PolygamousRanchKid shares a report from CNET: NASA's Doug Hurley and his crewmate Bob Behnken had a satellite phone at their disposal after splashdown on Sunday. At a press conference later that day, Hurley filled us in on what they did with their spare time as they floated around. "Five hours ago we were in a spaceship bobbing around making prank satellite phone calls to whoever we could get ahold of," Hurley said. "Which was kind of fun, by the way." Hurley suggested the satellite phone bill should go to SpaceX founder Elon Musk, who was sitting nearby. Hurley and Behnken didn't elaborate on the content of the prank calls, but here's hoping they tried to order a pizza for delivery to GO Navigator, the SpaceX recovery ship that fished them out of the water.

The World Health Organization warned on Monday that there might never be a "silver bullet" for COVID-19 in the form of a perfect vaccine and that the road to normality would be long, with some countries requiring a reset of strategy. From a report: More than 18.14 million people around the world are reported to have been infected with the disease and 688,080 have died, according to a Reuters tally, with some nations that thought they were over the worst experiencing a resurgence. WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus and WHO emergencies head Mike Ryan exhorted nations to rigorously enforce health measures such as mask-wearing, social distancing, hand-washing and testing. "The message to people and governments is clear: 'Do it all'," Tedros told a virtual news briefing from the U.N. body's headquarters in Geneva. He said face masks should become a symbol of solidarity round the world. "A number of vaccines are now in phase three clinical trials and we all hope to have a number of effective vaccines that can help prevent people from infection. However, there's no silver bullet at the moment -- and there might never be."

CNBC reports: SpaceX said Starlink, its nascent satellite internet service, has already seen "extraordinary demand" from potential customers, with "nearly 700,000 individuals" across the United States indicating they are interested in the company's coming service. Due to the greater-than-expected interest, SpaceX filed a request with the Federal Communications Commission on Friday — asking to increase the number of authorized user terminals to 5 million from 1 million. User terminals are the devices consumers would use to connect to the company's satellite internet network...

SpaceX is beginning a private beta test of Starlink's service this summer, which it says will be "followed by public beta testing." Elon Musk's company told the FCC that Starlink will begin offering commercial service in the northern United States and southern Canada" before the end of this year, "and then will rapidly expand to near-global coverage of the populated world in 2021...."

An anonymous reader quotes Scientific American: For centuries, people have described unusual animal behavior just ahead of seismic events: dogs barking incessantly, cows halting their milk, toads leaping from ponds... Now researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior and the University of Konstanz, both in Germany, along with a multinational team of colleagues, say they have managed to precisely measure increased activity in a group of farm animals prior to seismic activity...

The researchers used highly sensitive instruments that record accelerated movements — up to 48 each second — in any direction. During separate periods totaling about four months in 2016 and 2017, they attached these biologgers and GPS sensors to six cows, five sheep and two dogs living on a farm in an earthquake-prone area of northern Italy. A total of more than 18,000 tremors occurred during the study periods, with more seismic activity during the first one — when a magnitude 6.6 quake and its aftershocks struck the region. The team's work was published in July in Ethology...

Analyzing the increased movements as a whole, the researchers claim, showed a clear signal of anticipatory behavior hours ahead of tremors. "It's sort of a system of mutual influence," Wikelski says. "Initially, the cows kind of freeze in place — until the dogs go crazy. And then the cows actually go even crazier. And then that amplifies the sheep's behavior, and so on...." This "swarm intelligence" can happen within or across species, Wikelski says. For example, "we did a study on Galápagos marine iguanas, and we know that they are actually listening in to mockingbirds' warnings about the Galápagos hawks," he adds. "These kinds of systems exist all over the place. We're just not really tuned in to them yet."

The researchers say the farm animals appeared to anticipate tremors anywhere from one to 20 hours ahead, reacting earlier when they were closer to the origin and later when they were farther away. This finding, the authors contend, is consistent with a hypothesis that animals somehow sense a signal that diffuses outward.

After travelling all night to return from the International Space Station, two NASA astronauts will splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico at 11:48 PT, reports CNET. "There will be about an hour of excitement prior to that moment as Crew Dragon deorbits and re-enters Earth's atmosphere..."

That 11-minute deorbiting burn should begin in five minutes (at 10:56 PT), and you can watch it live on SpaceX's YouTube channel before the splashdown 52 minutes later. CNET notes that "This will be the first crew recovery at sea of NASA astronauts since 1975 at the end of the Apollo moon exploration era, the space agency tweeted on Sunday." The reentry process is dramatic. "Crew Dragon will be traveling at orbital velocity prior to reentry, moving at approximately 17,500 miles per hour. The maximum temperature it will experience on reentry is approximately 3,500 degrees Fahrenheit," said NASA in a statement on July 24...

If Crew Dragon passes these final tests, then SpaceX will be able to provide regular, operational flights to the ISS starting later this year. And it would end NASA's reliance on Russian spacecraft for the first time since the shuttle era.
After splashdown the crew "will spend up to an hour floating inside the capsule before joint recovery teams from SpaceX and NASA retrieve them for a helicopter trip ashore," reports Reuters.

A post-splashdown news conference is then scheduled about 30 minutes later at 1:30 p.m. PT.

jd (Slashdot reader #1,658) writes: The large scale maps of the universe show something is seriously wrong with current models of gravity and dark matter. The universe simply isn't clumping right and, no, it's not the new improved formula. As you go from the early universe to the present day, gravity should cause things to clump in specific ways.

It isn't. Which means dark matter can't be cold and general relativity may have a problem.

They need more data to prove it's not just a freaky part of the universe they're looking at, which is being collected.
"The new results come from the Kilo-Degree Survey, or KiDS, which uses the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope to map the distribution of matter across our universe," according to the Independent: So far, it has charted roughly 5% of the extragalactic sky, from an analysis of 31 million galaxies that are as much as 10 billion light years away... That allows researchers to build up a picture of all matter in the universe, of which some 90 per cent is invisible, made up of dark matter and tenuous gas.

"In a new paper, Cornell Tech researchers identified a problem that holds the key to whether all encryption can be broken — as well as a surprising connection to a mathematical concept that aims to define and measure randomness," according to a news release shared by Slashdot reader bd580slashdot: "Our result not only shows that cryptography has a natural 'mother' problem, it also shows a deep connection between two quite separate areas of mathematics and computer science — cryptography and algorithmic information theory," said Rafael Pass, professor of computer science at Cornell Tech...

Researchers have not been able to prove the existence of a one-way function. The most well-known candidate — which is also the basis of the most commonly used encryption schemes on the internet — relies on integer factorization. It's easy to multiply two random prime numbers — for instance, 23 and 47 — but significantly harder to find those two factors if only given their product, 1,081. It is believed that no efficient factoring algorithm exists for large numbers, Pass said, though researchers may not have found the right algorithms yet.

"The central question we're addressing is: Does it exist? Is there some natural problem that characterizes the existence of one-way functions?" he said. "If it does, that's the mother of all problems, and if you have a way to solve that problem, you can break all purported one-way functions. And if you don't know how to solve that problem, you can actually get secure cryptography...."

In the paper, Pass and doctoral student Yanyi Liu showed that if computing time-bounded Kolmogorov Complexity is hard, then one-way functions exist. Although their finding is theoretical, it has potential implications across cryptography, including internet security.

Slashdot reader sciencehabit quote Science magazine: It's a fact of life for birders that some species are fiendishly difficult to tell apart — in particular, the sparrows and drab songbirds dubbed "little brown jobs." Distinguishing individuals is nearly impossible. Now, a computer program analyzing photos and videos has accomplished that feat. The advance promises to reveal new information on bird behaviors...

The tool, called a convolutional neural network, sifts through thousands of pictures to figure out which visual features can be used to classify a given image; it then uses that information to classify new images. Convolutional neural networks have already been used to identify various plant and animal species in the wild, including 48 kinds of African animals. They have even achieved a more complicated task for elephants and some primates: distinguishing between individuals of the same species. Team member André Ferreira, a Ph.D. student at the University of Montpellier, fed the neural network several thousand photos of 30 sociable weavers that had already been tagged... [W]hen given photos it hadn't seen before, the neural network correctly identified individual birds 90% of the time, they report this week in Methods in Ecology and Evolution. Behavioral ecologist Claire Doutrelant of CNRS, the French national research agency, says that's about the same accuracy as humans trying to spot color rings with binoculars.

Ferreira then tried the approach on two other bird species studied by Damien Farine, a behavioral ecologist at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior. The tool was just as accurate...

"NASA and SpaceX are going ahead with plans to bring NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken home from the International Space Station for a splashdown this weekend, even though Hurricane Isaias is heading for Florida's Atlantic coast," reports GeekWire.

"Fortunately, SpaceX's Dragon capsule is heading for waters off Florida's other coast." NASA said weather conditions are all systems go for the targeted site in the Gulf of Mexico, close to Pensacola, as well as for an alternate site off the coast of Panama City, Fla. That opened the way for preparations to proceed for the Dragon Endeavour to undock at 7:34 p.m. ET (4:34 p.m. PT) today, with a splashdown set for 2:41 p.m. ET (11:41 a.m. PT) Sunday.

The plan could be adjusted, before or after the docking, if the weather forecast changes. NASA and SpaceX had made plans for seven potential splashdown targets, but due to Isaias' strength, NASA concentrated on the westernmost sites.
Live coverage has begun online, and will continue for the next 19 hours.

Tomorrow's splashdown "will mark the first return of a commercially built and operated U.S. spacecraft from orbit," reports GeekWire, "and the first at-sea return of U.S. astronauts since the topsy-turvy splashdown of NASA's Apollo-Soyuz crew in 1975..."

"The next SpaceX Crew Dragon launch to the space station is scheduled for as early as next month. And Bob Behnken's wife, NASA astronaut Megan McArthur, is due to be part of a Dragon crew heading for the station next spring."

"Johnson & Johnson's experimental coronavirus vaccine protected macaque monkeys with a single shot in a pre-clinical study, potentially gaining on other vaccines that are further along in testing but require two doses over time," reports Bloomberg: Five of six primates exposed to the pandemic-causing pathogen were immune after a single injection. The exception showed low levels of the virus, according to a study published in the medical journal Nature...

The health-care behemoth kick-started human trials on July 22 in Belgium and in the U.S. earlier this week. Although other vaccine-makers have moved more quickly into development, with AstraZeneca having already administered its experimental vaccine to almost 10,000 people in the U.K., gaining protection with a single dose could prove an advantage in the logistical challenge of rolling out massive vaccination programs worldwide.... The primate data show that the coronavirus vaccine candidate generated a strong antibody response, and provided protection with only a single dose, said Paul Stoffels, the drugmaker's chief scientific officer.

J&J aims to embark on the last phase of tests in September, compressing the traditional timeline as it races against others including AstraZeneca, Moderna Inc., Pfizer Inc. and GlaxoSmithKline Plc for a shot to end the pandemic.... The New Brunswick, New Jersey-based drugmaker will test both a one-dose coronavirus shot, and a shot coupled with a booster in its early-stage studies of more than 1,000 adults, which launched this month.

An anonymous reader quotes Newsweek: A hypothetical spacecraft made from an extremely thin layer of a synthetic foam could technically make it to our closest neighboring star Proxima Centauri in just 185 years, scientists have said. If Voyager were to make the same journey, it would take around 73,000 years, according to NASA.

In a study that is due to be published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, René Heller from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Germany, and colleagues, propose the spacecraft as a precursor to interstellar travel — beyond our own solar system. They estimate a prototype would cost around $1 million, while the launch of an interplanetary mission would be around $10 million.

The spacecraft would be made from aerographite. This is a carbon-based foam that is around 15,000 times more lightweight than aluminium. It is versatile and light enough that it could be used to create solar sails — "which harness energy from the sun for propulsion, a process called solar photon pressure... In most cases, photons would have little impact on an object. But if the target is an ultralight material, such as aerographite, then the target can actually be pushed to significant speed," he said.

"We found out that a thin layer of aerographite, with a thickness of about 1 millimeter (0.04 inches), can be pushed to speeds that are sufficiently high to let it escape the solar system. Once it has gained an initial push from the solar radiation pressure, it will simply float through space...."

Heller said these spacecraft could travel far faster than any probe ever sent by humans before.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from IFLScience: Promising results have come out of the only active clinical trial for a vaccine against Lyme disease. Valneva, a French biotech company, recently announced its first Phase 2 clinical trial has shown that its vaccine against Lyme disease is both safe and effective. The vaccine works by triggering the body's immune system to produce antibodies for the six common serotypes of the disease that are found in North America and Europe. It does this by introducing an isolated protein of the pathogen to the body, allowing the immune system to recognize and respond to the surface proteins found on the bacteria responsible for Lyme disease, Borrelia burgdorferi.

Over 570 healthy adults in the US and Europe were given one of two dose levels of the vaccine in three injections, while others were given a placebo as a control. Both groups that received the active dose were found to have produced a significant amount of antibodies against each of the six most prevalent Outer Surface Protein A serotypes of B. burgdorferi. [...] This new potential vaccine, known as VLA15, is currently the only active Lyme disease vaccine in clinical development. Back in 1998, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved a Lyme disease vaccine known as LYMErix. It was withdrawn from the market just three years later following doubts over its effectiveness and other contentions. Much of the controversy, however, was often said to have been kicked up by the anti-vaccination movement, which was growing in momentum at the time.

Yesterday, the FCC approved Amazon's plans for its ambitious Kuiper constellation of 3,236 internet-beaming satellites. We have now learned that Amazon will invest $10 billion into the space-based internet delivery system. From a report: The U.S. tech giant said on Thursday it is moving forward with its Project Kuiper, one of several systems planned to bring internet to customers without land-based connections. Project Kuiper aims to deliver satellite-based broadband services in the United States, and eventually around the world, and may offer connectively for wireless carriers and 5G networks. Amazon offer no timetable for the project but said it would begin deployment of its 3,236 satellites after the Federal Communications Commission approved the project.

"We have heard so many stories lately about people who are unable to do their job or complete schoolwork because they don't have reliable internet at home," said Amazon senior vice president Dave Limp. "There are still too many places where broadband access is unreliable or where it doesn't exist at all. Kuiper will change that. Our $10 billion investment will create jobs and infrastructure around the United States that will help us close this gap."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: There are few animals more bizarre than the anglerfish, a species that has so much trouble finding a mate that when the male and female do connect underwater, males actually fuse their tissue with the females for life. After the merger, the two share a single respiratory and digestive system. Now scientists have discovered that the anglerfish accomplishes this sexual parasitism because it has lost a key part of its immune system, which then allows two bodies to become one without tissue rejection.

All vertebrates, including humans, have two kinds of immune systems. The first is the innate system, which responds quickly to attacks by microscopic invaders with a variety of chemicals like mucous physical barriers like hair and skin, and disease-munching cells called macrophages. The second line of defense is an adaptive system that produces both "killer" T cells to attack the pathogen and antibodies custom-made to fight specific bacteria or viruses. The two systems work together to fight infections and prevent disease. But in a study published Thursday in the journal Science, researchers from Germany's Max Planck Institute and the University of Washington found that many anglerfish species (there are more than 300) have evolved over time to lose the genes that control their adaptive immune systems, meaning that they can't create antibodies and lack those T cells.

Excessive drinking, exposure to air pollution and head injuries all increase dementia risk, experts say in a report revealing that up to 40% of dementia cases worldwide could be delayed or prevented by addressing 12 such lifestyle factors. The Guardian reports: The report from the Lancet Commission on dementia prevention, intervention and care builds on previous work revealing that about a third of dementia cases could be prevented by addressing nine lifestyle factors, including midlife hearing loss, depression, less childhood education and smoking. The research weighs up the latest evidence, largely from high-income countries, supporting the addition of a further three risk factors to the list. It suggests that 1% of dementia cases worldwide are attributable to excessive mid-life alcohol intake, 3% to mid-life head injuries and 2% a result of exposure to air pollution in older age -- although they caution that the latter could be an underestimate.

While some actions can be taken on a personal level to tackle such issues, many require government-led change. The report includes a list of nine recommendations, including improving air quality, and urges policymakers to "be ambitious about prevention." Research has suggested that the incidence of dementia in Europe and North America has fallen by around 15% per decade for the past 30 years -- likely because of lifestyle changes such as a reduction in smoking -- even though the numbers of people with dementia are rising as people live longer. The impact of lifestyle interventions, the team add, is likely to be greatest among the most deprived individuals and in low- and middle-income countries. The impact of lifestyle interventions, the team add, is likely to be greatest among the most deprived individuals and in low- and middle-income countries.

slack_justyb shares a report from Ars Technica: As COVID-19 hospitalizations in the US approach the highest levels seen in the pandemic so far, national efforts to track patients and hospital resources remain in shambles after the federal government abruptly seized control of data collection earlier this month. Watchdogs and public health experts were immediately aghast by the switch to the HHS database, fearing the data would be manipulated for political reasons or hidden from public view all together. However, the real threat so far has been the administrative chaos. The switch took effect July 15, giving hospitals and states just days to adjust to the new data collection and submission process.

As such, hospitals have been struggling with the new data reporting, which involves reporting more types of data than the CDC's previous system. Generally, the data includes stats on admissions, discharges, beds and ventilators in use and in reserve, as well as information on patients. For some hospitals, that data has to be harvested from various sources, such as electronic medical records, lab reports, pharmacy data, and administrative sources. Some larger hospital systems have been working to write new scripts to automate new data mining, while others are relying on staff to compile the data manually into excel spreadsheets, which can take multiple hours each day, according to a report by Healthcare IT News. The task has been particularly onerous for small, rural hospitals and hospitals that are already strained by a crush of COVID-19 patients. "It seems the obvious of going from a system that is well tested, to something new and alien to everyone is happening exactly as everyone who has ever done these kinds of conversions predicted," adds Slashdot reader slack_justyb.

After scrubbing several attempts for weather concerns, technical issues, and even a range violation due to a nearby boat, SpaceX succeeded in static-fire testing the latest prototype of its Starship vehicle on Thursday. Ars Technica reports: At 3:02pm local time in South Texas, the single Raptor engine attached to the Starship prototype dubbed Serial Number 5, or SN5, roared to life for a few seconds. In video shared by NASASpaceflight.com, the test appeared to be nominal, evidently providing SpaceX engineers with the confidence they need in the latest iteration of Starship. Shortly after the test, the founder and chief engineer of SpaceX, Elon Musk, confirmed that the static fire meant the company now plans to move forward with a short test flight of the vehicle. Based upon a notification from the US Federal Aviation Administration, this 150-meter flight test could take place as soon as Sunday, with a launch window opening at 8am local time (13:00 UTC). This would be the first flight test of Starship hardware since a stubby prototype -- Starhopper -- soared to 150 meters in late August 2019. That test, in which a single Raptor engine powered the vehicle upward and laterally for about 100 meters before landing, was successful in demonstrating thrust and vector control of the methane-fueled engine.

The Federal Communications Commission has approved Amazon's plans for its ambitious Kuiper constellation, which entails sending 3,236 satellites into orbit to beam internet coverage down to Earth. Amazon claims that Kuiper will "provide broadband services to unserved and underserved consumers, businesses in the United States, and global customers by employing advanced satellite and earth station technologies." The Verge reports: The company plans to send the satellites to three different altitudes, and it claims it needs just 578 satellites in orbit to begin service, according to an FCC document announcing the approval. Amazon has not announced which launch provider it plans to use to fly the satellites into orbit yet. While Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos also owns the rocket company Blue Origin, the launch provider will have to compete to launch the satellites along with other companies.

There are few caveats to Amazon's FCC approval. The company must launch half of the constellation by 2026 to retain its FCC license, and then the remaining satellites by 2029. Amazon also must submit to the FCC a finalized plan for how it will mitigate orbital debris, since the design of its satellites aren't finalized yet. Amazon claims it will take its satellites out of orbit within 355 days, but the FCC argues the company didn't "present specific information concerning some required elements" for its debris plan. A big concern of a constellation of this size is that the influx of satellites will lead to more collisions in space, creating pieces of debris that could threaten other satellites. Amazon claims that Kuiper will "provide broadband services to unserved and underserved consumers, businesses in the United States, and global customers by employing advanced satellite and earth station technologies," according to the FCC's approval document.

An anonymous reader writes: Photos and videos are usually produced by capturing photons -- the building blocks of light—with digital sensors. For instance, digital cameras consist of millions of pixels that form images by detecting the intensity and color of the light at every point of space. 3-D images can then be generated either by positioning two or more cameras around the subject to photograph it from multiple angles, or by using streams of photons to scan the scene and reconstruct it in three dimensions. Either way, an image is only built by gathering spatial information of the scene. In a new paper published today in the journal Optica, researchers based in the U.K., Italy and the Netherlands describe an entirely new way to make animated 3-D images: by capturing temporal information about photons instead of their spatial coordinates.

Their process begins with a simple, inexpensive single-point detector tuned to act as a kind of stopwatch for photons. Unlike cameras, measuring the spatial distribution of color and intensity, the detector only records how long it takes the photons produced by a split-second pulse of laser light to bounce off each object in any given scene and reach the sensor. The further away an object is, the longer it will take each reflected photon to reach the sensor. The information about the timings of each photon reflected in the scene -- what the researchers call the temporal data -- is collected in a very simple graph.

Those graphs are then transformed into a 3-D image with the help of a sophisticated neural network algorithm. The researchers trained the algorithm by showing it thousands of conventional photos of the team moving and carrying objects around the lab, alongside temporal data captured by the single-point detector at the same time. Eventually, the network had learned enough about how the temporal data corresponded with the photos that it was capable of creating highly accurate images from the temporal data alone. In the proof-of-principle experiments, the team managed to construct moving images at about 10 frames per second from the temporal data, although the hardware and algorithm used has the potential to produce thousands of images per second. Currently, the neural net's ability to create images is limited to what it has been trained to pick out from the temporal data of scenes created by the researchers. However, with further training and even by using more advanced algorithms, it could learn to visualize a varied range of scenes, widening its potential applications in real-world situations.

For more than four centuries, archaeologists and geologists have sought to determine the geographical origins of the stones used to build Stonehenge thousands of years ago. Pinning down the source of the large blocks known as sarsens that form the bulk of the monument has proved especially elusive. From a report: Now researchers have resolved the mystery: 50 of the 52 extant sarsens at Stonehenge came from the West Woods site in the English county of Wiltshire, located 25 kilometers to the north of Stonehenge. The findings were published on Wednesday in Science Advances. Geologists can often use macroscopic and microscopic features of rocks to match them to the outcropping from which they were taken. Such techniques have allowed researchers to determine that many of Stonehenge's smaller "bluestones" were brought from southwestern Wales. But "the trouble with sarsen stone is that it's all the same," says study co-author Katy Whitaker, a graduate student at the University of Reading in England and an assistant listing adviser at Historic England. "When you look at it under the microscope, you see quartz sand grains stuck together with more quartz."

So the team turned to x-ray fluorescence spectrometry, a nondestructive technique that bombards a sample with x-rays and analyzes the wavelengths of light that sample emits in response, which can show its chemical makeup. The technique revealed the presence of trace elements, or those found in minute quantities, on the surface of Stonehenge's sarsens. Almost all of those stones shared a remarkably similar chemical composition, indicating that they originated together. The data were insufficient to pinpoint where that source was, however. The team's breakthrough came unexpectedly in 2018, when a sample core that had been drilled from one of Stonehenge's sarsens during a 1958 restoration project was returned to England after it spent 60 years in a private collection. The researchers were granted permission to destroy part of the core for a more detailed analysis. "We quietly jumped up and down with excitement," says lead author David Nash, a physical geographer at the University of Brighton in England. Using two types of mass spectrometry, the team determined the levels of 22 trace elements in the core and compared them with the levels in sarsen samples from 20 different sites dotting southern England. The chemical signature of the core exactly matched that of one of the sites -- West Woods, which encompasses about six square kilometers.