The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued updated guidance on Tuesday recommending that vaccinated people wear masks in indoor, public settings if they are in parts of the U.S. with substantial to high transmission, among other circumstances. From a report: The guidance, a reversal from recommendations made two months ago, comes as the Delta variant continues to drive up case rates across the country. Millions of people in the U.S. -- either by choice or who are ineligible -- remain unvaccinated and at risk of serious infection. Community leaders in areas with high transmission rates should encourage vaccination and masking, the agency says. In another reversal, the CDC also recommends universal indoor masking for all teachers, staff, students and visitors to K-12 schools this incoming school year, regardless of vaccination status. Los Angeles County, New Orleans, Savannah and Chicago are among the major metropolitan areas that reinstated mask mandates amid a rise in cases.

The lunar rovers of Apollo 15, 16 and 17 parked American automotive culture on the lunar surface, and expanded the scientific range of the missions' astronaut explorers. From a report: Dave Scott was not about to pass by an interesting rock without stopping. It was July 31, 1971, and he and Jim Irwin, his fellow Apollo 15 astronaut, were the first people to drive on the moon. After a 6-hour inaugural jaunt in the new lunar rover, the two were heading back to their lander, the Falcon, when Mr. Scott made an unscheduled pit stop. West of a crater called Rhysling, Mr. Scott scrambled out of the rover and quickly picked up a black lava rock, full of holes formed by escaping gas. Mr. Scott and Mr. Irwin had been trained in geology and knew the specimen, a vesicular rock, would be valuable to scientists on Earth. They also knew that if they asked for permission to stop and get it, clock-watching mission managers would say no. So Mr. Scott made up a story that they stopped the rover because he was fidgeting with his seatbelt. The sample was discovered when the astronauts returned to Earth, Mr. Scott described what he'd done, and "Seatbelt Rock" became one of the most prized geologic finds from Apollo 15.

Like many lunar samples returned to Earth by the final Apollo missions, Seatbelt Rock never would have been collected if the astronauts had not brought a car with them. Apollo 11 and Apollo 13 are the NASA lunar missions that tend to be remembered most vividly. But at the 50th anniversary of Apollo 15, which launched on July 26, 1971, some space enthusiasts, historians and authors are giving the lunar rover its due as one of the most enduring symbols of the American moon exploration program. Foldable, durable, battery-powered and built by Boeing and General Motors, the vehicle is seen by some as making the last three missions into the crowning achievement of the Apollo era. "Every mission in the crewed space program, dating back to Alan Shepard's first flight, had been laying the groundwork for the last three Apollo missions," said Earl Swift, author of a new book about the lunar rover, "Across the Airless Wilds: The Lunar Rover and the Triumph of the Final Moon Landings. You see NASA take all of that collected wisdom, gleaned over the previous decade in space, and apply it," Mr. Swift said. "It's a much more swashbuckling kind of science."

Mogster shares a report from SciTechDaily: A one-atom-thin 2D magnet developed by Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley could advance new applications in computing and electronics. The researchers synthesized the new 2D magnet -- called a cobalt-doped van der Waals zinc-oxide magnet -- from a solution of graphene oxide, zinc, and cobalt. The new material -- which can be bent into almost any shape without breaking, and is a million times thinner than a sheet of paper -- could help advance the application of spin electronics or spintronics, a new technology that uses the orientation of an electron's spin rather than its charge to encode data. And unlike previous 2D magnets, which lose their magnetism at room temperature or above, the researchers found that the new 2D magnet not only works at room temperature but also at 100 degrees Celsius (212 degrees Fahrenheit).

Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos on Monday offered to cover billions of dollars of NASA costs in exchange for a contract to build a lunar lander to land astronauts on the moon. CNBC reports: Bezos said Blue Origin would waive all payments up to $2 billion from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in the current and next two government fiscal years. Blue Origin would also fund its own pathfinder mission to low-Earth orbit, according to Bezos. In return, the company requested a fixed-priced contract from the government agency. "This offer is not a deferral, but is an outright and permanent waiver of those payments. This offer provides time for government appropriation actions to catch up," Bezos said in an open letter to NASA Administrator Bill Nelson.

NASA in April awarded Elon Musk's SpaceX with a sole $2.89 billion contract to build the next crewed lunar lander under its Human Landing Systems program. Before selecting the winner of the contest, NASA gave 10-month study contracts to SpaceX, Blue Origin and Dynetics to begin work on lunar landers. "Instead of this single source approach, NASA should embrace its original strategy of competition," Bezos said. "Without competition, a short time into the contract, NASA will find itself with limited options as it attempts to negotiate missed deadlines, design changes, and cost overruns."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Record-shattering" heatwaves, even worse than the one that recently hit north-west America, are set to become much more likely in future, according to research. The study is a stark new warning on the rapidly escalating risks the climate emergency poses to lives. The research found that highly populated regions in North America, Europe and China were where the record-shattering extremes are most likely to occur. One illustrative heatwave produced by the computer models used in the study showed some locations in mid-northern America having temperatures 18C higher than average. The new computing modeling study [...] looked for the first time at the highest margins by which week-long heatwave records could be broken in future.

It found that heatwaves that smash previous records by roughly 5C would become two to seven times more likely in the next three decades and three to 21 times more likely from 2051-2080, unless carbon emissions are immediately slashed. Such extreme heatwaves are all but impossible without global heating. The vulnerability of North America, Europe and China was striking, said Erich Fischer, at ETH Zurich in Switzerland, who led the research. "Here we see the largest jumps in record-shattering events. This is really quite worrying," he added. "Many places have by far not seen anything close to what's possible, even in present-day conditions, because only looking at the past record is really dangerous."

The study also showed that record-shattering events could come in sharp bursts, rather than gradually becoming more frequent. "That is really concerning," Fischer said: "Planning for heatwaves that get 0.1C more intense every two or three years would still be very worrying, but it would be much easier to prepare for." The new research, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, concluded: "Record-shattering extremes are [currently] very rare but their expected probability increases rapidly in the coming three decades." It found the rate of global heating was critical in increasing the risk, rather than simply the global temperature reached. This indicates that sharp cuts in emissions are needed as soon as possible, rather than emissions continuing and being sucked back out of the atmosphere at a later date. The scientists used a scenario in which carbon emissions are not reduced, which some experts have argued is unrealistic, given that some climate action is being taken. However, global emissions are not yet falling, bar the blip caused by the coronavirus pandemic, and the researchers argue the scenario remains relevant until CO2 emissions are consistently falling.

If funded, a government program costing several billion dollars could develop "prototype" vaccines to protect against 20 families of viruses. From a report: In one sense, the world got lucky with the new coronavirus. By sheer chance, scientists just happened to have spent years studying coronaviruses, developing exactly the tools needed to make Covid vaccines as soon as the virus's genetic sequence was published. But what will happen if the next pandemic comes from a virus that causes Lassa fever, or from the Sudan strain of Ebola, or from a Nipah virus? Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, is promoting an ambitious and expensive plan to prepare for such nightmare scenarios. It would cost "a few billion dollars" a year, take five years for the first crop of results and engage a huge cadre of scientists, he said. The idea is to make "prototype" vaccines to protect against viruses from about 20 families that might spark a new pandemic. Using research tools that proved successful for Covid-19, researchers would uncover the molecular structure of each virus, learn where antibodies must strike it, and how to prod the body into making exactly those antibodies.

âoeIf we get the funding, which I believe we will, it likely will start in 2022,â Dr. Fauci said, adding that he has been promoting the idea âoein discussions with the White House and others.â Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, also thought it likely that the necessary funds would be allocated, calling the project "compelling." "As we begin to contemplate a successful end to the Covid-19 pandemic, we must not shift back into complacency," Dr. Collins said. Much of the financial support would come from Dr. Fauci's institute, but a project of this scope would require additional funds that would have to be allocated by Congress. This year's budget for the infectious diseases institute is a little over $6 billion. Dr. Fauci did not specify how much additional money would be needed. If surveillance networks detected a new virus spilling over from animals into people, the logic goes, scientists could stop it by immunizing people in the outbreak by quickly manufacturing the prototype vaccine. And if the virus spread before the world realized what was happening, the prototype vaccines could be deployed more widely.

The Cabinet Office of Japan is co-hosting an event dedicated to "Society 5.0," a future society the government believes Japan should aspire to. Defined by the Cabinet Office as "a human-centered society [helped] by a system that highly integrates cyberspace and physical space," Society 5.0 is a concept intended to broaden the discussion of innovation from science and technology to all of socioeconomic activity. Nikkei Asia Review reports: The government has also established multiple large-scale programs to encourage companies, involved in everything from health care and mobility to energy, to invest in research and development, not only at the level of pure technology but also to bring it to a pilot level. The exhibition includes some achievements from these programs, including Cyberdyne's HAL, standing for "hybrid assistive limb," which the company claims to be the world's first "wearable cyborg." A HAL exoskeleton autonomously walks on a treadmill at the venue. When worn on a leg, HAL can read faint signals sent to muscles from the brain thanks to electrodes attached to the wearer's skin, determining the wearer's desired movements. "Even if your nerves are not connected at first, they gradually recover through the wearing of HAL, and you can eventually move your own body parts without wearing it," said a person from Cyberdyne.

SkyDrive's "flying car" also attracts the attention of visitors, who can observe a full-scale model of the SD-03, which performed the first successful public manned flights of a flying car in Japan in August 2020. Co-founded by former Toyota Motor engineer Tomohiro Fukuzawa, the startup plans to offer commercial mobility service during Expo 2025, to be held in Osaka. "It is as if we are traveling to the future," said Shinji Inoue, a minister of state who heads science and technology policy, when he visited the exhibition last week. Asked by reporters how to make these cutting-edge tools an everyday reality, Inoue spoke of a need to deregulate the market when it comes to obtaining operating permits for such items. Indeed, the government acknowledges challenges in keeping up with the country's capabilities in implementing scientific progress. Digitalization initiatives, the premise for achieving Society 5.0, "could not sufficiently create new business models through data collaboration, like what we see in other countries," said a report from the Cabinet Office analyzing the previous five-year plan through fiscal 2020. Instead, the initiatives aimed at improving the efficiency of existing operations, failing to drive innovation.

Jupiter's unusual icy moon Europa may be one of the best spots in the solar system to check for signs of alien life. But first we have to get there. NASA's Europa Clipper spacecraft will get a boost in the right direction from a SpaceX Falcon Heavy, one of the most powerful rockets ever built. From a report: NASA announced Friday that it has selected SpaceX to provide the launch services for the Jupiter moon mission. The launch is scheduled for October 2024 from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The contract is worth about $178 million. Europa Clipper will try to determine if the moon could possibly host life. "Key mission objectives are to produce high-resolution images of Europa's surface, determine its composition, look for signs of recent or ongoing geological activity, measure the thickness of the moon's icy shell, search for subsurface lakes, and determine the depth and salinity of Europa's ocean," said NASA. SpaceX has been working with NASA on many fronts, including carrying astronauts to and from the International Space Station, delivering cargo to the ISS and developing a human landing system to return astronauts to the moon through the Artemis program.

"A quake-measuring device on Mars is providing the first detailed look at the red planet's interior, revealing a surprisingly thin crust and a hot molten core beneath the frigid surface," reports the Associated Press: In a series of articles published this week, scientists reported that the Martian crust is within the thickness range of Earth's. The Martian mantle between the crust and core is roughly half as thick as Earth's. And the Martian core is on the high side of what scientists anticipated, although smaller than the core of our own nearly twice-as-big planet.

These new studies confirm that the Martian core is molten. But more research is needed to know whether Mars has a solid inner core like Earth's, surrounded by a molten outer core, according to the international research teams. Stronger marsquakes could help identify any multiple core layers, scientists said Friday. The findings are based on about 35 marsquakes registered by a French seismometer on NASA's InSight stationary lander, which arrived at Mars in 2018...

InSight has been hit with a power crunch in recent months. Dust covered its solar panels, just as Mars was approaching the farthest point in its orbit around the sun. Flight controllers have boosted power by using the lander's robot arm to release sand into the blowing wind to knock off some of the dust on the panels. The seismometer has continued working, but all other science instruments remain on hiatus because of the power situation — except for a German heat probe was declared dead in January after it failed to burrow more than a couple feet (half a meter) into the planet.

The three studies and a companion article appeared in Thursday's edition of the journal Science.

First Slashdot reader Thelasko quotes the BBC's report Wednesday: A Russian rocket has departed the Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, to deliver a new science module to the International space station (ISS). The 13m-long, 20-tonne [44,000-pound] Nauka laboratory will go on the rear of the orbiting platform, connected to the other major Russian segments, Zvezda and Zarya. The new module carries with it a large robotic arm supplied by the European Space Agency (Esa).

Nauka is much delayed. It was originally supposed to launch in 2007. But it suffered repeated slips in schedule, in part because of budget difficulties but also because engineers encountered a raft of technical problems during development.

The module will result in a significant boost in habitable volume for the ISS, raising it by 70 cubic metres.
It's expected to dock this Thursday (July29), according to CBS News, after which "It will take up to 11 Russian spacewalks over about seven months to electrically connect and outfit the new lab module, providing a new airlock, research space, living quarters, a European Space Agency robot arm and other systems."

But Friday Gizmodo reported the attempt to deliver the module to the Space Station "is still having problems." The first glitch in Nauka's journey happened yesterday, when the spacecraft didn't complete its first orbit-raising burn. This meant that the uncrewed Nauka wasn't on track to actually intercept the ISS, which it's scheduled to dock with on Thursday, July 29. The problem was attributed to a software issue in a computer aboard Nauka, which prevented the spacecraft's main engines from firing. Nauka's team was able to manage a remote course correction, but a second bout of course corrections were deemed necessary, and scheduled for Friday...

Nauka's also been having issues with one antenna and its docking target, and its uncertain how those issues will affect docking attempts, SpaceNews reported. "Apparently there is still an issue with the Kurs rendezvous system, and that is pretty critical for docking," said Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, adding that the spacecraft's TORU system — which allows the astronauts aboard the ISS assist with the docking — is working normally. For now, the Pirs docking compartment is currently sitting in Nauka's assigned dock on the ISS. Pirs' scheduled undocking to make way for the new module was postponed from Friday to Sunday, .

"Thanks to a breakthrough in RNA manipulation, crop scientists have developed new potato and rice varieties with higher yields and increased drought tolerance," reports UPI: By inserting a gene responsible for production of a protein called FTO, scientists produced bigger rice and potato plants with more expansive root systems. In experiments, the plants' longer roots improved their drought resistance.

Test results — detailed Thursday in the journal Nature Biotechnology — showed the RNA-manipulated plants also improved their rate of photosynthesis, boost yields by as much as 50 percent...

In the lab, the manipulated rice plants grew at three times their normal rate. In the field, the rice plants increased their mass by 50 percent. They also sprouted longer roots, increased their photosynthesis rate and produced larger yields. When they repeated the experiments with potato plants, the researchers got similar results, suggesting the new gene manipulation method could be used to bolster a variety of crops.
The researchers hope this could help crops survive climate change, and even prevent forests from being cleared for food production, according to the article. And one of the study's co-authors adds "This really provides the possibility of engineering plants to potentially improve the ecosystem as global warming proceeds."

Comic-Con went virtual again in 2020. (San Diego businesses will miss the chance to profit from the 100,000 visitors the convention usually attracted.) And NPR reports the convention has gotten smaller in other ways: Both Marvel Studios and DC are staying away; as it did last year, DC is again directing its resources towards its own event, DC FanDome, set for mid-October. But fans of shows like Doctor Who, Dexter and Comic-Con stalwart The Walking Dead will have lots to look forward to.
Rotten Tomatoes and The Verge have gathered up the trailers that did premier. Some of the highlights:

• Blade Runner: Black Lotus , an upcoming anime television series set to premiere in late 2021 on Crunchyroll and Adult Swim (co-producing it with Alcon Television Group).
• The upcoming remake of Dune
• J.J. Abrams' new four-part Showtime documentary about UFOs.
• Season 2 of Star Trek: Lower Decks and the new Star Trek: Prodigy, a CGI-animated series about a group of aliens who escape captivity onboard the Enterprise.

But interestingly, one of the more visibile presenters was: NASA. Current and former NASA officials made appearances on several different panels, according to Space.com, including one on modern space law, U.N. treaty-making, and how it all stacks up against the portrayal we get in our various future-space franchises. And a former NASA astronaut was also part of a panel touting a virtual simulation platform, "where students can have access to the same tools that professionals use and in the case of space are given the opportunity to solve real problems related to missions to our Moon, Mars, and beyond... from piloting to terra-forming to creating habitats and spacecraft."

There was also a panel of four NASA engineers titled "No Tow Trucks Beyond Mars," on "how we go boldly where there's no one around to fix it. Hear stories from the trenches of the heartbreaks, close calls, and adventures of real-life landing (and flying!) on Mars and our round-table discussion of what Netflix got right in their movie Stowaway."

Sunday's panels will include an astronomer, an astrobiologist, and a geologist/paleontologist discussing "The Science of Star Wars" with the concept designer for Star Wars episodes 7-9, Rogue One, and Solo.

"U.S. health officials said Thursday they now have evidence of an untreatable fungus spreading in two hospitals and a nursing home," reports the Associated Press: The "superbug" outbreaks were reported in a Washington, D.C, nursing home and at two Dallas-area hospitals, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported. A handful of the patients had invasive fungal infections that were impervious to all three major classes of medications. "This is really the first time we've started seeing clustering of resistance" in which patients seemed to be getting the infections from each other, said the CDC's Dr. Meghan Lyman...

Health officials have sounded alarms for years about the superbug after seeing infections in which commonly used drugs had little effect. In 2019, doctors diagnosed three cases in New York that were also resistant to a class of drugs, called echinocandins, that were considered a last line of defense. In those cases, there was no evidence the infections had spread from patient to patient — scientists concluded the resistance to the drugs formed during treatment. The new cases did spread, the CDC concluded....

Those cases were seen from January to April. Of the five people who were fully resistant to treatment, three died — both Texas patients and one in Washington.

Lyman said both are ongoing outbreaks and that additional infections have been identified since April. But those added numbers were not reported.
The fungus, Candida auris, "is a harmful form of yeast that is considered dangerous to hospital and nursing home patients with serious medical problems," they add — and it's spread through contaminated surfaces or contact with patients.

Newsweek points out that while it's only recently appeared in America, "infections have occurred in over 30 countries worldwide."

fahrbot-bot shares a report from Live Science: Human society is on track for a collapse in the next two decades if there isn't a serious shift in global priorities, according to a new reassessment of a 1970s report, Vice reported. In that report -- published in the bestselling book "The Limits to Growth" (1972) -- a team of MIT scientists argued that industrial civilization was bound to collapse if corporations and governments continued to pursue continuous economic growth, no matter the costs. The researchers forecasted 12 possible scenarios for the future, most of which predicted a point where natural resources would become so scarce that further economic growth would become impossible, and personal welfare would plummet.

The report's most infamous scenario -- the Business as Usual (BAU) scenario -- predicted that the world's economic growth would peak around the 2040s, then take a sharp downturn, along with the global population, food availability and natural resources. This imminent "collapse" wouldn't be the end of the human race, but rather a societal turning point that would see standards of living drop around the world for decades, the team wrote.

So, what's the outlook for society now, nearly half a century after the MIT researchers shared their prognostications? Gaya Herrington, a sustainability and dynamic system analysis researcher at the consulting firm KPMG, decided to find out. [...] Herrington found that the current state of the world -- measured through 10 different variables, including population, fertility rates, pollution levels, food production and industrial output -- aligned extremely closely with two of the scenarios proposed in 1972, namely the BAU scenario and one called Comprehensive Technology (CT), in which technological advancements help reduce pollution and increase food supplies, even as natural resources run out. While the CT scenario results in less of a shock to the global population and personal welfare, the lack of natural resources still leads to a point where economic growth sharply declines -- in other words, a sudden collapse of industrial society. "The good news is that it's not too late to avoid both of these scenarios and put society on track for an alternative -- the Stabilized World (SW) scenario," the report notes. "This path begins as the BAU and CT routes do, with population, pollution and economic growth rising in tandem while natural resources decline. The difference comes when humans decide to deliberately limit economic growth on their own, before a lack of resources forces them to."

"The SW scenario assumes that in addition to the technological solutions, global societal priorities change," Herrington wrote. "A change in values and policies translates into, amongst other things, low desired family size, perfect birth control availability, and a deliberate choice to limit industrial output and prioritize health and education services." After this shift of values occurs, industrial growth and global population begin to level out. "Food availability continues to rise to meet the needs of the global population; pollution declines and all but disappears; and the depletion of natural resources begins to level out, too," adds Live Science. "Societal collapse is avoided entirely."

U.S. Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Oregon) plans to introduce legislation called the Securing Protections Against Carbon Emissions (SPACE) Tax Act, which would impose new excise taxes on space tourism trips. Space.com reports: "Space exploration isn't a tax-free holiday for the wealthy. Just as normal Americans pay taxes when they buy airline tickets, billionaires who fly into space to produce nothing of scientific value should do the same, and then some," Blumenauer said in a statement issued by his office. "I'm not opposed to this type of space innovation," added Blumenauer, a senior member of the House of Representatives' Ways and Means Committee. "However, things that are done purely for tourism or entertainment, and that don't have a scientific purpose, should in turn support the public good."

The proposed new tax would likely be levied on a per-passenger basis, as is done with commercial aviation, the statement said. "Exemptions would be made available for NASA spaceflights for scientific research purposes," the statement reads. "In the case of flights where some passengers are working on behalf of NASA for scientific research purposes and others are not, the launch excise tax shall be the pro rata share of the non-NASA researchers." There would be two taxation tiers, one for suborbital flights and another for missions that reach orbit. The statement did not reveal how much the tax would be in either case or if the collected revenue would be earmarked for any specific purpose. Such a purpose could be the fight against climate change, if the proposed act's full name is any guide. Blumenauer is concerned about the potential carbon footprint of the space tourism industry once it gets fully up and running, the statement said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Do you ever forget things, like a doctor's appointment or a lunch date? Do you sometimes struggle to think of the right word for something common? Do you ever feel more anxious or irritable than you typically do? Do you ever feel overwhelmed when trying to make a decision? If you answered "no, never" to all of those questions, there's a possibility that you may not actually be human. Nevertheless, you should still talk to a doctor about additional cognitive screenings to check if you have Alzheimer's disease. At least, that's the takeaway from a six-question quiz provided in part by Biogen, the maker of an unproven, $56,000 Alzheimer's drug.

The six questions include the four above, plus questions about whether you ever lose your train of thought or ever get lost on your way to or around a familiar place. The questions not only bring up common issues that perfectly healthy people might face from time to time, but the answers any quiz-taker provides are also completely irrelevant. No matter how you answer -- even if you say you never experience any of those issues -- the quiz will always prompt you to talk with your doctor about cognitive screening. The results page even uses your zip code to provide a link to find an Alzheimer's specialist near you. Biogen says the quiz website is part of a "disease awareness educational program." But it appears to be part of an aggressive strategy to sell the company's new Alzheimer's drug, Aduhelm, which has an intensely controversial history, to say the least. What's the controversial history you may ask? According to Ars, the drug "flunked out of two identical Phase III clinical trials in 2019." A panel of expert advisors for the FDA overwhelmingly voted against approval, yet it still was approved by the FDA on June 7. It also has a list price of $56,000 for a year's supply.

The report goes on to say that the company is basically making up the statistic that "about 1 in 12 Americans 50 years and older" has mild cognitive impairment due to Alzheimer's. Experts say they know of no evidence to back up that statistic and it appears to be a significant overestimate.

Furthermore, two medical experts from Georgetown University said the company's quiz website "appears designed to ratchet up anxiety in anyone juggling multiple responsibilities or who gets distracted during small talk." They added: "Convincing perfectly normal people they should see a specialist, be tested for amyloid plaque, and, if present, assume they have early Alzheimer's is a great strategy for increasing Aduhelm prescriptions... [It] could lead to millions of prescriptions -- and billions of dollars in profit -- for an ineffective and expensive drug."

New Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) rules say astronaut hopefuls must be part of the flight crew and make contributions to space flight safety. That means Jeff Bezos and Sir Richard Branson may not yet be astronauts in the eyes of the US government. The BBC reports: These are the first changes since the FAA wings program began in 2004. The Commercial Astronaut Wings program updates were announced on Tuesday -- the same day that Amazon's Mr Bezos flew aboard a Blue Origin rocket to the edge of space. To qualify as commercial astronauts, space-goers must travel 50 miles (80km) above the Earth's surface, which both Mr Bezos and Mr Branson accomplished. But altitude aside, the agency says would-be astronauts must have also "demonstrated activities during flight that were essential to public safety, or contributed to human space flight safety." What exactly counts as such is determined by FAA officials.

In a statement, the FAA said that these changes brought the wings scheme more in line with its role to protect public safety during commercial space flights. On July 11, Sir Richard flew on-board Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo to the edge of space as a test before allowing customers aboard next year. Mr Bezos and the three other crew members who flew on Blue Origin's spacecraft may have less claim to the coveted title. Ahead of the launch, Blue Origin CEO Bob Smith said that "there's really nothing for a crew member to do" on the autonomous vehicle. Those wishing for commercial wings need to be nominated for them as well. An FAA spokesperson told CNN they are not currently reviewing any submissions.

There are two other ways to earn astronaut wings in the US - through the military or Nasa. However, a glimmer of hope remains for Sir Richard, Mr Bezos and any future stargazers hoping to be recognized as astronauts. The new order notes that honorary awards can be given based on merit -- at the discretion of the FAA's associate administrator. Astronaut wings were first awarded to astronauts Alan Shepard Jr and Virgil Grissom in the early 1960s for their participation in the Mercury Seven program.

The extremes of floods and fires are not going away, but adaptation can lessen their impact. Economist (paywalled): If temperatures rise by 3C above pre-industrial levels in the coming decades -- as they might even if everyone manages to honour today's firm pledges -- large parts of the tropics risk becoming too hot for outdoor work. Coral reefs and the livelihoods that depend on them will vanish and the Amazon rainforest will become a ghost of itself. Severe harvest failures will be commonplace. Ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland will shrink past the point of no return, promising sea rises measured not in millimetres, as today's are, but in metres.

Six years ago, in Paris, the countries of the world committed themselves to avoiding the worst of that nightmare by eliminating net greenhouse-gas emissions quickly enough to hold the temperature rise below 2C. Their progress towards that end remains woefully inadequate. Yet even if their efforts increased dramatically enough to meet the 2C goal, it would not stop forests from burning today; prairies would still dry out tomorrow, rivers break their banks and mountain glaciers disappear. Cutting emissions is thus not enough. The world also urgently needs to invest in adapting to the changing climate. The good news is that adaptation makes political sense. People can clearly see the need for it. When a country invests in flood defences it benefits its own citizens above all others -- there is no free-rider problem, as there could be for emissions reduction. Nor does all the money come from the public purse; companies and private individuals can see the need for adaptation and act on it. When they do not do so, insurance companies can open their eyes to the risks they are running.

Some adaptation is fairly easily set in place. Systems for warning Germans of coming floods will surely now improve. But other problems require much larger public investment, like that which has been put into water-management in the Netherlands. Rich countries can afford such things. Poor countries and poor people need help, which is why the Paris climate agreement calls for annual transfers of $100bn from rich to poor. The rich countries have not yet lived up to their side of this. On July 20th John Kerry, President Joe Biden's special envoy on climate change, reiterated America's pledge to triple its support to $1.5bn for adaptation in poorer countries by 2024, part of a broader move to increase investment in adaptation and mitigation in developing countries. More such efforts are vital.

Most Americans who haven't been vaccinated against COVID-19 say they are unlikely to get the shots and doubt they would work against the aggressive delta variant despite evidence they do, according to a new poll that underscores the challenges facing public health officials amid soaring infections in some states. AP: Among American adults who have not yet received a vaccine, 35% say they probably will not, and 45% say they definitely will not, according to a poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. Just 3% say they definitely will get the shots, though another 16% say they probably will. What's more, 64% of unvaccinated Americans have little to no confidence the shots are effective against variants -- including the delta variant that officials say is responsible for 83% of new cases in the U.S. -- despite evidence that they offer strong protection. In contrast, 86% of those who have already been vaccinated have at least some confidence that the vaccines will work.

That means "that there will be more preventable cases, more preventable hospitalizations and more preventable deaths," said Dr. Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease specialist at Johns Hopkins University. "We always knew some proportion of the population would be difficult to persuade no matter what the data showed, (and) a lot of people are beyond persuasion," said Adalja. He echoed Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky in calling the current surge "a pandemic of the unvaccinated" because nearly all hospital admissions and deaths have been among those who weren't immunized.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ScienceAlert: [A] team of surgeons has successfully completed the first human implantation in the US of an artificial heart device called the 'Aeson', developed by French company CARMAT. The artificial heart has two ventricular chambers and four biological valves, just like the real organ, and is powered by an external device. Made from "biocompatible materials" including bovine tissue, the artificial heart uses a combination of sensors and algorithms to maintain its pace and keep blood circulating through the body. "We are encouraged that our patient is doing so well after the procedure," says cardiologist Carmelo Milano from the Duke University School of Medicine. "As we evaluate this device, we are both excited and hopeful that patients who otherwise have few to no options could have a lifeline."

The patient in question is 39-year-old Matthew Moore, from Shallotte in North Carolina. Moore was initially due to have heart bypass surgery, but as his condition deteriorated the medical staff started to run out of options; he became so ill that even a regular heart transplant was too risky. Fortunately, he was in the right place: the Aeson device is being tested at Duke University, pending approval from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). It's already been given the green light for use by regulators in Europe, after several years of tests in European patients, not all of which have been successful. The artificial heart has been developed specifically to help those whose hearts can no longer pump enough blood through both chambers. It replaces the entire natural heart, although it's not intended to be permanent -- it's designed to be a bridge towards a full heart transplant within six months or so.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Just one week after Google's DeepMind AI group finally described its biology efforts in detail, the company is releasing a paper that explains how it analyzed nearly every protein encoded in the human genome and predicted its likely three-dimensional structure -- a structure that can be critical for understanding disease and designing treatments. In the very near future, all of these structures will be released under a Creative Commons license via the European Bioinformatics Institute, which already hosts a major database of protein structures. In a press conference associated with the paper's release, DeepMind's Demis Hassabis made clear that the company isn't stopping there. In addition to the work described in the paper, the company will release structural predictions for the genomes of 20 major research organisms, from yeast to fruit flies to mice. In total, the database launch will include roughly 350,000 protein structures.
[...]
At some point in the near future (possibly by the time you read this), all this data will be available on a dedicated website hosted by the European Bioinformatics Institute, a European Union-funded organization that describes itself in part as follows: "We make the world's public biological data freely available to the scientific community via a range of services and tools." The AlphaFold data will be no exception; once the above link is live, anyone can use it to download information on the human protein of their choice. Or, as mentioned above, the mouse, yeast, or fruit fly version. The 20 organisms that will see their data released are also just a start. DeepMind's Demis Hassabis said that over the next few months, the team will target every gene sequence available in DNA databases. By the time this work is done, over 100 million proteins should have predicted structures. Hassabis wrapped up his part of the announcement by saying, "We think this is the most significant contribution AI has made to science to date." It would be difficult to argue otherwise. Further reading: Google details its protein-folding software, academics offer an alternative (Ars Technica)

Last year the artificial intelligence group DeepMind cracked a mystery that has flummoxed scientists for decades: stripping bare the structure of proteins, the building blocks of life. Now, having amassed a database of nearly all human protein structures, the company is making the resource available online free for researchers to use. From a report: The key to understanding our basic biological machinery is its architecture. The chains of amino acids that comprise proteins twist and turn to make the most confounding of 3D shapes. It is this elaborate form that explains protein function; from enzymes that are crucial to metabolism to antibodies that fight infectious attacks. Despite years of onerous and expensive lab work that began in the 1950s, scientists have only decoded the structure of a fraction of human proteins.

DeepMind's AI program, AlphaFold, has predicted the structure of nearly all 20,000 proteins expressed by humans. In an independent benchmark test that compared predictions to known structures, the system was able to predict the shape of a protein to a good standard 95% of time. DeepMind, which has partnered with the European Molecular Biology Laboratory's European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), hopes the database will help researchers to analyse how life works at an atomic scale by unpacking the apparatus that drives some diseases, make strides in the field of personalised medicine, create more nutritious crops and develop "green enzymes" that can break down plastic.

UnknowingFool shares a report from CBS News: After being down for a month due to a computer issue, Hubble was brought back up last week. NASA released images captured by Hubble over the weekend including a rare observance of two galaxies that are colliding. The other interesting image is that of a spiral galaxy with three arms, as most spiral galaxies have an even number of arms. "I'm thrilled to see that Hubble has its eye back on the universe, once again capturing the kind of images that have intrigued and inspired us for decades," NASA administrator Bill Nelson said in a statement. "This is a moment to celebrate the success of a team truly dedicated to the mission. Through their efforts, Hubble will continue its 32nd year of discovery, and we will continue to learn from the observatory's transformational vision."

turp182 shares a report from USA Today: [T]he UAE is now testing a new method that has drones fly into clouds to give them an electric shock to trigger rain production [...]. The project is getting renewed interest after the UAE's National Center of Meteorology recently published a series of videos on Instagram of heavy rain in parts of the country. Water gushed past trees, and cars drove on rain-soaked roads. The videos were accompanied by radar images of clouds tagged "#cloudseeding." The Independent reports recent rain is part of the drone cloud seeding project.

The UAE oversaw more than 200 cloud seeding operations in the first half of 2020, successfully creating excess rainfall, the National News reported. There have been successes in the U.S., as well as China, India, and Thailand. Long-term cloud seeding in the mountains of Nevada have increased snowpack by 10% or more each year, according to research published by the American Meteorological Society. A 10-year cloud seeding experiment in Wyoming resulted in 5-10% increases in snowpack, according to the State of Wyoming. According to a researcher that worked on the drone initiative, "the aim of the UAE's project is to change the balance of electrical charge on the cloud droplets, causing water droplets to clump together and fall as rain when they are big enough."

The world's largest carbon capture and storage project has failed to meet a crucial target of capturing and burying an average of 80% of the carbon dioxide produced from gas wells in Western Australia over five years. From a report: The energy giant Chevron agreed to the target with the West Australian government when developing its $54 billion Gorgon project to extract and export gas from fields off the WA coast. The five year milestone passed on Sunday. In a statement the energy giant Chevron announced that since operations began in August 2019 it had injected five million tonnes of greenhouse gases underground. According to the independent analyst Peter Milne, that leaves a shortfall of around 4.6 million tonnes, which he estimates would cost about $100 million to offset via carbon credits.

The project has national and even international significance, with the oil and gas industry and the federal government declaring the success of carbon capture and storage to be crucial in tackling climate change while making use of fossil fuels. "It is essential we position Australia to succeed by investing now in the technologies that will support our industries into the future, with lower emissions energy that can support Australian jobs," Prime Minister Scott Morrison said in April while announcing $263.7 million in funding to develop carbon capture and storage technology.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ohio State News: Scientists who study glacier ice have found viruses nearly 15,000 years old in two ice samples taken from the Tibetan Plateau in China. Most of those viruses, which survived because they had remained frozen, are unlike any viruses that have been cataloged to date. The findings, published today in the journal Microbiome, could help scientists understand how viruses have evolved over centuries. For this study, the scientists also created a new, ultra-clean method of analyzing microbes and viruses in ice without contaminating it.

The researchers analyzed ice cores taken in 2015 from the Guliya ice cap in western China. The cores are collected at high altitudes -- the summit of Guliya, where this ice originated, is 22,000 feet above sea level. The ice cores contain layers of ice that accumulate year after year, trapping whatever was in the atmosphere around them at the time each layer froze. Those layers create a timeline of sorts, which scientists have used to understand more about climate change, microbes, viruses and gases throughout history. Researchers determined that the ice was nearly 15,000 years old using a combination of traditional and new, novel techniques to date this ice core. When they analyzed the ice, they found genetic codes for 33 viruses. Four of those viruses have already been identified by the scientific community. But at least 28 of them are novel. About half of them seemed to have survived at the time they were frozen not in spite of the ice, but because of it.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: Jeff Bezos has heard the complaints about billionaires like himself funneling their money into private rocket companies instead of donating to causes on Earth, and he doesn't disagree. In an interview with CNN ahead of his planned Tuesday morning space voyage in a rocket built by his company Blue Origin, Bezos was asked for his thoughts on critics who call the extraterrestrial flights "joyrides for the wealthy, and [who say] you should be spending your time and your money and energy trying to solve problems here on Earth." "Well, I say they are largely right," said Bezos, who Bloomberg estimates is worth $206 billion. "We have to do both. We have lots of problems here on Earth and we have to work on those."

Bezos and fellow billionaires [...] have been characterized by critics as deaf to issues on the ground and too obsessed with making space more accessible when they could put their resources elsewhere. The 57-year-old Bezos, who earlier this month stepped down as CEO of Amazon, said it's important to "look to the future ... as a species and as a civilization." In his view, the work being done today will lay the foundation for future generations to work in space, which "will solve problems here on Earth." In an opinion piece for MSNBC, Talia Lavin views billionaires going to space through a more incendiary lens, writing: "What they seek to leave behind is a planet burning and flooding and full of the kind of small and ordinary suffering such fortunes could alleviate in an instant."

The space program of the 1960s, which resulted in the first crewed mission to land on the Moon, "may have been mired in the bitter and petty rivalries of the Cold War, and limned by prejudice about who could excel," writes Lavin, "but it was a project funded and created by our government, an achievement held in common by the masses. No such common pride can be held in the launch of the titans of capital."

"In this billionaire battle, there is no pretense at a sense of collective pride or communal achievement. Even the drumbeat of nationalism would be better than this obscene egotism, whose fumes are more putrid than rocket-jet emissions. It feels like a parody of hubris, and a colossal celebration of the social failure to moderate preposterous accumulations of wealth."

Thoughts?

Aerospace companies have launched about 2,000 Internet satellites into orbit around Earth over the past 2 years, nearly doubling the number of active satellites. This has sparked concerns among astronomers and other skygazers, who worry about interference with observations of the night sky. From a report: Now, in what would be the biggest international step yet towards addressing these concerns, diplomats at a United Nations forum next month might discuss whether humanity has a right to 'dark and quiet skies.' The debate could initiate a framework for how scientists and the public would deal with the flood of new satellites -- with many more expected.

Tens of thousands of satellites could be added to Earth orbit in the next few years to provide broadband Internet, if companies and governments build and launch all the networks, or 'megaconstellations,' they have publicly announced. The sheer number of these could mean that hundreds are visible all night long, affecting the sky like never before in human history. "These constellations are changing dramatically the way space has been used," says Piero Benvenuti, an astronomer at the University of Padua in Italy and a former general secretary of the International Astronomical Union (IAU). He and other astronomers have been working through the IAU to raise international awareness of how the megaconstellations are affecting scientists and members of the public. They say the goal is not to pit astronomers against satellite companies, but to develop a vision of how to fairly use the shared realm of outer space.

Another scorching summer heat wave was set to peak across portions of the western United States early this week, with air so dry that rain from thunderstorms evaporated before reaching the ground and smoke from wildfires delayed hundreds of flights at one of the region's largest airports. From a report: Temperatures reached the upper 90s and lower 100s in parts of the Northern Rockies on Monday, and forecasters warned of "dry thunderstorms," which bring lightning that can spark fires, but no rain to quench them. It was the fourth major heat wave to afflict parts of the West since early June, bringing dangerously hot temperatures and helping fuel the deepening drought and exploding wildfires across the region. An excessive heat warning was also in effect for parts of Montana and Wyoming through Thursday, the National Weather Service said.

Glasgow, a town in northern Montana, hit 110 degrees on Monday, the Weather Service said. By 2:45 p.m. local time, Billings, toward the southern portion of the state, was officially hotter than Death Valley, Calif., at 110.4 degrees. Weather officials in Billings took advantage of the toasty temperatures and baked a batch of cookies on the dashboard of a car. "It may have taken 5 hours but we have fully baked cookies," they shared on Twitter. Lander, in central Wyoming, reached a record 100 degrees on Monday, according to the Weather Service. In 130 years, it was only the 21st day in Lander to reach triple digits. Parts of Idaho, including Boise and Twin Falls, saw much needed rain showers.

NPR: Wearing a cowboy hat under the West Texas morning sun, Jeff Bezos crossed the bridge to enter the capsule made by his company Blue Origin. He was accompanied by three others -- his brother Mark Bezos, female aviation pioneer Wally Funk and 18-year-old Oliver Daemen. Then the shuttle hatch closed and just before 9:15 a.m. ET, the four blasted into space on the first human flight on Blue Origin's New Shepard launch vehicle. Bezos is the second billionaire this month to reach the edge of space: Richard Branson rocketed there last week aboard a vessel made by his company Virgin Galactic. The date of the New Shepard's maiden launch is no accident: July 20 was the day in 1969 that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon. Further reading: 'Mercury 13' pilot Wally Funk carried 60 years of history to space on Blue Origin flight.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Interesting Engineering: [Researchers at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER), Kolkata] along with those at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kharagpur decided to focus on developing something that is harder than conventional self-healing material, as reported by The Telegraph India. The researchers used a piezoelectric organic material, which converts mechanical energy to electrical energy and vice versa, to make needle-shaped crystals that aren't more than 2 mm long or 0.2 mm wide, according to the experimental results which were published in the journal Science. Due to their molecular arrangement in the specially designed crystals, a strong attractive force developed between two surfaces. Every time a fracture occurred, the attractive forces joined the pieces back again, without needing an external stimulus such as heat or others that most self-healing materials would need.

"Our self-healing material is 10 times harder than others, and it has a well-ordered internal crystalline structure, that is favored in most electronics and optical applications," lead researcher Professor Chilla Malla Reddy of IISER said. "I can imagine applications for an everyday device," said Bhanu Bhushan Khatua, a member of the team from IIT Kharagpur." Such materials could be used for mobile phone screens that will repair themselves if they fall and develop cracks."

fahrbot-bot shares a report from Live Science: Imagine a universe where you could point a spaceship in one direction and eventually return to where you started. If our universe were a finite donut, then such movements would be possible and physicists could potentially measure its size. "We could say: Now we know the size of the universe," astrophysicist Thomas Buchert, of the University of Lyon, Astrophysical Research Center in France, told Live Science in an email.

Examining light from the very early universe, Buchert and a team of astrophysicists have deduced that our cosmos may be multiply connected, meaning that space is closed in on itself in all three dimensions like a three-dimensional donut. Such a universe would be finite, and according to their results, our entire cosmos might only be about three to four times larger than the limits of the observable universe, about 45 billion light-years away.

18-year-old Oliver Daemon will become the youngest person ever to travel to space as the fourth passenger on Blue Origin's first crewed mission this week to the edge of outer space (flying with Jeff Bezos, his brother Mark, and 82-year-old aviator Wally Funk).

The Atlantic calls it "a rather unusual bunch": When they take off on Tuesday, they will each fulfill a personal dream, but as a crew, they're making history: No group like this one has ever gone to space together before. Even the participants of the most diverse missions to the International Space Station have had far more in common with one another than this quartet. They were all professional astronauts, with comparable ages, educational backgrounds, and even temperaments, given that potential astronauts must undergo psychological screenings before getting the job. The motley crew of Blue Origin's first passenger flight seems closer to a cast of offbeat characters gathered together for a zany adventure: If The Breakfast Club had the brain, the jock, the basket case, the princess, and the criminal, this Blue Origin flight has the boss, the tag-along, the real deal, and the kid...

Blue Origin has conducted 15 test flights of the New Shepard rocket, but has never before flown the vehicle with people on board.

Of the passengers on Bezos's debut flight, Daemen might be the most unexpected pick. In fact, Daemen wasn't supposed to be on this flight. Blue Origin had held an auction for one of the seats on the flight, culminating in a top bid of a whopping $28 million. But the company said today that the winner, whose name has not been disclosed, decided to skip this particular flight and go later, citing "scheduling conflicts," so the company slotted in Daemen, a soon-to-be physics student at Utrecht University, in the Netherlands. (Blue Origin said the teen was "a participant in the auction," but did not disclose how much the seat cost.)

Daemen and Funk, as Blue Origin pointed out in its announcement, "represent the youngest and oldest astronauts to travel to space." But describing them by age alone elides the very different journeys they have taken to reach this point. Funk is an aviation legend who underwent more difficult tests than John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth, had to, and has waited 60 years for this moment. Daemen is a teenager who took a gap year to get his pilot's license, and the son of a private-equity executive... Daemen represents a new class of spacefarers; in the coming years, as private companies such as Blue Origin, Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic, and Elon Musk's SpaceX make people into astronauts more readily than government agencies like NASA can, the distance between a childhood dream and reality is bound to shrink. Expect more smorgasbord space crews like the Blue Origin one, filled with an assortment of very wealthy individuals and the people they choose to go with them...

The rules about who can become an astronaut have changed, and the new "right stuff" is money and luck.

Slashdot reader sciencehabit shares news from Science magazine: When a giant space rock struck the waters near Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula 66 million years ago, it sent up a blanket of dust that blotted out the Sun for years, sending temperatures plummeting and killing off the dinosaurs. The impact also generated a tsunami in the Gulf of Mexico that some modelers believe sent an initial tidal wave up to 1500 meters (or nearly 1 mile) high crashing into North America, one that was followed by smaller pulses.

Now, for the first time, scientists have discovered fossilized megaripples from this tsunami buried in sediments in what is now central Louisiana.

"It's great to actually have evidence of something that has been theorized for a really long time," says Sean Gulick, a geophysicist at the University of Texas, Austin. Gulick was not involved in the work, but he co-led a campaign in 2016 to drill down to the remains of the impact crater, called Chicxulub... Cores from the 2016 drilling expedition helped explain how the impact crater was formed and charted the disappearance and recovery of Earth's life. In 2019, researchers reported the discovery of a fossil site in North Dakota, 3000 kilometers north of Chicxulub, that they say records the hours after the impact and includes debris swept inland from the tsunami.

"We have small pieces of the puzzle that keep getting added in," says Alfio Alessandro Chiarenza, a paleontologist at the University of Vigo who was not involved with the new study. "Now this research is another one, giving more evidence of a cataclysmic tsunami that probably inundated [everything] for thousands of miles."

"China conducted a clandestine first test flight of a reusable suborbital vehicle Friday as a part of development of a reusable space transportation system," reports Space News:

The vehicle launched from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center Friday and later landed at an airport just over 800 kilometers away at Alxa League in Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp. (CASC) announced. No images nor footage nor further information, such as altitude, flight duration or propulsion systems, were provided. The CASC release stated however that the vehicle uses integrated aviation and space technologies and indicates a vertical takeoff and horizontal landing profile.

The test follows a September 2020 test flight of a "reusable experimental spacecraft". The spacecraft orbited for days, releasing a small transmitting payload and later deorbited and landed horizontally. The spacecraft is widely believed to be a reusable spaceplane concept, though no images have emerged. Giant space and defense contractor CASC also developed that vehicle and stated that the new vehicle tested Friday can be used as a first stage of a reusable space transportation system. The implication is that the two vehicles will be combined for a fully reusable space transportation system. The developments have not come out of the blue. China stated in 2017 that it aimed to test a reusable spaceplane in 2020...

Chen Hongbo, from CASC's China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology (CALT), told Science and Technology Daily (Chinese) in 2017 that the reusable spacecraft would be capable of carrying both crew and payloads... Chen stated the aim was full reusability, moving beyond partial reusability of Falcon 9-like launchers. The spaceplane, the development and testing of which is to be completed by 2030, should be capable of being reused more than 20 times.

"The efficacy of a drug being promoted by rightwing figures worldwide for treating Covid-19 is in serious doubt," reports the Guardian, "after a major study suggesting the treatment is effective against the virus was withdrawn due to 'ethical concerns'." The preprint study on the efficacy and safety of ivermectin — a drug used against parasites such as worms and headlice — in treating Covid-19, led by Dr Ahmed Elgazzar from Benha University in Egypt, was published on the Research Square website in November. It claimed to be a randomised control trial, a type of study crucial in medicine because it is considered to provide the most reliable evidence on the effectiveness of interventions due to the minimal risk of confounding factors influencing the results...

A medical student in London, Jack Lawrence, was among the first to identify serious concerns about the paper, leading to the retraction... He found the introduction section of the paper appeared to have been almost entirely plagiarised. It appeared that the authors had run entire paragraphs from press releases and websites about ivermectin and Covid-19 through a thesaurus to change key words. "Humorously, this led to them changing 'severe acute respiratory syndrome' to 'extreme intense respiratory syndrome' on one occasion," Lawrence said.

The data also looked suspicious to Lawrence... "In their paper, the authors claim that four out of 100 patients died in their standard treatment group for mild and moderate Covid-19," Lawrence said. "According to the original data, the number was 0, the same as the ivermectin treatment group. In their ivermectin treatment group for severe Covid-19, the authors claim two patients died, but the number in their raw data is four..." Lawrence contacted an Australian chronic disease epidemiologist from the University of Wollongong, Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz, and a data analyst affiliated with Linnaeus University in Sweden who reviews scientific papers for errors, Nick Brown, for help analysing the data and study results more thoroughly... "The main error is that at least 79 of the patient records are obvious clones of other records," Brown told the Guardian. "It's certainly the hardest to explain away as innocent error, especially since the clones aren't even pure copies. There are signs that they have tried to change one or two fields to make them look more natural..."

Meyerowitz-Katz told the Guardian that "this is one of the biggest ivermectin studies out there", and it appeared to him the data was "just totally faked".
Meta-analyses incorporating the "just totally faked" data were then published in Oxford Academic's Open Forum Infectious Diseases and in the American Journal of Therapeutics.

Meanwhile, the Guardian also notes a new (and peer-reviewed) paper that was just published last month in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases. Its finding? Iermectin is "not a viable option to treat COVID-19 patients".

"Since Joe Biden took office [in January], about two dozen U.S. intelligence officers, diplomats, and other government officials in Vienna have reported experiencing mysterious afflictions similar to the Havana Syndrome," reports the New Yorker: U.S. officials say the number of possible new cases in the Austrian capital — long a nexus of U.S. and Russian espionage — is now greater than the number reported by officials in any city except for Havana itself, where the first cases were reported...

The exact cause of the ailments in Vienna, which U.S. government agencies formally refer to as "anomalous health incidents" or "unexplained health incidents," remains unknown, but in response to the surge the C.I.A., the State Department, and other agencies are redoubling their efforts to determine the cause, and to identify the culprit or culprits...

The Havana Syndrome derives its name from the Cuban capital, where C.I.A. officers and State Department employees first reported experiencing strange sensations of sound and pressure in their heads in 2016 and 2017. Some of the patients said the sensations seemed to follow them around their homes, apartments, and hotel rooms in the Cuban capital. Some of the patients described feeling as though they were standing in an invisible beam of energy. Many of them suffered debilitating symptoms, from headaches and vertigo to vision problems. Specialists at the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Brain Injury and Repair used advanced MRIs to study the brains of forty of the original patients from Havana. They found no signs of physical impact to the patients' skulls — it was as if they had "a concussion without a concussion," one specialist told me — and the team detected signs of damage to their brains.

Senior officials in the Trump and Biden Administrations suspect that the Russians are responsible for the syndrome. Their working hypothesis is that operatives working for the G.R.U., the Russian military-intelligence service, have been aiming microwave-radiation devices at U.S. officials, possibly to steal data from their computers or smartphones, which inflicted serious harm on the people they targeted. But American intelligence analysts and operatives have so far been unable to find concrete evidence that would allow them to declare that either microwave radiation or the Russians were to blame.
The article also points out that the CIA's director has privately called the incidents "attacks" rather than incidents or illnesses.

Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot shared some fascinating photos and a report from Live Science.

"This rarely seen glass octopus bared all recently — even a view of its innards — when an underwater robot filmed it gracefully soaring through the deep waters of the Central Pacific Ocean." Like other "glass" creatures, such as glass frogs and certain comb jellies, glass octopuses are almost completely transparent, with only their cylindrical eyes, optic nerve and digestive tract appearing opaque. The expedition crew reported two encounters with the glass octopus — an impressive count given that previously there was such limited footage of these clear cephalopods, scientists had to learn about them by studying chunks of them in the gut contents of their predators...

During the expedition, which ended July 8, a crew of marine scientists discovered a handful of what are likely newfound marine animals on nine previously unexplored submarine mountains known as seamounts. The team also completed high-resolution seafloor mapping of more than 11,500 square miles (30,000 square km) around the archipelago and video recordings of five additional seamounts filmed by the underwater robot SuBastian, according to a statement. SuBastian also snagged footage of a whale shark (the largest living fish in the world) and a long-legged crab stealing a fish from another crab.

The expedition sent SuBastian on 21 dives, enabling the robot to record more than 182 hours on the seafloor.
The expedition was run by the Schmidt Ocean Institute, a nonprofit operating foundation co-founded by Wendy and Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: Over the past 2 decades, researchers have found hundreds of radioactive atoms, trapped in seafloor minerals, that came from an ancient supernova explosion marking the death of a nearby star. Erupting from hundreds of light-years away, the flash of x-rays and gamma rays probably did no harm on Earth. But the expanding fireball also accelerated cosmic rays -- mostly nuclei of hydrogen and helium -- to close to the speed of light. These projectiles arrived stealthily, decades later, ramping up into an invisible fusillade that could have lasted for thousands of years and might have affected the atmosphere -- and life. In a flurry of studies and speculation, astronomers have sketched out their potential effects, including a depleted ozone layer, cancer-causing particles, wildfires, and a cooling of the climate that could have helped initiate the ice ages 2.5 million years ago. Most paleontologists are yet to be convinced, but astronomers argue that such supernovae could explain some extinction events that lack customary triggers like volcanic outbursts or asteroid impacts.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: Physicists at Google have taken an important step toward protecting delicate information in their nascent quantum computer from errors that can obliterate it. The researchers can't yet compensate for all types of errors -- a necessary step toward building a full-fledged quantum computer -- but others say they're poised to achieve that goal. Working with chains of up to 11 data qubits, Google researchers have now been able to preserve a logical qubit for a time that increases exponentially with the number of physical qubits, they report today in Nature. By spreading a single qubit's state over up to 11 data qubits, they reduced the chances of an error after 50 microseconds from 40% to 0.2%. Other groups have demonstrated similar error corrections schemes, but the new work is the first to demonstrate the exponential suppression of errors, says Julian Kelly, a physicist at Google and senior author on the paper. Such exponential suppression suggests developers may eventually be able to maintain a logical qubit indefinitely by spreading it over about 1000 physical qubits.

Covid cases are rising in all 50 US states as the Delta variant spreads coast to coast, news outlets reported on Friday , and with less than half the US population fully vaccinated, public health chiefs warned of an "extraordinary surge." Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), said at a White House briefing: "This is becoming a pandemic of the unvaccinated." The Guardian reports: Walensky said the US was seeing an average of 26,000 new coronavirus cases a day -- a seven-day average that is 70% higher than last week. Hospitalizations and deaths are also seeing increases -- about 36% and 26%, respectively, with Walensky noting this was another "critical moment" in the outbreak. "We are seeing outbreaks of cases in parts of the country that have low vaccination coverage because unvaccinated people are at risk. Communities that are fully vaccinated are generally faring well," she said.

Anthony Fauci, the nation's top infectious diseases official, said there had been an "extraordinary surge" in the Delta variant of Covid-19 -- which is more transmissible -- around the world, including in the US. Jeff Zients, the coordinator of the White House coronavirus team, confirmed that unvaccinated Americans "account for virtually all recent Covid-19 hospitalizations and deaths." Four states that are currently seeing high increases in Covid-19 cases have accounted for over 40% of the total Covid cases seen in the country this past week, Zients said. One in five cases occurred in Florida, in which about 50% of the state is fully vaccinated.

The Hubble Space Telescope has powered on once again. NASA was able to successfully switch to a backup computer on the observatory on Friday following weeks of computer problems. From a report: On June 13, Hubble shut down after a payload computer from the 1980s that handles the telescope's science instruments suffered a glitch. Now, over a month since Hubble ran into issues, which the Hubble team thinks were caused by the spacecraft's Power Control Unit (PCU), NASA switched to backup hardware and was able to switch the scope back on. With Hubble back online with this backup hardware, the Hubble team is keeping a close watch to make sure that everything works correctly, according to a statement from NASA.

The World Health Organization's chief scientist has advised individuals against mixing and matching Covid-19 vaccines from different manufacturers, saying such decisions should be left to public health authorities. From a report: "It's a little bit of a dangerous trend here," Soumya Swaminathan told an online briefing on Monday after a question about booster shots. "It will be a chaotic situation in countries if citizens start deciding when and who will be taking a second, a third and a fourth dose." Swaminathan had called mixing a âoedata-free zoneâ but later clarified her remarks in an overnight tweet. "Individuals should not decide for themselves, public health agencies can, based on available data," she said in the tweet. "Data from mix and match studies of different vaccines are awaited -- immunogenicity and safety both need to be evaluated."

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: A man unable to speak after a stroke has produced sentences through a system that reads electrical signals from speech production areas of his brain, researchers report this week. The approach has previously been used in non-disabled volunteers to reconstruct spoken or imagined sentences, but this is the first demonstration of its potential in the type of patient it's intended to help. The participant had a stroke more than 10 years ago that left him with anarthria -- an inability to control the muscles involved in speech. Researchers used a computational model known as a deep-learning algorithm to interpret patterns of brain activity in the sensorimotor cortex, a brain region involved in producing speech, and 'decoded' sentences he attempted to read aloud.

In the new study, [the researchers] temporarily removed a portion of the participant's skull and laid a thin sheet of electrodes smaller than a credit card directly over his sensorimotor cortex. To "train" a computer algorithm to associate brain activity patterns with the onset of speech and with particular words, the team needed reliable information about what the man intended to say and when. So the researchers repeatedly presented one of 50 words on a screen and asked the man to attempt to say it on cue. Once the algorithm was trained with data from the individual word task, the man tried to read sentences built from the same set of 50 words, such as "Bring my glasses, please." To improve the algorithm's guesses, the researchers added a processing component called a natural language model, which uses common word sequences to predict the likely next word in a sentence. With that approach, the system only got about 25% of the words in a sentence wrong, they report today in The New England Journal of Medicine. With the new approach, the man could produce sentences at a rate of up to 18 words per minute.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBS News: Every coast in the U.S. is facing rapidly increasing high tide floods. NASA says this is due to a "wobble" in the moon's orbit working in tandem with climate change-fueled rising sea levels. The new study from NASA and the University of Hawaii, published recently in the journal Nature Climate Change, warns that upcoming changes in the moon's orbit could lead to record flooding on Earth in the next decade. Through mapping the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) sea-level rise scenarios, flooding thresholds and astronomical cycles, researchers found flooding in American coastal cities could be several multiples worse in the 2030s, when the next moon "wobble" is expected to begin. They expect the flooding to significantly damage infrastructure and displace communities.

While the study highlights the dire situation facing coastal cities, the lunar wobble is actually a natural occurrence, first reported in 1728. The moon's orbit is responsible for periods of both higher and lower tides about every 18.6 years, and they aren't dangerous in their own right. "In half of the Moon's 18.6-year cycle, Earth's regular daily tides are suppressed: High tides are lower than normal, and low tides are higher than normal," NASA explains. "In the other half of the cycle, tides are amplified: High tides get higher, and low tides get lower. Global sea-level rise pushes high tides in only one direction -- higher. So half of the 18.6-year lunar cycle counteracts the effect of sea-level rise on high tides, and the other half increases the effect." But this time around, scientists are more concerned. With sea-level rise due to climate change, the next high tide floods are expected to be more intense and more frequent than ever before, exacerbating already grim predictions. The study says these floods will exceed flooding thresholds around the country more often, and can also occur in clusters lasting more than a month. "During curtain alignments, floods could happen as frequently as every day or every other day," the report adds. "Almost all U.S. mainland coastlines, Hawaii and Guam are expected to face these effects."

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: High on Greenland's ice sheet, particle astrophysicists are this week drilling boreholes in a search for the cosmic accelerators responsible for the universe's most energetic particles. By placing hundreds of radio antennas on and below the surface, they hope to trap elusive particles known as neutrinos at higher energies than ever before. Detectors elsewhere on Earth occasionally register the arrival of ultra-high-energy (UHE) cosmic rays, atomic nuclei that slam into the atmosphere at colossal speed. Researchers want to pinpoint their sources, but because the nuclei are charged, magnetic fields in space bend their paths, obscuring their origins. But theorists believe that as UHE cosmic rays set out from their sources, they spawn so-called cosmogenic neutrinos in collisions with photons and, because neutrinos are not charged, they travel to Earth as straight as an arrow. The hard part is catching them.

According to Politico, "Biden allied groups, including the Democratic National Committee, are [...] planning to engage fact-checkers more aggressively and work with SMS carriers to dispel misinformation about vaccines that is sent over social media and text messages." The White House is also planning to work with social media platforms and traditional media outlets to combat misinformation and ultimately improve vaccination rates. TmoNews reports: The White House could ask carriers like T-Mobile, Verizon, and AT&T to step in and stop the spread of these text messages. This is one way they hope they will be able to get their vaccination message across better and eliminate misinterpretation. There is no word yet on whether or not the White House has reached out to these carriers to help them screen anti-vax messages. But if it does, it will be interesting to see how this will be acted upon and which tools would be used. Then again, it could open a can of worms with potential issues that would violate customer privacy and an individual's right to free speech. "We are steadfastly committed to keeping politics out of the effort to get every American vaccinated so that we can save lives and help our economy further recover," White House spokesperson Kevin Munoz said. "When we see deliberate efforts to spread misinformation, we view that as an impediment to the country's public health and will not shy away from calling that out."

The molecules produced by stomach bacteria could give the human body a helping hand when it comes to the immune system, even going so far as to help fight tumors. ScienceAlert reports: "The results are an example of how metabolites of intestinal bacteria can change the metabolism and gene regulation of our cells and thus positively influence the efficiency of tumor therapies," says immunologist Maik Luu from University Hospital Wurzburg in Germany. Short chain fatty acids (SCFAs) are one of the helpful molecules produced when dietary fiber is fermented in the gut. Major SCFAs are acetate and butyrate, along with the less common pentanoate, found only in some bacteria. All of these SCFAs have a bunch of positive health effects in humans, such as the regulation of insulin resistance, cholesterol, and even appetite. Luu and colleagues have now found that butyrate and pentanoate also boost the anti-tumor activity of a type of killer T cell known as CD8, by reprogramming the way they work. For the first time, they have experimentally demonstrated this in mice.

Using lab mice, the team found that certain commensal bacteria produce pentanoate. For example, one relatively rare human gut bacterium, Megasphaera massiliensis, enhanced small proteins called cytokines in the killer T cells, leading to an increased ability to destroy tumor cells. As a control, the team experimented with other, non-pentanoate producing bacteria and found no effect on the cytokine levels. This finding could be particularly useful for therapies that leverage the immune system to fight cancer. Some tumor cells have proteins on their surfaces that can bind to proteins on T cells, resulting in an immune 'checkpoint' response which tells the killer cell to spare its target -- in this case, the cancer cell. Immune checkpoint inhibitor (ICI) therapy works by blocking these checkpoint proteins, allowing the T cells to do their job and destroy the tumor cells. [...] The team also looked at a genetically modified type of T cell called CAR-T cells which are used in immunotherapy, and found that the bacterial assistance worked the same way, particularly on solid tumors. The research has been published in Nature Communications.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Atlas: By making alterations to the plastic manufacturing process, scientists hope to produce forms of the ubiquitous material that can break down far more safely and quickly in the environment than current versions do. Researchers in China have now demonstrated a new example of this that degrades in just a week when exposed to sunlight and oxygen, which they believe could make for electronics that are easier to dispose of at the end of their lives. The new material came about when study author Liang Luo from China's Huazhong University of Science and Technology was working on an advanced type of chemical sensor, as reported by PNAS. The materials scientist was developing a novel polymer film that changed color in response to pH levels. This process was driven by the material's unique molecular structure, with the chains of monomers giving the film its deep red color, and taking it away when these bonds were broken.

Through his team's experiments, Luo found that the deep red color of the film quickly faded away and the material broke apart after several days in the sunlight. Breaking apart these bonds is a common objective in research efforts to better recycle plastics, and in doing so Luo may have inadvertently conjured up a promising, environmentally friendly version of the material. The molecular makeup of the plastic means it wouldn't be suited for use in soda bottles or shopping bags, as it is only stable as a functional material in the dark and without oxygen. But exposed to sunlight and air, it disintegrates rapidly and completely decomposes within a week, leaving no environmentally damaging microplastic fragments behind. A byproduct of the process is naturally occurring succinic acid, however, which could potentially be upcycled for commercial use in pharmaceuticals or food.

David Nield shares the findings of a new study via ScienceAlert: Researchers tasked 42 adult volunteers with learning the Arabic alphabet from scratch: some through writing it out on paper, some through typing it out on a keyboard, and some through watching and responding to video instructions. Those in the handwriting group not only learned the unfamiliar letters more quickly, but they were also better able to apply their new knowledge in other areas -- by using the letters to make new words and to recognize words they hadn't seen before, for example. While writing, typing, and visual learning were effective at teaching participants to recognize Arabic letters -- learners made very few mistakes after six exercise sessions -- on average, the writing group needed fewer sessions to get to a good standard.

Researchers then tested the groups to see how the learning could be generalized. In every follow-up test, using skills they hadn't been trained on, the writing group performed the best: naming letters, writing letters, spelling words, and reading words. The research shows that the benefits of teaching through handwriting go beyond better penmanship: There are also advantages in other areas of language learning. It seems as though the knowledge gets more firmly embedded through writing. The research has been published in Psychological Science.