A new report finds Amazon set prices for essential products during the COVID-19 pandemic at levels that would violate price gouging laws in many U.S. states. Public Citizen reports Amazon marked up some goods by as much as 1,000% over the expected price at a time when millions of people were forced to shop online due to remain-at-home orders. Meanwhile, a new Oxfam report finds Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos could personally pay each of his 876,000 employees a six-figure bonus and still have more wealth than he controlled at the start of the pandemic.

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An early analysis of the data, which did not include patients enrolled later in the trial, found that median time to recovery was 11 days for patients on remdesivir and 15 days for patients on placebo. It also suggested a lower death rate, 8 percent on remdesivir compared to 11.6 percent on placebo, but that difference was just short of statistical significance.

UCSF and Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital together enrolled about 30 patients in the NIH trial. Because the trial was double-blinded, neither the doctors nor the patients knew which patients received remdesivir or placebo. With survival rates in San Francisco relatively high compared to harder hit cities, it was hard to attribute any specific improvement to the drug, said Chin-Hong and Doernberg, who both cared for patients in the trial.

“We’re talking about a couple days of faster recovery overall, so in any one particular patient, that may not be so apparent,” said Doernberg. “This is why you have to do large trials.”

O,.o.

Bloodhound LSR reached 628 mph during testing but now needs cash to fund a rocket booster to ultimately hit a goal of 1,000 mph.

Our planet vibrates incessantly, sometimes with notable but more often with imperceptible intensity. Conventional seismology attempts to decipher vibrational sources and path effects by studying seismograms—records of vibrations measured with seismometers. In doing so, scientists seek either to understand the tectonic processes that lead to strong ground motions and earthquake failure (1) or to probe otherwise inaccessible planetary interiors (2). Progress in these areas of research typically has relied on the rare and geographically irregular occurrence of large earthquakes. However, anthropogenic (human) activities at Earth’s surface also generate seismic waves that instruments can detect over great distances. On page 1338 of this issue, Lecocq et al. (3) report on a quieting of anthropogenic vibrations since the start of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) pandemic.

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