The Cornell Alliance for Science seeks to build "a significant international alliance of partners" to "correct misinformation and counter conspiracy theories" slowing progress on climate change, synthetic biology, agricultural innovations, and other issues.

Slashdot reader wooloohoo shares their article about research on Ghana's first gene-edited crop — a high-yielding sweet potato with increased beta carotone content. "For sweet potatoes, we want to look at how we can use the CRISPR-Cas9 system to increase beta carotene," said Samuel Acheampong of the University of Cape Coast's Department of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology, who has been working on the project for the past year. "Beta carotene is a big deal for us because as animals, when we eat beta carotene, our cells are able to convert them into vitamin A."

The World Health Organization estimates that between 250,000 and 500,000 children in developing nations go blind every year as a result of vitamin A deficiency, making it the world's leading preventable cause of childhood blindness. Some 50 percent of them die within a year of losing their sight. Respiratory illnesses and infectious and diarrheal diseases in children also have been linked to vitamin A deficiency. Acheampong is using CRISPR-Cas9 to knock out the genes responsible for the production of an enzyme in the sweet potato that converts beta carotene into other products. This will leave higher beta carotene content in the crop, which when consumed by humans will allow them to produce vitamin A. Sweet potato is a very popular vegetable in Ghana, making it ideal for a biofortification effort of this kind...

Additionally, Acheampong is researching how to increase the size of the crop's storage roots. "I'm looking at a set of genes which affects the transport of sugars in plants. So I'm trying to use the CRISPR genome editing to knock out some sets of genes so that there will be more flow of sugars in the crop, which will definitely lead to increase in the yield...."

He estimates it will take him up to five years to complete his research before any conversation can begin around putting the product in the hands of farmers. "Getting it to the market may take a long time, depending on regulations, etc.," he said.
In another article, The Alliance for Science cites a researcher with the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing who argues "it is unlikely that genome editing-based next generation breeding will completely displace conventional approaches; only when combined with other technologies, such as high-throughput phenotyping, genomic selection and speed breeding, can we guarantee the widespread implementation of genome editing in agriculture."

"This multidisciplinary approach will advance plant breeding to help secure a second Green Revolution in order to meet the increasing food demands of a rapidly growing global population under ever-changing climate conditions."

Despite America's vast population of nearly 330 million people, 43.6 million Americans have already received one or both doses of a Covid-19 vaccine.

Axios writes: The U.S. has carried out more vaccinations than any country in the world, and given a first dose to a higher percentage of its population (12%) than all but five countries: Israel, the Seychelles, the UAE, the U.K. and Bahrain. In fact, the U.S. is distributing doses three times as quickly as the EU, adjusted for population, and nearly five times as quickly as Canada.

The U.S. has some major advantages over most of the world. Not only does America have the money to reserve more doses than it could possibly use, it also has the capacity to manufacture them domestically. Canada's slow rollout and the recent dispute over doses between the EU and U.K. have underlined the difficulties of relying on imports...

It also helps that the two most effective vaccines on the market were developed entirely (Moderna) or partially (Pfizer/BioNTech) in the U.S.
Their article concludes that "Despite crumbling infrastructure and chaotic politics, the U.S. remains a scientific, technological and manufacturing powerhouse."

The Associated Press reports that America's daily inoculation average "climbed to 1.7 million shots per day last week," adding "but as many as double that number of doses are soon expected to be available on average each day."

Slashdot reader Rei writes: On 15 February, 2021, the paper Discrete SARS-CoV-2 antibody titers track with functional humoral stability was accepted for publication by the prestigious journal Nature — interesting not only for being a large-cohort study on COVID-19 reinfection, but for the presence of one of its coauthors: one Elon Reeve Musk. According to reporting, Musk — concerned in April 2020 with maintaining the schedule for the SpaceX crewed launch in May and wanting to make sure that an outbreak wouldn't set back plans — contacted academic researchers and worked with them to set up an antibody testing research programme. Over 4,000 SpaceX employees volunteered and were provided with periodic free testing at work to look for infection and monitor previously-infected people for reinfection. The programme gave SpaceX an advance heads up about upcoming threats, such as the growing wave in Texas in June, and continues to this day, with a new focus on mutant COVID strains.

The primary results of the study? Past infection provides a strong, although not perfect, barrier to reinfection; the level of antibodies strongly indicate the level of risk of reinfection; and this bodes well for vaccines, which tend to result in much higher antibody levels than infection.

The New York Times reports: A large analysis looked at hundreds of factors that may influence the risk of heart failure and found one dietary factor in particular that was associated with a lower risk: drinking coffee...

The analysis included extensive, decades-long data from three large health studies with 21,361 participants, and used a method called machine learning that uses computers to find meaningful patterns in large amounts of data. "Usually, researchers pick things they suspect would be risk factors for heart failure — smoking, for example — and then look at smokers versus nonsmokers," said the senior author, Dr. David P. Kao, an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Colorado. "But machine learning identifies variables that are predictive of either increased or decreased risk, but that you haven't necessarily thought of."

Using this technique, Dr. Kao and his colleagues found 204 variables that are associated with the risk for heart failure. Then they looked at the 41 strongest factors, which included, among others, smoking, marital status, B.M.I., cholesterol, blood pressure and the consumption of various foods. The analysis is in Circulation: Heart Failure. In all three studies, coffee drinking was associated more strongly than any other dietary factor with a decreased long-term risk for heart failure.

Drinking a cup a day or less had no effect, but two cups a day conferred a 31 percent reduced risk, and three cups or more reduced risk by 29 percent...

Should you start drinking coffee or increase the amount you already drink to reduce your risk for heart failure? "We don't know enough from the results of this study to recommend this," said Dr. Kao, adding that additional research would be needed.

Pfizer and BioNTech "have asked the U.S. health regulator to relax requirements for their COVID-19 vaccine to be stored at ultra-low temperatures, potentially allowing it to be kept in pharmacy freezers," reports Reuters, which adds that approval "could send a strong signal to other regulators around the world that may ease distribution of the shot in lower-income countries."

Slashdot reader FrankOVD shares more information from TechCrunch: Originally, the mRNA-based vaccine had to be maintained at ultra-low temperatures throughout the transportation chain in order to remain viable — between -76F and -112F... To date, the vaccine has relied largely on existing "cold-chain" infrastructure to be in place in order for it to be able to reach the areas where it's being used to inoculate patients... This development is just one example of how work continues on the vaccines that are already being deployed under emergency approvals by health regulators across the U.S. and elsewhere in the world. Pfizer and BioNTech say they're working on bringing those storage temp requirements down even further, so they could potentially approach the standard set by the Moderna jab....

The new requirements open up participation to a whole host of potential new players in supporting delivery and distribution — including ride-hailing and on-demand delivery players with large networks like Amazon, which has offered President Biden's administration its support, and Uber, which is already teamed up with Moderna on vaccine education programs. This also opens the door for participation from a range of startups and smaller companies in both the logistics and the care delivery space that don't have the scale or the specialized equipment to be able to offer extreme "cold-chain" storage.

"When NASA's Perseverance rover landed on Mars this week, it also brought the Linux operating system to the Red Planet," reports PC Magazine: The tidbit was mentioned in an interview NASA software engineer Tim Canham gave to IEEE Spectrum. The helicopter-like drone on board the Perseverance rover uses a Linux-powered software framework the space agency open-sourced a few years ago. "This the first time we'll be flying Linux on Mars. We're actually running on a Linux operating system," Canham said.

It also might be the first time NASA has brought a Linux-based device to Mars. "There isn't a previous use of Linux that I'm aware of, definitely on the previous rovers," Canham told PCMag in an email.

Past Mars rovers have used proprietary OSes, largely from the software company Wind River Systems. The same is true for the Perseverance rover itself; the machine has been installed with Wind River's VxWorks, which was used on past Mars missions.
The article also notes that the helicopter-like drone Ingenuity "was built using off-the-shelf parts, including Qualcomm's Snapdragon 801 processor, a smartphone chip."

"Ingenuity is purely a technology demonstration," notes ZDNet. "It's not designed to support the Perseverance mission, which is searching for signs of ancient life and collecting rock and dirt samples for later missions to return to Earth. Its mission is to show that it's possible to fly on Mars using commercial off-the-shelf hardware and open-source software."

Neel V. Patel, writing at MIT Technology Review: Einstein first predicted the existence of black holes when he published his theory of general relativity in 1916, describing how gravity shapes the fabric of spacetime. But astronomers didn't spot one until 1964, some 6,070 light-years away in the Cygnus constellation. Geiger counters launched into space detected cosmic x-rays coming from a region called Cygnus X-1. (We now know the cosmic rays are produced by black holes. Back then, scientists disagreed about what it was: Stephen Hawking famously bet physicist Kip Thorne that this signal was not from a black hole, but he conceded in 1990.) Now, some 57 years later, scientists have learned that the black hole at Cygnus X-1 is much more massive than first believed -- forcing us to once again rethink how black holes form and evolve. This time, the observations were taken from Earth's surface. "To some extent, the result was serendipitous," says James Miller-Jones of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research at Curtin University in Australia, the lead author of the new study, published in Science. "We had not initially set out to remeasure the distance and black hole mass, but when we had analyzed our data, we realized its full potential."

Black holes are objects so massive that not even light, let alone physical matter, is supposed to escape its gravitational pull. Yet sometimes one inexplicably spews jets of radiation and ionized matter into space. Miller-Jones and his team wanted to investigate how matter is sucked into and expelled from black holes, so they took a closer look at Cygnus X-1. They observed the black hole for six days using the Very Long Baseline Array, a network of 10 radio telescopes sited across North America from Hawaii to the Virgin Islands. The resolution is comparable to what would be required to spot a 10-centimeter object on the moon, and it's the same technique that the Event Horizon Telescope used to snap the first photo of a black hole. Using a combination of measurements involving radio waves and temperatures, the team modeled the precise orbits of both Cygnus X-1's black hole and the massive supergiant star HDE 226868 (the two objects orbit each other). Knowing the orbits of each object allowed the team to extrapolate their masses -- in the case of the black hole, 21 solar masses, which is about 50% more than once thought.

Her birth represents the first cloning of an endangered species native to North America, and may bring needed genetic diversity to the species. From a report: Last year, Ben Novak drove across the country to spend New Year's Eve with a black-footed ferret. Elizabeth Ann had just turned 21 days old -- surely a milestone for any ferret but a particularly meaningful one for Elizabeth Ann, the first of any native, endangered animal species in North America to be cloned. Mr. Novak, the lead scientist of the biotechnology nonprofit Revive & Restore, bought a trailer camper to drive his wife and identical twin toddlers from North Carolina to the National Black-footed Ferret Conservation Center near Fort Collins, Colo. (They made one pit stop in Texas to see Kurt, the first cloned Przewalski's horse.) Mr. Novak spent less than 15 minutes with Elizabeth Ann, whose black mask, feet and tail were just beginning to show through her downy white fur. "It felt like time stopped," Mr. Novak said. Thankfully, time has not stopped for Elizabeth Ann, who now looks bigger, browner and considerably more like a ferret. Her successful cloning is the culmination of a yearslong collaboration with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Revive & Restore, the for-profit company ViaGen Pets & Equine, San Diego Zoo Global and the Association of Zoos and Aquariums.

Cloned siblings are on the way, and potential (cloned) mates are already being lined up. If successful, the project could bring needed genetic diversity to the endangered species. And it marks another promising advance in the wider effort to use cloning to retrieve an ever-growing number of species from the brink of extinction. The black-footed ferret, the first species to be reintroduced to former habitats with the help of artificial insemination, has long been a model species for new conservation technologies. So it is fitting that the ferrets have become the second species to be cloned for this type of genetic rescue. (Elizabeth Ann follows in the footsteps of Kurt the horse.) "Pinch me," joked Oliver Ryder, the director of conservation genetics at San Diego Zoo Global, over a Zoom call. "The cells of this animal banked in 1988 have become an animal."

Science magazine: As Samuel West combed through a paper that found a link between watching cartoon violence and aggression in children, he noticed something odd about the study participants. There were more than 3000 -- an unusually large number -- and they were all 10 years old. "It was just too perfect," says West, a Ph.D. student in social psychology at Virginia Commonwealth University. Yet West added the 2019 study, published in Aggressive Behavior and led by psychologist Qian Zhang of Southwest University of Chongqing, to his meta-analysis after a reviewer asked him to cast a wider net. West didn't feel his vague misgivings could justify excluding it from the study pool. But after Aggressive Behavior published West's meta-analysis last year, he was startled to find that the journal was investigating Zhang's paper while his own was under review. It is just one of many papers of Zhang's that have recently been called into question, casting a shadow on research into the controversial question of whether violent entertainment fosters violent behavior. Zhang denies any wrongdoing, but two papers have been retracted. Others live on in journals and meta-analyses -- a "major problem" for a field with conflicting results and entrenched camps, says Amy Orben, a cognitive scientist at the University of Cambridge who studies media and behavior. And not just for the ivory tower, she says: The research shapes media warning labels and decisions by parents and health professionals.

The investigations were triggered by Illinois State University psychologist Joe Hilgard, who published a blog post last month cataloging his concerns about Zhang's work. Hilgard was initially impressed when he came across a 2018 paper of Zhang's in Youth & Society, another study with 3000 subjects. "I was like, holy smokes!" he says. The study found some teenagers were more aggressive after playing violent video games. Given the huge sample size, it had the potential to be a "powerful chunk of evidence," Hilgard says. But he found the paper's statistics mathematically impossible. Zhang and his co-authors reported high levels of statistical significance for their finding, but the reported differences in the effects of violent games versus nonviolent games were too small for that high statistical significance to be possible. Hilgard alerted Zhang and the journal, and Zhang submitted a correction. Hilgard says that made the statistics seem more plausible, but they were still incorrect. Hilgard says he found problems in other papers of Zhang's, such as nearly identical results reported in three different papers. He emailed Zhang and asked to see his data, but he says Zhang refused. Hilgard then contacted Dorothy Espelage, a psychologist at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and co-author with Zhang on multiple papers. She told Hilgard that Zhang had refused to send her the data, too. It was only after Hilgard asked Southwest University to investigate that Zhang sent Hilgard data for a Youth & Society paper on movie violence. But the data were odd, Hilgard says, and missing features normally found in similar experiments.

NASA's Perseverance rover has successfully touched down on the surface of Mars after surviving a blazing seven-minute plunge through the Martian atmosphere. The rover's clean landing sets the stage for a years-long journey to scour the Red Planet's Jezero Crater for ancient signs of life. From a report: "Touchdown confirmed," Swati Mohan, a member of NASA's entry, descent and landing team, said. "Perseverance is safely on the surface of Mars ready to begin seeking the signs of past life." The landing team of roughly 30 engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California jumped from their seats and cheered at the confirmation. Moments after touching down, Perseverance beamed back its first image from one of its 19 cameras. Perseverance hit Mars' atmosphere on time at 3:48PM ET at speeds of about 12,100 miles per hour, diving toward the surface in an infamously challenging sequence engineers call the "seven minutes of terror." With an 11-minute comms delay between Mars and Earth, the spacecraft had to carry out its seven-minute plunge at all by itself with a wickedly complex set of pre-programmed instructions. The moment we learned Perseverance had successfully landed.

It took six and a half months for Perseverance to travel from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida to the atmosphere of the red planet. It will now take about seven minutes to get from the atmosphere to the sandy ground. The highly-anticipated 293-million-mile journey of Perseverance is moments away from its conclusion. NASA's newest rover is set to touch down in Jerezo Crater at 12:55 p.m. Pacific. If all goes according to plan, Perseverance will begin its search for signs of ancient Martian life after conducting a series of system checks and making other preparations for its mission. You can watch the live feed right here -- or below.

When the Perseverance rover sets down on Mars on Thursday, another NASA spacecraft already there will be listening for the thump-thump that will result when the newcomer arrives. From a report: The hope is that these thumps will create enough shaking to be detected by InSight, a stationary NASA probe that arrived in 2018 to listen for marsquakes with an exquisitely sensitive seismometer. The InSight lander sits more than 2,000 miles to the east of where Perseverance is to land. "We have a reasonable chance of seeing it," said Benjamin Fernando, a graduate student at the University of Oxford in England and a member of the InSight science team. Perseverance will land on Mars at 3:55 p.m. Eastern time on Thursday. NASA Television will provide coverage of the event beginning at 2:15 p.m.

Unless something goes catastrophically wrong, the seismic signals that InSight might hear will not emanate from the rover itself. Perseverance is to be lowered to the surface from a hovering crane, bumping to the ground gently at slower than 2 miles per hour. Rather, scientists will be sifting through InSight's seismic data for signs of the impacts of two 170-pound blocks of tungsten metal that helped keep Perseverance in a stable, balanced spin during its 300-million-mile trip from Earth. At an altitude of 900 miles above Mars, they will be jettisoned as junk, and without parachutes or retrorockets to slow them down, they will then slam into the surface at some 9,000 m.p.h. "This enormous speed means that they'll make quite a substantial crater," Mr. Fernando said. In 2012, similar tungsten blocks from the Curiosity rover, which is almost the same design as Perseverance, left scars visible from orbit.

Massachusetts-based amateur historian Jim Hamilton, who developed the Free Fall Research Page -- an online database of nearly every imaginable human plummet, documents one case of a sky diver who, upon total parachute failure, was saved by bouncing off high-tension wires. Contrary to popular belief, water is an awful choice. Like concrete, liquid doesn't compress. Hitting the ocean is essentially the same as colliding with a sidewalk, Hamilton explains, except that pavement (perhaps unfortunately) won't "open up and swallow your shattered body." Popular Mechanics: With a target in mind, the next consideration is body position. To slow your descent, emulate a sky diver. Spread your arms and legs, present your chest to the ground, and arch your back and head upward. This adds friction and helps you maneuver. But don't relax. This is not your landing pose. The question of how to achieve ground contact remains, regrettably, given your predicament, a subject of debate. A 1942 study in the journal War Medicine noted "distribution and compensation of pressure play large parts in the defeat of injury." Recommendation: wide-body impact. But a 1963 report by the Federal Aviation Agency argued that shifting into the classic sky diver's landing stance -- feet together, heels up, flexed knees and hips -- best increases survivability. The same study noted that training in wrestling and acrobatics would help people survive falls. Martial arts were deemed especially useful for hard-surface impacts: "A 'black belt' expert can reportedly crack solid wood with a single blow," the authors wrote, speculating that such skills might be transferable.

The ultimate learn-by-doing experience might be a lesson from Japanese parachutist Yasuhiro Kubo, who holds the world record in the activity's banzai category. The sky diver tosses his chute from the plane and then jumps out after it, waiting as long as possible to retrieve it, put it on and pull the ripcord. In 2000, Kubo -- starting from 9,842 feet -- fell for 50 seconds before recovering his gear. A safer way to practice your technique would be at one of the wind-tunnel simulators found at about a dozen U.S. theme parks and malls. But neither will help with the toughest part: sticking the landing. For that you might consider -- though it's not exactly advisable -- a leap off the world's highest bridge, France's Millau Viaduct; its platform towers 891 feet over mostly spongy farmland. Water landings -- if you must -- require quick decision-making. Studies of bridge-jump survivors indicate that a feet-first, knife-like entry (aka "the pencil") best optimizes your odds of resurfacing. The famed cliff divers of Acapulco, however, tend to assume a head-down position, with the fingers of each hand locked together, arms outstretched, protecting the head. Whichever you choose, first assume the free-fall position for as long as you can. Then, if a feet-first entry is inevitable, the most important piece of advice, for reasons both unmentionable and easily understood, is to clench your butt.

The European Space Agency is on the hunt for a new, more diverse group of astronauts. From a report: This is the first time ESA has put out the call for more astronauts since 2008. Applications open March 31, and there are a few basic requirements for people hoping to make it as an ESA astronaut. Applicants must be citizens of a state associated with ESA and have a master's degree in a STEM field or have an experimental test pilot degree or test engineer, according to the space agency. "Candidates must have at least three years of relevant professional experience after graduation and be fluent in English," ESA said in a statement. "Good knowledge of another foreign language and any other additional language is a plus."

A significant portion of Cuba's available drinking water is lost through its leaky and antiquated pipelines -- more than 50 percent, by some estimates. From a report: In recent years, infrastructure problems have been compounded by droughts and rising temperatures. For much of the population, running water is available only sporadically -- in some cases, for one or two hours a day, every few days. While it flows, residents store the available water in cisterns or tanks, which then serve as potential breeding environments for mosquitoes.

Morgan Housel, on the art and power of storytelling: C. R. Hallpike is a respected anthropologist who once wrote a review of a young author's recent book on the history of humans. It states: "It would be fair to say that whenever his facts are broadly correct they are not new, and whenever he tries to strike out on his own he often gets things wrong, sometimes seriously ... [It is not] a contribution to knowledge."

Two things are notable here.

One is that the book's author doesn't seem to disagree with the assessment.

Another is that the author, Yuval Noah Harari, has sold over 27 million books, making him one of the bestselling contemporary authors in any field, and his book Sapiens -- which Hallpike was reviewing -- the most successful anthropology book of all time.

Harari recently said about writing Sapiens: "I thought, 'This is so banal!' ... There is absolutely nothing there that is new. I'm not an archeologist. I'm not a primatologist. I mean, I did zero new research... It was really reading the kind of common knowledge and just presenting it in a new way.

What Sapiens does have is excellent writing. Beautiful writing. The stories are captivating, the flow is effortless. Harari took what was already known and wrote it better than anyone had done before. The result was fame greater than anyone before him could imagine. Best story wins.

It's nothing to be ashamed of, because so many successes work this way.

The Civil War is probably the most well-documented period in American history. There are thousands of books analyzing every conceivable angle, chronicling every possible detail. But in 1990 Ken Burns' Civil War documentary became an instant phenomenon, with 39 million viewers and winning 40 major film awards. As many Americans watched Ken Burns' Civil War in 1990 as watched the Super Bowl that year. And all he did -- not to minimize it, because it's such a feat -- is take 130-year-old existing information and wove it into a (very) good story.

Bill Bryson is the same. His books fly off the shelves, which I understand drives the little-known academics who uncovered the things he writes about crazy. His latest work is basically an anatomy textbook. It has no new information, no discoveries. But it's so well written -- he tells such a good story -- that it became an instant New York Times bestseller and the Washington Post's Book of the Year. Charles Darwin didn't discover evolution, he just wrote the first and most compelling book about it. John Burr Williams had more profound insight on the topic of valuing companies than Benjamin Graham. But Graham knew how to write a good paragraph, so he became the legend.

The World Health Organization (WHO) on Monday listed AstraZeneca and Oxford University's COVID-19 vaccine for emergency use, widening access to the relatively inexpensive shot in the developing world. From a report: A WHO statement said it had approved the vaccine as produced by AstraZeneca-SKBio (Republic of Korea) and the Serum Institute of India. "We now have all the pieces in place for the rapid distribution of vaccines. But we still need to scale up production," said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO Director-General. The listing by the UN health agency comes days after a WHO panel provided interim recommendations on the vaccine, saying two doses with an interval of around 8 to 12 weeks must be given to all adults, and can be used in countries with the South African variant of the coronavirus as well. The AstraZeneca/Oxford shot has been hailed because it is cheaper and easier to distribute than some rivals, including Pfizer/BioNTech's, which was listed for emergency use by the WHO late in December.

Friday the New York Times (following up on reports from the Wall Street Journal) wrote that China had "refused to hand over" important raw data to a 14-member World Health Organization team investigating the origins of the coronavirus, reporting that "their Chinese counterparts were frustrated by the team's persistent questioning and demands for data."

But Saturday two of those 14 team members disputed that characterization, posting on Twitter that "This was NOT my experience" — even though the Times had quoted both of them to support its article.

First Peter Daszak, president of the U.S. national science academy's microbial threats forum, weighed in. "As lead of animal/environment working group I found trust and openness with my China counterparts. We DID get access to critical new data throughout. We DID increase our understanding of likely spillover pathways. New data included env. & animal carcass testing, names of suppliers to Huanan Market, analyses of excess mortality in Hubei, range of covid-like symptoms for months prior, sequence data linked to early cases & site visits w/ unvetted live Q&A etc. All in report coming soon!"

Then Thea Kølsen Fischer, a Danish epidemiologist on the team, tweeted that the Times hadn't accurately described her experience either. "We DID build up a good relationship in the Chinese/Int Epi-team! Allowing for heated arguments reflects a deep level of engagement in the room. Our quotes are intendedly twisted casting shadows over important scientific work."

Daszak reappeared to respond to her tweet, writing "Hear! Hear! It's disappointing to spend time with journalists explaining key findings of our exhausting month-long work in China, to see our colleagues selectively misquoted to fit a narrative that was prescribed before the work began. Shame on you @nytimes!"

Ironically, the next day the Times published a longer interview they'd done with Daszak, which acknowledges that Daszak "said that the visit had provided some new clues..."

The Times had even specifically asked him if China's attitude made their work difficult, to which Daszak explicitly had answered: no.

"Investigators from the World Health Organization (WHO) looking into the origins of coronavirus in China have discovered signs the outbreak was much wider in Wuhan in December 2019 than previously thought," reports CNN, "and are urgently seeking access to hundreds of thousands of blood samples from the city that China has not so far let them examine." The lead investigator for the WHO mission, Peter Ben Embarek, told CNN in a wide-ranging interview that the mission had found several signs of the more wide-ranging 2019 spread, including establishing for the first time there were over a dozen strains of the virus in Wuhan already in December. The team also had a chance to speak to the first patient Chinese officials said had been infected, an office worker in his 40s, with no travel history of note, reported infected on December 8.

The slow emergence of more detailed data gathered on the WHO's long-awaited trip into China may add to concerns voiced by other scientists studying the origins of the disease that it may have been spreading in China long before its first official emergence in mid-December.

Embarek, who has just returned to Switzerland from Wuhan, told CNN: "The virus was circulating widely in Wuhan in December, which is a new finding."

The WHO food safety specialist added the team had been presented by Chinese scientists with 174 cases of coronavirus in and around Wuhan in December 2019. Of these 100 had been confirmed by laboratory tests, he said, and another 74 through the clinical diagnosis of the patient's symptoms. Embarek said it was possible this larger number — of likely severe cases that had been noticed by Chinese doctors early on — meant the disease could have hit an estimated 1,000-plus people in Wuhan that December. "We haven't done any modeling of that since," he said. "But we know ...in big ballpark figures... out of the infected population, about 15% end up severe cases, and the vast majority are mild cases."

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: As the first COVID-19 vaccines arrived at Penn Medicine last year, Penn Today reported with great pride, "It was mRNA research conducted at Penn—by Drew Weissman, a professor of Infectious Diseases, and Katalin Karikó, an adjunct associate professor—that helped pave the way for the development of the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna COVID vaccines." While Weissman and Karikó are coronavirus vaccine heroes these days, Dr. David Scales — who studied under Weissman and Karikó 20 years ago as they worked on mRNA vaccines aimed to fight HIV — recalls How Our Brutal Science System Almost Cost Us A Pioneer Of mRNA Vaccines.

"When I got my own [COVID vaccine] shot," Scales writes, "I felt an added emotion: awe. You see, I witnessed some of the early scientific heartbreaks that came before the historic vaccine victories. And I found myself simply awestruck by the scientists I knew who persevered in spite of our system of scientific research. [...] While Weissman was an expert at designing experiments, I remember him most for his generosity. He made sure all contributors in the lab shared the credit, from the lab tech and lowly undergrad all the way to fellow researcher Karikó. Still, Karikó was struggling. Her science was fantastic, but she was less adept at the competitive game of science. She tried again and again to win grants, and each time, her applications were rejected. Eventually, in the mid-1990s, she suffered the academic indignity of demotion, meaning she was taken off the academic ladder that leads to becoming a professor. [...] But [Karikó] stuck to her passions. She was too committed to the promise of mRNA to switch to other, perhaps more easily fundable projects. Eventually, the university stopped supporting her."

"Academic science failed Karikó. But when she contacted me in 2015, I saw she had moved to the private sector, a common path for researchers when a university stops offering support. I was glad to see she had landed on her feet. And now, I watch in awe, like the rest of the world, as the technology she helped developed leads to one of the most spectacular victories in the history of science — a vaccine for a deadly pandemic developed in less than one year. So, my vaccination day was an emotional one. As the lipid-encapsulated mRNA molecules went into my arm, I reminisced about Kati and Drew, and the lab circa 2000. And I thought: You were right, Kati. You were right."