China is massively expanding its weather-control project, and is aiming to be able to cover half the country in artificial rain and snow by 2025, the government said Tuesday. Business Insider reports: The practice of "cloud seeding" was discovered in the US in 1946 by a chemist working for General Electric. China launched its own similar program in the 1960s. Dozens of other countries -- including the US -- also have such programs, but Beijing has the world's largest, employing around 35,000 people, The Guardian reported.

In a statement, China's State Council said that the country's cloud seeing project will expand fivefold to cover an area of 2.1 million square miles and be completed by 2025. (China encompasses 3.7 million square miles, meaning the project could cover 56% of the country's surface area.) The project will be at a "worldwide advanced level" by 2035, the State Council said, and will help alleviate "disasters such as drought and hail" and facilitate emergency responses "to forest or grassland fires."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: PhD in genetics might seem like an unusual requirement for the role of head chef. It makes more sense when the man running the kitchen is not just in charge of frying your chicken burger -- he created the meat himself. "This burger takes something between two to three days to grow," says Tomer Halevy as he chops red onions, iceberg lettuce and avocado. He proceeds to batter what appears to be a strip of raw chicken before dipping it in breadcrumbs. Halevy uses the word "grow" because chickens do not need to be slaughtered en masse to produce this type of meat. Cells taken from "source" chickens are cultured in a laboratory, creating potentially endless supplies of muscle and fat tissue. Some cells were removed from eggs, meaning the meat is from birds that were never even born. The result is the signature dish of a new venture in Israel, the Chicken, the world's first cultured meat restaurant experience. Still closed to the public owing to coronavirus restrictions, the eatery near Tel Aviv opened its doors to the Guardian for the first private visit by a journalist.

At the Chicken, bottles of red wine line the walls, black stools surround circular tables, and the warm glow of hanging bulbs lights the restaurant. The entire back wall is made of glass. Behind it is the production facility where lab-coated scientists wander around between large metal vats. It is petri-dish-to-table service. "The meat was made on the other side of the glass. That's true local production of meat," jokes Ido Savir, CEO of the restaurant's parent company, SuperMeat. The breaded patty is deep-fried in oil, before being placed on a sweet brioche bun, flavored by wasabi and chilli mayonnaise, with a side of sweet potato chips. Similar to many chicken burgers, it breaks and flakes when pulled apart and is extremely tender. It tastes, at least to this reporter, like a chicken burger.

Halevy, who also holds the role of head of product at SuperMeat, explains that muscle cells naturally contract when they are grown, making the fibers that result in the flakes of the burger that you would expect. While Halevy says he could make a recreation of a chicken breast -- with longer fibers and a dryer, denser bite -- one was not offered, and others in the industry have said a fillet is much harder to create outside the bird. For now, like others in the nascent industry, the start-up is focused on minced chicken. It is aiming to sell to meat companies that often reprocess chicken anyway, for example, into patties and nuggets. The report notes that SuperMeat cannot charge customers since there is no regulation around cultured meat in Israel. Those who try the product must also sign a waiver agreeing to "voluntarily assume any and all risks."

The industry is still very much in its infancy, but it was given a significant boost this week when Singapore became the first state to approve the sale of cultured meat.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Scientific American: For the first time, a quantum computer made from photons -- particles of light -- has outperformed even the fastest classical supercomputers. Physicists led by Chao-Yang Lu and Jian-Wei Pan of the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) in Shanghai performed a technique called Gaussian boson sampling with their quantum computer, named Jiuzhang. The result, reported in the journal Science, was 76 detected photons -- far above and beyond the previous record of five detected photons and the capabilities of classical supercomputers.

Unlike a traditional computer built from silicon processors, Jiuzhangis an elaborate tabletop setup of lasers, mirrors, prisms and photon detectors. It is not a universal computer that could one day send e-mails or store files, but it does demonstrate the potential of quantum computing. Last year, Google captured headlines when its quantum computer Sycamore took roughly three minutes to do what would take a supercomputer three days (or 10,000 years, depending on your estimation method). In their paper, the USTC team estimates that it would take the Sunway TaihuLight, the third most powerful supercomputer in the world, a staggering 2.5 billion years to perform the same calculation as Jiuzhang. [...] This latest demonstration of quantum computing's potential from the USTC group is critical because it differs dramatically from Google's approach. Sycamore uses superconducting loops of metal to form qubits; in Jiuzhang, the photons themselves are the qubits. Independent corroboration that quantum computing principles can lead to primacy even on totally different hardware "gives us confidence that in the long term, eventually, useful quantum simulators and a fault-tolerant quantum computer will become feasible," Lu says.

... [T]he USTC setup is dauntingly complicated. Jiuzhang begins with a laser that is split so it strikes 25 crystals made of potassium titanyl phosphate. After each crystal is hit, it reliably spits out two photons in opposite directions. The photons are then sent through 100 inputs, where they race through a track made of 300 prisms and 75 mirrors. Finally, the photons land in 100 slots where they are detected. Averaging over 200 seconds of runs, the USTC group detected about 43 photons per run. But in one run, they observed 76 photons -- more than enough to justify their quantum primacy claim. It is difficult to estimate just how much time would be needed for a supercomputer to solve a distribution with 76 detected photons -- in large part because it is not exactly feasible to spend 2.5 billion years running a supercomputer to directly check it. Instead, the researchers extrapolate from the time it takes to classically calculate for smaller numbers of detected photons. At best, solving for 50 photons, the researchers claim, would take a supercomputer two days, which is far slower than the 200-second run time of Jiuzhang.

John Trumpian shares a report from SciTechDaily: Harvard Medical School scientists have successfully restored vision in mice by turning back the clock on aged eye cells in the retina to recapture youthful gene function. The team's work, described today in Nature, represents the first demonstration that it may be possible to safely reprogram complex tissues, such as the nerve cells of the eye, to an earlier age. In addition to resetting the cells' aging clock, the researchers successfully reversed vision loss in animals with a condition mimicking human glaucoma, a leading cause of blindness around the world.

The achievement represents the first successful attempt to reverse glaucoma-induced vision loss, rather than merely stem its progression, the team said. If replicated through further studies, the approach could pave the way for therapies to promote tissue repair across various organs and reverse aging and age-related diseases in humans. Sinclair and colleagues caution that the findings remain to be replicated in further studies, including in different animal models, before any human experiments. Nonetheless, they add, the results offer a proof of concept and a pathway to designing treatments for a range of age-related human diseases.

For their work, the team used an adeno-associated virus (AAV) as a vehicle to deliver into the retinas of mice three youth-restoring genes -- Oct4, Sox2 and Klf4 -- that are normally switched on during embryonic development. The three genes, together with a fourth one, which was not used in this work, are collectively known as Yamanaka factors. The treatment had multiple beneficial effects on the eye. First, it promoted nerve regeneration following optic-nerve injury in mice with damaged optic nerves. Second, it reversed vision loss in animals with a condition mimicking human glaucoma. And third, it reversed vision loss in aging animals without glaucoma.

"The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Pfizer is planning to cut their shipment of Covid-19 vaccines for 2020 in half due to supply-chain problems," writes Slashdot reader phalse phace. Axios (non-paywalled source) reports: The U.K. government has ordered 40 million doses of Pfizer-BioNTech's vaccine -- enough to inoculate some 20 million people. The companies now expect to ship 50 million vaccines by the end of 2020, per WSJ. "Based on current projections we expect to produce globally up to 50 million vaccine doses in 2020 and up to 1.3 billion doses in 2021," Pfizer spokesperson Kim Bencker told Axios.

"[S]caling up a vaccine at this pace is unprecedented, and we have made significant progress as we have moved forwards in the unknown," Bencker said. "And it's important to highlight that the outcome of the clinical trial was somewhat later than the initial projection requiring us to focus additional efforts on clinical trial production." Pfizer did not specify to the Journal what shortfalls over ingredients and raw materials -- which were sourced from Europe and the U.S. -- took place as production ramped up. For the record, Pfizer's vaccine has been shown to be more than 90% effective.

China's Chang'e spacecraft has lifted off from Oceanus Procellarum at 10:10 EST Thursday, carrying with it the first fresh lunar samples since 1976. Space.com reports: Six minutes later, the ascent spacecraft achieved lunar orbit, marking a huge milestone in the Chang'e 5 mission to return lunar samples to Earth. The ascent vehicle's job now is to meet up with the Chang'e 5 orbiter while still circling the moon, and then transfer its precious cargo to a return capsule for the journey home. That next stage is an extremely challenging rendezvousing and docking between the small ascent vehicle and the Chang'e 5 orbiter while orbiting the moon. The activity needs to be automated due to the time delay in communicating across the roughly 236,000 miles (380,000 kilometers) between the Earth and the moon.

The two spacecraft will begin a final approach sometime on Saturday (Nov. 5)and complete the docking 3.5 hours later. If all goes well, China will then prepare for the final leg of the journey to deliver the first lunar samples to Earth in 44 years. The lunar samples won't be coming home immediately however. The Chang'e 5 spacecraft will need to wait in lunar orbit for a number of days for a narrow window in which to fire its engines and head for Earth.

The careful timing of this trans-Earth injection maneuver will allow the orbiter to deliver the reentry module to Earth at the precise time in order to land in Siziwang Banner, Inner Mongolia -- the same site used by the China National Space Administration to return astronauts home aboard Shenzhou spacecraft. The journey back to Earth will last 112 hours -- just over four and a half days -- before the reentry attempt. As spacecraft returning from the moon are traveling faster than those reentering from low Earth orbit, such as trips from the International Space Station, the Chang'e 5 reentry module will bounce off the atmosphere once to help it slow down before taking a final, fiery plunge to Earth.

A reader shares a report from The Verge: Today, the National Science Foundation (NSF) released shocking footage of the collapse of the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. The video, captured on December 1st, shows the moment when support cables snapped, causing the massive 900-ton structure suspended above Arecibo to fall onto the observatory's iconic 1,000-foot-wide dish.

The videos of the collapse were captured by a camera located in Arecibo's Operations Control Center, as well as from a drone located above the platform at the time of collapse. The operator of the drone was able to adjust the drone camera once the platform started to fall and capture the moment of impact. NSF, which oversees Arecibo, had been doing hourly monitoring of the observatory with drones, ever since engineers warned that the structure was on the verge of collapsing in November. The footage highlights the moment when multiple cables snapped, causing the platform to swing outward and hit the side of the dish. The collapse also brought down the tops of the three support towers surrounding Arecibo, where the cables had been connected to keep the platform in the air. Slashdot reader joshgs shares a petition to rebuild the Arecibo Observatory. "On December 1, the platform of the 305-meter radio telescope at Arecibo Observatory suffered a catastrophic collapse," the petition states. "This telescope had many capabilities that cannot be replaced by any existing or planned facility. It had the world's most powerful and most sensitive planetary radar system, providing unparalleled capacity to track and characterize near-Earth asteroids. The telescope was also a source of tourism, education, and pride for the people of Puerto Rico, inspiring many to pursue careers in science and technology."

"We ask Congress to allocate funding to build a new Arecibo radio telescope with greater capabilities than the previous telescope -- to maintain American leadership in planetary defense, astronomy, and ionospheric studies; and to inspire a new generation of scientists."

AstraZeneca and Oxford University have given conflicting accounts of how they came upon the most effective dosing pattern for their COVID-19 vaccine, a rare instance of public dissension between major institutions collaborating on a pivotal project. From a report: The discrepancy, reported for the first time by Reuters, centres on the regimen administered to a smaller group of volunteers in the late-stage trials, of half a dose followed by a full dose. This diverged from the original plan of two full doses, given to the majority of participants. The half-dose pattern was found to be 90% effective, versus the 62% success rate of the two-full-dose main study, based on interim data. AstraZeneca's research chief told Reuters 10 days ago, when interim trial data was released, the half-dose was given inadvertently as a first shot to some trial participants, and emerged as a stroke of fortune -- "serendipity" -- that scientists expertly harnessed.

This narrative was refuted by a leading Oxford University scientist, however, who told Reuters on Monday that the half-dose shot was given deliberately after thorough consultations. Uncertainty over how the dosing regimen came about raises questions about the robustness of the data, according to some experts who said it risked slowing down the process of gaining regulatory approval for the shot and denting public confidence. "These differing accounts are worrying," Eleanor Riley, a professor of immunology and infectious disease at the University of Edinburgh, told Reuters. "Trust is at a premium when it comes to vaccines and we must not do anything that might in any way undermine it."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Dec. 2 was the 25th anniversary of the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), a joint project from NASA and the European Space Agency. To celebrate, the agencies released a dramatic, nearly 50-minute-long video showing the sun blasting out solar material from 1998 through 2020. The SOHO spacecraft constantly stares at the sun, recording its every whim. It's spectacular and mesmerizing. "What becomes clear as the sun turns and years pass and background stars whirl by, is how constant the stream of material is that is blasted in all directions -- the solar wind," ESA said in a statement on Wednesday. "This constant wind is interrupted only by huge explosions that fling bows of material at vast speeds, filling the solar system with ionized material and solar radiation."

With vaccines against Covid-19 on the verge of being rolled out around the world, Facebook said it will start removing false claims about the immunizations that have been debunked by public health experts. From a report: The move announced Thursday adds to Facebook's policy of taking down misinformation about the deadly virus that could lead to imminent physical harm. The type of posts that could be removed on Facebook or Instagram include false claims about the safety, efficacy, ingredients or side effects of the vaccine, Facebook said. These could include claims that the vaccines contain microchips or anything else not on the official ingredient list. In October, Facebook said it would ban ads that discourage people from getting vaccines in general, not just for Covid.

Natalie Wolchover writes via Quanta Magazine: As fundamental constants go, the speed of light, c, enjoys all the fame, yet c's numerical value says nothing about nature; it differs depending on whether it's measured in meters per second or miles per hour. The fine-structure constant, by contrast, has no dimensions or units. It's a pure number that shapes the universe to an astonishing degree -- "a magic number that comes to us with no understanding," as Richard Feynman described it. Paul Dirac considered the origin of the number "the most fundamental unsolved problem of physics."

Numerically, the fine-structure constant, denoted by the Greek letter a (alpha), comes very close to the ratio 1/137. It commonly appears in formulas governing light and matter. [...] The constant is everywhere because it characterizes the strength of the electromagnetic force affecting charged particles such as electrons and protons. Because 1/137 is small, electromagnetism is weak; as a consequence, charged particles form airy atoms whose electrons orbit at a distance and easily hop away, enabling chemical bonds. On the other hand, the constant is also just big enough: Physicists have argued that if it were something like 1/138, stars would not be able to create carbon, and life as we know it wouldn't exist.

Today, in a new paper in the journal Nature, a team of four physicists led by Saida Guellati-Khelifa at the Kastler Brossel Laboratory in Paris reported the most precise measurement yet of the fine-structure constant. The team measured the constant's value to the 11th decimal place, reporting that a = 1/137.03599920611. (The last two digits are uncertain.) With a margin of error of just 81 parts per trillion, the new measurement is nearly three times more precise than the previous best measurement in 2018 by Muller's group at Berkeley, the main competition. (Guellati-Khelifa made the most precise measurement before Muller's in 2011.) Muller said of his rival's new measurement of alpha, "A factor of three is a big deal. Let's not be shy about calling this a big accomplishment."

Singapore has granted San Francisco start-up Eat Just Inc. regulatory approval to sell its laboratory-grown chicken in the city-state -- the world's first government to allow the sale of cultured meat. CNN reports: The product, created from cultured chicken cells, has been approved as an ingredient in chicken bites following Singapore Food Agency (SFA) approval, Eat Just said Tuesday. Initially, the chicken bites will debut in a Singapore restaurant, with plans for wider expansion into dining and retail establishments in the country, Josh Tetrick, co-founder and CEO of Eat Just told CNN Business. The product will be priced at parity with premium chicken, he added.

The cultured meat is created in a bioreactor -- an apparatus in which a biological reaction or change takes place -- Eat Just said. It has a high protein content and is a rich source of minerals, according to the company, which plans to sell the product under the GOOD Meat brand. For now, with manufacturing hubs in Singapore and Northern California, the company only has approval to sell the meat in Singapore, but it hopes to expand sales of cultured meat -- including cultured beef -- into the US and Western Europe, Tetrick said.

AmiMoJo shares a report from the BBC: The winning numbers in South Africa's national lottery have caused a stir and sparked accusations of fraud over their unusual sequence. Tuesday's PowerBall lottery saw the numbers five, six, seven, eight and nine drawn, while the Powerball itself was, you've guessed it, 10. Some South Africans have alleged a scam and an investigation is under way. The organizers said 20 people purchased a winning ticket and won 5.7 million rand ($370,000; 278,000 pounds) each. Another 79 ticketholders won 6,283 rand each for guessing the sequence from five up to nine but missing the PowerBall.

The chances of winning South Africa's PowerBall lottery are one in 42,375,200 -- the number of different combinations when selecting five balls from a set of 50, plus an additional bonus ball from a pool of 20. The odds of the draw resulting in the numbers seen in Tuesday's televised live event are the same as any other combination. Competitions resulting in multiple winners are rare, but this may have something to do with this particular sequence.

Hope Thelps shares a report: The UK has become the first country in the world to approve the Pfizer/BioNTech coronavirus vaccine, paving the way for mass vaccination. Britain's medicines regulator, the MHRA, says the jab, which offers up to 95% protection against Covid-19 illness, is safe to be rolled out. The first doses are already on their way to the UK, with 800,000 due in the coming days, Pfizer said. Health Secretary Matt Hancock said the NHS will contact people about jabs. Elderly people in care homes and care home staff have been placed top of the priority list, followed by over-80s and health and care staff. But because hospitals already have the facilities to store the vaccine at -70C, as required, the very first vaccinations are likely to take place there -- for care home staff, NHS staff and patients -- so none of the vaccine is wasted. The Pfizer/BioNTech jab is the fastest vaccine to go from concept to reality, taking only 10 months to follow the same steps that normally span 10 years. The UK has already ordered 40 million doses of the jab - enough to vaccinate 20 million people. The doses will be rolled out as quickly as they can be made by Pfizer in Belgium, Mr Hancock said, with the first load next week and then "several millions" throughout December. Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said the first people in Scotland will be immunised on Tuesday.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk remains highly confident that his company will land humans on Mars by 2026, saying on Tuesday that it's an achievable goal "about six years from now." From a report: "If we get lucky, maybe four years," Musk said, speaking on an award show webcast from Berlin, Germany. "We want to send an uncrewed vehicle there in two years." The ambitious 2026 goal matches with what Musk outlined at the International Astronautical Congress in September 2016, when he said that "if things go super well," landing people on Mars "might be kind of in the 10-year timeframe." "I don't want to say that's when it will occur -- there's a huge amount of risk," Musk said in 2016.

A powerful new telescope developed by Australian scientists has mapped three million galaxies in record speed, unlocking the universe's deepest secrets. The Guardian reports: The Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (Askap) broke records as it conducted its first survey of the entire southern sky, mapping approximately three million galaxies in 300 hours. Scientists used the telescope at an observatory in outback Western Australia to observe 83% of the sky. The result is a new atlas of the universe, according to the telescope's developer and operator, Australian science agency the CSIRO.

The survey -- the Rapid Askap Continuum Survey -- has mapped millions of star-like points; most are distant galaxies, the CSIRO says. About a million of those distant galaxies have never been seen before. Scientists expect to find tens of millions of new galaxies in future surveys, lead author and CSIRO astronomer David McConnell said. The telescope mapped the sky in unprecedented speed and detail. The CSIRO says the result proves that an all-sky survey can be done in weeks rather than years. The instrument has a particularly wide field of view, enabling it to take panoramic pictures of the sky in high detail. The quality of the telescope's receivers means the team only needed to combine 903 images to form a full map of the sky. Other major world telescopes have required tens of thousands of images to put together an all-sky survey. The CSIRO's custom-built hardware and software then processed the 13.5 exabytes (13.5 billion gigabytes) of raw data generated by the telescope. That raw data was generated at a faster rate than Australia's entire internet traffic. The initial results were published in the journal Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia.

China's Chang'e 5 mission, tasked with bringing a sample of lunar dirt back to Earth, successfully landed on the Moon on Tuesday, marking the third time that China has placed a robotic spacecraft on the lunar surface. The lander will soon begin digging up samples of lunar soil, which will be returned to our planet later this month. From a report: Chang'e 5 launched from China's Wenchang Spacecraft Launch Site on November 23rd, flying to space on top of a Long March 5 rocket. It's a complex mission consisting of four main spacecraft that will all work together to bring between 2 to 4 kilograms of lunar dirt back to Earth. The quartet traveled to the Moon attached together and got into lunar orbit on November 28th.Two of those four spacecraft include a lander and an ascent vehicle, which are stacked on top of each other. On November 28th, the pair separated from the third spacecraft, Chang'e-5's service module, which remained in orbit around the Moon. The lander and ascent module touched down on the lunar surface today, according to CGTN, though a time was not provided. Now over the next few days, the lander will use a robotic arm to drill into the lunar dirt and scoop up rocks, storing them inside a sample container.

The Chinese submersible Fendouzhe just reached one of the deepest spots on the planet, reaching a dizzying (and dark) depth of 35,791 feet (10,909 meters), according to a state-run news agency. LiveScience reports: During a months-long expedition, Fendouzhe completed 13 dives into the Mariana Trench -- which boasts the deepest region on Earth -- in the western Pacific Ocean over the course of the mission, which began Oct. 10, according to China Daily. Eight of those dives exceeded 32,808 feet (10,000 m), and the crewed submersible reached its own record depth on Nov. 10 -- plunging to a depth exceeding the height of Mount Everest. The depth world record is still held by Victor Vescovo, a private equity investor who dived to 35,873 feet (10,934 m) on June 26 in his vessel Limiting Factor, according to Guinness World Records. The Fendouzhe's maximum depth reached by Fendouzhe (which means "Striver" in Chinese) exceeds film director James Cameron's solo 2012 dive to 35,787 feet (10,908 m) in the trench, and falls short of the 35,800 feet (10,912 m) attained by the Swiss-Italian-American vessel Trieste on Jan. 23, 1960.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Popular Mechanics: Scientists are going back to the salt mines, literally, to find a revolutionary new way to store large quantities of hydrogen for energy. Proponents say this could be a step toward unlocking hydrogen for renewables -- something that could change the energy landscape if it were resolved. "The project would initially have enough energy to power 150,000 households for one year and is scheduled to be operational by 2025," Fuel Cell Works reports. "It is being managed by Mitsubishi Hitachi Power Systems (MHPS), a maker of gas turbines, and Magnum Development, which owns salt caverns for liquid fuel storage." This works by basically repurposing existing, enormous caves to store reserves of hydrogen as well as other fuels.

Salt in particular makes a great medium for storing and then continuing to generate green hydrogen. CNBC explains how the caves are used to store and generate hydrogen: "Caverns can be created in salt domes by drilling into the salt dome and injecting the rock with water, which dissolves the salt. The resulting brine is extracted, leaving a large cavity. The next step is storing hydrogen in the cavern. Hydrogen electrolyzers can convert water into hydrogen by using renewable energy from solar and other sources. The hydrogen can then be stored, and reconverted to electricity when needed." Fuel Cell Works reports that while these caves are in the U.S., the major push for salt cave storage is in Europe.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Science Magazine: Continuing the spate of stunning news about COVID-19 vaccines, the biotech company Moderna announced the final results of the 30,000-person efficacy trial for its candidate in a press release today: Only 11 people who received two doses of the vaccine developed COVID-19 symptoms after being infected with the pandemic coronavirus, versus 185 symptomatic cases in a placebo group. That is an efficacy of 94.1%, the company says, far above what many vaccine scientists were expecting just a few weeks ago.

More impressive still, Moderna's candidate had 100% efficacy against severe disease. There were zero such COVID-19 cases among those vaccinated, but 30 in the placebo group. The company today plans to file a request for emergency use authorization (EUA) for its vaccine with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and is also seeking a similar green light from the European Medicines Agency. The data released today bolster an interim report from the company two weeks ago that only analyzed 95 total cases but produced similarly impressive efficacy. "I would still like to see all of the actual data, but what we've seen so far is absolutely remarkable," says Paul Offit, a vaccine researcher at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia who is a member of an independent committee of vaccine experts that advises FDA.