On Monday RockDoctor (Slashdot reader #15,477) wrote: Regular readers may remember recurring concerns over the instability of the island of La Palma, in the Canaries archipelago [population: 85,000]. Estimates of the threat ranged from 100 megadeaths (from tsunami impacts on the coasts of about a dozen countries bordering the Atlantic — including the eastern seaboard of America) down to a 10- to 30- metre tsunami with a few thousand deaths in the Canaries and other Atlantic islands (Madeira, Azores).

To bring relaxation and good cheer, today we have the news that the volcano at the centre of these concerns is erupting for the first time in 50 years. While a hundred or so houses have so far been destroyed and around 5000 people evacuated from the path of the lava flow, some people are more sanguine — Spain's Tourism Minister considers the eruption a "great attraction", and indeed recent eruptions in Hawaii did see a significant amount of "Volcano tourism". To be honest, I'm rather tempted myself — Etna studiously did not erupt during my last holiday there. Or should I wait for Vesuvius to go off again?
Here's an update. "Seven days after a volcano on La Palma erupted, lava flow and ash continue to spread shutting down the local airport and leaving hundreds without a home," according to one newspaper report (with several photos of the aftermath). "As of Friday, almost 6,000 people have evacuated.

"The government is working to locate emergency housing for the affected families as researchers are unsure when the ash and lava flow will stop."

Meanwhile, the Associated Press reports, "scientists said another volcanic vent opened up, exposing islanders to possible new dangers." The intensity of the eruption that began Sept. 19 has increased in recent days, prompting the evacuation of three additional villages on the island, part of Spain's Canary Islands archipelago in the Atlantic Ocean off northwest Africa...

Emergency crews pulled back from the volcano Friday as explosions sent molten rock and ash over a wide area...

AltMachine shares a report from Phys.Org: Chinese scientists recently reported a de novo route for artificial starch synthesis from carbon dioxide (CO2) for the first time. Relevant results were published in Science on Sept. 24. The new route makes it possible to produce starch, a major component of grains, by industrial manufacturing instead of traditional agricultural planting and opens up a new technical route for synthesizing complex molecules from CO2. The artificial route can produce starch from CO2 with an efficiency 8.5-fold higher than starch biosynthesis in maize, suggesting a big step towards going beyond nature. It provides a new scientific basis for creating biological systems with unprecedented functions. "If the overall cost of the process can be reduced to a level economically comparable with agricultural planting in the future, it is expected to save more than 90% of cultivated land and freshwater resources," said MA Yanhe, corresponding author of the study. In addition, it would also help to avoid the negative environmental impact of using pesticides and fertilizers, improve human food security, facilitate a carbon-neutral bioeconomy, and eventually promote the formation of a sustainable bio-based society.

schwit1 shares a report from TMZ: The 90-year-old actor is slated to be part of the second crew to take the space flight in the New Shepard capsule. That would make him the oldest person ever to be launched into space. We're told Shatner will be on board in October for the 15-minute civilian flight -- similar to the last launch. What we don't know -- BUT WHAT WOULD BE AWESOME -- is if he wears his Capt. Kirk getup. Our sources say the mission will be filmed for a documentary. We're told Shatner's people were talking to Discovery about the special, but that didn't materialize ... but our sources say Shatner and Co. have taken the project elsewhere and are in negotiations.

Engineers at the University of Cincinnati are developing new ways to convert greenhouse gases to fuel to address climate change and get astronauts home from Mars. UC: UC College of Engineering and Applied Science assistant professor Jingjie Wu and his students used a carbon catalyst in a reactor to convert carbon dioxide into methane. Known as the "Sabatier reaction" from the late French chemist Paul Sabatier, it's a process the International Space Station uses to scrub the carbon dioxide from air the astronauts breathe and generate rocket fuel to keep the station in high orbit. But Wu is thinking much bigger.

The Martian atmosphere is composed almost entirely of carbon dioxide. Astronauts could save half the fuel they need for a return trip home by making what they need on the red planet once they arrive, Wu said. "It's like a gas station on Mars. You could easily pump carbon dioxide through this reactor and produce methane for a rocket," Wu said. UC's study was published in the journal Nature Communications with collaborators from Rice University, Shanghai University and East China University of Science and Technology. Wu began his career in chemical engineering by studying fuel cells for electric vehicles but began looking at carbon dioxide conversion in his chemical engineering lab about 10 years ago.

"I realized that greenhouse gases were going to be a big issue in society," Wu said. "A lot of countries realized that carbon dioxide is a big issue for the sustainable development of our society. That's why I think we need to achieve carbon neutrality." The Biden Administration has set a goal of achieving a 50% reduction in greenhouse gas pollutants by 2030 and an economy that relies on renewable energy by 2050. "That means we'll have to recycle carbon dioxide," Wu said. Wu and his students, including lead author and UC doctoral candidate Tianyu Zhang, are experimenting with different catalysts such as graphene quantum dots -- layers of carbon just nanometers big -- that can increase the yield of methane.

Searches for Covid-19 tests on Google are surging as the delta variant spreads in the U.S. and more employers and large-scale events require testing. From a report: The number of Americans looking up "at-home Covid test near me" on the platform has doubled in the past month, according to Google Trends, while those asking how long rapid test results take is up by 250%. In the past week, users were also more interested in searches related to tests, rather than vaccines, in most states, with Louisiana and Mississippi as exceptions. The highly contagious delta variant has kept cases high in the U.S. This is creating the need for more tests as children return to school, workplaces resume activities and consumers head back to concerts and events. This appears to have taken manufacturers by surprise after months of flagging demand. The Biden administration also recently announced plans to require either vaccination or weekly testing for companies with 100 or more employees. That comes on top of the federal-worker mandate.

Thousands of scientific studies had to toss out weeks of data because of a 56-second TikTok video by a teenager. From a report: The July 23rd video is short and simple. It opens with recent Florida high school graduate and self-described "teen author" Sarah Frank sitting in her bedroom and smiling at the camera. "Welcome to side hustles I recommend trying -- part one," she says in the video, pointing users to the website Prolific.co. "Basically, it's a bunch of surveys for different amounts of money and different amounts of time." That video got 4.1 million views in the month after it was posted and sent tens of thousands of new users flooding to the Prolific platform. Prolific, a tool for scientists conducting behavioral research, had no screening tools in place to make sure that it delivered representative population samples to each study. Suddenly, scientists used to getting a wide mix of subjects for their Prolific studies saw their surveys flooded with responses from young women around Frank's age.

Though not particularly well known, Prolific is part of a small collection of online tools that have transformed the way corporations and scientists study the way people think and act. The first and largest of these research platforms is Amazon-owned Mechanical Turk, which was released in 2005 as a general-purpose platform for crowdsourcing work on repetitive tasks. Soon after it was released, behavioral scientists realized its potential value for their research, and it quickly revolutionized several research fields. [...] The Behavioral Lab at Stanford mainly uses the newer, smaller Prolific platform for online studies these days, said Nicholas Hall, director of the Behavioral Lab at the Stanford School of Business. While many Mechanical Turk customers are big businesses conducting corporate research, Prolific gears its product to scientists.

The smaller platform offers more transparency, promises to treat survey participants more ethically, and promises higher-quality research subjects than alternative platforms like Mechanical Turk. Scientists doing this sort of research in the United States generally want a pool of subjects who speak English as a first language, are not too practiced at taking psychological surveys, and together make up a reasonably representative demographic sample of the American population. Prolific, most agreed, did a good job providing high-quality subjects. The sudden change in the platform's demographics threatened to upend that reputation. In the days and weeks after Frank posted her video, researchers scrambled to figure out what was happening to their studies. A member of the Stanford Behavioral Laboratory posted on a Prolific forum, "we have noticed a huge leap in the number of participants on the platform in the US Pool, from 40k to 80k. Which is great, however, now a lot of our studies have a gender skew where maybe 85% of participants are women. Plus the age has been averaging around 21."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Engineers at Columbia University [...] figured out how to simultaneously 3D-print and cook layers of pureed chicken, according to a recent paper published in the journal npj Science of Food. [...] The scientists purchased raw chicken breast from a local convenience store and then pureed it in a food processor to get a smooth, uniform consistency. They removed any tendons and refrigerated the samples before repackaging them into 3D-printing syringe barrels to avoid clogging. The cooking apparatus used a high-powered diode laser, a set of mirror galvanometers (devices that detect electrical current by deflecting light beams), a fixture for custom 3D printing, laser shielding, and a removable tray on which to cook the 3D-printed chicken.

"During initial laser cooking, our laser diode was mounted in the 3D-printed fixture, but as the experiments progressed, we transitioned to a setup where the laser was vertically mounted to the head of the extrusion mechanism," the authors wrote. "This setup allowed us to print and cook ingredients on the same machine." They also experimented with cooking the printed chicken after sealing it in plastic packaging. The results? The laser-cooked chicken retained twice as much moisture as conventionally cooked chicken, and it shrank half as much while still retaining similar flavors. But different types of lasers produced different results. The blue laser proved ideal for cooking the chicken internally, beneath the surface, while the infrared lasers were better at surface-level browning and broiling. As for the chicken in plastic packaging, the blue laser did achieve slight browning, but the near-infrared laser was more efficient at browning the chicken through the packaging. The team was even able to brown the surface of the packaged chicken in a pattern reminiscent of grill marks.

"Millimeter-scale precision allows printing and cooking a burger that has a level of done-ness varying from rare to well-done in a lace, checkerboard, gradient, or other custom pattern," the authors wrote. "Heat from a laser can also cook and brown foods within a sealed package... [which] could significantly increase their shelf life by reducing their microbial contamination, and has great commercial applications for packaged to-go meals at the grocery store, for example." To make sure the 3D-printed chicken still appealed to the human palate, the team served samples of both 3D-printed laser cooked and conventionally cooked chicken to two taste testers. It's not a significant sample size, but both taste testers preferred the laser-cooked chicken over the conventionally cooked chicken, mostly because it was less dry and rubbery and had a more pleasing texture. One tester was even able to identify which sample was the laser-cooked chicken and did note a slight metallic taste from the laser heating.

Scientists have successfully used artificial intelligence to create a new drug regime for children with a deadly form of brain cancer that has not seen survival rates improve for more than half a century. The Guardian reports: The breakthrough, revealed in the journal Cancer Discovery, is set to usher in an "exciting" new era where AI can be harnessed to invent and develop new treatments for all types of cancer, experts say. Computer scientists and cancer specialists at the ICR and the Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust used AI to work out that combining the drug everolimus with another called vandetanib could treat diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma (DIPG), a rare and fast-growing type of brain tumor in children. Currently, DIPG and other similar types of tumors are incredibly difficult to remove surgically from children because they are diffuse, which means they do not have well-defined borders suitable for operations. But after crunching data on existing drugs, the team found everolimus could enhance vandetanib's capacity to "sneak" through the blood-brain barrier and treat the cancer.

The combination has proved effective in mice and has now been tested in children. Experts now hope to test it on a much larger group of children in major clinical trials. The research found that combining the two drugs extended survival in mice by 14% compared with those receiving a standard control treatment. Both the drugs in the research, which was funded by Brain Research UK, the DIPG Collaborative, Children with Cancer UK and the Royal Marsden Cancer Charity, among others, are already approved to treat other types of cancer. "The AI system suggested using a combination of two existing drugs to treat some children with DIPG -- one to target the ACVR1 mutation, and the other to sneak the first past the blood brain barrier," said Chris Jones, professor of paediatric brain tumor biology at the ICR. "The treatment extended survival when we tested it in a mouse model, and we have already started testing it out in a small number of children. We still need a full-scale clinical trial to assess whether the treatment can benefit children, but we've moved to this stage much more quickly than would ever have been possible without the help of AI."

Impossible Foods' latest meatless product is set to hit tables from Thursday: plant-based pork that claims to be tastier and healthier than the real deal. CNBC reports: The ground pork product will first be available in restaurants in the U.S., Hong Kong and Singapore, with further plans for retail expansion in those markets in the coming months. It marks the California-based company's third commercial launch after ground beef and chicken nuggets as it seeks to solidify its position in the growing plant-based protein space.

Speaking in a first-on interview ahead of the launch, Impossible Foods' president Dennis Woodside told CNBC's "Squawk Box Asia" that the pork alternative could beat the real deal in both taste and nutritional value. "Pig typically isn't regarded as a healthy product, but here you have a substitute that tastes just as good but is actually better for you," he said. According to the company, the product -- which is made primarily from soy -- provides the same amount of protein as its traditional meat counterpart, but with no cholesterol, one-third less saturated fat, and far fewer calories. Meantime, in a recent blind taste test conducted by Impossible Foods, it found that the majority (54%) of Hong Kong consumers said they preferred the meatless pork product.

A key Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advisory group unanimously voted Thursday to recommend distributing Pfizer and BioNTech's Covid-19 booster shots to older Americans and nursing home residents, clearing the way for the agency to give the final OK as early as this evening. CNBC reports: The agency's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices specifically endorsed giving third Pfizer shots to people 65 and older in the first of four votes. The panel will also vote on whether to recommend the shots for adults with medical conditions that put them at risk of severe disease and those who are more frequently exposed to the virus -- possibly including people in nursing homes and prisons, teachers, front-line health employees and other essential workers. The elderly were among the first groups to get the initial shots in December and January.

The vote is seen as mostly a win for President Joe Biden, whose administration has said it wants to give booster shots to all eligible Americans 16 and older as early as this week. While the CDC panel's recommendation doesn't give the Biden administration everything it wanted, boosters will still be on the way for millions of Americans. The endorsement comes a day after the Food and Drug Administration granted emergency use authorization to administer third Pfizer shots to many Americans six months after they complete their first two doses. While the CDC's panel's recommendation isn't binding, Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky is expected to accept the panel's endorsement shortly.

ytene writes: As reported by CNBC, the US Court of Federal Claims has released a redacted version of the lawsuit, filed by Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin, in a complaint against NASA. Earlier this year, the agency had awarded a $2.9 billion contract to SpaceX for the design and development of a lunar lander.

Although NASA has a long history of awarding contracts to promote innovation and competition, the Blue Origin suit seemed a little unusual given the company's current lack of launch experience (they have completed numerous successful tests, including a high-altitude "edge of space" flight for Bezos, his brother and guests, but have yet to place any vehicle in orbit, let alone establish a credible, commercial space flight presence).

As was also reported by CNBC, the Government Accountability Office conducted an investigation in to the initial Blue Origin complaint, after NASA suspended the process, but found no evidence that NASA awarded the contract incorrectly and denied the initial Blue Origin complaint.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: Mammals from mice to monkeys have tails. But humans and our cousins the great apes lack them. Now, researchers may have unearthed a simple genetic change that led to our abbreviated back end: an itinerant piece of DNA -- in a gene known as TBTX -- that leapt into a new chromosomal home and changed how great apes make a key developmental protein. The finding also suggests the genetic shift came with a less visible and more dangerous effect: a higher risk of birth defects involving the developing spinal cord.

Mice carrying both copies of the shortened gene didn't survive, but those with one long and one short version were born with a variety of tail lengths -- from none at all to nearly normal. That suggests the shorter version of the gene interferes with tail development. Because the genetically altered mice had a mix of tail lengths, other genes must be working together to eliminate all tail development in apes and humans, but the ape-specific change "was likely a critical event" about 25 million years ago as great apes diverged from other simians.

The genetically modified mice also had unusually high levels of neural tube problems, defects in the developing spinal cord. Such birth defects, which produce spina bifida, where the spinal cord doesn't close, and anencephaly, where parts of the brain and skull are missing, are fairly common in humans, affecting as many as one in 1,000 newborns. "We apparently paid a cost for the loss of the tail, and we still feel the echoes," says one author. "We must have had a clear benefit for losing the tail, whether it was improved locomotion or something else." The researchers reported their findings in a preprint posted last week on bioRxiv.

After weeks of internal strife at the Food and Drug Administration, the agency on Wednesday authorized people over 65 who had received Pfizer-BioNTech's coronavirus vaccine to get a booster shot at least six months after their second injection. The New York Times reports: The F.D.A. also authorized booster shots for adult Pfizer-BioNTech recipients who are at high risk of becoming severely ill with Covid-19 or are at risk of serious complications from the disease due to frequent exposure to the coronavirus at their jobs. The authorization sets up what is likely to be a staggered campaign to deliver the shots, starting with the most vulnerable Americans. It opens the way for possibly tens of millions of vaccinated people to receive boosters at pharmacies, health clinics, doctors' offices and elsewhere. Roughly 22 million Americans are at least six months past their second dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. About half of them are 65 and older. Millions of Americans who received the Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccines are still waiting to learn whether they, too, can get boosters.

The F.D.A.'s decision will be followed as soon as Thursday by a recommendation from the C.D.C., which issues guidance on vaccine policy for clinicians and public health officials throughout the United States. An advisory committee of the C.D.C. is now in the midst of a two-day meeting on the issue. But even if the C.D.C. takes a different stance, health care providers are now authorized to offer third shots to Pfizer-BioNTech recipients who meet the F.D.A.'s eligibility criteria. The ruling followed weeks of internal disagreement at the F.D.A., where some vaccine regulators openly challenged the idea of offering booster shots to the general population. Public health experts and state officials have criticized what they said were confusing public messages from the Biden administration about who should be eligible for a booster shot and when.

Jeff Bezos on Monday pledged to give away $1 billion in grants this year with a focus on conservation efforts. "Nature is our life support system and it's fragile," Bezos said Monday at an event in New York City. "I was reminded of this just this July when I went into space with Blue Origin. I'd heard that seeing the Earth from space changes one's point of view of the world, but I was not prepared for just how much that would be true." CNBC reports: The pledge comes through the Bezos Earth Fund, which the Amazon founder and chairman started in 2020 to execute his $10 billion commitment to fight climate change. The Bezos Earth Fund has pledged to donate about $1 billion a year to activists, scientists and other groups working to address the globe's climate crisis, with a goal of spending $10 billion by 2030. Following this year's focus on conservation, the fund said that in the coming years it intends to support efforts around landscape restoration and food system transportation.

The latest round of grants will be used to "create, expand, manage and monitor protected and conserved areas," the Bezos Earth Fund said in a release. To start, the fund plans to focus on Central Africa's Congo Basin, the tropical Andes region and the tropical Pacific Ocean, all of which are key areas for biodiversity and carbon stocks, or the amount of carbon stored in things such as vegetation, soils and oceans. "The natural world is not better today than it was 500 years ago, when we enjoyed unspoiled forests, clean rivers and the pristine air of the pre-industrial age," Bezos said in a statement. "We can and must reverse this anomaly." It is not yet known which organizations will receive the grants. The gifts will be prioritized in areas where local communities and Indigenous peoples are a main focus of conservation programs, among other considerations, the Bezos Earth Fund said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: A relatively new type of computing that mimics the way the human brain works was already transforming how scientists could tackle some of the most difficult information processing problems. Now, researchers have found a way to make what is called reservoir computing work between 33 and a million times faster, with significantly fewer computing resources and less data input needed. In fact, in one test of this next-generation reservoir computing, researchers solved a complex computing problem in less than a second on a desktop computer. Using the now current state-of-the-art technology, the same problem requires a supercomputer to solve and still takes much longer, said Daniel Gauthier, lead author of the study and professor of physics at The Ohio State University. The study was published today in the journal Nature Communications.

Reservoir computing is a machine learning algorithm developed in the early 2000s and used to solve the "hardest of the hard" computing problems, such as forecasting the evolution of dynamical systems that change over time, Gauthier said. Previous research has shown that reservoir computing is well-suited for learning dynamical systems and can provide accurate forecasts about how they will behave in the future, Gauthier said. It does that through the use of an artificial neural network, somewhat like a human brain. Scientists feed data on a dynamical network into a "reservoir" of randomly connected artificial neurons in a network. The network produces useful output that the scientists can interpret and feed back into the network, building a more and more accurate forecast of how the system will evolve in the future. The larger and more complex the system and the more accurate that the scientists want the forecast to be, the bigger the network of artificial neurons has to be and the more computing resources and time that are needed to complete the task.

In this study, Gauthier and his colleagues [...] found that the whole reservoir computing system could be greatly simplified, dramatically reducing the need for computing resources and saving significant time. They tested their concept on a forecasting task involving a weather system developed by Edward Lorenz, whose work led to our understanding of the butterfly effect. Their next-generation reservoir computing was a clear winner over today's state-of-the-art on this Lorenz forecasting task. In one relatively simple simulation done on a desktop computer, the new system was 33 to 163 times faster than the current model. But when the aim was for great accuracy in the forecast, the next-generation reservoir computing was about 1 million times faster. And the new-generation computing achieved the same accuracy with the equivalent of just 28 neurons, compared to the 4,000 needed by the current-generation model, Gauthier said. An important reason for the speed-up is that the "brain" behind this next generation of reservoir computing needs a lot less warmup and training compared to the current generation to produce the same results. Warmup is training data that needs to be added as input into the reservoir computer to prepare it for its actual task.

FallOutBoyTonto shares a report from Ars Technica: A US intelligence officer traveling in India earlier this month with CIA director William Burns reported experiencing a mysterious health incident and symptoms consistent with so-called Havana syndrome, according to a report by CNN. The officer received immediate medical care upon returning to the US. The case raises fears that such incidents are not only increasing, but potentially escalating, unnamed officials told CNN and The New York Times. The new incident within Burns' own team reportedly left the CIA chief "fuming" with anger.

The director's schedule is tightly guarded, and officials do not know if the affected intelligence officer was targeted because the officer was traveling with the director. If the health incident was an attack carried out by an adversarial intelligence agency -- as feared -- it's unclear how the adversarial agency learned of the trip and was able to prepare an attack. It's also possible, however, that the officer was targeted for other reasons and without knowledge that the officer was traveling with the director. The report notes that this incident is the second high-profile case in less than a month. "On August 24, another so-called 'anomalous health incident' affecting US embassy staff in Hanoi, Vietnam, came to light," reports Ars Technica. "It is still unclear how many staff members were affected in that incident, but NBC News reported that two US personnel were medevaced out of the country."

Apple is working on ways to help detect and diagnose conditions such as depression, anxiety and cognitive decline using an iPhone, WSJ is reporting. Techcrunch: Researchers hope that analysis of data such as mobility, sleep patterns and how people type could spot behaviors associated with those conditions, according to The Wall Street Journal. ther measurements could include facial expression analysis and heart and respiration rates. All of the processing would take place on the device, with no data sent to Apple servers. The company is working on research projects that could lead to the development of these features. The University of California, Los Angeles, is studying stress, anxiety and depression, with Apple Watch and iPhone data for 3,000 volunteers being tracked in a study that starts this year. A pilot phase that began in 2020 recorded data from 150 participants.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration plans to retire the International Space Station by the end of this decade, so the U.S. space agency is turning to private companies to build new space stations in orbit -- and expects to save more than $1 billion annually as a result. CNBC reports: NASA earlier this year unveiled the Commercial LEO Destinations project, with plans to award up to $400 million in total contracts to as many as four companies to begin development on private space stations. In response to NASA's request, director of commercial spaceflight Phil McAlister told CNBC that the agency "received roughly about a dozen proposals" from a variety of companies for contracts under the project. "We got an incredibly strong response from industry to our announcement for proposals for commercial, free fliers that go directly to orbit," McAlister said. "I can't remember the last time we got that many proposals [in response] to a [human spaceflight] contract announcement."

The ISS is more than 20 years old and costs NASA about $4 billion a year to operate. The space station is approved to operate through the end of 2024, with a likely lifespan extension to the end of 2028. But, moving forward, McAlister says that NASA wants "to be just one of many users instead of the primary sponsor and infrastructure supporter" for stations in low Earth orbit. "This strong industry response shows that our plan to retire the International Space Station in the latter part of this decade and transition to commercial space destinations is a viable, strong plan," McAlister said. "We are making tangible progress on developing commercial space destinations where people can work, play, and live," McAlister added. NASA is now evaluating the proposals, and McAlister said the agency hopes to announce the contract winners "before the end of the year," although he is "pushing for earlier." NASA "will not need anything near as big and as capable" as the ISS moving forward, said McAlister. He said the private space stations "could be very large, but NASA will only be paying for the part that we need."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Small doses of Pfizer's COVID-19 mRNA vaccine in children ages 5 to 11 appeared to produce strong antibody responses and comparable side effects to those seen in older age groups, according to the first top-line results from a Phase 2/3 clinical trial released by Pfizer and its partner BioNTech early Monday. The trial data involved 2,268 children ages 5 to 11 years, and these children were given a series of two 10-microgram doses of the vaccine, 21 days apart. The dosage is just a third of the 30-microgram doses given to people ages 12 and above. One month after the second dose, researchers measured the children's levels of antibodies able to neutralize the SARS-CoV-2 virus in a lab experiment. The geometric mean titer of antibody in the 5 to 11 year olds was 1,197.6 (95 percent confidence interval of 1,106.1 to 1,296.6), which is comparable to the geometric mean titer of 1,146.5 seen in people ages 16 to 25. Pfizer described the vaccine as being well tolerated in children, with side effects generally comparable to what's seen in people ages 16 to 25. But the company did not provide further data on the side effects. It also did not provide any further data on vaccine efficacy, though experts expect that comparable neutralizing antibody levels will provide comparable levels of protection against infection, hospitalization, and death. The company said it plans to submit the data to the FDA as soon as possible. It also aims to submit the data for emergency use authorization to the FDA by the end of the month. "Once data is submitted to the FDA, it will take regulators several weeks to review the data and make a decision," the report adds. "That places the earliest estimates for vaccine authorization and availability for the 5-to-11 group at the end of October."

The U.S. death toll from COVID-19 has surpassed that of the 1918 flu pandemic, according to a tracker from Johns Hopkins University. The Hill reports: The U.S. has passed 675,000 deaths, the estimated toll from the 1918 pandemic, which for a century had been the worst pandemic to hit the country. "The number of reported deaths from Covid in the US will surpass the toll of the 1918 flu pandemic this month," Tom Frieden, the former head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, tweeted earlier this month. "We cannot become hardened to the continuing, and largely preventable, tragedy."

Deaths from COVID-19 are also far from over. The U.S. is averaging about 2,000 more deaths from the virus every day, according to a New York Times tracker. Those deaths are overwhelmingly among the unvaccinated, though, highlighting that the continuing toll of COVID-19 is now largely preventable now that vaccines are widely available in the U.S. In 1918, there was no vaccine to help stop the flu pandemic. Still, the U.S. population was far smaller a century ago, meaning that the death rate from the 1918 pandemic is still higher than for COVID-19. E. Thomas Ewing, a Virginia Tech history professor, wrote in Health Affairs earlier this year that the death rate from the 1918 pandemic was about six in every 1,000 people, given the U.S. population at the time of around 100 million. The death rate from COVID-19 in the U.S. is about two in every 1,000 people. A disproportionate share of COVID-19 deaths are also in the United States. Worldwide, the 1918 flu killed far more people than COVID-19 has so far, at about 50 million compared to about 5 million.