Russian state intelligence is hacking international research centers that are racing to develop a Covid-19 vaccine, the U.K., U.S. and Canadian governments said. From a report: It is unclear whether research facilities have been damaged or if the vaccine programs have been set back as a result of the hacks but officials warned that the cyber attacks are ongoing. In a dramatic statement on Thursday, Britain's National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) said vaccine and therapeutic sectors in multiple countries have been targeted by a group known as APT29, which it said is "almost certainly" part of Russian state intelligence. Security agencies in the U.S. and Canada later issued their own statements backing up the findings. "It is completely unacceptable that the Russian intelligence services are targeting those working to combat the coronavirus pandemic," British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said. "While others pursue their selfish interests with reckless behavior, the U.K. and its allies are getting on with the hard work of finding a vaccine and protecting global health."

India on Friday became the third country in the world to record more than one million coronavirus cases, behind only the United States and Brazil, as infections spread further out into the countryside and smaller towns. From a report: For India's population of around 1.3 billion, experts say a million cases are still low and the number will rise significantly in the coming months as testing is expanded. India recorded 34,956 new infections on Friday, taking the total so far to 1.004 million, with 25,602 deaths from COVID-19, federal health ministry data showed. That compares to some 3.6 million cases in the United States and 2 million in Brazil -- both countries with populations under 400 million.

Epidemiologists say India is still likely months away from hitting its peak of cases, suggesting the country's already overburdened healthcare system will come under further strain. "In the coming months, we are bound to see more and more cases, and that is the natural progression of any pandemic," said Giridhar Babu, epidemiologist at the nonprofit Public Health Foundation of India. "As we move forward, the goal has to be lower mortality... A critical challenge states will face is how to rationally allocate hospital beds," he said.

The launch of NASA's next flagship space telescope has been pushed back another seven months. Space.com reports: The liftoff of the $9.8 billion James Webb Space Telescope has been delayed from March 2021 until Oct. 31 of that year, NASA officials announced today (July 16), citing technical difficulties as well as complications imposed by the coronavirus pandemic. "Webb is the world's most complex space observatory, and our top science priority, and we've worked hard to keep progress moving during the pandemic," Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate, said in a statement. "The team continues to be focused on reaching milestones and arriving at the technical solutions that will see us through to this new launch date next year."

NASA officials attributed three months of this latest seven-month delay to the coronavirus pandemic, which forced many NASA centers to impose mandatory work-from-home orders. "Risk reduction" work on complex Webb tech, such as the observatory's huge, foldable sunshield, added two more months. The remaining two months were added for "schedule margin," giving the mission some breathing room on its long road to the launch pad. But the schedule slip won't increase the 13,670-lb. (6,200 kilograms) Webb's hefty price tag, mission team members said. "Based on current projections, the program expects to complete the remaining work within the new schedule without requiring additional funds," Gregory Robinson, NASA Webb program director at the agency's headquarters in Washington, D.C., said in the same statement.

The Trump administration is now ordering hospitals to send coronavirus patient data to a database in Washington, DC as part of a new initiative that may bypass the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), according to a report from The New York Times published on Tuesday. The Verge reports: As outlined in a document (PDF) posted to the website of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), hospitals are being ordered to send data directly to the administration, effective tomorrow, a move that has alarmed some within the CDC, according to The Times. The database that will collect and store the information is referred to in the document as HHS Protect, which was built in part by data mining and predictive analytics firm Palantir. The Silicon Valley company is known most for its controversial contract work with the US military and other clandestine government agencies as well as for being co-founded and initially funded by Trump ally Peter Thiel.

"A unique link will be sent to the hospital points of contact. This will direct the [point of care] to a hospital-specific secure form that can then be used to enter the necessary information. After completing the fields, click submit and confirm that the form has been successfully captured," reads the HHS instructions. "A confirmation email will be sent to you from the HHS Protect System. This method replaces the emailing of individual spreadsheets previously requested." While the White House's official reasoning is that this plan will help make data collection on the spread of COVID-19 more centralized and efficient, some current and former public health officials fear the bypassing of the CDC may be an effort to politicize the findings and cut experts out of the loop with regard to federal messaging and guidelines, The Times reports.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: Researchers on Tuesday [reported in the journal Nature Communications] strong evidence that the coronavirus can be transmitted from a pregnant woman to a fetus. A baby born in a Paris hospital in March to a mother with Covid-19 tested positive for the virus and developed symptoms of inflammation in his brain, said Dr. Daniele De Luca, who led the research team and is chief of the division of pediatrics and neonatal critical care at Paris-Saclay University Hospitals. The baby, now more than 3 months old, recovered without treatment and is "very much improved, almost clinically normal," Dr. De Luca said, adding that the mother, who needed oxygen during the delivery, is healthy.

Dr. De Luca said the virus appeared to have been transmitted through the placenta of the 23-year-old mother. The testing indicated that "the virus reaches the placenta and replicates there," Dr. De Luca said. It can then be transmitted to a fetus, which "can get infected and have symptoms similar to adult Covid-19 patients." [Dr. Yoel Sadovsky, executive director of Magee-Womens Research Institute at the University of Pittsburgh] said, it is important to note that cases of possible coronavirus transmission in utero appear to be extremely rare. With other viruses, including Zika and rubella, placental infection and transmission is much more common, he said. With the coronavirus, he said, "we are trying to understand the opposite -- what underlies the relative protection of the fetus and the placenta?"

Another study published on Tuesday in eLife, an online research journal, may help answer that question. It found that while cells in the placenta had many of the receptor proteins that allow viruses to propagate, there was evidence of only "negligible" amounts of a key cell surface receptor and an enzyme that are known to be involved in allowing the coronavirus to enter cells and replicate. The study was led by Dr. Robert Romero, chief of the perinatology research branch at the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

Joseph R. Biden Jr. announced on Tuesday a new plan to spend $2 trillion over four years to significantly escalate the use of clean energy in the transportation, electricity and building sectors, part of a suite of sweeping proposals designed to create economic opportunities and build infrastructure while also tackling climate change. DogDude shares a report: In a speech in Wilmington, Del., Mr. Biden built on his plans, released last week, for reviving the economy in the wake of the coronavirus crisis, with a new focus on enhancing the nation's infrastructure and emphasizing the importance of putting the United States on a path to significantly cut fossil fuel emissions. "These are the most critical investments we can make for the long-term health and vitality of both the American economy and the physical health and safety of the American people," he said, repeatedly criticizing President Trump's leadership on issues including climate and the pandemic. "When Donald Trump thinks about climate change, the only word he can muster is 'hoax.' When I think about climate change, the word I think of is 'jobs.'"

The proposal is the second plank in Mr. Biden's economic recovery plan. His team sees an opportunity to take direct aim at Mr. Trump, who has struggled to deliver on his pledges to finance major improvements to American infrastructure. Republicans are sure to criticize the proposal as an attack on jobs in the energy sector -- but the plan will also test whether Mr. Biden has found a way to win over environmental activists and other progressives who have long been skeptical about the scope of his ambitions on climate. His plan outlines specific and aggressive targets, including achieving an emissions-free power sector by 2035 and upgrading four million buildings over four years to meet the highest standards for energy efficiency. The plan also calls for establishing an office of environmental and climate justice at the Department of Justice and developing a broad set of tools to address how "environmental policy decisions of the past have failed communities of color."

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: A pair of earthquakes that struck the remote California desert 1 year ago have raised the risk of 'the big one' hitting Southern California, according to a new study. The research finds that the 2019 Ridgecrest, California, quakes shifted underground stresses, making the San Andreas fault -- the state's longest and most dangerous fault -- three times more likely to rupture. U.S. Geological Survey estimates for the annual probability of an earthquake on this part of the San Andreas are about one-third of a percent -- equivalent to expecting a magnitude 7.8 every 300 years, on average. The new modeling triples that hazard to 1% per year -- or a big one every century. And if the Garlock actually does rupture, then the hazard really rises on the San Andreas, by a factor of 150: The probability of a big one rises to 50% in the following year. In principle, a Garlock earthquake could lead to rupture on the San Andreas in a matter of hours or days, much as the two Ridgecrest events came within a day or two. USGS regional scenarios anticipate 1,800 deaths and 50,000 injuries in the event of a major San Andreas earthquake. More than 3 million homes could be damaged, at a reconstruction cost of $289 billion. The study has been published in the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: Researchers in Singapore have developed an apparatus that can be placed in a window to reduce incoming sound by 10 decibels. The system was created by a team of scientists, including Masaharu Nishimura, who came up with the basic concept, and Bhan Lam, a researcher at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. Their results were published on Thursday in Scientific Reports. The prototype is not yet the most practical device in real world conditions, but it points the way toward the development of technologies that may help ease the strain of noisy city living.

Borrowing from the same technological principles used in noise-canceling headphones, the team expanded the concept to fit an entire room by placing 24 small speakers in a window. The speakers emit sound waves that correspond to the incoming racket and neutralize it -- or, at least some of it. The system is based on the frequency of the sound waves and, for now, the optimal range is between 300 and 1,000 hertz. [...] The system uses a microphone outside the window to detect the repeating sound waves of the offending noise source, which is registered by a computer controller. That in turn deciphers the proper wave frequency needed to neutralize the sound, which is transmitted to the array of speakers on the inside of the window frame. The speakers then emit the proper "anti" waves, which cancel out the incoming waves, and there you have it: near blissful silence. Unfortunately, there are some limitations. The system works best from the types of steady noise sources found within the optimal frequency range and isn't great at neutralizing sporadic noises. Also, since human voices don't fit within most of that range, they won't be canceled out.

Engineers from Kenoteq are working to reinvent the humble clay-fired brick, which has remained largely the same for thousands of years and causes significant environmental problems. Not only are the majority of brick kilns required to produce bricks heated by fossil fuels, but the bricks that are made must be transported to construction sites, generating more carbon emissions. CNN reports: [Gabriela Medero, a professor of Geotechnical and Geoenvironmental Engineering at Scotland's Heriot-Watt University] joined forces with fellow engineer Sam Chapman and founded Kenoteq in 2009. The company's signature product is the K-Briq. Made from more than 90% construction waste, Medero says the K-Briq -- which does not need to be fired in a kiln -- produces less than a tenth of the carbon emissions of conventional bricks. With the company testing new machinery to start scaling up production, Medero hopes her bricks will help to build a more sustainable world.

To make it, construction and demolition waste including bricks, gravel, sand and plasterboard is crushed and mixed with water and a binder. The bricks are then pressed in customized molds. Tinted with recycled pigments, they can be made in any color. [...] Kenoteq currently operates one workshop in Edinburgh, which can produce three million K-Briqs a year. Medero is looking at scaling up -- but it's hard to create a revolution in construction. Over the next 18 months, Medero plans to get K-Briq machinery on-site at recycling plants. This will increase production while reducing transport-related emissions, she says, because trucks can collect K-Briqs when they drop off construction waste. "We need to have ways of building sustainably, with affordable, good quality materials that will last."

Sphere packing might seem like a topic only a mathematician could love. Who else could get excited about finding the most efficient way to arrange circles in the plane, or spheres in space? But right now, millions of people all over the world are thinking about this very problem. From a report: Determining how to safely reopen buildings and public spaces under social distancing is in part an exercise in geometry: If each person must keep six feet away from everyone else, then figuring out how many people can sit in a classroom or a dining room is a question about packing non-overlapping circles into floor plans. Of course there's a lot more to confronting COVID than just this geometry problem. But circle and sphere packing plays a part, just as it does in modeling crystal structures in chemistry and abstract message spaces in information theory.

It's a simple-sounding problem that's occupied some of history's greatest mathematicians, and exciting research is still happening today, particularly in higher dimensions. For example, mathematicians recently proved the best way to pack spheres into 8- and 24-dimensional space -- a technique essential for optimizing the error-correcting codes used in cell phones or for communication with space probes. So let's take a look at some of the surprising complications that arise when we try to pack space with our simplest shape. If your job involves packing oranges in a box or safely seating students under social distancing, the size and shape of your container is a crucial component of the problem. But for most mathematicians, the theory of sphere packing is about filling all of space. In two dimensions, this means covering the plane with same-size circles that don't overlap.

The world's fastest computer is now part of "a vast supercomputer-powered search for new findings pertaining to the novel coronavirus' spread" and "how to effectively treat and mitigate it," according to an emerging tech journalist at Nextgov.

It's part of a consortium currently facilitating over 65 active research projects, for which "Dozens of national and international members are volunteering free compute time...providing at least 485 petaflops of capacity and steadily growing, to more rapidly generate new solutions against COVID-19."

"What started as a simple concept has grown to span three continents with over 40 supercomputer providers," Dario Gil, director of IBM Research and consortium co-chair, told Nextgov last week. "In the face of a global pandemic like COVID-19, hopefully a once-in-a-lifetime event, the speed at which researchers can drive discovery is a critical factor in the search for a cure and it is essential that we combine forces...."

[I]ts resources have been used to sort through billions of molecules to identify promising compounds that can be manufactured quickly and tested for potency to target the novel coronavirus, produce large data sets to study variations in patient responses, perform airflow simulations on a new device that will allow doctors to use one ventilator to support multiple patients — and more. The complex systems are powering calculations, simulations and results in a matter of days that several scientists have noted would take a matter of months on traditional computers.
The Undersecretary for Science at America's Energy Department said "What's really interesting about this from an organizational point of view is that it's basically a volunteer organization."

The article identifies some of the notable participants:

• IBM was part of the joint launch with America's Office of Science and Technology Policy and its Energy Department.
• The chief of NASA's Advanced Supercomputing says they're "making the full reserve portion of NASA supercomputing resources available to researchers working on the COVID-19 response, along with providing our expertise and support to port and run their applications on NASA systems."
• Amazon Web Services "saw a clear opportunity to bring the benefits of cloud... to bear in the race for treatments and a vaccine," according to a company executive.
• Japan's Fugaku — "which surpassed leading U.S. machines on the Top 500 list of global supercomputers in late June" — also joined the consortium in June.

Other consortium members:

• Google Cloud
• Microsoft
• Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
• The National Science Foundation
• Argonne, Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos, Oak Ridge and Sandia National laboratories.
• National Center for Atmospheric Research's Wyoming Supercomputing Center
• AMD
• NVIDIA
• Dell Technologies. ("The company is now donating cycles from the Zenith supercomputer and other resources.")

The author of an opinion piece in the New York Times describes what happened after sharing their cancer diagnosis on Facebook: Since then, my Facebook feed has featured ads for "alternative cancer care." The ads, which were new to my timeline, promote everything from cumin seeds to colloidal silver as cancer treatments. Some ads promise luxury clinics — or even "nontoxic cancer therapies" on a beach in Mexico.

There's a reason I'll never fall for these ads: I'm an advocate against pseudoscience. As a consultant for the watchdog group Bad Science Watch and the founder of the Campaign Against Phony Autism Cures, I've learned to recognize the hallmarks of pseudoscience marketing: unproven and sometimes dangerous treatments, promising simplistic solutions and support. Things like "bleach cures" that promise to treat everything from Covid-19 to autism.

When I saw the ads, I knew that Facebook had probably tagged me to receive them. Interestingly, I haven't seen any legitimate cancer care ads in my newsfeed, just pseudoscience. This may be because pseudoscience companies rely on social media in a way that other forms of health care don't. Pseudoscience companies leverage Facebook's social and supportive environment to connect their products with identities and to build communities around their products. They use influencers and patient testimonials. Some companies also recruit members through Facebook "support groups" to sell their products in pyramid schemes...

It was only last April that Facebook removed "pseudoscience" as a keyword from its categories for targeted advertising, and only after the tech publication The Markup reported that 78 million users were listed in Facebook's ad portal as having an "interest" in the category... Facebook pledged that it would add a warning label to Covid-19-related ads and would remove pseudoscience ads that were reported by its users. The problem, which even Facebook acknowledged, is that pseudoscience content can run for months before being flagged by readers. Facebook's main ad-screening system is automated. While we wait for its artificial intelligence system to catch up with the discernment abilities of human reviewers, a steady flow of pseudoscience advertising has already slipped through on a platform with billions of users.

Could it be that Facebook has gotten too big to adequately regulate its content?
The article also suggests one way that individuals can join a movement to pressure Facebook to change: "suspend, delete or even just spend less time on Facebook (and on Instagram, which is owned by Facebook)."

"My retreat from Facebook may mean fewer online connections, perhaps at a time when I need them the most. But I'd rather leave than see what another friend with cancer calls the 'slap in the face' ads."

"It might be the next best thing to a coronavirus vaccine," writes the Los Angeles Times. "Scientists have devised a way to use the antibody-rich blood plasma of Covid-19 survivors for an upper-arm injection that they say could inoculate people against the virus for months." Using technology that's been proven effective in preventing other diseases such as hepatitis A, the injections would be administered to high-risk health care workers, nursing home patients, or even at public drive-through sites — potentially protecting millions of lives, the doctors and other experts say. The two scientists who spearheaded the proposal — an 83-year-old shingles researcher and his counterpart, an HIV gene therapy expert — have garnered widespread support from leading blood and immunology specialists, including those at the center of the nation's Covid-19 plasma research.

But the idea exists only on paper. Federal officials have twice rejected requests to discuss the proposal, and pharmaceutical companies — even acknowledging the likely efficacy of the plan — have declined to design or manufacture the shots, according to a Los Angeles Times investigation... There is little disagreement that the idea holds promise; the dispute is over the timing. Federal health officials and industry groups say the development of plasma-based therapies should focus on treating people who are already sick, not on preventing infections in those who are still healthy...

But scientists who question the delay argue that the immunity shots are easy to scale up and should enter clinical trials immediately. They say that until there's a vaccine, the shots offer the only plausible method for preventing potentially millions of infections at a critical moment in the pandemic. "Beyond being a lost opportunity, this is a real head-scratcher," said Dr. Michael Joyner, a Mayo Clinic researcher who leads a program sponsored by the Food and Drug Administration to capitalize on coronavirus antibodies from COVID-19 survivors. "It seems obvious." The use of so-called convalescent plasma has already become widespread. More than 28,000 patients have already received the IV treatment, and preliminary data suggest that the method is safe.

"A newly-discovered comet is giving skywatchers quite the show during the month of July," reports CBS News: Astronomers discovered the comet, known as Comet C2020 F3 NEOWISE, back in March. It was named for the NASA mission that spotted it, for the Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer... But astronomers knew they found something unique when they spotted Neowise. On July 3, Neowise was closer to the sun than the orbit of Mercury, coming dangerously close to breaking apart. The sun heated up much of the comet's icy makeup, erupting in a large debris trail of gas and dust.

Measuring about 3 miles across, Neowise is considered a fairly large comet — providing skywatchers with a spectacular view from Earth. The comet, which has a bright opulent tail, has been putting on a stunning show in the early hours before sunrise in the Northern Hemisphere... But late sleepers need not worry — the comet will start appearing in the evening, just after sunset, starting Saturday.

To view it, people in the Northern Hemisphere can look to the northwestern sky, just below Ursa Major, commonly known as the Big Dipper constellation. Scientists say the comet will be visible across the Northern Hemisphere for about another month.
The comet is made up of material dating back 4.6 billion years, to the origins of our solar system, according to the article. "The event is truly a once-in-a-lifetime experience — the comet takes about 6,800 years to complete its path around the sun, according to NASA..."

"NASA says it will be one of the brightest comets this century."

An anonymous reader quotes Forbes: Conventional theory has it that Planet 9 — our outer solar system's hypothetical 9th planet — is merely a heretofore undetected planet, likely captured by our solar system at some point over its 4.6 billion year history. But Harvard University astronomers now raise the possibility that orbital evidence for Planet 9 could possibly be the result of a missing link in the decades-long puzzle of dark matter. That is, a hypothetical primordial black hole with a horizon size no larger than a grapefruit, and with a mass 5 to 10 times that of Earth.

In a paper accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, the co-authors argue that observed clustering of extreme trans-Neptunian objects suggest some sort of massive super-earth type body lying on the outer fringes of our solar system. Perhaps as much as 800 astronomical units (Earth-Sun distances) out...

If they exist, such primordial black holes would require new physics and go a long way towards solving the mystery of the universe's missing mass, or dark matter.
Their argument also constitutes a "new method to search for black holes in the outer solar system based on flares that result from the disruption of intercepted comets," according to a statement from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. The paper was co-authored by Avi Loeb, chair of Harvard's astronomy department, who points out that "Because black holes are intrinsically dark, the radiation that matter emits on its way to the mouth of the black hole is our only way to illuminate this dark environment."

And in an explanatory video, Mike Brown, a planetary astronomy professor at CalTech, suggests another way it could be significant. "All those people who are mad that Pluto is no longer a planet can be thrilled to know that there is a real planet out there still to be found."

Research continues in a field which involves using the spin and magnetism of electrons in solid-state devices — spintronics.

hackingbear shared this report from Nature: Electric control of magnetic vortex dynamics in a reproducible way on an ultrafast time scale is a key element in the quest for efficient spintronic devices with low-energy consumption. Researchers in China and Germany demonstrated a simple method for controlling magnetic patterns that are useful for data storage and information processing.

Magnetic nanostructures are engineered as to host swirling magnetic vortices. The vortex intrinsic properties such as the vortex sense of rotations or polarity are well defined and thus are predestinate as digital information carriers. Furthermore, the magnetic nanostructures are readily integrated in existing computers. Chenglong Jia from Lanzhou University, Jamal Berakdar from Martin-Luther Universitat Halle-Wittenberg and their co-workers demonstrated how to process the so stored information swiftly by switching both the vortex's sense of rotation and the orientation of its magnetic field using at a simple sequence of ultra-short, low average-energy electric-field pulses. The team believe that their method is scalable, non-invasive, reliable and reversible, fullfing thus important prerequisites for practical implementation.

A new Motherboard article interviews William, a ventilator refurbisher who's repaired at least 70 broken ventilators that he's bought on eBay and from other secondhand websites, then sold to U.S. hospitals and governments to help handle a spike in COVID-19 patients.

He's part of a grey-market supply chain that's "essentially identical to one used by farmers to repair John Deere tractors without the company's authorization and has emerged because of the same need to fix a device without a manufacturer's permission..." The issue is that, like so many other electronics, medical equipment, including ventilators, increasingly has software that prevents "unauthorized" people from repairing or refurbishing broken devices, and Medtronic will not help him fix them... Faced with a global pandemic, hospitals, biomedical technicians, right to repair activists, and refurbishers like William say that medical device manufacturers are profiteering by putting up artificial barriers to repair that drive up the cost of medical care in the United States and puts patient lives in danger. They describe difficulty getting parts and software, delays in getting service from "authorized" technicians, and a general sense of frustration as few manufacturers appear ready to loosen their repair restrictions during the COVID-19 crisis.

For the past decade, medical device manufacturers have refused to sell replacement parts and software to hospitals and repair professionals unless they pay thousands of dollars annually to become "authorized" to work on machines. The medical device industry has lobbied against legislation that would make it easier to repair their machines, refused to release repair manuals, and used copyright law to threaten those who have made repair manuals available to the public. The technicians who are unable to gain access to repair parts, manuals, and software are not random people who are deciding on a whim to try to fix complex medical equipment that is going to be used on sick patients. Hospitals and trained professionals are regularly unable to fix the equipment that they own unless they pay for expensive service contracts or annual trainings from manufacturers.

While hospitals deal with a resurgent coronavirus that is overtaxing intensive care units across the country, their biomedical technicians are wasting time on the phone and in Kafkaesque email exchanges with medical device manufacturers, pleading for spare parts, passwords to unlock diagnostic modes, or ventilator repair manuals.
The article notes that newer medical devices even have "more advanced anti-repair technologies built into them. Newer ventilators connect to proprietary servers owned by manufacturers to verify that the person accessing it is authorized by the company to do so."

Slashdot reader shirappu writes: AI|Writer is an experiment in which artificial intelligence is used to simulate both real and fictitious famous personalities through written correspondence. Users can ask questions and receive explanations from simulated versions of Isaac Newton, Alfred Hitchcock, Marie Curie, Mary Shelley, and many more.
The Next Web calls it "a new experiment by magician and novelist Andrew Mayne," pointing out that it's using OpenAI's new text generator API. Other simulated conversations include Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing, Stephen Hawking, Richard Feynman, Isaac Asimov, Benjamin Franklin, and even Edgar Allen Poe.

"We have all kinds of theoretical ideas about AI and what counts as real or not," Mayne said on Twitter, "however I think you just have to be pragmatic and just ask: What can it do? I think this gets lost in a lot of discussions about AI. The end goal isn't a witty chatbot. It's to expand our knowledge."

There's a wait list for access to the site "so we can make sure everything works right and we don't accidentally create Skynet," Mayne jokes on Twitter. But assuming this isn't another magic trick, The Next Web is already reporting on some of the early results: The system first works out the purpose of the message and the intended recipient by searching for patterns in the text. It then uses the API's internal knowledge of that person to guess how they would respond in their written voice. The digitized characters can answer questions about their work, explain scientific theories, or offer their opinions. For example, Marie Curie gave a lesson on radiation, H.G. Wells revealed his inspiration for The Time Machine, while Alfred Hitchcock compared Christopher Nolan's Interstellar to Stanley Kubrick's 2001...

The characters could also compare their own eras with the present day... Mayne says the characters did well with historical facts, but could be "quite erratic with matters of opinion" and "rarely reply to the same question in the same way." He demonstrated these variations by asking both Newton and Gottfried Leibniz who invented calculus. "Newton almost always insists that he invented Calculus alone and is pretty brusque about it," Mayne wrote on his website. "Leibniz sometimes says he did. Other times he'll be vague." At one point, Leibniz even threatened to kill Mayne if he tried to take the credit for the discovery.

As well as historical figures, the system can respond in the voice of fictional characters. In fact, Mayne says the most "touching" message he's received was this reply from the Incredible Hulk.
Another conversation shows Bruce Wayne's response when asked to make a donation to support freeing the Joker...

Rick Schumann writes: Researchers at a Cleveland clinic performed a study with 1,914 patients into a phenomenon called "Broken Heart Syndrome," where someone can be experiencing heart attack-like symptoms, but it's not a heart attack or anything related to blocked blood flow to the heart. Turns out that it seems likely that the aggregate stresses of the pandemic (so-called "social distancing," lack of contact with fellow humans, enforced isolation, and so on) appear to create emotional stresses that manifest with physical symptoms that mimic a heart attack.

"The pandemic has created a parallel environment which is not healthy," said Dr. Ankur Kalra, the cardiologist who led the study. "Emotional distancing is not healthy. The economic impact is not healthy. We've seen that as an increase in non-coronavirus deaths, and our study says that stress cardiomyopathy has gone up because of the stress that the pandemic has created." The study didn't examine whether or not there could be a medical link between this phenomenon and the coronavirus, but all the participants in the study were tested for infection and were found to be free of the virus. The study has been published in the journal JAMA Network Open.

Long-time Slashdot reader kartis writes: Canada's Supreme Court upheld the Genetic Non-Discrimination Act (GINA) which prohibits under criminal penalty, employers or insurers from demanding or using genetic information. This was a result of a private member's bill in Parliament, which meant it passed without the government's support, and in fact both the Federal government and Quebec government (which had gotten it declared unconstitutional as outside federal powers) argued that it extended criminal powers into a provincial jurisdiction. Well, the Supreme Court has surprisingly upheld it in a 5-4 decision, which means great things for Canadians' privacy, and also suggests a wider ability for federal privacy legislation than many jurists had thought.