A "new variant" of coronavirus has been identified in the UK, which is believed to be causing the faster spread in the South East, Health Secretary Matt Hancock has said. From a report: More than 1,000 cases of the new variant have been found, "predominantly in the south of England", Mr Hancock told the House of Commons this afternoon. It is spreading faster than the existing strain of coronavirus and believed to be fuelling the "very sharp, exponential rises" in cases across the South East, he said. So far it has been found in 60 local authority areas and is thought to be similar to the mutation discovered in other countries in recent months. It was first identified in Kent last week during routine surveillance by Public Health England (PHE), with ministers told about it on Friday. The health secretary said that there is currently no evidence that the new variant will not respond to the COVID-19 vaccines being rolled out across the country.

The New York Times reports: As coronavirus deaths soar across the country, deaths in communities that are home to colleges have risen faster than the rest of the nation, a New York Times analysis of 203 counties where students compose at least 10 percent of the population has found... [S]ince the end of August, deaths from the coronavirus have doubled in counties with a large college population, compared with a 58 percent increase in the rest of the nation.

Few of the victims were college students, but rather older people and others living and working in the community.

Health officials and family members of some people who died in such counties described large surges of cases involving students followed by subsequent infections and deaths in the wider community. "When the rate of transmission in the surrounding community is high and increasing," said Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, "you are going to see more deaths...." [I]n September and October, when deaths were well below earlier peaks and fairly steady, they were already rising in many college communities. That trend highlighted a central fear of health officials — that young adults with limited symptoms may unwittingly transmit the virus, increasing the possibility it would ultimately spread to someone more vulnerable...

"All it really takes is one cavalier interaction," said Tali Elfassy, an epidemiologist at the University of Miami.

Slashdot reader Hmmmmmm shared this report from Reuters: AstraZeneca is to start clinical trials to test a combination of its experimental COVID-19 vaccine with Russia's Sputnik V shot to see if this can boost the efficacy of the British drugmaker's vaccine, Russia's sovereign wealth fund said on Friday. Trials will start by the end of the year and Russia wants to produce the new vaccine jointly if it is proven to be effective, said the RDIF wealth fund, which has funded Sputnik V.

AstraZeneca said it was considering how it could assess combinations of different vaccines, and would soon begin exploring with Russia's Gamaleya Institute, which developed Sputnik V, whether two vaccines based on a common-cold virus could be successfully combined... Sputnik's Russian developers say clinical trials, still under way, have shown it has an efficacy rate of over 90%, higher than that of AstraZeneca's own vaccine and similar to those of U.S. rivals Pfizer and Moderna.

Some Western scientists have raised concerns about the speed at which Russia has worked, giving the regulatory go-ahead for its vaccines and launching large-scale vaccinations before full trials to test Sputnik V's safety and efficacy have been completed. Russia says the criticism is unfounded.

CNN reports: U.S. Covid-19 hospitalizations hit a record high for the seventh day in a row Saturday with 108,487 patients in hospitals around the country, according to the Covid Tracking Project.

And the number of Covid-19 cases reported in the United States reached more than 16 million after the country added 1 million cases in just four days, according to Johns Hopkins University data.

It took the nation more than eight months to reach 8 million cases but less than two months to double that, as the number of new cases continues to soar... On Friday, as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration authorized the Pfizer vaccine for emergency use, the U.S. recorded more than 3,300 Covid-19 deaths — the most ever in one day, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. More than 231,700 new cases were reported, another pandemic high... The average of daily cases over the last week was 210,764, another pandemic high, according to a CNN analysis of Johns Hopkins data.
Another statistic from CNN: There have been more than 100,000 Covid-19 patients in America's hospitals every day since December 2.

hcs_$reboot shares a remarkable new theory from Larry M. Silverberg, an aerospace engineering professor at North Carolina State University (with colleague Jeffrey Eischen). They're proposing that matter is not made of particles (or even waves), as was long thought, but fragments of energy.

[W]hile the theories and math of waves and particles allow scientists to make incredibly accurate predictions about the universe, the rules break down at the largest and tiniest scales. Einstein proposed a remedy in his theory of general relativity. Using the mathematical tools available to him at the time, Einstein was able to better explain certain physical phenomena and also resolve a longstanding paradox relating to inertia and gravity. But instead of improving on particles or waves, he eliminated them as he proposed the warping of space and time.Using newer mathematical tools, my colleague and I have demonstrated a new theory that may accurately describe the universe... Instead of basing the theory on the warping of space and time, we considered that there could be a building block that is more fundamental than the particle and the wave....

Much to our surprise, we discovered that there were only a limited number of ways to describe a concentration of energy that flows. Of those, we found just one that works in accordance with our mathematical definition of flow. We named it a fragment of energy... Using the fragment of energy as a building block of matter, we then constructed the math necessary to solve physics problems... More than 100 [years] ago, Einstein had turned to two legendary problems in physics to validate general relativity: the ever-so-slight yearly shift — or precession — in Mercury's orbit, and the tiny bending of light as it passes the Sun... In both problems, we calculated the trajectories of the moving fragments and got the same answers as those predicted by the theory of general relativity. We were stunned.

Our initial work demonstrated how a new building block is capable of accurately modeling bodies from the enormous to the minuscule. Where particles and waves break down, the fragment of energy building block held strong. The fragment could be a single potentially universal building block from which to model reality mathematically — and update the way people think about the building blocks of the universe.

Just today in America there were 223,365 new Covid-19 cases. The Hill notes that's "the worst it has ever been."

Long-time Slashdot reader smooth wombat also highlights this quote from Robert Redfield, the director of America's Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: "We are in the timeframe now that probably for the next 60 to 90 days we're going to have more deaths per day than we had at 9/11 or we had at Pearl Harbor," Redfield said during an event hosted by the Council on Foreign Relations.

In addition, when asked about the vaccines which are being prepared for use, Redfield said, "The reality is the vaccine approval this week's not going to really impact that I think to any degree for the next 60 days." Redfield, echoing a wide range of health experts, urged people to "double down" on basic precautions in the short term until a vaccine is widely available [including wearing a mask but also avoiding indoor gatherings.]

The University of California San Francisco issued this glowing announcement of some new research: Just a few doses of an experimental drug can reverse age-related declines in memory and mental flexibility in mice, according to a new study by UC San Francisco scientists. The drug, called ISRIB, has already been shown in laboratory studies to restore memory function months after traumatic brain injury, reverse cognitive impairments in Down Syndrome, prevent noise-related hearing loss, fight certain types of prostate cancer, and even enhance cognition in healthy animals.

In the new study, published Dec. 1, 2020, in the open-access journal eLife, researchers showed rapid restoration of youthful cognitive abilities in aged mice, accompanied by a rejuvenation of brain and immune cells that could help explain improvements in brain function.

"ISRIB's extremely rapid effects show for the first time that a significant component of age-related cognitive losses may be caused by a kind of reversible physiological "blockage" rather than more permanent degradation," said Susanna Rosi, PhD, Lewis and Ruth Cozen Chair II and professor in the departments of Neurological Surgery and of Physical Therapy and Rehabilitation Science.

"The data suggest that the aged brain has not permanently lost essential cognitive capacities, as was commonly assumed, but rather that these cognitive resources are still there but have been somehow blocked, trapped by a vicious cycle of cellular stress," added Peter Walter, PhD, a professor in the UCSF Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. "Our work with ISRIB demonstrates a way to break that cycle and restore cognitive abilities that had become walled off over time...."

"We've seen how ISRIB restores cognition in animals with traumatic brain injury, which in many ways is like a sped-up version of age-related cognitive decline," said Rosi, who is director of neurocognitive research in the UCSF Brain and Spinal Injury Center and a member of the UCSF Weill Institute for Neurosciences. "It may seem like a crazy idea, but asking whether the drug could reverse symptoms of aging itself was just a logical next step."
Forbes also reports that "In all studies, the researchers have observed no serious side effects."

CNN reports: Virgin Galactic's supersonic rocket plane was scheduled to fire into the upper atmosphere Saturday, but after climbing more than 40,000 feet over New Mexico attached to its mothership, the space plane made an unexpected turn toward home rather than shooting skyward.

The company confirmed that the space plane, which was carrying test pilots CJ Sturckow and Dave Mackay, safely landed.

"The ignition sequence for the rocket motor did not complete," the company said via Twitter. "Vehicle and crew are in great shape. We have several motors ready at Spaceport America. We will check the vehicle and be back to flight soon." The root cause of the issue was not immediately clear...

This mission was meant to be the third test flight of VSS Unity to exceed the 50-mile mark, which the US government considers to be the beginning outer space.
CNN also reports that Virgin Galactic now has 600 customers "who so far have forked over between $200,000 to $250,000 each to reserve seats [for] their brief journey to the edge of space."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: A biotech conference in Boston last February that's already been flagged as a Covid-19 superspreading event led to at least 245,000 other cases across the US and Europe, a new genetic fingerprinting study shows. One single case seems to have been responsible for many of the other eventual cases, the team at the Broad Institute in Massachusetts reported. Their study finds two particular genetic fingerprints of viruses associated with the conference and then tracks those lineages across the US. One "was exported from Boston to at least 18 US states as well as to other countries, including Australia, Sweden, and Slovakia," the team, led by Bronwyn MacInnis, director of pathogen genomic surveillance at the Broad Institute, wrote in the journal Science.

One was especially bad. A virus carrying one mutation -- a small genetic change they've flagged as C2416T -- was apparently carried to the conference by a single person, and ended up infecting 245,000 people. A subset of the viral strain with a mutation known as G26233T ended up in 88,000 of these cases. "A single introduction had an outsize effect on subsequent transmission because it was amplified by superspreading in a highly mobile population very early in the outbreak, before many public health precautions were put in place," the team wrote. "While Massachusetts accounted for most early spread related to the conference, Florida accounted for the greatest proportion of cases overall," they added.

Friday night America's Food and Drug Administration finally authorized Pfizer and BioNTech's coronavirus vaccine for emergency use in the United States, reports CNN.

The Verge calls it "a landmark moment in the fight to suppress a virus that has killed nearly 300,000 people in the United States and sickened tens of millions around the world." The vaccine is authorized in the U.S. for people over the age of 16. It was found to be 95 percent effective at preventing symptomatic COVID-19 in clinical trials. "That is extraordinary," Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said in a press conference at the end of November. It's far better than experts had dared hope for. The FDA was prepared to authorize a vaccine as long as it was at least 50 percent effective. "We were shocked," Pfizer's chief executive officer, Albert Bourla, told The New York Times. "We couldn't believe it."

The shot appears to protect people against the most severe forms of the disease. It is also highly effective in people over the age of 65, who are particularly vulnerable to COVID-19. Scientists will continue to monitor the vaccine after it's deployed to see how well it works in the real world.... The Pfizer and BioNTech vaccine has already been authorized by regulatory authorities in the United Kingdom, Canada, and Bahrain.

The authorizations of this vaccine, which have come less than a year after development began, shatter the record for the fastest vaccine developed. The record was previously held by the mumps vaccine, which took four years.

Earlier this week, Florida state police raided the home of Rebekah Jones, the data scientist who ran the state's coronavirus dashboard until she was fired in June. "Jones has alleged in a whistleblower lawsuit that her firing was in retaliation for her refusal to manipulate data to make the state's COVID-19 outbreak last spring appear less severe," reports Yahoo News. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis angrily defended the handling of the search warrant, saying: "Obviously, she has issues." From the report: Later, when another reporter asked about Monday's incident -- a recording of which was made by Jones and went viral on social media, drawing widespread outrage -- DeSantis grew visibly irritated. "It was not a raid," the governor said, at one point thrusting a finger and raising his voice at the reporter who asked about the Jones case. "They went, they followed protocol." He said the Gestapo comparison was especially offensive. In keeping with his Trumpian approach to politics, DeSantis also denounced the "fever swamps" of the internet -- his apparent term for mainstream media outlets like the New York Times and Washington Post -- for turning Jones into a "darling" of, presumably, anti-Trump progressives. ("He threw me into the public spotlight," Jones told Yahoo News in response to that accusation. "I never wanted it.")

Officers executed a search warrant on Jones's home on Monday morning, after knocking on her door for several minutes before she opened it and came outside with her hands up. Jones has said she wanted to settle her children before acknowledging the officers. It is not clear why the officers drew their weapons to go inside. They left with laptops and cellphones, which were being sought as part of an investigation into a Nov. 10 message sent to Florida Department of Health employees, encouraging them to resist DeSantis. State authorities allege that digital fingerprints indicate that Jones, who now runs a coronavirus dashboard of her own, was behind the message. Jones denies she was the author and maintains she did not have the means to access the department's emergency notification system, through which the note was sent. Users on Reddit have discovered that the emergency system would have been easy to access, and that anyone else -- not just Jones -- could have accessed the system and sent the Nov. 10 message with relative ease.

The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) will open up access to more data from Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiments. Under an updated policy, data will be released around five years after it's collected and CERN hopes to release the full dataset publicly "by the close of the experiment concerned." Core LHC collaborators ALICE, ATLAS, CMS and LHCb all endorsed the move. From a report: CERN will make level 3 data available, which will allow anyone to conduct "high-quality analysis" on information obtained from Large Hadron Collider experiments. Level 3 relates to "calibrated reconstructed data with the level of detail useful for algorithmic, performance and physics studies," according to CERN. The organization won't release raw data, however. The open data policy states that it's "not practically possible to make the full raw dataset from the LHC experiments usable in a meaningful way outside its collaborations." That's because of the complexity of the data, software and metadata and access issues to the vast troves of stored information, among other factors. LHC collaborators don't have general access to the raw data either. Instead, the assembly of level 3 data "is performed centrally."

A key Food and Drug Administration advisory panel on Thursday recommended the approval of Pfizer and BioNTech's coronavirus vaccine for emergency use in people over 16 years old, the last step before the FDA gives the final OK to broadly distribute the first doses throughout the United States. CNBC reports: If the FDA accepts the nonbinding recommendation from the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee -- which is expected -- it would mark a pivotal moment in the Covid-19 pandemic, which has infected more than 15.4 million people and killed roughly 290,000 in the U.S. in less than a year. The committee plays a key role in approving flu and other vaccines in the U.S., verifying the shots are safe for public use. While the FDA doesn't have to follow the advisory committee's recommendation, it often does.

The FDA could grant emergency use authorization of Pfizer's vaccine as early as Friday, James Hildreth, a member of the committee, told NBC's "Weekend Today" on Saturday. An emergency use authorization, or EUA, generally allows a drug or vaccine to be administered to a limited population or setting, such as to hospitalized patients, as the agency continues to evaluate safety data. It's unclear whether the FDA will authorize Pfizer and BioNTech's vaccine for use in certain groups. Some people, including pregnant women and young children, will likely have to wait to get the vaccine in the U.S. until Pfizer can finish trials on those specific groups. The FDA said Tuesday that there is currently insufficient data to make conclusions about the safety of the vaccine in children under age 16, pregnant women and people with compromised immune systems. Regulators in Canada, the U.K. and Bahrain have all cleared the vaccine for use by most adults.

Salesforce today peeled back the curtains on ReceptorNet, a machine learning system researchers at the company developed in partnership with clinicians at the University of Southern California's Lawrence J. Ellison Institute for Transformative Medicine of USC. From a report: The system, which can determine a critical biomarker for oncologists when deciding on the appropriate treatment for breast cancer patients, achieved 92% accuracy in a study published in the journal Nature Communications. Breast cancer affects more than 2 million women each year, with around one in eight women in the U.S. developing the disease over the course of their lifetime. In 2018 in the U.S. alone, there were also 2,550 new cases of breast cancer in men. And rates of breast cancer are increasing in nearly every region around the world.

In an effort to address this, Salesforce researchers developed an algorithm -- the aforementioned ReceptorNet -- that can predict hormone-receptor status from inexpensive and ubiquitous images of tissue. Typically, breast cancer cells extracted during a biopsy or surgery are tested to see if they contain proteins that act as estrogen or progesterone receptors. (When the hormones estrogen and progesterone attach to these receptors, they fuel the cancer growth.) But these types of biopsy images are less widely available and require a pathologist to review. In contrast to the immunohistochemistry process favored by clinicians, which requires a microscope and tends to be expensive and not readily available in parts of the world, ReceptorNet determines hormone receptor status via hematoxylin and eosin (H&E) staining, which takes into account the shape, size, and structure of cells. Salesforce researchers trained the system on several thousand H&E image slides from cancer patients in "dozens" of hospitals around the world.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: Researchers have found a way to protect highly fragile quantum systems from noise, which could aid in the design and development of new quantum devices, such as ultra-powerful quantum computers. The researchers, from the University of Cambridge, have shown that microscopic particles can remain intrinsically linked, or entangled, over long distances even if there are random disruptions between them. Using the mathematics of quantum theory, they discovered a simple setup where entangled particles can be prepared and stabilized even in the presence of noise by taking advantage of a previously unknown symmetry in quantum systems.

Their results, reported in the journal Physical Review Letters, open a new window into the mysterious quantum world that could revolutionize future technology by preserving quantum effects in noisy environments, which is the single biggest hurdle for developing such technology. Harnessing this capability will be at the heart of ultrafast quantum computers. [...] Now, Dutta and his co-author Professor Nigel Cooper have discovered a robust quantum system where multiple pairs of qubits remain entangled even with a lot of noise. They modeled an atomic system in a lattice formation, where atoms strongly interact with each other, hopping from one site of the lattice to another. The authors found if noise were added in the middle of the lattice, it didn't affect entangled particles between left and right sides. This surprising feature results from a special type of symmetry that conserves the number of such entangled pairs.

They showed this hidden symmetry protects the entangled pairs and allows their number to be controlled from zero to a large maximum value. Similar conclusions can be applied to a broad class of physical systems and can be realized with already existing ingredients in experimental platforms, paving the way to controllable entanglement in a noisy environment. The researchers are hoping to confirm their theoretical findings with experiments within the next year.

A new study, published in the European Journal of Psychotraumatology, is the first to explore the effects of MDMA therapy in couples where one member is suffering from PTSD. New Atlas reports: This preliminary study investigated the feasibility of incorporating two MDMA sessions into a previously established PTSD therapeutic regime known as CBCT, or cognitive-behavioral conjoint therapy. As opposed to traditional PTSD therapies focusing on the individual, CBCT is designed to help improve relationship functioning for couples, while still improving PTSD symptoms in the individual patient. The new trial recruited six couples, in which one member of the couple had a pre-existing PTSD diagnosis, and explored the feasibility of incorporating two MDMA sessions into the CBCT protocol, which traditionally involves around 15 therapy sessions conducted over several months.

The new study reports the addition of MDMA to the couples therapy protocol resulted in effects that were, "on par with, or greater than, those achieved with CBCT alone." Improvements were detected in both relationship outcomes and individual PTSD symptoms. The effects were most significant at the six-month follow up implying the MDMA therapy confers compelling long-term benefits. It is important to note the study was uncontrolled, so any efficacy comparisons to CBCT alone can only be garnered by examining prior CBCT studies. However, this feasibility study does establish the addition of MDMA to the pre-existing therapeutic protocol is safe and it does not negatively interfere with other PTSD treatments.

Thelasko shares a report from Engadget: After a successful launch, the Starship rose and successfully maneuvered its way to the landing area. However, it appeared that the spacecraft didn't slow down enough for a proper landing, and it exploded in thrilling fashion. On the live feed, SpaceX said the test was successful and noted it would be moving on to testing the SN9 prototype next. Elon Musk tweeted "Successful ascent, switchover to header tanks & precise flap control to landing point!" In a follow-up, he explained the landing, saying that low fuel header tank pressure during the landing burn contributed to the high touchdown velocity and the massive explosion. The good news, is that the team got âoeall the data we neededâ and it appears everything is in order for future tests. You can view the full test flight here.

Britain's medicine regulator warned people with significant allergies not to get Pfizer-BioNTech's COVID-19 vaccine after two people suffered adverse reactions, but was set to give more detailed guidance on Wednesday based on reviews of those cases. Reuters reports: Starting with the elderly and frontline workers, Britain began mass vaccinating its population on Tuesday, part of a global drive that poses one of the biggest logistical challenges in peacetime history. National Health Service medical director Stephen Powis said the advice had been changed as a precaution after two NHS workers reported anaphylactoid reactions from the vaccine. "Two people with a history of significant allergic reactions responded adversely yesterday," Powis said. "Both are recovering well."

The Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) initially advised anyone with "a history of a significant allergic reaction to a vaccine, medicine or food" to avoid taking the vaccine. However, by the end of Wednesday that guidance was set to be refined after discussions with experts on the nature of the reactions. "We're tweaking advice to make it very clear that if you've got a food allergy, you're not more at risk," Imperial College London's Paul Turner, an expert in allergy and immunology who has been advising the MHRA on their revised guidance, told Reuters. Pfizer and BioNTech said they were supporting the MHRA's investigation. In other vaccine-related news, the European Medicines Agency (EMA), the EU regulatory body in charge of approving COVID-19 vaccines, said today it was the victim of a cyberattack.

The European Medicines Agency (EMA), the EU regulatory body in charge of approving COVID-19 vaccines, said today it was the victim of a cyber-attack. From a report: In a short two-paragraph statement posted on its website today, the agency discloses the security breach but said it couldn't disclose any details about the intrusion due to an ongoing investigation. EMA is currently in the process of reviewing applications for two COVID-19 vaccines, one from US pharma giant Moderna, and a second developed in a collaboration between BioNTech and Pfizer. An EMA spokesperson did not return a request for comment seeking information if the attack targeted its vaccine approval process or if it was a financially-motivated attack like ransomware. Nonetheless, in a follow-up statement released on its own website, BioNTech said that "some documents relating to the regulatory submission for Pfizer and BioNTech's COVID-19 vaccine candidate, BNT162b2, which has been stored on an EMA server, had been unlawfully accessed" during the attack, confirming that COVID-19 research was most likely the target of the attack.

sciencehabit writes: It's not just your storage unit that's packed to the gills. According to a new study, the mass of all our stuff -- buildings, roads, cars, and everything else we manufacture -- now exceeds the weight of all living things on the planet. And the amount of new material added every week equals the total weight of Earth's nearly 8 billion people. "If you weren't convinced before that humans are dominating the planet, then you should be convinced now," says Timon McPhearson, an urban ecologist at the New School who was not involved with the research. "This is an eye-catching comparison," adds Fridolin Krausmann, a social ecologist at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna, who also was not involved in the work. There are many measures of humanity's impact on the planet. Fossil fuels have sent greenhouse gases soaring to levels not seen in at least 800,000 years. Agriculture and dwellings have altered 70% of land. And humans have wiped out untold numbers of species in an emerging great extinction. The transformations are so great that researchers have declared we're living in a new human-dominated age: the Anthropocene.