Scientists have identified 37 volcanic structures on Venus that appear to be recently active -- and probably still are today -- painting the picture of a geologically dynamic planet and not a dormant world as long thought. NBC News reports: The research focused on ring-like structures called coronae, caused by an upwelling of hot rock from deep within the planet's interior, and provided compelling evidence of widespread recent tectonic and magma activity on Venus's surface, researchers said on Monday. Coronae are essentially fields of lava flows and major faults spanning a large circular area. Many of the 37 reside within in a gigantic ring in the planet's Southern Hemisphere, including a colossal corona called Artemis 1,300 miles (2,100 km) in diameter.

Many scientists long had thought Venus, lacking the plate tectonics that gradually reshape Earth's surface, was essentially dormant geologically for the past half billion years. The researchers determined the type of geological features that could exist only in a recently active corona - a telltale trench surrounding the structure. Then they scoured radar images of Venus from NASA's Magellan spacecraft in the 1990s to find coronae that fit the bill. Of 133 coronae examined, 37 appear to have been active in the past 2 million to 3 million years, a blink of the eye in geological time. The research has been published in the journal Nature Geoscience.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: The ramps for disabled people that smooth entry into many public buildings today aren't a modern invention. The ancient Greeks constructed similar ramps of stone to help individuals who had trouble walking or climbing stairs access holy sites, new research suggests. That would make the ramps -- some more than 2300 years old -- the oldest known evidence of architecture designed to meet the needs of the disabled.

Archaeologist Debby Sneed focused on the fourth century B.C.E., when sanctuaries to Asclepius -- the Greek god of healing -- proliferated. She found that the two best documented healing sanctuaries she looked at were outfitted with more ramps than other sacred sites, and that their ramps were more likely to access buildings other than the main temple. At Asclepius's main sanctuary at Epidaurus, near Athens, for example, a broad stone ramp led up to the temple. Two more ramps led through the sanctuary gates. And a series of smaller side buildings also feature narrow ramps just wide enough to walk up, Sneed reports today in Antiquity. High stairs would be hard for people using crutches. And though wheelchairs wouldn't be invented for more than 1,000 years, visitors to healing shrines who couldn't walk sometimes had to be carried on litters or stretchers -- both easier to navigate up a ramp.

"The risk of nasty side effects in the Moderna and Oxford trials should be made clear now, before it ends up as fodder for the skeptics," argues Hilda Bastian, a former consumer health care advocate and a Ph.D. student at Bond University who studies evidence-based medicine. An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from her article via Wired: On Monday, vaccine researchers from Oxford University and the pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca announced results from a "Phase 1/2 trial," suggesting their product might be able to generate immunity without causing serious harm. Similar, but smaller-scale results, were posted just last week for another candidate vaccine produced by the biotech firm Moderna, in collaboration with the U.S. National Institutes of Health. [...] Back in May, a CNN report described the Oxford group as being "the most aggressive in painting the rosiest picture" of its product, so let's start with them. Just how rosy is the Oxford picture really? It's certainly true that this week's news shows the vaccine has the potential to provide protection from Covid-19. But there are flies in the ointment. After the first clinical trial for this vaccine began in April, for example, the researchers added new study arms in which people got acetaminophen every six hours for 24 hours after the injection. That's not featured in their marketing, of course, and I saw no discussion of this unusual step in media coverage in early summer. Newspapers only said the vaccine had been proven "safe with rhesus monkeys," and did not cause any adverse effects in those animal tests. It was a worrying signal though: How rough a ride were people having with this vaccine? Was the acetaminophen meant to keep down fever, headaches, malaise -- or all of the above?

The press release for Monday's publication of results from the Oxford vaccine trials described an increased frequency of "minor side effects" among participants. A look at the actual paper, though, reveals this to be a marketing spin that has since been parroted in media reports. Yes, mild reactions were far more common than worse ones. But moderate or severe harms -- defined as being bad enough to interfere with daily life or needing medical care -- were common, too. Around one-third of people vaccinated with the Covid-19 vaccine without acetaminophen experienced moderate or severe chills, fatigue, headache, malaise, and/or feverishness. Close to 10 percent had a fever of at least 100.4 degrees and just over one-fourth developed moderate or severe muscle aches. That's a lot, in a young and healthy group of people -- and the acetaminophen didn't help much for most of those problems. The paper's authors designated the vaccine as "acceptable" and "tolerated," but we don't yet know how acceptable this will be to most people.

There is another red flag. Clinical trials for other Covid-19 vaccines have placebo groups, where participants receive saline injections. Only one of the Oxford vaccine trials is taking this approach, however; the others instead compare the experimental treatment to an injected meningococcal vaccine. There can be good reasons to do this: Non-placebo injections may mimic telltale signs that you've received an active vaccine, such as a skin reaction, making the trial more truly "blind." But their use also opens the door to doubt-sowing claims that any harms of the new vaccine are getting buried among the harms already caused by the control-group, "old" vaccines.What about the Moderna vaccine? "According to the press release from May, there were no serious adverse events for the people in that particular dosage group," reports Wired. "But last week's paper shows the full results: By the time they'd had two doses, every single one was showing signs of headaches, chills or fatigue; and for at least 80 percent this could have been enough to interfere with their normal activities. A participant who had a severe reaction to a particularly high dose has talked in detail about how bad it was: If reactions even half as bad as this were to be common for some of these vaccines, they will be hard sells once they reach the community -- and there could be a lot of people who are reluctant to get the second injection."

UPDATE 7/27/20: Slashdot interviewed Oxford Vaccine Trial participant Jennifer Riggins and asked what her reaction was to Wired's article. Riggins is an American technology journalist and marketer who's self-employed in London. Here's what she said:

"I think the article is a poorly written, poorly researched opinion piece. It says offering acetaminophen or paracetamol is unusual with vaccines. I'm a working mom with a three-year-old, and you are told to give them acetaminophen or paracetamol before all live vaccines as they can cause discomfort and fever for the first 24 to 48 hours.

"I'm actually surprised this article was in Wired that tends to be reputable. It seems to be written by a vaccine skeptic at best who knows little about them. This is a dangerous message because we most likely won't have a widely distributed vaccine til 2021 at earliest. Even longer if you consider, like the chicken pox vaccine, it needs a booster for efficacy. This flu season is going to be awful and then combined with this coronavirus. Add to that less kids are getting vaccinated or at least are delayed during the pandemic. Any antivaxxer message is incredibly dangerous. We won't be able to have herd immunity for Covid-19 by winter but we could for the flu which will save so many lives."

The first Arab space mission to Mars has blasted off aboard a rocket from Japan, with its unmanned probe -- called Al-Amal, or Hope -- successfully separating about an hour after liftoff. The Guardian reports: The Emirati project is one of three racing to Mars, including Tianwen-1 from China and Mars 2020 from the United States, taking advantage of a period when the Earth and Mars are nearest. In October, Mars will be a comparatively short 38.6m miles (62m km) from Earth, according to Nasa. Hope is expected to reach Mars's orbit by February 2021, marking the 50th anniversary of the unification of the UAE, an alliance of seven emirates. Unlike the two other Mars ventures scheduled for this year, it will not land on the planet, but instead orbit it for a whole Martian year, or 687 days.

While the objective of the Mars mission is to provide a comprehensive image of the weather dynamics in the red planet's atmosphere, the probe is a foundation for a much bigger goal -- building a human settlement on Mars within the next 100 years. The UAE also wants the project to serve as a source of inspiration for Arab youth, in a region too often wracked by sectarian conflicts and economic crises. On Twitter, the UAE's government declared the probe launch a "message of pride, hope and peace to the Arab region, in which we renew the golden age of Arab and Islamic discoveries."

Researchers from the University of Stirling, UK, have embedded ceramic spheres in aluminum foam to create a material that couldn't be cut with angle grinders, power drills or water jet cutters. "They dubbed it Proteus after the shape-shifting Greek god, for the way the material metamorphosed in different ways to defend against attacks," reports New Scientists. From the report: "It's pretty amazing," says Miranda Anderson at the University of Stirling, UK, who worked on the project. Rather than just being a hard surface that resists external pressure, the material turns the force of the drill or cutting mechanism back on itself, as the ceramic spheres create vibrations that disrupt the external force. "It actually destroys the cutting blade through the sideways jerky vibrations that it creates, or it widens the water jet's spray," says Anderson.

The material has a second defense mechanism. Attempting to cut it breaks the ceramic spheres into smaller fragments which are even harder and act like very tough sandpaper. "So the attack mechanism causes the material to become more resistant to the attack," says Anderson. While an angle grinder took 45 seconds to cut through steel armor used to protect against explosive mines, it was rendered inoperative by Proteus. The only comparable structure in the natural world is diamond, says Anderson, but Proteus is cheaper and lighter, making it practical for a range of applications, from security doors and barriers to shoe soles or elbow pad and forearm guards for workers. She believes it can be mass-produced, as there is no shortage of the metals and ceramics it is made from. The new material has been reported in the journal Scientific Reports.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: So many of us do it: You get into bed, turn off the lights, and look at your phone to check Twitter one more time. You see that coronavirus infections are up. Maybe your kids can't go back to school. The economy is cratering. Still, you incessantly scroll though bottomless doom-and-gloom news for hours as you sink into a pool of despair. This self-destructive behavior has become so common that a new word for it has entered our lexicon: "doomscrolling." The recent onslaught of dystopian stories related to the coronavirus pandemic, combined with stay-at-home orders, have enabled our penchant for binging on bad news. But the habit is eroding our mental health, experts say. [C]linical psychologist Dr. Amelia Aldao warns that doomscrolling traps us in a "vicious cycle of negativity" that fuels our anxiety. "Our minds are wired to look out for threats," she says. "The more time we spend scrolling, the more we find those dangers, the more we get sucked into them, the more anxious we get." Aldao, the director of Together CBT, a clinic that specializes in cognitive behavioral therapy, has worked with her patients to cut back on doomscrolling. Here's some of her advice on how to temper the doom:

Set a timer. I work mostly with clients who experience anxiety and part of what I've been doing with them now for weeks, for months, is actually setting limits to how much they're scrolling. And I literally tell them, "Set up a timer." You do want to know what's happening in the world, so the solution isn't to never go online again, but it's finding boundaries.

Stay cognizant. Going into it, opening up your phone, reminding yourself why you're there, what are you looking for, what information are you trying to find. And then periodically checking in with yourself -- have I found what I needed?

Swap 'vicious cycles' for 'virtuous cycles.' Whether it's ice cream, connecting with friends, sending something funny to a friend -- those are the things we should spend more time doing just to build positive emotions in our lives.

A coronavirus vaccine the University of Oxford is developing with AstraZeneca showed promising results in early human testing, a sign of progress in the high-stakes pursuit of a shot to defeat the pathogen. From a report: The vaccine increased levels of both protective neutralizing antibodies and immune T-cells that target the virus, according to the study organizers. The results were published Monday in The Lancet medical journal. BBC adds: Trials involving around 1,077 people showed the injection led to them making antibodies and white blood cells that can fight coronavirus. The findings are hugely promising, but it is still too soon to know if this is enough to offer protection and larger trials are under way. The UK has already ordered 100 million doses of the vaccine.

Slashdot reader destinyland writes: On April 7th, a Trump campaign advisor told the Los Angeles Times "One way we still win this election is by turning it into a referendum on China." Within weeks the Washington Post noted "reports that the Trump administration has sought to pressure U.S. intelligence agencies to search for proof of a link between the Wuhan lab and the covid-19 outbreak." And that same month selected portions of two diplomatic cables from 2018 were leaked to the Washington Post, and published in a controversial "opinion piece."

The Post requested "expedited processing" for the release of the complete text of both cables — a routine request which was nevertheless denied. (Though a virologist at Columbia University shared a rebuttal in memes.) The complete text of the cables has now been released — and the additional information undercuts the story line that the lab — which was located a full nine miles from the market at the center of the outbreak — was anything less than safe. Though the Post's opinion piece had highlighted a clause about "a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory" — the diplomats had actually been concerned instead that the shortage would interfere with the lab's productivity and utilization — and not it's safety.

And there was apparently more information in the cable which was withheld. CNN reports:

The January 2018 cable, obtained by the Washington Post after a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, noted that ties between the WIV and the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston could help alleviate the shortage and that, reportedly, the US-based institution was training technicians to work at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). A second cable about the WIV from April 2018 cited a French official who said that "French experts have provided guidance and biosafety training to the lab, which will continue...."

Back in April a senior policy fellow at the Center for Global Development surmised the misleading excerpts from the cables had come from "an administration official with an obvious axe to grind." And this weekend the Columbia University virologist reacted to what the cable's full text revealed about the high safety standards at the Wuhan Institute of Virology:

"This cable says NOTHING about concerns with the work that was being done at WIV. The supposedly worrisome work was actually presented as a success story in a lab that was coming online more slowly than everyone — including the US authors of the cable — expected or hoped."

The United Arab Emirates has successfully launched a spacecraft towards an orbit around Mars, reports the New York Times. Built by a space physics lab at the University of Colorado, the Hope Mars probe was tested in Dubai, before being shipped to Japan's Tanegashima Island, where it was launched by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. The launch is being streamed on the web and on YouTube. It will join a fleet of six other spacecrafts studying the red planet from space, three operated by NASA, two by the European Space Agency (one shared with Russia) and one by India. Each contains different instruments to help further research of the Martian atmosphere and surface.

The Hope orbiter is carrying three instruments: an infrared spectrometer, an ultraviolet spectrometer and a camera. From its high orbit — varying from 12,400 miles to 27,000 miles above the surface — the spacecraft will give planetary scientists their first global view of Martian weather at all times of day. Over its two-year mission, it will investigate how dust storms and other weather phenomena near the Martian surface have either speed or slow the loss of the planet's atmosphere into space.
"You'll be hearing a lot about Mars this summer," the Times adds. "Three missions are launching toward the red planet, taking advantage of the way Earth and its neighbor get closer every 26 months or so, allowing a relatively short trip between the two worlds." The next expected launch will be China's Tianwen-1, which could occur between later this week through early August... On July 30, NASA is scheduled to launch Perseverance, a robotic rover that will be the fifth wheeled American vehicle to explore Mars... A fourth mission, the joint Russian-European Rosalind Franklin rover, was to launch this summer, too. But technical hurdles, aggravated by the coronavirus pandemic, could not be overcome in time to meet the launch window. It is now scheduled to launch in 2022.
If the other three spacecraft all launch successfully, they should arrive at Mars early next year.

Discover magazine reports: For years, many artificial intelligence enthusiasts and researchers have promised that machine learning will change modern medicine. Thousands of algorithms have been developed to diagnose conditions like cancer, heart disease and psychiatric disorders. Now, algorithms are being trained to detect COVID-19 by recognizing patterns in CT scans and X-ray images of the lungs.

Many of these models aim to predict which patients will have the most severe outcomes and who will need a ventilator. The excitement is palpable; if these models are accurate, they could offer doctors a huge leg up in testing and treating patients with the coronavirus. But the allure of AI-aided medicine for the treatment of real COVID-19 patients appears far off. A group of statisticians around the world are concerned about the quality of the vast majority of machine learning models and the harm they may cause if hospitals adopt them any time soon.

So far, their reviews of COVID-19 machine learning models aren't good: They suffer from a serious lack of data and necessary expertise from a wide array of research fields. But the issues facing new COVID-19 algorithms aren't new at all: AI models in medical research have been deeply flawed for years...
"The main problems appear to be (perhaps unsurprisingly) a lack of necessary data, and not enough domain expertise," writes Slashdot reader shirappu: The leader of the above group of statisticians, Maarten van Smeden, pointed to a lack of collaboration between researchers as a road block in the way of developing truly accurate models. "You need expertise not only of the modeler," he said, "but you need statisticians, epidemiologists and clinicians to work together to make something that is actually useful."
One biostatistician has even been arguing that with many current AI models, medical researchers are using machine learning to "torture their data until it spits out a confession."

Saturday the Washington Post (in an article republished in Stars and Stripes) took a closer look at what's known as "superspreading events": Many scientists say such infection bursts — probably sparked by a single, highly infectious individual who may show no signs of illness and unwittingly share an enclosed space with many others — are driving the pandemic. They worry these cases, rather than routine transmission between one infected person and, say, two or three close contacts, are propelling case counts out of control...

Transmission, it turns out, is far more idiosyncratic than previously understood. Scientists say they believe it is dependent on such factors as an individual's infectivity, which can vary person to person by billions of virus particles, whether the particles are contained in large droplets that fall to the ground or in fine vapor that can float much further, and how much the air in a particular space circulates. Donald Milton, a professor of environmental health at the University of Maryland, and other experts have wondered if superspreading events could be the "Achilles' heel" of the virus. If we could pinpoint the conditions under which these clusters occur, Milton argued, we could lower the transmission rate enough to extinguish the spread. "If you could stop these events, you could stop the pandemic," Milton said. "You would crush the curve..."

Some people will not transmit the virus to anyone, contact tracing has shown, while others appear to spread the virus with great efficiency. Overall, researchers have estimated in recent studies that some 10 to 20 percent of the infected may be responsible for 80 percent of all cases... An infected person's viral load can impact how much they "shed"; the differences have been shown to be on a scale of billions of virus particles... A growing body of evidence suggests that SARS-CoV2, like other coronaviruses, expands in a community in fits and starts, rather than more evenly over space and time....

While it's often impossible to identify the person who triggered an outbreak, there have been some commonalities among those who have been pinpointed as the likely source in studies. They tend to be young. Asymptomatic. Social. Scientists suspect these "super-emitters" may have much higher levels of the virus in their bodies than others, or may release them by talking, shouting or singing in a different way from most people... In a study published in Emerging Infectious Diseases by Japan's Hitoshi Oshitani at Tohoku University of 22 superspreading individuals with the coronavirus, about half were under the age of 40, and 41 percent were experiencing no symptoms.

sciencehabit shares an article from Science magazine: Dogs are renowned for their world-class noses, but a new study suggests they may have an additional — albeit hidden — sensory talent: a magnetic compass. The sense appears to allow them to use Earth's magnetic field to calculate shortcuts in unfamiliar terrain. The finding is a first in dogs, says Catherine Lohmann, a biologist at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, who studies "magnetoreception" and navigation in turtles...

There were already hints that dogs — like many animals, and maybe even humans — can perceive Earth's magnetic field. In 2013, Hynek Burda, a sensory ecologist at the Czech University of Life Sciences Prague who has worked on magnetic reception for 3 decades, and colleagues showed dogs tend to orient themselves north-south while urinating or defecating. Because this behavior is involved in marking and recognizing territory, Burda reasoned the alignment helps dogs figure out the location relative to other spots.
Lohmann and a graduate student tracked the path of dogs on 233 separate trips spread out over three years: In 170 of these trips, the dogs stopped before they turned back and ran for about 20 meters along a north-south axis. When the animals did this, they tended to get back to the owner via a more direct route than when they didn't, the authors report in eLife...

Burda thinks the dogs run along a north-south axis to figure out which way they are. "It's the most plausible explanation," he says. Lohmann says the implication is that dogs can remember their previous heading and use the reference to the magnetic compass to figure out the most direct route home.

CNN shares some bad news. "After people are infected with the novel coronavirus, their natural immunity to the virus could decline within months, a new pre-print paper suggests." The paper was co-authored by 37 researchers from seven different institutions: The paper, released on the medical server medrxiv.org on Saturday and not yet published in a peer-reviewed medical journal, suggests that antibody responses may start to decline 20 to 30 days after Covid-19 symptoms emerge. Antibodies are the proteins the body makes to fight infection...

Since early on in the pandemic, the World Health Organization has warned that people who have had Covid-19 are not necessarily immune from getting the virus again. Yet the new study had some limitations, including that more research is needed to determine whether similar results would emerge among a larger group of patients and what data could show over longer periods of time when it comes to infection with the coronavirus...
"The report is the latest in a growing chain of evidence that immunity to COVID-19 is short-lived," reports the San Francisco Chronicle: A Chinese study published June 18 in the journal Nature Medicine also showed coronavirus antibodies taking a nosedive. The study of 74 patients, conducted by Chongqing Medical University, a branch of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, showed that more than 90% exhibited sharp declines in the number of antibodies within two to three months after infection... Studies of four seasonal coronaviruses that cause colds show that although people develop antibodies, the immune response declines over time and people become susceptible again. Scientists suspect that the severity of cold symptoms is reduced by previous infections.
The Chronicle reports this new information suggests two implications:

• "Waning antibodies affect vaccine development," said Shannon Bennett, the chief of science at San Francisco's California Academy of Sciences. "Where natural immunity doesn't really develop or last, then vaccine programs are not likely to be easily successful or achievable..."

• The Chronicle adds, "Whatever happens, epidemiologists hope the recent reports about antibody viability put to rest the concept embraced by many young people of herd immunity, where the disease can't find any more victims because so many people have survived infections and must be immune. 'This attitude that if I go out there and just get exposed — get it over with — then I'll be immune is a dangerous presumption,' Bennett said. Now more than ever."

Face masks "offer much more protection against coronavirus than many think," reports the Los Angeles Times. [Alternate version here ....] There's a common refrain that masks don't protect you; they protect other people from your own germs, which is especially important to keep unknowingly infected people from spreading the coronavirus. But now, there's mounting evidence that masks also protect you.

If you're unlucky enough to encounter an infectious person, wearing any kind of face covering will reduce the amount of virus that your body will take in. As it turns out, that's pretty important. Breathing in a small amount of virus may lead to no disease or far more mild infection. But inhaling a huge volume of virus particles can result in serious disease or death. That's the argument Dr. Monica Gandhi, UC San Francisco professor of medicine and medical director of the HIV Clinic at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital, is making about why — if you do become infected with the virus — masking can still protect you from more severe disease...

She cited an outbreak at a seafood plant in Oregon where employees were given masks, and 95% of those who were infected were asymptomatic.... The protective effects are also seen in countries where masks are universally accepted for years, such as Taiwan, Thailand, South Korea and Singapore. "They have all seen cases as they opened ... but not deaths," Gandhi said.
"The emerging scientific data is clear: wearing a mask doesn't only protect others, it also significantly reduces your own risk of getting Coronavirus," one U.S. governor recently pointed out.

"So if you're a selfish bastard and wearing a mask to protect others isn't enough of a reason to do so, then maybe protecting yourself is?"

Engineers have developed a new type of hybrid solar energy converter, which uses energy from the Sun to create both electricity and steam. The device reportedly has high efficiency and runs at low cost, allowing industry to make use of a wider spectrum of solar energy. New Atlas reports: The device looks like a satellite dish, with a small device suspended over the center of a parabolic collector. The dish part is mirrored, and focuses the sun's rays onto the box in the middle. The bottom of this section contains multi-junction solar cells, which collect and convert visible and ultraviolet light into electricity. But the clever part is that these cells redirect the infrared light -- the heat energy -- to a separate thermal receiver, higher up in the device. This receiver is essentially a cup-shaped cavity surrounded by pressurized water, which captures the heat and turns into steam.

The team says that the total collection efficiency is 85.1 percent, meaning a very high amount of the Sun's energy is converted into either electricity or heat. The steam can be heated up to 248C (478F), which is a much higher temperature than many other thermal energy collectors. This means it's hot enough for many industrial processes, such as drying, curing, sterilizing, and pasteurizing. The other advantage is cost. The team reports that once scaled up, the hybrid device could run for as little as 3 cents per kilowatt hour. The research was published in the journal Cell Reports Physical Science.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Vox: There's an old truism in the business world: what gets measured gets managed. One of the challenges in managing the greenhouse gas emissions warming the atmosphere is that they aren't measured very well. The ultimate solution to this problem-- the killer app, as it were -- would be real-time tracking of all global greenhouse gases, verified by objective third parties, and available for free to the public. Now, a new alliance of climate research groups called the Climate TRACE (Tracking Real-Time Atmospheric Carbon Emissions) Coalition has launched an effort to make the vision a reality, and they're aiming to have it ready for COP26, the climate meetings in Glasgow, Scotland, in November 2021 (postponed from November 2020). If they pull it off, it could completely change the tenor and direction of international climate talks. It could also make it easier for the hundreds of companies, cities, counties, and states that have made ambitious climate commitments to reliably track their process.

In addition to [Al Gore, who had been looking for more reliable ways to track emissions] and WattTime, [which intends to create a public database that will track carbon emissions from all the world's large power plants using AI], the coalition now contains:

-Carbon Tracker uses machine learning and satellite data to predict the utilization of every power plant in the world;
-Earthrise Alliance aggregates and organizes publicly available environmental data into a format meaningful to journalists and researchers;
-CarbonPlan uses satellite data to track changes in aboveground biomass (especially forests) and the associated carbon emissions, down to a spatial resolution of 300 meters;
-Hudson Carbon uses satellite data to track changes in agricultural cover, cropping, and tilling, down to the level of the individual field, and compares that data against ground-level sensors;
-OceanMind uses onboard sensors to track the global movement of ships in real time and combines that with engine specs to extrapolate carbon emissions;
-Rocky Mountain Institute combines multiple sources of data to quantify methane emissions from oil and gas infrastructure;
-Hypervine uses spectroscopic imagery to track vehicle usage and blasting at quarries;
-Blue Sky Analytics uses near-infrared and shortwave infrared imagery from satellites to track fires.

The coalition will also be gathering data from a variety of other sources, from power grid data to fuel sales, sensor networks, and drones. Gore acknowledges that "this is a work in progress," but says the coalition is aiming big: "everything that can be known about where greenhouse gas emissions are coming from will be known, in near-real time."

schwit1 shares a report from UPI: Up to 75% of the coronavirus strains circulating in New York City in early March shared genetic similarities with those seen in Europe and other areas of North America, according to an analysis published Thursday by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The findings are significant, given that they are based on samples of the new coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, collected from patients at five hospitals in the city selected intentionally because "of their high use" by people who are "self-identified Chinese speakers," the agency researchers said. "In retrospect, perhaps Trump should have shut down flights from Europe when he shut them down from China, but you can imagine the reaction if he had done so," adds Slashdot reader schwit1. Trump did restrict travel from Europe to the U.S. in early March, but at that point the virus was already spreading rapidly across the country.

The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline will be available for people in suicidal crisis under a new easier-to-remember phone number in two years. The Verge reports: On Thursday, the Federal Communications Commission voted unanimously to finalize 988 as the number Americans can call to be directed to the 24/7 National Suicide Prevention Lifeline hotline. As of right now, individuals in suicidal crisis can reach that hotline by dialing 1-800-273-8255 (TALK), but that number will be easier to remember once it transitions to its three-digit equivalent starting on July 16th, 2022. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai said in a statement on Thursday, "Establishing the easy-to-remember 988 as the '911' for suicide prevention and mental health services will make it easier for Americans in crisis to access the help they need."

As of right now, the national suicide hotline does not provide texting services. Democratic Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel took issue with the commission's decision not to include the ability to text the hotline in its rulemaking. "Voice service has its benefits, but it is not native for most young people," Rosenworcel said in a statement on Thursday. "So I regret today's decision is anchored in older technologies and takes a pass on developing texting capabilities with this three-digit hotline. We should have done so here."

The recent retraction of a research paper which claimed to find no link between police killings and the race of the victims was a story tailor-made for today's fights over cancel culture. From a report: First, the authors asked for the paper to be withdrawn, both because they'd been "careless when describing the inferences that could be made from our data" and because of how others had interpreted the work. (In particular they pointed to recent op-ed in The Wall Street Journal with the headline, "The Myth of Systemic Police Racism.") Then, after two days of predictable blowback from those decrying what they saw as left-wing censorship, the authors tried to clarify: "People were incorrectly concluding that we retracted due to either political pressure or the political views of those citing the paper," they wrote in an amended statement. No, the authors said, the real reason they retracted the paper was because it contained a serious mistake. In fact, that mistake -- a misstatement of its central finding -- had been caught soon after the paper's initial publication in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in July 2019, and was formally corrected in April of this year. At that point, the authors acknowledged their error -- sort of -- while insisting that their main conclusions held. That the eventual retraction came only after the paper became a flashpoint in the debate over race and policing in the wake of George Floyd's murder ... well, let's agree that the retraction happened.

[...] As we and others have written many times, peer review -- the way journals ask researchers to perform it, anyway -- is not designed to catch fraud. It's also vulnerable to rigging and doesn't go so well when done in haste. Editors and publishers tend to admit these problems only under duress -- i.e., when a well-publicized retraction happens -- and then hope that we believe their claims that such colossal blunders are somehow "the system is working the way it should." But their protestations only serve as an acknowledgement that the standard system doesn't work, and that we must instead rely upon the more informal sort of peer review that happens to a paper after it gets published. The internet has enabled such post-publication peer review, as it is known, to happen with more speed, on sites like PubPeer.com. In some cases, though -- as with the PNAS paper described above -- the resolution of this after-the-fact assessment comes much too late, after a mistaken claim has already made the rounds. So how might journals do things better? As Daniel Lakens, of Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands, and his colleagues have argued, researchers should embrace a "Red Team challenge" approach to peer review. Just as software companies hire hackers to probe their products for potential gaps in the security, a journal might recruit a team of scientific devil's advocates: subject-matter specialists and methodologists who will look for "holes and errors in ongoing work and ... challenge dominant assumptions, with the goal of improving project quality," Lakens wrote in Nature recently. After all, he added, science is only as robust as the strongest critique it can handle.

California said public schools in the state's hardest hit counties won't be able to open for on-campus classes until the spread of the coronavirus in that area is contained. The order means that students in counties accounting for more than 70% of the state's population will likely switch to remote learning for the beginning of the school year. Bloomberg reports: "The virus will be with us for a year or more, and school districts must provide meaningful instruction in the midst of this pandemic," Governor Gavin Newsom said in a statement. "In California, health data will determine when a school can be physically open --- and when it must close -- but learning should never stop. Students, staff, and parents all prefer in-classroom instruction, but only if it can be done safely."

School districts in Los Angeles, San Diego and Sacramento had already decided they would offer remote learning only, despite calls by the Trump administration for classrooms to fully reopen. Schools located in counties that are on the state's virus monitoring list must not physically open for in-person instruction until their county has come off the list for 14 consecutive days. All staff and students in 3rd grade and above will be required to wear a mask or face covering. Students in 2nd grade and below are strongly encouraged to wear a face covering.