fahrbot-bot shares a report from Phys.Org: A team of astronomers led by the University of Arizona has observed a luminous quasar 13.03 billion light-years from Earth -- the most distant quasar discovered to date. Dating back to 670 million years after the Big Bang, when the universe was only 5% its current age, the quasar hosts a supermassive black hole equivalent to the combined mass of 1.6 billion suns.

In addition to being the most distant -- and by extension, earliest -- quasar known, the object is the first of its kind to show evidence of an outflowing wind of super-heated gas escaping from the surroundings of the black hole at a fifth of the speed of light. In addition to revealing a strong quasar-driven wind, the new observations also show intense star formation activity in the host galaxy where the quasar, formally designated J0313-1806, is located. The researchers will present their findings, which have been accepted for publication in Astrophysical Journal Letters, during a press conference and a scientific talk at the 237th Meeting of the American Astronomical Society, which will be held virtually Jan. 11-15.

Razer has created a concept reusable N95 respirator called Project Hazel, featuring Chroma RGB LEDs and microphones and amplifiers to project your voice. The Verge reports: It's a concept design with a glossy outside shell made of waterproof and scratch-resistant recycled plastic, which is transparent to allow for lip-reading and seeing facial cues when you chat with people. Currently, there isn't a price or release date attached. Razer refers to Project Hazel as a surgical N95, but it hasn't yet earned any of the necessary approvals and certifications from the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or Occupational Safety and Health Administration. In a statement to The Verge, Razer said it is working with a team of medical experts and scientists who are helping to develop the mask.

The main features of this mask lie within its two circular zones that flank your mouth. They're used for ventilation, giving the device an almost futuristic gas mask look. Razer claims Project Hazel will use active disc-type ventilators, filtering air that's breathed in, as well as the CO2 that's being exhaled. The company adds that it will be certified to filter 95 percent of airborne particles, including the COVID-19 virus and other common pathogens. [...] Microphones and amplifiers embedded in the ventilators will project your voice through the mask, so you won't have to worry about sounding muffled. Razer told us that it's working with THX sound engineers to find a balance in terms of how loud the speakers should be for accessibility purposes. [...] Each of the respirator-meets-amplifier rings can glow in the color of your choosing. And when it gets dark, a set of LEDs activate automatically to shine light on your mouth so others can still see you talk. The company also envisions that each mask will include a large charging case that sterilizes the mask with UV light when it's not in use.

According to Reuters, the CDC is expected to sign an order on Tuesday requiring nearly all international air travelers to test negative for COVID-19 within 72 hours of departure. Those under 2 and passengers connecting through the UK are exempt. From the report: The new rules are to take effect two weeks from the day they are signed by CDC Director Mark Redfield, which would be Jan. 26. The CDC has been urgently pressing for an expansion of the requirements with the Trump administration for weeks. One remaining issue is how to address some countries that have limited testing capacity and how the CDC would address travel to those countries, the sources said.

At a White House meeting on Monday, Redfield again made an urgent case to adopt the testing requirements as new strains of COVID-19 are identified in different parts of the world. He raised concerns that vaccines could potentially not be effective against new strains, sources said. U.S. officials do not plan to drop restrictions that were adopted starting in March that ban most non-U.S. citizens who have been in most of Europe, the United Kingdom and Brazil as soon as possible, the sources said. They added that public health officials are sympathetic to the push to lift the restrictions that apply only to a limited number of countries.

NASA's InSight lander on Mars and the Juno orbiter at Jupiter have new leases on life. From a report: The spacecraft are expected to continue gathering data about their respective planetary targets during their newly extended missions, allowing scientists to learn more about seismic activity on Mars and turn their attention to the moons of Jupiter. Juno's mission has been extended to September 2025 or whenever its life ends with a crash into Jupiter's atmosphere. InSight will continue its mission to study Mars' geology and seismic activity from the Martian surface through December 2022. Both missions are expected to make good use of their extended time at Jupiter and Mars. InSight's extra two years will see the spacecraft collect more data on marsquakes to help create a long-term dataset that scientists can refer to for years to come, according to NASA. Juno will broaden the scope of its studies to observe Jupiter's rings and moons including flybys of Ganymede, Europa and Io.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Failed blood-testing unicorn Theranos trashed vital incriminating evidence of its fraud, prosecutors said on Monday. The imploded startup's extensive testing data over three years, including its accuracy and failure rate, was "stored on a specially-developed SQL database called the Laboratory Information System (LIS)," according to a filing [PDF] in the fraud case against Theranos's one-time CEO Elizabeth Holmes and COO Sunny Balwani. The database "even flagged blood test results that might require immediate medical attention, and communicated this to the patient's physician," we're told.

Theranos claimed to have perfected technology that would allow industry standard blood tests to be run at great speed and with just a drop of blood, revolutionizing the health industry, and causing the business to be valued at $10bn. The reality, however, was that for one set of tests, the failure rate was 51.3 per cent. What does that mean? Prosecutors explain: "In other words, Theranos's TT3 blood test results were so inaccurate, it was essentially a coin toss whether the patient was getting the right result. The data was devastating."

So devastating that the database was subpoenaed by a grand jury digging into fraud claims against Holmes and Balwani. But when investigators turned to take a copy of the database, guess what? From the filing: "On or about August 31, 2018 -- three months after a federal grand jury issued a subpoena requesting a working copy of this database -- the LIS was destroyed. The government has never been provided with the complete records contained in the LIS, nor been given the tools, which were available within the database, to search for such critical evidence as all Theranos blood tests with validation errors. The data disappeared."

CNN reports: When President Donald Trump signed the $2.3 trillion coronavirus relief and government funding bill into law in December, so began the 180-day countdown for US intelligence agencies to tell Congress what they know about UFOs.

No, really.

The director of National Intelligence and the secretary of defense have a little less than six months now to provide the congressional intelligence and armed services committees with an unclassified report about "unidentified aerial phenomena." It's a stipulation that was tucked into the "committee comment" section of the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2021, which was contained in the massive spending bill. That report must contain detailed analyses of UFO data and intelligence collected by the Office of Naval Intelligence, the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force and the FBI, according to the Senate intelligence committee's directive...

A spokesperson for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence confirmed the news to the fact-checking website Snopes.

Slashdot reader the_newsbeagle shares an article from IEEE Spectrum: Many associate XPrize with a $10-million award offered in 1996 to motivate a breakthrough in private space flight. But the organization has since held other competitions related to exploration, ecology, and education. And in November, they launched the Pandemic Response Challenge, which will culminate in a $500,000 award to be split between two teams that not only best predict the continuing global spread of COVID-19, but also prescribe policies to curtail it...

For Phase 1, teams had to submit prediction models by 22 December... Up to 50 teams will make it to Phase 2, where they must submit a prescription model... The top two teams will split half a million dollars. The competition may not end there. Amir Banifatemi, XPrize's chief innovation and growth officer, says a third phase might test models on vaccine deployment prescriptions. And beyond the contest, some cities or countries might put some of the Phase 2 or 3 models into practice, if Banifatemi can find adventurous takers.

The organizers expect a wide variety of solutions. Banifatemi says the field includes teams from AI strongholds such as Stanford, Microsoft, MIT, Oxford, and Quebec's Mila, but one team consists of three women in Tunisia. In all, 104 teams from 28 countries have registered. "We're hoping that this competition can be a springboard for developing solutions for other really big problems as well," Miikkulainen says. Those problems include pandemics, global warming, and challenges in business, education, and healthcare. In this scenario, "humans are still in charge," he emphasizes. "They still decide what they want, and AI gives them the best alternatives from which the decision-makers choose."

But Miikkulainen hopes that data science can help humanity find its way. "Maybe in the future, it's considered irresponsible not to use AI for making these policies," he says.
For the Covid-19 competition, Banifatemi emphasized that one goal was "to make the resulting insights available freely to everyone, in an open-source manner — especially for all those communities that may not have access to data and epidemiology divisions, statisticians, or data scientists."

"As COVID-19 relentlessly infects more and more of us, scientists are getting a close look at the strange and frightening damage it can inflict on our bodies," writes Science Alert (in an article shared by long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo): We've known since early in the pandemic this disease wreaks havoc on more than just the respiratory system, also causing gastrointestinal conditions, heart damage and blood clotting disorders. Now, a year into the pandemic, in-depth autopsies of COVID-19 patients have revealed greater details of widespread inflammation and damage in brain tissues. This may help explain the deluge of neurological symptoms that have manifested in some patients, from headaches, memory loss, dizziness, weakness and hallucinations to more severe seizures and strokes.

Some estimate that up to 50 percent of those hospitalised with COVID-19 could have neurological symptoms that can leave people struggling to do even common daily tasks like preparing a meal. "We were completely surprised. Originally, we expected to see damage that is caused by a lack of oxygen," said physician and clinical director at National Institute of Health (NIH), Avindra Nath. "Instead, we saw multifocal areas of damage that is usually associated with strokes and neuroinflammatory diseases...."

Their report was published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
The article also remembers a September remark by a University of Liverpool neurologist to Nature magazine back in September who had also suggested possible neurological symptoms from COVID-19. "We've seen this group of younger people without conventional risk factors who are having strokes, and patients having acute changes in mental status that are not otherwise explained."

The Weather Channel reports: One main reason humans need to get a flu vaccine annually: flu strains mutate regularly so vaccines need to be slightly altered every year. During past flu seasons, the CDC has noted a vaccine effectiveness range between 40-60%, and a reduced the risk of flu-related illness by 40-60% within the overall population. There are, however, several "universal" flu vaccines currently being studied that aim to make annual flu vaccinations a thing of the past. In fact, according to the American Society for Microbiology, some of these vaccine candidates are in phase 2 and phase 3 trials right now.
Now UPI reports: Researchers believe they are one step closer to a "universal" flu vaccine, even as concerns over the seasonal virus move to the back burner during the COVID-19 pandemic. T cells found in the lungs may hold the key to long-lasting immunity against influenza A, the more common and often more severe form of the virus, according to the researchers behind a study published Friday by Science Immunology.

These cells, which the researchers call resident helper T cells, help the body initiate antiviral responses against new influenza strains even after experience with only one type of the virus, the researchers said. This type of "generalized" immune response, against all virus strains, is not possible with the currently available yearly vaccine formulations, they said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Genetic differences between identical twins can begin very early in embryonic development, according to a study that researchers say has implications for examining the effects of nature versus nurture. Identical -- or monozygotic -- twins come from a single fertilized egg that splits in two. They are important research subjects because they are thought to have minimal genetic differences. This means that when physical or behavioral differences emerge, environmental factors are presumed to be the likely cause. But the new research, published on Thursday in the journal Nature Genetics, suggests the role of genetic factors in shaping these differences has been underestimated.

[Kari Stefansson, the co-author of the paper and head of Iceland's deCODE genetics] and his team sequenced the genomes of 387 pairs of identical twins and their parents, spouses and children in order to track genetic mutations. They measured mutations that occurred during embryonic growth and found that identical twins differed by an average of 5.2 early developmental mutations. In 15% of twins, the number of diverging mutations was higher. When a mutation happened in the first few weeks of embryonic development, it would be expected to be widespread both in an individual's cells and in those of their offspring.

In one of the pairs of twins studied, for example, a mutation was present in all cells in one sibling's body -- meaning it is likely to have happened very early in development -- but not at all in the other twin. Stefansson said that out of the initial mass that would go on to form the individuals, "one of the twins is made out of the descendants of the cell where the mutation took place and nothing else," while the other was not. "These mutations are interesting because they allow you to begin to explore the way in which twinning happens."

A new theory described today in Scientific Reports posits that hunter-gatherers whose omnivorous digestive system prevented too much protein consumption likely shared surplus meat with wolves. Those scraps may have initiated a step toward domestication. Scientific American reports: [Maria Lahtinen, a senior researcher at the Finnish Food Authority and a visiting scholar at the Finnish Museum of Natural History] did not originally set out to solve a long-standing dog mystery. Instead she was studying the diet of late Pleistocene hunter-gatherers in Arctic and sub-Arctic Eurasia. At that time, around 20,000 to 15,000 years ago, the world was engulfed in the coldest period of the last ice age. In frigid environments then, as today, humans tended to derive the majority of their food from animals. Nutritional deficiencies came from the absence of fat and carbohydrates, not necessarily protein. Indeed, if humans eat too much meat, diarrhea usually ensues. And within weeks, they can develop protein poisoning and even die. "Because we humans are not fully adapted to a carnivorous diet, we simply cannot digest protein very well," Lahtinen says. "It can be very fatal in a very short period of time."

During the coldest years of the last ice age -- and especially in harsh Arctic and sub-Arctic winters -- reindeer, wild horses and other human prey animals would have been eking out an existence, nearly devoid of fat and composed mostly of lean muscle. Using previously published early fossil records, Lahtinen and her colleagues calculated that the game captured by people in the Arctic and sub-Arctic during this time would have provided much more protein than they could have safely consumed. In more ecologically favorable conditions, wolves and humans would have been competing for the same prey animals. But under the harsh circumstances of the Arctic and sub-Arctic ice age winter, sharing excess meat with canines would have cost people nothing. The descendants of wolves that took advantage of such handouts would have become more docile toward their bipedal benefactors over time, and they likely went on to become the first domesticated dogs. As the authors point out, the theory makes sense not just ecologically but also geographically: the earliest Paleolithic dog discoveries primarily come from areas that were very cold at the time.

A new study provides early evidence that a Covid-19 vaccine might be effective against two new coronavirus strains first identified in South Africa and the UK, despite a concerning mutation. CNN reports: The two strains share a mutation known as N501Y that scientists worry could allow the virus to evade the immune protection generated by a vaccine. In research posted online Thursday, scientists found that antibodies from people who had received the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine showed "no reduction in neutralization activity" against a version of the virus that carries the N501Y mutation, which they created in the lab. In order to do this, researchers tested the virus against blood from 20 people who had received two doses of the vaccine as part of a clinical trial.

The N501Y mutation is located in the coronavirus' spike protein -- the same structure targeted by vaccines. The virus uses this protein to enter the cells it attacks. This particular mutation appears to help the virus attach to human cells, which may partly explain why these new strains appear to be more transmissible. But it is just one of many mutations in both strains that scientists have worried could make the virus less susceptible to vaccines or treatments. The study -- conducted by researchers at Pfizer and the University of Texas Medical Branch -- does not test the full array of these mutation, nor has it been peer-reviewed.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Atlas: One of the most remarkable "sixth" senses in the animal kingdom is magnetoreception -- the ability to detect magnetic fields -- but exactly how it works remains a mystery. Now, researchers in Japan may have found a crucial piece of the puzzle, making the first observations of live, unaltered cells responding to magnetic fields. Many animals are known to navigate by sensing the Earth's magnetic field, including birds, bats, eels, whales and, according to some studies, perhaps even humans. However, the exact mechanism at play in vertebrates isn't well understood. One hypothesis suggests it's the result of a symbiotic relationship between the animals and magnetic field-sensing bacteria. But the leading hypothesis involves chemical reactions induced in cells through what's called the radical pair mechanism.

Essentially, if certain molecules are excited by light, electrons can jump between them to their neighbors. That can create pairs of molecules with a single electron each, known as a radical pair. If the electrons in those molecules have matching spin states, they will undergo chemical reactions slowly, and if they're opposites the reactions occur faster. Since magnetic fields can influence electron spin states, they could induce chemical reactions that change an animals' behavior. In the living cells of animals with magnetoreception, proteins called cryptochromes are thought to be the molecules that undergo this radical pair mechanism. And now, researchers at the University of Tokyo have observed cryptochromes responding to magnetic fields for the first time. The research was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The 28 fastest days on record (since 1960) all occurred in 2020, with Earth completing its revolutions around its axis milliseconds quicker than average. Live Science reports: That's not particularly alarming -- the planet's rotation varies slightly all the time, driven by variations in atmospheric pressure, winds, ocean currents and the movement of the core. But it is inconvenient for international timekeepers, who use ultra-accurate atomic clocks to meter out the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) by which everyone sets their clocks. When astronomical time, set by the time it takes the Earth to make one full rotation, deviates from UTC by more than 0.4 seconds, UTC gets an adjustment.

Until now, these adjustments have consisted of adding a "leap second" to the year at the end of June or December, bringing astronomical time and atomic time back in line. These leap seconds were tacked on because the overall trend of Earth's rotation has been slowing since accurate satellite measurement began in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Since 1972, scientists have added leap seconds about every year-and-a-half, on average, according to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The last addition came in 2016, when on New Year's Eve at 23 hours, 59 minutes and 59 seconds, an extra "leap second" was added.

However, according to Time and Date, the recent acceleration in Earth's spin has scientists talking for the first time about a negative leap second. Instead of adding a second, they might need to subtract one. That's because the average length of a day is 86,400 seconds, but an astronomical day in 2021 will clock in 0.05 milliseconds shorter, on average. Over the course of the year, that will add up to a 19 millisecond lag in atomic time.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Atlas: Mundane as it may seem, glass is a surprisingly mysterious material. Now scientists at the University of Konstanz have identified a new state of matter called liquid glass, which has some unusual properties. [...] In the new study, the researchers discovered a form of glass where the atoms exhibit a complex behavior that's never been seen in bulk glass before. Essentially, the atoms can move but aren't able to rotate. The team made this discovery in a model system of colloidal suspensions. These mixtures are made up of large solid particles suspended in a fluid, making it easier for scientists to observe the physical behavior of atoms or molecules. Normally these particles are spheres, but for this experiment the team used elliptical ones so they could tell which direction they were pointing.

The researchers tested different concentrations of particles in the fluid, tracking how well they could move and rotate. Eventually they found that at higher concentrations, the particles blocked each other from rotating, but they could still move, forming a liquid glass state. "At certain particle densities orientational motion froze whereas translational motion persisted, resulting in glassy states where the particles clustered to form local structures with similar orientation," says Andreas Zumbusch, lead author of the study. The team says that the observed behavior comes from two competing glass transitions interacting with each other. Liquid glass has been predicted for decades, and the new observation suggests that similar processes could be at work in other glass-forming systems. The research was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Every day in the United States, 17 people die waiting for a lifesaving organ transplant. To address this crisis, one biotech company is turning to an unlikely source: pigs. Maryland-based United Therapeutics says it plans to begin transplanting organs from genetically modified pigs into people as soon as this year. From a report: "We're right on that cusp. We're looking to get into humans within the next year or two," said David Ayares, PhD, in an exclusive interview with Future Human. Ayares is the chief scientific officer of Revivicor, a subsidiary of United Therapeutics that's developing the pigs. "We think we have the pig that is going to be what we bring forward into humans in 2021 or 2022." For decades, scientists have been hopeful that organs from other species could be used to replace faulty ones in humans, known as xenotransplantation. But animal organs trigger immediate and severe immune reactions when transplanted into humans.

The Environmental Protection Agency has finalized a rule that limits scientific research used in the crafting of public health and environmental policy. From a report: Researchers argue the rule that prioritizes studies with all data available publicly "essentially blocks" research that uses personal information and confidential medical records that can't be released because of privacy conditions, per the New York Times, which first reported the news Monday. A requirement to disclose raw data would have prevented past major studies from going ahead. "Such studies have served as the scientific underpinnings of some of the most important clean air and water regulations of the past half century," the Times notes. The EPA declined a request for comment, but referred Axios to an op-ed by Administrator Andrew Wheeler in the Wall Street Journal published Monday evening headlined, "Why We're Ending the EPA's Reliance on Secret Science." Wheeler is expected to officially announce the rule Tuesday. In the op-ed, Wheeler insists the rule is "not a stick for forcing scientists to choose between respecting the privacy and rights of their study participants and submitting their work for consideration."

UK scientists have expressed concern that COVID-19 vaccines being rolled out in Britain may not be able to protect against a new variant of the coronavirus that emerged in South Africa and has spread internationally. From a report: Both Britain and South Africa have detected new, more transmissible variants of the COVID-19-causing virus in recent weeks that have driven a surge in cases. British Health Secretary Matt Hancock said on Monday he was now very worried about the variant identified in South Africa. Simon Clarke, an associate professor in cellular microbiology at the University of Reading, said that while both variants had some new features in common, the one found in South Africa "has a number additional mutations ... which are concerning." He said these included more extensive alterations to a key part of the virus known as the spike protein -- which the virus uses to infect human cells -- and "may make the virus less susceptible to the immune response triggered by the vaccines." Lawrence Young, a virologist and professor of molecular oncology at Warwick University, also noted that the South African variant has "multiple spike mutations."

Whole Foods CEO John Mackey says the key to keeping people healthy in the United States is for people to eat better and live healthier lives. From a report: "I mean, honestly, we talk about health care. The best solution is not to need health care," Mackey told Freakonomics Radio host Stephen Dubner in an episode. "The best solution is to change the way people eat, the way they live, the lifestyle, and diet," Mackey says. "There's no reason why people shouldn't be healthy and have a longer health span. A bunch of drugs is not going to solve the problem." Americans are not taking as good care of their own bodies as they ought to be, Mackey says: "71% of Americans are overweight and 42.5% are obese. Clearly, we're making bad choices in the way we eat," he says. "It's not a sustainable path. And so, I'm calling it out."

Astronomers have taken a new look at the oldest light in the universe, which suggests that the universe is 13.77 billion years old -- give or take 40 million years. Phys.Org reports: The new estimate, using data gathered at the National Science Foundation's Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT), matches the one provided by the standard model of the universe, as well as measurements of the same light made by the European Space Agency's Planck satellite, which measured remnants of the Big Bang from 2009 to '13. The research was published in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics.

The lead author of "The Atacama Cosmology Telescope: A Measurement of the Cosmic Microwave Background Power Spectra at 98 and 150 GHz" is Steve Choi, NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellow at the Cornell Center for Astrophysics and Planetary Science, in the College of Arts and Sciences. In 2019, a research team measuring the movements of galaxies calculated that the universe is hundreds of millions of years younger than the Planck team predicted. That discrepancy suggested a new model for the universe might be needed and sparked concerns that one of the sets of measurements might be incorrect. "Now we've come up with an answer where Planck and ACT agree," said Simone Aiola, a researcher at the Flatiron Institute's Center for Computational Astrophysics and first author of one of two papers. "It speaks to the fact that these difficult measurements are reliable."