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l1tw1ck · 2 years

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Heizou and a Locked Room

based off his birthday voiceline

FTM!Heizou x Top!Male Reader

Warnings: Non-Con, Aphrodisiacs, Oral & Vaginal Sex, Drugging, Kidnapping

Words: 909

You slowly opened your eyes, feeling groggy. It was pitch black and your head was pounding. You had no idea where you were or why you were there. You were bound with rope to a chair so you tried use your vision to get out of it but you felt weak, barely even a spark managed to come from your hands. You sigh and give up, waiting for your captor to come. You were hoping you weren't about to be murdered.

The door cracks open, the room or wherever they came from was dark as well so you still had no idea who it was. Your captor walks in and locks the door behind them.

You hear their footsteps as they walk towards you, or whatever's next to you. The next moment you hear the flick of a lighter. You turn your head to where you'd heard the sound, Heizou was lighting a red candle on the table next to you.

You tried to speak but you were too delirious to say anything.

He moved to the other side of you, lighting another candle.

He finally goes to look you in the eyes, a soft smile on his face. "Happy birthday!"

You smile back at him, well it was more of a goofy grin. It looks like he was just pranking you. At least that's what you thought.

"Do you have any birthday wishes?" He tilts his head, his smile everlasting. You noticed the weird look in his eyes but ignored it, maybe you were just making things up.

"Ah.." You still couldn't speak much so you shrugged instead.

"That's fine, you can think of them later." His soft voice soothed you. It made you feel like you were in a dream, you just wanted to hear his voice and feel his touch. You ignored everything wrong with the situation you were in because you adored him.

"I'll give you your birthday gift now." He puts his hands on the bottom of his tank top, causing you to look at him weirdly. His perky breasts bounce lightly as he pulls it over his head.

"Nn.." Your face grows hotter at the sight.

"I've been saving myself for you~" He kneels down and grabs the waistband of your pants. "I've been practicing too..."

Your underwear tightens at the thought of him practicing sucking your dick on a popsicle.

He pulls down your pants and underwear, grinning in excitement when he sees how hard you were despite being drugged. Of course, he'd seen it before (He totally hadn't been watching you masturbate) but it was even better in person.

He licks your dick like he's trying to savor the flavor forever.

"Mmh.." You moan as he finally puts it in his mouth. His tongue swirls against the head of your dick, it was like he was trying to get every last bit of pre cum that emerged from your tip. You bucked your hips upwards, no longer wanting to be tortured by his tongue.

"H- hh..." You try to say his name but you were far too drowsy. Heizou let you fuck his mouth, happy you were reciprocating his lust. Even if you were drugged to be compliant.

"Ugh..." You groan, feeling yourself come undone. You slow down while Heizou speeds up, making sure you cum in his mouth. Before long, you end up shooting your load into Heizou's throat and he gratefully swallows.

He removes his mouth from your dick with small bits of cum dribbling from his lips. You look at him hazily, wanting more.

Heizou laughs cutely, knowing exactly what your expression meant. He stands up and takes off his pants.

He wasn't wearing any underwear.

Archons, you could see the slick dripping from his thighs.

"Like what you see?" He winks. You nod dumbly. He picks up his pants and goes through his pockets, bringing out a pill bottle. He takes three before moving onto your lap, and maybe you were just really high but you swore he floated onto it.

He puts two pills on your tongue and urges you to swallow. You're not in the right state of mind so you comply. He swallows one next.

"You're so big, I'm getting nervous~" He smiles while jerking you off to full length.

He lifts himself up and hovers over your dick.

"Mm.." You look at him in anticipation. "Gh–!" You make a shocked noise as he manages to completely envelop your dick in his cunt.

"Ooh~!" He grins widely with his back arching. "It hurts but...it's so good~" He hisses before moving.

"H...hei.." You fail at saying Heizou's name.

"Fuck yes~" Heizou bounces up and down, the way his breasts moved with him gave you enough strength to break free. You pushed Heizou to the ground and took control.

"Ooh~! (Name)~! Fu- fuck me~!" Heizou comes just from your newfound aggression.

You look at him with hazy but lustful eyes, low groans escaping your mouth as you fuck him through his orgasm.

"Oh gods~! Gh- gonna- fuck~!" Heizou has another orgasm, you follow shortly after.

"...zou.." You mumble, your thrusts unrelenting despite having an orgasm. The pills Heizou gave you had to have been aphrodisiacs because you were going insane.

You completely focus on Heizou, ignoring everything except for Heizou's sweet moans as you pound into him. The two of you were insatiable, nothing could satiate the impure lust the two of you shared.

#wicks🕯works #genshin shikanoin #shikanoin heizou #heizou smut #heizou x male reader #genshin heizou #top male reader #male reader #genshin smut #genshin impact #genshin impact smut #🕯heizou #🕯️heizou #🕯️Genshin

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hobbyspacer · 1 year

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ESO: Hidden views of vast stellar nurseries

A new report from the European Space Observatory (ESO): ESO telescope reveals hidden views of vast stellar nurseries

This image shows the L1688 region in the Ophiuchus constellation. New stars are born in the colourful clouds of gas and dust seen here. The infrared observations underlying this image reveal new details in the star-forming regions that are usually obscured by the clouds of dust. The image was produced with data collected by the VIRCAM instrument, which is attached to the VISTA telescope at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile. The observations were done as part of the VISIONS survey, which will allow astronomers to better understand how stars form in these dust-enshrouded regions. This 520-million-pixel image can be explored in more detail with this zoomable version. Using ESO’s Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA), astronomers have created a vast infrared atlas of five nearby stellar nurseries by piecing together more than one million images. These large mosaics reveal young stars in the making, embedded in thick clouds of dust. Thanks to these observations, astronomers have a unique tool with which to decipher the complex puzzle of stellar birth. “In these images we can detect even the faintest sources of light, like stars far less massive than the Sun, revealing objects that no one has ever seen before,” says Stefan Meingast, an astronomer at the University of Vienna in Austria and lead author of the new study published today in Astronomy & Astrophysics. “This will allow us to understand the processes that transform gas and dust into stars.” Stars form when clouds of gas and dust collapse under their own gravity, but the details of how this happens are not fully understood. How many stars are born out of a cloud? How massive are they? How many stars will also have planets? https://youtu.be/0cCMSOELuRA To answer these questions, Meingast’s team surveyed five nearby star-forming regions with the VISTA telescope at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile. Using VISTA’s infrared camera VIRCAM, the team captured light coming from deep inside the clouds of dust. “The dust obscures these young stars from our view, making them virtually invisible to our eyes. Only at infrared wavelengths can we look deep into these clouds, studying the stars in the making,” explains Alena Rottensteiner, a PhD student also at the University of Vienna and co-author of the study.

This image shows the HH 909 A object in the Chamaeleon constellation. New stars are born in the colourful clouds of gas and dust seen here. The infrared observations underlying this image reveal new details in the star-forming regions that are usually obscured by the clouds of dust. The image was produced with data collected by the VIRCAM instrument, which is attached to the VISTA telescope at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile. The observations were done as part of the VISIONS survey, which will allow astronomers to better understand how stars form in these dust-enshrouded regions. The survey, called VISIONS, observed star-forming regions in the constellations of Orion, Ophiuchus, Chamaeleon, Corona Australis and Lupus. These regions are less than 1500 light-years away and so large that they span a huge area in the sky. The diameter of VIRCAM’s field of view is as wide as three full Moons, which makes it uniquely suited to map these immensely big regions.

This image shows the IRAS 11051-7706 object in the Chamaeleon constellation. New stars are born in the colourful clouds of gas and dust seen here. The infrared observations underlying the image reveal new details in the star-forming regions that are usually obscured by the clouds of dust. The image was produced with data collected by the VIRCAM instrument, which is attached to the VISTA telescope at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile. The observations were done as part of the VISIONS survey, which will allow astronomers to better understand how stars form in these dust-enshrouded regions. The team obtained more than one million images over a period of five years. The individual images were then pieced together into the large mosaics released here, revealing vast cosmic landscapes. These detailed panoramas feature dark patches of dust, glowing clouds, newly-born stars and the distant background stars of the Milky Way. Since the same areas were observed repeatedly, the VISIONS data will also allow astronomers to study how young stars move. “With VISIONS we monitor these baby stars over several years, allowing us to measure their motion and learn how they leave their parent clouds,” explains João Alves, an astronomer at the University of Vienna and Principal Investigator of VISIONS. This is not an easy feat, as the apparent shift of these stars as seen from Earth is as small as the width of a human hair seen from 10 kilometres away. These measurements of stellar motions complement those obtained by the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission at visible wavelengths, where young stars are hidden by thick veils of dust.

A dark cloud of cosmic dust snakes across this spectacular image, illuminated by the brilliant light of new stars. This dense cloud is a star-forming region called Lupus 3, where dazzlingly hot stars are born from collapsing masses of gas and dust. This image was created from images taken using the VLT Survey Telescope and the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope. Click here for a wider version of this image. The VISIONS atlas will keep astronomers busy for years to come. “There is tremendous long-lasting value for the astronomical community here, which is why ESO steers Public Surveys like VISIONS,” says Monika Petr-Gotzens, an astronomer at ESO in Garching, Germany, and co-author of this study. Moreover, VISIONS will set the groundwork for future observations with other telescopes such as ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), currently under construction in Chile and set to start operating later this decade. “The ELT will allow us to zoom into specific regions with unprecedented detail, giving us a never-seen-before close-up view of individual stars that are currently forming there,” concludes Meingast. Links Research paper Photos of VISTA For journalists: subscribe to receive our releases under embargo in your language For scientists: got a story? Pitch your research === Amazon Ads === Orion Skyline 6" Dobsonian Reflector Telescope Kit === Celestron 70mm Travel Scope Portable Refractor Telescope Fully-Coated Glass Optics Ideal Telescope for Beginners BONUS Astronomy Software Package Read the full article

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rempstafmafi-blog · 5 years

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clexa--warrior · 4 years

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SEOUL - In late January, South Korean health officials summoned representatives from more than 20 medical companies from their lunar New Year celebrations to a conference room tucked inside Seoul’s busy train station.

One of the country’s top infectious disease officials delivered an urgent message: South Korea needed an effective test immediately to detect the novel coronavirus, then running rampant in China. He promised the companies swift regulatory approval.

Though there were only four known cases in South Korea at that point, “we were very nervous. We believed that it could develop into a pandemic,” one attendee, Lee Sang-won, an infectious diseases expert at the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told Reuters.

“We acted like an army,” he said.

A week after the Jan. 27 meeting, South Korea’s CDC approved one company’s diagnostic test. Another company soon followed. By the end of February, South Korea was making headlines around the world for its drive-through screening centers and ability to test thousands of people daily.

South Korea’s swift action stands in stark contrast to what has transpired in the United States. Seven weeks after the train station meeting, the Koreans have tested well over 290,000 people and identified over 8,000 infections. New cases are falling off: Ninety-three were reported Wednesday, down from a daily peak of 909 two weeks earlier.

The United States, whose first case was detected the same day as South Korea’s, is not even close to meeting demand for testing. About 60,000 tests have been run by public and private labs in a country of 330 million, federal officials said Tuesday.

As a result, U.S. officials don’t fully grasp how many Americans have been infected and where they are concentrated - crucial to containment efforts. While more than 7,000 U.S. cases had been identified as of Wednesday, as many as 96 million people could be infected in coming months, and 480,000 could die, according to a projection prepared for the American Hospital Association by Dr. James Lawler, an infectious disease expert at the University of Nebraska Medical Center.

“You cannot fight what you cannot see,” said Roger Klein, a former laboratory medical director at the Cleveland Clinic and previously an adviser to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services on clinical laboratory issues.

How the United States fell so far behind South Korea, according to infectious disease experts, clinicians and state and local officials, is a tale of many contrasts in the two nations’ public health systems: a streamlined bureaucracy versus a congested one, bold versus cautious leadership, and a sense of urgency versus a reliance on protocol.

The delayed and chaotic testing in the United States will cost lives, potentially including those of doctors and nurses, many medical experts predict. Already more than 100 people have died overall, and fears of rampant spread have led to extraordinary restrictions on social interaction, upending the U.S. economy, schools, hospitals and everyday life.

“It makes me feel like I’m living in a farce,” said Dr. Ritu Thamman, a cardiologist and clinical assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. Even hospital staff who may have been exposed can’t get a test, she said. “We are a rich country but we don’t have these kinds of things?”

The administration of President Donald Trump was tripped up by government rules and conventions, former officials and public health experts say. Instead of drafting the private sector early on to develop tests, as South Korea did, U.S. health officials relied, as is customary, on test kits prepared by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, some of which proved faulty. Then, sticking to its time-consuming vetting procedures, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration didn’t approve tests other than the CDC’s until Feb. 29, more than five weeks after discussions with outside labs had begun.

Meanwhile, in the absence of enough kits, the CDC insisted for weeks on narrow criteria for testing, recommending it only when a person had recently been to China or other hot spots or had contact with someone known to be infected. As a result, the federal government failed to screen an untold number of Americans and missed opportunities to contain the spread, clinicians and public health experts say.

South Korea took a risk, releasing briskly vetted tests, then circling back later to spot check their effectiveness. By contrast, the United States’ FDA said it wanted to ensure, upfront, that the tests were accurate before they went out to millions of Americans.

“There are always opportunities to learn from situations like this one,” FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn, who has been on the job only three months, told Reuters. “But one thing I will stand firm on: We cannot compromise on the quality of the tests because what would be worse than no tests at all is wildly inaccurate test results.”

In a statement, CDC spokesman Benjamin Haynes said, “This process has not gone as smoothly as we would have liked.” But he said “more and more state labs have come online, increasing our public health system’s ability to detect and respond to cases.”

Bombarded by criticism amid a re-election campaign, Trump vowed on Friday to ramp up production of test kits in partnership with private companies and to make the diagnostic tests more widely available at hospitals and in-store parking lots. This week, the FDA said more than 35 universities, hospitals and lab companies had begun running their own tests, under the agency’s revised policy.

But it may be weeks before enough tests are on hand to fill the need.

“The idea of anybody getting (tested) easily the way people in other countries are doing it, we’re not set up for that,” Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases told a House committee last week. “That is a failing. Let’s admit it.”

It’s a problem many Americans, accustomed to hearing they have the most advanced medical care in the world, find hard to fathom.

“I don’t know how we messed this up so badly,” said Ruth Blodgett, 65, whose husband of the same age couldn’t get a coronavirus test on Saturday in an urgent care clinic outside Rochester, New York, even though he was coughing and the doctor ordered one for him. “We got caught flat-footed. For America, that’s unacceptable.”

‘HURRY UP AND DEVELOP THE KITS’

At the pivotal Jan. 27 meeting at the Seoul train station, South Korean government leaders told companies they were cleared for takeoff.

“They were told that the ‘emergency use authorization’ would be coming, so hurry up and develop the kits,” said Lee Hyukmin, head of the coronavirus task force at the Korean Society for Laboratory Medicine, who was at the meeting.

One of the companies was Kogene Biotech Co Ltd, whose test kit was the only one to work initially. The government announced its approval on Feb. 4.

“The government acted quickly,” said Myoah Baek, an executive director at Kogene. The Korean CDC “disclosed information on test methods so test kit makers were able to speed up development.”

Lee Hyukmin of the Korean laboratory society said the government was swift - but not reckless.

“Of course, a kit that’s approved in one week isn’t as good as one that goes through a year of clinical trials,” he said. So in the early days, Lee said, the government cross-checked cases to ensure the tests were working properly.

Cross-checking involved verifying that labs got the same result the government did on an initial pool of patient samples. As of last week, nearly 100 labs were available to perform tests nationwide, according to government figures.

South Korea’s rapid response to the new coronavirus resulted from scars of the past.

In the aftermath of the 2015 outbreak of MERS, short for the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, critics slammed then-President Park Geun-hye and her administration for a slow response and a lack of transparency. Public confidence waned in Park, who was impeached in 2017 following an unrelated corruption scandal.

FILE PHOTO: Medical staff in protective gear work at a 'drive-thru' testing center for the novel coronavirus disease of COVID-19 in Yeungnam University Medical Center in Daegu, South Korea, March 3, 2020. REUTERS/Kim Kyung-Hoon

The country had 186 MERS cases, more than anywhere outside the Middle East, including 38 deaths.

“We can’t ever forget the incident. It is engraved in our mind,” the Korean CDC’s Lee Sang-won said. “We were hurt so much, and we felt remorseful.”

‘A REAL FOUL UP’

On Jan. 31, only days after the Seoul train station meeting, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) declared the novel coronavirus a public health emergency, citing a similar pronouncement from the World Health Organization.

HHS oversees the separate operations of the FDA and CDC, key agencies involved in responding to the pandemic. The CDC was responsible for developing the initial test kits for the virus. Then, under longstanding protocols, the FDA needed to approve the test before it could be sent to state and local labs around the country. Private labs and large hospitals could develop their own tests or work off the CDC version.

On Feb. 3, amid the preparations to address the emergency, the FDA hosted an all-day conference at its headquarters in Silver Spring, Maryland, which had been scheduled well before the outbreak. Regulators, researchers and industry representatives gathered to discuss the general process for putting diagnostic tests cleared under emergencies on the path to permanent approval by the FDA.

Though coronavirus was now the hottest topic in global medicine, a broadcast of the meeting conveyed little sense of urgency about the epidemic sweeping the globe. It was mentioned in passing but regulators mostly stuck to their Powerpoint presentations.

In his remarks, Dr. Timothy Stenzel, who oversees the FDA’s review of diagnostic tests, spoke broadly about the agency’s mission to protect public health: “It’s our goal to be first in the world wherever possible to authorize new tests.”

Carolyn Hiller, a program director at the Medical Device Innovation Consortium, which hosted the event alongside FDA, said there were discussions with the agency about postponing the meeting because of the coronavirus outbreak, but both sides opted to go ahead.

“The whole coronavirus thing blew up in real time while this was happening,” she said.

Stenzel did not respond to a request for comment. In a statement, the FDA acknowledged that the coronavirus was not a “specific topic on the agenda.” But it said the agency already was talking to test developers and “the conference was timely and addressed issues important” to firms and institutions looking to produce a test.

The following day, Feb. 4, the FDA greenlighted a CDC test kit for the virus.

Weeks of chaos would follow.

By Feb. 8, some states and other public labs were complaining that the CDC’s test wasn’t working because of a flawed component that gave inconclusive results. Three days later, the CDC told the labs that it was manufacturing a new component.

As of mid-February, the federal government remained stuck in first gear. The CDC was the primary supplier of tests across much of the country, and other labs couldn’t immediately deploy their own without the FDA’s blessing.

HHS said it has assigned a team of outside scientists to examine what went wrong with the CDC’s initial batch of tests, such as whether there was a manufacturing defect, flawed design or contamination in the agency’s lab. The precise problem has not been identified.

The CDC didn’t send out new test kits until late February. Meanwhile, public health experts say, a crucial window was closing on containing the virus, which by then was known to have infected more than 60 people.

The U.S. emergency declaration issued in late January created additional hurdles that hindered a wider expansion in testing, according to former federal officials and lab professionals.

The declaration eased the way for drugmakers to pursue vaccines and antiviral treatments for COVID-19. But public health experts said that the same declaration made it harder to expand diagnostic testing outside the CDC.

That’s because the declaration required diagnostic tests developed by individual labs, such as those at hospitals or universities, to undergo greater scrutiny than in non-emergencies - presumably because the stakes are higher.

“Paradoxically, it increased regulations on diagnostics while it created an easier pathway for vaccines and antivirals,” said Dr. Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security. “There was a real foul-up with diagnostic tests that has exposed a flaw in the United States’ pandemic response plan.”

Dr. William Schaffner, a professor of preventive medicine and infectious diseases at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, said the CDC and FDA stuck to their conventional playbook for too long.

“Traditional public health thinking is,’Don’t create widespread panic and don’t go over the top. Keep the testing narrow in a precision rifle approach rather than a mass, shotgun approach,’” Schaffner said. “That failed in this instance. This virus acted differently and it overwhelmed the U.S. system. South Korea had a much better sense of what was happening.”

In a statement Tuesday, the CDC said: “After finding out that some labs could not fully verify the test, CDC began working on a solution and identifying the source of the problem …. CDC, in conjunction with FDA, determined how to move forward and shared this information immediately with public health labs.”

The CDC statement also suggested that the agency was not exclusively responsible for testing delays.

The CDC was “not an impediment” to getting large-scale commercial testing started, according to the statement. That was the role of the FDA, and as the initial U.S. cases were being detected in late January and early February, CDC director Dr. Robert Redfield highlighted the need for that agency to act, according to the CDC statement.

Alberto Gutierrez, who led the FDA’s office overseeing diagnostic testing from 2009 to 2017, said the agency proceeded with caution because it saw itself as the last line of defense against opportunistic companies looking to cash in on threats to public health. “There is money to be made in an emergency, and a lot of people try to take advantage of that,” Gutierrez said. “The problem the FDA faces is, do you let it become the Wild West?”

“The FDA had good intentions,” he said.

RAMPING UP

As U.S. efforts faltered, South Korean officials cleared a test from a second company, Seegene Inc, on Feb. 12.

With many more tests in hand, health officials were well armed to attack a fast-moving virus and aggressively track down people who may have been exposed. This testing-backed offensive helped South Korea reduce the number of new cases over a matter of weeks, serving as a model for other countries grappling with the pandemic.

In mid-February, cases spiked at a secretive church in the southeastern city of Daegu. On Feb. 26, Daegu city officials said they would test every single member of the church, including those without symptoms.

As of March 10, Daegu said that it had tested almost all of the 10,000 members of the church in that area, and about 40% came back positive. The city, which now accounts for about three-quarters of total infections in South Korea, has seen new cases sharply drop. On Wednesday, officials announced 46 new cases compared to a peak of 741 cases on Feb. 29.

The country went from two approved test makers on Feb. 18 to five as of last week, according to the Korean CDC.

Slideshow (3 Images)

“To my surprise, test kit makers were able to boost production quickly,” Korean CDC’s Lee Sang-won said.

PLEADING WITH WASHINGTON

By Feb. 24, state and local labs in the United States were pleading with the FDA to relax its rules so the nation no longer had to rely so heavily on the CDC for testing. They asked Hahn, the FDA commissioner, for “enforcement discretion” so they could use their own lab-developed tests.

“We are now many weeks into the response with still no diagnostic or surveillance test available outside of CDC for the vast majority of our member laboratories,” Scott Becker, chief executive of the Association of Public Health Laboratories, and Grace Kubin, lab services director at the Texas Department of State Health Services, wrote to Hahn on Feb. 24 in a letter reviewed by Reuters.

In an interview, Becker, whose group represents more than 100 state and local health laboratories, called the letter a “Hail Mary” pass, an act of desperation.

“The entire lab community was really coming unglued. We knew we could develop tests and were very capable of doing that, but we felt hamstrung” Becker told Reuters.

He said labs wanted FDA to make more tests available so they could run more patient samples at a faster pace.

Two days after receiving Becker’s letter, the FDA commissioner said his agency was ready to approve new outside tests quickly - if its requirements for accuracy were satisfied.

“False diagnostic test results can lead to significant adverse public health consequences,” Hahn wrote to the Association of Public Health Laboratories in a Feb. 26 letter, “not only serious implications for individual patient care but also serious implications for the analyses of disease progression and for public health decision-making.”

Under increasing pressure, the FDA relented and removed many of the bureaucratic obstacles. On Feb. 29, the agency said public and private labs, including academic medical centers, could start using their own tests before the FDA had completed its full review. Laboratories had 15 business days to submit a completed application, which could be approved retroactively.

That same day, the Trump administration confirmed the first death in the United States from the coronavirus, a man in his 50s in Washington state.

On March 2, Stenzel at the FDA’s diagnostic testing office hosted a webinar for lab test developers, highlighting additional challenges, including a shortage of viral samples needed for validation of test results. Some labs also have reported shortages of other key supplies and ingredients, as well as the need for more trained personnel.

As U.S. regulators rewrote their policies, South Korean municipalities were opening roadside testing facilities across the country, collecting samples in minutes while people sat in their cars.

At a closed-door meeting last week in Congress, U.S. Representative Raul Ruiz, a Democrat from California and an emergency-room physician who treated patients during the 2009 H1N1 influenza outbreak, pressed the FDA commissioner and other members of the Trump administration on why South Korea was lapping the United States in its response.

“Why don’t we have drive-through testing like South Korea?” Ruiz asked leaders of the president’s coronavirus task force.

Ruiz told Reuters the officials said they were working on it. On their own, some hospitals and communities have begun offering drive-through testing in Colorado, New York, Texas and elsewhere.

In recent days, as the public criticism grew louder, Trump appointed a testing czar to improve coordination across agencies. The FDA launched a 24-hour hotline for laboratories needing help to accelerate testing, approved two company applications for higher-volume testing and granted states the flexibility to authorize new tests so labs can bypass the FDA.

Despite the new moves, Ruiz said he fears America is still weeks away from approaching what South Korea has accomplished. “I think months have been lost here,” Ruiz said. “Maybe we should look into purchasing South Korea’s tests.”

That may happen. Both Kogene and SolGent Co, two of the COVID-19 test-makers approved in South Korea, said their companies have an eye on the U.S. market.

“The FDA asked us to proceed with applications quickly,” Kogene executive Myoah Baek said.

Chad Terhune reported from Los Angeles; Dan Levine and Jane Lee reported from San Francisco and Hyunjoo Jin from South Korea. Contributing were Julie Steenhuysen, Josh Smith, Sangmi Cha and Aram Roston; Editing by Michele Gershberg and Julie Marquis

Our Standards:

The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

#us #health #coronavirus #testing #specialreport

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thekingofgear · 7 years

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Hi Kog I have a question for you, could you please explain me how does the percussion works in the live version of Videotape? I know Colin uses a keyboard and Jonny uses Max but I don't quite understand how it works, thanks!! Oh and btw excellent work with the Feral Glitch, I couldn't grab one, so if someday you want to make more, me and more people would be very pleased. Cheers.

Hello there, glad that you like the pedal! So that you know, we’re going to be opening up a few more on the kickstarter next week.

Drum Machines and Acoustic Percussion on Videotape

For live performances of Videotape since 2008, percussion has been provided by Phil and Jonny’s combined forces. While Colin does trigger percussive samples with his MIDI keyboard (usually a Roland PCR-500) on 15 Step, on Videotape he uses the keyboard to play a sampled synth bass. When Clive Deamer joins the band on tour, he mirrors Phil’s playing, as visible in this video.

Phil’s main pattern consists of a roll on a high tom, followed by a simultaneous single hit on the floor tom and kick. Phil enters with this pattern when Thom begins repeating the line “on videotape” (1:48 – all times in parentheses are with reference to the 2008 full band From The Basement performance), and repeats it until Thom sings “because I can’t do it face to face” (2:58). At that point, he switches to matching Jonny’s sampled kick drums with his own. You can hear the difference between Jonny’s independent kick drums and their layered kicks by comparing this section to the very start of the performance. Phil switches back to his main pattern at during the song’s final swell (3:52), then switches to matching Jonny’s kick again at the very end of the song (4:22). It’s worth noting that Phil’s pattern is not quoted from the studio version of the song, but rather combines several percussion elements into a single acoustic part.

Jonny’s percussion forms the backbone of the live performances of the track, with a vacillating 909 kick drum leading off each performing. To better understand what he’s doing with Max, it’s best to first understand what he’s doing in the 2008 ‘Scotch Mist’ performance of Videotape.

Jonny’s hands on the Roland TR-909 during the ‘Scotch Mist’ performance of Videotape (youtube).

For this performance, Jonny is playing a Roland TR-909 Rhythm Composer – the same one as heard on the studio recording, starting with the closed hihat at 3:06. In performance and on the studio recording, Jonny uses the TR-909 to supply kick, closed hihat, snare, and rimshot sounds. In performance, the hihat pattern which begins at 3:06 on the studio version is introduced much earlier, starting as Thom sings “my videotape”.

In order to provide a “live” feeling performance with a drum machine, Jonny continuously programs the unit as the song progresses, modifying patterns and adjusting decay and level knobs. His hands are constantly at work, and his right spends most of the track glued to the closed hihat’s “decay” knob, minutely adjusting it to add subtle variation to its sound.

The best place to listen for this is when Thom sings his last line. Jonny quickly drops out as Thom sings his final word, then swells back in with a hihat and kick, soon adding a rimshot whilst also varying the hihat pattern.

Jonny’s laptop, showing his drum machine Max patch, in 2008 (citizeninsane).

Rather than bring his TR-909 on tour, and probably also to have some fun, Jonny seems to have sampled the drum machine and created a Max patch to control and sequence his samples. In the photo above, one can see the displayed waveforms of the samples, as well as sliders to adjust the volume and “tuning” of each sample. “Tuning” likely refers to pitch for some sounds (like kick) and decay time for others (like hihat).

Jonny’s laptop setup in 2008, with his Kenton Control Freak SE at the front. The sliders on the left are labeled K, R, HH, HI T, LO T, S – corresponding to the samples on his Max patch.

In order to replicate his TR-909 live programming, Jonny uses his Kenton Control Freak Studio Edition. He uses the MIDI controller’s sliders to adjust volume and tuning of the samples, and likely uses the controller’s programmable buttons to program patterns and call up presets. Aside from the ‘Scotch Mist’ version, there isn’t really any good footage of Jonny’s hands during a performance of Videotape, but we get a very good look at Jonny’s use of the Control Freak during the From The Basement performance of The Gloaming – particularly during the intro segment.

To summarize, Jonny controls a sampled drum machine which he built in Max/MSP, providing the song’s primary percussive elements, while Phil adds warm rolled toms as well as kick drum layering. Hope that this helps!

#Videotape #Radiohead #Jonny Greenwood #Phil Selway #Clive Deamer #The Gloaming #In Rainbows

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