A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention webpage that previously made the case that vaccines don't cause autism now says they might. WSJ: The contents of the webpage came up during Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Senate confirmation process. Sen. Bill Cassidy (R., La.) in February said Kennedy had assured him that, if he was confirmed, the CDC would "not remove statements on their website pointing out that vaccines do not cause autism."

The revised webpage says: "The claim 'vaccines do not cause autism' is not an evidence-based claim because studies have not ruled out the possibility that infant vaccines cause autism. Studies supporting a link have been ignored by health authorities." The new text posted Wednesday also notes that the Department of Health and Human Services has launched "a comprehensive assessment" to probe the causes of autism.

An anonymous reader shares a report: For the past several years, America has been using its young people as lab rats in a sweeping, if not exactly thought-out, education experiment. Schools across the country have been lowering standards and removing penalties for failure. The results are coming into focus.

Five years ago, about 30 incoming freshmen at UC San Diego arrived with math skills below high-school level. Now, according to a recent report from UC San Diego faculty and administrators, that number is more than 900 -- and most of those students don't fully meet middle-school math standards. Many students struggle with fractions and simple algebra problems. Last year, the university, which admits fewer than 30 percent of undergraduate applicants, launched a remedial-math course that focuses entirely on concepts taught in elementary and middle school. (According to the report, more than 60 percent of students who took the previous version of the course couldn't divide a fraction by two.) One of the course's tutors noted that students faced more issues with "logical thinking" than with math facts per se. They didn't know how to begin solving word problems.

The university's problems are extreme, but they are not unique. Over the past five years, all of the other University of California campuses, including UC Berkeley and UCLA, have seen the number of first-years who are unprepared for precalculus double or triple. George Mason University, in Virginia, revamped its remedial-math summer program in 2023 after students began arriving at their calculus course unable to do algebra, the math-department chair, Maria Emelianenko, told me.

"We call it quantitative literacy, just knowing which fraction is larger or smaller, that the slope is positive when it is going up," Janine Wilson, the chair of the undergraduate economics program at UC Davis, told me. "Things like that are just kind of in our bones when we are college ready. We are just seeing many folks without that capability."

Part of what's happening here is that as more students choose STEM majors, more of them are being funneled into introductory math courses during their freshman year. But the national trend is very clear: America's students are getting much worse at math. The decline started about a decade ago and sharply accelerated during the coronavirus pandemic. The average eighth grader's math skills, which rose steadily from 1990 to 2013, are now a full school year behind where they were in 2013, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the gold standard for tracking academic achievement. Students in the bottom tenth percentile have fallen even further behind. Only the top 10 percent have recovered to 2013 levels.

Researchers in Germany achieved a major milestone for the future quantum internet by successfully teleporting quantum information between photons generated by two different, physically separated quantum dots -- something never accomplished before due to the difficulty of producing indistinguishable photons from remote sources. Phys.org reports: At the University of Stuttgart, the team succeeded in teleporting the polarization state of a photon originating from one quantum dot to another photon from a second quantum dot. One quantum dot generates a single photon, the other an entangled photon pair. Entangled means that the two particles constitute a single quantum entity, even when they are physically separated. One of the two particles travels to the second quantum dot and interferes with its light particle. The two overlap. Because of this superposition, the information of the single photon is transferred to the distant partner of the pair.

Instrumental for the success of the experiment were quantum frequency converters, which compensate for residual frequency differences between the photons. These converters were developed by a team led by Prof. Christoph Becher, an expert in quantum optics at Saarland University. [...] In the Stuttgart experiment, the quantum dots were separated only by an optical fiber of about 10 m length. "But we are working on achieving considerably greater distances," says Strobel. In earlier work, the team had shown that the entanglement of the quantum dot photons remains intact even after a 36-kilometer transmission through the city center of Stuttgart. Another aim is to increase the current success rate of teleportation, which currently stands at just over 70%. Fluctuations in the quantum dot still lead to slight differences in the photons. The findings have been published in the journal Nature Communications.

A new treatment for tuberculosis could boost cure rates and shorten the time needed to treat the disease by months, trial results suggest. The Guardian: Globally, an estimated 10.7 million people fell ill with TB last year and 1.23 million died from it. In its annual report on tuberculosis, launched last week, the World Health Organization said it remained a "major global public-health problem" and the leading infectious cause of death. [...] Sorfequiline, a new antibiotic, showed stronger action against the deadly bacteria than existing treatments, with a comparable safety profile, researchers from the TB Alliance told the Union Conference on Lung Health in Copenhagen on Wednesday.

The trial involved 309 people across 22 sites in South Africa, the Philippines, Georgia, Tanzania and Uganda, with different dose regimens. All participants had "drug-sensitive" tuberculosis, meaning a standard cocktail of drugs can safely treat them but researchers believe TB infections that are resistant to standard treatment could also be helped. The trial suggested a sorfequiline-based regimen could be used for anyone testing positive, said Dr Maria Beumont, vice-president of TB Alliance.

Action is needed now to reduce ultra-processed food (UPF) in diets worldwide because of their threat to health, say international experts in a global review of research. From a report: They say the way we eat is changing - with a move away from fresh, whole foods to cheap, highly-processed meals - which is increasing our risk of a range of chronic diseases, including obesity and depression. Writing in The Lancet, the researchers say governments need "to step up" and introduce warnings and higher taxes on UPF products, to help fund access to more nutritious foods.

[...] This review of evidence on the impact of UPFs on health, carried out by 43 global experts and based on 104 long-term studies, suggests these foods are linked to a greater risk of 12 health conditions. These include type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, kidney disease, depression and dying prematurely from any cause.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Federal health officials have linked two massive US measles outbreaks, confirming that the country is about two months away from losing its measles elimination status, according to a report by The New York Times. The Times obtained a recording of a call during which officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed to state health departments that the ongoing measles outbreak at the border of Arizona and Utah is a continuation of the explosive outbreak in West Texas that began in mid- to late-January. That is, the two massive outbreaks are being caused by the same subtype of measles virus.

This is a significant link that hasn't previously been reported despite persistent questions from journalists and concerns from health experts, particularly in light of Canada losing its elimination status last week. The loss of an elimination status means that measles will once again be considered endemic to the US, an embarrassing public health backslide for a vaccine-preventable disease.

A Chinese man who cryogenically preserved his wife after her death has sparked a heated online debate after it emerged he began dating a new partner in 2020. Some argue it's natural for him to move on, while others say he's being selfish or disrespectful to both his late wife and his current partner. The BBC reports: As a sign of his devotion, Gui Junmin decided to freeze his wife Zhan Wenlian's body after she died from lung cancer in 2017, aged 49, making her China's first cryogenically preserved person. But after a November interview revealed he had been dating a different partner since 2020, Chinese social media has been torn on Mr Junmin's predicament. Whilst some asked why the 57-year-old didn't just "let go" another commenter remarked he appeared to be "most devoted to himself."

After Zhan Wenlian was given months to live by doctors, Gui Junmin decided to use cryonics - which is scientifically unproven - to preserve her body once she died. Following her death, he signed a 30-year agreement to preserve his wife's frozen body with the Shandong Yinfeng Life Science Research Institute. Since then, Zhan's body has been stored in a 2,000-litre container at the institute in a vat of -190C liquid nitrogen.

Chinese newspaper Southern Weekly revealed that although Mr Junmin lived alone for two years after the procedure, in 2020 he began dating again, despite his wife remaining in cryopreservation. He told the newspaper that a severe gout attack which left him unable to move for two days began to change his mind about the benefits of living alone. Soon after, he started seeing his current partner Wang Chunxia, although Mr Junmin suggested to the paper the love was only "utilitarian" and that she hadn't "entered" his heart.

UC Berkeley researchers working with Project CETI discovered that sperm whales produce vowel-like sounds embedded in their click codas, suggesting a far more complex communication system than previously understood. "It was striking just how structured the system was. I've never seen anything like that before with other animals," Begus, a UC Berkeley linguistics professor and the linguistics lead at Project CETI, told SFGATE. "We're showing the world that there's more than meets the eye in sperm whales and that, if one cares to look closely, they're not as alien. We're much more similar to each other than we used to think." SFGATE reports: With the help of a machine-learning model to identify patterns, Begus and his team combed through recordings collected from social units of sperm whales off the coast of the island of Dominica between 2005 and 2018. When they sped up the audio, removing the silences between clicks, they heard new patterns. They found acoustic properties that share similarities with two vowels -- a and i -- and several vowel combinations.

"Before, people were looking just at the timing and the number of clicks exchanged between sperm whales, but now we have to look at the frequencies, too. A whole new set of patterns have appeared," Begus said. "Now, it's one of the most complex non-human communication systems we have observed." [...] Begus said the research only shows how much more we have to learn about whales' style of communicating. He is particularly interested in exploring how the system may differ for whales between regions and how whale babies learn to communicate in this way. Most importantly, he wants to understand the meaning behind the sounds, as a "window into whale thoughts and lives." The research was published in the journal Open Mind.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: For the first time, scientists are tracking the migration of monarch butterflies across much of North America, actively monitoring individual insects on journeys from as far away as Ontario all the way to their overwintering colonies in central Mexico. This long-sought achievement could provide crucial insights into the poorly understood life cycles of hundreds of species of butterflies, bees and other flying insects at a time when many are in steep decline.

The breakthrough is the result of a tiny solar-powered radio tag that weighs just 60 milligrams and sells for $200. Researchers have tagged more than 400 monarchs this year and are now following their journeys on a cellphone app created by the New Jersey-based company that makes the tags, Cellular Tracking Technologies. Most monarchs weigh 500 to 600 milligrams, so each tag-bearing migrator making the transcontinental journey is, by weight, equivalent to a half-raisin carrying three uncooked grains of rice.

Researchers are tracking more than 400 tagged monarch butterflies as they fly toward winter colonies in central Mexico. The maps [in the article] follow six butterflies. [...] Tracking the world's most famous insect migration may also have a big social impact, with monarch lovers able to follow the progress of individual butterflies on the free app, called Project Monarch Science. Many of the butterflies are flying over cities and suburbs where pollinator gardens are increasingly popular. Some tracks could even lead to the discovery of new winter hideaways. "There's nothing that's not amazing about this," said Cheryl Schultz, a butterfly scientist at Washington State University and the senior author of a recent study documenting a 22 percent drop in butterfly abundance in North America over a recent 20-year period. "Now we will have answers that could help us turn the tide for these bugs."

alternative_right shares a report from ScienceAlert: A new study from researchers in Australia reveals that the people who never forget faces look "smarter, not harder." In other words, they naturally focus on a person's most distinguishing facial features. "Their skill isn't something you can learn like a trick," explains lead author James Dunn, a psychology researcher at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) Sydney. "It's an automatic, dynamic way of picking up what makes each face unique."

To see what super-recognizers see, Dunn and his colleagues used eye-tracking technology to reconstruct how people surveyed new faces. They did this with 37 super-recognizers and 68 people with ordinary facial recognition skills, noting where and for how long participants looked at pictures of faces displayed on a computer screen. The researchers then fed the data into machine learning algorithms trained to recognize faces. The algorithms, a type known as deep neural networks, were tasked with deciding if two faces belonged to the same person. "These findings suggest that the perceptual foundations of individual differences in face recognition ability may originate at the earliest stages of visual processing -- at the level of retinal encoding," Dunn and colleagues write in their paper.

The findings have been published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

"To be clear, the current economics of space-based data centers don't make sense," writes the Wall Street Journal.

"But they could in the future, perhaps as soon as a decade or so from now, according to an analysis by Phil Metzger, a research professor at the University of Central Florida and formerly of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration." "Space enthusiasts (comme moi) have long sought a business case to enable human migration beyond our home world," he posted on X amid the new hype. "I think AI servers in space is the first real business case that will lead to many more...."

The argument essentially boils down to the belief that AI's needs are eventually going to grow so great that we need to move to outer space. There the sun's power can be more efficiently harvested. In space, the sun's rays can be direct and constant for solar panels to collect — no clouds, no rainstorms, no nighttime. Demands for cooling could also be cut because of the vacuum of space. Plus, there aren't those pesky regulations that executives like to complain about, slowing construction of new power plants to meet the data-center needs. In space, no one can hear the Nimbys scream. "We will be able to beat the cost of terrestrial data centers in space in the next couple of decades," Bezos said at a tech conference last month. "Space will end up being one of the places that keeps making Earth better."

It's still early days. At Alphabet, Google's plans sound almost conservative. The search-engine company in recent days announced Project Suncatcher, which it describes as a moonshot project to scale machine learning in space. It plans to launch two prototype satellites by early 2027 to test its hardware in orbit. "Like any moonshot, it's going to require us to solve a lot of complex engineering challenges," Pichai posted on social media. Nvidia, too, has announced a partnership with startup Starcloud to work on space-based data centers. Not to be outdone, Elon Musk has been painting his own updated vision for the heavens... in recent weeks he has been talking more about how he can use his spaceships to deploy new versions of his solar-powered Starlink satellites equipped with high-speed lasers to build out in-space data centers.

On Friday, Musk further reiterated how those AI satellites would be able to generate 100 gigawatts of annual solar power — or, what he said, would be roughly a quarter of what the U.S. consumes on average in a year. "We have a plan mapped out to do it," he told investor Ron Baron during an event. "It gets crazy." Previously, he has suggested he was four to five years away from that ability. He's also touted even wilder ideas, saying on X that 100 terawatts a year "is possible from a lunar base producing solar-powered AI satellites locally and accelerating them to escape velocity with a mass driver." Simply put, he's suggesting a moon base will crank out satellites and throw them into orbit with a catapult. And those satellites' solar panels would generate 100,000 gigawatts a year. "I think we'll see intelligence continue to scale all the way up to where...most of the power of the sun is harnessed for compute," Musk told a tech conference in September.

"Three Chinese astronauts returned from their nation's space station Friday," reports the Associated Press, "after more than a week's delay because the return capsule they had planned to use was damaged, likely from being hit by space debris." The team left their Shenzhou-20 spacecraft in orbit and came back using the recently arrived Shenzhou-21, which had ferried a three-person replacement crew to the station, China's Manned Space Agency said. The original return plan was scrapped because a window in the Shenzhou-20 capsule had tiny cracks, most likely caused by impact from space debris, the space agency said Friday... Their return was delayed for nine days, and their 204-day stay in space was the longest for any astronaut at China's space station...

China developed the Tiangong space station after the country was excluded from the International Space Station over U.S. national security concerns. China's space program is controlled by its military.

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Guardian: The number of deaths linked to superbugs that do not respond to frontline antibiotics increased by 17% in England last year, according to official figures that raise concerns about the ongoing increase in antimicrobial resistance.

The figures, released by the UK Health Security Agency, also revealed a large rise in private prescriptions for antibiotics, with 22% dispensed through the private sector in 2024. The increase in private prescribing is partly explained by the Pharmacy First scheme, a flagship policy of Rishi Sunak's government that allows patients to be prescribed antibiotics for common illnesses without seeing a GP, raising questions about whether the shift in prescribing patterns risks contributing to the rise in resistance.

"Antibiotic resistance is one of the greatest health threats we face," said the UKHSA's chief executive, Prof Susan Hopkins. "More people than ever are acquiring infections that cannot be effectively treated by antibiotics. This puts them at greater risk of serious illness and even death, with our poorest communities hit the hardest... It's positive that we've seen antibiotic use fall in England within the NHS but we need to go further, faster," said Hopkins.

"Please remember to only take antibiotics if you have been told to do so by a healthcare professional. Do not save some for later or share them with friends and family. If you have leftover antibiotics, please bring them to a pharmacy for appropriate disposal."

The dream of quantum computers has been hampered by the challenge of error correction, writes the Harvard Gazette, since qubits "are inherently susceptible to slipping out of their quantum states and losing their encoded information."

But in a newly-published paper, a research team "combined various methods to create complex circuits with dozens of error correction layers" that "suppresses errors below a critical threshold — the point where adding qubits further reduces errors rather than increasing them." "For the first time, we combined all essential elements for a scalable, error-corrected quantum computation in an integrated architecture," said Mikhail Lukin, co-director of the Quantum Science and Engineering Initiative, Joshua and Beth Friedman University Professor, and senior author of the new paper. "These experiments — by several measures the most advanced that have been done on any quantum platform to date — create the scientific foundation for practical large-scale quantum computation..."

"There are still a lot of technical challenges remaining to get to very large-scale computer with millions of qubits, but this is the first time we have an architecture that is conceptually scalable," said lead author Dolev Bluvstein, Ph.D. '25, who did the research during his graduate studies at Harvard and is now an assistant professor at Caltech. "It's going to take a lot of effort and technical development, but it's becoming clear that we can build fault-tolerant quantum computers...."

Hartmut Neven, vice president of engineering at the Google Quantum AI team, said the new paper came amid an "incredibly exciting" race between qubit platforms. "This work represents a significant advance toward our shared goal of building a large-scale, useful quantum computer," he said... With recent advances, Lukin believes the core elements for building quantum computers are falling into place. "This big dream that many of us had for several decades, for the first time, is really in direct sight," he said.
"In theory, a system of 300 quantum bits can store more information than the number of particles in the known universe..." the article points out.

"The new paper represents an important advance in a three-decade pursuit of quantum error correction."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the article.

alternative_right shares a report from ScienceAlert: A thorough investigation published in May 2023 found that the inner core of the Moon is, in fact, a solid ball with a density similar to that of iron. To figure it out once and for all, [astronomer Arthur Briaud of the French National Centre for Scientific Research in France] and his colleagues collected data from space missions and lunar laser-ranging experiments to compile a profile of various lunar characteristics. These include the degree of its deformation by its gravitational interaction with Earth, the variation in its distance from Earth, and its density.

... they found that the lunar core is very similar to that of Earth â" with an outer fluid layer and a solid inner core. According to their modeling, the outer core has a radius of about 362 kilometers (225 miles), and the inner core has a radius of about 258 kilometers (160 miles). That's about 15 percent of the entire radius of the Moon. The inner core, the team found, also has a density of about 7,822 kilograms per cubic meter. That's very close to the density of iron. [...] The research has been published in Nature.