China and Nepal say they have determined the "most accurate height of Everest that we have ever had," calculating it to be about 8,848.86 meters (29,031.7 feet) high. That's almost a meter taller than the mountain's previous recognized height. CNET reports: The two countries, which border each other at the mountain's summit, shared the news in a joint virtual briefing Tuesday that was streamed live online. Nepal began remeasuring the mountain in 2017, and China began its own work after Chinese President Xi Jinping visited Nepal in 2019. As part of the complicated measurement, researchers placed signal receivers on the mountain and measured the amount of time it took signals to travel between the receiver and satellites to figure out the new height. Global positioning devices and ground-penetrating radar were also used. Nepal's lead surveyor Khimlal Gautam ended up with damaged toes due to frostbite he suffered while installing the measuring equipment.

A 2015 earthquake in Nepal helped inspire the re-measurement of Everest. The BBC notes that some geologists thought that quake could've shrunk the mountain's snow cap, while others note that Himalayan peaks can actually grow taller over time as shifting tectonic plates push them upward.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: In a high-stakes mission that could take five years to complete, NASA wants to land astronauts on Mars in the 2030s. Transporting enough oxygen and fuel on a spacecraft to sustain the mission for anywhere near that length of time, however, isn't currently viable. The way NASA plans to address this problem is by deploying MOXIE, or the Mars Oxygen in Situ Resource Utilization Experiment. This system is in the testing phase on the Mars Perseverance rover, which launched in July. The apparatus will convert the carbon dioxide that makes up 96% of the gas in the red planet's' atmosphere into oxygen.

On Mars, oxygen is only 0.13% of the atmosphere, compared to 21% of the Earth's atmosphere. The MOXIE system essentially produces oxygen like a tree -- pulling in the Martian air with a pump and using an electrochemical process to separate two oxygen atoms from each molecule of carbon dioxide, or CO2. The experimental technique proposed by Vijay Ramani and his colleagues uses a completely different resource -- salty water in lakes beneath the Martian surface. "The presence of the brine is fortuitous because it lowers freezing point of the water. You take the salty, brackish water and electrolyze that. Our process takes the water and splits it into hydrogen and oxygen," Ramani said. The method proposed in the new paper, however, assumes that these brines are readily available on Mars, said Michael Hecht, NASA's principal investigator for MOXIE and associate director for research management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Haystack Observatory. The study has been published in the journal PNAS.

The coronavirus vaccine made by Pfizer and BioNTech provides strong protection against Covid-19 within about 10 days of the first dose, according to documents published on Tuesday by the Food and Drug Administration before a meeting of its vaccine advisory group. From a report: The finding is one of several significant new results featured in the briefing materials, which include more than 100 pages of data analyses from the agency and from Pfizer. Last month, Pfizer and BioNTech announced that their two-dose vaccine had an efficacy rate of 95 percent after two doses administered three weeks apart. The new analyses show that the protection starts kicking in far earlier. What's more, the vaccine worked well regardless of a volunteer's race, weight or age. While the trial did not find any serious adverse events caused by the vaccine, many participants did experience aches, fevers and other side effects. "This is what an A+ report card looks like for a vaccine," said Akiko Iwasaki, an immunologist at Yale University.

On Thursday, F.D.A.'s vaccine advisory panel will discuss these materials in advance of a vote on whether to recommend authorization of Pfizer and BioNTech's vaccine. Pfizer and BioNTech began a large-scale clinical trial in July, recruiting 44,000 people in the United States, Brazil and Argentina. Half of the volunteers got the vaccine, and half got the placebo. New coronavirus cases quickly tapered off in the vaccinated group of volunteers about 10 days after the first dose, according to one graph in the briefing materials. In the placebo group, cases kept steadily increasing.

FriendlySolipsist writes: Independent journalist Rebekah Jones, a scientist fired by the Florida state government because, she said, of her refusal to manipulate official COVID-19 data releases to coincide with political considerations and who now operates website floridacovidaction.com, had her home raided by the FL state police who seized computers and cellphones, the Miami Herald reported. The FDLE affidavit in support of the raid was published by the Miami Herald and asserts that an unauthorized internal message was sent to the "ReadyOps" system within the state Department of Health from an IPv6 address associated with the Comcast account at Jones residence. "The Florida Department of Law Enforcement on Monday raided the home of a former Department of Health data analyst who has been running an alternative web site to the state's COVID dashboard, alleging that she may have broken into a state email system and sent an unauthorized message to employees," reports the Miami Herald. "But Rebekah Jones, who was was fired from her job in May as the geographic information system manager for DOH's Division of Disease Control and Health Protection and who has since filed a whistleblower complaint against the state, denied having any role in the alleged intrusion into the state web site and instead said she believes Monday's action was intended to silence her."

Slashdot reader mtrachtenberg shares a thread on Twitter of Jones describing what happened.

The former head of Israel's space program, Haim Eshed, says space aliens have reached an agreement with the U.S. government to stay mum on the experiments they conduct on Earth -- as well as their secret base on Mars -- until mankind is ready to accept them. The New York Post reports: "The aliens have asked not to announce that they are here [because] humanity is not ready yet," Eshed told Israeli paper Yedioth Aharonoth, according to the Jewish Press. The Jewish Press -- speculating that Eshed, 87, may have gone to insanity and beyond -- goes on to unspool his tangled web, which claims the involvement of President Trump and interplanetary diplomacy.

"Trump was on the verge of revealing [aliens existence], but the aliens in the Galactic Federation are saying, "Wait, let people calm down first,'" Eshed, who helmed Israel's space security program from 1981 to 2010, reportedly said. "They don't want to start mass hysteria. They want to first make us sane and understanding." Until that day, aliens have secured an agreement to keep their moves under wraps, said Eshed, noting that the extraterrestrials come in peace.

"There's an agreement between the U.S. government and the aliens. They signed a contract with us to do experiments here. They, too, are researching and trying to understand the whole fabric of the universe, and they want us as helpers." One of the hubs of the cooperation is a base on Mars -- where, by the way, Eshed claims American astronauts have already set foot. "There's an underground base in the depths of Mars, where their representatives are, and also our American astronauts," Eshed reportedly said. Eshed added: "If I had come up with what I'm saying today five years ago, I would have been hospitalized. Wherever I've gone with this in academia, they've said, 'The man has lost his mind,'" he reportedly said. "Today they're already talking differently. I have nothing to lose. I've received my degrees and awards, I am respected in universities abroad, where the trend is also changing."

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) scientists developed the world's first mobile genome sequence analyzer, a new iPhone app called iGenomics. By pairing an iPhone with a handheld DNA sequencer, users can create a mobile genetics laboratory, reminiscent of the "tricorder" featured in Star Trek. Phys.Org reports: The iGenomics app runs entirely on the iOS device, reducing the need for laptops or large equipment in the field, which is useful for pandemic and ecology workers. Aspyn Palatnick programmed iGenomics in CSHL Adjunct Associate Professor Michael Schatz's laboratory, over a period of eight years, starting when he was a 14-year-old high school intern. The iPhone app was developed to complement the tiny DNA sequencing devices being made by Oxford Nanopore.

Users can AirDrop sequencing data to each other, enabling DNA analysis in the most remote locations -- even those without internet access. iGenomics may soon even find its way into the hands of astronauts, Schatz describes: "There's a lot of interest to do DNA sequencing in space. I'm trying to see if there's a way we can get iGenomics up there. There's a lot of people that are interested to do that. It's a real testament about how it would be impossible to do, you know, any sort of analysis on regular computers. It's just impossible to bring them with you." In the journal Gigascience, Palatnick and Schatz report the iGenomics algorithm can quickly map DNA sequences of viral pathogens, such as a flu virus or Zika virus, and identify mutations important for diagnosis and treatment. They also provide an online tutorial for analyzing other viral genomes, such as from a SARS-CoV-2 patient.

California is partnering with Apple and Google on an app to let people use their phones to track potential exposure to COVID-19. CNET reports: The digital system uses Bluetooth signals from people's phones to alert them if they've been in contact with someone who's tested positive for the novel coronavirus. The project takes advantage of two of the world's most popular operating systems -- Apple's iOS and Google's Android -- to potentially reach billions of people. To use the features, people can download the app, called CA Notify, starting Thursday. On iPhones, people can turn on the alerts in their phone settings. The companies said they intend to shut down the tools after they are no longer needed to fight the pandemic.

Ever since astronomers reached a consensus in the 1980s that most of the mass in the universe is invisible -- that "dark matter" must glue galaxies together and gravitationally sculpt the cosmos as a whole -- experimentalists have hunted for the nonluminous particles. From a report: They first set out in pursuit of a heavy, sluggish form of dark matter called a weakly interacting massive particle, or WIMP -- the early favorite candidate for the cosmos's missing matter because it could solve another, unrelated puzzle in particle physics. Over the decades, teams of physicists set up ever larger targets, in the form of huge crystals and multi-ton vats of exotic liquids, hoping to catch the rare jiggle of an atom when a WIMP banged into it. But these detectors have stayed quiet, and physicists are increasingly contemplating a broader spectrum of possibilities. On the heavy end, they say the universe's invisible matter could clump into black holes as heavy as stars. At the other extreme, dark matter could spread out in a fine mist of particles thousands of trillions of trillions of times lighter than electrons. With new hypotheses come new detection methods. Kathryn Zurek, a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology, said that if current WIMP experiments don't see anything, "then I think there's going to be a substantial part of the field that's going to shift into these new kinds of experiments." Already, the work has begun.

The U.S. air pollution monitoring network has fallen into disrepair after years of budget cuts and neglect, leaving tens of millions of Americans vulnerable to undetected bad air quality from events like wildfires to industrial pollution, according to a report by the investigative arm of Congress. Reuters: The conclusions from a 2-1/2-year audit by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) confirm key findings in a Reuters special report published last week that detailed broad failures in the air-pollution monitoring system, whose data guides U.S. regulatory policy and informs the public about health risks. Federal funding for the air monitoring network, which is overseen by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and operated and maintained by state and local environmental agencies, has declined by about 20% since 2004, after adjusting for inflation, leaving it in poor condition, according to the GAO report viewed by Reuters. The GAO report said some agencies have reported termite damage and leaky roofs at shelters housing sensitive but aging pollution monitoring equipment, and one state agency resorted to shopping on eBay to find used monitor parts because the manufacturer had stopped making them.

Patterns of missing credit card and loan payments could be an early indicator of dementia years before diagnosis, a new study says. From a report: The study, published Monday in the medical journal JAMA, looked at Medicare patients living alone across the United States and analyzed their credit data and payments over time. Researchers found that patients with Alzheimer's disease and related dementia were more likely to miss payments up to six years before getting diagnosed, the study said. And, those poor financial actions led them to subprime credit scores two and a half years before diagnosis, as opposed to the patients without dementia. "I think we were a little surprised that it was so common that we could really see it in the data," lead author Lauren Hersch Nicholas told CNN. "Doctors colloquially say that you should look for dementia in the checkbook, but I don't think we had any sense of for how many years in advance these effects could be happening." Nicholas is an associate professor at Johns Hopkins University. Researchers from Johns Hopkins and the Federal Reserve Board of Governors led the study. Alzheimer's dementia affects about 5.8 million Americans who are 65 and older, according to the Alzheimer's Association. The number of Americans with the disease is projected to hit 13.8 million by 2050, the non-profit said.

"NASA's twin Voyager probes keep making discoveries in interstellar space," reports Space.com The Voyager mission has detected a new type of "electron burst," which will provide insights into the mechanisms of flaring stars, a new study reports. The bursts occur when cosmic ray electrons — fast-moving particles from far beyond the solar system — are pushed by shock waves generated by solar eruptions. The electrons then accelerate further along cosmic magnetic field lines to incredible speed, study team members said.

"The idea that shock waves accelerate particles is not new," corresponding author Don Gurnett, professor emeritus in physics and astronomy at the University of Iowa, said in a statement. "[But] we detected it in a new realm: the interstellar medium, which is much different than in the solar wind, where similar processes have been observed...."

Eventually, the magnetic field lines propel the cosmic rays to almost the speed of light — nearly 670 times faster than the solar shock waves that first pushed them. (The shock waves move at roughly 1 million mph, or 1.6 million kph, study team members said.)
The article marvels at the fact that the spacecraft are still sending back data regularly from 14 billion miles away, beyond the edge of our solar system, more than 43 years after they left earth. They even detected the original solar shock wave which caused the electron burst "up to a year after the event occurred.

"The wait time happened because the spacecraft are so far from the sun."

The Washington Post tells the remarkable story of how both Moderna's vaccine and the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine relied on a specially designed spike protein partially created by America's Vaccine Research Center — along with messenger RNA, "a technology never before harnessed in an approved vaccine."

And also decades of path-breaking research: If, as expected in the next few weeks, regulators give those vaccines the green light, the technology and the precision approach to vaccine design could turn out to be the pandemic's silver linings: scientific breakthroughs that could begin to change the trajectory of the virus this winter and also pave the way for highly effective vaccines and treatments for other diseases. Vaccine development typically takes years, even decades. The progress of the last 11 months shifts the paradigm for what's possible, creating a new model for vaccine development and a toolset for a world that will have to fight more never-before-seen viruses in years to come.

But the pandemic wasn't a sudden eureka moment — it was a catalyst that helped ignite lines of research that had been moving forward for years, far outside the spotlight of a global crisis... Long before the pandemic, [Vaccine Research Center deputy director Barney] Graham worked with colleagues there and in academia to create a particularly accurate 3-D version of the spiky proteins that protrude from the surface of coronaviruses — an innovation that was rejected for publication by scientific journals five times because reviewers questioned its relevance. His laboratory partnered with one of the companies, Moderna, working to develop a fast and flexible vaccine technology, in the hope that science would be ready to respond when a pandemic appeared. "People hear about [vaccine progress] and think someone just thought about it that night. The amount of work — it's really a beautiful story of fundamental basic research,", said Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases [of which the center is an intramural division]...

The leading coronavirus vaccine candidates in the United States began their development not in January when a mysterious pneumonia emerged in Wuhan, China, but decades ago — with starts and stops along the way.... Unlike fields that were sparked by a single powerful insight, [Ugur Sahin, chief executive of BioNTech] said that the recent success of messenger RNA vaccines is a story of countless improvements that turned an alluring biological idea into a beneficial technology. "This is a field which benefited from hundreds of inventions," said Sahin, who noted that when he started BioNTech in 2008, he cautioned investors that the technology would not yield a product for at least a decade. He kept his word: Until the coronavirus sped things along, BioNTech projected the launch of its first commercial project in 2023...

On Jan. 13, Moderna RNA scientist Melissa Moore came into work and found her team already busy translating the stabilized spike protein into their platform. The company could start making the vaccine almost right away because of its experience manufacturing experimental cancer vaccines, which involves taking tumor samples and developing personalized vaccines in 45 days.
The Post tries to convey how meaningful this moment is for the scientists involved. Years ago one BioNTech scientist had told their spouse, "I just want to live long enough that I can help the RNA go to the patient. I want to see...at least one person would be helped with this treatment."

And when the Vaccine Research Center's deputy director finally learned how effective the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine was, "I just let it all go.

"I was sobbing, I guess, is the term."

The Verge reports that a power component failed on the Orion deep-space crew capsule that NASA hopes to launch (unmanned) from its Space Launch System (or SLS) in late 2021, in a mission called Artemis 1.

The problem? It's buried deep within one of the spacecraft's power/data units (or PDUs) within the adapter that connects the capsule to its power/propulsion trunk "service module," so there's no easy way to fix it: As many as nine months would be needed to take the vehicle apart and put it back together again, in addition to three months for subsequent testing, according to the presentation. Lockheed has another option, but it's never been done before and may carry extra risks, Lockheed Martin engineers acknowledge in their presentation. To do it, engineers would have to tunnel through the adapter's exterior by removing some of the outer panels of the adapter to get to the PDU. The panels weren't designed to be removed this way, but this scenario may only take up to four months to complete if engineers figure out a way to do it. A third option is that Lockheed Martin and NASA could fly the Orion capsule as is. The PDU failed in such a way that it lost redundancy within the unit, so it can still function. But at a risk-averse agency like NASA, flying a vehicle without a backup plan is not exactly an attractive option...

If engineers choose to remove Orion from its service module, the capsule's first flight on the SLS may be delayed past its current date of November 2021. But the SLS has experienced its own set of delays: it was supposed to fly for the first time in 2017 but hasn't done so yet. It's not clear if the SLS itself will make the November 2021 flight date either; a key test of the rocket coming up at the end of the year has been pushed back, with no new target date set. So it's possible that Lockheed Martin and NASA can fix Orion before the SLS is ready to fly.

Any further delays to Artemis I add uncertainty to NASA's lunar landing timeline. NASA is hoping to land astronauts on the Moon by 2024, though many experts are skeptical that such a mission can be pulled off in time. Artemis I is vulnerable to other possible delays, but the component failure adds one more level of uncertainty to when the Orion and SLS combo will get off the ground.

Long-time Slashdot reader sixoh1 shares "an interesting spin on biotechnology tools that we've been seeing explode lately like Crisper-CAS and mRNA."

Ars Technica writes: This is in no way a route to a practical therapy, but it does provide a fantastic window into what we can accomplish by manipulating biology. The whole effort described in the new paper is focused on a simple idea: if you figure out how to wreck one of the virus's key proteins, it won't be able to infect anything. And, conveniently, our cells have a system for destroying proteins, since that's often a useful thing to do...

This system relies on a small protein called "ubiquitin." When a protein is to be targeted for destruction, enzymes called ubiquitin ligases chemically link a chain of ubiquitins to it. These serve as a tag that is recognized by enzymes that digest any proteins with ubiquitin attached to them. So, the idea behind the new work is to identify a key viral protein and figure out how to attach ubiquitin to it...

Unfortunately, there are no proteins that attach ubiquitin to the viral spike protein. Or, rather, there were no proteins that fit that description. But a team at Harvard has now produced one.
They fed atomic-level details of the proteins' structure into software that finds the most energetically-favored interactions between proteins, simulated mutations, and eventually engineered the most promising ones to test their efficacy, ultimately cutting the presence of the viral spike protein in tested cells by 60 percent.

Ars Technica ultimately calls it "A mildly insane idea for disabling the coronavirus," though "Unfortunately, it's also likely to be absolutely useless... this is likely to be a non-starter, especially given that there are promising vaccines and many other potential therapies ahead of it in the pipeline for safety testing."

Yet "while the details of this work aren't really significant, the fact that we've developed all the underlying technology needed for it is worth keeping in mind."

sciencehabit summarizes a new article from Science magazine: Attention racehorse jockeys: Start fast, but save enough energy for a final kick. That's the ideal strategy to win short-distance horse races, according to the first mathematical model to calculate how horses use up energy in races. The researchers say the approach could be used to identify customized pacing plans that, in theory, would optimize individual horses' chances of winning.

The team took advantage of a new GPS tracking tool embedded in French racing saddles. The trackers let fans watch digital images of the horses move across a screen, and they gave the researchers real-time speed and position data. The scientists studied patterns in dozens of races at the Chantilly racetracks north of Paris and developed a model that accounted for winning strategies for three different races: a short one (1300 meters), a medium one (1900 meters), and a slightly longer one (2100 meters), all with different starting points on the same curved track. The model takes into account not just different race distances, but also the size and bend of track curves, and any slopes or friction from the track surface.

The results might surprise jockeys who hold horses back early for bursts of energy in the last furlough. Instead, a strong start leads to a better finish, the team found. That doesn't mean those jockeys are wrong, though. Too strong of a start can be devastating as well, leaving the horse 'exhausted by the end,' one of the researchers says.
Even so, "We can't truly model performance," argues a veterinarian at the University of Sydney with over 30 years of experience working at horse racetracks. But he also asks Science, "Do we really want to?

"For people who love horse racing, the uncertainty provides the excitement, and the actual running of the horses provides the spectacle and the beauty."

Friday on Instagram Jeff Bezos shared footage from NASA's test of Blue Origin's BE-7 engine, which he described approvingly as "a high-performance, additively manufactured liquid hydrogen/liquid oxygen lunar landing engine with 10,000 lbf [pound-force] of thrust — deep throttling down to 2,000 lbf for a precise landing on the Moon."

The test brings the program's cumulative test time up to 1,245 seconds, reports Reuters: Blue Origin leads a "national team" as the prime contractor that it assembled in 2019 to help build its Blue Moon lander. That team includes Lockheed Martin Corp, Northrop Grumman Corp and Draper. Blue Origin has vied for lucrative government contracts in recent years and is competing with rival billionaire Elon Musk's SpaceX and Dynetics, owned by Leidos Holdings Inc, to win a contract to build NASA's next human lunar landing system to ferry humans to the moon in the next decade.

In April, NASA awarded a lunar lander development contract to Blue Origin's team worth $579 million, as well as two other companies: SpaceX which received $135 million to help develop its Starship system and Leidos-owned Dynetics which won $253 million. NASA is poised to pick two of the three companies "in early March" 2021 to continue building their lander prototypes for crewed missions to the moon beginning in 2024, an agency spokeswoman has said.

Long-time Slashdot reader reminds us that in 1999 scientists discovered the asteroid Ryugu flying 300 million kilometres (or 186,411,357 miles) from earth. In 2014, Japan launched a probe to collect samples from it.

Today those samples returned to earth.

The International Business Times shares pictures and report: In a streak of light across the night sky, samples collected from a distant asteroid arrived on Earth after being dropped off by Japanese space probe Hayabusa-2. Scientists hope the precious samples, which are expected to amount to no more than 1 gram of material, could help shed light on the origin of life and the formation of the universe. [That's 0.00220462262185 pounds.]

The capsule carrying samples entered the atmosphere just before 2:30 am Japan time (1730 GMT Saturday), creating a shooting-star-like fireball as it entered Earth's atmosphere. "Six years and it has finally come back to Earth," an official narrating a live broadcast of the arrival said, as images showed officials from Japan's space agency JAXA cheering and pumping their fists in excitement... The capsule was recovered in the southern Australian desert, and will now be processed before being sent to Japan...

The probe collected both surface dust and pristine material from below the surface that was stirred up by firing an "impactor" into the asteroid. The material collected from the asteroid is believed to be unchanged since the time the universe was formed...

Scientists are especially keen to discover whether the samples contain organic matter, which could have helped seed life on Earth.

"A Mysterious Object Is Hurtling Towards Earth, and Scientists Don't Know What It Is," read Newsweek's headline on Monday, describing an object projected to pass 31,605 miles from earth. (One astronomer told them that was roughly 13% of the average distance between the earth and the moon).

But then a computer model calculated its past trajectories through space, according to the director for NASA's Center for Near Earth Object Studies (CNEOS). "One of the possible paths for 2020 SO brought the object very close to Earth and the Moon in late September 1966," he said in a statement. "It was like a eureka moment when a quick check of launch dates for lunar missions showed a match with the Surveyor 2 mission."

On Wednesday NASA described how a team led by Vishnu Reddy, an associate professor/planetary scientist at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona, tried to prove what they'd seen was a 54-year-old booster rocket: Through a series of follow up observations, Reddy and his team analyzed 2020 SO's composition using NASA's IRTF and compared the spectrum data from 2020 SO with that of 301 stainless steel, the material Centaur rocket boosters were made of in the 1960's. While not immediately a perfect match, Reddy and his team persisted, realizing the discrepancy in spectrum data could be a result of analyzing fresh steel in a lab against steel that would have been exposed to the harsh conditions of space weather for 54 years. This led Reddy and his team to do some additional investigation.

"We knew that if we wanted to compare apples to apples, we'd need to try to get spectral data from another Centaur rocket booster that had been in Earth orbit for many years to then see if it better matched 2020 SO's spectrum," said Reddy. "Because of the extreme speed at which Earth-orbiting Centaur boosters travel across the sky, we knew it would be extremely difficult to lock on with the IRTF long enough to get a solid and reliable data set."

However, on the morning of Dec. 1, Reddy and his team pulled off what they thought would be impossible. They observed another Centaur D rocket booster from 1971 launch of a communication satellite that was in Geostationary Transfer Orbit, long enough to get a good spectrum. With this new data, Reddy and his team were able to compare it against 2020 SO and found the spectra to be consistent with each another, thus definitively concluding 2020 SO to also be a Centaur rocket booster...
So what happens next? 2020 SO made its closest approach to Earth on Dec. 1, 2020 and will remain within Earth's sphere of gravitational dominance — a region in space called the "Hill Sphere" that extends roughly 930,000 miles (1.5 million kilometers) from our planet — until it escapes back into a new orbit around the Sun in March 2021.

As NASA-funded telescopes survey the skies for asteroids that could pose an impact threat to Earth, the ability to distinguish between natural and artificial objects is valuable as nations continue to explore and more artificial objects find themselves in orbit about the Sun.

Astronomers will continue to observe this particular relic from the early Space Age until it's gone.

NBC News reports: The mysterious neurological symptoms experienced by American diplomats in China and Cuba are consistent with the effects of directed microwave energy, according to a long-awaited report by the National Academies of Sciences that cites medical evidence to support the long-held conviction of American intelligence officials.

The report, obtained Friday by NBC News, does not conclude that the directed energy was delivered intentionally, by a weapon, as some U.S. officials have long believed. But it raises that disturbing possibility...

A team of medical and scientific experts who studied the symptoms of as many as 40 State Department and other government employees concluded that nothing like them had previously been documented in medical literature, according to the National Academies of Sciences report... "The committee felt that many of the distinctive and acute signs, symptoms and observations reported by (government) employees are consistent with the effects of directed, pulsed radio frequency (RF) energy," the report says. "Studies published in the open literature more than a half-century ago and over the subsequent decades by Western and Soviet sources provide circumstantial support for this possible mechanism...."

In the last year, as first reported by GQ Magazine and The New York Times, a number of new incidents have been reported by CIA officers in Europe and Asia, including one involving Marc Polymeropoulos, who retired last year after a long and decorated career as a case officer. He told NBC News he is still suffering the effects of what he believes was a brain injury he sustained on a trip to Moscow. A source directly familiar with the matter told NBC News the CIA, using mobile phone location data, had determined that some Russian intelligence agents who had worked on microwave weapons programs were present in the same cities at the same time that CIA officers suffered mysterious symptoms. CIA officials consider that a promising lead but not conclusive evidence.

The State Department, responding to the report, said that "each possible cause remains speculative" and added that the investigation, now three years old, is still "ongoing." Although it praised the National Academies of Sciences for undertaking the effort, the State Department offered a long list of "challenges of their study" and limitations in the data the academies were given access to, suggesting that the report should not be viewed as conclusive...

The report says more investigation is required [and] recommends that the State Department establish a response mechanism for similar incidents that allows new cases to be studied more quickly and effectively [as well as neurological assessments for all State Department employees on foreign assignments].
NBC notes that the study examined four possible causes: Infection, chemicals, psychological factors and microwave energy. The report concludes that "Among the plausible mechanisms that the committee considered, directed radio frequency (RF) energy, especially in those with the distinct early manifestations, appears most germane, along with persistent postural perceptual dizziness (PPPD) as a secondary reinforcing mechanism, as well as the additive effects of psychological conditions.

"The committee cannot rule out other possible mechanisms, and again, considers it likely that a multiplicity of factors explains some cases and the differences between others."

New Mexico's governor announced plans to allow hospitals "to ration care depending on a patient's likelihood of surviving," according to the Washington Post.

But in fact, many of America's hospitals are now "overwhelmed," reports CBS News, adding "A record-breaking 227,00 new cases were reported in the U.S. on Friday alone — the first time the daily case count has topped 220,000, according to a tally from Johns Hopkins University."

Two co-founders of the COVID Tracking Project offer this assessment of the state of America: On Wednesday, the country tore past a nauseating virus record. For the first time since the pandemic began, more than 100,000 people were hospitalized with COVID-19 in the United States, nearly double the record highs seen during the spring and summer surges. The pandemic nightmare scenario — the buckling of hospital and health-care systems nationwide — has arrived. Several lines of evidence are now sending us the same message: Hospitals are becoming overwhelmed, causing them to restrict whom they admit and leading more Americans to die needlessly...

Many states have reported that their hospitals are running out of room and restricting which patients can be admitted. In South Dakota, a network of 37 hospitals reported sending more than 150 people home with oxygen tanks to keep beds open for even sicker patients. A hospital in Amarillo, Texas, reported that COVID-19 patients are waiting in the emergency room for beds to become available. Some patients in Laredo, Texas, were sent to hospitals in San Antonio — until that city stopped accepting transfers. Elsewhere in Texas, patients were sent to Oklahoma, but hospitals there have also tightened their admission criteria....

The bulk of evidence now suggests that one of the worst fears of the pandemic — that hospitals would become overwhelmed, leading to needless deaths — is happening now. Americans are dying of COVID-19 who, had they gotten sick a month earlier, would have lived.