Ford announced today that it's partnering with 3M and GE to build respirators, ventilators and face shields for front-line healthcare workers and COVID-19 patients. TechCrunch reports: Its efforts include building Powered Air-Purifying Respirators (PAPRs) with partner 3M, including a new design that employs existing parts from both partners to deliver effectiveness and highly scalable production capacity. Ford says that it's also going to be building face shields, leaning on its 3D printing capabilities, with an anticipated production rate of more than 100,000 units per week. The company has designed a new face shield, which will be tested with the first 1,000 units this week at Detroit Mercy, Henry Ford Health Systems and Detroit Medical Center Sinai-Grace Hospitals in Michigan to evaluate their efficacy. Provided they perform as planned, Ford anticipates scaling to building 75,000 by end of week, with 100,000 able to be made in one of the company's Plymouth, Mich. production facilities each week thereafter.

The automaker is also going to be working with GE on expanding production capacity for GE Healthcare's ventilator, with a simplified design that should allow for higher-volume production. That's part of a response to a U.S. government request for more units to support healthcare needs, the company said. On top of its U.S.-focused ventilator project with GE, Ford is also working on a separate effort to spin up ventilator production targeting the U.K. based on a request for aid from that country's government, and it's also shipping back 165,000 N95 respirator masks that were sent by the company from the U.S. to China earlier this year, since the need for that equipment is now greater back in the U.S., the company said, and China's situation continues to improve. "The PAPRs that Ford is building, for instance, will use off-the-shelf components from the automaker's F-150 truck's cooled seating, as well as 3M's existing HEPA filters," the report adds. "These respirators could potentially offer significant advantages in use compared to N95s, since they are battery-powered and can filter airborne virus particles for up to eight hours on a single, swappable standard power tool battery pack worn at the waist."

Compounds once thought indestructible were successfully broken down. From a report: 2019, nearly two dozen water agencies in Southern California were found to have reportable levels of cancer-causing chemical compounds in their wells. By 2020, 700 agencies with similar contamination had been identified across the United States. These compounds, known as perfluorinated alkylated substances or PFAS, are dubbed "forever chemicals" because, for a long time, there was no known way to break them down. But Sharma Yamijala, a computational chemist at the University of California, Riverside, may have just discovered a solution. After hearing about the issue at a seminar in 2019, he got to work on the problem with two colleagues at the university. The results of their project were published in the journal Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics in January. "I thought that we should try something out to understand what's happening," he tells OneZero. Since the 1940s, PFAS have been used in a wide variety of products, like food packaging, nonstick pans, paints, cleaning supplies, and even smartphones. Because they don't break down in the environment, they get into drinking water and other living organisms, many of which we eat. Since the body can't digest them either, they accumulate inside of us, too.

"These pollutants are very persistent," explains Bryan Wong, one of Yamijala's co-authors on the paper, to OneZero. "They last for a long time." High levels of PFAS intake are linked to cancer as well as low birth weight and thyroid hormone disruption, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. In his research, Yamijala used computer simulations to study the chemical structure of the PFAS that are the most ubiquitous in the environment: perfluorooctanoic acid and perfluorooctanesulfonic acid. The carbon-fluorine bond that acts as the backbone of these chemicals is one of the strongest bonds in organic chemistry, which is why they seem to last forever. But this is exactly what the team's breakthrough addresses: When they exposed the compounds to excess electrons -- a process called reduction -- the bond with the fluorine atom broke. What's more, the broken molecules that resulted from the process had a domino effect on the remaining PFAS in the water. In the simulation, these smaller molecules accelerated the breaking down of the other PFA molecules.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi said on Tuesday the government would impose a nationwide lockdown from midnight for 21 days to stem the spread of the coronavirus. "There will be a total ban on venturing out of your homes," Modi said in a televised address.

Communities living in warmer places appear to have a comparative advantage to slow the transmission of coronavirus infections, according to an early analysis by scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. From a report: The researchers found that most coronavirus transmissions had occurred in regions with low temperatures, between 37.4 and 62.6 degrees Fahrenheit (or 3 and 17 degrees Celsius). While countries with equatorial climates and those in the Southern Hemisphere, currently in the middle of summer, have reported coronavirus cases, regions with average temperatures above 64.4 degrees Fahrenheit (or 18 degrees Celsius) account for fewer than 6 percent of global cases so far. "Wherever the temperatures were colder, the number of the cases started increasing quickly," said Qasim Bukhari, a computational scientist at M.I.T. who is a co-author of the study. "You see this in Europe, even though the health care there is among the world's best."

sciencehabit writes: Science Magazine has learned that researchers across the U.S. are euthanizing thousands of lab mice in anticipation of a shortage of workers who can care for them. Some scientists have had to sacrifice half or more of their colonies, potentially resulting in the loss of months or years of work. "I was staring at my mice one by one and deciding who lives and who dies," says one researcher. "It was really rough." At the moment, Science has not seen evidence that larger animals such as cats, dogs, or monkeys are being proactively euthanized. That will likely remain the case. Unlike larger animals, mice breed quickly and must be used quickly. And because they comprise about 95% of all research animals, they suck up the most money and time.

The Bad Astronomer writes: A new study of very young binary stars shows that exoplanets orbiting them (circumbinary planets) will orbit in the same plane as the stars if the two stars are relatively close together. If the stars are farther apart, the planets may have a perpendicular (polar) orbit around them. This study looked at the protoplanetary disks of dust and gas around binaries to draw this conclusion. Extrapolating to fiction, this means Tatooine in Star Wars was coplanar with its host stars.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: President Donald Trump is considering easing health directives that prevent the spread of the coronavirus in an attempt to contain economic fallout. A new analysis suggests that those measures are helping to save hundreds of thousands of lives. Economists led by Northwestern University's Martin Eichenbaum wrote that keeping social-distancing measures in place before the number of new virus cases declines -- in other words, before a peak in the infection rate -- could limit infections and prevent as many as 600,000 additional U.S. deaths. While the economic damage is deeper when optimal health measures are taken, a recession is unavoidable even without them, as infected people would stay at home to recover and millions die, the report shows.

Under a worst-case scenario, with stores remaining open and no social isolation policies, as many as 215 million Americans could become infected and 2.2 million could die from the spread of the virus, the economists' data shows. That's based on an estimate from German Chancellor Angela Merkel that up to 70% of that country's population could become infected without a vaccine. It also matches the worst-case global estimate from Harvard University epidemiology professor Marc Lipsitch.

According to Reuters, elite hackers tried to break into the World Health Organization earlier this month. While the effort was unsuccessful, the agency said there's been a more than two-fold increase in cyberattacks as they battle to contain the coronavirus. From the report: The attempted break-in at the WHO was first flagged to Reuters by Alexander Urbelis, a cybersecurity expert and attorney with the New York-based Blackstone Law Group, which tracks suspicious internet domain registration activity. Urbelis said he picked up on the activity around March 13, when a group of hackers he'd been following activated a malicious site mimicking the WHO's internal email system. "I realized quite quickly that this was a live attack on the World Health Organization in the midst of a pandemic," he said.

Urbelis said he didn't know who was responsible, but two other sources briefed on the matter said they suspected an advanced group of hackers known as DarkHotel, which has been conducting cyber-espionage operations since at least 2007. When asked by Reuters about the incident, the WHO's Security Officer Flavio Aggio confirmed that the site spotted by Urbelis had been used in an attempt to steal passwords from multiple agency staffers. Cybersecurity firms including Romania's Bitdefender and Moscow-based Kaspersky said they have traced many of DarkHotel's operations to East Asia - an area that has been particularly affected by the coronavirus. Specific targets have included government employees and business executives in places such as China, North Korea, Japan, and the United States. Costin Raiu, head of global research and analysis at Kaspersky, could not confirm that DarkHotel was responsible for the WHO attack but said the same malicious web infrastructure had also been used to target other healthcare and humanitarian organizations in recent weeks.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Modern capitalism has never seen anything quite like the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2. In a matter of months, the deadly contagious bug has spread around the world, hobbling any economy in its path. [...] This economic catastrophe is blowing up the myth of the worker robot and AI takeover. We've been led to believe that a new wave of automation is here, made possible by smarter AI and more sophisticated robots. San Francisco has even considered a tax on robots -- replace a human with a machine, and pay a price. The problem will get so bad, argue folks like former presidential candidate Andrew Yang, we'll need a universal basic income to support our displaced human workers.

Yet our economy still craters without human workers, because the machines are far, far away from matching our intelligence and dexterity. You're more likely to have a machine automate part of your job, not destroy your job entirely. Moving from typewriters to word processors made workers more efficient. Increasingly sophisticated and sensitive robotic arms can now work side-by-side on assembly lines with people without flinging our puny bodies across the room, doing the heavy lifting and leaving the fine manipulation of parts to us. The machines have their strengths -- literally in this case -- and the humans have theirs. While robots can do the labor we don't want to do or can't do, such as lifting car doors on an assembly line, they're not very good at problem-solving. "Think about how you would pick up a piece of paper that's lying flat on a table. You can't grip it like you would an apple -- you have to either pinch it to get it to lift off the surface, or drag it to hang over the edge of the table," writes Matt Simon via Wired. "As a kid, you learn to do that through trial and error, whereas you'd have to program a robot with explicit instructions to do the same."

In closing, Simon writes: "Overestimating robots and AI underestimates the very people who can save us from this pandemic: Doctors, nurses, and other health workers, who will likely never be replaced by machines outright. They're just too beautifully human for that."

With medical supplies strained by the coronavirus outbreak, health care professionals and technologists are coming together online to crowdsource repairs and supplies of critical hospital equipment. From a report: Doctors, hospital technicians and 3D-printing specialists are also using Google Docs, WhatsApp groups and online databases to trade tips for building, fixing and modifying machines like ventilators to help treat the rising number of patients with COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. The efforts come as supply shortages loom in one of the biggest challenges for health care systems around the world. "We have millions of health care workers around this country who are prepared to do battle against this virus, but I am concerned there are a couple of areas of supplies they need to fight that virus as effectively as possible," Dr. Peter Slavin, president of Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, told NBC News, noting that protective equipment, including surgical masks and eye protection, was in particularly short supply. "We wouldn't want to send soldiers to war without helmets and armor," he said. "We don't want to do the same with our health care workers."

The American Hospital Association says COVID-19 could require the hospitalization of 4.8 million patients, 960,000 of whom would need ventilators. As the demand for the equipment surges, making timely repairs will be critical to saving lives. New York Mayor Bill de Blasio warned Friday that the city could run out of basic medical supplies in as little as two weeks. 3D printing, a relatively new and niche technology that can create everything from houses to tiny and complex structures from raw materials, has remained mostly on the fringes of the manufacturing and health care sectors. But the coronavirus has suddenly made it a crucial resource. On Thursday, Slavin called on people with 3D printers to help make protective masks for hospital staff.

UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced strict measures to combat the spread of the coronavirus. He says a "huge national effort" has been needed to halt the spread, adding: "there will come a moment when no health service in the world could possibly cope because there won't be enough ventilators, enough intensive care beds, enough doctors and nurses." Non-essential businesses will be closed and citizens are being ordered to stay in their homes. They can only leave for the following "very limited purposes": shopping for basic necessities; one form of exercise a day alone or with members of your household; any medical need, to provide care or to help a vulnerable person; and/or traveling to and from work, but only where this is absolutely necessary and cannot be done from home.

"That's all -- these are the only reasons you should leave your home," says Johnson. "You should not be meeting friends. If your friends ask you to meet, you should say No. You should not be meeting family members who do not live in your home. You should not be going shopping except for essentials like food and medicine -- and you should do this as little as you can. And use food delivery services where you can." The police will be able to take action through fines and dispersing gatherings. The lockdown restrictions will be looked at again in three weeks to determine if they'll be relaxed or not.

You can read the full text of Boris Johnson's address to the nation here.

It might not show much of a family resemblance but fossil hunters say a newly discovered creature, that looks like a teardrop-shaped jellybean and is about half the size of a grain of rice, is an early relative of humans and a vast array of other animals. From a report: The team discovered the fossils in rocks in the outback of South Australia that are thought to be at least 555 million years old. The researchers say the diminutive creatures are one of the earliest examples of a bilateral organism -- animals with features including a front and a back, a plane of symmetry that results in a left and a right side, and often a gut that opens at each end. Humans, pigs, spiders and butterflies are all bilaterians, but creatures such as jellyfish are not. Dr Scott Evans, of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History and a co-author of the research, said: "The major finding of the paper is that this is possibly the oldest bilaterian yet recognised in the fossil record. "Because humans are bilaterians, we can say that this was a very early relative and possibly one of the first on the diverse bilaterian tree of life."

Writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Scott and colleagues in the US and Australia report how they made their discovery in sandstone at sites including fossil-rich Nilpena. They say careful analysis ruled out the possibility that the fossils were actually formed by the action of currents or from microbial mats. The animal has been named Ikaria wariootia in reference to an Indigenous term for Wilpena Pound, a nearby landmark, and the Warioota Creek that is close to the sites of the find.

India is turning to WhatsApp, the most popular app in the country, to create awareness about the coronavirus pandemic and has urged social media services to tackle the spread of misinformation on their platforms. From a report: Narendra Modi, India's Prime Minister, said on Saturday that citizens in the country can text a WhatsApp bot -- called MyGov Corona Helpdesk -- to get instant authoritative answers to their coronavirus queries such as the symptoms of the viral disease and how they could seek help. An individual is required to text +919013151515 to connect to the bot. The bot was built by Mumbai-based firm Haptik Technologies, which local telecom giant Reliance Jio acquired last year, and the information is being provided by the nation's Ministry of Health.

The number of "silent carriers" -- people who are infected by the new coronavirus but show delayed or no symptoms -- could be as high as one-third of those who test positive, according to classified Chinese government data seen by the South China Morning Post. An anonymous reader writes: That could further complicate the strategies being used by countries to contain the virus, which has infected more than 300,000 people and killed more than 14,000 globally. More than 43,000 people in China had tested positive for Covid-19 by the end of February but had no immediate symptoms, a condition typically known as asymptomatic, according to the data. They were placed in quarantine and monitored but were not included in the official tally of confirmed cases, which stood at about 80,000 at the time. Scientists have been unable to agree on what role asymptomatic transmission plays in spreading the disease. A patient usually develops symptoms in five days, though the incubation period can be as long as three weeks in some rare cases.

South Korea "has emerged as a sign of hope and a model to emulate," reported Nature earlier on Tuesday. "The country of 50 million appears to have greatly slowed its epidemic; it reported only 74 new cases today, down from 909 at its peak on 29 February." And it has done so without locking down entire cities or taking some of the other authoritarian measures that helped China bring its epidemic under control. "South Korea is a democratic republic, we feel a lockdown is not a reasonable choice," says Kim Woo-Joo, an infectious disease specialist at Korea University. South Korea's success may hold lessons for other countries — and also a warning: Even after driving case numbers down, the country is braced for a resurgence.

Behind its success so far has been the most expansive and well-organized testing program in the world, combined with extensive efforts to isolate infected people and trace and quarantine their contacts. South Korea has tested more than 270,000 people, which amounts to more than 5200 tests per million inhabitants — more than any other country except tiny Bahrain, according to the Worldometer website. The United States has so far carried out 74 tests per 1 million inhabitants, data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show. South Korea's experience shows that "diagnostic capacity at scale is key to epidemic control," says Raina MacIntyre, an emerging infectious disease scholar at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. "Contact tracing is also very influential in epidemic control, as is case isolation," she says...

Legislation enacted since [2015] gave the government authority to collect mobile phone, credit card, and other data from those who test positive to reconstruct their recent whereabouts. That information, stripped of personal identifiers, is shared on social media apps that allow others to determine whether they may have crossed paths with an infected person... There are 43 drive-through testing stations nationwide, a concept now copied in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. In the first week of March, the Ministry of the Interior also rolled out a smartphone app that can track the quarantined and collect data on symptoms.


"We hope our experience will help other countries control this COVID-19 outbreak," Kim tells Nature. And Reuters reports that in the five days since the article was published, South Korea has still kept new infections around a low 100 or less each day -- for 12 consecutive days -- compared with the peak of 909 new cases reported on February 29.

Reuters adds that though South Korea has experienced 8,961 cases, on Monday it reported its lowest daily number yet for new cases -- 64. And on the same day, "257 patients were released from hospitals where they had been isolated for treatment, the KCDC said.

"South Korea posted more recoveries than new infections on March 13 for the first time since its first case was confirmed on January 20."

An anonymous reader writes: 57-year-old U.S. Senator Rand Paul has tested positive for the coronavirus, reports CNN, citing a tweet from the senator's Twitter account.

"He is feeling fine and is in quarantine," the tweet reports. "He is asymptomatic and was tested out of an abundance of caution due to his extensive travel and events. He was not aware of any direct contact with any infected person." Another tweet adds that "Ten days ago, our D.C. office began operating remotely, hence virtually no staff has had contact with Senator Rand Paul."

Paul plans to continue working while in quarantine, and hopes to return to the Senate after his quarantine period ends.

"A successful firing test shows that Europe's lightweight Vega launcher is well on its way to cheaper and more efficient launches in 2025," reports Space.com, citing officials at the European Space Agency (ESA).

"3D printing has changed rocket development by greatly reducing upfront manufacturing time," argues Popular Mechanics: The new part belongs to Vega's M10 engine, which the ESA hopes to put into space beginning in 2025. As part of a "hot fire" test, the engine was fired 19 times for a combined 450 seconds. This kind of test mimics the most challenging conditions a system might face during launch so scientists can identify any weaknesses and help shore them up as development continues. Watch it here... The engine runs on liquid oxygen and liquid methane, which is an environmental improvement over the solid aluminum and ammonia the current launch assembly uses.... Not only is this piece 3D-printed, but it's also been scaled up over time beginning with the smallest initial model in 2018.

After each model is printed, it's tested using technologies like ultrasound to make sure it's structurally sound, and then it's subjected to the normal battery of tests.... The ESA says the engine performed well in the tests, and it hopes to test the fully assembled development model of the engine later in 2020... The ESA says it can build more complicated designs in an overall more agile process by using 3D printing, which removes the need for special manufacturing of machine parts, die casts, and more.
The article also notes Vega is "a semi-privatized project, because a commercial service actually launches the rockets.

"Indeed, like NASA, the boundaries between private and public development have blurred in recent decades."

The Wall Street Journal reports that as the coronavirus pandemic began, America's Centers for Disease Control and Prevention "provided restrictive guidance on who should be tested."

They're basing that on archived pages on the CDC's own web site. "While agencies in other countries were advising and conducting widespread testing, the CDC, charged with setting the U.S. standard for who should be tested for the virus, kept its criteria limited." Once the CDC deferred testing evaluations to individual physicians and rolled out testing widely, early data show a surge in positive cases, so public-health officials expect a clearer picture of the epidemic's scale to emerge... Containing a virus requires identifying and isolating those who are infected, infectious-disease and public-health experts say. "If we would have had a true understanding of the extent of the disease several weeks ago, implementation of social-distancing measures could have prevented the escalation of the disease," said Neil Fishman, chief medical officer at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania and an infectious-disease specialist...

Initially, the CDC recommended only investigating those who had symptoms and had recently traveled to Wuhan, China, or made contact with someone who may have the virus. As the outbreak worsened, it expanded the criteria for travel history slowly, but maintained its recommendation that symptoms be present, despite some cases having mild or no symptoms.

Now, the CDC has turned over authority to physicians to determine who gets tested, but the testing rates vary widely by state.
America's response was also hampered by "a botched initial test batch," according to the article, which meant there were fewer tests available until the agency allowed private laboratories to develop tests.

ZDNet reports that Singapore is fighting the coronavirus with a new smartphone app named "TraceTogether". The app is able to estimate the distance between TraceTogether smartphones as well as the duration of such interactions. The data then is captured, encrypted, and stored locally on the user's phone for 21 days, which spans the incubation period of the virus. When needed in contact tracing, users will have to authorise the uploading of their TraceTogether data to Singapore's Ministry of Health, which then will assess the information and retrieve the mobile numbers of close contacts within that period of time.

Developed by Government Technology Agency (GovTech), alongside the health ministry, the app was designed to help speed up the contact tracing process and stem the spread of COVID-19, the government IT office said. GovTech said the current processed depended heavily on the memory of patients, who might not be ale to remember all close contacts or have the contact details and information of these individuals. The mobile app can plug the gaps and more quickly identify potential carriers, who then can monitor their health and take the necessary action sooner...

Data logs were stored locally on the mobile phone and contained only cryptographically generated temporary IDs. The data logs would be extracted only when needed by the authorities for contact tracing, it said.

America's Food and Drug Administration has approved a coronavirus test from a company called Cepheid.

It can deliver its results in about 45 minutes, "much faster than current tests that require a sample to be sent to a centralized lab, where results can take days," reports The Hill: The test has been designed to operate on any of Cepheid's more than 23,000 automated GeneXpert Systems worldwide, of which 5,000 are in the U.S., the company said. The systems are already being used to test for conditions such as HIV and tuberculosis. The systems do not require users to have specialty training to perform testing and are capable of running around the clock.

"An accurate test delivered close to the patient can be transformative" and can "help alleviate the pressure" that the COVID-19 outbreak has put on health facilities, David Persing, Cepheid's chief medical and technology officer, said in a statement.