Sharp deterioration in response times for emergencies like heart attacks and strokes in England.
‘We couldn’t get an ambulance for my husband then he died’
Heart attack victim Martin Clark died after family drove him to hospital themselves after 45-minute wait.
34 Of Prince Harry’s Bombshells From His ‘Spare’ Interviews
Prince Harry has given the world access to his own life like no royal ever has before – and not just through his new memoir Spare.
The Duke of Sussex has gone on a bombshell-filled media tour to promote his autobiography, from intense 90 minutes with ITV to a tequila-fuelled more light-hearted appearance on late night US TV.
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Here’s a round-up of some of the most insightful things the royal said.
Released: January 8

via Associated Press
1. Harry accused some royals of ‘getting into bed with the devil’
“After many, many years of lies being told about me and my family, there comes a point where again, going back to the relationship between certain members of the family and the tabloid press, those certain members have decided to get into bed with the devil,” the Duke claimed.
“If you need to do that, or you want to do that, you choose to do that – well, that is a choice. That’s up to you.
“But the moment that rehabilitation comes at the detriment of others – me, other members of my family – then that’s where I draw the line.”
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2. Harry denies that he ever suggested the Royal Family was racist
Harry denied that he and Meghan had ever meant to imply the royals were racist for supposedly enquiring about the skin colour of their firstborn, a revelation they made in 2021 during an interview with Oprah Winfrey.
When Bradby noted that the Duke of Sussex had “accused members of your family of racism” in the Winfrey interview, Harry pushed back.
“No, I didn’t. The British press said that,” Harry said. “Did Meghan ever mention that they’re racist?”
Bradby mentioned Meghan’s revelation that “there were troubling comments about Archie’s skin colour”.
“There was concern about his skin colour,” Harry replied.
“Right. Wouldn’t you describe that as essentially racist?” Bradby followed up.
“I wouldn’t,” Harry said. “Not having lived within that family.”
“The difference between racism and unconscious bias, the two things are different,” he continued. “But once it’s been acknowledged, or pointed out to you as an individual, or as an institution, that you have unconscious bias, you therefore have an opportunity to learn and grow from that in order so that you are part of the solution rather than part of the problem. Otherwise, unconscious bias then moves into the category of racism.”
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3. Harry wants Charles and William ‘back’
Harry says he wants “a family, not an institution”, and says “they’ve shown absolutely no willingness to reconcile”.
He also talks about King Charles and Prince William. “I would like to get my father back,” he says. “I would like to have my brother back.”
But, Harry added, “At the moment, I don’t recognise them,” he said of his father and brother, noting: “As much as they probably don’t recognise me.”
4. William ordered Harry to shave his beard off for his wedding
The Duke revealed that his older sibling had ordered him to go clean shaven for his 2018 wedding.
He explained: “I think there’s a level of competition there. I remembered that William had a beard himself and that Granny, and other people, the ones to tell him – told him that he had to shave it off.”
He said the difference was that the beard was “a shield to my anxiety” – but that he thought William still “found it hard that other people told him to shave it off”.
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5. Harry and Meghan ‘love’ Lady Susan Hussey
Hussey, a former royal aide, was criticised last year for making racist comments towards charity boss Ngozi Fulani at the Palace, and subsequently stepped down.
Harry touched on the incident in his interview and said he was “very happy” that the Palace had organised a reconciliatory meeting between the two parties, as he and Meghan “love Susan Hussey”.
He added: “And I also know that what she meant – she never meant any hard at all. But the response from the British press, and from people online because of the stories that they wrote was horrendous.”
He said he and Meghan had only ever wanted the same kind of “accountability” from the royals – but pointed out the Palace had not even introduced the diversity tsar they had promised to back in 2021.
“I’ve always been open to wanting to help them understand their part in it, and especially when you are the monarchy – you have a responsibility, and quite rightly people hold you to a higher standard than others.”
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6. Harry’s fury over Jeremy Clarkson’s column – and the Palace’s inaction
Clarkson faced a widespread backlash in December when he wrote in an opinion column for The Sun that he “hates” the Duchess of Sussex on a “cellular level”.
Speaking to ITV, the Duke of Sussex brought up the piece of his own accord while discussing “accountability”.
Harry said: “Not only was what he said horrific, and is hurtful and cruel towards my wife, but it also encourages other people around the UK, and around the world – men particularly – to think that it’s acceptable to treat women that way.
“To use my stepmother’s words recently as well, there is a global pandemic of violence against women.”
He also said he was frustrated by the royals’ silence, while his wife continues to receive criticism from the press. He said: “The world is asking for some form of comment from the monarchy but the silence is deafening. To put it mildly.
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“Everything to do with my wife, after six years, they haven’t said a single thing.”
7. Harry defends writing about his family
On why now felt like the right time to write his memoir, Harry told Bradby: “38 years of having my story told by so many different people with intentional spin and distortion felt like a good time to own my story and be able to tell it for myself.
“You know, I don’t, I don’t think that if I was still part of the institution that I would have been given this chance to.
“So, I’m actually really grateful that I’ve had the opportunity to tell my story because it’s my story to tell.”
Asked what his brother would have to say after reading Spare, Harry continued: “He’d probably say all sorts of different things.
“But you know, for the last however many years, let’s just focus on the last six years, the level of planting and leaking from other members of the family means that in my mind they have written countless books – certainly millions of words have been dedicated to trying to trash my wife and myself to the point of where I had to leave my country.”
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8. Harry rejects claims he has burnt his bridges
Bradby put to Harry that he’d not so much “burned bridges” with his family as “taken a flamethrower to them”, although that’s now how the Duke saw it.
“Silence only allows the abuser to abuse. I’m not sure how honesty is burning bridges,” he replied.
9. Harry is still hopeful of a family reconciliation
“I genuinely believe, and I hope, that reconciliation between my family and us will have a ripple effect across the entire world,” he said. “Maybe that’s lofty, maybe that’s naïve, whatever. But I genuinely feel that.
“And knowing the monarchy as I know it from something that I was brought up in, for me it’s always been about uniting people.”
However, he added: “They’ve shown absolutely no willingness to reconcile up until this point.”
10. Harry said the royals ‘stereotyped’ Meghan
Harry said William and Kate never got on with Meghan “from the get-go”, and that there was “a lot” of stereotyping her as a “divorced biracial American actress”.
Anderson Cooper: 60 Minutes, CBS
Released: January 8

CBS Photo Archive via Getty Images
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11. Harry says he was ‘probably bigoted’ before meeting Meghan
The Duke was touching on the struggles many newcomers to the royal family face when he said: “What Meghan had to go through, in some part, was similar to what Kate and Camilla went through.”
However, he added that the women faced “very different circumstances”.
“But then you add in the race element, which was what the press – the British press – jumped on straightaway. I went into this incredibly naive.
“I had no idea the British press were so bigoted. How I was probably bigoted before the relationship with Meghan.”
“You think you were bigoted before the relationship with Meghan?” Cooper pressed.
“I don’t know,” Harry answered. “Put it this way – I didn’t see what I now see.”
12. Harry didn’t believe Diana was actually dead ‘for a long time’
He said for “many many years” he did not believe she had actually died, adding: “I refused to accept she was gone.”
13. Harry claimed again that Palace leak royal stories
Harry spoke about leaks to the press and the royal family’s motto of “never complain, never explain”, while claiming that some royal correspondents are “spoon-fed information” to write stories.
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“At the bottom of it, they will say that they’ve reached out to Buckingham Palace for comment. But the whole story is Buckingham Palace commenting,” he told Cooper. “So when we’re being told for the last six years, ‘We can’t put a statement out to protect you’ – but you do it for other members of the family. There becomes a point when silence is betrayal.”
14. He has no plans to return as a full-time member of the royal family
The Duke of Sussex also gave a firm “no” when Cooper asked in a separate clip if he would ever return as a full-time member of the royal family.
15. Harry admits he has not spoken to Camilla, Charles or William recently
Harry said that he and Camilla “haven’t spoken for a long time”.
Asked if he was texting William, Harry replied: “Currently, no. But I look forward to – I look forward to us being able to find peace.”
“How long has it been since you spoke?” Cooper said.
“A while,” the Duke of Sussex answered.
He gave a similar answer when asked about communication with his father. “We aren’t – we haven’t spoken for quite a while. Um, no, not recently.”
16. He gave a confusing depiction of his relationship with Camilla
Talking about her supposed closeness with the media, he said: “She was the villain. She was the third person in their marriage. She needed to rehabilitate her image.
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“That made her dangerous because of the connections she was forging within the British press. And there was open willingness on both sides to trade information.”
However, he also said: “I love every member of my family, despite the differences. So, when I see her, we’re perfectly pleasant with each other,” he said with a smile. “She’s my stepmother. I don’t look at her as an evil stepmother.”
“I see someone who has married into this institution and done everything that she can to improve her reputation and her own image, for her own sake,” he continued.
17. Harry says he and Meghan will apologise for any wrongdoing
When Cooper asked if the “rupture” between Harry and Meghan and the rest of the royal family could be healed, the Duke answered “absolutely”.
“The ball is very much in their court,” he explained. “Meghan and I have continued to say that we will openly apologise for anything that we did wrong, but every time we ask that question, no one’s telling us the specifics or anything. There needs to be a constructive conversation, one that can happen in private that doesn’t get leaked.”
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18. The Duke dismissed the idea of giving up royal titles
“Why not renounce your titles as Duke and Duchess?” Cooper also asked Harry directly.
“And what difference would that make?” Harry retorted.
19. Harry was not invited to share the plane which took royals to see Queen before her death
Harry arrived several hours after his relatives in Scotland, where the Queen died, despite also being in the south of England when his family left to see the dying matriarch.
He claimed: “I asked my brother – I said, ‘What are your plans? How are you and Kate getting up there?’ And then, a couple of hours later, you know, all of the family members that live within the Windsor and Ascot area were jumping on a plane together, a plane with 12, 14, maybe 16 seats.
“I was not invited.”
Prince Harry: In His Own Words with Michael Strahan, ABC
Released: January 9

via Associated Press
20. Queen was not angry about him leaving royal life
The Queen never told Harry she was angry about him changing role, according to the royal.
He said he thought she was “sad” about it, but “it was never a surprise to anybody, least of all to her”.
“She knew what was going on. She knew how hard it was. She never said to me that she was angry. I think she was sad that it got to that point.”
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21. Diana would be ‘heartbroken’ if she knew about the brothers’ rift
“I think she would be heartbroken about the fact that William, his office were part of these [negative] stories,” he said. “I think she’d be looking at it long-term to know that there are certain things that we need to go through to be able to heal the relationship.”
22. Harry admitted partial responsibility to relationship breakdown with William
Strahan asked if Harry had any responsibility for the breakdown of the relationship with his brother. The Duke of Sussex replied: “Without question, I’m sure.”
“But what people don’t know is the efforts I’ve gone to to resolve this privately,” he continued. “Both with my brother and with my father.”
23. Harry refutes the idea that the book would make rift worse
“I thought about it long and hard, and as far as I see it the divide couldn’t be greater before this book.”
23. Harry’s not ‘angry any more’
The royal said: “I am exactly where I am supposed to be.” But he admitted that not reconciling with his family would be “very sad”.
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If that were the case, Harry said, he would focus on his life and family in California.
24. Sussexes would support the Commonwealth
Harry ruled out the possibility of returning to the UK as a working royal, explaining: “Even if there was an agreement or an arrangement between me and my family, there is that third party that is going to do everything they can to make sure that that isn’t possible.”
That was presumably an allusion to the UK press.
He added: “If there was something in the future where we can continue to support the Commonwealth, then that’s of course on the table.”
He also revealed that he made a “hybrid” proposal for Sussexes to split time between Canada and UK but there was no compromise. He said this was “really sad because I still to this day believe that this was entirely possible”.
25. Harry said he was speaking out to help protect other royal children
He said his role in the line of succession was “used against me for a long part of my life”, and that he worries about other “young kids” still in the institution.
“There are some people, especially in the UK, who have been led to believe that because you are a member of the royal family, somehow everyone owns you or has a stake in you,” he said.
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“And that’s a message that has been purely pushed out by the British tabloids, and it creates real problems within that family and that relationship.”
Harry added: “Of course, there has to be some sort of relationship, but where it’s got too now is incredibly unhealthy.”
He said he hoped he could help future generations. “I also worry about other young kids within that family if this continues,” he said.
26. Harry refuted claims he sees Camilla as ‘evil stepmother’
He said: “I love every member of my family… so when I see her we’re perfectly pleasant with each other.
“She’s my stepmother. I don’t see her as an evil stepmother, I think she’s someone who married into this institution and done everything she can to improve her own reputation, her own image, for her own sake.”
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27. Harry rejected hypocrisy claims
Strahan pointed out: “There are going to be people who say ‘Why don’t they either be in or get out, because if you get out there’s no hypocrisy’.”
Harry said: “I can’t ever get out and I’m incredibly aware of my position.
“I’m incredibly grateful for the life that I’ve had and continue to live.
“But there’s no version of me being ever able to get out of this. I was stunned that my family would allow security to be taken away, especially at the most vulnerable point for us.”
He added that writing the book was his only way to protect his family by correcting mistruths: “I fully accept that writing a book is feeding the beast anyway.”
28. Harry ‘genuinely’ believes in the monarchy still
But, he called for it to be reformed and modernised, saying: “I think the same process that I went through regarding my own unconscious bias would be hugely beneficial to them.
“It’s not racism, but unconscious bias if not confronted, if not acknowledged, if not learned and grown from, that can then move into racism.”
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People magazine cover
Released: January 10
29. Diana is his ‘guardian angel’
“I struggled for years to accept or even speak about my mother’s death. I was unable to process that she was gone. I’m not sure anyone can ever truly have closure when they lose a parent, or anyone for that matter, especially when that grief may be the only thing left of them,” he told People.
“The healing process has allowed me to get to a place where I now feel the presence of my mum more than ever before. She’s with me all the time – my guardian angel.”
30. He wants his kids to have a relationship with the royals
“I’ve said before that I’ve wanted a family, not an institution – so of course, I would love nothing more than for our children to have relationships with members of my family, and they do with some, which brings me great joy,” he said.
The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, CBS
Released: January 10

via Associated Press
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31. Prince Harry blasts ‘dangerous lie’ he ‘boasted’ about Taliban killings
Harry slammed reports that he “somehow boasted about the number of people that I killed in Afghanistan” and called it “the most dangerous lie”.
“If I heard anyone boasting about that kind of thing, I would be angry. But it’s a lie. And hopefully now that the book is out, people will be able to see the context. It’s really troubling and very disturbing that they can get away with it. They had the context. It wasn’t like, ‘Here’s just one line.’”
Harry told Colbert that “the reason why I decided to share this in my book” was to “reduce the number of suicides” in the soldier and veteran communities.
Harry claimed this was a dangerous lie because it makes you “an increased target”, alleging this was a “choice” the media made.
32. Harry ‘fact-checks’ The Crown
The royal confirmed that he watched both “the older stuff and the more recent stuff” aired on the dramatised Netflix series.
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Asked if he did any fact-checking, he said: “Yes, I do, actually. Which, by the way, is another reason why it’s so important that history has it right.”
33. Harry believes royals are trying to ‘undermine’ his book
Colbert asked Harry if he believed there was an “active campaign by the rest of your family, by the royal house…to undermine this book”.
The royal replied: “Of course, mainly by the British press.”
Colbert pushed the question again, this time adding if the UK media was “aided and abetted by the Palace”.
He said: “Yes, again, of course. This is the other side of the story, right?
“After 38 years, they have told their side of the story. This is the other side of the story, and there’s a lot in there that, perhaps, makes people feel uncomfortable and scared.”
34. If Diana were still alive, he and William would be in a different place
Harry claimed that if his mother were still alive, his relationship with his brother would be different.
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He said: “It’s impossible to say where we would be now, where those relationships would be now, but there is no way that the distance between my brother and I would be the same.”
Putin’s Decision To Dump Army Chief Shows Russia Is Failing In Ukraine, Says UK

Vladimir Putin has replaced the army chief in charge of Russian troops in Ukraine because his invasion of the country is failing, according to UK intelligence.
Chief of the general staff (CGS) Valery Gerasimov, the head of the Russian military, has taken over from General Sergei Surovikin, who will now be one of his three deputies.
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In their latest intelligence update on the war, the Ministry of Defence said: “This is a significant development in Russian president Vladimir Putin’s approach to managing the war.
“The deployment of the CGS as theatre commander is an indicator of the increasing seriousness of the situation Russia is facing, and a clear acknowledgement that the campaign is falling short of Russia’s strategic goals.”
The MoD also said the surprise move “is likely to be greeted with extreme displeasure by much of the Russian ultra-nationalist and military blogger community, who have increasingly blamed Gerasimov for the poor execution of the war”.
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They said that in contrast, Surovikin “has been widely praised by this community for his championing of a more realistic approach”.
The changes are further evidence of Russia’s struggles in Ukraine.
Earlier this week, Kyiv denied Russia’s claim that it had killed more than 600 Ukrainian troops in a deadly attack.
Russia claimed that this was its “retaliatory strike” for the New Year’s Day attack, which Moscow says killed 89 of its own soldiers while they were in a Russian base.
It came after Vladimir Putin suggested a 36-hour ceasefire last week, so Russian citizens could mark the Orthodox Christmas, although shelling began very soon after.
Ukraine’s military intelligence has also alleged that Russia is looking to mobilise as many as 500,000 conscripts in mid-January, on top of the 300,000 brought into the army back in October.
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Russia has denied any plans for a second wave of mobilisation – it’s worth noting that the September call-up sparked protests across the country.
Computer models determine drug candidate’s ability to bind to proteins

Combing computational physics with experimental data, University of Arkansas researchers have developed computer models for determining a drug candidate’s ability to target and bind to proteins within cells.
If accurate, such an estimator could computationally demonstrate binding affinity and thus prevent experimental researchers from needing to investigate millions of chemical compounds. The work could substantially reduce the cost and time associated with developing new drugs.
“We developed a theoretical framework for estimating ligand-protein binding,” said Mahmoud Moradi, associate professor of chemistry and biochemistry in the Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences. “The proposed method assigns an effective energy to the ligand at every grid point in a coordinate system, which has its origin at the most likely location of the ligand when it is in its bound state.”
A ligand is a substance — an ion or molecule — such as a drug that binds to another molecule, such as a protein, to form a complex system that may cause or prevent a biological function.
Moradi’s research focuses on computational simulations of diseases, including coronavirus. For this project, he collaborated with Suresh Thallapuranam, professor of biochemistry and the Cooper Chair of Bioinformatics Research.
Moradi and Thallapuranam used biased simulations — as well as non-parametric re-weighting techniques to account for the bias — to create a binding estimator that was computationally efficient and accurate. They then used a mathematically robust technique called orientation quaternion formalism to further describe the ligand’s conformational changes as it bound to targeted proteins.
The researchers tested this approach by estimating the binding affinity between human fibroblast growth factor 1 — a specific signaling protein — and heparin hexasaccharide 5, a popular medication.
The project was conceived because Moradi and Thallapuranam were studying human fibroblast growth factor 1 protein and its mutants in the absence and presence of heparin. They found strong qualitative agreement between simulations and experimental results.
“When it came to binding affinity, we knew that the typical methods we had at our disposal would not work for such a difficult problem,” Moradi said. “This is why we decided to develop a new method. We had a joyous moment when the experimental and computational data were compared with each other, and the two numbers matched almost perfectly.”
The researchers’ work was published in Nature Computational Science.
Moradi previously received attention for developing computational simulations of the behavior of SARS-CoV-2 spike proteins prior to fusion with human cell receptors. SARS-CoV-2 is the virus that causes COVID-19.
Symptoms of illness help pathogens spread amongst songbirds

It’s “Treasure Island” author Robert Louis Stevenson who is credited with coining the phrase, “You cannot make an omelet without breaking eggs.” For us humans, it’s now cliché. For pathogens, it’s words to live by. Or, rather, spread by.
Like all living organisms, pathogens want to thrive. Aside from cellular reproduction, though, the best future for them lies in moving from host to host. Think of each host as Stevenson’s eggs, unwittingly waiting to be, if not broken, certainly cracked. Meaning ill. That’s why pathogens — from conjunctivitis, commonly known as pink eye, or a common cold or a disease as severe as COVID-19 — make their hosts sick: Spread is sometimes only made possible by expulsion via swollen red eyes; ,coughing or sneezing, or passing through bodily fluids, according to Virginia Tech biologist Dana Hawley.
“For a pathogen, ‘spreading’ is their key form of reproduction. And when we think about why pathogens make their hosts sick, it’s long been a mystery, because making a host sick or making your host die is superficially not a good way for a pathogen to be able to spread. A very sick host will stay home and not interact as much as others, which means less spread potential for a pathogen,” said Hawley, a professor in the Department of Biological Sciences, part of the Virginia Tech College of Science.
But here’s the caveat: “Making your hosts feel ill can be important for getting some of the copies of yourself out of the host you are infecting and into another. So there is a trade-off for the pathogen,” Hawley said. “Making your host feel sick means that host may not interact with as many other hosts as they normally would — this is bad for the pathogen — but when they do have interactions, a very sick host that is coughing or has swollen eyes is going to be much more likely to spread whatever pathogen it has in its body. This isgoodfor the pathogen.”
Using songbirds, a type known as finches, whose populations are affected by a pink-eye disease in nature, Hawley and a team of researchers from Virginia Tech and the University of Memphis in Tennessee have shown just how easily these pathogens — in this case, a form of conjunctivitis common in birds, but harmless to humans — spread. And they did it without having the pink eye pathogen itself spread from bird to bird.
Instead, the team used UV fluorescent powder coatings and tracked thatand not the pathogen. During the experiment, birds were divided up into three groups: not ill, mildly ill, and strongly ill, all with conjunctivitis, and each bird was housed with four healthy flockmates. By applying a powder coating around the outer eye of each bird, but not inside the eye, the researchers could track how much powder was spread to flockmates from birds that were strongly, mildly, or not ill with pink eye.
“We weren’t actually tracing the spread of conjunctivitis. We were tracing the spread of powder as a model for the likely spread of conjunctivitis,” said Hawley, who is also an affiliated member of the Virginia Tech Fralin Life Sciences Institute’s Global Change Center and its Center for Emerging, Zoonotic, and Arthropod-borne Pathogens, about the study, published today in the journal Royal Society Open Science.
During the study, birds were kept in large-flight cages, sharing feeders and potentially spreading powder to cage mates. Feeder surfaces are one main avenue of the powder’s travel, according to the study.
There were some surprises along the way, Hawley said. The finches experiencing the strongest conjunctivitis symptoms were far less likely to eat but nonetheless spread the powder at a higher rate than the mildly ill birds who spent more time feeding.
“In our study system, the benefits of making your host sicker by increasing eye swelling outweighed the cost of making the finches feed and interact less,” Hawley said. “So overall, this pathogen is going to likely evolve to causemore harm to birds in nature so that it can spread at a higher rate, but up to some limit, because if the pathogen kills a bird immediately, the pathogen doesn’t have a chance to spread at all.”
The human factor
What does all this mean for humans and the spread of a common cold or COVID-19 at a doctor’s office or the cinema, or the spread of conjunctivitis amongst young children at a nursery school or day care?
The mantra of “stay home if you’re sick” still applies more than ever, according to Hawley. This study suggests that symptoms will make the spread of anything you are infected with much more likely. And wear a face mask — and not just for potential spread of COVID. “Wearing masks when you are coughing from any illness can likely go a long way in preventing disease spread,” Hawley said. “For pink eye, keeping kids isolated is going to be key because young children are just not going to be able to wash their hands or avoid touching each other — speaking from experience as a parent.”
Evolution plays another part. Again, pathogens are living organisms and prone to the rules of life, including evolution. “This goes back to the idea that everyone hoped that COVID would evolve to become milder over time,” Hawley said. “Our study shows that the pressures on pathogens are complicated. On the one hand, being mild is good for pathogens if it keeps your host out and about and in others’ company — good for spread, but on the other hand, being mild may mean that none of the pathogen makes it out of the host and into another because your host isn’t coughing or depositing as much pathogen onto hands or other surfaces. So pathogens are in many cases going to be favored to make us sick.”
In other words, for humans, common sense actions can prevent us from being those proverbial eggs spoken of by Stevenson.
Co-authors on the paper include Courtney A. Thomason, a former postdoctoral associate at Virginia Tech from January 2015 to October 2017, who is now at the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation; Matt Aberle, who earned a master’s degree in biological sciences in 2018 and is now a wildlife biologist with Oregon Department of Forestry; and Richard Brown, who graduated with a bachelor’s degree in wildlife conservation from the Virginia Tech College of Natural Resources and Environment in 2017 and is now a master’s student at George Mason University; as well as James S. Adelman, an assistant professor at the University of Memphis.
Funding for the study came from two National Science Foundation grants and additional funding from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, the latter part of the National Institutes for Health.
Old and new stars paint very different pictures of the Triangulum Galaxy

Astronomers have been gazing at the Triangulum galaxy for centuries. But they’ve never seen it quite like this.
On Jan. 11 at the 241st meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle, a team led by scientists at the University of Washington and the Center for Computational Astrophysics will unveil results using the Panchromatic Hubble Andromeda Treasury Triangulum Extended Region — or PHATTER — survey. The endeavor is giving astrophysicists their first in-depth look at the distinct populations of stars that make up the Triangulum galaxy.
Researchers discovered that this satellite galaxy, a close companion of the much larger Andromeda galaxy, has two drastically different structures depending on the age of the stars.
“The youngest stars and the oldest stars in the Triangulum galaxy — which we can separate out using multiple wavelength filters on the Hubble Space Telescope — are organized very differently,” said Adam Smercina, a postdoctoral researcher at the UW. “This is surprising. For a lot of galaxies, like the Milky Way and Andromeda, the stars are distributed roughly consistently, regardless of their age. That is not the case with Triangulum.”
At about 61,000 light years across, Triangulum is the third-largest galaxy in our local group, after Andromeda and our own Milky Way. In lower-resolution images it has a “flocculent” structure — with many small spiral arms radiating out from a well-defined center.
For the PHATTER survey, the Hubble Space Telescope obtained hundreds of high-resolution images of different sections of the Triangulum galaxy in 108 orbits over the course of more than a year. The team tiled these smaller-section images together to create a comprehensive, high-resolution dataset for Triangulum that for the first time showed the galaxy’s individual stars over a large region in its center.
Thanks to Hubble’s array of filters, researchers could also separate those stars by age. The distribution of younger, massive stars — those less than 1 billion years in age — were roughly in line with the “flocculent” pattern, for which the Triangulum is so renowned. But its older, redder stars are distributed in a very different pattern: two spiral arms radiating out from a rectangular bar at the galaxy’s center.
“This was a largely unknown and hidden feature of the Triangulum galaxy that was very difficult to see without this kind of detailed survey,” said Smercina.
Old stars make up the majority of Triangulum’s mass, but are dimmer than their younger counterparts, according to Smercina. That could explain why the “flocculent” pattern prevails in low-resolution images of the galaxy.
The survey team also does not know why young and old stars have such divergent distributions in Triangulum. Satellite galaxies in general are an eclectic bunch, and many questions remain about their formation and evolution. Satellite galaxies come in many different shapes and can be molded by interactions with their parent galaxies. The Milky Way’s largest satellite galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud, for example, is similar in size and mass to Triangulum, but has an irregular and globular shape due to its proximity to our own galaxy.
The PHATTER survey’s on-going analysis should shed light on how these types of galaxies form and interact with their larger neighbors. The team plans to follow up on these initial findings by tracing the history of star formation in Triangulum, comparing different sections of the galaxy.
“A major goal of the PHATTER survey was to generate the kind of detailed, high-resolution data on this prominent satellite galaxy that will allow us to examine its structure in depth, trace its history of star formation and compare what we see to theories of galaxy formation and evolution,” said Smercina. “We’re already finding surprises.”
Other team members include Julianne Dalcanton, director of the Center for Computational Astrophysics in New York, a UW professor of astronomy and principal investigator of the PHATTER project; UW research associate professor of astronomy Benjamin Williams; UW doctoral student Meredith Durbin; and Margaret Lazzarini, a postdoctoral researcher at Caltech.
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