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The Pentagon's drones are an iconic symbol of war abroad, plane-sized matchsticks with wings lurking over cities and countrysides waiting for the moment routine patrol becomes un-routine. For the most part, the missions of those drones have remained abroad, but over the years the Department of Defense has flown drones a handful of times over the United States in support of civil authorities. From 2011 to 2017, the Pentagon reports just 11 total domestic drone missions. But in 2018, that total doubled, with 11 domestic missions flown by military drones. On Jan. 11, the Department of Defense published its 2018 statistics. The drones involved include everything from MQ-9 Reapers down to DJI Phantoms, and involvement in missions ranging from training exercises to border security and emergency response. (Notably, drone operations by the Department of Homeland Security are excluded from these statistics). These numbers are helpfully collected and contrasted with domestic drone use by the military from 2011 to 2017 by the Center for the Study of the Drone at Bard University. In 2018, military MQ-9 Reapers flew five missions over the United States, four of which were in support of forest firefighting in California and Oregon. One Reaper mission, flown from May 7-10, was described as an incident and awareness exercise in the state of New York. RQ-11B Ravens flew two missions: one a base installation in Bangor, Kitsap, Washington, and the other a Defense Support of Civil Authorities mission in response to Hurricane Florence and requested by the South Carolina National Guard.

One of the most striking features of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, is the exceptional breadth of symptoms it causes in people. Of the nearly 30 million recorded infections to date, the vast majority of people experienced mild or moderate disease - which itself can range from no symptoms at all to pneumonia or long-term, debilitating neurological symptoms. A minority ended up with severe respiratory symptoms but eventually recovered. And some - nearly 940,000 worldwide, of which 196,000 are in the US - took a turn for the worse and died. Why some people die while others recover is thought to depend in large part on the human immune response, which spirals out of control in severe disease. Over the past few months, researchers have developed a better understanding of this dysfunctional immune response. By comparing patients with varying degrees of disease severity, they've catalogued a number of dramatic changes across the human immune arsenal that are often apparent when patients first come into the hospital - from signaling cytokine proteins and first-responder cells of the innate immune system, to the B cells and T cells that confer pathogen-specific adaptive immunity. The factors that trigger this immune dysregulation have so far remained elusive due to the complexity of the immune system, which consists of seemingly endless biological pathways that twist and turn and feed back on one another like a ball of spaghetti. But researchers - drawing on knowledge from other conditions such as sepsis, cancer, and autoimmune disease - are gradually building coherent theories of what puts patients en route to severe disease. Along the way, they're also uncovering signals that clinicians could use to predict disease prognosis and identify potential new treatment avenues.

The grinning voice of John Denver caroling "Rocky Mountain High" may never again seem quite so innocent once you've consumed "Final Destination," the leaden teenage horror film in which the song is repeatedly used to announce the arrival of death (with a capital D). The first time you hear the anthem by the perky folk-pop singer, who died in a plane crash, it is being piped over the sound system at Kennedy Airport minutes before Alex Browning (Devon Sawa), a jittery high school senior, is to board a jet for Paris on his class trip. For weeks, Alex has been having premonitions of disaster, and as he quakes with terror in a men's room stall, the Denver song sneaks into the background to taunt him with the reminder that what goes up must come down. Once on the plane, Alex is seized by a fantasy (the movie's scariest scene) in which the aircraft, seconds after takeoff, shudders with a death rattle as an explosion rips through the cabin, creating pandemonium. Berserk with panic, Alex snaps out of his nightmare and screams that the plane is going to crash, even though it still hasn't left the gate. Escorted back to the terminal, he ends up one of seven who stay behind. When the plane carrying most of his classmates finally takes off and seconds later explodes in midair, killing everyone aboard, Alex is shattered but not surprised. The disaster and Alex's premonitions set up a heavy-handed fable about death and teenage illusions of invulnerability. Having cheated death, Alex and his six fellow survivors discover that the Grim Reaper is in a major snit. And for the rest of the movie, it sets about picking them off, one by one. But if you imagined that death would dispatch them as quickly and efficiently as possible, think again. Being a teenage horror film, "Final Destination" is not about to let anybody go gentle into that good night.

Interest in natural language processing (NLP) began in earnest in 1950 when Alan Turing published his paper entitled "Computing Machinery and Intelligence," from which the so-called Turing Test emerged. Turing basically asserted that a computer could be considered intelligent if it could carry on a conversation with a human being without the human realizing they were talking to a machine. The goal of natural language processing is to allow that kind of interaction so that non-programmers can obtain useful information from computing systems. This kind of interaction was popularized in the 1968 movie "2001: A Space Odyssey" and in the Star Trek television series. Natural language processing also includes the ability to draw insights from data contained in emails, videos, and other unstructured material. "In the future," writes Marc Maxson, "the most useful data will be the kind that was is too unstructured to be used in the past." ["The future of big data is quasi-unstructured," Chewy Chunks, 23 March 2013] Maxson believes, "The future of Big Data is neither structured nor unstructured. Big Data will be structured by intuitive methods (i.e., 'genetic algorithms'), or using inherent patterns that emerge from the data itself and not from rules imposed on data sets by humans.