Enlarge / A strain of Candida auris cultured in a petri dish at the CDC. (credit: CDC)

A deadly fungal pathogen developed the ability to resist all existing antifungal drugs on three separate occasions in the United States, according to a new report.

The fungus, Candida auris, was already classified as an "urgent threat" by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But the emergence of so-called "pan-resistant" strains raises additional concern, according to the report's authors, who are infectious disease specialists at the CDC and the New York State Department of Health. They published their findings Thursday in the CDC's publication Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

C. auris was first identified in 2009 in Japan and has since popped up in nearly 40 countries. (It arrived in the US by 2013, and New York City, Chicago, and New Jersey have been hit the hardest.) The insidious germ is known for creeping around healthcare facilities and infecting vulnerable patients, causing invasive infections marked by nondescript fever and chills.

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I was cooking this weekend when my eight-year-old son looked up from the couch, where he was listening to the Stardew Valley game soundtrack on Apple Music.

"Dad," he announced, "I'm going to read you the name of every song on this album."

"Cool," I said as I minced the garlic.

Enlarge / Helicopter footage of the well from the day after the explosion. (credit: Ohio State Highway Patrol)

In February 2018, an accident at a gas well in Ohio, near the West Virginia border, didn’t make as much national news as it should have. An explosion at the well caused a blowout, with billowing black smoke and gushing natural gas spewing into the air. It didn’t generate as much interest as the three-and-a-half-month-long leak from a California underground gas storage facility in 2015, but a new study published this week shows it was almost as bad.

The study, led by Sudhanshu Pandey at the SRON Netherlands Institute for Space Research, utilized measurements from ESA’s new Sentinel-5P satellite. Although it wasn’t quite officially operational at the time of the accident, the researchers were able to grab data. Unfortunately, although the leak went on for 20 days, there was too much cloud cover to use the data on all but two of those days.

The data, however, is quite good, as this satellite can deliver methane measurements at much higher resolution (about 7 kilometer) than others. The researchers were able to compare against days before the leak and also to compare the levels from upwind and downwind of the leaking well. They also used a simulation including the weather conditions on those days, calculating what the methane plume would look like for different rates of release.

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  Screenshots from the newest Warcraft game.

This week, game developer and publisher Blizzard Entertainment emailed customers who had pre-ordered its upcoming 4K remaster of strategy classic Warcraft III announcing that the game will become playable at 3am PST on January 28, 2020.

The game was previously slated for launch before the end of 2019, but players had begun to suspect some kind of delay when Blizzard didn't provide a firm release date for the game at its otherwise packed BlizzCon conference in early November. The company explained the short delay in a blog post, writing:

Though we've been working hard to get Reforged in your hands before the end of the year, as we started approaching the finish line, we felt we'd need a little extra development time for finishing touches. As always, our goal is to honor the high standards you hold us to.

As recent controversies over crunch in game development have made clear, making triple-A video games is complex and fraught with unexpected roadblocks and ever-shifting scope. Delays like this are common. Some excited players may be frustrated that they have to wait a little longer, but others will be happy to see a focus on quality or saner worker conditions for developers, whichever (if either) the case may be here.

Eccentric mad scientist Rick Sanchez, of Rick and Morty fame, is as notorious for his constant mid-speech belching as he is for his brilliantly eccentric inventions—and for routinely dragging grandson Morty into highly dangerous situations. Now, paralinguistic researcher Brooke Kidner of the University of Southern California has made the first acoustical analysis of Rick's unique speech patterns. She described her work at a meeting of the Acoustical Society of America this week in San Diego.

“Paralinguistics have been shown to carry significant meaning when inserted into conversation, and being able to understand the meanings of these less common sounds can lead to a greater understanding of natural language processing," Kidner said at a press conference.

Kidner's unusual study began with a phonetics seminar course at USC, focusing on non-speech sounds that occur in human speech—groans, gasps, sighs, the infamous "Loser!" sneeze, and so forth—and how we attribute meaning to them (sarcasm, for instance). The instructor noted that burps were an example of non-speech sounds with no meaning. Kidner brought up Rick Sanchez's constant mid-sentence burps in Rick and Morty as a counter-argument, and the instructor encouraged her to investigate further.

Such sounds are technically known as paralanguage (or vocalics), a field pioneered back in the 1950s by George L. Trager, a linguist who worked in the State Department's Foreign Service Institute. Trager was one of the first to acoustically analyze paralinguistic sounds, producing detailed representations for several, including belching. "He acknowledged that belching is a sound that can be talked through," Kidner said. "You can still move the articulators in your mouth to try and make an 'L' or 'T' sound, although it's easier with vowel sounds." In other words, you can keep talking mid-burp.

That's the hallmark of Rick's speech patterns ("burp-talking") on Rick and Morty—possible due to alcoholic gastritis, according to one theory, since the character drinks a lot. Series co-creator Justin Roiland voices both main characters and has said that the tic started when he burped accidentally while recording voices for an animated short satirizing Back to the Future. When Rick and Morty was in development, he adapted the burping to Rick's character, although it took a bit of trial and error before the creators realized the optimal BPM (burps per minute) for that first season. Roiland is not a natural-born belcher, however. "I can't burp on command," he told Vice in 2015. "I have to sit there with a low-calorie beer and a bottle of water and blow air into my stomach. It's disgusting."

What Trager did not do in his early research was determine what such sounds would look like on a wave grammar spectrogram, according to Kidner. Specifically, he wasn't able to identify the acoustic identifiers for belching. So Kidner focused her efforts on filling that knowledge gap. Belching is a so-called "laryngeal vocalization" that occurs at or below the glottis in the throat, with an acoustic profile similar in many ways to "vocal fry." (Think Britney Spears croaking out “Oh, baby, baby.”) Belching is just a more extreme version.

For instance, the glottal pulses per second for normal speech (modal voice) is around 100-105 GPPS (glottal pulses per second); for vocal fry, it is between 100 to 135 GPPS, while belching averaged out to 140 GPPS but was often much higher. The acoustical qualities of a burp also include "jitter" and "shimmer," both of which relate to the instability of the frequency and amplitude of sounds. Burps tend to be low frequency compared to normal speech, per Kidner, on the order of 300Hz, and much more erratic and unstable, making it difficult to make accurate measurements. The jitter is 4 percent higher than normal speech, and shimmer is 15 percent higher.

Once Kidner had determined the three primary acoustic identifiers for a burp—at least 144 glottal pulses per second, jitter of at least 4 percent, and shimmer of at least 15 percent compared to normal speech—she was able to apply that criteria to her data set of the many potential burps she had identified from Rick and Morty. She found that most of the 200 or so sounds were not technically burps by this definition but rather other kinds of paralinguistic sounds. And Rick's mid-speech belches serve to express emotion, or agreement, for instance. They tend to appear in the same places where a speaker might use "um," "like," "err," or similar vocalization.

Kidner acknowledges that her criteria should not be considered the final word on what constitutes any belch anywhere. "There is inherent instability in the articulatory nature of belching," she said. "I was confident enough to put these [criteria] forward within this data set. For this speaker, these are the acoustic parameters for belching as it appears in the speech stream." Perhaps for the next phase of her research, Kidner can apply her analysis to the burping repertoire of Barney Grumble on The Simpsons, just for comparison.