In the Media

A sparkling landscape of baby stars. A foamy blue and orange view of a dying star. Five galaxies in a cosmic dance. The splendors of the universe glowed in a new batch of images released Tuesday from NASA’s powrful new telescope.

The unveiling from the $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope began Monday at the White House with a sneak peek of the first shot — a jumble of distant galaxies that went deeper into the cosmos than humanity has ever seen.

Tuesday’s releases showed parts of the universe seen by other telescopes. But Webb’s sheer power, distant location from Earth and use of the infrared light spectrum showed them in a new light that scientists said was almost as much art as science.

“It’s the beauty but also the story,” NASA senior Webb scientist John Mather, a Nobel laureate, said after the reveal. “It’s the story of where did we come from.”

“Severance,” Apple TV+’s vicious satire of office culture, managed to charm Emmy voters with 14 nominations.

“Severance” is set in a shadowy corporate headquarters where employees have agreed to get a chip implanted in their brains that separates the personal life from office life. Though conceived before the pandemic, it arrived just as many white-collar workers were making their first tentative steps back to the office — and questioning why.

The show — written by newcomer Dan Erickson, with all episodes directed by Ben Stiller and Aoife McArdle — is drenched in paranoia about what corporate work does to people and became one of the most acclaimed series of the year.

Adam Scott stars as the leader of a group who work under bright florescent lights and wander down endless antiseptic corridors, cut off from the world outside. In Season One, the series morphs from satire to thriller as some employees start questioning what is happening to them.

Among the show’s nominations are a berth in top drama series and a best writing honor. Scott earned a lead actor nod, Patricia Arquette got one as a supporting actor and Stiller for directing the episode “The We We Are.”

*Dan Erickson is a WWU alum with a degree in English who also studied screenwriting and was active in the theater department and the improv group known as the Dead Parrots Society.

A faster workout recovery is a good indicator of overall fitness level and is essential for improving performance, whether it’s lifting more, running faster, or building endurance. And for years, the advice has been to recover from a high-intensity workout by holding your hands above your heads. You maybe had a similar experience growing up: When I ran track in high school, my teammates and I were taught to resist the urge to lean over and place our hands on our legs. But the truth is different than what we were taught.

As research is showing, your instinct to recover from a tough workout by putting your hands on your knees may be the best one. In a study published in 2019, researchers at Western Washington University had 20 college varsity soccer players do sprint trials. For the study, each soccer player ran two separate trials, spaced one week apart, for which they did four 4-minute sprints, running at 90 to 95 percent of their maximum heart rate. After the sprints, the soccer players were asked to either hold their hands on their head or their knees, with researchers collecting information on how fast their heart rate dropped in the first minute and how efficiently their lungs filled. What they found was that when the soccer players put their hands on knees, their heart rate dropped faster in the first minute of recovery, and their lungs operated more efficiently.

When Teena Thach first downloaded TikTok a few years ago, she, like most of us, struggled to wrap her head around it.

“What’s funny is, I’ve worked in social media for so long that I felt like I understood each channel when it came to Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook,” said the Tacoma-bred social media manager and now-TikTok star. “But I was like, ‘I don’t understand TikTok.’ It was just something that, at first, I thought was so weird, and so odd.” 

In July 2020, Thach called her friend Thai Ha, owner of the Mangosteen food stand in Seattle’s International District. She hadn’t yet been, and wanted to stop by. Ha suggested she make a promotional TikTok during her visit in exchange for free boba, given her familiarity with the app and her social-media background. “And I was like, ‘I love free boba,’ so I’m coming,” she said.

The 34-second post — which began with Thach greeting her fellow foodies and continued with her enticingly shot recommendations — unforeseeably became a hit, attracting thousands in hours. 

Going viral was definitely cool. But even better was the giddy-with-disbelief follow-up call from Ha. Post-video, Mangosteen saw an enormous sales bump. It was common for TikTok-savvy customers to play Thach’s endorsement for an employee to make sure they got her same order. They wanted those golden-brown pieces of Korean fried chicken, those crispy fish sauce wings, that refreshingly frosty mangonada. 

She graduated from Mount Tahoma High School, then went to Western Washington University, making her the first person in her family to pursue higher education.

When she started college, she broadly went after communications because of a longstanding interest in social media and storytelling. Then she honed her focus as more classes affirmed where her interests most lay. One public-speaking course was emboldening. But a journalism class where she got to tell a visual story about someone usually pushed to societal sidelines was particularly impactful. (She centered her assignment on a school janitor, with whom she remains in touch.) Because it meaningfully put her then-mostly-untapped storytelling inclinations into practice, the project solidified her purpose. 

“It was just a bunch of, ‘I like telling people’s stories. I like public speaking. I love reporting, but I also love social media and I love getting people together,’” Thach remembers realizing. “It was everything all coming together.” 

A COVID-19 vaccine developed by UW Medicine researchers has been approved in Korea, becoming the first COVID therapeutic technology from the Seattle health care system to be greenlighted for patient use.

UW Medicine scientists who worked on the technology behind the vaccine say their version is a “second-generation” COVID immunization that’s protein-based — different from the mRNA vaccines developed by Pfizer and Moderna. As a result, the vaccine, trademarked as SKYCovione, is effective in low doses, simple to manufacture and stable without deep freezing, said Neil King and David Veesler, both UW Medicine biochemistry professors and vaccine co-developers.

The vaccine, which was approved for patient use by the Korean Ministry of Food and Drug Safety last week, is now pursuing authorization in the U.K. and other countries, according to a UW Medicine statement. If the vaccine is approved for emergency use by the World Health Organization, it will become available through COVAX, an international effort to distribute vaccines equitably around the world.

For much of the pandemic, the only silver lining to coming down with a case of COVID-19 was that you likely wouldn't catch it again for a while (though there isn't exactly a definitive answer on how long that period immunity typically lasts).

Increasingly, however, more people appear to be contracting the virus multiple times in relatively quick succession, as another omicron subvariant sweeps through the U.S.

The BA.5 variant is now the most dominant strain of COVID-19 in the country, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And while it's hard to get an exact count — given how many people are taking rapid tests at home — there are indications that both reinfections and hospitalizations are increasing.

For example: Some 31,000 people across the U.S. are currently hospitalized with the virus, with admissions up 4.5% compared to a week ago. And data from New York state shows that reinfections started trending upwards again in late June.

So far there is no evidence that this variant causes more serious illness. And infectious disease experts say that even though new infections are on the rise, the impact of BA.5 is unlikely to be on the scale of the surge we saw last winter — in part because the country is better equipped to manage it.

For the first time since May the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention rated Whatcom County at “low” community COVID-19 risk level, though one region within the county would have received a “high” rating and three others would have been “medium.”

The county’s rates of reported COVID-19 cases and its COVID-related hospitalizations both dropped to levels last week low enough for the CDC to give Whatcom the “low” community rating when new data was released Thursday, July 7, marking the first time since the week of May 22-28 that Whatcom County was in the lowest of the CDC’s three categories after four straight weeks at “medium.” But The Bellingham Herald’s analysis of the latest location data released Thursday by the Whatcom County Health Department showed that the region covered by the Mount Baker School District would receive a “high” rating if the CDC drilled down to that level. The CDC recommends every resident within counties that receive “high” rankings mask in public situations.

As of Thursday, July 7, St. Joseph hospital in Bellingham reported it was treating 15 COVID-related patients. That would give it an average of 14.1 COVID-related patients per day over the past week (July 1-7) — up from 12.1 one week earlier (June 24-30) but well within the CDC’s “low” guidelines with 5.6% of the hospital’s 252 inpatient beds filled by COVID patients.

The most transmissible variant of the coronavirus is threatening a fresh wave of infections in the United States, even among those who have recovered from the virus fairly recently.

The subvariant of omicron known as BA.5 is now dominant, according to federal estimates released Tuesday, and together with BA.4, another subvariant, it is fueling an outbreak of cases and hospitalizations.

Although the popularity of home testing means reported cases are a significant undercount of the true infection rate, the share of tests that come back positive is shooting upward and is now higher than during most other waves of the pandemic. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the risk from COVID-19 is increasing in much of the country.

“I think there’s an underappreciation of what it’s going to do to the country, and it already is exerting its effect,” said Eric Topol, a professor of molecular medicine at Scripps Research, who has written about the subvariant.

BA.5 and BA.4, both subvariants of the omicron variant that swept the world during the winter, are the most capable versions of the virus yet at evading immunity from previous infections and vaccines. 

The number of bald eagles seen around Deming in the last 50 years has sextupled, a trend that persists all along the Nooksack River.

Past studies in the area have shown only about 100 bald eagles in an 18-mile stretch of the Nooksack River, but that number has ballooned to nearly 600, according to a just-published study.

The independent study, titled Spatiotemporal Responses of Wintering Bald Eagles to Changes in Salmon Carcass Availability in the Pacific Northwest, was conducted by Ethan Duvall, a graduate student at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. The study is available through the Northwest Scientific Association. 

Duvall spent two winters trekking along the Nooksack River, beginning the study during his time at Western Washington University. While hiking in the cold months, he counted the bald eagles in the area and monitored what they ate.

Duvall said there were clear connections between the availability of chum salmon remains and the response of bald eagles. One limiting factor is the amount of total salmon available, and in rivers like the Skagit, this could drive eagles to rivers with more stable salmon populations like the Nooksack.

But, this is not the most important factor. Duvall said a more "ubiquitous" concern was climate change and how that affects salmon migration and water flow.

See the study here: https://doi.org/10.3955/046.095.0306

A waterway in the San Juan Islands has officially been renamed to honor one of Washington’s first Indigenous elected officials.

The little-known strait of water — about a half-mile wide and 2 miles long between Orcas and Shaw islands — is now named Cayou Channel.

Previously, the channel was named Harney Channel, after Gen. William Harney, who almost started the “Pig War” and was also responsible for the slaying of Indigenous people and an enslaved woman.

Now, the channel honors Henry Cayou, who was an Orcas Island county commissioner for 29 years. Cayou was a commercial fisherman and lived his entire life on Orcas Island, from 1869 to 1959.