Links of Interest – Cracking a Measles Vaccine Mystery, Killing Bin Laden, WWII Story

Here are some links I’ve found interesting during the past couple of days:

Scientists Crack A 50-Year-Old Mystery About The Measles Vaccine – NPR.org

Like many viruses, measles is known to suppress the immune system for a few weeks after an infection. But previous studies in monkeys have suggested that measles takes this suppression to a whole new level: It erases immune protection to other diseases, Mina says. ~ NPR

The Killing of Osama Bin Laden

It’s been four years since a group of US Navy Seals assassinated Osama bin Laden in a night raid on a high-walled compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The killing was the high point of Obama’s first term, and a major factor in his re-election. The White House still maintains that the mission was an all-American affair, and that the senior generals of Pakistan’s army and Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) were not told of the raid in advance. This is false, as are many other elements of the Obama administration’s account. The White House’s story might have been written by Lewis Carroll: would bin Laden, target of a massive international manhunt, really decide that a resort town forty miles from Islamabad would be the safest place to live and command al-Qaida’s operations? He was hiding in the open. So America said. ~ The London Review of Books

An Epic Adventure on the Way to WWII – Medium.com

Few of us have had the opportunity to consider that — even before a B-24 flew its first combat mission —she had to be ferried from the United States to Europe under the cloak of secrecy without the benefit of fighter escort or navigation aids. This is the story of one such aircraft — Slick Chick — flown by its freshly trained, but green crew (and a stowaway monkey) as they used dead reckoning, celestial navigation and no small amount of intestinal fortitude to arrive in wartime England after flying over 10,000 miles and braving dense Amazonian jungles, the storm-ravaged Atlantic ocean, vast deserts and being lost in an infamous forbidden city. ~ Medium.com

Review: The Absolutely Optional Apple Watch – Ars Technica
Ars Technica lets us know it’s okay to sit out this first version of the Apple Watch. My plan is to extend the period in the middle of this xkcd comic.