An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Atlas: Organic solar cells (OSCs) have a few advantages over other designs. They still collect energy from sunlight, but can be made more flexible, transparent (or at least semi-transparent) and can be tuned to only absorb certain wavelengths of light. That potentially makes them perfect for greenhouse roofing -- they can let most light through for the plants, while harvesting enough to offset a decent chunk of the facility's energy needs. "Plants only use some wavelengths of light for photosynthesis, and the idea is to create greenhouses that make energy from that unused light while allowing most of the photosynthetic band of light to pass through," says Brendan O'Connor, corresponding author of the study [from North Carolina State University]. "However, until now it wasn't clear how much energy a greenhouse could capture if it was using these semitransparent, wavelength selective, organic solar cells."

To begin to answer that question, the researchers modeled how much energy would be coming in from a greenhouse with OSCs in the roof, versus the amount of energy it would normally consume. The idea was to find the point where the greenhouse becomes energy neutral -- that is, it generates enough energy from the Sun to completely power itself. For this study, the theoretical greenhouses were modeled on the energy needed to grow tomatoes in three locations with different climates -- Arizona, North Carolina and Wisconsin. As a bonus, the OSCs are effective insulators too, helping maintain the right temperature. The team found that there would be a small hit to the amount of usable light the plants inside would receive, but the benefits would be worth it. In the famously sunny Arizona, for example, a greenhouse with OSCs installed could become energy neutral while blocking just 10 percent of the light the plants need. This shouldn't negatively affect the plants, the team says. In fact, the energy output could be doubled with just a little more light blocked. In North Carolina, sunlight is a little more sparse, so a greenhouse would need to block 20 percent of the photosynthetic light to become energy neutral. Chilly Wisconsin winters would be too much to ever achieve neutrality though, but these greenhouses could still generate almost half of their energy needs. The new study was published in the journal Joule.

It's another sea of red ink for federal research funding programs in President Donald Trump's latest budget proposal. The 2021 budget request to Congress released today calls for deep, often double-digit cuts to R&D spending at major science agencies. From a report: At the same time, the president wants to put more money into a handful of areas -- notably artificial intelligence (AI) and quantum information science (QIS) -- to create the new technology needed for what the budget request calls "industries of the future." Here is a rundown of some of the numbers from the budget request's R&D chapter. (The numbers reflect the portion of each agency's budget classified as research, which in most cases is less than its overall budget.)

1. National Institutes of Health: a cut of 7%, or $2.942 billion, to $36.965 billion.
2. National Science Foundation (NSF): a cut of 6%, or $424 million, to $6.328 billion.
3. Department of Energy's (DOE's) Office of Science: a cut of 17%, or $1.164 billion, to $5.760 billion.
4. NASA science: a cut of 11%, or $758 million, to $6.261 billion.
5. DOE's Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy: a cut of 173%, which would not only eliminate the $425 million agency, but also force it to return $311 million to the U.S. Department of the Treasury.
6. U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA's) Agricultural Research Service: a cut of 12%, or $190 million, to $1.435 billion.
7. National Institute of Standards and Technology: a cut of 19%, or $154 million, to $653 million.
8. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration: a cut of 31%, or $300 million, to $678 million.
9. Environmental Protection Agency science and technology: a cut of 37%, or $174 million, to $318 million.
10. Department of Homeland Security science and technology: a cut of 15%, or $65 million, to $357 million.
11. U.S. Geological Survey: a cut of 30%, or $200 million, to $460 million.

Last June NASA announced plans to host visitors on the International Space Station for just $35,000 a day.

"And now we know where they'll be sleeping," reports the Motley Fool: Earlier this week, NASA announced that it has selected Axiom Space to build "at least one habitable commercial module to be attached to the International Space Station...." In this particular demonstration project, Axiom will deliver to the ISS an "element" which "will attach to the space station's Node 2 forward port," giving access to the rest of the space station, and also a place for weary private astronauts to lay their heads at night...

"Developing commercial destinations in low-Earth orbit" is a priority for NASA, explains the agency -- whether those destinations are attached to the ISS or not... The "habitable commercial module" that Axiom is building will facilitate onboarding private businesses to do work on the ISS, creating potential new revenue streams to subsidize NASA's more adventurous endeavors farther out from Low Earth Orbit. With NASA's budget today stuck below where it was in 1972 -- the year of America's last crewed mission to the moon -- the agency's going to need significant new funding to perform planned missions to Mars and beyond in future years. If Congress won't pony up additional cash, therefore, the agency may hope to raise cash from private industry...

NASA says it "also plans to issue a final opportunity to partner with the agency in the development of a free-flying, independent commercial destination" at some point in the future. This latter opportunity should be of particular interest to both Axiom and Bigelow -- which, like Axiom, has expressed interest in building its own space stations independent of the ISS.
"If Axiom succeeds in building and operating a commercial space station," writes Axios, "it will mark a turning point for how space is used and who has access to it..."

They also report that Axiom expects to procure flights to the ISS from both SpaceX and Boeing. And when the International Space Station reaches its end-of-life, "Axiom plans to remove its modules and become a free-standing station that can be accessed by the company's customers."

"Scientists have discovered the first fast radio burst that beats at a steady rhythm, and the mysterious repeating signal is coming from the outskirts of another galaxy," reports Vice: A mysterious radio source located in a galaxy 500 million light years from Earth is pulsing on a 16-day cycle, like clockwork, according to a new study. This marks the first time that scientists have ever detected periodicity in these signals, which are known as fast radio bursts (FRBs), and is a major step toward unmasking their sources.

FRBs are one of the most tantalizing puzzles that the universe has thrown at scientists in recent years. First spotted in 2007, these powerful radio bursts are produced by energetic sources, though nobody is sure what those might be... Pulses from these repeat bursts have, so far, seemed somewhat random and discordant in their timing. But that changed last year, when the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment Fast Radio Burst Project (CHIME/FRB), a group dedicated to observing and studying FRBs, discovered that a repeater called FRB 180916.J0158+65 had a regular cadence...

While we still don't know what is blasting out these bizarre signals, the discovery of a clear tempo from one of these sources provides a significant lead for scientists to follow.

"Russia's intelligence services are apparently behind a well-coordinated social media campaign to blame the U.S. for creating and unleashing the Wuhan coronavirus on the world," reports the International Business Times.

That conclusion comes from the Atlantic Council think tank (founded in 1961), which established its Digital Forensic Research Lab in 2016. Eto Buziashvili, an analyst at the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab, published a report detailing how Russia's state propaganda units are disseminating different versions of conspiracies alleging the coronavirus is a U.S. creation. Western intelligence sources quoted by media said posts blaming the U.S. for attacking China with 2019-nCoV first began appearing on pro-Russia social media outlets such as VK (VKontakte) and Topcor.ru. The fake news has now spread to traditional Russian news media organizations such as Pravda and Izvestia and state propaganda platforms. State-controlled outlets are accusing the U.S. of using bioweapons against China...

A Russian website called Katushya.org says the People's Liberation Army (PLA), China's armed forces, is claiming the coronavirus was artificially produced in U.S. laboratories with the goal of destroying China from within.
"So far, their efforts have gained very little traction," Eto Buziashvili wrote on January 30, while adding that it still "serves as a reminder of Russia's long history of employing anti-U.S. influence operations during public health crises."

But the progressive political magazine Mother Jones argues that pro-Kremlin websites "are just one example of the kinds of outlets trying to capitalize on coronavirus fears. Some YouTube creators have been doing their best to get views and hawk money-making products and services on the backs of coronavirus fears; high-profile right-wing conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones are doing the same. Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have tried to step up their efforts to curb misinformation linked to the virus, but hoaxes and conspiracies continue to seep through."

A reader quotes Inverse: In an incredible feat of remote engineering, NASA has fixed one of the most intrepid explorers in human history. Voyager 2, currently some 11.5 billion miles from Earth, is back online and resuming its mission to collect scientific data on the solar system and the interstellar space beyond.

On Wednesday, February 5 at 10:00 p.m. Eastern, NASA's Voyager Twitter account gave out the good news: Voyager 2 is not only stable, but is back at its critical science mission.

"My twin is back to taking science data, and the team at @NASAJPL is evaluating the health of the instruments after their brief shutoff," the account tweeted... In a statement, NASA confirmed that Voyager 2 is back in business. "Mission operators report that Voyager 2 continues to be stable and that communications between the Earth and the spacecraft are good...."

The fix is no mean feat: It takes 17 hours one-way to communicate with Voyager 2 from Earth, which is the furthest away manmade object in space. That means a single information relay takes 34 hours.

This week Medium's tech blog OneZero published a 4,500-word look at Google's "methodical, iterative" and massive "living experiment" on its own employees to see if they can nudge them into making healthier choices when they eat: The campaign isn't changing just the food itself, but how it's presented. Google's tactics include limiting portion sizes for meat and desserts and redesigning its premises to lead its "users" to choose water and fruit over soda and M&M's. The goal, says Michiel Bakker, Google's director of global workplace programs, is to make the healthy choice the easy choice...

[T]he small changes make big differences. The plates on the buffet line are only eight to 10 inches wide, versus a standard 12 inches, which effectively limits serving sizes. Vegetables always come first on the line, so by the time you get to the meat or the snickerdoodles and chocolate tarts, there's not much space on your plate. "Spa water," bobbing with strawberries or cucumbers or lemons, is everywhere -- and deliberately more accessible than sugary drinks or even bottled water. A burrito at Google weighed in at about 10 ounces -- 60% smaller than the whopping one-pound nine-ounce log filled with similar ingredients that I picked up at a Chipotle near my home in Washington, D.C....

"Early choice architecture focused specifically on the process," said Ravi Dhar, a professor at Yale and the director of the school's Center for Customer Insights, which partners with Google on food research. "You didn't change the set of alternatives, but you rearranged them." So, if the goal was to get people to eat more vegetables, you would make the salad bar the first thing people see in a cafeteria -- hungry people usually grab the first food they see -- and leave it at that. But it turns out that's not enough. You also have to make the vegetables more abundant and more compelling -- and do the opposite for meat.
For example, moving the snacks table 10 feet further from the coffee machine reduced the likelihood of snacking by as much as 23% for men and 17% for women. But "Since then, Google has remade its 1,450 microkitchens. The unhealthy snacks -- now limited for the most part to M&M's and gummy bears -- are well away from the coffee machine, hidden in opaque canisters or in a drawer.

"At the same time, a big bowl of fresh fruit sits alluringly in the center of the counter nearest the coffee machine..."

"Chinese researchers reportedly have applied for a local patent on an experimental Gilead drug that they believe could help fight the novel coronavirus outbreak -- and also significantly bolster Gilead's bottom-line going forward..." reports The Street. "If granted, Gilead will need to get Chinese patent owners on board when it wants to sell the drug for treating the novel coronavirus infection outside China."

"The move is a sign that China views Gilead's therapy as one of the most promising candidates to fight the outbreak that has now claimed almost 500 lives..." Time reports. "While Gilead's experimental drug isn't licensed or approved anywhere in the world, it is being rushed into human trials in China on coronavirus patients after showing early signs of being highly effective."

But China's move concerns Bloomberg Opinion biotech/pharma columnist Max Nisen: If the patent is granted, it will confirm long-standing drugmaker fears about China's commitment to IP protection, raising concern about the industry's future in a crucial market. It also could further erode the already weak incentives for pharma to invest in drugs to combat emerging infectious diseases... [T]he company could see any potential return on the medication curtailed if China starts manufacturing it.

China's increasingly affluent population represents a huge opportunity for drugmakers. Many are investing heavily in the region despite previous data integrity and sales scandals. Leadership has recently demonstrated a greater commitment to IP rights in its initial trade deal with the U.S., but granting this patent could erode trust in the government and scare off foreign drugmakers.

The consequences wouldn't be limited to declining corporate confidence in China, even if this is a one-time emergency event. The world dramatically under-invests in drugs to combat infectious diseases, and a move like this by the Chinese government wouldn't help. Developing such medicines isn't very profitable, compared to drugs for rare diseases and cancer. That's especially true when it comes to emerging viruses, in spite of the obvious risk. Outbreaks are more common in developing countries, which limits pricing power. By the time a company has managed to get approval for any given drug, often a years-long process, there's a good chance that the outbreak will be over.

Seizing the rights to treatments dents drugmakers' already limited incentive to invest in infectious-disease drugs, let alone spend heavily to develop and maintain the ability to respond rapidly to outbreaks and scale up manufacturing. Without the promise of some kind of return, investment is going to dry up. I'm not a rah-rah pharma guy. The industry often abuses the patent system, especially in the U.S., in order to profit for years off of old drugs to the detriment of patients and the health-care system. Its pricing practices are frequently unconscionable. This isn't one of those situations. It's arguably one of the rare cases where the ability of drugmakers to profit needs to be boosted rather than crimped.

"Scientists have cultivated plants from date palm seeds that languished in ancient ruins and caves for 2,000 years," writes ScienceAlert. schwit1 shared their report: This remarkable feat confirms the long-term viability of the kernels once ensconced in succulent Judean dates, a fruit cultivar lost for centuries. The results make it an excellent candidate for studying the longevity of plant seeds. From those date palm saplings, the researchers have begun to unlock the secrets of the highly sophisticated cultivation practices that produced the dates praised by Herodotus, Galen, and Pliny the Elder.

First, they collected fragments of the seed shells still clinging to the roots of the plants. These were perfect for radiocarbon dating -- which confirmed the seeds date back to between 1,800 and 2,400 years ago. Then, the researchers could conduct genetic analyses of the plants themselves, comparing them to a genetic database of current data palms. This showed exchanges of genetic material from eastern date palms from the Middle East, and western date palms from North Africa.

Indeed, the researchers found that the ancient seeds were up to 30 percent larger than date seeds today, which probably meant the fruit was larger, too.

And, of course, there's the seemingly miraculous germination after so many centuries. As anyone who buys seeds for their garden knows, seeds deteriorate; the longer you have a packet of seeds sitting in storage, the fewer will germinate when you finally plant them. If scientists can discover how the date seeds retained their viability for so long, that could have important implications for agriculture.

"Scientists have announced a breakthrough that could be key to the creation of a powerful new kind of particle collider," reports the Fermilab/SLAC magazine Symmetry.

Long-time Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot shared their report: As reported in the journal Nature, the Muon Ionization Cooling Experiment, or MICE, has for the first time demonstrated the successful taming of a beam of particles called muons through a process called transverse ionization cooling, and the more potential you have to make discoveries as that energy converts into new particles...

Muons — which are heavy relatives of electrons — are interesting to accelerator scientists for a number of reasons. For one, they are more massive than the particles they have traditionally used in colliders. The more massive the particles you collide, the higher the energies you can reach with your collisions, and the more potential you have to make discoveries as that energy converts into new particles... Scientists have thus far stuck to colliding particles such as protons, antiprotons, electrons, positrons and ions. One reason for this is the difficulty of producing a sufficient amount of muons and funneling them into an organized beam for an accelerator to propel and collide...

MICE scientists passed a beam of muons through an absorber, slowing down their momentum perpendicular to the beam direction and focusing them into a tight beam. They then used radio-frequency cavities to speed up the momentum of the beam in the forward direction. They repeated this until they were left with a focused, well-behaved beam of muons traveling the right way.

The scientists undertook the difficult task of measuring each particle one-by-one to evaluate their efforts. They found that they had achieved what they set out to do, bringing scientists a step closer to potentially making a muon collider a reality.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from IEEE Spectrum: A team from the University of California, Los Angeles, has developed a system that transforms "waste CO2" into gray blocks of concrete. In March, the researchers will relocate to the Wyoming Integrated Test Center, part of the Dry Fork power plant near the town of Gillette. During a three-month demonstration, the UCLA team plans to siphon half a ton of CO2 per day from the plant's flue gas and produce 10 tons of concrete daily. Carbon Upcycling UCLA is one of 10 teams competing in the final round of the NRG COSIA Carbon XPrize. The global competition aims to develop breakthrough technologies for converting carbon emissions into valuable products.

The UCLA initiative began about six years ago, as researchers contemplated the chemistry of Hadrian's Wall -- the nearly 1,900-year-old Roman structure in northern England. Masons built the wall by mixing calcium oxide with water, then letting it absorb CO2 from the atmosphere. The resulting reactions produced calcium carbonate, or limestone. But that cementation process can take years or decades to complete, an unimaginably long wait by today's standards. "We wanted to know, 'How do you make these reactions go faster?'" Gaurav Sant, a civil engineering professor who leads the team, recalled. The answer was portlandite, or calcium hydroxide. The compound is combined with aggregates and other ingredients to create the initial building element. That element then goes into a reactor, where it comes in contact with the flue gas coming directly out of a power plant's smokestack. The resulting carbonation reaction forms a solid building component akin to concrete. The UCLA system is unique among green concrete technologies because it doesn't require the expensive step of capturing and purifying CO2 emissions from power plants. Sant said his team's approach is the only one so far that directly uses the flue gas stream. The group has formed a company, CO2Concrete, to commercialize their technology with construction companies and other industrial partners.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: Viruses are some of the most mysterious organisms on Earth. They're among the world's tiniest lifeforms, and because none can survive and reproduce without a host, some scientists have questioned whether they should even be considered living things. Now, scientists have discovered one that has no recognizable genes, making it among the strangest of all known viruses. But how many viruses do we really know? Another group has just discovered thousands of new viruses hiding out in the tissues of dozens of animals. The finds speak to 'how much we still need to understand' about viruses, says one of the researchers, Jonatas Abrahao, a virologist at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte.

Abrahao made his discovery while hunting down giant viruses. These microbes -- some the size of bacteria -- were first discovered in amoebae in 2003. In a local artificial lake, he and his colleagues found not only new giant viruses, but also a virus that -- because of its small size -- was unlike most that infect in amoebae. They named it Yaravirus. (Yara is the "mother of waters" according to Indigenous Tupi-Guarani mythology.) Yaravirus's size wasn't the only thing weird about it. When the team sequenced its genome, none of its genes matched any scientists had come across before, the group reports on the bioRxiv preprint server.

A second software problem during a CST-100 Starliner test flight is prompting a NASA safety panel to recommend a review of Boeing's software verification processes. Space News reports: That new software problem, not previously discussed by NASA or Boeing, was discussed during a Feb. 6 meeting of NASA's Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel that examined the December uncrewed test flight of Starliner that was cut short by a timer error. That anomaly was discovered during ground testing while the spacecraft was in orbit, panel member Paul Hill said. "While this anomaly was corrected in flight, if it had gone uncorrected, it would have led to erroneous thruster firings and uncontrolled motion during [service module] separation for deorbit, with the potential for a catastrophic spacecraft failure," he said.

The exact cause of the failure remains under investigation by Boeing and NASA, who are also still examining the timer failure previously reported. Those problems, Hill said, suggested broader issues with how Boeing develops and tests the software used by the spacecraft. "The panel has a larger concern with the rigor of Boeing's verification processes," he said. The panel called for reviews of Boeing's flight software integration and testing processes. "Further, with confidence at risk for a spacecraft that is intended to carry humans in space, the panel recommends an even broader Boeing assessment of, and corrective actions in, Boeing's [systems engineering and integration] processes and verification testing." The panel added that all those investigations and reviews be completed as "required input for a formal NASA review to determine flight readiness for either another uncrewed flight test or proceeding directly to a crewed test flight."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Today, scientists are releasing the results of a clinical trial designed to test the safety of gene editing as a way of fighting cancer. The results are promising, in that a version of the CRISPR gene-editing system that's already a few years out of date appears to be safe when used to direct immune cells to attack cancer. But the cancers that it was meant to treat simply evolved ways of slipping past immune surveillance. For the clinical trial, this gene-editing system has been combined with recently developed immune therapies that target cancer. There is a class of immune T cells that kill cells recognized as foreign, either because they come from a different person (such as after an organ transplant) or because they are infected with a bacteria or virus. These cells can also recognize and attack cancer but often don't, in part because cancer cells are so similar to healthy ones. People have engineered versions of the T cells' recognition system that specifically target cancer cells, and placed these back into patients, helping the immune system attack the cancer, sometimes with spectacular results. As part of the clinical trial, gene editing was used to improve the efficiency of the cancer-targeting T cells. This was done in two different ways.

The first was to target a gene that normally functions to tone down the immune system (called PDCD1). There has been evidence generated in mice that using antibodies that block the protein made from this gene will increase the immune system's attack on cancers. For this work, the researchers targeted the CRISPR system to delete part of the gene itself, inactivating it. This poses a potential risk, as a failure to tone down the immune response can lead to problematic conditions such as autoimmune diseases. The other way gene editing was used was to knock out the T cell's normal system for recognizing foreign cells, called the T cell receptor (TCR). The TCR is composed of two related proteins that form a binary receptor complex. Engineered versions of this protein are the ones used to get cells to recognize and kill cancer. Normally, these engineered versions of the TCR are simply inserted into an immune cell, where both they and the cell's normal TCR genes are also active. The result is four different TCR parts active at the same time, resulting in a variety of hybrid TCRs. At best, these are ineffective and will reduce the total amount of active TCR in a cell. At worst, they'll cause the T cell to attack healthy cells. For the trial, the researchers generated CRISPR constructs that targeted the cell's normal TCR genes. When successfully deleted, this would ensure that the only TCR on the cell's surface would recognize cancer cells. The researchers ended up working with a total of three patients that had cancers recognized by a known version of the TCR genes.

"While the rates of successful editing were high, the procedure is nowhere near 100 percent effective, and rates of editing varied from nearly half down to 15 percent, depending on the gene," the report says. It adds: "There were no serious adverse affects of the T cell infusions, no sign of a problematic immune response, and the cells persisted in the patients up to nine months after the transfusions, indicating they were tolerated well. [...] The response to the tumor, however, was limited. Two patients appeared to stabilize, while the third showed a response in some tissues but not in others. Ultimately, however, the disease began to progress again, and one of the patients has since died."

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: This month, on the frozen plains of Saskatchewan in Canada, workers began to inject steam and air into the Superb field, a layer of sand 700 meters down that holds 200 million barrels of thick, viscous oil. Their goal was not to pump out the oil, but to set it on fire -- spurring underground chemical reactions that churn out hydrogen gas, along with carbon dioxide (CO2). Eventually, the company conducting the $3 million field test plans to plug its wells with membranes that would allow only the clean-burning hydrogen to reach the surface. The CO2, and all of its power to warm the climate, would remain sequestered deep in the earth. Markets are growing for hydrogen as a fuel for power, heat, and transport, because burning it only releases water. But most hydrogen is made from natural gas, through a process that spews carbon into the air, or by electrolyzing water, which is pricey. Proton Technologies says it can cut costs by relying on oil reservoirs shunned by drillers because they are water-logged or because their oil is too thick.

Thelasko shares a report from Bloomberg: Elon Musk's SpaceX plans to spin out and pursue a public offering of its budding space-internet business Starlink, giving investors a chance to buy into one of the most promising operations within the closely held company. Space Exploration Technologies Corp. has already launched more than 240 satellites to build out Starlink, which will start delivering internet services to customers from space this summer, President Gwynne Shotwell said Thursday at a private investor event hosted by JPMorgan Chase & Co. in Miami. "Right now, we are a private company, but Starlink is the right kind of business that we can go ahead and take public," said Shotwell, SpaceX's chief operating officer. "That particular piece is an element of the business that we are likely to spin out and go public."

Investors have to this point had limited ways to own a piece of SpaceX, which has become one of the most richly valued venture-backed companies in the U.S. by dominating the commercial rocket industry. It flies satellites into orbit for customers including the U.S. military, carries cargo to the International Space Station and aims to start flying NASA astronauts and high-paying tourists soon. But the rocket-launch business remains competitive and tough. Starlink and its ability to provide high-speed internet across the globe has helped private investors in SpaceX justify a roughly $33 billion valuation. Musk has long maintained that the parent is unlikely to go public until it is regularly ferrying people to Mars.

Early signs of cancer can appear years or even decades before diagnosis, according to the most comprehensive investigation to date of the genetic mutations that cause healthy cells to turn malignant. From a report: The findings, based on samples from more than 2,500 tumours and 38 cancer types, reveal a longer-than-expected window of opportunity in which patients could potentially be tested and treated at the earliest stages of the disease. The work was carried out as part of the Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes project, the most comprehensive study of cancer genetics to date. "What's extraordinary is how some of the genetic changes appear to have occurred many years before diagnosis, long before any other signs that a cancer may develop, and perhaps even in apparently normal tissue," said Clemency Jolly, a co-author of the research based at the Francis Crick Institute in London. "Unlocking these patterns means it should now be possible to develop new diagnostic tests that pick up signs of cancer much earlier," said Peter Van Loo, co-lead author, also of the Crick Institute. "There is a window of opportunity."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: More than a thousand scientists have built the most detailed picture of cancer ever in a landmark study. They said cancer was like a 100,000-piece jigsaw, and that until today, 99% of the pieces were missing. Their studies, published in the journal Nature, provide an almost complete picture of all cancers. They could allow treatment to be tailored to each patient's unique tumor, or develop ways of finding cancer earlier. The Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes Consortium analyzed the whole genetic code of 2,658 cancers.

The project found people's cancers contain, on average, between four and five fundamental mutations that drive a cancer's growth. These are potential weak-spots that can be exploited with treatments that attack these "driver mutations." However, 5% of cancers appear to have no driver mutations at all, showing there is still more work to do. Scientists also developed a way of "carbon dating" mutations. They showed that more than a fifth of them occurred years or even decades before a cancer is found. "We've developed the first timelines of genetic mutations across the spectrum of cancer types," said Dr Peter Van Loo from the Francis Crick Institute. He added: "Unlocking these patterns means it should now be possible to develop new diagnostic tests, that pick up signs of cancer much earlier." Further reading: Science Magazine

With the new coronavirus coronavirus spreading from person to person (possibly including from people without symptoms), reaching four continents, and traveling faster than SARS, driving it out of existence is looking increasingly unlikely. From a report: It's still possible that quarantines and travel bans will first halt the outbreak and then eradicate the microbe, and the world will never see 2019-nCoV again, as epidemiologist Dr. Mike Ryan, head of health emergencies at the World Health Organization, told STAT on Saturday. That's what happened with SARS in 2003. Many experts, however, view that happy outcome as increasingly unlikely. "Independent self-sustaining outbreaks [of 2019-nCoV] in major cities globally could become inevitable because of substantial exportation of pre-symptomatic cases," scientists at the University of Hong Kong concluded in a paper published in The Lancet last week. Researchers are therefore asking what seems like a defeatist question but whose answer has huge implications for public policy: What will a world with endemic 2019-nCoV -- circulating permanently in the human population -- be like?

NASA's Parker Solar Probe is healthy and operating as designed following its fourth close approach to the Sun, called perihelion, on Jan. 29. From a report: Mission controllers at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, received a "status A" beacon from the spacecraft at 5:20 a.m. EST on Feb. 1. Status A is the best of four possible status signals, and indicates that the spacecraft is operating nominally and the instrument suites are collecting science data. This status also indicates that any minor issues that may have occurred were identified and resolved by Parker Solar Probe's onboard autonomy and fault management systems.

During this perihelion, Parker Solar Probe broke its own records for speed and proximity to the Sun for a human-made object. The spacecraft reached a speed of 244,255 miles per hour (about 393,044 kilometers per hour) as it whipped around the Sun at a distance of 11.6 million miles (about 18.6 million kilometers). Parker Solar Probe's heat shield, called the Thermal Protection System, or TPS, reached new record temperatures as well. At this distance from the Sun, computer modeling estimates show that the Sun-facing side of the TPS experienced a blazing 1,134 degrees Fahrenheit (612 degrees C), about 300 degrees hotter than encountered on the spacecraft's previous three perihelia. The spacecraft and instruments behind this protective heat shield remained at a temperature of about 85 F (30 C). During the spacecraft's closest three perihelia in 2024-25, the TPS will see temperatures around 2,500 F (1,370 C).

By exploiting randomness, three mathematicians have proved an elegant law that underlies the chaotic motion of turbulent systems. From a report: Picture a calm river. Now picture a torrent of white water. What is the difference between the two? To mathematicians and physicists it's this: The smooth river flows in one direction, while the torrent flows in many different directions at once. Physical systems with this kind of haphazard motion are called turbulent. The fact that their motion unfolds in so many different ways at once makes them difficult to study mathematically. Generations of mathematicians will likely come and go before researchers are able to describe a roaring river in exact mathematical statements. But a new proof finds that while certain turbulent systems appear unruly, they actually conform to a simple universal law. The work is one of the most rigorous descriptions of turbulence ever to emerge from mathematics. And it arises from a novel set of methods that are themselves changing how researchers study this heretofore untamable phenomenon.

"It may well be the most promising approach to turbulence," said Vladimir Sverak, a mathematician at the University of Minnesota and an expert in the study of turbulence. The new work provides a way of describing patterns in moving liquids. These patterns are evident in the rapid temperature variations between nearby points in the ocean and the frenetic, stylized way that white and black paint mix together. In 1959, an Australian mathematician named George Batchelor predicted that these patterns follow an exact, regimented order. The new proof validates the truth of "Batchelor's law," as the prediction came to be known. "We see Batchelor's law all over the place," said Jacob Bedrossian, a mathematician at the University of Maryland, College Park and co-author of the proof with Alex Blumenthal and Samuel Punshon-Smith. "By proving this law, we get a better understanding of just how universal it is."

Claudia Dreifus, writing for Quanta magazine: When I first met the immunology researcher James P. Allison in 2014, he was just becoming an icon. Columbia University had brought him to its campus to present him with the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize for the new type of cancer therapy he had developed. Instead of trying to burn, poison or surgically remove malignant cells from the body, his treatment mobilized a patient's immune system to destroy them. During his talk at the award ceremony, Allison explained that three years earlier, the Food and Drug Administration had approved the antibody drug he had developed, ipilimumab, for use against late-stage metastatic melanoma, which is among the deadliest of cancers. Some of the terminal patients who had participated in earlier trials, he reported, had gained a decade of life. As he described how his drug had changed the prognosis for some of these patients -- it was effective for about 20% of them -- tears came to his eyes.

In all my years on a science beat, I'd never seen a researcher cry. Allison, with his long gray hair and his loose-fitting clothes, struck me as among the most interesting figures in the scientific world. Speaking with him later, I sensed that he was someone deeply original, extremely confident of his intellectual powers and unafraid to go where they took him -- the exact qualities it takes to invent a paradigm-shifting cancer treatment. Allison's drug wasn't the first or only form of immunotherapy; scientists have worked on anticancer vaccines, for example, for decades. What made Allison's "immune checkpoint therapy" unique was that it used antibodies to unlock the immune system's potential to kill cancer cells. This approach is the culmination of Allison's highly accomplished immunology career.

In the early 1980s, he identified the receptor that allows the immune system's T cells to recognize the antigens of infected or abnormal cells. A decade later, he showed that T cells also need a signal from a "costimulatory" molecule to launch their attacks. Then Allison and his colleagues discovered that a molecule called cytotoxic T lymphocyte antigen-4 (CTLA-4) acts as a checkpoint, or built-in brake, on T cells. They could remove the brake and set T cells loose against cancer cells with an antibody -- ipilimumab -- that inhibited the CTLA-4 checkpoint.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Atlas: New research led by Wen-Sung Chung and Justin Marshall of the University of Queensland is shedding new light on the complexity of squid brains. Using MRI scanning to examine the brain of the of the reef squid Sepioteuthis lessoniana, the researchers have produced a new map of neural connections that improves our understanding of their behavior. The cephalopods are widely recognized as the most intelligent of mollusks, but how do they rate when they are competing against something other than clams? Cephalopods show all sorts of complex behavior, like being able to recognize patterns, solve problems, communicate through signals, and camouflage themselves in different textures and colors, despite being colorblind.

But just how complex are these neural circuits? The answer may lie in the maps made by the new MRI scans. "This the first time modern technology has been used to explore the brain of this amazing animal, and we proposed 145 new connections and pathways, more than 60 percent of which are linked to the vision and motor systems," says Chung. "The modern cephalopods, a group including octopus, cuttlefish, and squid, have famously complex brains, approaching that of a dog and surpassing mice and rats, at least in neuronal number. For example, some cephalopods have more than 500 million neurons, compared to 200 million for a rat and 20,000 for a normal mollusk." "Chung says that this complexity may be an example of convergent evolution, where very distantly related animals, like dogs and squids, evolve similar solutions," the report adds. "It's why the eye of the squid is remarkably similar to that of the human eye, even though the two parted ways in evolutionary terms about 560 million years ago."

The research was published in the journal iScience.

fahrbot-bot shares a report from Phys.Org: The University of Rochester research lab that recently used lasers to create unsinkable metallic structures has now demonstrated how the same technology could be used to create highly efficient solar power generators. In a paper published in Light: Science & Applications, the lab of Chunlei Guo, professor of optics also affiliated with Physics and the Material Sciences Program, describes using powerful femto-second laser pulses to etch metal surfaces with nanoscale structures that selectively absorb light only at the solar wavelengths, but not elsewhere.

A regular metal surface is shiny and highly reflective. Years ago, the Guo lab developed a black metal technology that turned shiny metals pitch black. "But to make a perfect solar absorber," Guo says, "We need more than a black metal and the result is this selective absorber." This surface not only enhances the energy absorption from sunlight, but also reduces heat dissipation at other wavelengths, in effect, "making a perfect metallic solar absorber for the first time," Guo says. "We also demonstrate solar energy harnessing with a thermal electric generator device." "This will be useful for any thermal solar energy absorber or harvesting device," particularly in places with abundant sunlight, he adds.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: Supermassive black holes have a reputation for consuming everything in their path, from gas clouds to entire solar systems. So is there any way aliens could live on a world that actually orbited one of these cosmic beasts? Surprisingly, the answer is a tentative yes, researchers say, although there are plenty of reasons why life could never take hold in such a place. If it did, living on such a planet would be truly surreal, with the black hole filling nearly half the sky and concentrating leftover photons from the big bang into a pseudosun. It would certainly be no place like home. The deep blackness of the event horizon, looming over nearly half the sky, would be a forbidding presence. And because of the time dilation effects in Albert Einstein's theory of gravity, known as general relativity, 1 year passing on such a planet would see thousands of years go by around an ordinary star. Even if life could take hold on such a world, there's little chance of detecting it. A planet passing in front of a black hole isn't going to make it appear any dimmer when it's black already. An expert says a vast array of radio telescopes, like the one used last year to image a black hole for the first time, might be able to detect such a transit. "Technically it's not so easy, but in theory it's possible." If this idea sounds familiar, it's because it was first published in 2017. The researchers said that in order for a planet to receive strong enough cosmic microwave background (CMB) light, it would need to orbit very close to the black hole's event horizon. However, if it were too close it would get sucked in.

"As the researchers report in The Astrophysical Journal, for their planet to get close enough, the surface of the black hole would have to spin at less than a 100-millionth of a percent shy of the speed of light," reports Science Magazine. "The black hole would also need to be large, the team calculates, at least 163 million times the Sun's mass." It would also need to be "an old galaxy" with "almost empty space" surrounding the black hole. "That's because any other stray matter being sucked into the black hole would emit a blast of radiation during its death spiral powerful enough to kill any life on a nearby planet," the report says.

A group of online archivists have created an open-access directory of over 5,000 scientific studies about coronaviruses that anyone can browse and download without encountering a paywall . From a report: The directory is hosted on The-Eye, a massive online archiving project run by a Reddit user named "-Archivist." Last week, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared a global health emergency amid the spread of the novel coronavirus beyond China, where it originated, into roughly two dozen countries so far. The organizers of the archive see their project as a resource for scientists and non-scientists alike to study the virus. "These articles were always written to be shared with as many people as possible," Reddit user "shrine," an organizer of the archive, said in a call. "From every angle that you look at it, [paywalled research] is an immoral situation, and it's an ongoing tragedy."

In 2015, Liberian public health officials co-authored a New York Times op-ed that lamented the amount of critical Ebola research that was unknown or inaccessible to scientists and health workers at the center of the 2014 epidemic. "Even today, downloading one of the papers would cost a physician here $45, about half a week's salary," the authors wrote. Shrine, who is in his late 20s, said he was inspired to assemble the archive when, last week, he clicked on a new research article about the coronavirus and encountered a $39.95 paywall. He and a few friends started to brainstorm solutions around paywalls like the one he had run into. They came up with the idea of searching for coronavirus-related papers on Sci-Hub, a free scientific research repository sometimes called "the Pirate Bay of science." Sci-Hub's site says it provides free access to over 78 million research articles by downloading HTML and PDF pages off the web, in some cases bypassing paywalls. Because of this, major scientific publishing companies -- most prominently Elsevier -- have repeatedly sued Sci-Hub for copyright infringement. Similarly, by disseminating PDFs from Sci-Hub, the coronavirus archive is in questionable legal territory.

According to a new study published in the journal Nature Geoscience, rapidly-thawing permafrost in the Arctic is causing sinkholes in a process called thermokarst. "That's the land that gets ravaged whenever permafrost thaws rapidly," reports Wired. "As the ice that holds the soil together disappears, hillsides collapse and massive sinkholes open up." From the report: Today in the journal Nature Geoscience, researchers argue that without taking abrupt thaws into account, we're underestimating the impact of permafrost thaw by 50 percent. "The amount of carbon coming off that very narrow amount of abrupt thaw in the landscape, that small area, is still large enough to double the climate consequences and the permafrost carbon feedback," says study lead author Merritt Turetsky, of the University of Guelph and University of Colorado Boulder. Less than 20 percent of northern permafrost land is susceptible to this kind of rapid thaw. Some permafrost is simply frozen rock, or even sand. But the kind we're worried about here contains a whole lot of water. "Where permafrost tends to be lake sediment or organic soils, the type of earth material that can hold a lot of water, these are like sponges on the landscape," says Turetsky. "When you have thaw, we see really dynamic and rapid changes."

That's because frozen water takes up more space than liquid water. When permafrost thaws, it loses a good amount of its volume. Think of it like thawing ice cubes made of water and muck: If you defrost the tray, the greenery will sink to the bottom and settle. "That's exactly what happens in these ecosystems when the permafrost has a lot of ice in it and it thaws,â says Turetsky. "Whatever was at the surface just slumps right down to the bottom. So you get these pits on the land, sometimes meters deep. They're like sinkholes developing in the land." "Essentially, we're taking terra firma and making it terra soupy," Turetsky adds. [...] When these lands thaw, they play host to a number of processes. As ice turns to liquid water, trees flood and die off. Thus more light reaches the soil, further accelerating thawing. This is in contrast to gradual thaw, when the plant community largely stays the same as the ice thaws. Defrosted soil at the surface gets thicker and thicker, but it doesn't catastrophically collapse.

NASA is launching a new air quality measurement tool aboard a Maxar 1300-class satellite to help improve air quality forecasting. Called "TEMPO," which stands for Tropospheric Emissions: Monitoring of Pollution, the new tool will provide hourly measurements of the levels of gases in the atmosphere over North America, including ozone, nitrogen dioxide and aerosols. TechCrunch reports: The TEMPO tool won't launch until 2022, however, which is when the Maxar satellite, called Intelsat 40e, is set to be delivered to geostationary orbit. It's not uncommon for NASA to host its scientific payloads on commercial communications satellites, providing an opportunity for NASA to effectively hitch a ride on a large geostationary satellite that'll cover the territory it wants to cover, while offering significant cost savings versus putting up a dedicated spacecraft. Ball Aerospace developed the TEMPO instrument for NASA, and it'll be transported to Maxar's Palo Alto-based satellite manufacturing facility for incorporation into the Intelsat 40e vehicle ahead of its scheduled launch. The instrument will also be used alongside other tools, including one from the European Space Agency, and South Korea's Geostationary Environment Monitoring Spectrometer, which will all combine to provide a more comprehensive and detailed picture of air quality across the northern hemisphere.

The simulators used to forecast warming have suddenly started giving us less time. From a report: There are dozens of climate models, and for decades they've agreed on what it would take to heat the planet by about 3 Celsius. It's an outcome that would be disastrous -- flooded cities, agricultural failures, deadly heat -- but there's been a grim steadiness in the consensus among these complicated climate simulations. Then last year, unnoticed in plain view, some of the models started running very hot. The scientists who hone these systems used the same assumptions about greenhouse-gas emissions as before and came back with far worse outcomes. Some produced projections in excess of 5C, a nightmare scenario.

The scientists involved couldn't agree on why -- or if the results should be trusted. Climatologists began "talking to each other like, 'What'd you get?', 'What'd you get?'" said Andrew Gettelman, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, which builds a high-profile climate model. "The question is whether they've overshot," said Mark Zelinka, staff scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Researchers are starting to put together answers, a task that will take months at best, and there's not yet agreement on how to interpret the hotter results. The reason for worry is that these same models have successfully projected global warming for a half century. Their output continues to frame all major scientific, policy and private-sector climate goals and debates, including the sixth encyclopedic assessment by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change due out next year. If the same amount of climate pollution will bring faster warming than previously thought, humanity would have less time to avoid the worst impacts.

Thanks to the coronavirus outbreak, working from home is no longer a privilege, it's a necessity. From a report: While factories, shops, hotels and restaurants are warning about plunging foot traffic that is transforming city centers into ghost towns, behind the closed doors of apartments and suburban homes, thousands of businesses are trying to figure out how to stay operational in a virtual world. "It's a good opportunity for us to test working from home at scale," said Alvin Foo, managing director of Reprise Digital, a Shanghai ad agency with 400 people that's part of Interpublic Group. "Obviously, not easy for a creative ad agency that brainstorms a lot in person." It's going to mean a lot of video chats and phone calls, he said. The cohorts working from home are about to grow into armies. At the moment, most people in China are still on vacation for the Lunar New Year. But as Chinese companies begin to restart operations, it's likely to usher in the world's largest work-from-home experiment.

That means a lot more people trying to organize client meetings and group discussions via videochat apps, or discussing plans on productivity software platforms like WeChat Work or Bytedance's Slack-like Lark. The vanguards for the new model of scattered employees are the Chinese financial centers of Hong Kong and Shanghai, cities with central business districts that rely on hundreds of thousands of office workers in finance, logistics, insurance, law and other white-collar jobs. One Hong Kong banker said he's going to extend an overseas vacation, as he can work from anywhere with a laptop and a phone. Others say they are using the time typically spent wining and dining clients to clear their backlog of travel expenses. One said he's shifted focus to deals in Southeast Asia.

"A Russian satellite has positioned itself uncomfortably close to an American spy satellite in orbit around Earth..." reports the Verge, adding that the Russian satellite "has been in constant view of its U.S. target for nearly two weeks now."

An anonymous reader quotes The Drive: Russia has a number of what it calls "space apparatus inspectors" in orbit, which the U.S. government and others warn the Kremlin could use to gather intelligence on other satellites or function as "killer satellites," using various means to damage, disable, or destroy those targets.

On Jan. 30, 2020, Michael Thompson, a graduate student at Purdue University focusing on astrodynamics, posted a detailed thread on Twitter... [H]ow Cosmos 2542 is orbiting now means that it now has a "consistent view" of USA 245. "As I'm typing this, that offset distance shifts between 150 and 300km depending on the location in the orbit," according to Thompson....

One possibility is that it could be using onboard systems, such as cameras or other sensors, to gather information about the [U.S. satellite] KH-11, the capabilities of which are highly classified... It may also be possible to gather electronic or signals intelligence data that could be of additional value. Beyond that, the ability of Cosmos 2542 to get into this position at all is notable and is exactly the kind of orbital maneuvering that the U.S. government had pointed to in the past as evidence of potential "killer satellites." A highly maneuverable, but small satellite could possibly get close enough to disrupt the operation of, disable, or destroy another object in space using a variety of means, ranging from electronic warfare jammers to directed energy weapons, such as a laser...

Russia is known to be interested in anti-satellite capacities and has developed or is developing a number of terrestrial anti-satellite weapons, including ground-based and air-launched interceptors, too. China is pursuing similar developments, as well.


The article points out that is all happening "as the U.S. military is very publicly working to address concerns about the increasing vulnerability of various space-based systems that it relies on heavily... The most obvious expression of this recent push is the creation of U.S. Space Force, an entirely new branch of the U.S. military to focus on American military activities in and related to space, as well as the procurement of satellites and other related systems and infrastructure."

And then late Saturday night, Thompson posted another update on Twitter: that the Russian satellite had made yet another manuever on Friday, "and is now drifting back towards USA 245."

"It's been almost a year since Instagram pledged to reduce the spread of vaccine-related misinformation on its platform. But today, it continues to do the exact opposite," reports the Huffington Post: When HuffPost created a new Instagram account and searched for the term "vaccines" on Saturday, almost all of the top results were anti-vax pages... At the very top was a profile with more than 74,000 followers and posts pushing blatant falsehoods about vaccines and the Wuhan coronavirus. As soon as HuffPost followed that account, Instagram recommended dozens more that, just like it, were promoting dangerous medical misinformation amid a global health emergency.

With its 1 billion users, the role that Facebook-owned Instagram plays in shaping public discourse is not easily understated.

schwit1 quotes Space.com:
The way the fabric of space and time swirls in a cosmic whirlpool around a dead star has confirmed yet another prediction from Einstein's theory of general relativity, a new study finds.

That prediction is a phenomenon known as frame dragging, or the Lense-Thirring effect. It states that space-time will churn around a massive, rotating body. For example, imagine Earth were submerged in honey. As the planet rotated, the honey around it would swirl — and the same holds true with space-time.

Satellite experiments have detected frame dragging in the gravitational field of rotating Earth, but the effect is extraordinarily small and, therefore, has been challenging to measure. Objects with greater masses and more powerful gravitational fields, such as white dwarfs and neutron stars, offer better chances to see this phenomenon...

The researchers noted that they used frame dragging to yield insight into the rotating star that caused it. In the future, they said, they can use a similar method to analyze binary neutron stars to learn more about their internal composition, "which, even after more than 50 years of observing them, we do not yet have a handle on," study lead author Vivek Venkatraman Krishnan said. "The density of matter inside a neutron star far exceeds what can be achieved in a lab, so there is a wealth of new physics to be learnt by using this technique to double neutron-star systems."

The scientists detailed their findings online Thursday in the journal Science.

An anonymous reader quotes Reuters: Thai doctors have seen success in treating severe cases of the new coronavirus with combination of medications for flu and HIV, with initial results showing vast improvement 48 hours after applying the treatment, they said on Sunday...

"This is not the cure, but the patientâ(TM)s condition has vastly improved. From testing positive for 10 days under our care, after applying this combination of medicine the test result became negative within 48 hours," Dr. Kriangska Atipornwanich, a lung specialist at Rajavithi, told reporters.

A coronavirus has now infected over 14,380 people worldwide and killed at least 304 people in China, reports the New York Times. But they also note that when the first symptoms appeared in December, Chinese authorities "silenced doctors and others for raising red flags." They played down the dangers to the public, leaving the city's 11 million residents unaware they should protect themselves. They closed a food market where the virus was believed to have started, but didn't broadly curb the wildlife trade.

Their reluctance to go public, in part, played to political motivations as local officials prepared for their annual congresses in January. Even as cases climbed, officials declared repeatedly that there had likely been no more infections.

By not moving aggressively to warn the public and medical professionals, public health experts say, the Chinese government lost one of its best chances to keep the disease from becoming an epidemic. "This was an issue of inaction," said Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations who studies China. "There was no action in Wuhan from the local health department to alert people to the threat."

The first case, the details of which are limited and the specific date unknown, was in early December. By the time the authorities galvanized into action on Jan. 20, the disease had grown into a formidable threat.

It is now a global health emergency.
The Times also reports on the last day of 2019, the police even announced "that they were investigating eight people for spreading rumors about the outbreak."

And days later Wuhan's mayor spoke to the Communist Party-run legislatures, promising that his city would soon host a World Health Expo.

There's a North American tradition that says there'll be six more weeks of winter if a groundhog can see his shadow (due to clear skies) on February 2nd.

And while it's been honored every year with a ceremony in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania since 1887, PETA is now suggesting that the event's organizers should stop using a live groundhog -- and replace him with a robot. The Morning Caller reports:
The People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals said in a news release Tuesday it sent a letter calling for the current incarnation of Punxsutawney Phil to be sent to a "reputable sanctuary" to live out the remainder of his life. Phil, arguably the world's most famous groundhog, takes part in a ceremony every Feb. 2 at Gobbler's Knob in Punxsutawney. His handlers, also known as the Inner Circle, host festivities that culminate at 7:20 a.m., when they pull Punxsutawney Phil from a decorative stump so he can predict an early spring or six more weeks of winter.

"Gentle, vulnerable groundhogs are not barometers," PETA Executive Vice President Tracy Reiman said in the release. "PETA is offering the club a win-win situation: Breathe life into a tired tradition and finally do right by a long-suffering animal... An AI Phil would renew interest in Punxsutawney, generating a great deal of buzz, much like Sony's robot dog 'aibo,' which walks, plays, misbehaves, and responds to commands...

"By creating an AI Phil, you could keep Punxsutawney at the center of Groundhog Day but in a much more progressive way."
One LiveScience article points out that "you'll be better off flipping a coin than going by the groundhog's predictions."

Or, as one PETA blog post explains, "To predict the weather you need a robot, not a terrified groundhog."

"The vegan diet is low in — or, in some cases, entirely devoid of — several important brain nutrients," argues the BBC. "Could these shortcomings be affecting vegans' abilities to think?"

omfglearntoplay shared their article: According to the latest statistics, there are around 375 million vegetarians on the planet. In the West, veganism has ditched the hippie stigma to become one of the fastest-growing millennial trends; in the United States, it grew by 600% between 2014 and 2017. Meanwhile in India, meat-free diets have been mainstream since the 6th Century BCE...

[T]he holes in our current understanding of what the brain needs to be healthy could potentially be a major problem for vegans, since it's hard to artificially add a nutrient to your diet, if scientists haven't discovered its worth yet... "I think we need a lot more research into vegan nutrition and health," says Heather Russell, a dietitian from The Vegan Society. "As far as we can tell, it's possible to lead a healthy life as a vegan — certainly there are people who thrive on a vegan diet." Though it's important to take supplements, she explains that a person's cardiovascular and brain health are inextricably linked, and vegans tend to have healthier hearts...

Nathan Cofnas, a biologist from Oxford University, takes a harsher view. Though vegans can take supplements, he thinks it's unrealistic to expect that they all will. Consequently, he finds the recent shift towards plant-based diets troubling, though he's sympathetic to the arguments for doing so. "Without question, veganism can cause B12 and iron deficiencies, and without question they affect your intelligence," he says.
The BBC does cite various studies about specific nutrients, but ultimately drew an angry response from a microbiologist who describes themself as "a vegan with a Ph.D., who works alongside many sharp and bright vegans," and complains the BBC is using outdated data, starting with the theory that meat consumption allowed humans to evolve larger brains. This is now considered outdated thinking as recent research, published in the journal Nature, refutes this, arguing that a higher-quality diet, including some meat but also improved by cooking, coupled with the energy saved by walking upright, growing more slowly and reproducing later, fuelled the growth in brain size. Prehistoric humans ate some meat but that alone didn't make them smart...

Sure vegans need to ensure a good B12 intake but so should everyone, as low levels of B12 are common in the entire population, regardless of diet. Everyone over 50 in the U.S. is advised to take B12 supplements and meat and dairy only contain it because animals are fed or injected with supplements... [A]ll major health bodies agree that well-planned vegan diets are appropriate for all people at all ages. For example: "It is the position of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics [America's largest organization of nutrition professionals] that appropriately planned vegetarian, including vegan, diets are healthful, nutritionally adequate, and may provide health benefits for the prevention and treatment of certain diseases...."

I recently wrote a piece for Viva!'s magazine Viva!life about the trend in vegan-bashing articles and this FOMO (fear of missing out) approach is popular click-bait claptrap. However, articles like this do nutrition journalism no favours as misleading the public is irresponsible and dangerous.

sciencehabit quotes Science magazine: A new close-up of the turbulent boiling plasma of the solar surface is the debut image of the largest telescope ever built for staring at the Sun. Sporting a 4-meter-wide mirror — twice the size of any existing solar scope—and a vantage point 3000 meters up on the summit of Haleakala on the Hawaiian island of Maui — the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope (DKIST) will reveal unprecedented detail of processes that channel energy from the Sun's interior into its atmosphere, the corona.

Researchers hope that by zooming in on cell-like structures — each about the size of Texas — they can learn what causes the Sun to launch powerful flares out into space, potentially causing damage to Earth's satellites, power grids, and communications. Such information could help scientists give warnings of such events days rather than minutes ahead.

Long-time Slashdot reader Kreuzfeld writes: Thursday marks the final mission of NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope.

Conceived of as an infrared-optimized "Great Observatory," Spitzer has spent the last 6002 days providing Earthlings with an unprecedented view into other galaxies, our own solar system, and (unexpected to its designers!) planets around other stars. But in its Earth-trailing solar orbit, Spitzer is now over 1.5 astronomical units from the Earth: radio transmissions are increasingly difficult, and (more importantly) Spitzer's operating costs were ultimately deemed to be too high relative to its science output.

Spitzer's infrared capabilities won't be replaced until 2021 (at the earliest) when NASA's James Webb Space Telescope — an even larger successor to Spitzer and the Hubble — is anticipated to launch.

Bon voyage, Spitzer — we'll see you again in about 30 years when our orbits meet up again.

sciencehabit writes: Most days, Willy van Wingerden spends a few free hours walking by the sea not far from the Dutch town of Monster. Here, the cheerful nurse has plucked more than 500 ancient artifacts from the broad, windswept beach known as the Zandmotor, or "sand engine." She has found Neanderthal tools made of river cobbles, bone fishhooks, and human remains thousands of years old. Her favorite beach -- made of material dredged from the sea bottom offshore -- preserves traces of a lost world, when sea levels were lower, and what is now the North Sea was a rich lowland, home to modern humans and Neanderthals. While she and other dedicated amateurs amass artifacts, scientists are applying new methods to date the finds and sequence any genetic traces, as well as to map the sea floor and analyze sediment cores. Together, researchers and collectors are bringing to light a vanished homeland of ancient Europeans.

Writing in Analytical Chemistry, Paige Hinners and Young Jin Lee of Iowa State University say they have figured out an accurate way to data to within 24 hours when a fingerprint under a week old was made -- and thus whether it is associated with a crime temporally, as well as spatially. The Economist reports: They knew from work conducted by other laboratories that the triglyceride oils contained in fingerprints change by oxidation over the course of time. That provides an obvious way to date prints. The problem is that the techniques which have been applied to analyze these oils are able to distinguish age only crudely. In practice, they can determine whether or not a print is over a week old, but nothing else. Dr Hinners and Dr Lee wondered if higher precision could be obtained by thinking a bit more about oxidation. Oxygen molecules in the air come in two varieties. Most have a pair of atoms but some, known as ozone, have three. Though far rarer than diatomic oxygen, ozone is more reactive and also reacts in ways different from those of its two-atomed cousin. The two researchers therefore decided to focus their attentions on ozonolysis, as triatomic oxidation is known.

Triglycerides, as their name suggests, are three-tailed molecules. Each tail is a chain of carbon atoms, with hydrogen atoms bonded to the carbons. The chains are held together by bonds between the carbon atoms. These are of two varieties, known as single and double bonds. Single bonds are, in chemistry-speak, saturated, and double bonds unsaturated. By extension, molecules with one or more double bonds in them are also referred to as unsaturated, while those with only single bonds are called saturated. Unsaturated bonds are more reactive, and it is here that ozonolysis does its work. Ozone breaks up triglycerides at their double bonds, with one or more of the ozone's oxygen atoms becoming attached to the carbon chain, to create new chemical species. In principle, this should result in a gradual loss of unsaturated triglycerides and a concomitant rise in the reaction products of ozonolysis. And that, in practice, is what Dr Hinners and Dr Lee found.

The Trump administration on Friday declared a public healthy emergency over the coronavirus outbreak and said any foreign national who has traveled within China in the last 14 days will not be allowed to enter the country. The Wall Street Journal reports: The announcement [from U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar] came as stock markets tumbled amid concern about how the impact of the virus could slow global growth. At the same time, Mr. Azar sought to minimize fears about the virus spreading further in the U.S. "I hope that people will see that their government is taking responsible steps to protect them," he said at a White House briefing. "The risk is low... but our job is to keep that risk low."

There are six confirmed cases in the U.S. and 191 people are under investigation, officials said. Meantime, Americans who were evacuated from the epicenter of the China coronavirus outbreak will be quarantined for 14 days at a U.S. military base to prevent any spread of the infectious disease, federal health authorities said Friday. The quarantine -- the first in the U.S. ordered by the federal government in roughly 50 years -- came as the U.K. and Russia each reported their first cases of the dangerous virus, while other countries moved to limit air traffic with China as the number of people infected there approached 10,000. The quarantine applies to 195 U.S. citizens evacuated Wednesday from Wuhan, the Chinese city at the center of the outbreak, and brought to the March Air Reserve Base in Riverside County, Calif., the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said. The State Department also on Friday advised Americans in China to consider leaving and requested all nonessential U.S. government personnel to postpone travel there.

The State Department's "Do Not Travel" advice placed China on the same list as Afghanistan, Iran, Syria, North Korea and Venezuela. It follows the WHO's designation Thursday of the coronavirus as a global public-health emergency.

Additionally, Delta Air Lines and American Airlines said they will suspend all U.S.-China flights for at least several weeks due to the outbreak. Delta's suspensions will begin Feb. 6 and last through April 30.

UPDATE (2/8/2020): NASA technicians were able to reach Voyager 2, a whopping 11.5 billion miles from earth, and get it fully back online and collecting scientific data again.

Below is Slashdot's original story from January 31st...

Last Saturday, Voyager 2's software shut down all five of the scientific instruments onboard because the spacecraft was consuming way too much power. Engineers at NASA don't know what triggered this energy spike and are currently trying to get the interstellar probe, which was launched in 1977, back to normal operations. Its primary mission was supposed to last five years. In 2018, it officially left the solar system. In order to keep the spacecraft running properly 42 years later, NASA has had to carefully manage power consumption for the instruments and the probe's heaters. From a report: About 11.5 billion miles away, Voyager 2 was supposed to make a scheduled 360-degree rotation that would help calibrate its magnetometer (used to measure magnetic fields). The spacecraft delayed this move for still unknown reasons, leaving two other internal systems running at high power. The onboard software decided to offset this power deficit by shutting down the five scientific instruments still working. NASA engineers shut down one of the power-hungry systems and turned the science instruments back on. But the spacecraft is still not cleared for normal operations and is not collecting any new data for now. [...] It takes 17 hours for data from Earth to get to Voyager 2, and vice versa. This lag means it will take several days to solve the spacecraft's woes. As it is, the radioisotope thermoelectric generator, which powers the spacecraft, is only expected to last another five years before the plutonium-238 can no longer provide enough heat to power the probe's instruments, so Voyager 2 is on its last hurrah anyway.

Delta Air Lines and American Airlines said on Friday that they will suspend all U.S.-China flights for at least several weeks due to the coronavirus outbreak. Delta on Friday said its China service suspension will begin Feb. 6 and last through April 30, but it will continue to operate the service until then to "ensure customers looking to exit China have options to do so." From a report: Dozens of carriers including United, Cathay Pacific, British Airways and others have slashed or suspended service to China because of the outbreak. Delta was the first in the U.S. to suspend service altogether. Large companies spanning industries from technology to packaged food have suspended business trips to the country because of coronavirus, driving down demand for flights to China. Time has a more comprehensive list.

The World Health Organization on Thursday declared an international public health emergency over the deadly new coronavirus that has hit China hard. From a report: The announcement comes as nearly a hundred cases have been spotted in countries outside of China, including the first case of human-to-human transmission in the U.S., also reported on Thursday. The WHO's decision on the outbreak of virus, known as 2019-nCoV, was made following a lengthy discussion by experts assembled by the agency. Last week, the same committee deliberated for two days about whether to call for a public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC), as it's officially known, but declined to do so. While China has reported a large surge of cases since then -- over 7,700 cases and 170 deaths as of early January 30 -- the move to now call for an international emergency was motivated by the worsening situation outside of China, according to WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. As of Thursday, there have been 98 cases reported outside of mainland China in at least 18 countries, but no deaths outside of China. "The main reason for this declaration is not because of what is happening in China, but because of what is happening in other countries," Tedros said at the press conference announcing the PHEIC today. "We don't know what sort of damage this virus could do if it were to spread in a country with a weaker health system. We must act now to help countries prepare for that possibility."

davidwr writes: Remember the aurora-that-wasn't called STEVE from last April? Well, amateur stargazers in Finland are at it again. This time it's for a new kind of aurora dubbed "the dunes." These new aurora are thought to be an example of a "mesosphereic bore" in which oxygen is exited by the solar wind or possibly gravity waves. The original paper can be found at here. News of it can be found at ScienceAlert, Live Science, and probably elsewhere. The researchers say the dunes emerge at an altitude of about 62 miles in the upper reaches of the mesosphere, and are visible simultaneously from different locations in Finland and Sweden.

The University of Helsinki has posted a video of the new type of Aurora Borealis on their YouTube channel.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ScienceAlert: On Monday, researchers from Japan's Osaka University announced the successful completion of a first-of-its-kind heart transplant. Rather than replacing their patient's entire heart with a new organ, these researchers placed degradable sheets containing heart muscle cells onto the heart's damaged areas -- and if the procedure has the desired effect, it could eventually eliminate the need for some entire heart transplants.

To grow the heart muscle cells, the team started with induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells. These are stem cells that researchers create by taking an adult's cells -- often from their skin or blood -- and reprogramming them back into their embryonic-like pluripotent state. At that point, researchers can coax the iSP cells into becoming whatever kind of cell they'd like. In the case of this Japanese study, the researchers created heart muscle cells from the iSP cells before placing them on small sheets. The patient, which suffers from ischemic cardiomyopathy, will be monitored for the next year. If all goes well, the researchers hope to conduct the same procedure on nine other people suffering from the same condition within the next three years.

A reader shares a report from MIT Technology Review: Astronomers have just released the highest-resolution image of the sun. Taken by the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope in Maui, it gives us an unprecedented view of our nearest star and brings us closer to solving several long-standing mysteries. The new image demonstrates the telescope's potential power. It shows off a surface that's divided up into discrete, Texas-size cells, like cracked sections in the desert soil. You can see plasma oozing off the surface, rising into the air before sinking back into darker lanes.

"We have now seen the smallest details on the largest object in our solar system," says Thomas Rimmele, the director of DKIST. The new image was taken December 10, when the telescope achieved first light. It is still technically under construction, with three more instruments set to come online. When formal observations begin in July, DKIST, with its 13-foot mirror, will be the most powerful solar telescope in the world. Located on Haleakala (the tallest summit on Maui), the telescope will be able to observe structures on the surface of the sun as small as 18.5 miles (30 kilometers). This resolution is over five times better than that of DKIST's predecessor, the Richard B. Dunn Solar Telescope in New Mexico.

After several weather delays, SpaceX successfully launched its fourth batch of Starlink satellites into orbit and nailed a rocket landing today. Space.com reports: A sooty Falcon 9 rocket -- which made its third flight with this launch -- roared to life at 9:06 a.m. EST (1406 GMT), lifting off from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station here in Florida. The rocket carried 60 more Starlink satellites for SpaceX's growing constellation, the second such launch by the company this month. The satellites all successfully deployed about an hour after liftoff.

The star of this mission, the Falcon 9 first stage dubbed B1051.3 by SpaceX, previously lofted a Crew Dragon capsule as part of the company's uncrewed mission to the space station (Demo-1) as well as a trio of Earth-observing satellites for Canada. Following the successful launch, the rocket's first stage gently touched down on a SpaceX's drone ship landing platform "Of Course I Still Love You" in the Atlantic Ocean, marking the company's 49th booster recovery. [...] Today's launch is part of SpaceX's goal of connecting the globe with its Starlink network. Each satellite is identical, weighing in at roughly 485 lbs. (220 kg), and is part of a larger network that aims to provide internet coverage to the world below. With this launch, it brings SpaceX's burgeoning constellation up to 240, making it the largest in orbit to date.

Google is temporarily shutting down all of its China offices due to the coronavirus outbreak, as well as offices in Hong Kong and Taiwan. The Verge reports: Currently, the offices are closed for the extended Lunar New Year holiday, a measure the Chinese government took to help reduce the spread of the virus by encouraging residents to stay inside and avoid travel. A Google spokesperson says the company now plans to keep its offices closed in accordance with the government guidance, and it's also placed temporary business travel restrictions on flying to mainland China and Hong Kong. The company is also advising employees currently in China, and employees who have immediate family members returning from the country, return home as soon as possible and to work from home for at least 14 days from their departure date. Apple is also taking action to reduce the spread of the virus by temporarily shutting down three stores located China. Two of the stores were in malls in Nanjing and Fuzhou, China, while the other was in Qingdao, China. They are expected to reopen next week.