Coronavirus infections continue to plummet across the U.S. From a report: The U.S. averaged about 30,000 cases per day over the past week. The progress is happening remarkably fast, and across the board. It was just last week that average daily cases dropped below 40,000, for the first time in months. This week's figures are a 20% improvement over last week. 39 states saw their caseloads improve over the past week. Alabama showed an increase in new cases, although the state had some unusual reporting glitches this week. Technically, cases also increased in Washington, D.C., but it's no cause for alarm: The District has fewer new cases per day (about 48, on average) than any state.

After 17 years underground, the Brood X periodical cicadas are slowly emerging in 15 states across the East Coast and Midwest. From a report: They'll shed their skins and spend four to six weeks mating before the females lay eggs and they all die. But some of them are getting wilder in their short lives above ground. A fungus called Massospora, which can produce compounds of cathinone -- an amphetamine -- infects a small number of them and makes them lose control. The fungus takes over their bodies, causing them to lose their lower abdomen and genitals. And it pushes their mating into hyperdrive.

"This is stranger than fiction," Matt Kasson, an associate professor of forest pathology and mycology at West Virginia University, tells NPR's All Things Considered. "To have something that's being manipulated by a fungus, to be hypersexual and to have prolonged stamina and just mate like crazy." Kasson, who has been studying Massospora for about five years, says just before the cicadas rise from the ground, the spores of the fungus start to infect the bug. Once it's above ground and starts to shed its skin to become an adult, its butt falls off. Then a "white plug of fungus" starts to grow in its place.

A giant slab of ice bigger than the Spanish island of Majorca has sheared off from the frozen edge of Antarctica into the Weddell Sea, becoming the largest iceberg afloat in the world, the European Space Agency said on Wednesday. From a report: The newly calved berg, designated A-76 by scientists, was spotted in recent satellite images captured by the Copernicus Sentinel-1 mission, the space agency said in a statement posted on its website with a photo of the enormous, oblong ice sheet. Its surface area spans 4,320 square km (1,668 square miles) and measures 175 km (106 miles) long by 25 km (15 miles) wide. By comparison, Spain's tourist island of Majorca in the Mediterranean occupies 3,640 square km (1,405 square miles). The U.S. state of Rhode Island is smaller still, with a land mass of just 2,678 square km (1,034 square miles). The enormity of A-76, which broke away from Antarctica's Ronne Ice Shelf, ranks as the largest existing iceberg on the planet, surpassing the now second-place A-23A, about 3,380 square km (1,305 square miles) in size and also floating in the Weddell Sea.

China has released the first photographs taken by its Zhurong rover, which touched down on Mars late on May 14 as part of the country's Tianwen-1 mission. Space.com reports: The China National Space Administration (CNSA), which runs the mission, has released two Mars photographs taken by the rover: one in color and one in black and white. Both images show parts of the rover and its lander against a backdrop of Utopia Planitia, the expansive northern plain that Zhurong will explore during its mission.

The color image shows a view looking to the rear of Zhurong from a navigation camera above the rover's main deck. Solar arrays are visible, as are some surface rocks and features. The black and white image is from an obstacle avoidance camera at the front of the rover. It was captured with a wide-angle lens that also revealed a view of the Mars horizon in the distance, as well as two subsurface radar instruments on the rover itself. In addition to the photos from the surface, CNSA also released two short videos of the orbiter and Zhurong rover's landing capsule separating during Friday's maneuver. Both videos come from cameras on the orbiter and show the capsule pulling away.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Among humans, laughter can signify a lot of different things, from intimacy to discomfort. Among animals, however, laughter usually communicates something along the lines of "this is playtime -- I'm not actually going for your throat." According to new research from the University of California, Los Angeles, there are likely at least 65 different creatures, including humans, that make these vocalizations. They're most commonly found in primates, but they have also been noted in distant relatives like birds. It's not clear whether this is because laughter has arisen several times over the course of evolution or if it's more widespread and we just haven't noticed.

The list of "laughing" animals is mostly made up of primates, but there are a few other mammals on the list, such as the degu -- whose laugh is described as purring or grumbling -- and the killer whale. There are even three birds on the list, such as the kea parrot, which uses play vocalizations discovered in 2017. According to [Sasha Winkler, a PhD student in UCLA's anthropology department], there have been other surveys of the primates who laugh, but little work has been done outside that group. "To my knowledge, no one has gone through and tried to see a comprehensive look of all the vocalizations during play across all mammals, and we even found some birds," she said. Winkler told Ars that understanding animal laughter could help us understand the origins of human laughter. Laughter in humans plays several other functions beyond play, such as indicating membership in a group. The findings appear in the journal Bioacoustics.

Archer-Daniels-Midland Co., one of the world's biggest grain traders, is injecting carbon dioxide released by its corn plants underground, using commercial-scale technology that's the first of its kind. BNN Bloomberg reports: The company just completed a project with the University of Illinois proving that its methods to capture carbon are safe, according to a Wednesday release. That will aid its commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 25% against a 2019 baseline. In the project, ADM used wells to pump carbon dioxide 6,500 feet underground. The site was able to accept and store 1 million metric tons over three years. That's equivalent to annual emissions from about 1.2 million passenger cars, according to the release. The corn plant in Decatur, Illinois, where the emissions originated from processes the grain into starches and sweeteners, among other products. ADM has another well set to operate until 2022 that could store 5.5 million metric tons of the gas. Together, the two projects have already stored 3.4 million tons.

sciencehabit writes: Using an observatory on the edge of the Tibetan Plateau, astronomers have spotted the highest energy light ever, gamma ray photons up to 1.4 petaelectronvolts (PeV). They have traced these extreme photons back to a dozen of their likely sources: powerful factories in the Milky Way Galaxy that accelerate charged particles called cosmic rays. The results are challenging theorists' understanding of what these factories are and how they generate such high-energy light. "The findings are extremely important and impressive," says Petra Huentemeyer, an astrophysicist at Michigan Technological University and spokesperson for a rival gamma ray telescope, the High-Altitude Water Cherenkov Observatory (HAWC) in Mexico. "It's a giant leap toward finally understanding the origin of the highest energy cosmic rays."

Discovered more than 100 years ago, cosmic rays are charged particles, including protons and other atomic nuclei, that have been accelerated nearly to the speed of light. Their sources are poorly understood because interstellar magnetic fields bend them on their path to Earth. However, as cosmic rays rocket away from their sources, they also emit photons, usually about one-tenth as energetic as the cosmic rays themselves, that follow a straight path to Earth. Although Earth's atmosphere blocks this gamma ray light, when the photons slam into air molecules, they create showers of secondary particles and faint blue Cherenkov light that astronomers can look for. China's Large High Altitude Air Shower Observatory (LHAASO) aims to catch the air showers associated with the highest energy gamma rays, which in turn correspond to the highest energy cosmic rays.

Scientists monitoring the ruins of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine have seen a surge in fission reactions in an inaccessible chamber within the complex. They are now investigating whether the problem will stabilise or require a dangerous and difficult intervention to prevent a runaway nuclear reaction. From a report: The explosion at Chernobyl in 1986 brought down walls and sealed off many rooms and corridors. Tonnes of fissile material from the interior of a reactor were strewn throughout the facility and the heat it generated melted sand from the reactor walls with concrete and steel to form lava-like and intensely radioactive substances that oozed into lower floors. One chamber, known as subreactor room 305/2, is thought to contain large amounts of this material, but it is inaccessible and hasn't been seen by human or robotic eyes since the disaster.

Now, researchers have seen a spike in neutron emissions from the room, with levels increasing around 40 per cent since the start of 2016. This points to a growing nuclear fission reaction, so researchers are trying to determine if this surge will fizzle out, as previous spikes in other parts of the ruins have done, or whether they will need to find a way to access the room and intervene. Neil Hyatt at the University of Sheffield, UK, who studies nuclear waste disposal, likens the situation to "embers in a barbecue pit" and says "it's a reminder to us that it's not a problem solved, it's a problem stabilised."

One suggestion for why this is happening is that a new structure placed over the ruined reactor in 2016 is causing the plant to dry out. When uranium or plutonium fuel decay radioactively, they emit neutrons, which can promote a fission reaction if the neutrons are captured by another radioactive nuclei. However, large amounts of water slow these neutrons down, preventing them from being captured. The original shelter, which was hurriedly constructed over the reactor in the months following the accident, was riddled with holes that allowed rainwater and birds inside. If the rainwater was helping to suppress reactions in room 305/2, its absence due to the new structure could mean there is no longer enough water in the room to sufficiently slow neutrons down.

RockDoctor (Slashdot reader #15,477) writes: For a number of years the administrative process for giving asteroids names has had a worsening logjam. Important or "interesting" bodies (such as `Oumuamua, the first definitely interstellar object identified) would still get names rapidly assigned, but in the background myriads of unspectacular objects would persist with "names" based on their discovery date like "1981 GD1". Which is adequate for managing databases, but less than satisfactory for most humans.

A new publication from the "Working Group for Small Body Nomenclature", combines what used to be several steps into one stage. So now one can easily find that "1981 GD1" has the name "Rutherford", to commemorate one of the major scientists of the 20th century.

No doubt there will be complaints of an over-concentration on figures from Classical legend (22 of 179 names assigned), but eventually that mine will play out. Professional and amateur astronomers (34 and 30 names) are, unsurprisingly, the largest groups commemorated. Other scientists get a good showing (16, Rutherford included), along with memorials to teachers, observatories and universities. One architect and one astronaut (there isn't a bar on memorialising living persons) also get mentions, and modest numbers of sports stars, musicians and other cultural figures pad out the list. Chinese, Japanese and Taiwanese contributors have a significant input to this batch, along with a number of South American contributions and a fair number from smaller countries (Paul Erdos, for example, in the {dead+ white+ mathematical eccentrics} category). And one entry which I can only class as a joke — 1990 QX19 gets a name which should have been used years ago. Obviously you'll need to RTFA to see the joke, but RTFA-ing is an un-Slashdot activity.

Future numbers of the Bulletin will publish new batches of assigned names, and work away on the backlog. You still need to be the discoverer of a "small body" to submit a name proposal, but that step of the process is also under review. With about 22,000 of the currently-recognised million-plus objects with well-characterised orbits, there is no realistic prospect of running out any time soon — they are being found faster than they get named. But eventually you too could name a pathetic little mudball for someone you despise. Won't that be fun?

Implantable miniaturized medical devices that wirelessly transmit data "are transforming healthcare and improving the quality of life for millions of people," writes Columbia University, noting the devices are "widely used to monitor and map biological signals, to support and enhance physiological functions, and to treat diseases."

Long-time Slashdot reader sandbagger shares the university's newest announcement: These devices could be used to monitor physiological conditions, such as temperature, blood pressure, glucose, and respiration for both diagnostic and therapeutic procedures. To date, conventional implanted electronics have been highly volume-inefficient — they generally require multiple chips, packaging, wires, and external transducers, and batteries are often needed for energy storage... Researchers at Columbia Engineering report that they have built what they say is the world's smallest single-chip system, consuming a total volume of less than 0.1 mm cubed. The system is as small as a dust mite and visible only under a microscope...

"We wanted to see how far we could push the limits on how small a functioning chip we could make," said the study's leader Ken Shepard, Lau Family professor of electrical engineering and professor of biomedical engineering. "This is a new idea of 'chip as system' — this is a chip that alone, with nothing else, is a complete functioning electronic system. This should be revolutionary for developing wireless, miniaturized implantable medical devices that can sense different things, be used in clinical applications, and eventually approved for human use...."

The chip, which is the entire implantable/injectable mote with no additional packaging, was fabricated at the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company with additional process modifications performed in the Columbia Nano Initiative cleanroom and the City University of New York Advanced Science Research Center (ASRC) Nanofabrication Facility. Shepard commented, "This is a nice example of 'more than Moore' technology—we introduced new materials onto standard complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor to provide new function. In this case, we added piezoelectric materials directly onto the integrated circuit to transducer acoustic energy to electrical energy...." The team's goal is to develop chips that can be injected into the body with a hypodermic needle and then communicate back out of the body using ultrasound, providing information about something they measure locally.

The current devices measure body temperature, but there are many more possibilities the team is working on.

Slashdot reader Hmmmmmm quotes the Guardian: A new study that checked American women's breast milk for PFAS contamination detected the toxic chemical in all 50 samples tested, and at levels nearly 2,000 times higher than the level some public health advocates advise is safe for drinking water. The findings "are cause for concern" and highlight a potential threat to newborns' health, the study's authors say. "The study shows that PFAS contamination of breast milk is likely universal in the US, and that these harmful chemicals are contaminating what should be nature's perfect food," said Erika Schreder, a co-author and science director with Toxic Free Future, a Seattle-based non-profit that pushes industry to find alternatives to the chemicals.

PFAS, or per and polyfluoroalkyl substances, are a class of about 9,000 compounds that are used to make products like food packaging, clothing and carpeting water and stain resistant. They are called "forever chemicals" because they do not naturally break down and have been found to accumulate in humans. They are linked to cancer, birth defects, liver disease, thyroid disease, plummeting sperm counts and a range of other serious health problems. The peer-reviewed study, published on Thursday in the Environmental Science and Technology journal, found PFAS at levels in milk ranging from 50 parts per trillion (ppt) to more than 1,850ppt.

There are no standards for PFAS in breast milk, but the public health advocacy organization Environmental Working Group puts its advisory target for drinking water at 1ppt, and the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, within the Department of Health and Human Services, recommends as little as 14ppt in children's drinking water.

Slashdot reader boudie2 writes: Maritime Launch Services has secured financing it says will allow it to begin construction on a spaceport facility this fall and get its first launch off the ground in 2022. The first Cyclone 4M medium-class launch vehicle would take off in 2023.

The company wants to construct a rocket-launching site in Canso, Nova Scotia to send satellites into orbit for use in near-earth imaging, communications and scientific experiments. President and CEO Steve Matier stated the company has been approached by small satellite launchers, and MLS is considering hosting one of them for a first flight to orbit from the launch site as the facility scales up its operations. The company is expecting additional funding for the project will be secured through equity, debt and launch contracts.

Space startup Rocket Lab "lost a pair of satellites as the second stage of one of its Electron rockets failed to make it to orbit Saturday," reports CNET: After a successful liftoff from the company's New Zealand launch facility, something went wrong after the first stage booster separated from the smaller second stage carrying two satellites for Earth imaging company BlackSky. A live feed from the second stage showed that after it separated, it appeared to go into an uncontrolled tumble.

Commentators on the company's livestream reported that telemetry from the second stage had been lost and later the Rocket Lab Twitter feed confirmed the mission failure.

"An issue was experienced during today's launch, resulting in the loss of the mission," the company tweeted. "We are deeply sorry to our launch customers BlackSky and Spaceflight. The issue occurred shortly after stage two ignition..."

Rocket Lab reported that the booster made a successful parachute-assisted splashdown in the Pacific and a specially modified ship was en route to try to recover it.
"Rocket Lab has mostly been successful so far, with 17 of its missions reaching orbit," writes Engadget. Or, as CNET puts it, "This is the third failure out of 20 Rocket Lab launches and the second loss of mission in the past year."

In a statement, Rocket Lab CEO Peter Beck said "We will learn from this, and we'll be back on the pad again."

"As a neuroscientist long experienced in the field, I recently completed a painstaking analysis of 30 years of research on human brain sex differences..." reports Lise Eliot in a recent article on The Conversation. "[T]here's no denying the decades of actual data, which show that brain sex differences are tiny and swamped by the much greater variance in individuals' brain measures across the population."

Bloomberg follows up: In 2005, Harvard's then president Lawrence Summers theorized that so few women went into science because, well, they just weren't inherently good at it. "Issues of intrinsic aptitude," Summers said, such as "overall IQ, mathematical ability, scientific ability" kept many women out of the field... "I would like nothing better than to be proved wrong," Summers said back in 2005. Well, sixteen years later, it appears his wish came true.

In a new study published in in the June edition of Neuroscience & Behavioral Reviews, Lise Eliot, a professor of neuroscience at Rosalind Franklin University, analyzed 30 years' worth of brain research (mostly fMRIs and postmortem studies) and found no meaningful cognitive differences between men and women. Men's brains were on average about 11% larger than women's — as were their hearts, lungs and other organs — because brain size is proportional to body size. But just as taller people aren't any more intelligent than shorter people, neither, Eliot and her co-authors found, were men smarter than women. They weren't better at math or worse at language processing, either.

In her paper, Eliot and her co-authors acknowledge that psychological studies have found gendered personality traits (male aggression, for example) but at the brain level those differences don't seem to appear.
"Another way to think about it is every individual brain is a mosaic of circuits that control the many dimensions of masculinity and femininity, such as emotional expressiveness, interpersonal style, verbal and analytic reasoning, sexuality and gender identity itself," Eliot's original article had stated.

"Or, to use a computer analogy, gendered behavior comes from running different software on the same basic hardware."

Long-time Slashdot reader jhylkema writes: Just 12 people account for the lion's share of anti-vaccination propaganda posted to three of the leading social media outlets, according to a study from a London-based group opposed to online hate and disinformation. A study (PDF file) conducted by the Centre for the Countering of Digital Hate identified the "Disinformation Dozen" people, including RFK Jr., Joseph Mercola, and Sherri Tenpenny... In its study, the group blasts the social media companies for allowing their platforms to be abused and calls for them to be de-platformed.

"Living in full view of the public on the internet are a small group of individuals who... are abusing social media platforms to misrepresent the threat of Covid and spread misinformation about the safety of vaccines," the study said in its introduction. "Facebook, Google and Twitter have put policies into place to prevent the spread of vaccine misinformation; yet to date, all have failed to satisfactorily enforce those policies."
Some misinformation spreaders complain they're being censored, NPR reports, adding that "After this story published on Thursday, Facebook said it had taken down more of the accounts run by these 12 individuals."

But the study concludes anti-vaccine misinformation has already spread to an audience of 59 million followers. And yet "Analysis of a sample of anti-vaccine content that was shared or posted on Facebook and Twitter a total of 812,000 times between 1 February and 16 March 2021 shows that 65 percent of anti-vaccine content is attributable to the Disinformation Dozen...

"Analysis of anti-vaccine content posted to Facebook over 689,000 times in the last two months shows that up to 73 percent of that content originates with members of the Disinformation Dozen of leading online anti-vaxxers."

Which country will shoot the first movie in outer space? Russia is now "in a race with the United States to claim the achievement," reports NBC News.

36-year-old actress Yulia Peresild and 37-year-old director Klim Shepenko will complete Russia's cosmonaut-training program, ultimately taking two of the three seats aboard the October launch of Russia's Soyuz mission to the International Space Station: The Russian space agency, Roscosmos, announced Thursday that it had selected its crew to headline the film, which will be called "Challenge..."

Very little is known about the plot, which in many ways seems secondary to the spectacle. When Russia announced the project last year, Konstantin Ernst, the head of Russia's Channel One — which is working with Roscosmos on the film — said that it would not be a science fiction film, but a realistic depiction of near-term space travel. "It's a movie about how a person in no way connected with space exploration, due to various reasons and personal debt, ends up a month later in orbit," Ernst said in a September 2020 interview. "That's all I can tell you...."

The decision to fill the October Soyuz flight with a movie crew comes at an uncertain time for Russia's space program... In October, NASA paid for its final flight aboard Soyuz... Russia is now left to look for other means to help subsidize launch costs. One of those obvious sources — beyond funding from the state television network Channel One — is space tourism. Another Soyuz will launch in December, and rather than fill those seats with Russian cosmonauts, Moscow announced Thursday that two Japanese space tourists will take the ride.

China just successfully landed its first rover on Mars, becoming only the second nation to do so. Space.com reports: The Tianwen-1 mission, China's first interplanetary endeavor, reached the surface of the Red Planet Friday (May 14) at approximately 7:11 p.m. EDT (2311 GMT), though Chinese space officials have not yet confirmed the exact time and location of touchdown. Tianwen-1 (which translates to "Heavenly Questions") arrived in Mars' orbit in February after launching to the Red Planet on a Long March 5 rocket in July 2020. After circling the Red Planet for more than three months, the Tianwen-1 lander, with the rover attached, separated from the orbiter to begin its plunge toward the planet's surface. Once the lander and rover entered Mars' atmosphere, the spacecraft endured a similar procedure to the "seven minutes of terror" that NASA's Mars rovers have experienced when attempting soft landings on Mars.

A heat shield protected the spacecraft during the fiery descent, after which the mission safely parachuted down to the Utopia Planitia region, a plain inside of an enormous impact basin in the planet's northern hemisphere. Much like during NASA's Perseverance rover landing, Tianwen-1's landing platform fired some small, downward-facing rocket engines to slow down during the last few seconds of its descent. China's Mars rover, called Zhurong after an ancient fire god in Chinese mythology, will part ways with the lander by driving down a foldable ramp. Once it has deployed, the rover is expected to spend at least 90 Mars days (or about 93 Earth days; a day on Mars lasts about 40 minutes longer than a day on Earth) roving around on Mars to study the planet's composition and look for signs of water ice. Utopia Planitia is believed to contain vast amounts of water ice beneath the surface. It's also where NASA's Viking 2 mission touched down in 1976.

fahrbot-bot shares a report from Gizmodo: When pressed for oxygen, some fish and sea cucumbers will use their lower intestines to get a little extra out of their environment. Now, a team of Japanese researchers say that mammals are also capable of respirating through their rectal cavity, at least in a lab setting. The team's research is published today in the journal Med and describes the capacity for mice, rats, and pigs to survive longer and have more strength in low-oxygen circumstances when given oxygen gas or an oxygen-rich liquid through their rectums, in a process similar to an enema. While fish like loaches and catfish use a similar method to gain additional oxygen in the natural world, this doesn't appear to be an evolutionary adaptation for mammals. In other words, mammalian bodies can't naturally do this, but with a little push from modern science, it becomes possible. Previous research has seen oxygen injected directly into mammalian bloodstreams, prolonging the lives of rabbits, but the rectal approach to the low-oxygen problem is novel.

The experiment, while disturbing, was designed to find new ways to save the lives of people whose lungs are failing. These treatments prolonged the animals' survival in a low-oxygen setting by staving off respiratory failure. Mice were given both the gas and liquid oxygen delivery methods, while the rats and pigs only received the liquid treatment. In a lab-controlled hypoxic setting (a chamber that was 9.5% oxygenated), mice without the supplemental oxygenation died after about 11 minutes. With the treatment, three-quarters of the tested mice survived for nearly an hour in the same lethal conditions. ScienceAlert adds these details: Initially, their research subjects were mice, who were thankfully anesthetized for the next part. The researchers developed an oxygen ventilation system to be inserted anally; they induced hypoxia via tracheal intubation, and compared mice ventilated intestinally to control mice who received no ventilation. Of the control mice, not a single one survived longer than 11 minutes. This was in marked contrast to the mice receiving intestinal oxygen, 75 percent of which survived for 50 minutes.

According to a new study conducted by researchers at MIT, being corrected online just makes the original posters more toxic and obnoxious. From a report: Basically, the new thinking is that correcting fake news, disinformation, and horrible tweets at all is bad and makes everything worse. This is a "perverse downstream consequence for debunking," and is the exact title of MIT research published in the '2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.' The core takeaway is that "being corrected by another user for posting false political news increases subsequent sharing of low quality, partisan, and toxic content."

The MIT researchers' work is actually a continuation of their study into the effects of social media. This recent experiment started because the team had previously discovered something interesting about how people behave online. "In a recent paper published in Nature, we found that a simple accuracy nudge -- asking people to judge the accuracy of a random headline -- improved the quality of the news they shared afterward (by shifting their attention towards the concept of accuracy)," David Rand, an MIT researcher and co-author of the paper told Motherboard in an email. "In the current study, we wanted to see whether a similar effect would happen if people who shared false news were directly corrected," he said. "Direct correction could be an even more powerful accuracy prime -- or, it could backfire by making people feel defensive or focusing their attention on social factors (eg embarrassment) rather than accuracy."

The Indian government has told doctors to look out for signs of mucormycosis or "black fungus" in COVID-19 patients as hospitals report a rise in cases of the rare but potentially fatal infection. From a report: The state-run Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) said at the weekend that doctors treating COVID-19 patients, diabetics and those with compromised immune systems should watch for early symptoms including sinus pain or nasal blockage on one side of the face, one-sided headache, swelling or numbness, toothache and loosening of teeth.

The disease, which can lead to blackening or discolouration over the nose, blurred or double vision, chest pain, breathing difficulties and coughing blood, is strongly linked to diabetes. And diabetes can in turn be exacerbated by steroids such as dexamethasone, used to treat severe COVID-19. "There have been cases reported in several other countries - including the UK, U.S., France, Austria, Brazil and Mexico, but the volume is much bigger in India," said David Denning, a professor at Britain's Manchester University and an expert at the Global Action Fund for Fungal Infections (GAFFI) charity. Further reading about the 'black fungus': BBC; NPR, the New York Times, and the Guardian.