The British Psychological Society: Watching lecture videos is now a major part of many students' university experience. Some say they prefer them to live lectures, as they can choose when to study. And, according to a survey of students at the University of California Los Angeles, at least, many students also take advantage of the fact that video playback can be sped up, so cutting the amount of time they spend on lectures. But what impact does sped-up viewing have on learning? The answer, according to a new paper in Applied Cognitive Psychology, is, within some limits, none. In fact, if used strategically, it can actually improve learning. However, what students think is going to be the best strategy isn't actually what's most beneficial, Dillon Murphy at UCLA and colleagues also report. First, the team assigned 231 student participants to watch two YouTube videos (one on real estate appraisals and the other on the Roman Empire) at normal speed, 1.5x speed, 2x speed or 2.5x speed. They were told to watch the videos in full screen mode and not to pause them or take any notes. After each video, the students took comprehension tests, which were repeated a week later. The results were clear: the 1.5x and 2x groups did just as well on the tests as those who'd watched the videos at normal speed, both immediately afterwards and one week on. Only at 2.5x was learning impaired.

When the team surveyed a separate group of UCLA students, they found that a massive 85% usually watched pre-recorded lectures at faster than normal speed. However, 91% said they thought that normal speed or slightly faster (1.5x) would be better for learning than 2x or 2.5x. These new results certainly suggest that this isn't right: double-time viewing was just as good as normal viewing. It seems, then, that as long as the material can still be accurately perceived and comprehended, it's okay to speed up playback. So, a student could just watch videos at 2x speed and halve their time spent on lectures...Or, according to the results of other studies reported in the paper, they could watch a video at 2x normal speed twice, and do better on a test than if they'd watched it once at normal speed. The timing mattered, though: only those who'd watched the 2x video for a second time immediately before a test, rather than right after the first viewing, got this advantage.

Slashdot readers fahrbot-bot and Tangential share a report from Defense One: Within weeks, scientists at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research expect to announce that they have developed a vaccine that is effective against COVID-19 and all its variants, even Omicron, as well as previous SARS-origin viruses that have killed millions of people worldwide. Walter Reed's Spike Ferritin Nanoparticle COVID-19 vaccine, or SpFN, completed animal trials earlier this year with positive results. Phase 1 of human trials, which tested the vaccine against Omicron and the other variants, wrapped up this month, again with positive results that are undergoing final review, Dr. Kayvon Modjarrad, director of Walter Reed's infectious diseases branch, said in an exclusive interview with Defense One. The new vaccine will still need to undergo phase 2 and phase 3 trials.

Unlike existing vaccines, Walter Reed's SpFN uses a soccer ball-shaped protein with 24 faces for its vaccine, which allows scientists to attach the spikes of multiple coronavirus strains on different faces of the protein. The vaccine's human trials took longer than expected, he said, because the lab needed to test the vaccine on subjects who had neither been vaccinated nor previously infected with COVID. The next step is seeing how the new pan-coronavirus vaccine interacts with people who were previously vaccinated or previously sick. The next step is seeing how the new pan-coronavirus vaccine interacts with people who were previously vaccinated or previously sick. Walter Reed is working with a yet-to-be-named industry partner for that wider rollout.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: Intel has told workers that unvaccinated people who don't get an exemption for religious or medical reasons will be on unpaid leave beginning in April. The California-based semiconductor company told employees last month they had a Jan. 4 deadline to be vaccinated against COVID-19 or seek an exemption, citing a government mandate for federal contractors.

In a Dec. 7 memo to employees, Chief People Officer Christy Pambianchi told employees the Jan. 4 vaccine deadline remains in place. She wrote that employees who aren't vaccinated must seek a medical or religious accommodation and submit to weekly testing, regardless of whether they are still working remotely. Intel will review employees' exemption requests until March 15. Pambianchi said employees who don't receive an exemption will begin unpaid leave on April 4 for at least three months but "will not be terminated." She said Intel will continue providing health care benefits to unvaccinated employees on leave.

The US Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday authorized Pfizer's antiviral pill, Paxlovid, to treat Covid-19. From a report: This is the first antiviral Covid-19 pill authorized for ill people to take at home, before they get sick enough to be hospitalized. High-risk individuals age 12 and older who weigh at least 88 pounds and have a positive SARS-CoV-2 test are eligible for this treatment and will need to have it prescribed by a doctor. The pill "should be initiated as soon as possible after diagnosis of Covid-19 and within five days of symptom onset," according to an FDA statement. Paxlovid combines a new antiviral drug named nirmatrelvir and an older one called ritonavir and is administered as three pills given twice a day for five days.

From Mount Everest to the Mariana Trench, microplastics are everywhere -- even high in the Earth's troposphere where wind speeds allow them to travel vast distances, a new study has found. From a report: Microplastics are tiny fragments -- measuring less than 5mm -- that come from packaging, clothing, vehicles and other sources and have been detected on land, in water and in the air. Scientists from the French national research institute CNRS sampled air 2,877 metres above sea level at the Pic du Midi Observatory in the French Pyrenees, a so-called "clean station" because of the limited influence exerted on it by the local climate and environment. There they tested 10,000 cubic metres of air a week between June and October of 2017 and found all samples contained microplastics.

Using weather data, they calculated the trajectories of different air masses preceding each sample and discovered sources as far away as north Africa and North America. The study's main author, Steve Allen of Dalhousie University in Canada, told AFP that the particles were able to travel such distances because they were able to reach great altitudes. "Once it hits the troposphere, it's like a superfast highway," he said. The research also points to microplastic sources in the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean.

A rare look inside a fossilized dinosaur egg found in southern China has revealed an exquisitely preserved embryo -- and evidence suggesting that some of these prehistoric creatures had even more in common with modern birds than previously thought. From a report: Scientists said the embryo inside the egg, which was laid between 72 million to 66 million years ago during the Late Cretaceous period, was that of a two-legged, feathered carnivore known as an oviraptorid. They said, in a paper about the discovery published Tuesday in the journal iScience, the embryo's curled body position -- with its back against the blunt end of the 7-inch-long egg and its head between its legs -- resembles that of bird embryos.

"This posture was previously not recognized in any dinosaur embryo," said Fion Waisum Ma, a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Birmingham in England and a co-author of the paper. She said the posture suggests that the embryo had assumed a tucked position before hatching -- a behavior previously thought unique to birds. She called the newly described specimen "one of the best preserved dinosaur embryos ever found." In birds, tucking leaves the embryo with its right wing over its head and its beak pointing toward an air space at the egg's blunt end. That orientation helps direct the hatchling's head as it uses its beak to crack the eggshell and emerge.

"Failure to attain this posture would increase the chance of death, as the bird is less likely to break out of the egg successfully," Ms. Ma said. An inspection of the oviraptorid egg showed what appeared to be an air space between the embryo's spine and the egg's blunt end, according to the researchers. The specimen was among several fossils discovered about two decades ago in the Chinese city of Ganzhou but not recognized to be fossilized dinosaur eggs until 2015, when evaluated by an expert. A close examination of one of the eggs, which had fossilized after breaking, showed that it held the preserved oviraptorid embryo.

Researchers have developed a rechargeable lithium-ion battery in the form of an ultra-long fiber that could be woven into fabrics. From a report: In a proof of concept, the team behind the new battery technology has produced the world's longest flexible fiber battery, 140 meters long, to demonstrate that the material can be manufactured to arbitrarily long lengths. The work is described today in the journal Materials Today. [...] The new fiber battery is manufactured using novel battery gels and a standard fiber-drawing system that starts with a larger cylinder containing all the components and then heats it to just below its melting point. The material is drawn through a narrow opening to compress all the parts to a fraction of their original diameter, while maintaining all the original arrangement of parts.

While others have attempted to make batteries in fiber form, [says MIT postdoc Tural Khudiyey, a lead author on the paper], those were structured with key materials on the outside of the fiber, whereas this system embeds the lithium and other materials inside the fiber, with a protective outside coating, thus directly making this version stable and waterproof. This is the first demonstration of a sub-kilometer long fiber battery which is both sufficiently long and highly durable to have practical applications, he says. The fact that they were able to make a 140-meter fiber battery shows that "there's no obvious upper limit to the length. We could definitely do a kilometer-scale length," he says.

The 140-meter fiber produced so far has an energy storage capacity of 123 milliamp-hours, which can charge smartwatches or phones, he says. The fiber device is only a few hundred microns in thickness, thinner than any previous attempts to produce batteries in fiber form. In addition to individual one-dimensional fibers, which can be woven to produce two-dimensional fabrics, the material can also be used in 3D printing or custom-shape systems to create solid objects, such as casings that could provide both the structure of a device and its power source. To demonstrate this capability, a toy submarine was wrapped with the battery fiber to provide it with power. Incorporating the power source into the structure of such devices could lower the overall weight and so improve the efficiency and range they can achieve.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: A security researcher found a Bluetooth vulnerability in a popular at-home COVID-19 test allowing him to modify its results. F-Secure researcher Ken Gannon identified the since-fixed flaw in the Ellume COVID-19 Home Test, a self-administered antigen test that individuals can use to check to see if they have been infected with the virus. Rather than submitting a sample to a testing facility, the sample is tested using a Bluetooth analyzer, which then reports the result to the user and health authorities via Ellume's mobile app. Gannon found, however, that the built-in Bluetooth analydzer could be tricked to allow a user to falsify a certifiable result before the Ellume app processes the data.

To carry out the hack, Gannon used a rooted Android device to analyze the data the test was sending to the app. He then identified two types of Bluetooth traffic that were most likely in charge of telling the mobile app if the user was COVID positive or negative, before writing two scripts that were able to successfully change a negative result into a positive one. Gannon says that when he received an email with his results from Ellume, it incorrectly showed he had tested positive. To complete the proof-of-concept, F-Secure also successfully obtained a certified copy of the faked COVID-19 test results from Azova, a telehealth provider that Ellume partners with for certifying at-home COVID-19 tests for travel or going into work.

While Gannon's writeup only includes changing negative results to positive ones, he says that the process "works both ways." He also said that, before it was patched, "someone with the proper motivation and technical skills could've used these flaws to ensure they, or someone they're working with, gets a negative result every time they're tested." In theory, a fake certification could be submitted to meet U.S. re-entry requirements. In response to F-Secure's findings, Ellume says it has updated its system to detect and prevent the transmission of falsified results.

InfiniteZero writes: Imaginary numbers are necessary to accurately describe reality, two new studies have suggested. Imaginary numbers are what you get when you take the square root of a negative number, and they have long been used in the most important equations of quantum mechanics, the branch of physics that describes the world of the very small. When you add imaginary numbers and real numbers, the two form complex numbers, which enable physicists to write out quantum equations in simple terms. But whether quantum theory needs these mathematical chimeras or just uses them as convenient shortcuts has long been controversial. In fact, even the founders of quantum mechanics themselves thought that the implications of having complex numbers in their equations was disquieting. In a letter to his friend Hendrik Lorentz, physicist Erwin Schrodinger -- the first person to introduce complex numbers into quantum theory, with his quantum wave function -- wrote, "What is unpleasant here, and indeed directly to be objected to, is the use of complex numbers. quantum wave function is surely fundamentally a real function."

Schrodinger did find ways to express his equation with only real numbers alongside an additional set of rules for how to use the equation, and later physicists have done the same with other parts of quantum theory. But in the absence of hard experimental evidence to rule upon the predictions of these "all real" equations, a question has lingered: Are imaginary numbers an optional simplification, or does trying to work without them rob quantum theory of its ability to describe reality? Now, two studies, published Dec. 15 in the journals Nature and Physical Review Letters, have proved Schrodinger wrong. By a relatively simple experiment, they show that if quantum mechanics is correct, imaginary numbers are a necessary part of the mathematics of our universe. "The early founders of quantum mechanics could not find any way to interpret the complex numbers appearing in the theory," lead author Marc-Olivier Renou, a theoretical physicist at the Institute of Photonic Sciences in Spain, told Live Science in an email. "Having them [complex numbers] worked very well, but there is no clear way to identify the complex numbers with an element of reality." To test whether complex numbers were truly vital, the authors of the first study devised a twist on a classic quantum experiment known as the Bell test. The test was first proposed by physicist John Bell in 1964 as a way to prove that quantum entanglement -- the weird connection between two far-apart particles that Albert Einstein objected to as "spooky action at a distance" -- was required by quantum theory.

The Omicron variant of the coronavirus is spreading faster than the Delta variant and is causing infections in people already vaccinated or who have recovered from the COVID-19 disease, the head of the World Health Organization (WHO) said. From a report: WHO chief scientist Soumya Swaminathan added it would be "unwise" to conclude from early evidence that Omicron was a milder variant that previous ones. "... with the numbers going up, all health systems are going to be under strain," Soumya Swaminathan told Geneva-based journalists. The variant is successfully evading some immune responses, she said, meaning that the booster programmes being rolled out in many countries ought to be targeted towards people with weaker immune systems. "There is now consistent evidence that Omicron is spreading significantly faster than the Delta variant," WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told the briefing. "And it is more likely people vaccinated or recovered from COVID-19 could be infected or re-infected," Tedros said.

New York-based firm Pliant Energy Systems is building a marine system reminiscent of the cuttlefish with its rippling underwater motion, a report from The Economist reveals. The company's biomimetic machine, called Velox, is based on the principle that propellers are nowhere near as efficient as the fins of sea creatures that are prevalent in nature. Interesting Engineering reports: Unlike propellers, fins and flippers can extend around a sea creature, meaning more propulsion without the need for a large protruding propeller that could get caught or damaged by hitting the seabed. Fins are also flexible, meaning that if they do come in contact with any other object in the sea, they are less likely to get damaged. In an interview with The Economist, an ex-marine biologist and founder of Pliant Energy Systems, Benjamin Pietro Filardo, explained how he is designing submersible machines that are propelled using flexible fin-like materials. He said Velox will produce approximately three times as much thrust per unit energy as the average propeller of a small boat. The system can travel underwater and even come out onto land, using its fins almost like robotic legs. The video below shows Velox skating on ice and swimming in a pool.

Filardo showed his new design to America's Office of Naval Research, leading them to commission a new iteration, called C-Ray, that will be faster and lighter than Velox. C-Ray also won't be tethered, unlike Velox, which is currently controlled via a cable. Autonomous swarms of the machine could eventually be used for missions such as undersea patrols, mine removal, and deepsea exploration and monitoring. [...] Filardo said the system has great potential for scalability, giving the blue whale as an example of a massive sea mammal that uses fins for propulsion. Impressively, he also revealed that he is also working on a concept that would allow his system to moor itself, and then use the undulations of its fins, thanks to the sea current, to recharge. A lot of testing is still needed, but if Filardo's system delivers on its promise, we might eventually see giant mechanical sea beasts silently gliding through the oceans.

Wildlife officials in Florida are preparing to feed manatees in the wild, an unprecedented response to the animals' mass starvation caused by the loss of seagrasses they normally eat. From a report: So far this year, 1,056 manatees have died in Florida, nearly double the average for the same period of the past five years, according to state data. While the record tally includes those killed by watercraft and other causes, malnourishment is the main reason propelling the increase, researchers say. The state's total manatee population numbered at least 5,733 in 2019, the most recent year in which officials conducted a count. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service declared an "unusual mortality event" along Florida's Atlantic coast this year -- a designation indicating a significant die-off that demands an immediate response. The problem can worsen in the winter when the animals congregate in warmer waters that have become devoid of food, researchers say.

"The status of manatees going into this winter is so poor that without this supplemental feeding to help get them through, we're going to have hundreds and hundreds of [them] dying," said Patrick Rose, executive director of the advocacy group Save the Manatee Club. Seagrasses are disappearing because of deteriorating water quality caused by improperly treated sewage, leaking septic tanks and runoff containing fertilizer used for lawns and agriculture, researchers say. It's part of a broader threat to other marine species, they say, and to Florida's economy, which relies heavily on visitors drawn to the state's coastline.

Just over a year after Japan's Hayabusa2 mission returned the first subsurface sample of an asteroid to Earth, scientists have determined that the near-Earth asteroid Ryugu is a pristine remnant from the formation of our solar system. From a report: This was the first material to be returned to Earth from a carbon-rich asteroid. These asteroids can reveal how our cosmic corner of the universe was formed. The organic and hydrated minerals locked within these asteroids could also shed light on the origin of the building blocks of life. Ryugu is a dark, diamond-shaped asteroid that measures about 3,000 feet (1 kilometer) wide. Hayabusa2 collected one sample from the asteroid's surface on February 22, 2019, then fired a copper "bullet" into the asteroid to create a 33-foot wide impact crater. A sample was collected from this crater on July 11, 2019. Then, Hayabusa2 flew by Earth and dropped the sample off in Australia last December.

The C-type, or carbonaceous, asteroid is much darker than scientists originally thought, only reflecting about 2% of the light that hits it, according to one study published Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy. After opening the sample, scientists were surprised to find that the spacecraft collected 5.4 grams from the asteroid -- much more than the single gram they were expecting, said Toru Yada, lead study author and associate senior researcher at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's Institute of Space and Astronautical Science. In the second study, also published Monday in Nature Astronomy, the researchers determined that Ryugu is made of clay and other hydrated minerals, with a number of carbonates and organics inside the sample.

Glaciers across the Himalayas are melting at an extraordinary rate, with new research showing that the vast ice sheets there shrank 10 times faster in the past 40 years than during the previous seven centuries. From a report: Avalanches, flooding and other effects of the accelerating loss of ice imperil residents in India, Nepal and Bhutan and threaten to disrupt agriculture for hundreds of millions of people across South Asia, according to the researchers. And since water from melting glaciers contributes to sea-level rise, glacial ice loss in the Himalayas also adds to the threat of inundation and related problems faced by coastal communities around the world. "This part of the world is changing faster than perhaps anybody realized," said Jonathan Carrivick, a University of Leeds glaciologist and the co-author of a paper detailing the research published Monday in the journal Scientific Reports. "It's not just that the Himalayas are changing really fast, it's that they're changing ever faster."

Scientists have long observed ice loss from large glaciers in New Zealand, Greenland, Patagonia and other parts of the world. But ice loss in the Himalayas is especially rapid, the new study found. The researchers didn't pinpoint a reason but noted that regional climate factors, such as shifts in the South Asian monsoon, may play a role. The new finding comes as there is scientific consensus that ice loss from glaciers and polar ice sheets results from rising global temperatures caused by greenhouse-gas emissions from the burning of fossil fuels. Many peer-reviewed scientific studies have identified human activity as a cause of rising global temperatures. So did a report issued in August by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which said "human influence is very likely the main driver of the global retreat of glaciers since the 1990s." For the new study, Dr. Carrivick and his colleagues scanned satellite photos of almost 15,000 glaciers in the region for signs of the large ridges of rock and debris that glaciers leave behind as they slowly grind their way through the valleys. Using the locations of these ancient glacial tracks, the scientists estimated the span of ice sheet coverage in previous centuries.

Slashdot reader Hmmmmmm quotes a report from Futurism: Researchers at the biotechnology startup Cortical Labs have created "mini-brains" consisting of 800,000 to one million living human brain cells in a petri dish, New Scientist reports.

The cells are placed on top of a microelectrode array that analyzes the neural activity... To teach the mini-brains the game, the team created a simplified version of "Pong" with no opponent. A signal is sent to either the right or left of the array to indicate where the ball is, and the neurons from the brain cells send signals back to move the paddle...

Brett Kagan, chief scientific officer at Cortical Labs and research lead of the project, said that while the mini-brains can't play the game as well as a human, they do learn faster than some AIs.

"The amazing aspect is how quickly it learns, in five minutes, in real time," he told New Scientist. "That's really an amazing thing that biology can do."

While this is certainly some amazing Twitch fodder, the team at Cortical Labs hope to use their findings to develop sophisticated technology using "live biological neurons integrated with traditional silicon computing," according to their website.
There's actually video of the brain cells playing Pong. The chief scientific officer told New Scientist that when the cells are in the game, they actually believe they are the paddle.

"We often refer to them as living in the Matrix."

"Apollo mission planners were really smart. Recognizing that future scientists will have better tools and richer scientific insights, they refrained from opening a portion of the lunar samples returned from the historic Apollo missions," writes Gizmodo.

"One of these sample containers, after sitting untouched for 50 years, is now set to be opened." The sample in question was collected by Gene Cernan in 1972. The Apollo 17 astronaut was working in the Taurus-Littrow Valley when he hammered a 28-inch-long (70 cm) tube into the surface, which he did to collect samples of lunar soil and gas. The lower half of this canister was sealed while Cernan was still on the Moon. Back on Earth, the canister was placed in yet another vacuum chamber for good measure. Known as the 73001 Apollo sample container, it remains untouched to this very day.

But the time has come to open this vessel and investigate its precious cargo, according to a European Space Agency press release. The hope is that lunar gases might be present inside, specifically hydrogen, helium, and other light gases. Analysis of these gases could further our understanding of lunar geology and shed new light on how to best store future samples, whether they be gathered on asteroids, the Moon, or Mars.

Like I said, Apollo mission planners were really clever — but they didn't exactly explain how future scientists were supposed to extract the presumed gases from the vacuum-sealed container. That task is now the responsibility of the Apollo Next Generation Sample Analysis Program (ANGSA), which manages these untouched treasures. In this case, ANGSA tasked the European Space Agency, among several other institutions, to figure out a way to safely release this trapped gas, marking the first time that ESA has been involved in the opening of samples returned from the Apollo program...

The ANGSA consortium spent the past 16 months working on the problem, and the solution, dubbed the "Apollo can opener," is now ready to rock.
Sometime in the next few weeks the gas will finally be decanted into multiple containers, and then sent to specialized labs around the world.

"As it seeks answers about the cosmos and what they mean for Earth's origins, NASA on Friday announced a slew of discoveries about Jupiter," reports the Washington Post

"And scientists brought home an interstellar tune from the road."

The Juno spacecraft is gathering data about the origin of the solar system's biggest planet — in which more than 1,300 Earths could fit. Among its recent findings are photos from inside the planet's ring, a map of its magnetic field, details of its atmosphere and a trippy soundtrack from a spacecraft's travels around one of its moons.

But it's not exactly a song, or even perceptible to the human ear.

The radio emissions Juno recorded are not what a person would hear if they went to Jupiter — space is a vacuum and does not carry soundwaves like air does on Earth. But the probe zooming through space captured the electric and magnetic emissions that scientists later converted into perceptible sound. Turns out, orbiting Ganymede, which is one of Jupiter's moons and the largest satellite in the solar system, kind of sounds like R2-D2.
Launched in 2011, became the eighth spacecraft to ever reach Jupiter in 2016, "and the first to probe below the giant planet's thick gas cover.

"It fought Jupiter's extreme temperatures and hazardous radiation to survey its north and south poles, chugging along despite a lack of sunshine on its solar panels."

"A growing body of preliminary research suggests the COVID vaccines used in most of the world offer almost no defense against becoming infected by the highly contagious omicron variant," reports the New York Times. (Emphasis added, because they stress that "All vaccines still seem to provide a significant degree of protection against serious illness from omicron, which is the most crucial goal.")

"But only the Pfizer and Moderna shots, when reinforced by a booster, appear to have initial success at stopping infections, and these vaccines are unavailable in most of the world." The other shots — including those from AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson and vaccines manufactured in China and Russia — do little to nothing to stop the spread of omicron, early research shows. And because most countries have built their inoculation programs around these vaccines, the gap could have a profound impact on the course of the pandemic. A global surge of infections in a world where billions of people remain unvaccinated not only threatens the health of vulnerable individuals but also increases the opportunity for the emergence of yet more variants.

The disparity in the ability of countries to weather the pandemic will almost certainly deepen.... Most evidence so far is based on laboratory experiments, which do not capture the full range of the body's immune response, and not from tracking the effect on real-world populations. The results are striking, however. The Pfizer and Moderna shots use the new mRNA technology, which has consistently offered the best protection against infection with every variant. All of the other vaccines are based on older methods of triggering an immune response. The Chinese vaccines Sinopharm and Sinovac — which make up almost half of all shots delivered globally — offer almost zero protection from omicron infection. The great majority of people in China have received these shots, which are also widely used in low- and middle-income countries such as Mexico and Brazil.

A preliminary effectiveness study in Britain found that the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine showed no ability to stop Omicron infection six months after vaccination. Ninety percent of vaccinated people in India received this shot, under the brand name Covishield; it has also been widely used across much of sub-Saharan Africa, where Covax, the global Covid vaccine program, has distributed 67 million doses of it to 44 countries. Researchers predict that Russia's Sputnik vaccine, which is also being used in Africa and Latin America, will show similarly dismal rates of protection against Omicron. Demand for the Johnson & Johnson vaccine had been surging in Africa, because its single-shot delivery regimen makes it easy to deliver in low-resource settings. But it too has shown a negligible ability to block Omicron infection.

Slashdot reader sciencehabit quotes Science magazine: In his 1972 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, American biochemist Christian Anfinsen laid out a vision: One day it would be possible, he said, to predict the 3D structure of any protein merely from its sequence of amino acid building blocks. With hundreds of thousands of proteins in the human body alone, such an advance would have vast applications, offering insights into basic biology and revealing promising new drug targets. Now, after nearly 50 years, researchers have shown that artificial intelligence (AI)-driven software can churn out accurate protein structures by the thousands—an advance that realizes Anfinsen's dream and is Science's 2021 Breakthrough of the Year.

Protein structures could once be determined only through painstaking lab analyses. But they can now be calculated, quickly, for tens of thousands of proteins, and for complexes of interacting proteins. "This is a sea change for structural biology," says Gaetano Montelione, a structural biologist at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. David Baker, a University of Washington, Seattle, computational biochemist who led one of the prediction projects, adds that with the bounty of readily available structures, "All areas of computational and molecular biology will be transformed."

The mosquitofish threatens native fish populations in Australia — including two of the most criticially endangered, reports the New York Times. And in various parts of the world, "For decades scientists have been trying to figure out how to control it, without damaging the surrounding ecosystem.

But in a new lab experiment, "the mosquitofish may have finally met its match: A menacing fish-shaped robot." It's "their worst nightmare," said Giovanni Polverino, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Western Australia and the lead author of a paper published Thursday in iScience, in which scientists designed a simulacrum of the fish's natural predator, the largemouth bass, to strike at the mosquitofish, scaring it away from its prey. The robot not only freaked the mosquitofish out, but scarred them with such lasting anxiety that their reproduction rates dropped; evidence that could have long term implications for the species' viability, according to the paper. "You don't need to kill them," Dr. Polverino said. Instead, he said, "we can basically inject fear into the system, and the fear kills them slowly...."

[S]cientists say there is a long way to go before the robot could be released into the wild. "It's an important proof of concept," said Peter Klimley, a marine biologist and a recently retired professor from the University of California, Davis, who was not involved in the study. But he questioned the feasibility of introducing the creature into a real-world environment.

"This study won't be a solution to the problem," Dr. Polverino said, adding that the next phase of their project would involve testing the robots in a larger, outdoor, freshwater pool. He said the robot should be thought of as a tool that can reveal a pest's weaknesses. "We've built a sort of vulnerability profile," Dr. Polverino said, that could help biologists and others to reimagine how to control invasive species. "This fear," he added, "has a collateral effect."
Their robot fish uses a built-in camera to differentiate between mosquitofish and the native tadpoles it's trying to protect.

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot for the link!