A South African woman suffering from inadequately treated HIV, and who harbored Covid-19 for nine months saw the respiratory virus develop at least 21 mutations while in her body, according to a study. From a report: Once the 22-year-old adhered to the anti-retroviral medication used to treat HIV and her immune system strengthened she was able to overcome the Covid-19 infection within six to nine weeks, the study, led by scientists from Stellenbosch and the University of KwaZulu-Natal showed. The research has not been peer reviewed. The study adds to evidence that Covid-19 may mutate rapidly when harbored by immunosuppressed individuals, such as those not taking medication to treat HIV, and this may lead to the development of new variants. The beta variant, which the patient in the study was infected with, was discovered in South Africa, as was omicron. "This case, like others before, describes a potential pathway for the emergence of novel variants," the scientists said, stressing that it was still a hypothesis. "Our experience reinforces previous reports that effective anti retroviral treatment is the key to controlling such events."

There are an estimated 73,300 species of tree on Earth, 9,000 of which have yet to be discovered, according to a global count of tree species by thousands of researchers who used second world war codebreaking techniques created at Bletchley Park to evaluate the number of unknown species. From a report: Researchers working on the ground in 90 countries collected information on 38 million trees, sometimes walking for days and camping in remote places to reach them. The study found there are about 14% more tree species than previously reported and that a third of undiscovered tree species are rare, meaning they could be vulnerable to extinction by human-driven changes in land use and the climate crisis.

"It is a massive effort for the whole world to document our forests," said Jingjing Liang, a lead author of the paper and professor of quantitative forest ecology at Purdue University in Indiana, US. "Counting the number of tree species worldwide is like a puzzle with pieces spreading all over the world. We solved it together as a team, each sharing our own piece." Despite being among the largest and most widespread organisms, there are still thousands of trees to be discovered, with 40% of unknown species believed to be in South America, according to the paper published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). Some of these undocumented species would probably have been known to indigenous communities but some, in the most inaccessible regions, may have never been found before.

An electric wound dressing can help heal injuries faster than existing methods, according to tests in rats. From a report: Previous research has found that applying electric fields across a cut can speed up wound healing, but this usually requires large and specialised equipment. Because of this, Guang Yao at the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China in Chengdu and his colleagues wanted to develop an alternative that could be applied in a similar way to traditional wound dressings. "Non-invasive, efficient, cost-effective and convenient approaches are always desired for treating skin wounds," he says. The dressing is made up of four layers. The bottom layer is made from an electrically charged plastic that produces an electric field through static contact with the skin. Next is a layer of flexible silicone rubber gel that moulds to the skin's curvature, and then a layer of shape memory alloy that pushes the two sides of the wound together. A second layer of flexible gel completes the dressing, which is just 0.2 millimetres thick in total. The team tested the wound-healing properties of the dressing on around 50 rats. They anaesthetised the rats before giving each either a 1-centimetre-long linear wound or a 0.8-centimetre-diameter circular wound and then either applying the new dressing, applying a standard dressing or leaving them to heal by themselves.

Science magazine checks in on the new "Galileo Project" from controversial Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb. It's searching for evidence of extraterrestrial technology, whether it's spotted deep in space by mountaintop observatories or by their network of rooftop cameras "designed to capture any UFOs prowling through Earth's atmosphere."

"After enlisting more than three dozen astronomers and engineers in the project — as well as some notorious nonscientists — Loeb hopes to solve the enduring UFO mystery once and for all. 'Scientists have to come to the rescue and clear up the fog,' Loeb says." Some researchers applaud Loeb's endeavor. "He has mounted a scientific attack on a problem that is frustratingly fuzzy," says Gregory Laughlin, an astrophysicist at Yale University. "A project like this would have been unthinkable 10 years ago." But others say Loeb is tarnishing astronomy and undermining the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) just as that effort has started to acquire a veneer of respectability. In particular, they are bothered by the outspoken UFO zealots with no science background whom Loeb has welcomed into the project. "He's intermingled legitimate scientists with these fringe people," says Caleb Scharf, an astrobiologist at Columbia University. "I think you lose far more by doing that...."

One part of the project would design software to screen the data coming from telescopes like the Rubin observatory for interstellar objects. But the core of the project would be a worldwide network of sky monitors, hundreds in all. Each dome-shaped unit, roughly the size of an umbrella, will contain infrared and optical cameras arranged like a fly's eye to capture the full expanse of sky overhead. Audio sensors and radio antennas will listen at other frequencies. Running 24 hours a day, the monitors are meant to record everything that moves through the sky, day and night: from birds and balloons to insects, airliners, and drones. Artificial intelligence algorithms, trained to discard known objects like birds in favor of fast-moving spherical and lens-shaped objects, will sift through the data, says Richard Cloete, a computer scientist at the University of Cambridge, who is overseeing the system's software. "We're basically filtering out all the things that we expect to find in the sky," he says. "And all these things that are labeled other [by the AI] will be of interest."

Seth Shostak, an astronomer at the SETI Institute who sits on the Galileo Project's advisory board, points out that networks of sky cameras are not new. Since 2010, one SETI Institute network has detected 2 million meteors, and in the past few years, the LaserSETI project has begun to watch the sky for pulses of light from alien technologies. What's novel about the Galileo Project, Shostak says, is its focus on hunting for aliens in Earth's atmosphere. Both the Galileo Project and the SETI Institute "are looking for indications of extraterrestrial intelligence," he adds. "But that's like saying that studying unknown fauna in the rainforest is similar to those who are hoping to find mermaids or unicorns."

Loeb says a prototype sky monitor is being built now and will be affixed to the roof of the Harvard College Observatory in the spring. If the instruments work, he plans to make duplicates; if he can raise another $100 million from private donors, he will place them around the world. He says he won't utter the UFO word unless they see an object "that looks strange and moves in ways that human technology cannot enable."
A former deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence, who participates as an unpaid "research affiliate "for the project, points out that "One of the problems is that many of the areas we're seeing the greatest level of [UFO] activity are restricted military airspace. The Defense Department is not going to be real excited about bringing in a lot of instruments to record everything that's going on."

Ed Turner, a Princeton University astrophysicist who is part of the project's core research team, tells the magazine that he's more excited by the interstellar component of the project — and doubts that the ground-based cameras will actually pick up any evidence of extraterrestrial visits. "If the aliens don't want us to know about them, they'll likely know about the Galileo Project," he says drily. "They can just avoid our high-resolution cameras."

Thanks to Slashdot reader sciencehabit for sharing the article

Last week a Chinese satellite "was observed grabbing another satellite and pulling it out of its normal geosynchronous orbit," reports the Drive, "and into a 'super-graveyard drift orbit.'"

"The maneuver raises questions about the potential applications of these types of satellites designed to maneuver close to other satellites for inspection or manipulation and adds to growing concerns about China's space program overall." On January 22, China's Shijian-21 satellite, or SJ-21, disappeared from its regular position in orbit during daylight hours when observations were difficult to make with optical telescopes. SJ-21 was then observed executing a "large maneuver" to bring it closely alongside another satellite, a dead BeiDou Navigation System satellite. SJ-21 then pulled the dead satellite out of its normal geosynchronous orbit and placed it a few hundred miles away in what is known as a graveyard orbit. These distant orbits are designated for defunct satellites at the end of their lives and are intended to reduce the risk of collision with operational assets....

According to Chinese state news outlets, SJ-21 was designed to "test and verify space debris mitigation technologies."

SJ-21's recent maneuver raises questions and concerns about these types of satellites and their potential for military use. Todd Harrison, director of CSIS's Aerospace Project, told Breaking Defense that SJ-21's actions present "more questions than answers," adding that while we can observe the satellite's actions, "the intent behind it and what China plans to do with this technology is a more subjective assessment."

This isn't the first time SJ-21 has made headlines with its questionable behavior. In November 2021, just a month after its launch, an unknown object was seen orbiting alongside SJ-21. At the time, Space Force designated the unidentified object as a spent apogee kick motor, but it was also reported that it might have been an experimental payload designed to test SJ-21's ability to perform remote operations and manipulate other satellites....

Analyzing the potential applications of these dual-use satellites is difficult.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for submitting the story!

America's Department of Defense "wants to clean up space...at least the increasingly polluted region in low Earth orbit, where thousands of bits of debris, spent rocket stages and dead satellites whiz uncontrollably," writes the Washington Post.

They're reporting that America's Space Force has now launched a program to give companies seed money to develop space-cleaning technology to eventually demo in space (starting with awards of $250,000 that rise as high as $1.5 million). The name of the program: Orbital Prime. The issue also has gotten the attention of the White House. Its Office of Science and Technology Policy recently held a meeting asking for input from space industry leaders about what to do about the problem. Speaker after speaker said that governments around the world need to fund these efforts to help create a market for companies to operate. They also said that it had become an imperative for the governments largely responsible for the problem in the first place. "If the U.S. Navy had had a derelict ship sitting in sovereign waters, creating a safety hazard, the U.S. Navy would go out and grab that ship," said Doug Loverro, a former top Pentagon and NASA space official. "And I'm not sure why we don't see the same responsibility for government for their derelict ships and their derelict bodies that are in space today."

Or as James Lowenthal, a professor of astronomy at Smith College in Michigan, put it: "Just as we rely on the government to protect the air we breathe and the water we drink, we have to rely on the government to protect the resource and the global commons of low Earth orbit."

Europe and Britain have also begun to work toward cleaning up debris — a move that's long overdue, space industry experts say. ClearSpace, a Swiss company, has a contract with the European Space Agency to remove a large piece of debris — a symbol that the issue is finally being addressed. It proposes using a spacecraft with large arms that would grapple the debris like a Venus' flytrap. "This is why we're here. Because we think change is possible," said Luc Piguet, ClearSpace's co-founder and CEO. "And we think we can build a space industry that operates with a different model, where maintenance is just a normal part of it."
"This debris and associated congestion threaten the longer sustainability of the space domain," said Space Force's vice chief of space operations, in a video advertising the seed-money program, adding that America's Department of Defense tracks 40,000 objects in orbit the size of a fist or larger, with at least 10 times as many smaller objects the Pentagon can't reliably track.

Slashdot reader sciencehabit quotes Science magazine: Imagine using any object around you—a frying pan, a glass paperweight—as the central processor in a neural network, a type of artificial intelligence that loosely mimics the brain to perform complex tasks. That's the promise of new research that, in theory, could be used to recognize images or speech faster and more efficiently than computer programs that rely on silicon microchips.

To demonstrate the concept, the researchers built neural networks in three types of physical systems, which each contained up to five processing layers. In each layer of a mechanical system, they used a speaker to vibrate a small metal plate and recorded its output using a microphone. In an optical system, they passed light through crystals. And in an analog-electronic system, they ran current through tiny circuits.

In each case, the researchers encoded input data, such as unlabeled images, in sound, light, or voltage. For each processing layer, they also encoded numerical parameters telling the physical system how to manipulate the data. To train the system, they adjusted the parameters to reduce errors between the system's predicted image labels and the actual labels.

In one task, they trained the systems, which they call physical neural networks (PNNs), to recognize handwritten digits. In another, the PNNs recognized seven vowel sounds. Accuracy on these tasks ranged from 87% to 97%, they report in this week's issue of Nature. In the future, researchers might tune a system not by digitally tweaking its input parameters, but by adjusting the physical objects—warping the metal plate, say.

The team is most excited about PNNs' potential as smart sensors that can perform computation on the fly. A microscope's optics might help detect cancerous cells before the light even hits a digital sensor, or a smartphone's microphone membrane might listen for wake words. These "are applications in which you really don't think about them as performing a machine-learning computation," they say, but instead as being "functional machines."

Astronomers said this week that a piece of a Falcon 9 rocket that was launched in February 2015 is currently on a trajectory to collide with the moon in just a few weeks. CBS News reports: The rocket left from Florida's Cape Canaveral and launched NOAA's Deep Space Climate Observatory, a project that allows researchers to maintain real-time data for more accurate space weather alerts and forecasts. According to NOAA, having that data is "critical," as space weather events "have the potential to disrupt nearly every major public infrastructure system on Earth." During that deployment, Falcon 9's second stage, which provides it with a second boost to reach its desired orbit, ran out of fuel to return to Earth, according to meteorologist and Ars Technica space editor Eric Berger. The second stage has been orbiting Earth ever since, and now, according to data gathered by astronomers, it's on track to hit the moon.

Bill Gray, who writes the Project Pluto software that is used by both amateur and professional astronomers, gathered data from those space observers over the past few weeks to predict just when the impact will occur. Based on the information he gathered, there will be a "certain impact" with the far side of the moon on March 4, he said. The rocket stage is currently floating away from Earth and outside of the moon's orbit on a "chaotic" orbit, Gray said, but in the coming days, it's expected to turn around and head back towards Earth. It made a "close lunar flyby" on January 5, but March 4 is when its path and the moon's will cross. Thankfully, there's no cause for concern, says Gray, noting that it's the "first unintentional case" of space junk hitting the moon that he's aware of. It may actually help researchers learn more about the moon's makeup if lunar orbiters are able to observe the crash site.

"If we can tell the [lunar orbiter] folks exactly where the crater is, they'll eventually pass over that spot and be able to see a very fresh impact crater and probably learn something about the geology (well, selenology) of that part of the moon," Gray said.

"Former heads of nuclear regulatory bodies across Europe and the US put out a statement this week voicing their opposition to nuclear energy as a climate solution," reports The Verge's Justine Calma. The publication spoke with Gregory Jaczko, former chairman of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, to learn more about why some nuclear experts oppose the energy source as a climate fix. Slashdot reader Ol Olsoc shares an excerpt of the interview: Former NRC Chair Gregory Jaczko in an interview with the Verge notes: "I think there's been a lot of misinformation about the role that nuclear power can play in any climate strategy. A lot of attention has been put on nuclear as somehow the technology that's going to solve a lot of problems when it comes to dealing with climate change. I just think that's not true. And it's taking the debate and discussion away from the areas that can have a role and that do need focus and attention." He added: "I think it's money that's not well spent. Nuclear has shown time and time again that it cannot deliver on promises about deployment and costs. And that's really the most important factor when it comes to climate." Jaczko goes on to note how many of the nuclear plants when he was chairman were supposed to come online but have experienced delays and exceptional cost overruns. Two of the four new design reactors that were licensed when he was chairman, which were supposed to be starting production in 2016 and 2017, were canceled, "and that involved federal indictments for fraud among the heads of the company running that reactor development." The other two, he says, "continue to be pushed back and now are scheduled to start in 2022 or 2023" with a price tag that's over $30 billion.

New submitter blackprint writes: The City of Austin released a memo saying that Samsung released as much as 763,000 gallons of sulfuric acid waste into a Northeast Austin creek over a period as long as 106 days. They confirmed the leak has stopped, but no fish or macro invertebrates survived in the impacted area. They don't know if there are any long-term impacts, but pH levels in the area have returned close to normal. According to the memo, "Public access to this area is limited, and there are no nearby parks."

They have not stated the cause of the spill. "Spill investigators and scientists took a look at the area Jan. 18-19 and saw iron staining in the tributary channel consistent with a low pH environment," reports local news station KXAN, citing the memo. "WPD says it was in this tributary stretch from the Samsung plant to the main branch of Harris Branch Creek that WPD staff found no surviving aquatic life, including fish."

Observations by a long-running Mars mission suggest that liquid water may have flowed on the Red Planet as little as 2 billion years ago, much later than scientists once thought. Space.com reports: Scientists charted the presence of chloride salt deposits left behind by flowing water using years of data from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), which has been orbiting the Red Planet since 2006. By studying dozens of images of salt deposits taken by the spacecraft's Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars (CRISM), the scientists interpreted a younger age for the salt deposits using a method "crater counting." The younger a region is, the fewer craters it should have, with adjustments for aspects such as a planet's atmosphere, allowing scientists to estimate its age. The new results push forward the existence of water on Mars from 3 billion years ago to as little as 2 billion years ago, based on the observations, which could have implications for life on Mars and more broadly, the planet's geological history. [...]

The scientists also created elevation maps using MRO's wide-angle context camera, and the zoomed-in views provided by the High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) that can spot craters as small as the Curiosity or Perseverance Mars rovers. The salt minerals were first spotted by a different spacecraft 14 years ago, called Mars Odyssey, but MRO's advantage is it has higher resolution instruments than its older (and still operational) companion in orbit. The study based on the research was published in AGU American Geophysical Union Advances.

Commercial space company SpaceX plans to launch a whopping 52 flights in 2022, a NASA safety panel revealed today during a meeting. If successful, it would be the most launches the company has ever conducted in a single year, with its previous record last year at 31 launches. The Verge reports: The impressive figure was given during a virtual meeting of NASA's Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, or ASAP, which gives guidance to the space agency on how to maintain safety within its biggest programs. "NASA and SpaceX will have to be watchful during 2022 that they're not victims of their success," Sandy Magnus, a former NASA astronaut and member of the panel, said during the meeting. "There's an ambitious 52-launch manifest for SpaceX over the course of the year. And that's an incredible pace."

Spaceflight schedules are always subject to change, so there's no guarantee that SpaceX will meet the 52-launch figure. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said the company was striving to hit 48 launches in 2021 but only made it to 31. So far this year, SpaceX has already launched three missions, and it has another one scheduled for this afternoon. While meeting the number would certainly be admirable, NASA's ASAP panel also warned about the downsides of having such a packed manifest. "Both NASA and SpaceX will have to ensure the appropriate attention and priority are focused on NASA missions," Magnus said, "and that the right resources are brought to bear to maintain that pace at a safe measure."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Elderly people living near or downwind from unconventional oil and gas wells such as fracking sites are more likely to die prematurely, according to a major new US study. Extracting oil and gas through newer or unconventional methods like fracking has expanded rapidly across America over the past two decades with at least 17.6 million people now living within one kilometer of an active well. Compared with traditional drilling, unconventional oil and gas development (UOGD) is linked to higher levels of exposure to toxic air pollution and poor water quality, as well as noise and light pollution which can be harmful to human health. The impact of fossil fuel extraction -- including by unconventional methods -- has disproportionately affected low income communities and people of color.

Researchers from the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health studied the health records of 15 million people on Medicare, the health insurance program that includes at least 95% of Americans aged 65 and older, living in all significant drilling regions from 2001 to 2015. They also gathered data on about 2.5 million oil and gas wells covering leading exploration states, from Montana to Texas and Pennsylvania. The closer people live to an oil and gas operation, the higher the risk of dying prematurely, even after accounting for socioeconomic, environmental and demographic factors such as gender and race, according to the study published in Nature Energy.

Residents most adversely affected are those living nearby and downwind, suggesting toxic airborne contaminants emitted from UOGD sites probably contributed to higher mortality rates. Exposure to toxins associated with unconventional drilling such as volatile organic compounds (VOCs), nitrogen oxides and radioactive materials are linked to a wide range of life-threatening medical conditions. Overall, elderly residents living near these wells have about 2.5% higher mortality rates than those living far away compared with 3.5% for those who are also downwind. This would mean thousands of premature deaths linked to the oil and gas boom, though the peer-reviewed study does not include estimates of lives lost.

sciencehabit writes: It took just one virus to cripple the world's economy and kill millions of people; yet virologists estimate that trillions of still-unknown viruses exist, many of which might be lethal or have the potential to spark the next pandemic. Now, they have a new -- and very long -- list of possible suspects to interrogate. By sifting through unprecedented amounts of existing genomic data, scientists have uncovered more than 100,000 novel viruses, including nine coronaviruses and more than 300 related to the hepatitis Delta virus, which can cause liver failure. "It's a foundational piece of work," says J. Rodney Brister, a bioinformatician at the National Center for Biotechnology Information's National Library of Medicine who was not involved in the new study. The work expands the number of known viruses that use RNA instead of DNA for their genes by an order of magnitude. It also "demonstrates our outrageous lack of knowledge about this group of organisms," says disease ecologist Peter Daszak, president of the EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit research group in New York City that is raising money to launch a global survey of viruses. The work will also help launch so-called petabyte genomics -- the analyses of previously unfathomable quantities of DNA and RNA data.

That wasn't exactly what computational biologist Artem Babaian had in mind when he was in between jobs in early 2020. Instead, he was simply curious about how many coronaviruses -- aside from the virus that had just launched the COVID-19 pandemic -- could be found in sequences in existing genomic databases. So, he and independent supercomputing expert Jeff Taylor scoured cloud-based genomic data that had been deposited to a global sequence database and uploaded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health. As of now, the database contains 16 petabytes of archived sequences, which come from genetic surveys of everything from fugu fish to farm soils to the insides of human guts. (A database with a digital photo of every person in the United States would take up about the same amount of space.) The genomes of viruses infecting different organisms in these samples are also captured by sequencing, but they usually go undetected.

While mapping radio waves across the universe, astronomers happened upon a celestial object releasing giant bursts of energy -- and it's unlike anything they've ever seen before. From a report: The spinning space object, spotted in March 2018, beamed out radiation three times per hour. In those moments, it became the brightest source of radio waves viewable from Earth, acting like a celestial lighthouse. Astronomers think it might be a remnant of a collapsed star, either a dense neutron star or a dead white dwarf star, with a strong magnetic field -- or it could be something else entirely. A study on the discovery published Wednesday in the journal Nature. "This object was appearing and disappearing over a few hours during our observations," said lead study author Natasha Hurley-Walker, an astrophysicist at the Curtin University node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research, in a statement. "That was completely unexpected. It was kind of spooky for an astronomer because there's nothing known in the sky that does that. And it's really quite close to us -- about 4,000 light-years away. It's in our galactic backyard."

Moderna gave its omicron-specific COVID-19 vaccine to the first participant in a clinical trial, the company announced Wednesday. The report comes a few days after Pfizer / BioNTech launched a trial of its shot targeting the fast-spreading variant. From a report: The announcement coincides with the release of data showing that the two-dose series of Moderna's original vaccine struggled to block the omicron variant of the virus, which has mutations that help it dodge those antibodies. A booster shot restored much of its ability to neutralize the virus -- and while that protection weakened over time, it still stuck around for at least six months. Still, Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel said in a statement that the omicron variant is enough of a threat that the company plans to move forward with the variant booster.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: African clawed frogs are masters of putting themselves back together, handily regenerating lost tails and hind limbs, when they are tadpoles. But these powers dim with maturity. Wait for an adult frog to regrow a lopped-off limb and you'll see only a tapered spike, more like a talon than a leg. Now, a group of scientists have found a way to harness the adult frog's own cells to regrow an imperfect but functional limb. The researchers placed a silicone cap laden with a mixture of regenerative drugs onto an amputation wound for 24 hours. Over the next 18 months, the frogs gradually regrew what was lost, forming a new leglike structure with nerves, muscles, bones and even toelike projections.

The researchers describe this approach, which builds on earlier research, in a paper published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances. The process could guide future research on limb regeneration in humans, but it will be challenging to replicate the results in mammals. "It was a total surprise," Nirosha Murugan, a researcher at Algoma University in Ontario, Canada, and an author of the paper, said of the complexity of the regrown limb. "I didn't think we would get the patterning that we did." "It's not a full limb that's regrown," said Kelly Tseng, a biologist studying regeneration at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, who was not involved with the research. "But it's certainly a robust response." "It is particularly promising that only a daylong treatment can have such a positive effect on an adult animal," Can Aztekin, a researcher studying limb regeneration at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne who was not involved with the research, wrote in an email.

The secret behind a record-breaking nuclear fusion experiment that spit out 10 quadrillion watts of power in a split second has been revealed: a "self-heating" -- or "burning" -- plasma of neutron-heavy hydrogen inside the fuel capsule used in the experiment, according to researchers. Live Science reports: Last year, scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Northern California announced the record release of 1.3 megajoules of energy for 100 trillionths of a second at the National Ignition Facility (NIF), Live Science reported at the time. In two new research papers, NIF scientists show the achievement was due to the precision engineering of the tiny cavity and fuel capsule at the heart of the world's most powerful laser system, where the fusion took place.

Although the fuel capsule was only about a millimeter (0.04 inch) across, and the fusion reaction lasted only the briefest sliver of time, its output was equal to about 10% of all the energy from sunlight that hits Earth every instant, the researchers reported. The researchers said the reaction blasted out that much energy because the process of fusion itself heated the remaining fuel into a plasma hot enough to enable further fusion reactions. "A burning plasma is when heating from the fusion reactions becomes the dominant source of heating in the plasma, more than required to initiate or jump-start the fusion," Annie Kritcher, a physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), told Live Science in an email. Kritcher is the lead author of a study published Jan. 26 in Nature Physics describing how the NIF was optimized to achieve the burning plasma, and the co-author of another study published in Nature the same day that details the first burning plasma experiments at NIF in 2020 and early 2021.

The two new studies describe burning plasma experiments conducted in the months before the 10 quadrillion watt reaction; those earlier experiments culminated in the production of 170 kilojoules of energy from a pellet of just 200 micrograms (0.000007 ounces) of hydrogen fuel -- around three times the energy output of any earlier experiments. It was achieved by carefully shaping both the fuel capsule -- a tiny spherical shell of polycarbonate diamond that enclosed the pellet -- and the cavity that contained it -- a small cylinder of depleted (not very radioactive) uranium lined with gold, known as a hohlraum. The new designs allowed the NIF lasers that heated the pellet to operate more efficiently within the hohlraum, and the hot shell of the capsule to rapidly expand outward while the fuel pellet "imploded" -- with the result that the fuel fused at such a high temperature that it heated other parts of the pellet into a plasma.

He Who Has No Name writes: In a synopsis posted Monday, John Hewitt at Phys.org points out some fairly unsettling implications of an ugly trick by Covid-19 (more formally, SARS-CoV-2) -- it wakes up latent viruses that we are born with in our DNA. A quick version for those not familiar with virology: retroviruses are a subclass of viruses that leave copies of their RNA in the host cell's DNA as part of their replication process, the reverse of the way most viruses replicate (that's where the 'retro' part comes from). Latent, inactive sequences of retroviral DNA make up more than 1% of the human genome. We're literally born with them in our genes. Now back to Covid's latest trick.

From the article: "Transposable elements, or jumping genes, are now known to be responsible for many human diseases. Keeping them repressed by methylation, RNA binding, or the attentions of the innate immune system is a full-time jump for cells. Last week, we reviewed the activation of one particular kind of transposable element, the Line-1 retrotransposons, in an ever-expanding host of neurodegenerative conditions. Retrotransposons derive from human endogenous retrovirus (HERVs) but typically have lost their signature long terminal repeat sequences at the beginning and ends of their genes. On Tuesday, a real zinger was dropped onto the medRxiv preprint server that could potentially explain many of the commonly observed pathogenic features of SARS-CoV-2. The authors provide solid evidence that the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein activates the envelope (ENV) protein encoded by HERV-W in blood cells, which is in turn directly responsible for many pathological features of the disease."

While this is all analysis of preprint research, the evidence and implied results are very much in line with other long-term effects from Covid infection, especially neurocognitive symptoms, known to long haul Covid patients as "brain fog." Given that other research is showing long haul Covid cognitive symptoms are more accurately detected by the cognitive function test specifically used for HIV-Associated Neurocognitive Disorder (HAND) compared to standard function tests, the implication of retroviral elements to the puzzle of PACS (Post-Acute Covid Symptoms, the official term now in use for long haul Covid) is disturbing. The good news: only about 20-30% of people infected with Covid appear to be susceptible. This is, however, conspicuously in line with other data analysis showing that about 1 in 4 Covid victims has PACS / long-haul symptoms after the acute infection stage...

Doctors have discovered an "antibody signature" that can help identify patients most at risk of developing long Covid, a condition where debilitating symptoms of the disease can persist for many months. From a report: Researchers at University hospital Zurich analysed blood from Covid patients and found that low levels of certain antibodies were more common in those who developed long Covid than in patients who swiftly recovered. When combined with the patient's age, details of their Covid symptoms and whether or not they had asthma, the antibody signature allowed doctors to predict whether people had a moderate, high or very high risk of developing long-term illness. "Overall, we think that our findings and identification of an immunoglobulin signature will help early identification of patients that are at increased risk of developing long Covid, which in turn will facilitate research, understanding and ultimately targeted treatments for long Covid," said Onur Boyman, a professor of immunology who led the research. The team studied 175 people who tested positive for Covid and 40 healthy volunteers who acted as a control group. To see how their symptoms changed over time, doctors followed 134 of the Covid patients for up to a year after their initial infection. When Covid strikes, IgM antibodies ramp up rapidly, while IgG antibodies rise later and provide longer-term protection. Blood tests on the participants showed that those who developed long Covid -- also known as post-acute Covid-19 syndrome (Pacs) -- tended to have low levels of IgM and the antibody IgG3.