The big launch finally happens in 2 minutes. "All systems are go for tonight's launch at 7:27 p.m. EST of Crew Dragon's first operational mission with four astronauts on board," SpaceX tweeted this morning. But live coverage is already streaming on SpaceX's web site.

Space.com explains it's the first operational flight of SpaceX's "astronaut taxi," the Crew Dragon: Called Crew-1, this will be the second Crew Dragon mission to carry astronauts. NASA astronauts Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover and Shannon Walker, along with Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Soichi Noguchi, will lift off from the historic Launch Complex 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 7:27p.m. EST (0027 GMT) to begin a six-month mission.
Space.com reports that the astronauts completed their 9-mile (14 km) drive to the Falcon 9 rocket on the launch pad inside a pair of Tesla's electric Model X SUVs.

In another report, CBS News has confirmed that SpaceX "plans to reuse the booster for the next Crew Dragon flight." NASA is counting on the Crew-1 flight and follow-on missions by SpaceX and Boeing to end the agency's sole reliance on Russian Soyuz spacecraft for trips to and from low-Earth orbit. NASA has spent $4 billion since 2006 buying seats aboard Soyuz spacecraft and another $6 billion to date on its Commercial Crew Program, ultimately awarding contracts to SpaceX and Boeing... With two successful test flights behind them, NASA engineers were able to certify the spacecraft after a detailed analysis of telemetry and inspections of the flight hardware. It was the first such certification since the space shuttle was being built in the 1970s and the first ever granted a commercially developed spacecraft.

"I believe 20 years from now, we're going to look back at this time as a major turning point in our exploration and utilization of space," said Phil McAlister, director of commercial spaceflight development at NASA Headquarters. "It's not an exaggeration to state that with this milestone, NASA and SpaceX have changed the historical arc of human space transportation...

The station's life support systems, including its water recycling equipment and carbon dioxide removal gear, have been beefed up to support a seven-member crew and additional stores and supplies have been laid in. But the U.S. segment of the station only has four crew "sleep stations" and Hopkins plans to bunk with a sleeping bag in the powered-down Crew Dragon.

A new article summarizes research from the University of Oxford and NIHR Oxford Health Biomedical Research Centre. Slashdot reader AleRunner writes: Nearly one in five people who have had Covid-19 are diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder such as anxiety, depression or insomnia within three months of testing positive for the virus," Natalie Grover writes.

Although "people with a pre-existing mental health diagnosis" are 65% more likely to get COVID, so it may be that this is partly explained by doctors diagnosing illness that would otherwise be missed, the article suggests that the rate is double the rate for influenza and unexpectedly high so other explanations are needed.
From the article: Paul Harrison, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Oxford, said more research was needed to establish whether a diagnosis of a psychiatric disorder could be directly linked to getting coronavirus. General factors that influence physical health were not captured in the records analysed, such as socio-economic background, smoking, or use of drugs. There was also potential that the general stressful environment of the pandemic is playing a role, he noted. Research suggests that people from poorer socio-economic backgrounds are more likely to suffer mental ill-health. Poverty also increases exposure to coronavirus, owing to factors like crowded housing and unsafe working conditions.

"Equally, it's not at all implausible that Covid-19 might have some direct effect on your brain and your mental health. But I think that, again, remains to be positively demonstrated," said Mr. Harrison...

The calculations were made on the basis of roughly 70 million US health records, including more than 62,000 cases of Covid-19 that did not require a hospital stay or an emergency department visit.

Popular Mechanics writes: In a new study, researchers found the traditional psychoactive drug ayahuasca stimulates the growth of new brain cells in the hippocampi of research mice. The hippocampus is responsible for many memory functions, and the mice dosed with ayahuasca also performed better in a battery of memory tests.

While ayahuasca, a hallucinogenic and often purgative tea brewed from leaves of a shrub that grows in South America, contains the psychoactive compound N, N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT), it also packs harmine and tetrahydoharmine, two compounds that form new neurons from stem cells in a petri dish, per IFL Science.
"The study, published in Translational Psychiatry, a Nature Research journal, reports the results of four years of in vitro and in vivo experimentation on mice..." according to one medical news site.

José Ángel Morales, a researcher in the UCM and CIBERNED Department of Cellular Biology, tells them "This capacity to modulate brain plasticity suggests that it has great therapeutic potential for a wide range of psychiatric and neurological disorders, including neurodegenerative diseases." In neurodegenerative diseases, it is the death of certain types of neurons that causes the symptoms of pathologies such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. Although humans have the capacity to generate new neuronal cells, this depends on several factors and is not always possible.

"The challenge is to activate our dormant capacity to form neurons and thus replace the neurons that die as a result of the disease. This study shows that DMT is capable of activating neural stem cells and forming new neurons," concluded Morales.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from IEEE Spectrum: While setting fire to an iron ingot is probably more trouble than it's worth, fine iron powder mixed with air is highly combustible. When you burn this mixture, you're oxidizing the iron. Whereas a carbon fuel oxidizes into CO2, an iron fuel oxidizes into Fe2O3, which is just rust. The nice thing about rust is that it's a solid which can be captured post-combustion. And that's the only byproduct of the entire business -- in goes the iron powder, and out comes energy in the form of heat and rust powder. Iron has an energy density of about 11.3 kWh/L, which is better than gasoline. Although its specific energy is a relatively poor 1.4 kWh/kg, meaning that for a given amount of energy, iron powder will take up a little bit less space than gasoline but it'll be almost ten times heavier. It might not be suitable for powering your car, in other words. It probably won't heat your house either. But it could be ideal for industry, which is where it's being tested right now.

Researchers from TU Eindhoven have been developing iron powder as a practical fuel for the past several years, and last month they installed an iron powder heating system at a brewery in the Netherlands, which is turning all that stored up energy into beer. Since electricity can't efficiently produce the kind of heat required for many industrial applications (brewing included), iron powder is a viable zero-carbon option, with only rust left over. So what happens to all that rust? This is where things get clever, because the iron isn't just a fuel that's consumed -- it's energy storage that can be recharged. And to recharge it, you take all that Fe2O3, strip out the oxygen, and turn it back into Fe, ready to be burned again. It's not easy to do this, but much of the energy and work that it takes to pry those Os away from the Fes get returned to you when you burn the Fe the next time. The idea is that you can use the same iron over and over again, discharging it and recharging it just like you would a battery.

To maintain the zero-carbon nature of the iron fuel, the recharging process has to be zero-carbon as well. There are a variety of different ways of using electricity to turn rust back into iron, and the TU/e researchers are exploring three different technologies based on hot hydrogen reduction (which turns iron oxide and hydrogen into iron and water). [...] Both production of the hydrogen and the heat necessary to run the furnace or the reactors require energy, of course, but it's grid energy that can come from renewable sources. [...] Philip de Goey, a professor of combustion technology at TU/e, told us that he hopes to be able to deploy 10 MW iron powder high-temperature heat systems for industry within the next four years, with 10 years to the first coal power plant conversion.

"Elon Musk predicted in March, at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, that there would be 'probably close to zero new cases' in the United States by the end of April," reports the Washington Post.

"Now, the Tesla chief executive is trying to figure out whether he has a virus that has killed at least 242,000 Americans." The billionaire said early Friday that he's experiencing cold-like symptoms, but that four rapid tests have produced two positives and two negatives — an experience that left him questioning the process.

"Something extremely bogus is going on," Musk, 49, tweeted. "Was tested for covid four times today. Two tests came back negative, two came back positive. Same machine, same test, same nurse..."
UPDATE: Thursday Musk tweeted he was also in the process of getting "PCR tests" — plural — "from separate labs," with results to be delivered within 24 hours. On Saturday, Musk then tweeted the news that he "most likely" has a moderate case of Covid-19.

Musk had said he had "symptoms of a typical cold," tweeting that for the past few days he's had "slight fever" and "mild sniffles" — and that he'd been taking NyQuil.

Australia's climate has entered a new era of sustained extreme weather events, such as dangerous bushfires and heatwaves, courtesy of rising average temperatures, a new report by the nation's two government climate science agencies has found. From a report: Rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, mostly from fossil fuel burning, has driven more dangerous bushfires, rising sea levels and a rapid rise in the days where temperatures reach extreme levels, the Bureau of Meteorology and the CSIRO said in Australia's latest State of the Climate Report. "What we are seeing now is beyond the realm of what was possible previously," said Dr Jaci Brown, director of CSIRO's Climate Science Centre.

While 2019 was Australia's hottest on record that helped deliver unprecedented bushfires, those temperatures would be seen as average once global heating reaches 1.5C, the report said. Among the key findings, the report said Australia's climate had warmed by 1.44C since 1910 with bushfire seasons getting longer and more dangerous. Australia's oceans had warmed by 1C and were acidifying. In a briefing to reporters on Tuesday, Dr Karl Braganza, manager of climate environmental prediction service at the bureau, said conditions in Australia were in line with projections over recent decades. But he said: "What we are seeing now is a more tangible shift in the extremes and we are starting to feel how that shift in the average is impacting on extreme events. So we don't necessarily feel that 1.44C increase in average temperature, but we do feel those heatwaves and we feel that fire weather."

The world's largest vaccine maker is ramping up production of AstraZeneca Plc's Covid-19 shot, aiming to have 100 million doses ready by December for an inoculation drive that could begin across India that same month. From a report: If final-stage trial data show AstraZeneca's candidate gives effective protection from the virus, the Serum Institute of India -- which is partnered to produce at least one billion doses -- may get emergency authorization from New Delhi by December, said Adar Poonawalla, chief executive officer of the family-owned firm based in the western city of Pune. That initial amount will go to India, Poonawalla said in an interview on Thursday. Full approval early next year will allow distribution on a 50-50 basis with the South Asian nation and Covax, the World Health Organization-backed body that's purchasing shots for poor nations. Serum, which has tied up with five developers, has so far made 40 million doses of AstraZeneca's vaccine in the past two months and aims to start manufacturing Novavax's contender soon.

Microsoft said Friday it has detected at least seven attacks on companies working to develop a COVID-19 vaccine or treatments. From a report: The company said attacks by three nation-state actors -- two from North Korea and one from Russia -- have targeted companies in Canada, France, India, South Korea and the United States. "Two global issues will help shape people's memories of this time in history -- COVID-19 and the increased use of the internet by malign actors to disrupt society," Microsoft deputy general counsel Tom Burt said in a blog post. "It's disturbing that these challenges have now merged as cyberattacks are being used to disrupt health care organizations fighting the pandemic." Attackers have used a range of approaches including phishing schemes and brute force to get needed passwords, with one group tied to North Korea posing as the World Health Organization in its spear-phishing effort. Microsoft said its built-in security protections stopped a majority of the attacks. "We've notified all organizations targeted, and where attacks have been successful, we've offered help," Burt said.

sciencehabit writes: Two years ago, a global dust storm veiled Mars. But although the storm took a toll, killing off NASA's Opportunity rover, it also revealed that such storms play an important role in how the once-wet planet loses its water. In 2014, looking back at data from 2007, scientists noticed that the fluorescent fog of hydrogen in the martian upper atmosphere faded as the southern hemisphere's summer ended and a previous global dust storm subsided. The only plausible source for that hydrogen was water. Subsequent observations have indicated that water, buoyed by storms, can reach much higher in the atmosphere than previously thought -- all the way to the ionosphere, a new paper reports. This allows charged particles to directly break the water apart, and it is likely the primary method of water loss on the planet today.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org : Even if humanity stopped emitting greenhouse gases tomorrow, Earth will warm for centuries to come and oceans will rise by meters, according to a controversial modeling study published Thursday. Natural drivers of global warming -- more heat-trapping clouds, thawing permafrost, and shrinking sea ice -- already set in motion by carbon pollution will take on their own momentum, researchers from Norway reported in the Nature journal Scientific Reports. Using a stripped-down climate model, [lead author Jorgen Randers, a professor emeritus of climate strategy at the BI Norwegian Business School] and colleague Ulrich Goluke projected changes out to the year 2500 under two scenarios: the instant cessation of emissions, and the gradual reduction of planet warming gases to zero by 2100.

In an imaginary world where carbon pollution stops with a flip of the switch, the planet warms over the next 50 years to about 2.3 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels -- roughly half-a-degree above the target set in the 2015 Paris Agreement -- and cools slightly after that. Earth's surface today is 1.2C hotter than it was in the mid-19th century, when temperatures began to rise. But starting in 2150, the model has the planet beginning to gradually warm again, with average temperatures climbing another degree over the following 350 years, and sea levels going up by at least three meters. Under the second scenario, Earth heats up to levels that would tear at the fabric of civilization far more quickly, but ends up at roughly the same point by 2500.

The core finding -- contested by leading climate scientists -- is that several thresholds, or "tipping points", in Earth's climate system have already been crossed, triggering a self-perpetuating process of warming, as has happened millions of years in the past. One of these drivers is the rapid retreat of sea ice in the Arctic. [...] Another source is the thawing of permafrost, which holds twice as much carbon as there is in the atmosphere. The third is increasing amounts of water vapor, which also has a warming effect. Reactions from half-a-dozen leading climate scientists to the study -- which the authors acknowledge is schematic -- varied sharply, with some saying the findings merit follow-up research, and others rejecting it out of hand. There is a way to stop the melting process, but it involves sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere and storing it underground, which isn't yet possible at the scale required. The authors also suggest making Earth's surface brighter and planting billions of trees to slow or halt the planet warming gases.

Temperature and symptom-based screening programs don't help catch coronavirus cases, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a new report that took a closer look at the programs used at US airports until mid-September. CNN reports: The CDC said this was a resource-intensive program that had a low case detection rate. Between January 17 and September 13, the CDC screened more than 766,000 travelers. Nearly 300 met the criteria for public health assessment, 35 were tested for the coronavirus, and nine tested positive. That means the program identified about one case per 85,000 travelers screened, the CDC reported Thursday in the agency's weekly report. This style of screening doesn't seem to work for a few reasons. Covid-19 has a wide range of nonspecific symptoms common to other infections, there are a high number of asymptomatic cases, travelers may deny symptoms or take steps to avoid detection and passenger data was limited.

The CDC also only shared contact information with local health departments for 68% of the passengers it screened. There were data collection problems, the report said, and some states opted out of receiving the information. The CDC ended the program September 14. Instead, the CDC has concentrated on communicating more with travelers to promote recommended preventive measures. The agency has also enhanced the public health response capacity at ports of entry. The CDC said travelers and their local communities would be better protected if there was "more efficient" collection of contact information for international air passengers before they arrive and real-time data that could be sent to US health departments. Pre-departure testing within 72 hours before the trip and testing upon arrival would help, as would rules that would encourage a traveler to self-isolate for a certain period.

schwit1 shares a report from Phys.Org: Forget glue, screws, heat or other traditional bonding methods. A Cornell University-led collaboration has developed a 3-D printing technique that creates cellular metallic materials by smashing together powder particles at supersonic speed. This form of technology, known as "cold spray," results in mechanically robust, porous structures that are 40% stronger than similar materials made with conventional manufacturing processes. The structures' small size and porosity make them particularly well-suited for building biomedical components, like replacement joints.

The team's paper, "Solid-State Additive Manufacturing of Porous Ti-6Al-4V by Supersonic Impact," published Nov. 9 in Applied Materials Today. "If we make implants with these kind of porous structures, and we insert them in the body, the bone can grow inside these pores and make a biological fixation," Moridi said. "This helps reduce the likelihood of the implant loosening. And this is a big deal. There are lots of revision surgeries that patients have to go through to remove the implant just because it's loose and it causes a lot of pain." Moridi added: "We only focused on titanium alloys and biomedical applications, but the applicability of this process could be beyond that. Essentially, any metallic material that can endure plastic deformation could benefit from this process. And it opens up a lot of opportunities for larger-scale industrial applications, like construction, transportation and energy."

Thelasko shares a report from the BBC: Early results from trials of a Covid vaccine developed in Russia suggest it could be 92% effective. The data is based on 20 cases of Covid-19 from 16,000 volunteers given the Sputnik V vaccine or a dummy injection. While some scientists welcomed the news, others said the data had been rushed out too early. The Sputnik V vaccine, developed at the National Research Centre for Epidemiology and Microbiology in Moscow, is currently going through phase III clinical trials in Belarus, UAE, Venezuela and India. So far there are no safety issues, with Russian researchers saying there were "no unexpected adverse events" 21 days after volunteers received their first of two injections.

The Russian researchers say their data will be published "in one of the leading international peer-reviewed medical journals." If it's positive, it means there will almost certainly be more than one way of protecting people against the virus. The Pfizer vaccine injects part of the genetic code of the virus into the body to train the immune system. The other two use a harmless virus that has been genetically modified to resemble the coronavirus. Two doses are also required, but one advantage of Sputnik is that it doesn't need to be stored at very low temperatures, around -80C, unlike Pfizer's.

Ticketmaster is planning to check the coronavirus vaccination status of concert-goers prior to shows once a treatment is approved. The New York Post reports: The ticketing giant plans to have customers use their cellphones to verify their inoculation or whether they've tested negative for the virus within a 24- to 72-hour window, according to the exclusive report. The plan, which is still being ironed out, will utilize three separate components, including the California-based company's digital ticketing app, third-party health information firms like CLEAR Health Pass and testing/vaccination distributors like Labcorp or CVS Minute Clinic.

Ticketmaster will reportedly not store or access medical records under the plan. If approved, fans would need to verify that they've either already been vaccinated or have tested negative as recently as 24 hours prior to the show. Concert-goers would then instruct a lab to send over test results to companies like CLEAR Health Pass or IBM's Digital Health Pass, which would verify the fan's status to Ticketmaster. Anyone who tests positive or doesn't get screened won't be granted access to the event venue, Billboard reported. The digital ticketing app will also eliminate the need for paper tickets and can be prohibited from being resold, according to the report. Further reading: Billboard

McDonald has announced plans to introduce its own plant-based burger option to the menu in select markets as soon as next year. From a report: The company made its plans public this week at an investor meeting. The McPlant -- the McPlant! -- uses a fake-meat amalgamation of McDonald's own creation, rather than partnering with an existing plant-based company like Impossible Foods as other chains have. (Beyond Meat and McDonalds co-created the plant-based patty .) "McPlant is crafted exclusively for McDonald's, by McDonald's," McDonald's international president Ian Borden said at this week's meeting. The reveal is a pretty drastic reversal of McDonald's public-facing strategy around plant-based options. If Borden's initial announcement is to be believed, the company doesn't just see it as a single menu option -- rather, McDonald's hopes the McPlant will prove successful enough to extend to a full plant-based menu.

A British firm has won a European Space Agency contract to develop the technology to turn moon dust and rocks into oxygen, leaving behind aluminium, iron and other metal powders for lunar construction workers to build with. The Guardian reports: If the process can be made to work well enough, it will pave the way for extraction facilities on the moon that make oxygen and valuable materials on the surface, rather than having to haul them into space at enormous cost. Analyses of rocks brought back from the moon reveal that oxygen makes up about 45% of the material by weight. The remainder is largely iron, aluminium and silicon. In work published this year, scientists at Metalysis and the University of Glasgow found they could extract 96% of the oxygen from simulated lunar soil, leaving useful metal alloy powders behind.

The Esa contract will fund Metalysis for nine months to perfect an electrochemical process that releases oxygen from lunar dust and rocks by sending an electrical current through the material. The process is already used on Earth, but the oxygen is released as an unwanted byproduct of mineral extraction. To make it work for lunar explorers, the oxygen must be captured and stored. Under the contract, the firm will try to boost the yield and purity of oxygen and metals from the rock while reducing the amount of energy the process consumes. If the technology looks promising, the next step will be to demonstrate oxygen extraction on the moon. The oxygen released from the lunar surface can be combined with other gases to produce breathable air, but it is also a vital component of rocket propellant that could be manufactured on the moon and used to refuel spacecraft bound for deep space.

An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from Wired: On Monday morning, when representatives from the drug company Pfizer said that its Covid-19 vaccine appears to be more than 90 percent effective, stocks soared, White House officials rushed to (falsely) claim credit, and sighs of relief went up all around the internet. [...] The arrival of an effective vaccine to fight SARS-CoV-2 less than a year after the novel coronavirus emerged would smash every record ever set by vaccine makers. "Historic isn't even the right word," says Larry Corey of the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Division at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center. A renowned virologist, Corey has spent the last three decades leading the search for a vaccine against the virus that causes AIDS. He's never seen an inoculation developed for a new bug in under five years, let alone one. "It's never happened before, never, not even close," he says. "It's just an amazing accomplishment of science."

And perhaps even more monumental is the kind of vaccine that Pfizer and BioNTech are bringing across the finish line. The active ingredient inside their shot is mRNA -- mobile strings of genetic code that contain the blueprints for proteins. Cells use mRNA to get those specs out of hard DNA storage and into their protein-making factories. The mRNA inside Pfizer and BioNTech's vaccine directs any cells it reaches to run a coronavirus spike-building program. The viral proteins these cells produce can't infect any other cells, but they are foreign enough to trip the body's defense systems. They also look enough like the real virus to train the immune system to recognize SARS-CoV-2, should its owner encounter the infectious virus in the future. Up until now, this technology has never been approved for use in people. A successful mRNA vaccine won't just be a triumph over the new coronavirus, it'll be a huge leap forward for the science of vaccine making.

[I]n the last decade, the field has started to move away from this see-what-sticks approach toward something pharma folks call "rational drug design." It involves understanding the structure and function of the target -- like say, the spiky protein SARS-CoV-2 uses to get into human cells -- and building molecules that can either bind to that target directly, or produce other molecules that can. Genetic vaccines represent an important step in this scientific evolution. Engineers can now design strands of mRNA on computers, guided by algorithms that predict which combination of genetic letters will yield a viral protein with just the right shape to prod the human body into producing protective antibodies. In the last few years, it's gotten much easier and cheaper to make mRNA and DNA at scale, which means that as soon as scientists have access to a new pathogen's genome, they can start whipping up hundreds or thousands of mRNA snippets to test -- each one a potential vaccine. The Chinese government released the genetic sequence of SARS-CoV-2 in mid-January. By the end of February, BioNTech had identified 20 vaccine candidates, of which four were then selected for human trials in Germany. [...] Genetic vaccines might be proving they can work -- but it's still not definitive, and they may not yet work for everyone. That's why experts say it's so crucial to continue supporting ongoing trials for the more than 60 other vaccine candidates still in various stages of human testing. What older technologies lack in terms of speed, they make up for in durability.

A cryptographic master tool called indistinguishability obfuscation has for years seemed too good to be true. Three researchers have figured out that it can work. Erica Klarreich, reporting for Quanta Magazine: In 2018, Aayush Jain, a graduate student at the University of California, Los Angeles, traveled to Japan to give a talk about a powerful cryptographic tool he and his colleagues were developing. As he detailed the team's approach to indistinguishability obfuscation (iO for short), one audience member raised his hand in bewilderment. "But I thought iO doesn't exist?" he said. At the time, such skepticism was widespread. Indistinguishability obfuscation, if it could be built, would be able to hide not just collections of data but the inner workings of a computer program itself, creating a sort of cryptographic master tool from which nearly every other cryptographic protocol could be built. It is "one cryptographic primitive to rule them all," said Boaz Barak of Harvard University. But to many computer scientists, this very power made iO seem too good to be true. Computer scientists set forth candidate versions of iO starting in 2013. But the intense excitement these constructions generated gradually fizzled out, as other researchers figured out how to break their security. As the attacks piled up, "you could see a lot of negative vibes," said Yuval Ishai of the Technion in Haifa, Israel. Researchers wondered, he said, "Who will win: the makers or the breakers?" "There were the people who were the zealots, and they believed in [iO] and kept working on it," said Shafi Goldwasser, director of the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing at the University of California, Berkeley. But as the years went by, she said, "there was less and less of those people."

Now, Jain -- together with Huijia Lin of the University of Washington and Amit Sahai, Jain's adviser at UCLA -- has planted a flag for the makers. In a paper posted online on August 18, the three researchers show for the first time how to build indistinguishability obfuscation using only "standard" security assumptions. All cryptographic protocols rest on assumptions -- some, such as the famous RSA algorithm, depend on the widely held belief that standard computers will never be able to quickly factor the product of two large prime numbers. A cryptographic protocol is only as secure as its assumptions, and previous attempts at iO were built on untested and ultimately shaky foundations. The new protocol, by contrast, depends on security assumptions that have been widely used and studied in the past. "Barring a really surprising development, these assumptions will stand," Ishai said. While the protocol is far from ready to be deployed in real-world applications, from a theoretical standpoint it provides an instant way to build an array of cryptographic tools that were previously out of reach. For instance, it enables the creation of "deniable" encryption, in which you can plausibly convince an attacker that you sent an entirely different message from the one you really sent, and "functional" encryption, in which you can give chosen users different levels of access to perform computations using your data. The new result should definitively silence the iO skeptics, Ishai said. "Now there will no longer be any doubts about the existence of indistinguishability obfuscation," he said. "It seems like a happy end."

An anonymous reader writes: Glaciers in China's bleak Qilian mountains are disappearing at a shocking rate as global warming brings unpredictable change and raises the prospect of crippling, long-term water shortages, scientists say. The largest glacier in the 800-kilometer (500-mile) mountain chain on the arid northeastern edge of the Tibetan plateau has retreated about 450 meters since the 1950s, when researchers set up China's first monitoring station to study it. The 20-square kilometer glacier, known as Laohugou No. 12, is criss-crossed by rivulets of water down its craggy, grit-blown surface. It has shrunk by about 7% since measurements began, with melting accelerating in recent years, scientists say. Equally alarming is the loss of thickness, with about 13 meters (42 feet) of ice disappearing as temperatures have risen, said Qin Xiang, the director at the monitoring station. "The speed that this glacier has been shrinking is really shocking," Qin told Reuters on a recent visit to the spartan station in a frozen, treeless world, where he and a small team of researchers track the changes. The Tibetan plateau is known as the world's Third Pole for the amount of ice long locked in the high-altitude wilderness. But since the 1950s, average temperatures in the area have risen about 1.5 Celsius, Qin said, and with no sign of an end to warming, the outlook is grim for the 2,684 glaciers in the Qilian range. Across the mountains, glacier retreat was 50% faster in 1990-2010 than it was from 1956 to 1990, data from the China Academy of Sciences shows.

The reopening of restaurants, gyms and hotels carries the highest risk of spreading Covid-19, according to a study that used mobile phone data from 98 million people to model the risks of infection at different locations. From a report: Researchers at Stanford University and Northwestern University used data collected between March and May in cities across the U.S. to map the movement of people. They looked at where they went, how long they stayed, how many others were there and what neighborhoods they were visiting from. They then combined that information with data on the number of cases and how the virus spreads to create infection models. In Chicago, for instance, the study's model predicted that if restaurants were reopened at full capacity, they would generate almost 600,000 new infections, three times as many as with other categories. The study, published Tuesday in the journal Nature, also found that about 10% of the locations examined accounted for 85% of predicted infections. This type of very granular data "shows us where there is vulnerability," said Eric Topol, of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, which wasn't involved in the study. "Then what you need to do is concentrate on the areas that light up."