Engineers from Stanford University developed a motorized exoskeleton rig that attaches around the ankle and foot and found that it made running 15 percent easier. "They explained that when the exoskeleton's motor is switched on, it reduces the energy cost of running and allows the user to run longer than they're usually capable of," reports Engadget. "The device can also boost a runner's speed by as much as 10 percent." From the report: Here's how the exoskeleton works: Its motors tug a cable running through the back of the rig from the heel to the calf. That pulls the foot upward during the toe-off, extending the ankle at the end of every step. Team member and Stanford grad student Delaney Miller said: "Powered assistance took off a lot of the energy burden of the calf muscles. It was very springy and very bouncy compared to normal running. Speaking from experience, that feels really good. When the device is providing that assistance, you feel like you could run forever."

140Mandak262Jamuna writes: Elon Musk announced that the Gigafactory in Buffalo, New York, making solar roof tiles and battery packs for home energy storage is switching to making ventilators in collaboration with Medtronic. "Days after offering 1,255 free ventilators to help deal with the coronavirus outbreak, Tesla boss Elon Musk said the company's New York factory will restart to make more," reports CNET.

"Giga New York will reopen for ventilator production as soon as humanly possible. We will do anything in our power to help the citizens of New York," he tweeted on Wednesday. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said the state needs 30,000 ventilators at the peak and they have 400 at hand.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: Scientists warned that the United States someday would become the country hardest hit by the coronavirus pandemic. That moment arrived on Thursday. In the United States, at least 81,321 people are known to have been infected with the coronavirus, including more than 1,000 deaths -- more cases than China, Italy or any other country has seen, according to data gathered by The New York Times.

With 330 million residents, the United States is the world's third most populous nation, meaning it provides a vast pool of people who can potentially get Covid-19, the disease caused by the virus. And it is a sprawling, cacophonous democracy, where states set their own policies and President Trump has sent mixed messages about the scale of the danger and how to fight it, ensuring there was no coherent, unified response to a grave public health threat. A series of missteps and lost opportunities dogged the nation's response. Among them: a failure to take the pandemic seriously even as it engulfed China, a deeply flawed effort to provide broad testing for the virus that left the country blind to the extent of the crisis, and a dire shortage of masks and protective gear to protect doctors and nurses on the front lines, as well as ventilators to keep the critically ill alive. "The world will be a different place when the pandemic is over," the report concludes. It suggests India may become the next global hotspot for virus cases as "it, too, is a vast democracy with deep internal divisions. But its population, 1.3 billion, is far larger, and its people are crowded even more tightly into megacities."

A new consortium of top scientists will be able to use some of the world's most advanced supercomputers to look for solutions. From a report: Advanced computers have defeated chess masters and learned how to pick through mountains of data to recognize faces and voices. Now, a billionaire developer of software and artificial intelligence is teaming up with top universities and companies to see if A.I. can help curb the current and future pandemics. Thomas M. Siebel, founder and chief executive of C3.ai, an artificial intelligence company in Redwood City, Calif., said the public-private consortium would spend $367 million in its initial five years, aiming its first awards at finding ways to slow the new coronavirus that is sweeping the globe. "I cannot imagine a more important use of A.I.," Mr. Siebel said in an interview.

Known as the C3.ai Digital Transformation Institute, the new research consortium includes commitments from Princeton, Carnegie Mellon, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of California, the University of Illinois and the University of Chicago, as well as C3.ai and Microsoft. It seeks to put top scientists onto gargantuan social problems with the help of A.I. -- its first challenge being the pandemic. The new institute will seek new ways of slowing the pathogen's spread, speeding the development of medical treatments, designing and repurposing drugs, planning clinical trials, predicting the disease's evolution, judging the value of interventions, improving public health strategies and finding better ways in the future to fight infectious outbreaks.

According to Johns Hopkins University, there are now more than 510,000 confirmed COVID-19 cases worldwide and more than 22,000 people have died from the new coronavirus. While China still has the most confirmed cases, the United States and Italy are close behind. CBS News reports: In the United States, more than 1,000 people have died and more than 75,000 people have been infected. An unprecedented number of Americans applied for unemployment benefits last week as the virus shuttered businesses and normal life across large swaths of the country came to a halt. Roughly 3.3 million people filed a claim for jobless aid in the week ending March 21 -- a nearly fivefold increase over the previous weekly record set in 1982. The Senate has passed an unprecedented $2 trillion relief package to help workers, businesses and the severely strained health care system survive the pandemic. UPDATE: The United States now leads the world with confirmed coronavirus cases. "[A]t least 81,321 people are known to have been infected with the coronavirus, including more than 1,000 deaths -- more cases than China, Italy or any other country has seen," reports The New York Times.

Isaac Chotiner of The New Yorker interviews Naomi Oreskes, a professor of the history of science at Harvard who has focussed much of her career on examining distrust of science in the U.S.: Chotiner: This idea that we reject science because it clashes with our beliefs or experience -- how does that explain why people in Miami, whose homes are going to be flooded, reject global-warming science? Is it partisanship?

Oreskes: The phrase I used was implicatory denial. What we found in "Merchants of Doubt" was that the original merchants of doubt, the people who started the whole thing, way back in the late nineteen-eighties, didn't want to accept the implication that capitalism, as we know it, had failed -- that climate change was a huge market failure and that there was a need for some kind of significant government intervention in the marketplace to address it. So, rather than accept that implication, they questioned the science. Now these things get complicated. People are complicated. One of the things that's happened with climate change over the last thirty years is that, because climate-change denial got picked up by the Republican Party as a political platform, it became polarized according to partisan politics, which is different than, say, vaccination rejection.

And so then it became a talking point for Republicans, and then it became tribal. So now you have this deeply polarized situation in the United States where your views on climate change align very, very strongly with your party affiliation. And now we see a cognitive dissonance. Let's say you live in Florida, and you're now seeing flooding on a rather regular basis. This is completely consistent with the scientific evidence, but you don't accept it as proof of the science. You say, "Oh, well, we've always had flooding, or maybe it's a natural variable." You come up with excuses not to accept the thing that you don't want to accept.

As the coronavirus pandemic continues to affect people all over the globe, Airbnb is stepping up with a plan to offer free or subsidized housing to people working on the disease's front lines, namely health care professionals, emergency workers and relief personnel. From a report: The company announced today that it will provide "free or subsidized housing" for 100,000 people working as frontline healthcare, relief for first response professionals focused on stemming the COVID-19 crisis. Airbnb's effort will work by allowing Hosts on its platform to opt-in to making their space available, with any fees that Airbnb would normally charge for using its platform waived for those who participate.

"As governments around the world have pushed their citizens away from populated places to slow the spread of Covid-19, they may not have realized that they were also combatting other infectious diseases, such as the seasonal flu," reports Quartz. The data comes from Kinsa Health, a company that collects anonymized thermometer readings from its active user base to estimate the share of people that are ill in different geographies. From the report: By comparing current thermometer readings to historical trends, researchers have used Kinsa's data to predict flu outbreaks weeks before the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's surveillance program, which uses hospitalization records. Recent data clearly show the spread of Covid-19. On March 19, the share of Americans with temperatures indicating they had flu-like symptoms was about 4.9% when it typically would be expected to be about 4.0%. This was likely a result of the spread of Covid-19, according to Kinsa's researchers.

But by March 23, it was down to 3.3%, when it would typically be at 3.7% (the share of fevers decreases quickly at this time of year because of the end of winter). The drop -- from 0.9% above typical flu-like illness rates to 0.4% below -- in just four days is the largest one Kinsa has ever observed in such a short period of time, according to Kinsa CEO Inder Singh. "There is no known precedent for this type of extensive social distancing in recent time," said Singh. "We have nothing to compare this to, but this extreme drop is exactly what we would hope and expect with the measures currently in place."

Scientists have revealed an important mechanism in the repair of DNA double-strand breaks, according to new research published today in eLife. Phys.Org reports: One of the main DNA repair processes is called homologous recombination (HR). This repairs a severe form of DNA damage where both strands of DNA are broken. A protein called Rad51 orchestrates HR, and Rad51 itself is supported by several 'helper' proteins. The researchers started by using yeast cells to study Rad51 and its helper proteins, called Swi5-Sfr1. They genetically engineered yeast cells so that they lacked either Module 1 or Module 2 of Swi5-Sfr1 and found that this prevented DNA repair by HR. This shows that both modules are needed for Rad51 to switch on HR repair.

Next, they purified the Swi5-Sfr1 helper proteins from cells to identify the precise regions within Module 1 that attach to Rad51. Then, by mutating the protein sequence, they were able to modify these regions in a way that prevents Swi5-Sfr1 from attaching to Rad51. Surprisingly, they found that although the mutated helper proteins could not switch on Rad51 in a test tube, yeast cells with these mutations were still able to repair their DNA without problems. This led the team to speculate that another group of helper proteins, which are present in the cell but absent in the test tube, was rescuing the DNA repair process. Previous genetic studies have shown that there are two HR sub-pathways in yeast -- one that depends on Swi5-Sfr1 and another that relies on molecules called Rad51 paralogs. To test whether it was this other HR pathway that was rescuing DNA repair, the team used yeast that lacked the Rad51 paralogs. The results were striking: in yeast with mutant Swi5-Sfr1 and no Rad51 paralogs, the DNA damage was much more severe. This suggests that the damaging effects of mutations to the Swi5-Sfr1 helper complex are suppressed by a second group of helper proteins.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: The $2 trillion stimulus package that the U.S. Senate is working to approve today is aimed at helping the country cope with the massive impact of the coronavirus pandemic. But it also includes at least $1.25 billion for federal research agencies to support scientists trying to better understand coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). In addition, it extends a financial hand to universities that have shut down because of the pandemic, some of which could go to support research that has been disrupted.

Details of the legislation have yet to emerge after Republican and Democratic leaders in Congress worked out their differences in negotiations that ran into the early morning. But a 22-page summary (PDF) released by the Senate Appropriations Committee this morning contains these highlights:

- The National Institutes of Health would receive $945 million for "vaccine, therapeutic, and diagnostic research" on COVID-19 as well as on "the underlying risks to cardiovascular and pulmonary conditions."
- The National Science Foundation would receive $76 million to supplement an ongoing program that allows scientists to jump into the field for pilot studies on all manner of natural disasters.
- The Department of Energy's Office of Science would get $99.5 million to cover the additional costs of operating user facilities at its national laboratories, including support for equipment and staff.
- The U.S. Forest Service would get $3 million to "reestablish experiments impacted by travel restrictions" stemming from the pandemic, including an ongoing forest inventory.

In addition, three research agencies would receive a total of $86 million "to support continuity of operations" affected by COVID-19. NASA would receive $60 million for the costs of rescheduling scientific missions, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration would get $20 million to supplement "life and property related services" within its National Weather Service, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology would receive $6 million to support "research and measurement science" aimed at developing better diagnostics and testing of the coronavirus.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from IEEE Spectrum: Researchers at the Center for Translational Atomaterials (CTAM) at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia, have developed a new graphene-based film that can absorb sunlight with an efficiency of over 90 percent, while simultaneously eliminating most IR thermal emission loss -- the first time such a feat has been reported. The result is an efficient solar heating metamaterial that can heat up rapidly to 83 degrees C (181 degrees F) in an open environment with minimal heat loss. Proposed applications for the film include thermal energy harvesting and storage, thermoelectricity generation, and seawater desalination.

The 3D structured graphene metamaterial (SGM) is composed of a 30-nanometer-thick film of alternating graphene and dielectric layers deposited on a trench-like nanostructure that does double duty as a copper substrate to enhance absorption. More importantly, the substrate is patterned in a matrix arrangement to enable flexible tunability of wavelength-selective absorption. The graphene film is designed to absorb light between 0.28- to 2.5-micrometer wavelengths. And the copper substrate is structured so that it can act as a selective bandpass filter that suppresses the normal emission of internally generated blackbody energy. This retained heat then serves to further raise the metamaterial's temperature. Hence, the SGM can rapidly heat up to 83 degrees C. Should a different temperature be required for a particular application, a new trench nanostructure can be fabricated and tuned to match that specific blackbody wavelength. "The new material also uses less graphene by significantly reducing the film thickness to one third, and its thinness aids in transferring the absorbed heat more efficiently to other media such as water," the report adds. "Additionally, the film is hydrophobic, which fosters self-cleaning, while the graphene layer effectively protects the copper layer from corrosion, helping to extend the metamaterial's lifetime."

The research is published in the journal Nature Communications.

Nuclear scientists in Austria are closing in on new coronavirus testing kits that could dramatically lower the cost and time it takes to diagnose people for the disease. From a report: With Covid-19 tests in short supply in many places, some individuals have turned to private laboratories that can genetically detect the pathogen. That process, called reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction, or RT-PCR, can cost as much as $400 in some private facilities. But the International Atomic Energy Agency expects it can produce Covid-19 tests costing as little as 10 euros ($10.83) that yield a diagnosis within hours, according to an spokesperson, who said the IAEA kits are close to being shipped. While the IAEA's individual tests may top out at 15 euros a person, countries will still need laboratories to process the results. Setting up a new facility from scratch can cost as much as 100,000 euros, according to the agency. The IAEA's lab outside Vienna has previously developed kits testing for Ebola, Zika and African Swine Fever. Fourteen countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America asked the agency's scientists earlier this month to help them ramp up testing. The effort drew an extra $5 million of funding on Tuesday from the U.S. State Department.

People are having to use videolinks to say their last goodbyes to dying relatives with Covid-19 because hospitals are curtailing visits to prevent spread of the virus. From a report: In a sad scene that is increasingly being played out out across the country, in the early hours of Tuesday morning a patient with coronavirus was taken off a ventilator at a hospital in south-east London. His wife and two children were unable to be with him but watched at home via videolink, after agreement from staff in the intensive treatment unit.

Coronavirus RNA survived for up to 17 days aboard the Diamond Princess cruise ship, lasting far longer on surfaces than previous research has shown, according to new data published this week by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. From a report: The study examined the Japanese and U.S. government efforts to contain the COVID-19 outbreaks on the Carnival-owned Diamond Princess ship in Japan and the Grand Princess ship in California. Passengers and crew on both ships were quarantined on board after previous guests, who didn't have any symptoms while aboard each of the ships, tested positive for COVID-19 after landing ashore. The RNA, the genetic material of the virus that causes COVID-19, "was identified on a variety of surfaces in cabins of both symptomatic and asymptomatic infected passengers up to 17 days after cabins were vacated on the Diamond Princess but before disinfection procedures had been conducted," the researchers wrote, adding that the finding doesn't necessarily mean the virus spread by surface. The CDC said researchers couldn't "determine whether transmission occurred from contaminated surfaces," and that further study of COVID-19's spread through touching surfaces on cruise ships was warranted.

Venezuela's first and only state-owned communications satellite has been out of service since March 13 when a series of maneuvers left it tumbling in an unusable orbit. SpaceNews reports: The VeneSat-1 satellite, built by China Great Wall Industry Corp. and launched in late 2008 on a 15-year mission to provide television and broadband services to Venezuela, has been stuck for 10 days in an elliptical orbit above the geostationary arc, according to telescopic observations from two U.S. companies that track satellites. VeneSat-1's operator, the Venezuelan space agency ABAE, had issued no status reports on the satellite as of March 23 and could not be reached for comment March 22 or March 23. In January, ABAE said Venezuela and China planned to develop a replacement satellite, VeneSat-2, that would continue service after VeneSat-1 retired.

California-based ExoAnalytic Solutions, which operates a network of satellite- and debris-tracking telescopes, spotted a "significant orbit change" for VeneSat-1 on March 13 at 3:15 a.m. Eastern, when the satellite left its position at 78 degrees West longitude over Venezuela, Bill Therien, ExoAnalytic's vice president of engineering, told SpaceNews. Approximately three hours later, the satellite conducted another maneuver that sent it tumbling westward, he said. Telescope observations from ExoAnalytic and Pennsylvania-based AGI show VeneSat-1 tumbling in an elliptical orbit that at its lowest point is 50 kilometers above the geosynchronous arc where most large communications satellites reside. Venesat-1's highest point, or apogee, is roughly 36,300 kilometers -- or about 525 kilometers above the geosynchronous arc, according to the companies. Bob Hall, AGI technical director for space situational awareness, said VeneSat-1 has drifted 30 degrees from its original orbital slot since March 13. If the satellite drifts another 40 degrees, it will be beyond line of sight from Venezuela, complicating any efforts to restore control of the spacecraft unless Venezuela relies on ground stations in other countries. VeneSat-1 will likely be maneuvered into a so-called graveyard orbit around 300 to 500 kilometers above the geosynchronous belt, where inactive or dead satellites are expected to orbit for thousands of years without colliding with active satellites.

On Tuesday, the Air Force's 45th Space Wing confirmed that the timing for SpaceX's upcoming SAOCOM launch, which was set to take off from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California on March 30 using a Falcon 9 rocket, has been put on "indefinite" hold due to the impact of the current coronavirus crisis. TechCrunch reports: Vandenberg has declared a public health emergency as of this past weekend, and while there are no confirmed cases of COVID-19 on the base thus far, the Air Force is limiting access to essential personnel, and providing only essential services, in addition to taking additional precautions to protect the safety of those who have to remain on site. The delay comes shortly after the company successfully launched 60 more of its Starlink satellites. The report notes that SpaceX still appears to be on track for its current mid-to-late May launch schedule for the first Commercial Crew mission with NASA.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: Bacteria form the largest biomass in the world, larger than all the animals and plants combined, and they are constantly moving, but their movement is chaotic. The researchers [at the Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen, in collaboration with groups in U.S. and U.K.] pursued the idea that if this motion could be controlled, they might be able to develop it into a biological tool. They used a liquid crystal to dictate the direction of the bacterial movement, and added a microscopic cargo for the bacteria to carry, more than five times the size of the bacteria.

Assistant Professor Amin Doostmohammadi at the Niels Bohr Institute explains that in the past, there have been attempts to control the behavior of bacteria. But he and his colleagues adopted a novel approach: "We thought to ourselves, how about we create a track for the bacteria? The way we do that experimentally is to put the bacteria inside a liquid crystal. The trick is that a liquid crystal is not like a crystal, nor is it a liquid, it is somewhere in between. Each molecule in the crystal has an orientation, but doesn't have a positional order. This means that the molecules can flow like a liquid, but they can also align like a crystal at the same time. [...] Strong jets of bacteria moving in a designated direction without fluctuations is the great outcome of the experiment, according to Amin Doostmohammadi. What usually happens if the jets of bacteria are strong enough to be useful, the concentration of bacteria has to be high, and instabilities typically start to appear. The jet becomes unstable and chaotic. But in the liquid crystal pattern, the instabilities can be largely suppressed and prevent the bacterial jets from becoming chaotic. The pattern dictates the direction. This means it is possible to create jets of bacteria strong enough to carry strings of microscopic cargo, each piece of cargo five times the size of the bacteria themselves.

Amazon said on Tuesday that it is temporarily discontinuing accepting orders for "lower-priority" products in India and prioritizing servicing urgent items such as household staples, health care, and personal safety products as the e-commerce player -- along with several of its competitors -- grapples with coronavirus outbreak in one of its key overseas markets. From a report: "To serve our customers' most urgent needs while also ensuring safety of our employees, we are temporarily prioritizing our available fulfilment and logistics capacity to serve products that are currently critical for our customers such as household staples, packaged food, health care, hygiene, personal safety and other high priority products," the American e-commerce giant said in a statement. "This also means that we have to temporarily stop taking orders and disable shipments for lower-priority products," it added. Understandably, the company said it did not have a timeline to share for how long this new measure would last. Amazon has taken a similar approach in the U.S. and Italy. The move, which goes into effect today, comes as nearly every Indian state has imposed a lockdown to prevent the spread of COVID-19.

When customers step in for a cup of coffee at Ritual Coffee Roasters on Valencia Street, a sign informs them that cash is no longer welcome. The coffee shop wants customers to use contactless forms of payments to pick up their cups of joe, in an effort to curb the spread of the new coronavirus. More and more businesses are turning away from cash, fearing that the virus could be sitting on banknotes and coins, as it exchanges hands from person to person in everyday transactions. From a report: "Looking at the situation with COVID-19 getting worse, we decided to switch," said Eileen Rinaldo, owner of Ritual Coffee. "Cash is notoriously covered with germs and it's a matter of eliminating that point of contact." The reluctance to take cash is emerging even though San Francisco ordered most businesses to accept cash last year, out of a concern that the trend to cashless payments was shutting out those without access to smartphones and credit cards. The city said it's still enforcing the rule and does not plan to lift it temporarily. "We're not currently engaged in any discussions about a freeze on this important equity policy," said Gloria Chan, spokeswoman for the Office of Economic and Workforce Development. "As a city, we still need to ensure everyone can purchase goods, whether or not they have access to credit or noncash forms of payment." Still, fears of cash abound. Other companies, like food delivery service DoorDash, are providing cashless options for payments. And on Saturday, cash toll collection on all seven Bay Area bridges was temporarily suspended under Gov. Gavin Newsom's orders, to curb the spread of the virus.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ProPublica: A nationwide shortage of two drugs touted as possible treatments for the coronavirus is being driven in part by doctors inappropriately prescribing the medicines for family, friends and themselves, according to pharmacists and state regulators. Demand for chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine surged over the past several days as President Donald Trump promoted them as possible treatments for the coronavirus and online forums buzzed with excitement over a small study suggesting the combination of hydroxychloroquine and a commonly used antibiotic could be effective in treating COVID-19.

"It's disgraceful, is what it is," said Garth Reynolds, executive director of the Illinois Pharmacists Association, which started getting calls and emails Saturday from members saying they were receiving questionable prescriptions. "And completely selfish." Reynolds said the Illinois Pharmacists Association has started reaching out to pharmacists and medical groups throughout the state to urge doctors, nurses and physician assistants not to write prescriptions for themselves and those close to them. "We even had a couple of examples of prescribers trying to say that the individual they were calling in for had rheumatoid arthritis," he said, explaining that pharmacists suspected that wasn't true. "I mean, that's fraud." In one case, Reynolds said, the prescriber initially tried to get the pills without an explanation and only offered up that the individual had rheumatoid arthritis after the pharmacist questioned the prescription. In a bulletin to pharmacists on Sunday, the state association wrote that it was "disturbed by the current actions of prescribers" and instructed members on how to file a complaint against physicians and nurses who were doing it. It's important to note that there is little evidence that the drugs work to treat coronavirus, although clinical trials are underway to find out.

The report mentions a man in his 60s who died after ingesting a version of the chloroquine commonly used to clean fish tanks. "The man, who thought he might have COVID-19, took a small amount of the substance in a misguided effort to treat his symptoms," reports ProPublica. "His wife was also hospitalized after taking the substance but survived."