Millions of people with eye conditions including age-related macular degeneration, cataracts and diabetes-related eye disease have an increased risk of developing dementia, new research shows. From a report: Vision impairment can be one of the first signs of the disease, which is predicted to affect more than 130 million people worldwide by 2050. Previous research has suggested there could be a link between eye conditions that cause vision impairment, and cognitive impairment. However, the incidence of these conditions increases with age, as do systemic conditions such as diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, depression and stroke, which are all accepted risk factors for dementia. That meant it was unclear whether eye conditions were linked with a higher incidence of dementia independently of systemic conditions.

Now researchers have found that age-related macular degeneration, cataracts and diabetes-related eye disease are independently associated with increased risk of dementia, according to a new study published in the British Journal of Ophthalmology. The research examined data from 12,364 British adults aged 55 to 73, who were taking part in the UK Biobank study. They were assessed in 2006 and again in 2010 with their health information tracked until early 2021.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Researchers in Germany recently demonstrated that cattle can be toilet trained to reduce some of their climate impact. By having the young cows pee in latrines made of turf, the team of experts in animal behavior and agricultural science stopped the natural production of nitrous oxide from the cow's urine. Cows are notorious for their contributions to greenhouse gas emissions in large-scale farming; the animals belch (and to a lesser extent, fart) methane, and their urine and poop combine to produce ammonia, which isn't a greenhouse gas itself but is converted into nitrous oxide by microbes in the soil. The team trained nearly a dozen calves to urinate in a makeshift latrine, nicknamed the MooLoo, thereby stopping the urine from becoming part of the problem. The research was published on Monday in Current Biology.

Training the cows was a fairly simple process on paper. First, the scientists penned 16 of the animals into the latrine area. When the cows urinated, they were given food or sugar water, tacit endorsements of their decisions. The next step was teaching them not to pee in the pasture, which the team did by implementing an unpleasant stimulus whenever they did so. That stimulus was originally a loud noise, but when the researchers realized the animals didn't mind it much, they swapped it out for spraying the cows with water, a relatively harmless message of "bad cow." The team found that the cows' ability to hold it and go in the latrine was equivalent to a child's ability with the toilet -- even superior to that of young children. [The team] hopes to bring the latrines to other sites and increase the number of potty-trained cows. "To do this, we must first automate the whole training procedure and adapt it to the conditions on the farm," he told Gizmodo in an email. "We want to tackle this in a follow-up project." The report notes there are a couple of limitations with this effort. "First, not all of the cows could be potty-trained. Only 10 of the 16 calves quickly learned to pee in the proper place and could routinely reproduce that action," reports Gizmodo. "That's trouble for anyone trying to scale up the practice (there are more than 1 billion cows on Earth). Second, the experiment didn't cover defecation, and cow poop also contains ammonia. There's also still the major problem of methane, a greenhouse gas 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide, tied to cows burps and farts."

Researchers from MIT have developed a new way to grow tiny replicas of the pancreas, using either healthy or cancerous pancreatic cells. They believe that their "specialized gel" could also be useful for studying lung, colorectal, and other cancers, including how potential cancer drugs affect tumors and their environment. The findings have been published in the journal Nature Materials. MIT reports: Using a specialized gel that mimics the extracellular environment surrounding the pancreas, the researchers were able to grow pancreatic "organoids," allowing them to study the important interactions between pancreatic tumors and their environment. Unlike some of the gels now used to grow tissue, the new MIT gel is completely synthetic, easy to assemble and can be produced with a consistent composition every time. The researchers have also shown that their new gel can be used to grow other types of tissue, including intestinal and endometrial tissue. [...] About 10 years ago, [Linda Griffith, the School of Engineering Professor of Teaching Innovation and a professor of biological engineering and mechanical engineering, and her lab] started to work on designing a synthetic gel that could be used to grow epithelial cells, which form the sheets that line most organs, along with other supportive cells.

The gel they developed is based on polyethylene glycol (PEG), a polymer that is often used for medical applications because it doesn't interact with living cells. By studying the biochemical and biophysical properties of the extracellular matrix, which surrounds organs in the body, the researchers were able to identify features they could incorporate into the PEG gel to help cells grow in it. One key feature is the presence of molecules called peptide ligands, which interact with cell surface proteins called integrins. The sticky binding between ligands and integrins allows cells to adhere to the gel and form organoids. The researchers found that incorporating small synthetic peptides derived from fibronectin and collagen in their gels allowed them to grow a variety of epithelial tissues, including intestinal tissue. They showed that supportive cells called stromal cells, along with immune cells, can also thrive in this environment.

In the new study, Griffith and [Claus Jorgensen, a group leader at the Cancer Research UK Manchester Institute] wanted to see if the gel could also be used to support the growth of normal pancreatic organoids and pancreatic tumors. Traditionally, it has been difficult to grow pancreatic tissue in a manner that replicates both the cancerous cells and the supporting environment, because once pancreatic tumor cells are removed from the body, they lose their distinctive cancerous traits. Griffith's lab developed a protocol to produce the new gel, and then teamed up with Jorgensen's lab, which studies the biology of pancreatic cancer, to test it. Jorgensen and his students were able to produce the gel and use it to grow pancreatic organoids, using healthy or cancerous pancreatic cells derived from mice. "We got the protocol from Linda and we got the reagents in, and then it just worked," Jorgensen says. "I think that speaks volumes of how robust the system is and how easy it is to implement in the lab."

Ten thousand years after woolly mammoths vanished from the face of the Earth, scientists are embarking on an ambitious project to bring the beasts back to the Arctic tundra. From a report: The prospect of recreating mammoths and returning them to the wild has been discussed -- seriously at times -- for more than a decade, but on Monday researchers announced fresh funding they believe could make their dream a reality. The boost comes in the form of $15m raised by the bioscience and genetics company Colossal, co-founded by Ben Lamm, a tech and software entrepreneur, and George Church, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School who has pioneered new approaches to gene editing.

The scientists have set their initial sights on creating an elephant-mammoth hybrid by making embryos in the laboratory that carry mammoth DNA. The starting point for the project involves taking skin cells from Asian elephants, which are threatened with extinction, and reprogramming them into more versatile stem cells that carry mammoth DNA. The particular genes that are responsible for mammoth hair, insulating fat layers and other cold climate adaptions are identified by comparing mammoth genomes extracted from animals recovered from the permafrost with those from the related Asian elephants. These embryos would then be carried to term in a surrogate mother or potentially in an artificial womb. If all goes to plan -- and the hurdles are far from trivial -- the researchers hope to have their first set of calves in six years.

NASA's Mars rover Perseverance collected its second rock sample this week — and Friday Caltech's Ken Farley, a project scientist for the mission, announced that they've learned something.

"It's a big deal that the water was there a long time." The Perseverance science team already knew a lake once filled the crater; for how long has been more uncertain. The scientists couldn't dismiss the possibility that Jezero's lake was a "flash in the pan": floodwaters could have rapidly filled the impact crater and dried up in the space of 50 years, for example. But the level of alteration that scientists see in the rock that provided the core samples — as well as in the rock the team targeted on their first sample-acquisition attempt — suggests that groundwater was present for a long time.

This groundwater could have been related to the lake that was once in Jezero, or it could have traveled through the rocks long after the lake had dried up. Though scientists still can't say whether any of the water that altered these rocks was present for tens of thousands or for millions of years, they feel more certain that it was there for long enough to make the area more welcoming to microscopic life in the past.
And they discovered something interesting in the rock samples: salts. These salts may have formed when groundwater flowed through and altered the original minerals in the rock, or more likely when liquid water evaporated, leaving the salts. The salt minerals in these first two rock cores may also have trapped tiny bubbles of ancient Martian water. If present, they could serve as microscopic time capsules, offering clues about the ancient climate and habitability of Mars.

Salt minerals are also well-known on Earth for their ability to preserve signs of ancient life.

Tonight 71-year-old Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak tweeted ten words: "A Private space company is starting up, unlike the others."

The tweet also included the URL for a new video just uploaded tonight to YouTube about a company called Privateer.

"Together we'll go far," says the narrator, later offering these thoughts on the people of our planet. "We are explorers. We are dreamers, risk-takers, engineers, and star gazers. We are human. And it's up to us to work together to do what is right and what is good."

The video's tagline? "The sky is no longer the limit.

The same tagline appears at Privateer.com, followed by two short sentences. "We are in stealth mode. We'll see you at AMOS in September 2021 in Maui, Hawaii." (With AMOS apparently, being the Advanced Maui Optical and Space Surveillance Technologies Conference running from this Tuesday through Friday.)

There's very little information about the company — although last month a 3D printing site reported Wozniak's company appeared to be using a printer for high-strength titanium — and suggested the company might have something to do with cleaning up space junk.

The New York Times reports: Scientists at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and the University of Maryland are working to determine whether three uranium cubes they have in their possession were produced by Germany's failed nuclear program during World War II. The answer could lead to more questions, such as whether the Nazis might have had enough uranium to create a critical reaction. And if the Nazis had been successful in building an atomic bomb, what would that have meant for the war...?

The Nazis produced 1,000 to 1,200 cubes, about half of which were confiscated by the Allied forces, said Jon Schwantes, the project's principal investigator. "The whereabouts of most all of those cubes is unknown today," Schwantes said, adding that "most likely those cubes were folded into our weapons stockpile."
Two history professors speculate in the article that the technology ultimately would not have changed outcome of the war. Kate Brown, who teaches environmental and Cold War history at MIT, argues that without planes that could fly long distances without being spotted, "the only target I can think of would be London." Brown said that while a Nazi bomb would not have had much of an impact on the war, the Nazis set the stage for the Cold War simply by trying to build one. The Soviets, who were then U.S. allies in defeating Germany, were aware that the Americans took this uranium out of the country "right out from under them," she said. "That becomes a real engine for suspicion that sets up the Cold War, almost immediately," Brown said.
The project's principle investigator tells the Times they're planning to use a process called radiochronometry to date the cubes by measuring how much their uranium has decayed.

"We do believe they are from Nazi Germany's nuclear program, but to have scientific evidence of that is really what we're attempting to do."

LiveScience reports that physicists sifting through old particle accelerator data "have found evidence of a highly-elusive, never-before-seen process: a so-called triangle singularity."

Long-time Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot shares their report: First envisioned by Russian physicist Lev Landau in the 1950s, a triangle singularity refers to a rare subatomic process where particles exchange identities before flying away from each other. In this scenario, two particles — called kaons — form two corners of the triangle, while the particles they swap form the third point on the triangle.

"The particles involved exchanged quarks and changed their identities in the process," study co-author Bernhard Ketzer, of the Helmholtz Institute for Radiation and Nuclear Physics at the University of Bonn, said in a statement.

It's called a singularity because the mathematical methods for describing subatomic particle interactions break down.

If this singularly weird particle identity-swap really happened, it could help physicists understand the strong force, which binds the nucleus together.

Research shows there is a 'sweet spot' and subjective wellbeing drops off after about five hours. The Guardian: The lesson of Goldilocks, that one can have too much of a good thing, even when it comes to the size of a chair, has applied in fields from astrobiology to economics. Now, it seems it may even govern our free time. Researchers have found that while levels of subjective wellbeing initially rise as free time increases, the trend does not necessarily hold for very high levels of leisure. "The sweet spot is a moderate amount of free time," said Dr Marissa Sharif, a co-author of the study from the University of Pennsylvania. "We found that having too much time was associated with lower subjective wellbeing due to a lacking sense of productivity and purpose."

Writing in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Sharif and colleagues reported how they analysed results from two large-scale surveys, involving a combined total of more than 35,000 participants. One was the American Time Use Survey, which was carried out between 2012 and 2013 and asked participants what they had done in the past 24 hours. After crowdsourcing opinions on which activities would be equated with leisure time and then calculating this time for participants, the team found that while subjective wellbeing rose with the amount of free time up to about two hours, it began to drop once it exceeded five hours. Meanwhile data from the National Study of the Changing Workforce, carried out between 1992 and 2008, revealed that beyond a certain point, having more free time was no longer linked to greater subjective wellbeing, but it did not dip -- possibly because few of the participants reported having more than five hours of free time a day.

A crop of companies want to make sperm-freezing a routine procedure for young men, as employers start to offer it as a benefit. From a report: For decades, the conversation about waning fertility has been focused largely on women. Think of Marisa Tomei stomping on the floorboards of a front porch to emulate her biological clock ticking in "My Cousin Vinny." More employers cover the cost of cryogenic egg freezing as a workplace benefit. Recently, a small group of biotech startups have hatched, dedicated to what they say is an underserved market: male fertility. Armed with recent scientific research suggesting that the quality of sperm is declining in the West, the companies are trying to make sperm-freezing a routine procedure for young, healthy men, one covered by health insurance and free of stigma.

"My fundamental belief is that if the product is affordable, this should be a no-brainer for every man," says Khaled Kteily, the 32-year-old founder of Legacy, one of the companies that Mr. Alam used to freeze his sperm. "I believe that in the future," he adds, "this will be something that parents will buy for their kids as a not-so-subtle gift." The push to make a case for its business is starting to catch on. The company recently struck a deal to eventually provide free sperm testing and storage to all active duty service members in the U.S. military, starting with the Navy SEALs, of which there are about 1,200 a year, and expanding next to all special operations forces. The Navy didn't respond to a request for comment. Soldiers regularly experience risky situations and time away from their partners, says Ellen Gustafson, a Navy wife and co-founder of the Military Family Coalition, a nonprofit that advocates for coverage of fertility medicine for members of the armed forces.

Here's a sentence that's basically unintelligible to most people: Humans must mitigate global warming by pursuing an unprecedented transition to a carbon neutral economy. A recent study found that some of the most common terms in climate science are confusing to the general public. From a report: The study tested words that are frequently used in international climate reports, and it concluded that the most confusing terms were "mitigation," "carbon neutral" and "unprecedented transition." "I think the main message is to avoid jargon," says Wandi Bruine de Bruin, a behavioral scientist at the University of Southern California and the lead author of the study. "That includes words that may seem like everyone should understand them."

For example, participants in the study mixed up the word "mitigation," which commonly refers to efforts that reduce greenhouse gas emissions, with the word "mediation," which is a way to resolve disputes. And even simple terms such as "carbon" can be misleading, the study found. Sometimes, carbon is shorthand for carbon dioxide. Other times, it's used to refer to multiple greenhouse gases. "As experts in a particular field, we may not realize which of the words that we're using are jargon," says Bruine de Bruin.

The study is the latest indication that scientists need to do a better job communicating about global warming, especially when the intended audience is the general public. Clear climate communication gets more important every day because climate change is affecting every part of life on Earth. Nurses, doctors, farmers, teachers, engineers and business executives need reliable, accessible information about how global warming is affecting their patients, crops, students, buildings and businesses. And extreme weather this summer -- from floods to fires, hurricanes to droughts -- underscores the urgency of clear climate communication.

NIST: Using a groundbreaking new technique at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), an international collaboration led by NIST researchers has revealed previously unrecognized properties of technologically crucial silicon crystals and uncovered new information about an important subatomic particle and a long-theorized fifth force of nature. By aiming subatomic particles known as neutrons at silicon crystals and monitoring the outcome with exquisite sensitivity, the NIST scientists were able to obtain three extraordinary results: the first measurement of a key neutron property in 20 years using a unique method; the highest-precision measurements of the effects of heat-related vibrations in a silicon crystal; and limits on the strength of a possible "fifth force" beyond standard physics theories.

In a regular crystal such as silicon, there are many parallel sheets of atoms, each of which forms a plane. Probing different planes with neutrons reveals different aspects of the crystal. The researchers report their findings in the journal Science. To obtain information about crystalline materials at the atomic scale, scientists typically aim a beam of particles (such as X-rays, electrons or neutrons) at the crystal and detect the beam's angles, intensities and patterns as it passes through or ricochets off planes in the crystal's lattice-like atomic geometry. That information is critically important for characterizing the electronic, mechanical and magnetic properties of microchip components and various novel nanomaterials for next-generation applications including quantum computing. A great deal is known already, but continued progress requires increasingly detailed knowledge.

fahrbot-bot shares a report from Live Science: Astronomers have detected a strange, repeating radio signal near the center of the Milky Way, and it's unlike any other energy signature ever studied. According to a new paper accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal and posted on the preprint server arXiv, the energy source is extremely finicky, appearing bright in the radio spectrum for weeks at a time and then completely vanishing within a day. This behavior doesn't quite fit the profile of any known type of celestial body, the researchers wrote in their study, and thus may represent "a new class of objects being discovered through radio imaging."

The radio source -- known as ASKAP J173608.2321635 -- was detected with the Australian Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) radio telescope, situated in the remote Australian outback. In an ASKAP survey taken between April 2019 and August 2020, the strange signal appeared 13 times, never lasting in the sky for more than a few weeks, the researchers wrote. This radio source is highly variable, appearing and disappearing with no predictable schedule, and doesn't seem to appear in any other radio telescope data prior to the ASKAP survey.

When the researchers tried to match the energy source with observations from other telescopes -- including the Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, as well as the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy in Chile, which can pick up near-infrared wavelengths -- the signal disappeared entirely. With no apparent emissions in any other part of the electromagnetic spectrum, ASKAP J173608.2-321635 is a radio ghost that seems to defy explanation. Prior surveys have detected low-mass stars that periodically flare up with radio energy, but those flaring stars typically have X-ray counterparts, the researchers wrote. That makes a stellar source unlikely here. Dead stars, like pulsars and magnetars (two types of ultradense, collapsed stars), are also unlikely explanations, the team wrote. The report goes on to say that the closest match is a mysterious class of object known as a galactic center radio transient (GCRT), a rapidly glowing radio source that brightens and decays near the Milky Way's center, usually over the course of a few hours. "So far, only three GCRTs have been confirmed, and all of them appear and disappear much more quickly than this new ASKAP object does," reports Live Science. "However, the few known GCRTs do shine with a similar brightness as the mysterious signal, and their radio flare-ups are never accompanied by X-rays."

David Chandler writes via MIT News: It was a moment three years in the making, based on intensive research and design work: On Sept. 5, for the first time, a large high-temperature superconducting electromagnet was ramped up to a field strength of 20 tesla, the most powerful magnetic field of its kind ever created on Earth. That successful demonstration helps resolve the greatest uncertainty in the quest to build the world's first fusion power plant that can produce more power than it consumes, according to the project's leaders at MIT and startup company Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS). That advance paves the way, they say, for the long-sought creation of practical, inexpensive, carbon-free power plants that could make a major contribution to limiting the effects of global climate change.

Developing the new magnet is seen as the greatest technological hurdle to making that happen; its successful operation now opens the door to demonstrating fusion in a lab on Earth, which has been pursued for decades with limited progress. With the magnet technology now successfully demonstrated, the MIT-CFS collaboration is on track to build the world's first fusion device that can create and confine a plasma that produces more energy than it consumes. That demonstration device, called SPARC, is targeted for completion in 2025.

The Covid-19 pandemic has severely set back the fight against other global scourges like H.I.V., tuberculosis and malaria, according to a sobering new report released on Tuesday. From a report: Before the pandemic, the world had been making strides against these illnesses. Overall, deaths from those diseases have dropped by about half since 2004. "The advent of a fourth pandemic, in Covid, puts these hard-fought gains in great jeopardy," said Mitchell Warren, executive director of AVAC, a nonprofit organization promoting H.I.V. treatment worldwide. The pandemic has flooded hospitals and disrupted supply chains for tests and treatments. In many poor countries, the coronavirus crisis diverted limited public health resources away from treatment and prevention of these diseases. Many fewer people sought diagnosis or medication, because they were afraid of becoming infected with the coronavirus at clinics. And some patients were denied care because their symptoms, such as a cough or a fever, resembled those of Covid-19.

Unless comprehensive efforts to beat back the illnesses resume, "we'll continue to play emergency response and global health Whac-a-Mole," Mr. Warren said. The report was compiled by the Global Fund, an advocacy group that funds campaigns against H.I.V., malaria and tuberculosis. Before the arrival of the coronavirus, TB was the biggest infectious-disease killer worldwide, claiming more than one million lives each year. The pandemic has exacerbated the damage. In 2020, about one million fewer people were tested and treated for TB, compared with 2019 -- a drop of about 18 percent, according to the new report. The number of people treated for drug-resistant TB declined by 19 percent, and for extensively drug-resistant TB by 37 percent. Nearly 500,000 people were diagnosed with drug-resistant TB in 2019.

NASA's long-awaited and high-powered James Webb Space Telescope won't begin observations this year after NASA and its counterpart the European Space Agency (ESA) announced another launch delay. From a report: In coordinated statements, the two agencies announced that the observatory is now targeting a launch on Dec. 18, more than six weeks after its previously set liftoff date. The highly-anticipated project has racked up consistently escalating budget and schedule overruns since development began in the 1990s. "We now know the day that thousands of people have been working towards for many years, and that millions around the world are looking forward to," Gunther Hasinger, ESA's director of science, said in an agency statement. "Webb and its Ariane 5 launch vehicle are ready, thanks to the excellent work across all mission partners. We are looking forward to seeing the final preparations for launch at Europe's Spaceport."

A robot called CIMON-2 (short for Crew Interactive Mobile Companion) has received a software update that will enable it to perform more complex tasks with a new human crewmate later this year. Space.com reports: The cute floating sphere with a cartoon-like face has been stored at the space station since the departure of the European Space Agency's (ESA) astronaut Luca Parmitano in February 2020. The robot will wake up again during the upcoming mission of German astronaut Matthias Maurer, who will arrive at the orbital outpost with the SpaceX Crew-3 Dragon mission in October. In the year and a half since the end of the last mission, engineers have worked on improving CIMON's connection to Earth so that it could provide a more seamless service to the astronauts, CIMON project manager Till Eisenberg at Airbus, which developed the intelligent robot together with the German Aerospace Centre DLR and the LMU University in Munich, told Space.com.

"The sphere is just the front end," Eisenberg said. "All the voice recognition and artificial intelligence happens on Earth at an IBM data centre in Frankfurt, Germany. The signal from CIMON has to travel through satellites and ground stations to the data centre and back. We focused on improving the robustness of this connection to prevent disruptions." CIMON relies on IBM's Watson speech recognition and synthesis software to converse with astronauts and respond to their commands. The first generation robot flew to the space station with Alexander Gerst in 2018. That robot later returned to Earth and is now touring German museums. The current robot, CIMON-2, is a second generation. Unlike its predecessor, it is more attuned to the astronauts' emotional states (thanks to the Watson Tone Analyzer). It also has a shorter reaction time.

Airbus and DLR have signed a contract with ESA for CIMON-2 to work with four humans on the orbital outpost in the upcoming years. During those four consecutive missions, engineers will first test CIMON's new software and then move on to allowing the sphere to participate in more complex experiments. During these new missions CIMON will, for the first time, guide and document complete scientific procedures, Airbus said in a statement. "Most of the activities that astronauts perform are covered by step by step procedures," Eisenberg said. "Normally, they have to use clip boards to follow these steps. But CIMON can free their hands by floating close by, listening to the commands and reading out the procedures, showing videos, pictures and clarifications on its screen." The robot can also look up additional information and document the experiments by taking videos and pictures. The scientists will gather feedback from the astronauts to see how helpful the sphere really was and identify improvements for CIMON's future incarnations.

Astrobiologist Paul Davies suggests viruses may form a vital part of ecosystems on other planets. The Guardian reports: "Viruses actually form part of the web of life," said Davies. "I would expect that if you've got microbial life on another planet, you're bound to have -- if it's going to be sustainable and sustained -- the full complexity and robustness that will go with being able to exchange genetic information." Viruses, said Davies, can be thought of as mobile, genetic elements. Indeed, a number of studies have suggested genetic material from viruses has been incorporated into the genomes of humans and other animals by a process known as horizontal gene transfer. "A friend of mine thinks most, but certainly a significant fraction, of the human genome is actually of viral origin," said Davies, whose new book, What's Eating the Universe?, was published last week.

According to Davies, while the importance of microbes to life is well known, the role of viruses is less widely appreciated. But he said if there is cellular life on other worlds, viruses or something similar, would probably exist to transfer genetic information between them. What's more, he said, it is unlikely alien life would be homogenous. "I don't think it's a matter that you go to some other planet, and there will just be you one type of microbe and it's perfectly happy. I think it's got to be a whole ecosystem," he added. While the thought of extraterrestrial viruses may seem alarming, Davies suggests there is no need for humans to panic. "The dangerous viruses are those that are very closely adapted to their hosts," he said. "If there is a truly alien virus, then chances are it wouldn't be remotely dangerous."

Davies [...] said it is also important should humans attempt to colonize another planet. "Most people think about, well, we would need to have very large spacecraft, and then sort of recycle things for the very long journey, and then all the technology you'd need to take," he said. "Actually, the toughest part of this problem is what would be the microbiology that you'd have to take -- it's no good just taking a few pigs and potatoes and things like that and hoping when you get to the other end it'll all be wonderful and self sustainable." While Covid has left most of us with a dim view of viruses, Davies said they are not all bad. "In fact, mostly, they're good," he said. [A]s Davies notes, a significant fraction of the human genome may be remnants of ancient viruses. "We hear about the microbiome inside us, and there's a planetary microbiome," said Davies. But, he argues there is also a human and planetaryvirome, with viruses playing a fundamental role in nature. "I think without viruses, there may be no sustained life on planet Earth," he said.

Some scientists have called it "superhuman immunity" or "bulletproof." But immunologist Shane Crotty prefers "hybrid immunity." "Overall, hybrid immunity to SARS-CoV-2 appears to be impressively potent," Crotty wrote in commentary in Science back in June. From a report: No matter what you call it, this type of immunity offers much-needed good news in what seems like an endless array of bad news regarding COVID-19. Over the past several months, a series of studies has found that some people mount an extraordinarily powerful immune response against SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes the disease COVID-19. Their bodies produce very high levels of antibodies, but they also make antibodies with great flexibility -- likely capable of fighting off the coronavirus variants circulating in the world but also likely effective against variants that may emerge in the future.

"One could reasonably predict that these people will be quite well protected against most -- and perhaps all of -- the SARS-CoV-2 variants that we are likely to see in the foreseeable future," says Paul Bieniasz, a virologist at Rockefeller University who helped lead several of the studies. In a study published online last month, Bieniasz and his colleagues found antibodies in these individuals that can strongly neutralize the six variants of concern tested, including delta and beta, as well as several other viruses related to SARS-CoV-2, including one in bats, two in pangolins and the one that caused the first coronavirus pandemic, SARS-CoV-1. "This is being a bit more speculative, but I would also suspect that they would have some degree of protection against the SARS-like viruses that have yet to infect humans," Bieniasz says.

Animals are increasingly "shapeshifting" because of the climate crisis, researchers have said. From a report: Warm-blooded animals are changing their physiology to adapt to a hotter climate, the scientists found. This includes getting larger beaks, legs and ears to better regulate their body temperature. When animals overheat, birds use their beaks and mammals use their ears to disperse the warmth. Some creatures in warmer climates have historically evolved to have larger beaks or ears to get rid of heat more easily. These differences are becoming more pronounced as the climate warms. If animals fail to control their body temperature, they can overheat and die. Beaks, which are not covered by feathers and therefore not insulated, are a site of significant heat exchange, as are ears, tails and legs in mammals if not covered by fur.

The review, published in the journal Trends in Ecology & Evolution, found that the differences are particularly pronounced in birds. The author of the study, Sara Ryding of Deakin university, a bird researcher, said: "Shapeshifting does not mean that animals are coping with climate change and that all is fine. "It just means they are evolving to survive it -- but we're not sure what the other ecological consequences of these changes are, or indeed that all species are capable of changing and surviving." While the scientists say it is difficult to pinpoint climate breakdown as the sole cause of the shapeshifting, it is what the instances studied have in common across geographical regions and across a diverse array of species. Examples include several species of Australian parrot that have shown a 4-10% increase in bill size since 1871, positively correlated with the summer temperature each year.