An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: The Environmental Protection Agency is proposing that nine PFAS, also known as "forever chemicals," be categorized as hazardous to human health. The EPA signed a proposal Wednesday that would deem the chemicals "hazardous constituents" under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act. For the agency to consider a substance a hazardous constituent, it has to be toxic or cause cancer, genetic mutation or the malformations of an embryo. The full list of the nine substances can be found here.

The agency cited various studies in which forever chemicals were found to cause a litany of "toxic effects" in humans and animals, including, but not limited to cancer, a decreased response to vaccinations, high cholesterol, decrease in fertility in women, preeclampsia, thyroid disorders and asthma, the EPA said. Short for "per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances," PFAS cover thousands of man-made chemicals. PFAS are often used for manufacturing purposes, such as in nonstick cookware, adhesives, firefighting foam, turf and more. PFAS have been called "forever chemicals" because they break down very slowly and can accumulate in people, animals and the environment. Further reading: 'Forever Chemicals' Taint Nearly Half of US Tap Water, Study Estimates

NASA is starting to take its first steps toward opening a commercial pathway to Mars. From a report: This week, the space agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory issued a new solicitation to the industry titled "Exploring Mars Together: Commercial Services Studies." This is a request for proposals from the US space industry to tell NASA how they would complete one of four private missions to Mars, including delivering small satellites into orbit or providing imaging services around the red planet.

"The Mars Exploration Program Draft Plan through the next two decades would utilize more frequent lower cost missions to achieve compelling science and exploration for a larger community," the document states. "To realize the goals of the plan, government and US industry would partner to leverage current and emerging Earth and lunar products and commercial services to substantially lower the overall cost and accelerate leadership in deep space exploration."

NASA will pay proposers $200,000 for a study of one of the reference missions or $300,000 for a maximum of two studies. The space agency said it intends to award "multiple" contract awards. In its 496-page solicitation, NASA outlines four "design reference missions" that companies can bid on. Basically, the space agency is asking companies how they would go about fulfilling these tasks.

doc1623 shares a report from Ars Technica: Scientists at the University of Arizona decided to investigate whether closing the toilet lid before flushing reduces cross-contamination of bathroom surfaces by airborne bacterial and viral particles via "toilet plumes." The bad news is that putting a lid on it doesn't result in any substantial reduction in contamination, according to their recent paper published in the American Journal of Infection Control. The good news: Adding a disinfectant to the toilet bowl before flushing and using disinfectant dispensers in the tank significantly reduce cross-contamination. [...]

The scientists conducted their experiment with E. coli (as a host bacteria) and coliphage MS2; the latter is not a human or animal pathogen but serves as a useful model. The public toilet used in the experiment was located in a stall in the restroom of an office building. That toilet was tankless, relying on water-line pressure for flushing, with no lid and a U-shaped seat with a gap in the front. The home toilet was a standard siphonic toilet with a tank and lid in a private residence; there was no gap on the center of the seat. Toilet bowls were seeded with MS2 and flushed. After one minute, samples were taken from various restroom surfaces: the top and bottom of toilet seats, the bowl rim, three locations on the floor, and the right and left walls. The team also conducted a similar experiment involving cleaning the bowls with toilet brushes, both with and without Lysol toilet bowl cleaner. All those samples were then tested for MS2 contamination.

The results: both the tops and bottoms of the lidless public toilet seats had more contamination compared to household seats, but otherwise, there was no statistical significance in the degree of contamination between lidless public toilets and household toilets with lids. And the surface contamination did indeed persist even after repeated flushes. The toilet seat was the worst offender with the greatest degree of contamination, which the authors suggest "reflects the airflow that occurs during toilet flushing, i.e., largely around the top and bottom of the toilet seat." That same airflow is likely a factor in spreading the contamination to restroom floors and walls. Perhaps the least surprising finding is that rigorous cleaning with a toilet bowl brush and Lysol reduced the contamination by 99.99 percent compared to cleaning with just a brush. Therefore, "The most effective strategy for reducing restroom cross-contamination associated with toilet flushing include the addition of a disinfectant to the toilet bowl before flushing and the use of disinfectant/detergent dispensers in the toilet tank," the authors concluded. They also recommend regularly disinfecting all restroom surfaces after flushing or cleaning with a toilet brush in health care facilities -- which often have a lot of immunocompromised people -- and if someone in your house has an active infection like norovirus. The findings have been published in the journal American Journal of Infection Control.

Slashdot reader doc1623 writes: "This headline brought me joy today, so I thought I would share (I could honestly care less about reading the article but joy is joy, I take it where I can find it.)"

New submitter Smonster shares a report from the New York Times: With restrictions on space and weight, what would you bring if you were going to Mars? An ideal option might be a single material that can shift shapes into any object you imagine. In the morning, you could mold that material into utensils for eating. When breakfast is done, you could transform your fork and knife into a spade to tend to your Martian garden. And then when it's happy hour on the red planet, that spade could become a cup for your Martian beer. What sounds like science fiction is, perhaps, one step closer to reality.

Researchers at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering have created a new type of plastic with properties that can be set with heat and then locked in with rapid cooling, a process known as tempering. Unlike classic plastics, the material retains this stiffness when returned to room temperature. The findings, published in the journal Science on Thursday, could someday change how astronauts pack for space.

"Rather than taking all the different plastics with you, you take this one plastic with you and then just give it the properties you need as you require," said Stuart Rowan, a chemist at the University of Chicago and an author of the new study. But space isn't the only place the material could be useful. Dr. Rowan's team also sees its potential in other environments where resources are scare -- like at sea or on the battlefield. It could also be used to make soft robots and to improve plastics recycling.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Biotechnology company Biogen is abandoning Aduhelm, its questionable Alzheimer's drug that has floundered on the market since its scandal-plagued regulatory approval in 2021 and brow-raising pricing. On Wednesday, the company announced it had terminated its license for Aduhelm (aducanumab) and will stop all development and commercialization activities. The rights to Aduhelm will revert back to the Neurimmune, the Swiss biopharmaceutical company that discovered it.

Biogen will also end the Phase 4 clinical trial, ENVISION, that was required by the Food and Drug Administration to prove Biogen's claims that Aduhelm is effective at slowing progression of Alzheimer's in its early stages -- something two Phase 3 trials failed to do with certainty. In the announcement, Biogen noted it took a financial hit of $60 million in the fourth quarter of 2023 to close out its work on Aduhelm, which the company at one point reportedly estimated would bring in as much as $18 billion in revenue per year.

An anonymous reader shares a report: In a somewhat groundbreaking yet bizarre scientific feat, MIT biotechnology PhD student researcher Lauren "Ren" Ramlan has coaxed a simulation of the humble E. coli bacteria into a rudimentary screen capable of displaying the iconic video game. However, before you get too excited about playing games in a petri dish, there's a catch. According to Ramlan's simulation, displaying a single frame of Doom on these bioluminescent bacteria -- should anyone attempt to do this with the real thing -- would take roughly 70 minutes, with a full reset to the bacteria's original state taking a whopping eight hours and 20 minutes.

Dubbed a step into the world of biological screens, Ramlan engineered a system where the bacteria would function as 1-bit pixels, toggling between light and dark states. This bio-display utilizes a well plate in a 32x48 array, each containing genetically modified E. coli that can be induced to fluoresce, creating a grid of pixel-like structures.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The first lab-grown freshwater eel meat has been produced, potentially solving a diner's dilemma. Rampant overfishing has caused eel populations to plummet and prices to soar, but the cultivated eel could provide the delicacy guilt-free. The eel meat was produced by Forsea Foods in Israel from embryonic cells of a freshwater eel. The company collaborated with a Japanese chef to create unagi kabayaki, marinated grilled eel over rice, and unagi nigiri, a type of sushi.

The company aims to scale up its operation and have the cultivated eel on sale in about two years. Japan's prime minister, Fumio Kishida, last year backed the development of a cultivated meat industry. The restaurant price in Japan is about $250 a kilogram, and Forsea Foods expects the price of the cultivated eel to match that of the wild-caught eel. [...] Forsea Foods' strategy is to target species at risk of extinction in the wild that also command high prices in restaurants and shops, with eel meeting both criteria. The very complex life cycle of eels, involving long migrations from rivers to the ocean and several distinct life stages, means it is not possible to farm them like some fish.

The cultivated eel was produced using organoids, tiny bundles of tissue originally developed for use in medical research. The organoids are made of embryonic stem cells taken from fertilized eel eggs. These cells can develop into any kind of tissue and, as they grow, they self-organize into the structure of real meat. The final product also contains some plant-based ingredients. Other approaches to cultivated meat require greater use of expensive growth factor chemicals and scaffolds for cells to grow on [...]. The technique is particularly suited to fish and seafood, whose meat is fairly uniform unlike, for example, marbled beef, he said. Like other cultivated meat, the product is not produced using antibiotics or hormones. Forsea Foods is the only company known to be producing cultivated meat using this technology. The company has raised $5.2 million in investment, with more expected to be announced soon.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ScienceAlert: Peering into the jungle of microbes that live within us, researchers have stumbled across what seem to be an entire new class of virus-like objects. "It's insane," says University of North Carolina cell biologist Mark Peifer, who was not involved in the study, told Elizabeth Pennisi at Science Magazine. "The more we look, the more crazy things we see." These mysterious bits of genetic material have no detectable sequences or even structural similarities known to any other biological agents.

So Stanford University biologist Ivan Zheludev and colleagues argue their strange discovery may not be viruses at all, but instead an entirely new group of entities that may help bridge the ancient gap between the simplest genetic molecules and more complex viruses. "Obelisks comprise a class of diverse RNAs that have colonized, and gone unnoticed in, human, and global microbiomes," the researchers write in a preprint paper. Named after the highly-symmetrical, rod-like structures formed by its twisted lengths of RNA, the Obelisks' genetic sequences are only around 1,000 characters (nucleotides) in size. In fact, this brevity is likely one of the reasons we've failed to notice them previously.

In a study that has yet to be peer reviewed, Zheludev and team searched 5.4 million datasets of published genetic sequences and identified almost 30,000 different Obelisks. They appeared in about 10 percent of the human microbiomes the team examined. In one set of data, Obelisks turned up in 50 percent of the patients' oral samples. What's more, different types of Obelisks appear to be present in different areas of our bodies. "[This] supports the notion that Obelisks might include colonists of said human microbiomes," the researchers explain. They managed to isolate one type of host cell from our microbiome, the bacterium Streptococcus sanguinis -- a common human mouth microbe. The Obelisk in these microbes had a loop 1,137 nucleotides long. "While we don't know the 'hosts' of other Obelisks," write Zheludev and colleagues. "it is reasonable to assume that at least a fraction may be present in bacteria." The question of the Obelisks' source aside, all seem to include codes for a new class of protein the researchers have named Oblins. Zheludev and team couldn't identify any impact of the Obelisks on their bacterial hosts, or a means by which they could spread between cells. "These elements might not even be 'viral' in nature and might more closely resemble 'RNA plasmids,'" they conclude.

This research appears in the preprint server bioRxiv.

According to Neuralink founder Elon Musk, the first human received an implant from the brain-chip startup on Sunday and is recovering well. "Initial results show promising neuron spike detection," Musk added. Reuters reports: The U.S. Food and Drug Administration had given the company clearance last year to conduct its first trial to test its implant on humans. The startup's PRIME Study is a trial for its wireless brain-computer interface to evaluate the safety of the implant and surgical robot. The study will assess the functionality of the interface which enables people with quadriplegia, or paralysis of all four limbs, to control devices with their thoughts, according to the company's website.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ProPublica: Reeling from one of the most catastrophic recalls in decades, Philips Respironics said it will stop selling sleep apnea machines and other respiratory devices in the United States under a settlement with the federal government that will all but end the company's reign as one of the top makers of breathing machines in the country. The agreement, announced by Philips early Monday, comes more than two years after the company pulled millions of its popular breathing devices off the shelves after admitting that an industrial foam fitted in the machines to reduce noise could break apart and release potentially toxic particles and fumes into the masks worn by patients.

It could be years before Philips can resume sales of the devices, made in two factories outside Pittsburgh. The company said all the conditions of the multiyear consent decree -- negotiated in the wake of the recall with the Department of Justice on behalf of the Food and Drug Administration -- must be met first. The move by a company that aggressively promoted its machines in ad campaigns and health conferences -- in one case with the help of an Elvis impersonator -- follows relentless criticism about the safety of the machines. A ProPublica and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette investigation found the company held back thousands of complaints about the crumbling foam for more than a decade before warning customers about the dangers. Those using the machines included some of the most fragile people in the country, including infants, the elderly, veterans and patients with chronic conditions.

"It's about time," said Richard Callender, a former mayor in Pennsylvania who spent years using one of the recalled machines. "How many people have to suffer and get sick and die?" Philips said the agreement includes other requirements the company must meet before it can start selling the machines again, including the marquee DreamStation 2, a continuous positive airway pressure, or CPAP, device heralded by Philips when it was unveiled in 2021 for the treatment of sleep apnea. The settlement, which is still being finalized, has to be approved by a court and has not yet been released by the government. It remains unclear how the halt in sales will impact patients and doctors. The company's U.S. market share for sleep apnea devices in 2020 was about 37% -- behind only one competitor, medical device maker ResMed, according to an analysis by iData Research. Philips has dominated the market in ventilator sales, the data shows.

In an announcement earlier today, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said single-use vapes will be banned in Britain, with certain flavors restricted and regulations put in place around their packaging and displays. The New York Times reports: Mr. Sunak said that the ban, which is part of legislation that still has to be approved by Parliament, was intended to halt "one of the most worrying trends at the moment," before it becomes "endemic." "The long-term impacts of vaping are unknown and the nicotine within them can be highly addictive, so while vaping can be a useful tool to help smokers quit, marketing vapes to children is not acceptable," he said in a statement. Andrea Leadsom, Britain's health minister, said the measures were intended to make sure that vapes were aimed at adults who were quitting smoking, rather than children.

"Nicotine is highly addictive -- and so it is completely unacceptable that children are getting their hands on these products, many of which are undeniably designed to appeal to young people," she said in a statement. [...] While it is not illegal for people under 18 to smoke or vape in Britain, it is illegal for those products to be sold to them. By banning disposable vapes, and restricting the flavors and packaging of refillable vapes, the government hopes to make it far less likely that young people will experiment with e-cigarettes.

Andrew Joseph, writing for STAT News: There was something odd about these Alzheimer's cases. Part of it was the patients' presentations: Some didn't have the classic symptoms of the condition. But it was also that the patients were in their 40s and 50s, even their 30s, far younger than people who normally develop the disease. They didn't even have the known genetic mutations that can set people on the course for such early-onset Alzheimer's. But this small handful of patients did share a particular history. As children, they had received growth hormone taken from the brains of human cadavers, which used to be a treatment for a number of conditions that caused short stature.

Now, decades later, they were showing signs of Alzheimer's. In the interim, scientists had discovered that that type of hormone treatment they got could unwittingly transfer bits of protein into recipients' brains. In some cases, it had induced a fatal brain disease called Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, or CJD -- a finding that led to the banning of the procedure 40 years ago. It seemed that it wasn't just the proteins behind CJD that could get transferred. As the scientific team treating the patients reported Monday in the journal Nature Medicine, the hormone transplant seeded the beta-amyloid protein that's a hallmark of Alzheimer's in some recipients' brains, which, decades later, propagated into disease-causing plaques. They are the first known cases of transmitted Alzheimer's disease, likely a scientific anomaly yet a finding that adds another wrinkle to ongoing arguments about what truly causes Alzheimer's. "It looks real that some of these people developed early-onset Alzheimer's because of that [hormone treatment]," said Ben Wolozin, an expert on neurodegenerative diseases at Boston University's medical school, who was not involved in the study.

The Los Angeles Times reports that after more than 10 years of planning, "Barring weather delays, the space shuttle Endeavour will undergo its final, historic lift starting Monday night, a maneuver no other retired orbiter has undergone..." First, a pair of cranes will hoist the shuttle from a horizontal position to a vertical one; the spacecraft will be attached to a sling, a large metal frame that'll support it during the move. An 11-story crane will lift the tail of Endeavour, while a 40-story crawler crane — about the height of [Los Angeles'] City Hall — will lift the nose. Once the shuttle is pointed toward the stars, the shorter crane will be disconnected, leaving the taller crane to gently swing the orbiter to its final position and lowering it to be affixed with the giant orange external tank. The external tank is attached to twin solid rocket boosters, which are connected to the exhibit's foundation...

Once the shuttle full stack is in place, the rest of the museum will be built around it. It could be a few years before it is open to the public, given the construction schedule and additional time needed to install exhibits.
"Los Angeles will be home to the only retired space shuttle displayed in a full-stack arrangement as if ready for launch," the article points out.

Officials hope to livestream the historic lift on Monday night at 9:30 p.m. PST.

"Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope observed the smallest exoplanet where water vapor has been detected in the atmosphere," writes SciTechDaily.

"At only approximately twice Earth's diameter, the planet GJ 9827d could be an example of potential planets with water-rich atmospheres elsewhere in our galaxy." "This would be the first time that we can directly show through an atmospheric detection, that these planets with water-rich atmospheres can actually exist around other stars," said team member Björn Benneke of the Trottier Institute for Research on Exoplanets at Université de Montréal. "This is an important step toward determining the prevalence and diversity of atmospheres on rocky planets."

"Water on a planet this small is a landmark discovery," added co-principal investigator Laura Kreidberg of Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany. "It pushes closer than ever to characterizing truly Earth-like worlds."

However, it remains too early to tell whether Hubble spectroscopically measured a small amount of water vapor in a puffy hydrogen-rich atmosphere, or if the planet's atmosphere is mostly made of water, left behind after a primeval hydrogen/helium atmosphere evaporated under stellar radiation... Because the planet is as hot as Venus, at 800 degrees Fahrenheit, it definitely would be an inhospitable, steamy world if the atmosphere were predominantly water vapor...

"Observing water is a gateway to finding other things," said Thomas Greene, astrophysicist at NASA's Ames Research Center in California's Silicon Valley. "This Hubble discovery opens the door to future study of these types of planets by the James Webb Space Telescope.

Around three hours after its moon lander had touched down, Japan's space agency "decided to switch SLIM off with 12% power remaining to allow for a possible resumption when the sun's angle changed," reports Agence France-Presse.

Today there was good news: Japan's Moon lander has resumed operations, the country's space agency said on Monday, indicating that power had been restored after it was left upside down during a slightly haphazard landing. The probe, nicknamed the "moon sniper", had tumbled down a crater slope during its landing on 20 January, leaving its solar batteries facing in the wrong direction and unable to generate electricity...

The agency posted on X an image shot by Slim of "toy poodle", a rock observed near the lander.