Heineken is to cut one-tenth of its staff in a bid to stem losses from a coronavirus-hit 2020.

Heineken's job cuts were announced alongside sales and profits declines for 2020

The reduction, which will affect about 8,000 employees out of a total Heineken headcount of 86,000, forms part of a EUR2bn (US$2.4bn) cost-cutting programme over three years announced today, alongside full-year results. Staff at Heineken's head office look set to be disproportionally hit by the move, with personnel costs in Amsterdam in line for a 20% reduction.

The head office changes, first signalled in October last year, will take place before the end of March.

Also included in the cost-cutting programme, called 'Evergreen', is a move to strip out SKUs to "reduce complexity", Heineken said. Commercial commitments will be reviewed to tackle "least effective spend", the brewer added.

The cuts are in response to one of Heineken's most challenging years as the coronavirus pandemic closed bars and restaurants around the world and switched consumer demand to online and grocery channels. In today's results, Heineken's sales dropped by almost 12% in calender-2020 as volumes fell by 8%. In the same period, net profits slumped by almost 50%.

Heineken said the cuts aim to revive the brewer's operating profit margins, which dropped by almost five percentage points in 2020 to 12.3%. The company has set a 17% operating profit margin target for 2023.

Meanwhile, the group will take a leaf out of Molson Coors Beverage Co's recent playbook and target areas of growth beyond beer. In 2019, Molson Coors pledged to be more than just a brewer and started launching new products in categories including hard seltzer and RTD cocktails.

Today, Heineken said it will "stretch beer and move beyond beer" with plans to expand the international roll-out of alcohol-freeHeineken 0.0 and to investigate non-beer launches. As an example, the company pointed to its launch in September last year of Pure Piraa hard seltzer in Mexico and New Zealand.

Commenting on the cost-cutting programme, CEO Dolf van den Brink said EverGreen leverages "both our strengths and new opportunities to chart our next chapter of growth".

Van den Brink added: "Firmly putting customers and consumers at the core, we aim to continually enhance and expand our portfolio and footprint. We are stepping up our focus on continuous productivity improvements and raising our environmental and social sustainability ambitions."

Bernstein analyst Trevor Stirling said the EUR2bn cost-cutting plan was larger than expected. Bernstein had forecast a cut of EUR500m.

What's coming up in beer in 2021? - Predictions for the Year Ahead

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Heineken to shed 8,000 jobs in revival plan | Beverage Industry News | just-drinks - just-drinks.com

Cleveland is eventually dropping theIndiansbranding but will continue to use the name until a new moniker and branding have been finalized, according to Team Owner and Chairman Paul Dolan.

The rebranding is not a surprise: in July the team announced it wouldreexamine the use of a racially inappropriate name and brandingduring a time of social justice. The use of the Indians name has been a controversial one for several years now, and when the team announced a reexamination, the assumption in baseball was that new branding would be the inevitable result.

This certainly has been the year of social justice in professional sports, including baseball. Earlier this summer theMinnesota Twinstook down a statue offormer team owner Calvin Griffith at Target Field due to his racist legacy, while theUniversity of CincinnatiremovedMarge Schotts name from the schools ballpark for the same reason. (Our story here.) Prior efforts includedthe renaming ofYawkey Wayback to its original name,Jersey Street,after the Boston Red Sox petitioned to change it as a way to distance the team from former owner Tom Yawkeys racist past.

The Indians had previously struggled with a problematic part of its team branding: Chief Wahoo.It took until 2018 for the team to downplay Chief Wahooon team uniforms, branding and marketing. However, the idea of dropping the logo completely had previously been met with some reluctance from Indianschairman and chief executivePaul Dolan, even asMajor League Baseball commissionerRob Manfredincreased pressure on the team to get rid of Chief Wahoo.

Its been the Cleveland Indians since 1915. Before that the team had been known by a variety of names since launching as an original American League team in 1901: Blues, Broncos, Naps, and our favorite: the Molly McGuires. The Indians name came as a result of a decision by local sportswriters recruited by the team owner: the rationale given at the time in the Cleveland Plain Dealer was that the team name was to honor former Cleveland Spiders player Louis Sockalexis, regarded as the first American Indian to play professional baseball.

RELATED STORIES: Cleveland to reexamine Indians name, branding;Rethinking ballpark branding in #BLM times;Examining tangled legacies at sports facilities in a #BLM world

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Cleveland to shed Indians name soon: report - Ballpark Digest

Researchers have revealed how the brain encodes time and place into memories in the latest study conducted by the University of Texas.

The findings published in PNAS and Science could eventually provide the basis for new treatments to combat memory loss from conditions such as traumatic brain injury or Alzheimer's disease.

Also read:Blood test could predict Alzheimer's disease 4 years before symptoms begin

About 10 years prior, a gathering of neurons known as "time cells" was found in rodents. These cells seem to assume an extraordinary part in chronicle when occasions occur, permitting the cerebrum to accurately check the request for what occurs in a wordy memory.

Situated in the cerebrum's hippocampus, these phones show a trademark movement design while the creatures are encoding and reviewing occasions, clarifies Bradley Lega, a partner teacher of a neurological medical procedure at University of Texas Southwestern Medical School (UTSW) and senior creator of the PNAS study.

By terminating in a reproducible arrangement, they permit the cerebrum to coordinate when occasions occur, Lega says. The circumstance of their terminating is constrained by 5 Hz cerebrum waves, called theta motions, in a cycle known as precession.

Also read:Not sleeping enough? Your brain might be eating itself

Lega examined whether people likewise have time cells by utilizing a memory task that sets solid expectations for time-related data. Lega and his associates enlisted volunteers from the Epilepsy Monitoring Unit at UT Southwestern's Peter O'Donnell Jr. Mind Institute, where epilepsy patients remain for a few days before the medical procedure to eliminate harmed portions of their cerebrums that flash seizures. Cathodes embedded in these patients' cerebrums assist their specialists with recognizing the seizure foci and furthermore give important data on the mind's internal functions, Lega says.

While recording electrical movement from the hippocampus in 27 volunteers' cerebrums, what the group discovered was energizing: Not just did they recognize a powerful populace of time cells, however, the terminating of these phones anticipated how well people had the option to connect words together as expected (a marvel called fleeting bunching). At last, these cells seem to show stage precession in people, as anticipated.

"For quite a long time researchers have suggested that time cells resemble the magic that binds recollections of occasions in our lives," as indicated by Lega. "This finding explicitly underpins that thought in an exquisite manner."

In the second examination in Science, Brad Pfeiffer, associate educator of neuroscience, driven a group researching place cellsa populace of hippocampal cells in the two creatures and people that records where occasions happen.

Analysts have since quite a while ago referred to that as creatures travel a way they've been on previously, neurons encoding various areas along the way will fire in succession much like time cells fire in the request for worldly occasions, Pfeiffer clarifies. Likewise, while rodents are effectively investigating a climate, place cells are additionally coordinated into "small scale arrangements" that speak to a virtual compass of areas in front of the rodent. These radar-like ranges happen about 8-10 times each second and are believed to be a mind system for foreseeing promptly impending occasions or results.

Before this examination, it was realized that when rodents quit running, place cells would frequently reactivate in long groupings that seemed to replay the rodent's related knowledge in the opposite. While these "converse replay" occasions were known to be significant for memory development, it was hazy how the hippocampus had the option to create such successions. For sure, impressive work had shown that experience ought to fortify forward, "look forward" successions, however, debilitate switch replay occasions.

To decide how these retrogressive and forward recollections cooperate, Pfeiffer and his associates set anodes in the hippocampi of rodents, at that point permitted them to investigate two better places: a square field and a long, straight track. To urge them to travel through these spaces, they put wells with chocolate milk at different spots. They at that point broke down the creatures' place cell action to perceive how it compared to their areas.

Specific neurons terminated as the rodents meandered through these spaces, encoding data on spot. These equivalent neurons terminated in a similar arrangement as the rodents remembered their ways, and occasionally terminated backward as they finished various legs of their excursions. In any case, investigating the information, the specialists discovered something new: As the rodents traveled through these spaces, their neurons showed forward, prescient smaller than normal successions, yet in addition in reverse, review scaled-down arrangements. The forward and in reverse groupings rotated with one another, each taking a couple of dozen milliseconds to finish.

"While these creatures were pushing ahead, their cerebrums were continually exchanging between expecting what might occur straightaway and reviewing what simply occurred, all inside portion of-a-second time spans," Pfeiffer says.

Pfeiffer and his group are at present examining what inputs these cells are accepting from different pieces of the cerebrum that cause them to act in these forward or turn around designs.

In principle, he says, it very well may be conceivable to capture this framework to help the mind review where an occasion occurred with greater constancy. Essentially, adds Lega, incitement strategies may in the end have the option to copy the exact designing of time cells to help individuals all the more precisely recollect fleeting successions of occasions.

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Study sheds light on how brain encodes time and place into memories - WION

Karl-Anthony Towns sheds tears as he plays in first game since losing mother to COVID-19

Taking the court for the first time since he lost his mother and several other family members to COVID-19, Karl-Anthony Towns was in tears during warm-ups.

MINNEAPOLIS (FOX 9) - Taking to the court for the first time since losing his mother and other close family members to COVID-19, Karl-Anthony Towns was in tears during pre-game ceremonies.

Saturday night, as players were announced at the Target Center for the Wolves preseason opener versus the Grizzlies, Towns was seen sitting on the bench in tears. Coaches, staff, and his teammates all moved to comfort Towns as the Wolves center tried to wipe away tears.

Karl-Anthony Towns #32 of the Minnesota Timberwolves hugs his parents, Karl and Jackie Towns after winning the game against the Denver Nuggets of the game on April 11, 2018 at the Target Center in Minneapolis. (Hannah Foslien / Getty Images)

Saturday was the first time the team has played since the NBA's COVID-19 shutdown in March. Shortlyafter, his mother passed away in April. Since that point, he's also lost six other close family members.Speaking during training camp, Towns explained how important it was to see his mom on the sidelines as he played basketball.

"I played this game more because I just love watching my family members see me play a game that I was very successful and good at," Towns explained earlier this month. "It always brought a smile for me when I saw my mom at the baseline or in the stands having a good time."

"I've lost a lot," Towns lamented. "Close family members, people who have raised me, who have gotten me here."

When asked if basketball could provide a sort of therapy for him, Towns said he didn't see it that way.

"It's going to be hard to play," he added. "It's going to be hard to say this is therapy. I don't think this will ever be therapy again for me again. But it gives me a chance to re-live good memories I've had."

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Karl-Anthony Towns sheds tears as he plays in first game since losing mother to COVID-19 - FOX 9

Looking for a unique, warm and sustainable Christmas present?

Consider a handcrafted turkey feather blanket, although you likely wont have the time, nor the skills, to make one this Christmas.

Ah well, there is always 2021. Which begs the question, how many turkey feathers would you need?

Roughly 11,500, according to new research from archaeologists at Washington State University.

The good news? Those feathers could come from Spokanes resident turkey population. Youd need anywhere between four and 10 turkeys and you wouldnt have to kill them.

The study, published in the Journal of Archaeological Science in late November, examined the remnants of an 800-year-old 4-by-3-foot blanket housed in the Edge of the Cedars State Park Museum in Blanding, Utah.

The blanket is an artifact of the Pueblo people, predecessors to the modern Hopi, Zuni and Rio Grande Pueblo nations. Although the turkey feathers are long gone likely victims of dermestid beetle larvae the shafts of the feathers are still visible, tightly wound around yucca fiber cords.

In a region with extreme temperature swings, warm and durable blankets were a must.

The research further highlights the synergistic relationship between Indigenous peoples in the Southwest and turkeys, shedding light on the economic and social importance of the bird, said Bill Lipe, a retired WSU anthropologist and lead author of the study.

Bill and his colleagues research on turkey feather blankets is really a significant and exciting contribution, said Cyler Conrad, an archaeologist at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.

Conrad, who grew up in Spokane, studies ancient evidence of turkeys throughout the Southwest. He was not involved in the WSU study.

The findings, he said, helps contextualize the role and importance of turkeys in a process which is often not considered in turkey studies blanket manufacturing.

For the past few decades, archaeological research has focused on domestication, husbandry and management questions. While important, that hasnt directly examined the cultural and economic impact of the turkey-human relationship Conrad said.

Indigenous people in the American Southwest and the Mexican northwest hunted wild turkeys and raised domestic turkeys. They used turkey eggs for food, and then used the crushed-up shells to make paints and dyes.

What did they paint?

Turkeys.

Turkeys held a very special role in past societies, just as they do in modern Native American communities, Conrad said.

According to the WSU study, turkey feather blankets became popular roughly 2,000 years ago. Thats when blankets or robes relying on turkey feathers as the insulating medium began to replace those made with strips of rabbit fur.

Archaeologists believe turkeys were first domesticated in south-central Mexico around 800 BCE by pre-Aztecan people and again in the Southwest of the United States in 200 BCE.

The birds likely were first valued for their feathers, not their meat. The vibrant plumage was used in ceremonies and to make robes, blankets and more.

Exactly how turkeys were domesticated isnt known, but its possible a rafter of turkeys the technical term for a group of the birds was hanging out by a village eating garbage and never left.

As the Pueblo farming communities flourished, its likely that every member of an ancestral Pueblo community had a blanket.

Although turkeys would later become an important food source, they were initially domesticated for their feathers and eggs. Fragments of turkey bones found in household garbage piles, indicating consumption, only start to regularly appear in the 1100s and 1200s C.E.

Many of the turkey bones reported from sites dating to earlier periods are whole skeletons from mature birds that were intentionally buried, the study stated. Episodes of ritual sacrifice of intact adults and juvenile turkeys have also been reported.

That fact pattern led Lipe to believe that the feathers used for the blankets were taken from living birds.

In our article, we emphasize that the pre-molt loss of connections to the blood supply and nerves does make it possible for mature feathers to be (gently) collected from live birds without freaking them out, and we think that this was primarily how feathers would have been collected for use in making blankets, Lipe said in an email.

This is the same process used to ethically harvest goose down.

By the time Columbus came to the Americas in 1492, it is estimated there were 10 million wild and domestic birds on the continent. Historians dont know who brought the first turkeys to Europe, but the birds proved popular, both as ornamentation and sustenance.

Meanwhile, the ancient domesticated turkey in the Southwest, known as the Pueblo domesticated turkey or M. gallopavo ssp., likely fell victim to European violence. As Indigenous peoples succumbed to disease, slavery and the sword, their turkeys went extinct, as did Indigenous technologies and traditions.

The reliance on turkeys ceremonially and for attire was replaced by the use of European livestock, namely chickens and sheep. By 1920, turkeys were gone from 18 of the 39 states in which theyd originally lived. At their lowest, turkey numbers were generously estimated at 200,000, just 2% of the pre-European population. Throughout the continent, their numbers had declined by 90%, according to the National Wild Turkey Federation.

That started to change in the 1960s.

Turkeys arent native to the Spokane region, but starting in the 1960s they were introduced as part of a widespread conservation effort.

In recreating the blanket-making process, the WSU researchers received feathers from Merriam turkeys killed by hunters in Latah County, Idaho.

But what of the actual blanket-making process?

Its time intensive.

The blanket examined by Lipe and his colleagues was made by wrapping the 11,500 downy feathers around nearly 200 yards of yucca fiber cord. Freshly plucked turkey feathers are flexible. As they age, however, they harden. In all likelihood, feathers were collected, dried and then soaked before being wrapped.

Mary Weahkee, an archaeologist and anthropologist with the New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs, has recreated turkey-feather blankets, and consulted on the WSU study.

Its tedious, Ill tell you that, she said.

In 2018, she created a 2-by-3-foot blanket, slightly smaller than the blanket examined by Lipe. That took 18 months and 17,000 feathers from 68 turkeys. She was able to add feathers at about a foot of warp length per hour.

But the result is impressive, she said. The downy feathers trap heat and are soft to the touch. Weahkee used ground-up yucca to wash the feathers, a sort of natural shampoo. That stripped any grease or odors from the feathers. Whats more, most insects avoid yucca, which meant that even if the turkey feathers were eaten, You still had the cordage, so you didnt have to spin another 190 feet, she said.

The science behind it is fascinating.

Weahkee, who is of Comanche and Santa Clara descent, teaches these traditional technologies to Native school children in New Mexico. Research like the WSU study furthers her efforts at reviving an ancient technology.

I looked at how the ancestors were creative and patient, she told the New Mexico Wildlife magazine in 2018. Its a labor of love.

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Washington State University research sheds light on indigenous turkey technology - Sports and Weather Right Now

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SEOUL, South Korea -- Contact tracers in South Korea are working around the clock to do anything they can to mitigate the spread of COVID-19. From being on the phone all day to questioning COVID-19 patients about the places they have been to interrogating people about who they have been in contact since their first symptoms. Their work never stops.

Per one confirmed patient, contact tracers have to fact check between 10 to 20 traces and, when basic information is confirmed through a phone call, they have to follow that up in person to see if the representations that were disclosed were accurate.

It even sometimes takes replaying surveillance camera footage, speaking to witnesses and doing everything possible to collect all of the breadcrumbs a COVID-19 patient has left on the trail -- just like a detective.

South Korea has one of the most vigorous contact tracing systems in the world and authorities collect every piece of personal data possible to find any connecting link between COVID-19 patients in order to slow down the spread of the pandemic. Contact tracers will also call anyone who has been in contact with a patient and advise them to self-quarantine and get tested preemptively.

Posters on precautions against the coronavirus are displayed at a shopping street in Seoul, South Korea, Dec. 9, 2020. South Korea is experiencing a resurgence of the coronavirus.

On average, from the week between Dec. 2 to Dec. 8, 584 people were confirmed with COVID-19 each day last week in South Korea.

At Gangnam Public Health center, which handles the largest number of COVID-19 tests each day in South Korea, there are four doctors -- officially called Epidemics Intelligence Service (EIS) officers -- who make the initial phone call to COVID-19 patients. They are in charge of collecting sensitive personal data such as medical hand family history.

"I collect a detailed path of movement since two days prior to the first symptom. Who they dined with, how much they paid for, who they live with at home and the workplace every detail possible," Dr. Oum Seonmee, a dentist who was temporarily designated a contact tracer by authorities in April to cope with the rise in patients, told ABC News. "'Were you wearing a mask at the time?' is the key question."

Newly infected patients are transported to Seoul Medical Center by ambulances in Seoul, South Korea, Dec. 9, 2020.

It takes an entire public health center just to keep up with the vigorous contact tracing.

A total 305 government designated EIS officers often fall short of the manpower needed to keep the patients numbers in check. That is when civil servants are mobilized to take on the contact tracing role by making phone calls to contacts and going off to do field research for fact checking.

As soon as personal traces have been confirmed through a doctor's questioning, civil servants team up to do field research as contact tracers.

They verify the paths and cross check the testimony from patients and see if there's any additional people who need to be quarantined after contact -- and the penalty for not being truthful to contact tracers is heavy.

"We remind them that you could be fined up to 18,000 U.S. dollars or could be sent to prison for up to two years, under the Infectious Diseases Control and Preventions Act," Park Geon, a public nurse at Gangnam Public Health Center who has been working nonstop since the number of COVID19 patients has been on the rise, told ABC News.

Though some are unwilling to cooperate with authorities, there's little thought in South Korea that it could be an invasion of privacy.

A previously crowded shopping street is nearly empty after heightened social distancing rules were enforced amid the COVID-19 pandemic in Seoul, South Korea, Dec. 8, 2020.

"It was a relief to know that the government was actually tracking people," Steven Kim, a college student who received a call from the contact tracers in May, told ABC News. "[Authorities] offered me free testing even though I didn't have any symptoms and that was reassuring because there are many cases of asymptomatic patients and I could be one of them spreading the disease without noticing."

South Korean people in general take huge pride in what they achieved so far when it comes to containing the spread of COVID-19 and seem to appreciate the government's effort in heavy contact tracing. Frequently, there is a tendency to think that it was an individual's civic duty to cooperate with authorities on these matters.

"The majority of Korean people are supporting this type of very aggressive contact tracing at the potential cost or expense of privacy," Kwon Soonman, public health professor at Seoul National University, told ABC News. "There is a kind of group pressure that I should not harm my neighbor, because it's an infectious disease."

Experts agree, however, that contact tracing is only part of slowing down the pandemic and until a vaccine is accessible to everyone, contact tracing, along with masks and social distancing, will be key to protecting people from the pandemic.

ABC News' Joohee Cho, Aaron Kwon and HyunJoo Haley Yang contributed to this report.

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South Korea's contact tracing sheds light on extensive efforts to slow spread of COVID-19 - ABC News

New research sheds light on the origin and early evolution of pterosaurs flying reptiles that occupied the skies for 150 million years during the Age of Dinosaurs. In a paper published in Nature, team of scientists including Stony Brooks Alan H. Turnerintroduce strong evidence that the closest relatives of pterosaurs are a poorly known group of dinosaur precursors called lagerpetids, which lived across the ancient supercontinent Pangea during much of the Triassic Period, from ~237 to ~210 million years ago.

The origin of pterosaurs has been one of the major mysteries in vertebrate history, because close relatives have not been satisfactorily identified. The papers demonstrate that a group of dinosaur precursors, lagerpetids, are more closely related to pterosaurs than any other reptile group.

Previously known mostly from hip and hindlimb bones, newly discovered skull and forelimb remains help tie their skeletal features to those of early pterosaurs. Furthermore, new technological advances (micro Computed Tomography [CT] scanning) has allowed reconstruction of their brains and sensory systems within the skull (e.g., inner ear), revealing that they also match well to those of pterosaurs.

Pterosaurs appear in the fossil record already showing that they were fully adapted for flight, said Turner, Associate Professor in the Department of Anatomical Sciences in the Renaissance School of Medicine at Stony Brook University and study co-author. This means they look really different from any of the other reptile groups at the time. That makes piecing together their evolutionary origins quite difficult.

Collaborative field excavations by Dr. Turner and colleagues conducted over the last 15 years in Upper Triassic rocks exposed in Ghost Ranch, New Mexico provided key fossils for the study. One particularly important discovery was of a small dinosaur precursor, namedDromomeron.Dromomeronbelongs to a group of dinosaur precursors called Lagerpetids. Since the initial discovery, new lagerpetid bones have been discovered in North America, Brazil, Argentina, and Madagascar.

Any one of these species alone wasnt enough to solve the pterosaur puzzle, Turner said. We needed to join information from our five different research groups spread across three continents to get all the pieces of this puzzle in place.

The evolutionary relationships revealed create a new paradigm for understanding the origin of pterosaurs, providing a completely new framework for the study of the origin of these animals and their flight capabilities.

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Research Sheds Light on Origins of Ancient Pterosaurs | | SBU News - Stony Brook News

GE Aviation found itself distributing sheds this week.

The company has donated five wooden sheds initially built for COVID-19 screenings to area organizations, exposing a wider need in the process.

I have about 40 emails from people looking for sheds, GE business leader Drew Smith said.

Smith said GE assembled the sheds back in April.

We basically had tents set up at the mall where we did COVID screening, he said. We wanted to get back on our own property.

The maintenance staff built the wooden sheds, which he said were roughly 12 feet by 16 feet and insulated, with space to install a heater or air conditioner. They were made to hold one employee at a time along with the person tasked with taking employee temperatures before employees could enter the factory. About a month ago, Smith said, the company has acquired thermal scanners and moved the screening process indoors.

They withstood all the weather we had this year, including the big wind storms, Smith said.

With no more use for the sheds itself, Smith said the company figured there had to be organizations in the area that could use them. Inquiries led him to Project VISION, which sent a notice out on its mailing list.

I immediately had this mad rush of emails in my inbox of interest in sheds by nonprofits in Rutland County, he said. Within 24 hours, we had a home for all of them, and we have a backlog list.

Smith said the sheds were awarded on a first-come, first-served basis.

We didnt want to decide who needs a shed the most, he said. Every organization had a really specific special need.

The sheds wound up going to Northeast Primary School, Northwood Park, Alliance Community Fellowship, Habitat for Humanity and Kinder Way Farm Sanctuary.

With the changing health situation, we are spending a lot of time outdoors, said Susanne Engels, principal at Northeast Primary School. The more were learning outside, the more were realizing the value of convenient storage.

Also, Engels said the need for room for social distancing has placed a premium on indoor storage space, making the schools new shed doubly valuable.

gordon.dritschilo

@rutlandherald.com

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GE shed giveaway sparks heavy interest | Pandemic 2020 - Rutland Herald

A scientist originally from Nova Scotia was part of a Massachusetts-based team that used genetic fingerprinting to track the devastating spread of COVID-19 from a single event.

A Biogen corporate conference held at a Boston hotel in February led to an estimated 245,000 infections in 29 U.S. states and several countries around the world by Nov. 1.

Bronwyn MacInnis, director of pathogen genomic surveillance at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Mass., led a team that used genetic fingerprinting to track the spread of the virus from the Boston conference.

MacInnis grew up in Lower Sackville and credits her high school biology teacher, Roger O'Neil, with sparking her love of biology and curiosity aboutthe natural world.

That passion led her to complete an undergraduate degree in biology at Dalhousie.

MacInnis said it was an exciting time in genomicsas it was moving from being a theoretical field to one with real-world applications.

Inspired by the life-saving possibilities of genomic research, she went on to complete graduate degrees in molecular and cellular genetics at University of Alberta.

After following work opportunities in California and the U.K., she said the "gravitational force" of Nova Scotia drew her back to the East Coast.

When an opportunity arose for her to continue her work in Boston, a major biotech centre, she jumped at the opportunity to be closer to her family.

"It's now either a short flight or a long drive home depending on how you look at it," she said, adding that if an opportunity ever arose to work in Nova Scotia she would move back in a heartbeat.

She is the senior author of thestudy that waspublished in the journal Science on Dec. 10. The study paints a disturbing picture ofhow easily and quickly COVID-19 spreads.

"We're looking at little genetic markers, like a genetic fingerprint, that enable us to distinguishthe virus in one infection in one individual from another," she said.

"This is a new kind of approach to infectious disease epidemiology, where we use the DNA, the genetic sequence of the pathogens and viruses, to understand how they're evolving and spreading through communities."

She said the process was akin to building a virus "family tree."

MacInnis said when COVID-19 cases started to pop up in the state, the Massachusetts Department of Public Health and the Massachusetts General Hospital would sendsamples to her institute to be sequenced.

After looking at the genomic sequence of the viruses and identifying the COVID-19 variant, they were able to track the spread back to the conference and follow its progress.

She described the circumstances that led to the spread of the virus following the conference as a "perfect storm of unfortunate events."

Because the conference was held in the early days of the pandemic, measures like physical distancing, avoiding large gatherings and maskwearing were not yet in place.

"There was just a lot of opportunity for the virus to spread undetected widely at that time," MacInnis said.

Conference participants from across the U.S. and around the world returned home when the event ended, taking the virus with them.

It also led to widespread community transmission throughout the Boston area as well, including to homeless shelters and other high-risk communities.

The Boston conferenceis categorized as a superspreader event.

In a year when most people have been exposed to a slew of pandemic-related terms, MacInnis said the term has a specific meaning in the context of the study.

"Epidemiologically, we use that word when a single individualcase leads to many onward infections in a very short amount of time and often associated with a particular event or gathering," she said.

MacInnis said although the extent of the spread from a single event was dramatic, it wasn't shocking to her as it reflects infectious disease epidemiology at work.

She described seeing the transmission and reconstructing it with data as "kind of mind blowing."

MacInnis said there are practical applications of this new genetic approach to tracking infectious diseases and said it is a new tool in thetoolkit in thefight against COVID-19.

She said this study in particular offers an important"cautionary tale" in terms of public awareness and public health messaging, especially in the holiday season.

In the case of her home province, MacInnis said she was "deeply impressed" and very proud of Nova Scotia's ability to keep COVID-19 in check.

She said while there are features of the province, like a relatively small and fairly isolated population, that made containment easier, the political and public will also played a big role.

MacInnis said she often refers her colleagues to Nova Scotia when discussing preventative measures and the "receptivity of the public to take them up and enforce them."

"I have no doubt that those practices have largely protectedthe province from thedevastating experience that others are grappling with," she said

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Nova Scotian researcher sheds light on Boston COVID-19 superspreader event - CBC.ca

Want to learn about the likely economic outcomes for2021?Looking for sector insights for construction and agricultural machinery, the various forecast scenarios for the remainder of the year and the drivers behind the industries?

Consider attending this week's free 2021 Manufacturing Outlook Webinar, slated for Wednesday, Dec. 16 at 12:301:30 p.m. CST.

This is the first time that the AEM MI department will be presenting jointly with the economists of Oxford Economics, providing quantitative outlooks from the U.S. Ag and CE Machinery Outlook reports, as well as qualitative insights from AEMs quarterly industry conditions reports, said AEM Director of Market Intelligence Benjamin Duyck.

Register now.

Oxford Economics EconomistChloe Parkinsand Director of Industry ServicesMark Killion, will provide expert analysis of theU.S. Ag and CE Machinery Outlook Reports. In addition,Duyck will present the latest construction market insights and information to help prepare you to navigate the disruptive trends set to impact your business in the year ahead.

Through AEMs partnership with Oxford Economics, the quarterly Agriculture and Construction Machinery Outlook reports offer information on the evolution of the U.S. market, tied to trends in key industry drivers, such as industry structure, trade and major events.

For more information, contact AEM's Benjamin Duyck at bduyck@aem.org.

Subscribe to the AEM Industry Advisorfor the latest information about AEM member offerings.

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Attention AEM Members: Manufacturing Outlook Webinar To Shed Light on Likely Economic Outcomes for 2021 - Association of Equipment Manufacturers (AEM)