sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: The most advanced mind-controlled devices being tested in humans rely on tiny wires inserted into the brain. Now researchers have paved the way for a less invasive option. They've used ultrasound imaging to predict a monkey's intended eye or hand movements -- information that could generate commands for a robotic arm or computer cursor. If the approach can be improved, it may offer people who are paralyzed a new means of controlling prostheses without equipment that penetrates the brain.

A key next step will be to use the computer predictions in real time to guide a robot hand or a cursor. But ultrasound could still guide a robotic arm, as long as a computer could quickly direct the arm's fine motor movements from the user's cue. The team foresees many future improvements to the technique. "The technology is absolutely not at its full potential yet." The study has been published in the journal Neuron.

According to a Wall Street Journal investigation, hospitals are blocking confidential prices from web searches with special coding embedded on their websites. It's problematic because pricing information for hospital services must be disclosed under a new federal price transparency rule that went into effect on Jan. 1. Becker's Hospital Review reports: The code prevents pages from appearing in searches, such as a hospital's name and prices, computer experts told the Journal. While the prices are still there, it requires clicking through multiple layers of pages to find them. "It's technically there, but good luck finding it," Chirag Shah, an associate computer professor at the University of Washington, told the Journal. "It's one thing not to optimize your site for searchability, it's another thing to tag it so it can't be searched. It's a clear indication of intentionality."

Hospitals burying their pricing data include those owned by HCA Healthcare and Universal Health Services as well as the University of Pennsylvania Health System, NYU Langone Health, Beaumont Health and Novant Health, according to the Journal. Penn Medicine, NYU Langone Health and Novant Health told the publication they used the blocking code to direct patients first to information they "considered more useful than raw pricing data," for which they included web links. UHS uses the blocking code to ensure consumers acknowledge a disclosure statement before viewing prices and is making no effort to hide information, a hospital spokesperson told the Journal.

After the Journal reached out to hospitals about its discovery, the search-blocking code was removed from sites including those of HCA, Penn Medicine, Beaumont, Avera Health, Ballad Health and Northern Light Health. An HCA spokesperson told the publication the search blocker was "a legacy code that we removed," and Avera, Ballad, Beaumont and Northern Light said the code had been left on their websites by mistake.

It's been almost half a century since the three astronauts on board the Skylab 4 space mission famously fell out with mission control. Soon afterwards, reports began to circulate that they went on strike. But Ed Gibson, the only one of the crew still alive, says the idea that they stopped work is a myth. From a report: Bill Pogue got sick soon after the three astronauts arrived at the space station. It came as a surprise because Bill had been nicknamed "Iron Belly" during training at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. He could endlessly tolerate sitting in a rapidly rotating chair while moving his head backwards and forwards and side to side, without being sick. But this was the first time the three men had been in space and evidently resistance to motion sickness back on Earth didn't mean much up there.

Commander Jerry Carr suggested Bill eat a can of tomatoes to settle his stomach. Ed Gibson was sitting between the two men, and remembers the can floating past from left to right before his eyes. "Then I remember some bad noises coming from Bill, and a barf bag floating back from right to left," he says. "We felt discouraged because we knew we had so much work to do -- that's when we made our first mistake." Ed is 84 now and the Skylab 4 mission began in November 1973 but time hasn't dulled his most vivid memories -- the Earth from space, the blazing corona of the sun and the silence of a spacewalk. He's the last one of the astronauts able to share the story, because Jerry Carr and Bill Pogue have both died -- Carr last summer and Pogue in 2014. The Skylab space station was a research platform in orbit where astronauts helped scientists to study the human body's response to space flight, carried out experiments and made observations of the Sun and Earth. Skylab 4 was the final mission and as a result it had a long list of tasks to fulfil. The 84-day mission -- the longest ever at that point -- was on a tight schedule. Nasa was very concerned about someone getting sick, which would have meant losing precious time.

Nasa accepts that mission planners had not given the crew the typical period of adjustment to acclimatise to working weightlessly in orbit and had packed their schedules with large amounts of work. The number of spacewalks was also doubled, to four, to observe a newly discovered comet, Kohoutek. So the astronauts were already under pressure when they made their first bad decision. "We wanted to get organised before starting a big flurry with the ground so we decided to delay telling them about Bill being sick," says Ed. But they had forgotten that everything they said on board was being recorded, and that mission control was listening in. It wasn't long before the voice of Astronaut Office chief Alan Shepard came crackling over the radio from down in mission control, an exchange also broadcast to the public. "He got on the line and read us the riot act for not telling them immediately," says Ed. "Al was OK, we just didn't like being chewed out in front of the whole world."

Summers in the Northern Hemisphere could last nearly six months by the year 2100 if global warming continues unchecked, according to a recent study that examined how climate change is affecting the pattern and duration of Earth's seasons. From a report: The study, published last month in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, found that climate change is making summers hotter and longer, while shrinking the three other seasons. Scientists say the irregularities could have a range of serious implications, affecting human health and agriculture to the environment. "This is the biological clock for every living thing," said the study's lead author, Yuping Guan, a physical oceanographer at the State Key Laboratory of Tropical Oceanography at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. "People argue about temperature rise of 2 degrees or 3 degrees, but global warming changing the seasons is something everyone can understand."

Guan and his colleagues combed through daily climate data from 1952 to 2011 to pinpoint the start and end of each season in the Northern Hemisphere. They found that over the nearly 60-year period, summers grew from an average of 78 to 95 days long. Winters, on average, shortened from 76 to 73 days, and the spring and autumn seasons similarly contracted. On average, the spring seasons shrank from 124 days to 115 days, and autumns shortened from 87 days to 82 days. The scientists used the findings to build a model to project how the seasons might change in the future. They discovered that if the pace of climate change continues unmitigated, summers in the Northern Hemisphere could last nearly six months, while winters could span less than two months.

The BBC reports: The number of daily Covid-19 vaccine doses administered in the UK has hit a record high for a third consecutive day. A combined total of 844,285 first or second doses were given on Saturday, up from 711,157 on Friday. On Twitter, Prime Minister Boris Johnson thanked "everyone involved".

More than 27.6 million people in the UK — more than half the adult population — have now received at least one dose of a vaccine... Of the vaccinations administered on Saturday, 752,308 were first doses and 91,977 were second, meaning 2,228,772 people in the UK have now been fully vaccinated.
How does that compare to other regions? In the USA — which has roughly five times the UK's population — 81.4 million people have received at least one dose of vaccine, representating about 24.5% of the eligible population. But 41.9 million Americans have been fully vaccinated (according to figures compiled by the Washington Post).

And here's some more figures from the Los Angeles Times, including vaccination stats for the state of California — roughly 60% of the UK's population: The last six days have seen the six highest single-day totals of shots given out statewide, according to data compiled by the Los Angeles Times. During that stretch, roughly 2.35 million doses were administered statewide — including 344,489 on Thursday and 387,015 on Friday... To date, nearly 13.8 million shots have been administered statewide [and] 23.5% of Californians have received at least one vaccine dose — a proportion that ranks 33rd out of all states and U.S. territories, according to data from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

By comparison, 31.4% of New Mexico's population has gotten at least one shot, as have 29.6% of Alaskans and 29% of those living in South Dakota. California measures up better compared with more populous states. As of Friday, 24.3% of residents had received one shot in Pennsylvania, 24.2% in New York, 22.2% in Florida and 20.9% in Texas, CDC data show.. Roughly 11.8% of all Californians have been fully vaccinated. California is somewhat ahead of the national curve when it comes to vaccinating its older residents. Roughly 71.9% of residents ages 65 and older have received at least one dose, according to the CDC, compared with the nationwide figure of 67.1%.

"If that first person who brought that into the Huanan market had decided to not go that day, or even was too ill to go and just stayed at home, that or other early super-spreading events might not have occurred," says Michael Worobey, a professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Arizona. "We may never have even known about it!"

Worobey worked a new study published in the journal Science, which CNN describes as concluding that "The coronavirus pandemic almost didn't happen." Only bad luck and the packed conditions of the Huanan seafood market in Wuhan — the place the pandemic appears to have begun — gave the virus the edge it needed to explode around the globe, the researchers reported in the journal Science. "It was a perfect storm — we know now that it had to catch a lucky break or two to actually firmly become established," Worobey told CNN...

The team employed molecular dating, using the rate of ongoing mutations to calculate how long the virus has been around. They also ran computer models to show when and how it could have spread, and how it did spread... The study indicates only about a dozen people were infected between October and December, Worobey said... What's needed is an infected person and a lot of contact with other people — such as in a densely packed seafood market. "If the virus isn't lucky enough to find those circumstances, even a well-adapted virus can blip out of existence," Worobey said.

"It gives you some perspective — these events are probably happening much more frequently than we realize. They just don't quite make it and we never hear about them," Worobey said...

In the models the team ran, the virus only takes off about 30% of the time. The rest of the time, the models show it should have gone extinct after infecting a handful of people.

Five cities on Mars, home to one million people? That's the vision of architecture studio ABIBOO, which has drawn up designs based on the latest scientific research — and created an impressive three-and-a-half minute video to showcase it. "According to the architecture company's analysis, the construction can start by 2054," reports EuroNews, "and it could be built by 2100 — that is — when the first community could start living there..." "Water is one of the great advantages that Mars offers, it helps to be able to get the proper materials for the construction. Basically, with the water and the Co2, we can generate carbon and with the carbon, we can generate steel," says Alfredo Muñoz [founder of the architecture studio]. The architecture company plans to use exclusively Martian materials for the construction...

The Mars city project is part of scientific work organised by The Mars Society and developed by the SONet network, an international team of scientists and academics.
ABIBOO envisions "vertical cities" with large green spaces powered by solar panels, with inhabitants surviving on a plant-based diet from the greenhouse-grown crops (which also produce oxygen). The communities would be connected by elevators and tunnels, "all built into the side of a cliff to protect inhabitants from atmospheric pressure and radiation."

Muñoz argues that rather than repeating earth's mistakes of damaging the planet, careful planning can "try to minimize or ensure that new colonizations on other planets happen sustainably."

"New vaccine trials hold great promise in the management of an East African strain of African swine fever, one of the most devastating diseases to afflict pigs," writes Cornell's Alliance for Science (a group who gives its mission as correcting misinformation and countering conspiracy theories slowing progress on issues including synthetic biology and agricultural innovations).

Slashdot reader wooloohoo shares their report: Scientists at the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) are employing CRISPR Cas9 editing and synthetic biology to modify the ASFV genome in order to attenuate the virus for a live vaccine to help reduce deaths from African swine fever. Up to 10 vaccine candidates have been lined up for tests, in a project that commenced in 2016...

African swine fever is present in 26 African countries, Steinaa observed, as well as in parts of Asia and Europe. An effective vaccine could be a breakthrough for pig farmers across the globe... With a 100 percent fatality rate and a highly contagious nature, African swine fever poses a potent threat to the global pig farming industry. The rapid spread of the disease portends social and economic disruptions wherever it strikes.

"A pallet of batteries was released from the International Space Station last week, becoming the heaviest single piece of junk ever jettisoned from the station," reports UPI: Mission controllers in Houston commanded the Canadarm2 robotic arm to release an external pallet loaded with the 2.9 tons of nickel-hydrogen batteries into Earth's orbit Thursday morning. "It is safely moving away from the station and will orbit Earth between two to four years before burning up harmlessly in the atmosphere," NASA said in a statement.
Gizmodo shares a photo of the pallet orbiting 265 miles (427 km) above Chile. And they add that this chain of events starte in 2011 when NASA decided to switch the Space Station from nickel-hydrogen batteries to lithium-ion batteries. This effort required four supply missions from the Japanese H-II Transfer Vehicle (HTV) cargo spacecraft, 13 different astronauts, and 14 spacewalks, in which 48 nickel-hydrogen batteries were replaced by 24 lithium-ion batteries...

"It used to be that it wasn't a big deal to toss stuff from ISS because very few satellites were below it [at altitudes below 250 miles (400 km)], " Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, explained in an email. "That's not so true any more with a bunch of cubesats and with recently launched Starlinks during orbit raising. So I have concerns."

To which he added: "I don't immediately see what else they could have done except fly a whole extra HTV mission just to get rid of it."

According to the European Space Agency, around 34,000 objects larger than 3.9 inches (10 cm) are currently in orbit around Earth, in addition to millions of tinier objects, such as tools and bits of spacecraft. The volume of objects in space, both functional and non-functional, is steadily increasing, prompting concerns of potential collisions and even more orbital debris.
A NASA representative told Gizmodo their ballistics officers "indicate no threat" of the pallet smashing into other space objects, but added "this item, like all, will be tracked by U.S. Space Command."

couchslug shares a report from Ars Technica: At least five infants and children in Nevada have suffered acute non-viral hepatitis, resulting in liver failure, after drinking "alkalized" water by the brand "Real Water," local and federal regulators reported this week. At least six others fell ill with less severe conditions after drinking the water -- and additional reports continue to surface.

The initial five infants and children with liver failure fell ill in November 2020 and required hospitalization, but they have since recovered. They lived in four different households in southern Nevada. The other six ill people -- three adults and three children -- came from at least two of those same households and reported vomiting, nausea, loss of appetite, and fatigue, according to the Southern Nevada Health District. The health district is working to investigate the cases with the Food and Drug Administration. It's not yet clear what caused the illnesses but "to date, the consumption of 'Real Water' brand alkaline water was found to be the only common link identified between all the cases," the health district said." The FDA advises against drinking, cooking, selling, or serving "Real Water" alkaline water until more information is known. Real Water is asking that all retailers pull the product from the shelf immediately.

"Real Water claims that its water -- which is sold throughout the Southwest -- is infused with negative ions and has a pH of 9.0," reports Ars Technica. "The company makes vague references to unproven health benefits and suggests drinking the water leads to 'increased cellular hydration.' There are no established benefits to alkaline diets and water, and the human body maintains its own healthy pH." Two lawsuits have already been filed against the company.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: Saturn's frigid moon Titan has long intrigued scientists searching for life in the Solar System. Its surface is coated in organic hydrocarbons, and its icy crust is thought to cover a watery ocean. An asteroid or comet slamming into the moon could theoretically mix these two ingredients, according to a new study, with the resulting impact craters providing an ideal place for life to get started.

The idea is "very exciting," says Lea Bonnefoy, a planetary scientist and Titan expert at the University of Paris. "If you have a lot of liquid water creating a temporary warm pool on the surface, then you can have conditions that would be favorable for life," she says. And, "If you have organic material cycling from the surface into the ocean, then that makes the ocean a bit more habitable."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBC.ca: The scientist who won the race to deliver the first widely used coronavirus vaccine says people can rest assured the shots are safe, and that the technology behind it will soon be used to fight another global scourge -- cancer. Ozlem Tureci, who founded the German company BioNTech with her husband, Ugur Sahin, was working on a way to harness the body's immune system to tackle tumors when they learned last year of an unknown virus infecting people in China. Over breakfast, the couple decided to apply the technology they'd been researching for two decades to the new threat.

Britain authorized BioNTech's mRNA vaccine for use in December, followed a week later by Canada. Dozens of other countries, including the U.S., have followed suit and tens of millions of people worldwide have since received the shot developed together with U.S. pharmaceutical giant Pfizer. [...] As BioNTech's profile has grown during the pandemic, so has its value, adding much-needed funds the company will be able to use to pursue its original goal of developing a new tool against cancer. The vaccine made by BioNTech-Pfizer and U.S. rival Moderna uses messenger RNA, or mRNA, to carry instructions into the human body for making proteins that prime it to attack a specific virus. The same principle can be applied to get the immune system to take on tumors.

"We have several different cancer vaccines based on mRNA," said Tureci. Asked when such a therapy might be available, Tureci said "that's very difficult to predict in innovative development. But we expect that within only a couple of years, we will also have our vaccines [against] cancer at a place where we can offer them to people." For now, Tureci and Sahin are trying to ensure the vaccines governments have ordered are delivered and that the shots respond effectively to any new mutation in the virus.

Tiny plastic particles in the lungs of pregnant rats pass rapidly into the hearts, brains and other organs of their foetuses, research shows. It is the first study in a live mammal to show that the placenta does not block such particles. From a report: The experiments also showed that the rat foetuses exposed to the particles put on significantly less weight towards the end of gestation. The research follows the revelation in December of small plastic particles in human placentas, which scientists described as "a matter of great concern." Earlier laboratory research on human placentas donated by mothers after birth has also shown polystyrene beads can cross the placental barrier. Microplastic pollution has reached every part of the planet, from the summit of Mount Everest to the deepest oceans, and people are already known to consume the tiny particles via food and water, and to breathe them in.

The highly contagious variant first identified in the U.K. likely accounts for up to 30% of Covid-19 infections in the United States, White House Chief Medical Advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci said Friday. From a report: The variant, called B.1.1.7, has also been reported in at least 94 countries and detected in 50 jurisdictions in the U.S., Fauci said during a White House news briefing on the pandemic, adding that the numbers are likely growing. The U.K. first identified the B.1.1.7 strain, which appears to spread more easily and quickly than other variants, last fall. It has since spread across the world, including the U.S., Fauci said. U.S. researchers have identified 5,567 cases through genetic sequencing as of Thursday, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. U.S. health officials say the variant could become the dominant strain in the U.S. by the end of this month or in early April. New variants are especially a concern for public health officials as they could become more resistant to antibody treatments and vaccines. Top health officials, including Fauci, have urged Americans to get vaccinated as quickly as possible, saying the virus can't mutate if it can't infect hosts and replicate.

Microsoft unveiled new technology to boost government and health care organizations' vaccine management systems, including scheduling shot appointments and monitoring results, to fix shortcomings weeks after the company's initial custom-built programs ran aground in a few states. From a report: The Microsoft Vaccine Management product released Friday is made up of features and new apps that the software company said will improve upon and fix the glitches that occurred when its previous effort, the Vaccination Registration and Application System, failed to work properly in New Jersey and Washington D.C. The new software "incorporates lessons learned from VRAS regarding scalable architecture, improved user experiences for residents and health care workers," the company said in an email. It also uses health care standards for information transfer so data can be exported more quickly to other record systems, such as electronic medical records. The software also addresses other issues that hampered the previous option, including requiring users to pre-register before seeking a Covid-19 vaccine appointment and providing a way to proactively handle spikes in demand.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: A thermonuclear bomb might be ticking deep in the cores of some dead stars. A new theoretical study traces out how certain stellar corpses known as white dwarfs could accumulate a critical mass of uranium that would trigger a massive supernova explosion.

The findings could yield insights into the destruction habits of white dwarfs, which are responsible for creating heavy elements like iron and nickel. White dwarf supernovae light up their surroundings with the power of 5 billion Suns, and astronomers have used them as 'standard candles' to measure vast distances across the cosmos. But such blasts are still not entirely understood, and the new study could account for certain, anomalously dim observations of this type of supernovae. The findings appeared on the preprint server arXiv this month and have been accepted for publication in Physical Review Letters.

fahrbot-bot shares a report from Phys.Org: Much of the carbon in space is believed to exist in the form of large molecules called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). Since the 1980s, circumstantial evidence has indicated that these molecules are abundant in space, but they have not been directly observed. Now, a team of researchers led by MIT Assistant Professor Brett McGuire has identified two distinctive PAHs in a patch of space called the Taurus Molecular Cloud (TMC-1). PAHs were believed to form efficiently only at high temperatures -- on Earth, they occur as byproducts of burning fossil fuels, and they're also found in char marks on grilled food. But the interstellar cloud where the research team observed them has not yet started forming stars, and the temperature is about 10 degrees above absolute zero.

This discovery suggests that these molecules can form at much lower temperatures than expected, and it may lead scientists to rethink their assumptions about the role of PAH chemistry in the formation of stars and planets, the researchers say. "What makes the detection so important is that not only have we confirmed a hypothesis that has been 30 years in the making, but now we can look at all of the other molecules in this one source and ask how they are reacting to form the PAHs we're seeing, how the PAHs we're seeing may react with other things to possibly form larger molecules, and what implications that may have for our understanding of the role of very large carbon molecules in forming planets and stars," says McGuire, who is a senior author of the new study. The study appears today in the journal Science.

A digital certificate to kick-start foreign travel should be given to citizens across the EU "without discrimination," officials say. From a report: The aim is to enable anyone vaccinated against Covid-19, or who has tested negative or recently recovered from the virus to travel within the EU. The 27 member states will decide how to use the new digital certificate. Vaccine passports have faced opposition from some EU member states over concerns they might be discriminatory. Some argue that they would enable a minority to enjoy foreign travel without restrictions while others, such as young people who are not seen as a priority for inoculation, continue to face measures such as quarantine. European Commission officials have made clear they want to avoid discrimination.

Another issue raised has been that data on the efficacy of vaccines in preventing a person from carrying or passing on the virus is incomplete. Ahead of the EU's announcement, the World Health Organization (WHO) said that it was working to "create an international trusted framework" for safe travel, but that vaccinations should not be a condition. Separately, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has threatened to withhold exporting vaccines to the UK and any other countries outside the EU that do not supply doses in a reciprocal way. "We're still waiting for doses to come from the UK," she said. "So, this is an invitation to show us that there are also doses from the UK coming to the European Union."

President Joe Biden is expected to nominate former Sen. Bill Nelson of Florida to lead NASA, settling on a longtime booster of the space program to lead the agency's return to the moon, POLITICO reported Thursday, citing sources. From the report: If confirmed by the Senate, Nelson would lead the space agency as it partners with the new crop of private space companies to establish a long-term presence on the lunar surface in preparation for sending astronauts to Mars. A Senate staffer and a second source familiar with the decision told POLITICO that the administration has picked Nelson, and that the announcement will come on Friday. Both sources spoke on background because they were not authorized to speak ahead of the formal announcement. Nelson, 78, who himself spent six days in orbit when he flew to space in 1986 aboard the Space Shuttle Columbia, served as the top Democrat on the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee during his 18 years in Congress, where he was instrumental in establishing many of NASA's current priorities.

AmiMoJo shares a report from ScienceAlert: The menagerie of bacterial and fungal species living among us is ever growing -- and this is no exception in low-gravity environments, such as the International Space Station (ISS). Researchers from the United States and India working with NASA have now discovered four strains of bacteria living in different places in the ISS -- three of which were, until now, completely unknown to science.

Three of the four strains were isolated back in 2015 and 2016 -- one was found on an overhead panel of the ISS research stations, the second was found in the Cupola, the third was found on the surface of the dining table; the fourth was found in an old HEPA filter returned to Earth in 2011. All four of the strains belong to a family of bacteria found in soil and freshwater; they are involved in nitrogen fixation, plant growth, and can help stop plant pathogens. Basically, good bacteria to have around if you're growing things. The research has been published in Frontiers in Microbiology.