The James Webb Space Telescope Mission

Twenty-six years ago a small committee report, building on earlier studies, expounded a compelling and poetic vision for the future of astronomy, calling for an infrared-optimized space telescope with an aperture of at least $4m$. With the support of their governments in the US, Europe, and Canada, 20,000 people realized that vision as the $6.5m$ James Webb Space Telescope. A generation of astronomers will celebrate their accomplishments for the life of the mission, potentially as long as 20 years, and beyond. This report and the scientific discoveries that follow are extended thank-you notes to the 20,000 team members. The telescope is working perfectly, with much better image quality than expected. In this and accompanying papers, we give a brief history, describe the observatory, outline its objectives and current observing program, and discuss the inventions and people who made it possible. We cite detailed reports on the design and the measured performance on orbit.Comment: Accepted by PASP for the special issue on The James Webb Space Telescope Overview, 29 pages, 4 figure

QUALITY OF FROZEN PEAS AND PEACHES SUBJECTED TO ELEVATED TEMPERATURES DURING SIMULATED RETAIL AND CONSUMER HANDLING

The quality of frozen peas and peach slices exposed to 21ºC (70ºF) for several minutes or 2 hours and to 27ºC (80ºF) for 20 or 60 minutes was determined by panel ratings and shear force and color difference measurements

QUALITY OF FROZEN PEAS AND PEACHES SUBJECTED TO ELEVATED TEMPERATURES DURING SIMULATED RETAIL AND CONSUMER HANDLING

The quality of frozen peas and peach slices exposed to 21ºC (70ºF) for several minutes or 2 hours and to 27ºC (80ºF) for 20 or 60 minutes was determined by panel ratings and shear force and color difference measurements.Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety,

Ageism and risk during the coronavirus pandemic

The sudden risk and spread of the coronavirus, which was declared a global pandemic by the World Health Organization (2020) on 11 March 2020, has indelibly etched itself into social and public consciousness. Faced with the threat of COVID-19 infections and deaths, and the potential for the pandemic to place increasing burdens on healthcare systems, many countries have ‘staged’ precautionary safety measures to slow or contain the spread of the coronavirus. These measures included closing territorial borders, enforcing temporary closures on trading, hospitality and recreational venues, and introducing new policing and legal powers, including strict ‘stay at home’ measures and increased surveillance of social lives (Fernandes, 2020). These risk management or risk migration strategies regulate the activities of individuals, populations and economic systems. They involve risk discourses or frames that can cause ‘othering’ of specific behaviours or populations, which help shape public thinking about risk and vulnerability (McCormick and Whitney, 2013). Such discourses also fuel a range of discriminatory attitudes and actions towards certain individuals and populations (IFRC, UNICEF and World Health Organization, 2020), including stigma based on age. In this chapter, we explore how the topic of COVID and age was framed or ‘staged’ in political and media discourses. Drawing on examples from Australian online media sources published in the early phase of the crisis (between March and April 2020), we shed light on how these risk discourses problematise and homogenise younger and older age groups as ‘risky’ and ‘at risk’, while also presenting confusing risk messages. To begin this discussion, we first explore some sociological perspectives on risk

Governing risk and older age during COVID-19 : contextualizing ageism and COVID-19 outbreaks in Australian aged care facilities during 2020

The infectious spread of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) has generated numerous media and political responses that bring together health, risk, and age. Within these responses, older people have been cast as "the vulnerable elderly" who are less socially worthy and valuable than younger people, in poor health, and considered to be automatically at risk of COVID-19 due to their age. This simplistic connection between older age, frailty, and ill-health reduces older age to a medical and health problem, which perpetuates and deepens ageism. The implied connection has been particularly evident during the coronavirus pandemic through the imposition on older people, who are living in aged and long-term care facilities, of severe lockdown restrictions enforced through the processes of risk governmentality and authoritative control. These socio-political and institutional regulations have heightened the isolation from society that older people living in such environments already face, ironically further threatening their health and wellbeing. Drawing on Australian media reports and specific institutional responses imposed on or emerging from residential aged care that occurred during 2020, our theoretical examination reveals how ageism, risk discourses, and risk governance during the coronavirus pandemic jeopardized older Australian's health, wellbeing, and dignity of risk, while also reinforcing barriers to social inclusion. We conclude with suggestions for dealing with ageism including challenging the medicalisation of older age, promoting and supporting older people's dignity of risk, and radically changing our attitudes towards, and language regarding, ageing

A crowdsourced sociology of COVID-19

No abstract available

A crowdsourced sociology of COVID-19

No abstract available