Nations that hoard possible COVID-19 vaccines while excluding others will deepen the pandemic, World Health Organization (WHO) chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on Tuesday, issuing a last-ditch call for countries to join a global vaccine pact. From a report: The WHO has an Aug. 31 deadline for wealthier nations to join the "COVAX Global Vaccines Facility" for sharing vaccine hopefuls with developing countries. Tedros said he sent a letter to the WHO's 194 member states, urging participation. The global health agency also raised concerns that the pandemic's spread was being driven now by younger people, many of whom were unaware they were infected, posing a danger to vulnerable groups. Tedros' push for nations to join COVAX comes as the European Union, Britain, Switzerland and the United States strike deals with companies testing prospective vaccines. Russia and China are also working on vaccines, and the WHO fears national interests could impede global efforts.

Haider Warraich, a cardiologist, writing for the New York Times: An intriguing new study from Germany offers a glimpse into how SARS-CoV-2 affects the heart. Researchers studied 100 individuals, with a median age of just 49, who had recovered from Covid-19. Most were asymptomatic or had mild symptoms. An average of two months after they received the diagnosis, the researchers performed M.R.I. scans of their hearts and made some alarming discoveries: Nearly 80 percent had persistent abnormalities and 60 percent had evidence of myocarditis. The degree of myocarditis was not explained by the severity of the initial illness.

Though the study has some flaws, and the generalizability and significance of its findings not fully known, it makes clear that in young patients who had seemingly overcome SARS-CoV-2 it's fairly common for the heart to be affected. We may be seeing only the beginning of the damage. Researchers are still figuring out how SARS-CoV-2 causes myocarditis -- whether it's through the virus directly injuring the heart or whether it's from the virulent immune reaction that it stimulates. It's possible that part of the success of immunosuppressant medications such as the steroid dexamethasone in treating sick Covid-19 patients comes from their preventing inflammatory damage to the heart. Such steroids are commonly used to treat cases of myocarditis. Despite treatment, more severe forms of Covid-19-associated myocarditis can lead to permanent damage of the heart -- which, in turn, can lead to heart failure.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: Nearly 60 years ago, the Nobel prize-winning physicist Eugene Wigner captured one of the many oddities of quantum mechanics in a thought experiment. He imagined a friend of his, sealed in a lab, measuring a particle such as an atom while Wigner stood outside. Quantum mechanics famously allows particles to occupy many locations at once -- a so-called superposition -- but the friend's observation "collapses" the particle to just one spot. Yet for Wigner, the superposition remains: The collapse occurs only when he makes a measurement sometime later. Worse, Wigner also sees the friend in a superposition. Their experiences directly conflict. Now, researchers in Australia and Taiwan offer perhaps the sharpest demonstration that Wigner's paradox is real. In a study published this week in Nature Physics, they transform the thought experiment into a mathematical theorem that confirms the irreconcilable contradiction at the heart of the scenario. The team also tests the theorem with an experiment, using photons as proxies for the humans. Whereas Wigner believed resolving the paradox requires quantum mechanics to break down for large systems such as human observers, some of the new study's authors believe something just as fundamental is on thin ice: objectivity. It could mean there is no such thing as an absolute fact, one that is as true for me as it is for you.

Tim Harford, writing for Financial Times (not paywalled): Last spring, I returned from the holiday of a lifetime in Japan, and reflected on the richness of the memories it had generated. Time flew by while I was there, but in hindsight 10 days somewhere vividly new had produced more memories than 10 weeks back home. I likened the effect to the compression of a film. Instead of storing each frame separately, video compression algorithms will start with the first frame of a scene and then store a series of "diffs" -- changes from one frame to the next. A slow, contemplative movie with long scenes and fixed cameras can be compressed more than a fast-moving action flick. Similarly, a week full of new experiences will seem longer in retrospect. A month of repeating the same routine might seem endless, but will be barely a blip in the memory: the "diffs" are not significant enough for the brain to bother with. After months of working from home, I now realise that there was something incomplete about this account. New experiences are indeed important for planting a rich crop of memories. But, by itself, that is not enough. A new physical space seems to be important if our brains are to pay attention.

The Covid-19 lockdown, after all, was full of new experiences. Some were grim: I lost a friend to the disease; I smashed my face up in an accident; we had to wear masks and avoid physical contact and worry about where the next roll of toilet paper was coming from. Some were more positive: the discovery of new pleasures, the honing of new skills, the overcoming of new challenges. But I doubt I am alone in finding that my memory of the lockdown months is rather thin. No matter how many new people or old friends you talk to on Zoom or Skype, they all start to smear together because the physical context is monotonous: the conversations take place while one sits in the same chair, in the same room, staring at the same computer screen.>

Time magazine reports on is a big scientific advance: "the understanding that our bodies often operate according to different clocks." Although the federal government recommends that Americans sleep seven or more hours per night for optimal health and functioning, new research is challenging the assumption that sleep is a one-size-fits-all phenomenon. Scientists have found that our internal body clocks vary so greatly that they could form the next frontiers of personalized medicine...

Human sleep is largely a mystery. We know it's important; getting too little is linked to heightened risk for metabolic disorders, Type 2 diabetes, psychiatric disorders, autoimmune disease, neurodegeneration and many types of cancer. "It's probably true that bad sleep leads to increased risks of virtually every disorder," says Dr. Louis Ptacek, a neurology professor at the University of California, San Francisco... The ideal sleep duration has long been thought to be universal. "There are many people who think everyone needs eight to eight and a half hours of sleep per night and there will be health consequences if they don't get it," says Ptacek. "But that's as crazy as saying everybody has to be 5 ft. 10 in. tall. It's just not true..."

About a decade ago, Ptacek's wife Ying-Hui Fu discovered the first human gene linked to natural short sleep; people who had a rare genetic mutation seemed to get the same benefits from six hours of sleep a night as those without the mutation got from eight hours. In 2019, Fu and Ptacek discovered two more genes connected to natural short sleep, and they'll soon submit a paper describing a fourth, providing even more evidence that functioning well on less sleep is a genetic trait...

Doctors once dismissed short sleepers as depressed or suffering from insomnia. Yet short sleepers may actually have an edge over everyone else. Research is still early, but Fu has found that besides being more efficient at sleep, they tend to be more energetic and optimistic and have a higher tolerance for pain than people who need to spend more time in bed. They also tend to live longer.

"The moon is drifting away," reports the New York Times. Every year, it gets about an inch and a half farther from us. Hundreds of millions of years from now, our companion in the sky will be distant enough that there will be no more total solar eclipses.

For decades, scientists have measured the moon's retreat by firing a laser at light-reflecting panels, known as retroreflectors, that were left on the lunar surface, and then timing the light's round trip. But the moon's five retroreflectors are old, and they're now much less efficient at flinging back light. To determine whether a layer of moon dust might be the culprit, researchers devised an audacious plan: They bounced laser light off a much smaller but newer retroreflector mounted aboard a NASA spacecraft that was skimming over the moon's surface at thousands of miles per hour. And it worked...

Dust can be kicked up by meteorites striking the moon's surface. It coated the astronauts' moon suits during their visits, and it is expected to be a significant problem if humans ever colonize the moon. While it has been nearly 50 years since a retroreflector was placed on the moon's surface, a NASA spacecraft launched in 2009 carries a retroreflector roughly the size of a paperback book. That spacecraft, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, circles the moon once every two hours, and it has beamed home millions of high-resolution images of the lunar surface...

In 2017, Dr. Erwan Mazarico, a planetary scientist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and his collaborators began firing an infrared laser from a station near Grasse, France — about a half-hour drive from Cannes — toward the orbiter's retroreflector. At roughly 3 a.m. on Sept. 4, 2018, they recorded their first success: a detection of 25 photons that made the round trip... After accounting for the smaller size of the orbiter's retroreflector, Dr. Mazarico and his colleagues found that it often returned photons more efficiently than the Apollo retroreflectors... "For me, the dusty reflector idea is more supported than refuted by these results" he said.
Laser-reflection measurements over long periods of time and across several reflectors "have revealed that the Moon has a fluid core," NASA notes. "Scientists can tell by monitoring the slightest wobbles as the Moon rotates."

Slashdot reader sciencehabit tells the strange story of a 4.5-billion-year-old meteor from "the cold void beyond Jupiter" that sent "blazing fireballs and rocks raining down on farms and fields." On 23 April 2019, a space rock the size of a washing machine broke up in the skies over Aguas Zarcas, a village carved out of Costa Rica's rainforest. The falling fragments, which crashed through roofs and doghouses, set off a frenzy of hunting — for this rare meteorite soon became more valuable than gold.

Meteorites are not uncommon: Every year, tens of thousands survive the plunge through Earth's atmosphere. But meteorite falls, witnessed strikes that take their name from where they land, are rare — just 1,196 have been documented. And even among that exclusive group, there was something extraordinary about this particular meteorite: The dull stone was, as far as rocks go, practically alive. Aguas Zarcas, as the fragments would soon collectively be called, is a carbonaceous chondrite, a pristine remnant of the early Solar System. The vast majority of meteorites are lumps of stone or metal. But carbonaceous chondrites are rich in carbon — including organic molecules as complex as amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. They illustrate how chemical reactions in space give rise to complex precursors for life; some scientists even believe rocks like Aguas Zarcas gave life a nudge when they crashed into a barren Earth 4.5 billion years ago.

Slashdot reader sciencehabit quotes Science magazine: Astronomers imagine the early universe as a wild and lawless place, with chaotic fledgling galaxies full of swirling gases and frantic star formation. So an image released today comes as a surprise: a young galaxy, spied when the universe was just 10% of its current age, that looks remarkably like our calm and well-ordered Milky Way...

Astronomers used computer modeling to reconstruct what the galaxy, SPT0418-47, really looks like. Reporting today in Nature, they reveal it has a rotating disk and a bulge around its center just like the Milky Way. Such features were thought to form much later in galactic evolution. This and similar discoveries are pushing astronomers to look again at how galaxies can have evolved to an apparently mature stage in such a short time.

Some leaked speedtests from beta users of SpaceX's Starlink satellite-broadband service "aren't showing the gigabit speeds SpaceX teased," writes Ars Technica, "but it's early." Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shared their report: Beta users of SpaceX's Starlink satellite-broadband service are getting download speeds ranging from 11Mbps to 60Mbps, according to tests conducted using Ookla's speedtest.net tool. Speed tests showed upload speeds ranging from 5Mbps to 18Mbps. The same tests, conducted over the past two weeks, showed latencies or ping rates ranging from 31ms to 94ms. This isn't a comprehensive study of Starlink speeds and latency, so it's not clear whether this is what Internet users should expect once Starlink satellites are fully deployed and the service reaches commercial availability....

Links to 11 anonymized speed tests by Starlink users were posted by a Reddit user yesterday... A new Reddit post listing more speed tests shows some Starlink users getting even lower latency of 21ms and 20ms.

Beta testers must sign non-disclosure agreements, so these speed tests might be one of the only glimpses we get of real-world performance during the trials. SpaceX has told the Federal Communications Commission that Starlink would eventually hit gigabit speeds, saying in its 2016 application to the FCC that "once fully optimized through the Final Deployment, the system will be able to provide high bandwidth (up to 1Gbps per user), low latency broadband services for consumers and businesses in the US and globally." SpaceX has launched about 600 satellites so far and has FCC permission to launch nearly 12,000.

While 60Mbps isn't a gigabit, it's on par with some of the lower cable speed tiers and is much higher than speeds offered by many DSL services in the rural areas where SpaceX is likely to see plenty of interest.

Applehu Akbar shared CNN's article about why some people experience Covid-19 differently: "When we looked in the setting of Covid disease, we found that people who had prior vaccinations with a variety of vaccines — for pneumococcus, influenza, hepatitis and others — appeared to have a lower risk of getting Covid disease," Dr. Andrew Badley, an infectious disease specialist at Mayo Clinic, told CNN's Anderson Cooper on Monday night... There's been no definitive evidence of any other vaccines boosting immunity against Covid-19. But some researchers have suggested it's possible.... Last month, researchers found that countries where many people have been given the tuberculosis vaccine Bacillus Calmette-Guerin had less mortality from coronavirus, a finding that fits with other research suggesting the vaccine can boost people's immunity in general.

But once you're infected, how much of the virus made it into your body could also have an impact on what your experience is, another expert told CNN on Monday. Dr. Monica Gandhi, an infectious disease specialist at University of California, San Francisco, has been working with a team of researchers to understand how more people could go through their infections with minimal or no symptoms. About 40% of people infected with the virus don't have symptoms, according to an estimate last month by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Gandhi's team found masks make a difference.

"What the mask does is really reduce the amount of virus that you get in, if you do get infected," she said. "And by reducing that... you have a lower dose, you're able to manage it, you're able to have a calm response and you have mild symptoms or no symptoms at all."

Amid a flurry of concern over reports that frozen chicken wings imported to China from Brazil had tested positive for the coronavirus, experts said on Thursday that the likelihood of catching the virus from food -- especially frozen, packaged food -- is exceedingly low. From a report: "This means somebody probably handled those chicken wings who might have had the virus," said Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at Columbia University. "But it doesn't mean, 'Oh my god, nobody buy any chicken wings because they're contaminated.'" Guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention maintain that "there is no evidence to suggest that handling food or consuming food is associated with Covid-19." The main route the virus is known to take from person to person is through spray from sneezing, coughing, speaking or even breathing.

"I make no connection between this and any fear that this is the cause of any long-distance transmission events," said C. Brandon Ogbunu, a disease ecologist at Yale University. When the virus crosses international boundaries, it's almost certainly chauffeured by people, rather than the commercial products they ship. The chicken wings were screened on Wednesday in Shenzhen's Longgang district, where officials have been testing imports for the presence of coronavirus genetic material, or RNA. Several samples taken from the outer packaging of frozen seafood, some of which had been shipped in from Ecuador, recently tested positive for virus RNA in China's Anhui, Shaanxi and Shandong provinces as well. Laboratory procedures that search for RNA also form the basis of most of the coronavirus tests performed in people. But RNA is only a proxy for the presence of the virus, which can leave behind bits of its genetic material even after it has been destroyed, Dr. Ogbunu said. "This is just detecting the signature that the virus has been there at some point," he said.

schwit1 writes: Moviegoers will have to pay only 15 cents for tickets at AMC cinemas on Aug. 20, when the chain starts to reopen amid the coronavirus outbreak. The cheap tickets will be available at more than 100 theaters across the U.S. The deal, a throwback to the price the company charged when it was founded in 1920, is intended to lure customers who may be worried about venturing into a theater because of the risk of contracting COVID-19.

Squid are among the smartest ocean dwellers. Along with other ink-squirting cephalopods like octopuses and cuttlefish, squid boast the largest brains of all invertebrates. They also have an incredibly complex nervous system capable of instantaneously camouflaging their bodies and communicating with each other using various signals. From a report: Scientists have long marveled at these sophisticated behaviors and have tried to understand why these tentacled creatures are so intelligent. Gene editing may be able to help researchers unravel the mysteries of the cephalopod brain. But until now, it's been too hard to do -- in part because cephalopod embryos are protected by a hard outer layer that makes manipulating them difficult. Recently, a group of marine scientists managed to engineer the first genetically altered squid using the DNA editing tool CRISPR. In addition to being a big milestone in biology, the advance has potential implications for human health: Because of their big brains, cephalopods are used to study neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.

The ability to edit the genes of these animals could help scientists study the genes involved in learning and memory as well as specific cephalopod behaviors. "I think you're going to see a huge jump in the use of these [gene-edited] organisms by neurobiologists," Joshua Rosenthal, PhD, a senior scientist at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and a key architect of the first genetically engineered squid, tells OneZero. Rosenthal and his colleagues used CRISPR to snip out a gene responsible for the coloring of the squid's skin. As a result, the edited squid were transparent instead of having their usual reddish spots. The results were published July 30 in the journal Current Biology. But why bother to create a colorless squid? Rosenthal says the pigmentation gene was a logical starting place for experimentation. "If you see the pigmentation go away, it's easy to see if the gene editing is working," he explains. Being able to tinker with cephalopod DNA will allow scientists to better study what their individual genes do at a very basic level. The accomplishment wasn't easy. Scientists have successfully made gene-edited mice, monkeys, and other research animals to help them study a range of behaviors and medical conditions. But until now, they hadn't been successful at manipulating the genes of cephalopods.

Bricks are about as basic as architectural materials can get, yet these simple building blocks have hidden powers that can be leveraged to provide electricity, according to a new study. From a report: Scientists modified a common red brick -- the same kind you'll find on sale for under a dollar at your local hardware store -- so that it could power a green LED light. This proof-of-concept for a "smart brick" reveals that brick technology, which dates back thousands of years, can be tweaked to have futuristic applications, including electrical conductivity and sensing capabilities. The results were published on Tuesday in Nature Communications. "We have created a new brick that can be incorporated into your house that has the functionality of storing electrical energy," said study co-author Julio D'Arcy, assistant professor of chemistry at Washington University in St. Louis, in a call. "We are thinking that sensing applications is a low-hanging fruit for these bricks," he added.

Welcome to the age of the satellite megaconstellation. Within the next few years, vast networks, containing hundreds or even thousands of spacecraft, could reshape the future of Earth's orbital environment. From a report: Much of the attention on these strings of satellites has been placed on the prolific launches of SpaceX and OneWeb, but the focus is now turning to Amazon. Last month, the Federal Communications Commission approved a request by the online marketplace to launch its Project Kuiper constellation, which, like SpaceX's Starlink and OneWeb's network, aims to extend high-speed internet service to customers around the world, including to remote or underserved communities hobbled by a persistent digital divide. The Kuiper constellation would consist of 3,236 satellites. That's more than the approximately 2,600 active satellites already orbiting Earth. While Amazon's hardware is a long way from the launchpad, SpaceX has already deployed hundreds of satellites in its Starlink constellation, including 57 additional satellites that it launched on Friday. It may expand it to 12,000, or more. Facebook and Telesat could also get into the internet constellation business.

The rapid influx of satellites into low-Earth orbit has prompted pushback from professional and amateur astronomers. Starlink satellites are notorious for "photobombing" astronomical images with bright streaks, damaging the quality and reducing the volume of data that scientists collect for research. While SpaceX plans to mitigate the effects of its launches on astronomical observations, scientists and hobbyists in the community worry about the lack of regulation of constellations as more entrants such as Project Kuiper join the action. "We don't yet have any kind of industrywide guidelines," said Michele Bannister, a planetary astronomer at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. "We don't have an industry body that's producing good corporate citizenship on the part of all of these enthusiastic companies that want to launch, and we don't have any regulatory setup in place that's providing clear guidelines back to the industry." She added, "To me, honestly, it feels like putting a bunch of planes up and then not having air traffic control."

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: In the unimaginably far future, cold stellar remnants known as black dwarfs will begin to explode in a spectacular series of supernovae, providing the final fireworks of all time. That's the conclusion of a new study, which posits that the universe will experience one last hurrah before everything goes dark forever. The dramatic detonations will begin to occur about 10^1100 years from now, a number the human brain can scarcely comprehend. The already unfathomable number 10^100 is known as a googol, so 10^1100 would be a googol googol googol googol googol googol googol googol googol googol googol years. The explosions would continue until 10^32000 years from now, which would require most of a magazine page to represent in a similar fashion.

A time traveler hoping to witness this last cosmic display would be disappointed. By the start of this era, the mysterious substance acting in opposition to gravity called dark energy will have driven everything in the universe apart so much that each individual black dwarf would be surrounded by vast darkness: The supernovae would even be unobservable to each another. The study has been published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

New submitter Hmmmmmm shares a report from CNBC: Russian President Vladimir Putin announced the registration of what Russia claims to be the first vaccine for the coronavirus in the world and said one of his daughters had already taken it. "Although I know that it works quite effectively, it forms a stable immunity and, I repeat, has passed all the necessary checks," Putin said. Clinical trials of this Russian vaccine have been completed in less than two months and phase three trials are set to begin on Wednesday, despite the vaccine having already been registered. Countries including the United Arab Emirates, the Philippines and Saudi Arabia are taking part in those trials.

"The vaccine developed by Russia is a so-called viral vector vaccine, meaning it employs another virus to carry the DNA encoding of the needed immune response into cells," reports Al Jazeera. "[The Gamaleya research institute's vaccine] is based on the adenovirus, a similar technology to the coronavirus vaccine prototype developed by China's CanSino. The state-run Gamaleya institute came under fire after researchers and its director injected themselves with the prototype several months ago, with specialists criticizing the move as an unorthodox and rushed way of starting human trials.

schwit1 shares a report: New Zealand has reintroduced coronavirus restrictions in parts of the country after new locally transmitted cases broke the 102-day streak the country had gone without recording a local infection. New Zealand's Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern confirmed four new locally transmitted coronavirus cases on Tuesday night, and announced that New Zealand's most populous city, Auckland, will temporarily see level three restrictions introduced for three days starting from midday on Wednesday. All four of the cases were found within one household in South Auckland according to New Zealand's Director-General of Health Dr Ashley Bloomfield. He added that none of the new cases had recently traveled outside of New Zealand. "We have been preparing for that time, and that time is now," said Dr Bloomfield adding that the "health system is well prepared." "In line with our precautionary approach we will be asking Aucklanders to take swift actions with us, as of 12 noon tomorrow, Wednesday August 12, we will be moving Auckland to level 3 restrictions," said Ardern.

schwit1 writes: A new map shows what the red planet would look like if 71 percent of its surface area was covered with water -- around the same proportion as Earth. The results are spectacular: it shows two distinct landmasses forming, each of which would seem to form continents. While the left side shows a dramatic, mountainous terrain that includes Olympus Mons, the right side seems to offer more flatlands that include planes like Terra Sabaea.

The map was created by Aaditya Raj Bhattarai, a Nepal-based civil engineering student currently studying for his bachelor's degree at Tribhuwan University. "I am [a] big fan of Elon [Musk] and SpaceX and their plan to put man on Mars, and I hope I could help in his cause," Bhattarai says. "This is a part of my side project where I calculate the volume of water required to make life on Mars sustainable and the sources required for those water volumes from comets that will come nearby Mars in [the] next 100 years." [...] Bhattarai noted that in this map, Mars' sea level lies as low as 1,211 meters (0.75 miles) below the geoid level, a level that averages out the ocean surface by removing factors like tides and currents. The sea level also lies a staggering 20,076 meters (12.5 miles) below Olympus Mons, depicted in the image as the top-left-most black dot. Olympus Mons is the largest volcano in the solar system and measures more than double the height of Mount Everest.

The dwarf planet Ceres -- long believed to be a barren space rock -- is an ocean world with reservoirs of sea water beneath its surface, the results of a major exploration mission showed on Monday. The Guardian reports: Ceres is the largest object in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter and has its own gravity, enabling the Nasa Dawn spacecraft to capture high-resolution images of its surface. Now a team of scientists from the United States and Europe have analyzed images relayed from the orbiter, captured about 35km (22 miles) from the asteroid. They focused on the 20-million-year-old Occator crater and determined that there is an "extensive reservoir" of brine beneath its surface.

Using infrared imaging, one team discovered the presence of the compound hydrohalite -- a material common in sea ice but which until now had never been observed off of Earth. Maria Cristina De Sanctis, from Rome's Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica said hydrohalite was a clear sign Ceres used to have sea water. "We can now say that Ceres is a sort of ocean world, as are some of Saturn's and Jupiter's moons," she told AFP. The team said the salt deposits looked like they had built up within the last 2 million years -- the blink of an eye in space time. This suggests that the brine may still be ascending from the planet's interior, something De Sanctis said could have profound implications in future studies.

Writing in an accompanying comment article, Julie Castillo-Rogez, from the California Institute of Technology's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said the discovery of hydrohalite was a "smoking gun" for ongoing water activity. "That material is unstable on Ceres' surface, and hence must have been emplaced very recently," she said. In a separate paper, US-based researchers analyzed images of the Occator crater and found that its mounds and hills may have formed when water ejected by the impact of a meteor froze on the surface.