Gazette Daily News Podcast, Dec. 25-26

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Merry Christmas! This is your weekend news update from The Gazette for Dec. 25 and 26.

There’s a slight chance to see a little snow and rain fall this morning before 7, though anything that falls will be light, according to the National Weather Service’s Quad Cities’ bureau. It will be mostly cloudy to start the day then gradually becoming sunny, with a high near 43. Chance of precipitation is 30%. Saturday night will be mostly clear, with a low around 23. Southwest wind around 5 mph becoming calm.

Sunday: Increasing clouds, with a high near 41. Light and variable wind increasing to 10 to 15 mph in the morning. Winds could gust as high as 25 mph. Sunday night: A chance of rain between 7 p.m. and 1 a.m. It will be mostly cloudy, with a low around 33. Chance of precipitation is 40%.

A new high-powered, NASA-led infrared telescope with a sun shield the size of a tennis court is set to launch this morning, with expectations of revolutionizing astrophysics by expanding the science around how galaxies formed and enabling a glimpse back in time to billions and billions of years ago.

University of Iowa astrophysicist and assistant professor Keri Hoadley says the James Webb Space Telescope will allow scientists to see further back in time than the Hubble Space Telescope that’s been orbiting Earth for nearly 32 years.

Hoadley is among the scientists worldwide who have applied for and eventually hope to use the telescope in their research over its anticipated seven to 10 years orbiting the sun, about 1 million miles from Earth.

The launch is expected to happen between 6:20 and 6:52 Iowa time this morning from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana, located in a rainforest-heavy region of South America. You can find NASA’s livestream in this story on thegazette.com.

The telescope will orbit the sun — instead of Earth, like Hubble — pushing it much farther into space. It’s 100 times more powerful than Hubble, and its camera has a focal length of 131.4 meters — nearly 2.5 times the Hubble focal length and 2,620 times the standard camera’s 50 mm focal length.

The Iowa Capital Dispatch reports Iowa is expected to spend more than $9 million to place 100 out-of-state nurses and respiratory therapists at the state’s larger health care facilities for six weeks of the latest spike of COVID-19 hospitalizations.

The state agreed early this month to pay Kansas-based Favorite Healthcare Staffing $220 per hour for the nurses the company supplies, with the expectation that the nurses will work 20 hours of overtime each week at the rate of $330 per hour, according to Iowa Department of Public Health spokesperson Sarah Ekstrand.

The contract equals over $15,000 per week per nurse the state will pay Favorite Healthcare Staffing. The company acts as a go-between that solicits freelance nurses for hospitals. The company pays the nurses and provides housing for them, most often at hotels, according to recent job listings.

Not since the country’s founding has the population come to nearly a halt as it did in the first year of the pandemic, with 25 states showing a drop from July 2020 to July 2021. The United States grew by just 0.1 percent, with only an additional 392,665 added to the U.S. population during that time.

Iowa is one of the states that grew in population, adding 4,410 people, a 0.1 percent growth.

More than 800,000 people have died in the U.S.since the pandemic began — 7,799 of them in Iowa — driving the overall death toll up. At the same time, the birthrate was already at a low before the pandemic began, and the Census Bureau said it was expected to drop even more. In Iowa, the birthrate and the death rate were, as of 2020, the same, meaning, the same number of people who were born matched the number of people who died.

While Iowa’s estimate still is low, it still is the fourth-largest state in the Midwest in population growth between July 2020 and July 2021. Of the 11 states in the Midwest, five of them lost population between those two dates. Illinois’ population dropped the most in the Midwest, by 113,766, a 0.9 percent decline. Indiana had the highest growth of Midwest states, adding 20,341, 0.3 percent increase.