Formula 1 will require the Covid-19 vaccine for all drivers for the 2022 season, severalnewsoutlets reported Monday, a step that no other major sport has made. Here’s the state of play among other leagues:
Key Facts
Formula 1’s mandate will cover all drivers and personnel, not allowing for any exemptions, according to The Times, Reuters and the BBC, but is not expected to cause a stir as all drivers are believed to be vaccinated already, the BBC reports.
Other major sports have stopped short of requiring vaccination among its players, instead incentivizing people to receive the shot by implementing harsher restrictions against unvaccinated players.
All major American team sports – Major League Baseball, National Basketball Association, National Football League and National Hockey League – have required the shot for staff but not for players, and player vaccination rates are at about 86% in the MLB, 97% in the NBA, 95% in the NFL and 99% in the NHL.
The English Premier League has no vaccine mandate, and 84% of its players have received at least one Covid-19 vaccination dose as of January 9.
Formula 1’s American racing series counterpart NASCAR has not had nearly the same success in vaccinating its drivers: NASCAR president Steve Phelps said in November that the vaccination rate among drivers is “not high enough,” though Phelps did not share drivers’ vaccination rate.
The International Tennis Federation and Women's Tennis Association have not announced vaccine mandates for its players, but that doesn’t preclude tournaments from requiring vaccination, and the Australian government famously barred top-ranked men’s tennis player Novak Djokovic from playing in this month’s Australian Open for being unvaccinated against Covid-19.
Surprising Fact
Formula 1 star Lewis Hamilton shared and later deleted a video to his Instagram in 2020 promoting the debunked conspiracy theory that the Covid-19 is implanted with a microchip, but later had a change of heart about the vaccine, promoting the vaccine alongside other Formula 1 drivers. Hamilton, whose seven Formula 1 titles are tied for the most of all-time, placed No. 8 on Forbes’ 2021 “Highest-Paid Athletes” list thanks to $82 million in earnings.
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The Omicron variant has spread rapidly in countries worldwide.Credit: Fabrice Coffrini/AFP/Getty
On 11 January, just seven weeks after the Omicron variant was first reported, the World Health Organization (WHO) warned of a “tidal wave” of infection washing from west to east across the world. Fifty of the 53 countries in Europe and central Asia had reported cases of Omicron, said Hans Henri Kluge, the WHO’s regional director for Europe.
Countries would have to cope as best they could, he said, guided by their individual epidemiological situation, available resources, vaccination-uptake status and socioeconomic context. In recent weeks, countries in Europe and the United States have have felt the full force of the Omicron wave; in the United Kingdom, which has reported most cases, daily COVID-19 cases peaked at more than 160,000 earlier this month. Scientists there say all nations are facing the same major problem: the sheer speed at which the variant spreads.
And while the WHO and others have suggested that huge numbers of omicron infections could signal the end of the pandemic, because of the short-term surge in immunity that will follow, researchers warn that the situation remains volatile and difficult to model.
“It moves so fast that it gives very little time to prepare any kind of response. So, decisions have to be made under huge uncertainty,” says Graham Medley, an infectious-diseases modeller at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, who advises the UK government.
Rapid spread
Numbers of Omicron infections can double in under two days, which is significantly faster than previous COVID-19 variants and closer to what public-health officials would expect from the milder influenza virus. “Omicron is flu on acid,” one scientist says.
“We haven’t seen that speed before, and it meant you couldn’t vax your way out of it,” adds Christina Pagel, a health-care data analyst at University College London. “Even if you could vax everybody, it still takes two weeks for the vaccine to kick in, and by then you’re in the middle of it.”
That places policymakers and the researchers who advise them in an unenviable position. “It was a situation where you either put in restrictions very, very early, or you do nothing,” Pagel says. “But if you wait to see what happens, then it’s too late.”
Along with other countries, Britain tightened regulations in December. But it was a controversial move, particularly because reports from South Africa, which was hit by Omicron the previous month, suggested that the variant seemed to cause less severe illness and hospitalization — a conclusion now supported by the experience of the United Kingdom and other places.
The Philippines has experienced one of the worst surges in Omicron cases in southeast Asia.Credit: Ezra Acayan/Getty
Difficult to model
UK modellers were initially torn about how to use information from South Africa. It’s relatively straightforward to update a computer model to account for changes in the biological properties of a new variant. However, as the pandemic has progressed, it has become much harder to simulate the baseline immune response of a country’s population, and so to judge how that will limit spread.
In the early days of the pandemic, researchers could assume that most people worldwide were equally susceptible to infection, because COVID-19 was a new disease and no vaccines were available. But 12 months of different vaccine strategies, types and rates of take-up from country to country, as well as fluctuating rates of infection and recovery, have left a diverse immunological landscape.
“The probability that infection will put someone in hospital is absolutely a key parameter. But we are now estimating that in an obviously not naive population,” says Mark Woolhouse, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at the University of Edinburgh, UK, who also advises the government. “When you are making those sorts of estimates, formally you really should remake them for every population you’re interested in. And that applies everywhere.”
Vaccination differences
Modellers were confounded by the lack of specifics in South African data about reduced severity. “There was no quantitative analysis,” Woolhouse says. “So, what numbers do you plug in? Are you saying 10% less pathogenic, or 50% less, or 90% less?”
Still, Woolhouse, speaking in a personal capacity, says that some influential modellers in the United Kingdom were wrong not to allow for any reduced severity, instead working with assumed hospitalization rates for Omicron that were identical to those of previous variants. “That’s clearly a pessimistic assumption,” he says. “I do think it could have been much clearer from the beginning that there was this possibility it was less pathogenic and, and, you know, being crystal clear on what the policy implications of that difference might be.”
The heterogeneity in immunological baselines and other important factors, such as population dynamics from country to country, make it difficult to predict international spread of Omicron with any precision, or to assess — for example — how the variant might take hold in countries with lower vaccination rates. “It’s very hard to answer that question,” says Julian Tang, a consultant virologist at the Leicester Royal Infirmary, UK. “And it’s not very useful, because if you say it’s spreading in pattern XYZ across western Europe and then ABC across North America and MNO in Africa, that doesn’t really help anybody.”
Waning protection
The waning protection against infection offered by vaccines against Omicron also complicates the picture. Laboratory studies have indicated that inactivated-virus vaccines, which make up almost half of the 10 billion doses distributed worldwide, elicit few antibodies against the variant. Does that mean that Omicron will rip through places that rely on these shots even faster?
Not necessarily, says Woolhouse. “The inactivated-virus vaccines might induce a broader immunity that would react to a wider range of strains because it will elicit immune responses against viral proteins other than spike, which is particularly variable,” he says. “It’s a very interesting question but I simply haven’t seen a formal analysis of it yet.”
That’s because there is little real-world data to go on. “It’s only just hitting countries that have used them,” says Pagel.
Credit: Daniel Munoz/AFP/Getty
Among the countries that rely on inactivated-virus vaccines, Omicron seems to be making the most headway in the Philippines, which saw an exponential rise in COVID-19 cases this month, particularly in Manila. The number of new infections in Manila does seem to be dropping, but the virus is spreading beyond the capital. “Definitely cases are slowing down in the [National Capital Region] but in other regions it is now increasing,” said Maria Rosario Vergeire, health spokesperson for the Philippine government.
Vaccination rates are still relatively low in the Philippines, with just 53% of the population fully vaccinated. Officials there say they want to vaccinate all the country’s 77 million adults by May.
Although vaccines are likely to continue protecting against severe symptoms, Pagel says, infection will continue to spread. “I think the assumption is that none of the vaccines are going to give you long-lasting protection against infection,” she says.
Tang agrees: “I don’t think vaccines are the way this pandemic is going to end.”
When will it end?
So, how will it end? Not with Omicron, researchers predict. “This will not be the last variant, and so the next variant will have its own characteristics,” Medley says.
Given that the virus is unlikely to disappear completely, COVID-19 will inevitably become an endemic disease, scientists say. But that’s a slippery concept, and one that means different things to different people. “I think it’s the expectation that the general behaviour is somehow towards the situation where we have so much immunity in the population that we would no longer see very deadly epidemics,” says Sebastian Funk, an epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.
The transition to endemicity, or “living with the virus” without restrictions and safeguards, is difficult to model with any accuracy, he adds. That’s partly because even the best disease models struggle to make sensible forecasts beyond a few weeks ahead. It’s also because endemicity reflects a judgement call on how many deaths societies are willing to tolerate while the global population steadily builds up immunity.
For Woolhouse, COVID-19 will truly become endemic only when most adults are protected against severe infection because they have been exposed multiple times to the virus as children, and so have developed natural immunity. That will take decades, and it means many older people today (who were not exposed as children) will remain vulnerable and might need continued vaccinations.
That strategy has its flaws. Some of those exposed as children will develop long COVID. And it relies on children continuing to show much lower rates of severe illness as variants evolve.
There are no guarantees that the next variant will be milder, but Tang says that seems to be the pattern so far. “This virus is getting milder and milder with each iteration,” he says.
Bonds take on a bigger role in retirement, as investors take chips off the table to protect their nest egg.
Unfortunately, it's easy to get tripped up — namely, by chasing returns and taking too much risk, according to financial advisors.
"Bonds are the single biggest mistake I see over and over and over again," according to Allan Roth, a certified financial planner and accountant at Wealth Logic, based in Colorado Springs, Colo.
"Bonds should be boring ... and allow you to sleep at night," he said.
Stocks are the growth engine of a retiree's portfolio, as they were during their working years. They help a portfolio keep pace with the cost of living, which may be substantial over a retirement of maybe 30 or more years.
But it's generally too risky for retirees to put all their money in stocks.
Perhaps half or more of their nest egg (depending on the investor) will likely be in bonds or bond funds, which serve as a general shock absorber when stocks tank; retirees may also use bonds as a source of cash to live on or to rebalance their portfolios when stocks fall, according to advisors.
"The main reason you hold bonds is to stabilize your portfolio," Christine Benz, the director of personal finance at Morningstar, said.
This doesn't mean bonds are immune from losing money. In fact, 2021 was a rare year in which U.S. government bonds lost money. But bonds generally hold their ground or yield a slight gain when stocks fall, Benz said.
Which bonds to choose?
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However, some bonds and bond funds are safer than others.
Retirees should aim to hold only high-quality bonds, advisors said. That means generally avoiding junk bonds and choosing those of investment-grade caliber, advisors said.
That's because junk bonds often move in tandem with stocks. They're issued by companies or governments at higher risk of defaulting on their debt — and incapable of repaying investors — during a recession or if the stock market tumbles, advisors said.
(They're often called "high yield" bonds because the issuer pays a higher return to compensate for that higher risk.)
Retirees who want exposure to junk bonds should use money earmarked for stocks and not bonds, Benz said.
One general approach to bond investing is to allocate a third of the bond portfolio to each of three categories: U.S. Treasury bonds, corporate bonds and mortgage-backed securities, according to Charles Fitzgerald, CFP and principal at Moisand Fitzgerald Tamayo.
Allocating to municipal bonds may also make sense, especially for high-income retirees with a taxable brokerage account, given their tax advantages, Fitzgerald said.
But retirees are better off buying investment-grade bonds, which are issued by entities with a high credit rating, he said. For example, Standard & Poor's investment-grade ratings include AAA, AA, A, and BBB.
Aside from bond type and credit quality, retirees should also consider duration when buying a bond fund, Fitzgerald said. That refers to the average time it takes for the fund's bond holdings to mature (i.e., come due).
Given recent high inflation, it makes most sense to buy funds that are short term (zero to three years) or intermediate term (about three to seven years), he said.
"Inflation can just destroy the money-making ability of a long-term bond," Fitzgerald said.
A simple approach
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However, there's a simpler approach for retirees who are less do-it-yourself oriented.
For one, they can buy a mutual fund or exchange-traded fund that tracks a broad, diversified bond benchmark, Roth said.
The Vanguard Total Bond Market Index Fund (VBTLX or BND) and iShares Core U.S. Aggregate Bond ETF (AGG) are the two most common funds the Wealth Logic financial planner uses with clients.
"It shouldn't be complicated," Roth said of retirees' approach to bonds.
They may also invest their nest egg in a low-cost "balanced fund," Fitzgerald said.
These funds are a one-stop shop that diversify across both stocks and bonds according to a pre-set allocation. (A retiree who wants a 50-50 stock-bond split would invest in a 50-50 balanced fund, which automatically rebalances holdings for investors.)
Target-date funds are similar; they pick a mix of stocks and bonds depending on an investor's envisioned retirement year. These funds generally change their asset allocation over time, becoming more conservative. Retirees should make sure the fund doesn't throttle back on stocks too much or deviate from their desired asset allocation throughout retirement if they use this approach.
CINCINNATI (WXIX) - The Cincinnati Bengals are headed to their first Super Bowl game in more than three decades after beating the Kansas City Chiefs in overtime Sunday night for the AFC Championship.
Here’s where to get the latest gear to showcase the team’s first AFC win ever and now their first Super Bowl appearance since 1989.
You also can buy Bengals t-shirts and sweatshirts at Cincy Shirts.
But not in person Monday at their stores in Over-the-Rhine and Hyde Park.
They said in a tweet Sunday night the stores will be closed Monday because “We need to reorganize and revamp to get ready to better serve you for the next two weeks!”
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Super Bowl 56 is a battle of the expected vs. the unexpected between the Rams and the Bengals.
With the Rams edging the 49ers in the NFC championship game, Los Angeles made good on their trade for Matthew Stafford and are back in the Super Bowl for the second time in four years.
The Rams' appearance in the Super Bowl isn't too surprising, but what happened in the AFC was. For the first time in over three decades, the Cincinnati Bengals are Super Bowl-bound, thanks in big part to Joe Burrow.
Whether it's "Joey Franchise," "Joe Shiesty," "Joe Brrr" or just plain "Joey B," Cincinnati fans can call him one thing collectively: AFC champion. Burrow and the Bengals staged an all-time great comeback vs. the Chiefs to punch their ticket to Super Bowl 56.
The Super Bowl 56 matchup marks one of the few meetings between No. 1 overall picks. Stafford was the No. 1 overall pick of the Lions in 2008 and is making his first Super Bowl appearance in 2022. Burrow had a much shorter wait, appearing in the Super Bowl after being selected No. 1 overall in 2020.
Here's what you need to know about Super Bowl 56:
Who is in the Super Bowl 2022?
Cincinnati Bengals vs. Los Angeles Rams
The Bengals and the Rams are meeting for the first time in the Super Bowl.
The Rams are making their fifth post-merger Super Bowl appearance, while the Bengals return to the Super Bowl for the first time since the 1980s and Boomer Esiason-led teams.
When & where is Super Bowl 56?
Date: Sunday, Feb. 13
Kickoff time: 6:30 p.m. ET (unofficial)
TV network: NBC
Location: SoFi Stadium, Los Angeles, Cal.
Super Bowl 56 is happening at SoFi Stadium, marking the second season in a row that a team in the Super Bowl has something of a home-field advantage.
SoFi Stadium is the home of the Rams, so expect them to have something of a home-field advantage — even if the NFC championship game.
How many times have the Rams been to the Super Bowl?
The Rams have been to four Super Bowls before 2022, last appearing in a Super Bowl in 2019 to face the Patriots.
They're looking for their first Super Bowl victory since 2000, when Kurt Warner, Marshall Faulk and "The Greatest Show on Turf" knocked off the Tennessee Titans in Super Bowl 34, 23-16.
They've also appeared in the Super Bowl in 1980, 2000, 2002 and 2019.
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It's finally, actually happening. The first trailer for the Halo TV series exploded onto screens Sunday, and Master Chief finally looks set to complete his longest, most difficult mission: leaping from Xbox hit video game to live-action TV show.
The series will be available on streaming service Paramount Plus. Set in the 26th century, Halo sees a brilliant scientist played by Natascha McElhone genetically engineer super-soldiers to fight an alien menace called the Covenant. One of these so-called Spartans, in instantly recognizable green armor and yellow visor, is Master Chief Spartan John-117, played by Pablo Schreiber, from Orange Is the New Black and American Gods.
The 2-minute trailer for the Halo series debuted Sunday, Jan. 30, during the AFC championship game on CBS and Paramount Plus. It's a fast-paced, action-packed intro to Master Chief -- "humanity's best weapon" -- and we get a glimpse of a handful of other Spartans, as well as McElhone's character, plus a suspicious general, a minion that Master Chief saves and a rather haughty, beshawled sort uttering softly, "Humans, surrender to the Covenant." It winds toward its conclusion against an ethereal cover of the moody Phil Collins classic "In the Air Tonight" and what seems like the show's mission statement: Find the Halo, win the war.
A title card gives us a rough date to mark in our TV viewing calendars: this March. A tweet from the Halo on Paramount account gives the date of March 24.
Microsoft has been talking about a Halo TV show for a decade, with Steven Spielberg attached earlier in the process. His company Amblin is one of those behind the project, along with 343 Industries, the current owner of the Halo game franchise. In anticipation of the show, 343 explained that the series would have its own version of Halo continuity dubbed "the silver timeline," making it distinct from the backstory familiar to fans while still borrowing important and cool stuff from the lore of the games, novels and other spinoffs.
The series was originally intended to air on Showtime before it made the move to Paramount Plus (formerly known as CBS All Access, and home to new Star Trek series, among other things).
The show's cast also includes Jen Taylor, Shabana Azmi, Natasha Culzac, Olive Gray, Yerin Ha, Bentley Kalu, Kate Kennedy, Charlie Murphy, Danny Sapani and Bokeem Woodbine.
2022's best TV shows you can't miss on Netflix, HBO, Disney Plus and more
We have arrived at NFL Championship Sunday and the best BetMGM bonus code for Bengals-Chiefs and 49ers-Rams will bring bettors fantastic offers ahead of these two title tilts. With the ability to lock in a massive risk-free first bet or haul in 20-1 touchdown odds on either game, new players can immediately jump into the mix and grab these championship-caliber BetMGM promos.
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The Super Bowl 2022 matchup isn't even known yet, and already the game is a hot ticket. That makes sense given the increased demand for tickets after last year's matchup in Tampa, Fla., was played at a reduced capacity because of COVID-19 restrictions. With restrictions largely lifted this year, SoFi Stadium should be at or near or capacity for the game on Feb. 13.
SoFi Stadium opened just 16 months ago. The 2021 NFL season was the first with fans allowed inside the 70,240-seat venue, home to the Rams and Chargers, in Inglewood, Calif., just outside Los Angeles. Total seating inside can expand to 100,240 for events such as the Super Bowl. This will be the eighth Super Bowl held in the Los Angeles area.
Even with an abundance of tickets, it's still the Super Bowl. That means fans who want to attend will have to shell out a fair bit of cash, especially with the prospect of a local team playing in the big game.
Sporting News has all the info you need for how to attend Super Bowl 56.
With the Super Bowl roughly two weeks out, tickets are going for a premium. According to NFL Ticket Exchange, the cheapest tickets will run fans more than $6,600 while the most expensive seats are going for close to for $75,000 for one ticket. A pair of tickets will cost upwards of $100,000.
Prices on third-party ticket selling services are roughly the same. Vivid Seats, StubHub and SeatGeek are all selling seats for a minimum of $5,999, with the maximum price reaching into six figures on the open market.
Here's a look at the lowest and highest Super Bowl ticket prices on each site as of Jan. 27, with the highest prices being for VIP seats and suites:
Even with the pandemic impacting attendance at last year's Super Bowl, the average price was still around $6,200, a number that far outpaced many recent Super Bowls. The lowest-priced ticket last year cost $4,000, and that figure was set just days before kickoff.
History of Super Bowl ticket prices
Going to the Super Bowl is expensive these days, but it didn't always empty fans' wallets. Here's a look at the ticket prices from the past and their equivalents to today, according to a database compiled by the Minneapolis Star-Tribune in 2018 and the official "On Location" lowest price for the 2020 Super Bowl.
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As a powerful storm moves up the East Coast, the National Weather Service has issued several blizzard warnings, predicted blizzard conditions and even warned that parts of New England could experience a “historical blizzard.”
That led some people to wonder: What makes a storm a blizzard, anyway?
The storm is expected to dump upward of two feet of snow on some parts of the East Coast this weekend. But the National Weather Service’s definition of a blizzard doesn’t require heavy snow — or, for that matter, any particular temperature.
It defines a blizzard by three criteria: blowing or falling snow, winds of at least 35 miles per hour, and visibility of a quarter mile or less for at least three hours.
“Whether or not the snow falls during the time of the blizzard, dangerous conditions can result,” a Weather Service Twitter account said on Friday.
In order to form, blizzards need cold air to make snow, and moisture to form clouds and precipitation. The moist air needs to rise over very cold air, making clouds and snow.
Officials have also described this weekend’s storm as a “nor’easter.” That term usually describes a weather system in which winds just off the East Coast collide with surface winds from the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic States amid areas of low pressure.
Snowfall will be heavy from this storm and blizzard conditions are occurring in some areas.
Highs winds, coastal flooding and beach erosion are also threats.
Winter Storm Kenan is blasting parts of the East Coast with heavy snow and strong winds, including blizzard conditions that will cripple travel in some areas.
Low pressure is strengthening rapidly as it tracks off the East Coast in response to an upper-level disturbance moving through the eastern United States. That allowed Winter Storm Kenan to become a "bomb cyclone" – a term meteorologists use for a low-pressure system associated with fronts with a central pressure that plunges at least 24 millibars in 24 hours or less. In this case, it dropped 35 mb in 18 hours, as of Saturday morning. A storm with lower pressure is stronger.
This winter storm is producing snow in parts of the East with impressive snowfall rates in parts of New England. Heavy snow and blizzard conditions are expected through this afternoon in southeastern New England and into this afternoon in much of Maine.
As of early Saturday afternoon, an estimated 22.4 inches of snow was measured at Islip, New York. Additional snow reports can be found at the bottom of this article. As of 1 p.m., NYC's Central Park and Philadelphia have each picked up 7.5" and Boston has picked up 14.5".
Strong winds are expected into tonight as this system continues to intensify.
A wind gust of 83 mph was measured in Chatham, Massachusetts, and winds have gusted over 30 mph in New York City and 43 mph in Boston, as of Saturday morning. Nantucket island reported gusts over 60 mph.
The combination of wind and snow is greatly reducing visibility and leading to whiteout conditions at times.
In addition to the snow and wind, coastal flooding was observed Saturday morning, including on Nantucket.
Blizzard warnings are in effect from eastern New Jersey to central and eastern Long Island, southeast Connecticut, Rhode Island, eastern Massachusetts, coastal New Hampshire, coastal and eastern Maine. Boston, Providence, Portland, Maine, and Atlantic City, New Jersey, are among the locations in these warnings.
Winter storm warnings and winter weather advisories are in effect for many other areas along the East Coast. New York City, and Hartford are included in the winter storms warnings for a combination of significant snowfall and strong winds.
Travel should be avoided in any of the blizzard and winter storm warnings areas through Saturday night.
(From the National Weather Service.)
Below is our latest forecast timing followed by a breakdown of the snow totals as well as more details on the wind and coastal flood threats. Check back with us at weather.com and The Weather Channel app for important updates.
Kenan will reach its peak intensity off the New England coast.
Heavy snow, high winds and coastal flooding will hammer southern and eastern New England and Long Island. Snowfall rates of 1 to 4 inches per hour are expected in the most intense snowbands over eastern New England.
This snow will gradually diminish in Long Island and southern New England Saturday night, but will continue in parts of eastern New England
Moderate to locally heavy snowfall will also fall from the New York City tri-state into the Delmarva Peninsula and Virginia Tidewater before ending Saturday afternoon.
Poor visibility from blowing snow is expected where accumulating snow overlaps with the stronger winds along the East Coast. Blizzard conditions are most likely in areas under blizzard warnings.
(The green shadings depict where rain is expected. Areas that are shaded blue are expected to see snow. Purple-shaded locations may see either rain or snow. Areas in pink are expected to see sleet or freezing rain (ice). )
Sunday
Snow should have tapered off in most areas by Sunday morning.
Temperatures will be cold in the wake of the storm. Wind chills will be in the frigid single digits above and below zero to start the day since it will remain breezy.
The heaviest snow from Kenan will be in eastern New England. At least a foot of snow is likely from eastern Massachusetts, Rhode Island and eastern Connecticut to parts of coastal Maine, shaded in darkest purple and pink in the map below. Some areas could see totals of up to 2 feet, including in the Boston metro area, where Kenan could be one of the city's all-time heaviest snowstorms.
Heavier snow amounts of at least 6 inches are also possible farther south near the coast from the New York City metro area to the Delmarva Peninsula.
There may be a sharp gradient between heavy snow and much lighter amounts on the storm's western fringe from, for instance, western Long Island to the northwest suburbs of the New York City tri-state, the Jersey shore to eastern Pennsylvania and from the Delmarva Peninsula to the western suburbs of Washington, D.C.
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Wind Threat
The strongest winds in this storm will likely impact southeastern New England, where gusts as high as 70 mph are possible. Other areas from the New York tri-state area southward through the coastal mid-Atlantic could see gusts between 30 to 50 mph.
High winds in some coastal areas will be strong enough to knock out power and cause tree damage, especially in eastern and southern New England. The threat of at least some power outages might extend as far south as Long Island and the coastal mid-Atlantic.
Coastal Flooding
Coastal flooding, high surf and beach erosion are threats for much of the East Coast, from North Carolina to New England.
The next high tide of concern is between late afternoon and early evening, depending on the specific location. High astronomical tides are in place this weekend, which could act to worsen those threats.
Right now, the National Weather Service says at least minor coastal flooding is possible in these areas, but there could be pockets of moderate coastal flooding, especially in southeastern New England.
Snow and Wind Reports
Here's the top snowfall total reports by state, as of Saturday afternoon:
Connecticut: 14 inches in Sterling
Delaware: 13 inches in Millsboro
Maine: 2 inches near Millbridge
Maryland: 14 inches near Ocean Pines
Massachusetts: 17.6 inches in Norton; 14.5 inches in Boston
New Hampshire: 4 inches near Bedford and Salem
New Jersey: 19 inches in Bayville; 16 inches in Atlantic City
New York: 22.4 inches at Islip Airport
North Carolina: 9.7 inches near Burnsville
Pennsylvania: 8.9 inches in Belmont; 7.5 inches in Philadelphia
Rhode Island: 9 inches near Newport
South Carolina: estimated 3 inches in Florence
Virginia: estimated 9.5 inches near Oak Hall
Here's the top wind gust reports by state, as of Saturday afternoon:
Connecticut: 65 mph near New London
Maine: 71 mph near Cape Elizabeth
Massachusetts: 83 mph near Wellfleet
New Hampshire: 67 mph near Rye
New York: 63 mph near Montauk
Rhode Island: 72 mph near Block Island
The Weather Company’s primary journalistic mission is to report on breaking weather news, the environment and the importance of science to our lives. This story does not necessarily represent the position of our parent company, IBM.
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January 29, 2022 at 06:07PM
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Winter Storm Kenan Is Producing Blizzard Conditions as it Moves Up the East Coast | The Weather Channel - Articles from The Weather Channel | weather.com - The Weather Channel
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The stock market is having one of the worst starts to a year ever—with big names like Moderna and Netflix leading declines—as many of the pandemic-era’s top stocks continue to fall out of favor with investors.
Key Facts
Three stocks in the S&P 500 have led the market’s declines this month, each falling more than 35% through Friday’s session: Moderna, Netflix and Etsy.
Vaccine maker Moderna—one of last year’s top-performing stocks—is down nearly 40% amid growing research suggesting the firm’s booster shot is less effective against the rapidly spreading omicron variant.
Streaming giant Netflix, meanwhile, has seen its shares plunge 37% this month—in large part due to lackluster fourth-quarter earnings, which showed a continued slowdown in subscriber growth.
Online retailer Etsy—another pandemic-era favorite stock, which rose 324% in 2020—is down 35% this month as investors continue to rotate out of risky growth stocks and into safer value bets.
Other notable losers this month include semiconductor company Advanced Micro Devices (down 28%), chipmaker Nvidia (24%), Caesars Entertainment (23%) and Domino’s Pizza (22%).
The market selloff has been widespread, with everything from tech to energy stocks under pressure; Almost half of the stocks in the S&P 500 are now down more than 10% so far in 2022.
Surprising Fact:
A majority of the S&P 500’s top-performing stocks so far this year are oil and gas companies. Gains are led by the likes of Halliburton (up 37%), Occidental Petroleum (30%), Hess (24%) and Exxon Mobil (23%). That’s in large part thanks to oil prices rising for six weeks straight, with the price of Brent crude now at around $90 per barrel amid concerns of tight supply and rising demand.
Key Background:
Stocks have swung wildly—especially in the past few weeks—as investors remain fearful of the Federal Reserve’s tightening monetary policy and rising interest rates. That sentiment has sparked a widespread selloff in growth and tech stocks especially. The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite, which is in correction territory after falling nearly 15% since the start of 2022, is on pace for its worst January ever—and its worst month overall since the financial crisis in October 2008, when the index plunged over 17%. With market volatility surging this past week, the S&P 500 also briefly fell into correction territory—at one point 10% below its record high—and now remains close to falling below that level.
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January 29, 2022 at 03:08AM
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Here Are The Biggest Losing Stocks In The Market’s Worst Month Since March 2020 - Forbes
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Even though it’s only even odds that 2022 will turn out to be less of a disaster than 2021 (or 2020), at least 2022 is the best recent year for compiling a Top 10 list of science anniversaries.
Curiously, many of those anniversaries are of deaths: the astronomer William Herschel for instance, who died in 1822; Hermann Rorschach, Alexander Graham Bell and the mathematician Sophie Bryant (all in 1922); and Louis Leakey (1972).
But there are also some notable firsts (the original slide rule, for instance) and births, including the scientist who illuminated how science could save society from devastating infectious diseases. Honorable mentions go to the birthdays of physicists Rudolf Clausius (200th), Leon Lederman (100th) and C.N. Yang (100th). They just missed edging out the oldest anniversary, a death from an earlier millennium:
10. Al-Nayrīzī, 1,100th anniversary of death
Abū’l-‘Abbās al-Faḍl ibn Ḥātim al-Nayrīzī was a Persian mathematician and astronomer, probably born around A.D. 865 in the town of Nayriz (in present-day Iran), which is why he became known as al-Nayrīzī. He died in 922 or thereabouts (close enough for Top 10 purposes). He got a job in Baghdad with the caliph al-Mu‘taḍid, writing treatises on math and weather, among other topics.
Unfortunately, many of al-Nayrīzī’s writings were long ago lost. But other writers mention his works and report that he was a master of astronomy and geometry. Among his surviving works is a translation and commentary on Euclid’s Elements. Al-Nayrīzī also attempted a proof of Euclid’s famous postulate about parallel lines never meeting. One of Al-Nayrīzī’s treatises for the caliph discussed how to determine the distance to upright objects. Had golf been invented yet, the caliph would have used such knowledge to calculate the distance to the flagstick without need of a GPS app.
9. Invention of mathematical weather forecasting, 100th anniversary
Lewis Fry Richardson, a mathematician who later turned to psychology, worked early in his career at England’s National Peat Industries. He was given the task of calculating optimal designs of drainage systems for peat moss subjected to different amounts of rain. He worked out the equations and then realized they could be applied to other problems, such as predicting the weather.
In the years leading up to World War I, he worked on a book, to be titled Weather Prediction by Numerical Process. He showed how values for temperature, humidity, air pressure and other weather data from one day could be processed by his equations to make a forecast for the next day. He took a break to be an ambulance driver during the war and then finished his book, published in 1922.
As Science News-Letter reported that year, one U.S. Weather Bureau scientist believed the book to show “that meteorology has become an exact science.” Unfortunately, to make the next day’s forecast from one day’s data took Richardson six weeks of calculation time. Only decades later did modern electronic computers make the mathematics of weather forecasting practical, and sometimes useful.
8. Invention of slide rule, 400th anniversary
William Oughtred, born in England in 1575, became a priest and part-time mathematician and tutor. In 1631 he wrote a book summarizing arithmetic and algebra, which became widely popular, later earning lavish praise from Isaac Newton.
Nine years before his book, Oughtred had designed the first slide rule. In 1614 John Napier had invented logarithms, showing how multiplication could be accomplished by addition. Six years later the astronomer Edmund Gunter had the bright idea of marking numbers on a straightedge proportional to their logarithms. Multiplication could then be performed by using a compass (the caliper kind, not for finding north) to find the answer by measuring the distances between the numbers to be multiplied.
In 1622, Oughtred had the even brighter idea of placing two such rulers next to each other. Sliding one along the other to properly position the numbers of interest allowed him to read the product of a multiplication right off one of the rulers. Oughtred later designed a circular slide rule, but one of his students claimed to have had that idea first, initiating a nasty priority dispute.
Further advances in slide rule design, incorporating things like cubes and trigonometric functions, made slide rules the premier computing devices of the 19th and 20th centuries — UNTIL electronic calculators came along, sadly depriving slide rules the opportunity to make it to age 400. But some people alive today once used slide rules, and probably still have one in a box somewhere.
7. Maria Goeppert Mayer, 50th anniversary of death
Maria Goeppert was born in what is now Poland in 1906. Encouraged by her father, a university professor, to pursue higher education, Maria chose mathematics. But in the mid-1920s her fascination with a newfangled idea called quantum mechanics induced her to shift to physics. After earning her Ph.D., she married a chemist (Joseph Mayer) and moved to the United States. She was allowed to teach classes where her husband was on the faculty (first at Johns Hopkins, later at Columbia and then Chicago) but not offered a job of her own. She was free to pursue research projects, though, often in collaboration with her husband or other scientists, and she produced important work on many topics at the interface of quantum physics and chemistry.
She was a master of the math needed to understand spectroscopy; her studies of the light emitted by the newly discovered transuranic elements in the 1940s showed that they belonged in a chemical family related to the rare-earth elements — an essential clue to the proper positioning of the transuranics in the periodic table. After World War II, she began studying nuclear physics and soon deduced the existence of a shell-like structure for the arrangement of nucleons (protons and neutrons) in the atomic nucleus. Her findings complemented similar work by Hans Jensen, with whom she later collaborated in writing a book on the nuclear shell model. Jensen and Goeppert Mayer shared the 1963 Nobel in physics for that work.
Maria Goeppert Mayer, who died in 1972, received a Nobel Prize in physics for her work on the arrangement of protons and neutrons in the atomic nucleus.Everett Collection Historical/Alamy Stock Photo
Her shell model research was aided by a suggestion from Enrico Fermi, the physicist famous for his work on the secret Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb. That was only fair, as when Fermi disappeared from Columbia University in 1941 to work on the bomb, Goeppert Mayer was hurriedly recruited to teach his class. In 1960, Goeppert Mayer finally was awarded a full-time primetime job of her own at the University of California, San Diego, but shortly thereafter she suffered a stroke, limiting her ability to do research in the years before her death in 1972.
6. Aage Bohr, 100th birthday
Niels Bohr was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics in 1922, the same year as the birth of his son Aage. Aage grew up surrounded by physicists (who came from around the world to study with his father) and so naturally became a physicist himself. During World War II, Aage accompanied his father to the United States to work on the Manhattan Project, afterwards returning to his native Denmark to earn his Ph.D. at the University of Copenhagen. During that time Aage turned his attention to a problem with the atomic nucleus.
His father’s theory that a nucleus behaves much like a drop of liquid had been applied successfully in explaining nuclear fission. But more recent work by Maria Goeppert Mayer (remember her?) showed that nuclei had an inner shell-like structure, suggesting ordered arrangements of individual particles, not collective, liquidlike behavior. Aage developed a new theoretical view, showing that his father’s view could be reconciled with Goeppert Mayer’s shell model. He then worked on experiments that corroborated it and shared the 1975 physics Nobel “for the discovery of the connection between collective motion and particle motion in atomic nuclei and the development of the theory of the structure of the atomic nucleus based on this connection.”
5. Gregor Mendel, 200th birthday
Born July 22, 1822 to a family of farmers in what is now the Czech Republic, Johann Mendel preferred higher education to farming, enrolling in a philosophy program properly complemented with math and physics. When the time came to return home and take charge of the family farm, he opted instead to enter a monastery (where he adopted the monastic name Gregor). He did not particularly enjoy his priestly duties, though, so he got a job as a teacher, which required him to enter the University of Vienna for advanced science education. There, in addition to more math and physics, he encountered botany. Later he returned to the monastery, where he applied his botanical skills to investigating patterns in the physical features of successive generations of pea plants.
In 1866 he published results implying the existence of “differentiating characters” (now known as genes) that combined in different ways when transmitted by parents to offspring. Apparently nobody very astute read his paper, not even Charles Darwin, who would have been intrigued by Mendel’s mention that his work was relevant to “the history of the evolution of organic forms.” Only at the dawn of the 20th century was Mendel’s work translated into English and then recognized for its importance to heredity, evolution and biology in general.
4. Pioneer 10, 50th anniversary of launch
Of all the robotic spacecraft launched from Earth into space, Pioneer 10 was truly the pioneer. It was the first craft to fly beyond the orbit of Mars and the first to exceed the distance of the solar system’s outermost planet, Neptune. Launched March 2, 1972, Pioneer 10’s mission was to visit Jupiter to take some cool snapshots of the giant planet and a few of its moons. Pioneer’s escape velocity from Earth surpassed 51,000 kilometers per hour (about 32,000 miles per hour), at the time a solar system speed record for any flying machine or bird. After dodging asteroids (most of them anyway) on its journey, Pioneer 10 reached the solar system’s largest planet in late 1973, passing within 131,000 kilometers (about 81,000 miles) on December 4.
The record-setting Pioneer 10 launched in 1972 to fly by and take pictures of Jupiter.NASA
Pioneer continued transmitting signals back to Earth until 1997, when budget cuts forced NASA to stop listening except for an occasional check-in. The very last signal came on January 23, 2003, from 7.6 billion miles away. By now Pioneer 10 is roughly 12 billion miles away, headed in the direction of the star Aldebaran. It will arrive in a mere 2 million years or so. If any Aldebaranians encountering it can decipher the sketches of a man and woman and the map revealing the point of origin, perhaps they will refuel it and send it back.
3. Insulin treats diabetes, 100th anniversary
In a century of medical miracles, one of the earliest and most dramatic was the discovery of insulin for treating diabetes. Diabetes had been recognized as a serious disease in ancient times. By the 20th century, scientists suspected that the pancreas produced a substance that helped metabolize carbohydrates; a malfunctioning pancreas meant a person could not extract energy from carbohydrates in food, resulting in dangerously high blood sugar levels while depriving the body of needed energy. It was nearly always fatal in children, and adults diagnosed with diabetes could hope for only a few more years of life.
As Science News-Letter reported in 1922, diabetes ranked “with cancer in fatality and incurability.” But in that year, a young doctor reported success in treating diabetes with a substance secreted by the pancreas. That doctor, Frederick Banting, had tried the idea with dogs the year before and gave the first insulin injection to a human, a 14-year-old boy, in January 1922. Banting originally used insulin purified from animals; in the decades since, researchers have engineered more sophisticated forms for human use. But even with the animal insulin, success was so dramatic that Banting and his lab director John Macleod were awarded the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine in 1923.
2. Science News, 100th birthday
In its first year of providing news of science to the world, the organization then known as Science Service transmitted a weekly package of mimeographed pages (labeled Science News Bulletin) to newspapers and other media around the country. But soon other groups (such as libraries) as well as individuals began to request the package, and so Science Service initiated a new strategy with issue No. 50. On March 13, 1922, Science News-Letter was born, with a new masthead offering subscriptions for $5 per year, postpaid. Its first article: an account of a U.S. Department of Commerce report on the allocation of radio wavelengths. The report assured everybody that “widespread use of radio for the broadcasting of public information and other matters of general interest” would be forthcoming. In 1966 the magazine dropped “Letter” and became Science News, providing an excuse for another centennial celebration in 2066.
1. Louis Pasteur, 200th birthday
Born in France in December 1822, Louis Pasteur was not a precocious youth. His interests tended toward art, but later some inspiring lectures shifted his attention to chemistry, and he became one of the greatest chemists of all time. Also one of the greatest biologists. And although he received no medical education, he provided the foundation for modern medicine’s ability to fight disease.
Louis Pasteur, born in 1822, has done more than any one person to preserve human health and prevent unnecessary deaths.Nastasic/DigitalVision Vectors/Getty Images Plus
Pasteur’s understanding of microorganisms led to the recognition of their capacity to damage human health. His tenacity in conducting rigorous experiments and his pugnacious public promotion of his findings established the germ theory of disease and encouraged new methods of hygiene. Time after time he was called on to devise solutions for perplexing problems facing various industries. He saved the silk industry. He showed how to prevent wine from going sour, and how to make milk safe to drink. He devised vaccines for various diseases, including one to cure rabies. No one person in history is more responsible than Pasteur for preserving human health and preventing unnecessary deaths. He is lucky he was born 200 years ago, though. If he were around today, he’d be getting death threats.
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