomsday — is now an imminent problem for the next president and whomever voters send to Congress in the coming years. The trust fund that bankrolls monthly checks to retirees is set to be drained of reserves in late 2032. That means tens of millions of Americans age 62 and older, as well as children and widowed spouses who get survivor benefits following the death of a family member, would see their monthly payments shrink by more than 20 percent — or an average of about $500 a month — unless Congress and the president act. (Sources: politico.com, ssa.gov)
3. It’s crunch time at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. Since earlier this summer, a countdown clock by the campus’s main gate in Greenbelt, Maryland, has been ticking down to 30 August. That’s when the agency’s long-awaited Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is planned to make its ascent into Earth’s orbit from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. With its crisp infrared vision and expansive field of view, Roman is a powerhouse telescope unlike any NASA has launched before — one month of Roman’s Milky Way observations would take about a century for the Hubble Space Telescope. Roman is poised to give scientists a better picture of the early Universe and insights into the mysterious force called dark energy. But perhaps no one is more keenly anticipating the telescope’s launch than the scientists who study exoplanets, worlds outside our solar system. Roman could spot as many as 40 times more exoplanets than scientists have currently inventoried. (Source: nature.com)
4. The New Yorker:
The usual way of diagnosing an uncommon infection could be compared to finding a loose page in a library and trying to determine which book it came from. The page will surely contain clues—maybe the subject matter points to a particular shelf, or the author uses telltale turns of phrase—but sometimes a match can’t be found. There are diagnostic tests for many conditions, but a doctor’s list of potential diagnoses may be long, and the culprit might be too rare to come readily to mind. Metagenomics, in contrast, works more like a search of the entire Google Books database. First, scientists sequence the full range of genetic material in a patient’s sample. Then they compare what they’ve found to a vast data set of known pathogens. Matches can reveal infections that doctors either could not culture in a laboratory or never thought to look for. (Source: newyorker.com)
