Short Takes – 6-8-24

Wyden pushes HHS to mandate healthcare cybersecurity standards. Duo.com article. Pull quote: ““The agency’s current approach of allowing the health sector to self-regulate cybersecurity is insufficient and fails to protect personal health information as intended by Congress,” said Wyden in his letter on Wednesday. “HHS must act now to address corporations’ lax cybersecurity practices, which have enabled hackers to steal patient health information and shut down parts of the health care system, causing actual harm to patient health.””

3 private citizens launched to space and back on Virgin Galactic’s Unity spacecraft. TheHill.com article. Pull quote: “The flight took off from New Mexico at around 8:31 am local time and it landed little over an hour later. The carrier jet dropped the spaceplane at an altitude of 44,500 feet. The craft reached the speed of almost three times the speed of sound, according to the company. Atasever flew with headgear that has brain activity monitoring sensors and two insulin pens to test insulin administration in microgravity.”

Chinese lander instrument detects negative ions on far side of moon. Futurism.com article. Pull quote: “"These observations on the Moon will help us better understand the surface environment and act as a pathfinder to explore negative ion populations in other airless bodies in the Solar System," NILS principal investigator Martin Wieser explained in the statement, "from planets to asteroids and other moons."”

Scientists map one of Earth’s top hazards in the Pacific Northwest. WashingtonPost.com article. Pull quote: “The new study is expected to be the first of many scientific papers out of the new data set, but already scientists have made a few key findings. There is a particularly flat and smooth portion of the fault, spanning the state of Washington up to southern Vancouver Island. At other similar fault systems across the world, those areas often cause the largest and most destructive earthquakes. That section of the fault is also shallow and closer to the surface than previous models, which could make it more hazardous, Wirth said.”

Tens of millions of acres of cropland lie abandoned, study shows. WashingtonPost.com article. Pull quote: “That surprised researchers. “A lot of the assumptions were that this former cropland had a lot of overlap with formal conservation programs,” Tyler Lark, an assistant scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment who co-authored the study, said in a news release. “But we saw that they’re almost entirely distinct pools.””