Slashdot reader shirappu writes: For eight years now, the Mars Rover Curiosity has been exploring the surface of Mars. Even now, it's still exploring, and still getting upgrades. According to Tech Crunch, NASA is now looking to interested volunteers to help upgrade the rover's terrain-scanning AI systems by annotating image data of the planet itself.
"The problem is that while there are lots of ready-made data sets of images with faces, cats and cars labeled, there aren't many of the Martian surface annotated with different terrain types..." notes TechCrunch. "Improvements to the AI might let the rover tell not just where it can drive, but the likelihood of losing traction and other factors that could influence individual wheel placement."

shirappu continues: Volunteers go through a short tutorial after which they can label images to help the rover better understand the terrain on which it drives. The system is expected to be used in future planet rover robots, and the project marks an interesting example of open crowd-sourcing to improve machine learning systems, and how it is impacting technology even on other planets.

Click this link for the AI4Mars site link where people can volunteer.

The World Health Organization has now halted research on whether hydroxychloroquine could be an effective treatment for COVID-19, reports NBC News, after multiple studies showed the drug "has no impact on the coronavirus."

But now that America's Food and Drug Administration has revoked permission for using it to treat coronavirus patients, CNN reports that the U.S. government "is stuck with 63 million doses of hydroxychloroquine." The government started stockpiling donated hydroxychloroquine in late March, after President Trump touted it as "very encouraging" and "very powerful" and a "game-changer." But Monday, the FDA revoked its emergency use authorization to use the drug to treat Covid-19, saying there was "no reason to believe" the drug was effective against the virus, and that it increased the risk of side effects, including heart problems... [M]any infectious disease experts, including those who've studied the drug for coronavirus, say there was never any evidence that the drug worked for the virus.
And some of America's states are now also stuck with millions of hydroxychloroquine pills which they're no longer allowed to use to treat COVID-19, reports The Columbus Dispatch: The state of Ohio purchased more than 2 million hydroxychloroquine pills for $602,629 on April 9, Melanie Amato, spokeswoman for the Department of Health, said via email. [And an additional 2 million were donated by an Ohio-based drugmaker...] The FDA change leaves the Ohio Department of Health with more than 4 million pills, which Amato said have a shelf life of about 18 to 24 months... [T]he state can give the drug only to facilities licensed to maintain dangerous prescription drugs...

Utah purchased $800,000 worth of the drug and Oklahoma spent $2 million on it...

A spokeswoman for Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder, a Glenford Republican, called the state Health Department's purchase of hydroxychloroquine "a waste of money."

New submitter UnsungBraveHeart shares a report from Reuters: Scientists in Italy have found traces of the new coronavirus in wastewater collected from Milan and Turin in December 2019 -- suggesting COVID-19 was already circulating in northern Italy before China reported the first cases. The Italian National Institute of Health looked at 40 sewage samples collected from wastewater treatment plants in northern Italy between October 2019 and February 2020. An analysis released on Thursday said samples taken in Milan and Turin on Dec. 18 showed the presence of the SARS-Cov-2 virus. Scientists said the detection of traces of the virus before the end of 2019 was consistent with evidence in other countries that COVID-19 may have been circulating before China reported the first cases on Dec. 31. A study in May by French scientists found that a Paris man was infected with COVID-19 as early as Dec. 27, nearly a month before France confirmed its first cases.

Planetary scientist Lynnae Quick decided to explore whether -- hypothetically -- ocean planets, similar to Saturn's moon Enceladus and Jupiter's moon Europa, are common in the Milky Way galaxy. "Through a mathematical analysis of several dozen exoplanets, including planets in the nearby TRAPPIST-1 system, Quick and her colleagues learned something significant: More than a quarter of the exoplanets they studied could be ocean worlds, with a majority possibly harboring oceans beneath layers of surface ice, similar to Europa and Enceladus," reports Phys.Org. "Additionally, many of these planets could be releasing more energy than Europa and Enceladus." From the report: To look for possible ocean worlds, Quick's team selected 53 exoplanets with sizes most similar to Earth, though they could have up to eight times more mass. Scientists assume planets of this size are more solid than gaseous and, thus, more likely to support liquid water on or below their surfaces. At least 30 more planets that fit these parameters have been discovered since Quick and her colleagues began their study in 2017, but they were not included in the analysis, which was published on June 18 in the journal Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. With their Earth-size planets identified, Quick and her team sought to determine how much energy each one could be generating and releasing as heat. The team considered two primary sources of heat. The first, radiogenic heat, is generated over billions of years by the slow decay of radioactive materials in a planet's mantle and crust. That rate of decay depends on a planet's age and the mass of its mantle. Other scientists already had determined these relationships for Earth-size planets. So, Quick and her team applied the decay rate to their list of 53 planets, assuming each one is the same age as its star and that its mantle takes up the same proportion of the planet's volume as Earth's mantle does.

Next, the researchers calculated heat produced by something else: tidal force, which is energy generated from the gravitational tugging when one object orbits another. Planets in stretched out, or elliptical, orbits shift the distance between themselves and their stars as they circle them. This leads to changes in the gravitational force between the two objects and causes the planet to stretch, thereby generating heat. Eventually, the heat is lost to space through the surface. One exit route for the heat is through volcanoes or cryovolcanoes. Another route is through tectonics, which is a geological process responsible for the movement of the outermost rocky or icy layer of a planet or moon. Whichever way the heat is discharged, knowing how much of it a planet pushes out is important because it could make or break habitability. For instance, too much volcanic activity can turn a livable world into a molten nightmare. But too little activity can shut down the release of gases that make up an atmosphere, leaving a cold, barren surface. Just the right amount supports a livable, wet planet like Earth, or a possibly livable moon like Europa.

Some have suggested that some of these planets could be watery, and Quick's estimates support this idea. According to her team's calculations, TRAPPIST-1 e, f, g and h could be ocean worlds, which would put them among the 14 ocean worlds the scientists identified in this study. The researchers predicted that these exoplanets have oceans by considering the surface temperatures of each one. This information is revealed by the amount of stellar radiation each planet reflects into space. Quick's team also took into account each planet's density and the estimated amount of internal heating it generates compared to Earth.

Behold the hot, energetic Universe. A German-Russian space telescope has just acquired a breakthrough map of the sky that traces the heavens in X-rays. From a report: The image records a lot of the violent action in the cosmos - instances where matter is being accelerated, heated and shredded. Feasting black holes, exploding stars, and searingly hot gas. The data comes from the eRosita instrument mounted on Spektr-RG. This orbiting telescope was launched in July last year and despatched to an observing position some 1.5 million km (930,000 miles) from Earth. Once commissioned and declared fully operational in December, it was left to slowly rotate and scan the depths of space. eRosita's first all-sky data-set, represented in the image at the top of this page, was completed only last week. It records over a million sources of X-rays. "That's actually pretty much the same number as had been detected in the whole history of X-ray astronomy going back 60 years. We've basically doubled the known sources in just six months," said Kirpal Nandra, who heads the high-energy astrophysics group at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE) in Garching, Germany. "The data is truly stunning and I think what we're doing here will revolutionise X-ray astronomy," he told BBC News.

CERN has taken a major step towards building a 100-kilometre circular super-collider to push the frontier of high-energy physics. From a report: The decision was unanimously endorsed by the CERN Council on 19 June, following the plan's approval by an independent panel in March. Europe's preeminent particle-physics organization will need global help to fund the project, which is expected to cost at least $23.5 billion and would be a follow-up to the lab's famed Large Hadron Collider. The new machine would collide electrons with their antimatter partners, positrons, by the middle of the century. The design -- to be built in an underground tunnel near CERN's location in Geneva, Switzerland -- will enable physicists to study the properties of the Higgs boson and, later, to host an even more powerful machine that will collide protons and last well into the second half of the century. The approval is not yet a final go-ahead. But it means CERN can now put substantial effort into designing a collider and researching its feasibility, while pushing to the backburner research and development efforts for alternative designs for LHC follow-ups, such as a linear eletron-positron collider or one that would accelerate muons. "I think it's a historic day for CERN and particle physics, in Europe and beyond," CERN director-general Fabiola Gianotti told the council after the vote.

The global coronavirus pandemic is accelerating, with Thursday's 150,000 new cases the highest in a single day, World Health Organization (WHO) director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said. From a report: "Almost half of the cases reported were from the Americas," he told a virtual briefing. "The world is in a new and dangerous phase ... the virus is still spreading fast, it is still deadly, and most people are still susceptible."

sciencehabit writes from a report via Science Magazine: With their ability to soak up carbon dioxide and breathe out oxygen, the world's great forests are often referred to as the planet's lungs. But Anastassia Makarieva, a theorist at the Petersburg Nuclear Physics Institute in Russia, says they are its beating heart, too. They recycle vast amounts of moisture into the air and, in the process, also whip up winds that pump that water around the world. The first part of that idea -- forests as rainmakers -- originated with other scientists and is increasingly appreciated by water resource managers in a world of rampant deforestation. But the second part, a theory Makarieva calls the biotic pump, is far more controversial.

When the NBA restarts its season next month, it may pipe in crowd noise from the NBA 2K video game to help simulate fans in the arena. Another proposal is to have players use Oura's smart rings to predict the onset of COVID-19 related symptoms. Engadget reports: According to Shams Charania of The Athletic, the specifics were laid out in an informational memo dubbed "Life inside the Bubble," that described testing plans, quarantine protocols and more. The part that's specifically interesting to us -- other than players only lounges with NBA 2K and bracelets that beep if people are within six feet of each other for too long -- is its proposed use of Oura's smart rings. Earlier this month, study results from West Virginia University's Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute suggested that physiological data from the rings, combined in its digital platform with information obtained from wearers via in-app surveys, can "forecast and predict the onset of COVID-19 related symptoms" three days in advance, with 90 percent accuracy.

According to The Athletic, use of the rings will be optional, and there's no word on what other data will be used to track possible symptoms. ESPN reporter Zach Lowe tweeted that if players wear the rings, team personnel will not have access unless it detects an "illness probability score" that triggers a medical review. The player's union hasn't announced it's fully on board with the restart just yet but plans appear to be in motion, and it's possible that if you're watching games played in mostly-empty arenas with video game crowd noise, some of the NBA players spectating will have very familiar-looking jewelry on.

Gov. Gavin Newsom on Thursday ordered all Californians to wear face coverings while in public or high-risk settings, including when shopping, taking public transit or seeking medical care, following growing concerns that an increase in coronavirus cases has been caused by residents failing to voluntarily take that precaution. From a report: Newsom's order comes a week after Orange County rescinded a requirement for residents to wear masks and as other counties across California are debating whether to join other local jurisdictions in mandating face coverings. The Newsom administration did not address how the new requirement will be enforced or if Californians who violate the order will be subject to citations or other penalties. "Simply put, we are seeing too many people with faces uncovered -- putting at risk the real progress we have made in fighting the disease," Newsom said in a statement. "California's strategy to restart the economy and get people back to work will only be successful if people act safely and follow health recommendations. That means wearing a face covering, washing your hands and practicing physical distancing." Until now, state public health officials had only recommended that Californians wear the face coverings which, if worn by someone with the virus, have been shown to decease chances of spreading it to others.

More than a century of oil and gas drilling has left behind millions of abandoned wells, many of which are leaching pollutants into the air and water. And drilling companies are likely to abandon many more wells due to bankruptcies, as oil prices struggle to recover from historic lows after the coronavirus pandemic crushed global fuel demand, according to bankruptcy lawyers, industry analysts and state regulators. Reuters reports: Leaks from abandoned wells have long been recognized as an environmental problem, a health hazard and a public nuisance. They have been linked to dozens of instances of groundwater contamination by research commissioned by the Groundwater Protection Council, whose members include state ground water agencies. Orphaned wells have been blamed for a slew of public safety incidents over the years, including a methane blowout at the construction site of a waterfront hotel in California last year. They also pose a serious threat to the climate that researchers and world governments are only starting to understand, according to a Reuters review of government data and interviews with scientists, regulators, and United Nations officials. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change last year recommended that U.N. member countries start tracking and publishing the amount of methane leaching from their abandoned oil and gas wells after scientists started flagging it as a global warming risk. So far, the United States and Canada are the only nations to do so.

The U.S. figures are sobering: More than 3.2 million abandoned oil and gas wells together emitted 281 kilotons of methane in 2018, according to the data, which was included in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's most recent report on April 14 to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. That's the climate-damage equivalent of consuming about 16 million barrels of crude oil, according to an EPA calculation, or about as much as the United States, the world's biggest oil consumer, uses in a typical day. The actual amount could be as much as three times higher, the EPA says, because of incomplete data. The agency believes most of the methane comes from the more than 2 million abandoned wells it estimates were never properly plugged.

schwit1 shares a report from Berkeley News: In 2005, University of California, Berkeley, researchers made the surprising discovery that making conjoined twins out of young and old mice -- such that they share blood and organs -- can rejuvenate tissues and reverse the signs of aging in the old mice. The finding sparked a flurry of research into whether a youngster's blood might contain special proteins or molecules that could serve as a 'fountain of youth' for mice and humans alike. But a new study by the same team shows that similar age-reversing effects can be achieved by simply diluting the blood plasma of old mice -- no young blood needed.

In the study, the team found that replacing half of the blood plasma of old mice with a mixture of saline and albumin -- where the albumin simply replaces protein that was lost when the original blood plasma was removed -- has the same or stronger rejuvenation effects on the brain, liver and muscle than pairing with young mice or young blood exchange. Performing the same procedure on young mice had no detrimental effects on their health. This discovery shifts the dominant model of rejuvenation away from young blood and toward the benefits of removing age-elevated, and potentially harmful, factors in old blood. schwit1 adds: "Does this mean donating blood helps?"

Researchers have found that soap bubbles can carry pollen grains and deposit them on flowers. CNET reports: "It sounds somewhat like fantasy, but the functional soap bubble allows effective pollination and assures that the quality of fruits is the same as with conventional hand pollination," said Eijiro Miyako, associate professor at the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology and lead author of a study published in the journal iScience on Wednesday.

The researchers first worked out that soap bubbles could indeed carry pollen. They then tested out different bubble formulations and settled on lauramidopropyl betain, a compound sometimes used in shampoos, as a good vehicle. Now comes the fun part. The researchers used a bubble gun on a pear orchard, "producing fruit that demonstrated the pollination's success," iScience publisher Cell Press said in a release. They also tested out the use of a drone to direct bubbles at flowers, which proved to be an accurate way to deliver the bubbles. The early experiments are promising, but there are still some hurdles around figuring out the most precise way to aim the bubbles and how to deal with potential weather issues like rain or wind.

STERIS Corporation, a company that makes sterilization and other medical equipment, sent a letter to iFixit claiming their online database of repair manuals for ventilators and medical equipment violates their copyrights. Motherboard reports: "It has come to my attention that you have been reproducing certain installation and maintenance manuals relating to our products, documentation which is protected by copyright law," the letter said. The letter then went on to tell [Kyle Wiens, CEO of iFixit] to remove all Steris copyrighted material from the iFixit website within 10 days of the letter. As Motherboard reported in March, major manufacturers of medical devices have long made it difficult for their devices to be repaired through third party repair professionals. Manufacturers have often lobbied against right to repair legislation and many medical devices are controlled by artificial "software locks" that allow only those with authorization to make modifications.

"I'm disappointed that Steris is resorting to legal threats to stop hospitals from having access to information about how to maintain critical sterilization equipment during a pandemic," Wiens told Motherboard in an email. "No manufacturer should be stopping hospitals from repairing their equipment," Wiens said. "The best way to ensure patient safety is to make sure that equipment is being maintained regularly using the manufacturer's recommended procedures. The only way to do that is if hospitals have up to date manuals." With regards to the letter sent by Steris, Wiens said iFixit has not removed any material from its website. "We explained to Steris that what we did is a lawful and protected fair use under the U.S. Copyright act," Wiens said. "iFixit is protected by Section 512 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which allows online platforms to host content contributed by users provided they comply with the Act's requirements, which iFixit does," a letter to Steris from the Electronic Frontier Foundation on behalf of iFixit said.

The CDC says to wash cloth face coverings after "each use," which leaves room for interpretation. From a report: The CDC notes that wearing a mask is a precaution to keep from spreading virus-carrying respiratory droplets to others. The idea is that if everyone wears a mask, the likelihood of the droplets getting sprayed around is much less. Each new study only provides further evidence that wearing face masks is a crucial component in slowing the spread of coronavirus. One recent paper, published by the Institute of Labor Economics in Germany, showed that masks may reduce the spread of COVID-19 by 40 percent. This is great, because wearing a mask is an easy thing to do, even if it's a little irritating. But as we accept masks as just another thing that must be worn in public, I have to wonder: What's the appropriate number to own -- and how often should they be cleaned?

Personally, I have one mask, which I bought in March from a friend on Instagram. I wash it when it "smells dirty" by swirling it around in a takeout soup container filled with hot water and laundry detergent, then hang drying it on my fire escape/backyard fence. The CDC has official guidelines on washing cloth face coverings that I'm not properly following. According to the CDC, a reusable cloth mask (versus the blue surgical masks and N95s, which are disposable and should be saved for healthcare workers) are to be washed on the warmest appropriate setting in a washing machine, or hand-washed in a solution of bleach and water. The CDC also says a mask should be "washed after each use." What constitutes a "use" isn't defined, and so how often one should perform the chore of cleaning their mask(s) is a bit of a gray area.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ABC News: It's been a rough year for the American psyche. Folks in the U.S. are more unhappy today than they've been in nearly 50 years. This bold -- yet unsurprising -- conclusion comes from the COVID Response Tracking Study, conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago. It finds that just 14% of American adults say they're very happy, down from 31% who said the same in 2018. That year, 23% said they'd often or sometimes felt isolated in recent weeks. Now, 50% say that. The survey, conducted in late May, draws on nearly a half-century of research from the General Social Survey, which has collected data on American attitudes and behaviors at least every other year since 1972. No less than 29% of Americans have ever called themselves very happy in that survey. The poll has revealed some other interesting findings. It says that the public is less optimistic today about the standard of living improving for the next generation than it has been in the past 25 years.

Americans are also less likely to report some types of emotional and psychological stress reactions following the COVID-19 outbreak, and about twice as many Americans report being lonely today as in 2018.

You can read the full study here (PDF).

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: They may not be little green men. They may not arrive in a vast spaceship. But according to new calculations there could be more than 30 intelligent civilizations in our galaxy today capable of communicating with others. In 1961 the astronomer Frank Drake proposed what became known as the Drake equation, setting out seven factors that would need to be known to come up with an estimate for the number of intelligent civilizations out there. These factors ranged from the the average number of stars that form each year in the galaxy through to the timespan over which a civilization would be expected to be sending out detectable signals.

But few of the factors are measurable. "Drake equation estimates have ranged from zero to a few billion [civilizations] -- it is more like a tool for thinking about questions rather than something that has actually been solved," said Christopher Conselice, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Nottingham and a co-author of the research. Now Conselice and colleagues report in the Astrophysical Journal how they refined the equation with new data and assumptions to come up with their estimates. "Basically, we made the assumption that intelligent life would form on other [Earth-like] planets like it has on Earth, so within a few billion years life would automatically form as a natural part of evolution," said Conselice.

The assumption, known as the Astrobiological Copernican Principle, is fair as everything from chemical reactions to star formation is known to occur if the conditions are right, he said. "[If intelligent life forms] in a scientific way, not just a random way or just a very unique way, then you would expect at least this many civilizations within our galaxy," he said. Under the strictest set of assumptions -- where, as on Earth, life forms between 4.5 billion and 5.5 billion years after star formation -- there are likely between four and 211 civilizations in the Milky Way today capable of communicating with others, with 36 the most likely figure. But Conselice noted that this figure is conservative, not least as it is based on how long our own civilization has been sending out signals into space -- a period of just 100 years so far. The team add that our civilization would need to survive at least another 6,120 years for two-way communication. "They would be quite far away ... 17,000 light years is our calculation for the closest one," said Conselice. "If we do find things closer ... then that would be a good indication that the lifespan of [communicating] civilizations is much longer than a hundred or a few hundred years, that an intelligent civilization can last for thousands or millions of years. The more we find nearby, the better it looks for the long-term survival of our own civilization."

Dr_Ish shares a BBC report: A cheap and widely available drug can help save the lives of patients seriously ill with coronavirus. The low-dose steroid treatment dexamethasone is a major breakthrough in the fight against the deadly virus, UK experts say. The drug is part of the world's biggest trial testing existing treatments to see if they also work for coronavirus. It cut the risk of death by a third for patients on ventilators. For those on oxygen, it cut deaths by a fifth. Had the drug had been used to treat patients in the UK from the start of the pandemic, up to 5,000 lives could have been saved, researchers say. And it could be of huge benefit in poorer countries with high numbers of Covid-19 patients. The UK government has 200,000 courses of the drug in its stockpile and says the NHS will make dexamethasone available to patients. Prime Minister Boris Johnson said there was a genuine case to celebrate "a remarkable British scientific achievement", adding: "We have taken steps to ensure we have enough supplies, even in the event of a second peak." Chief Medical Officer for England Prof Chris Whitty said it would save lives around the world.

schwit1 shares a report from The New York Times: As poor countries around the world struggle to beat back the coronavirus, they are unintentionally contributing to fresh explosions of illness and death from other diseases -- ones that are readily prevented by vaccines. This spring, after the World Health Organization and UNICEF warned that the pandemic could spread swiftly when children gathered for shots, many countries suspended their inoculation programs. Even in countries that tried to keep them going, cargo flights with vaccine supplies were halted by the pandemic and health workers diverted to fight it.

Now, diphtheria is appearing in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal. Cholera is in South Sudan, Cameroon, Mozambique, Yemen and Bangladesh. A mutated strain of poliovirus has been reported in more than 30 countries. And measles is flaring around the globe, including in Bangladesh, Brazil, Cambodia, Central African Republic, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Nepal, Nigeria and Uzbekistan. Of 29 countries that have currently suspended measles campaigns because of the pandemic, 18 are reporting outbreaks. An additional 13 countries are considering postponement. According to the Measles and Rubella Initiative, 178 million people are at risk of missing measles shots in 2020. The risk now is "an epidemic in a few months' time that will kill more children than Covid," said Chibuzo Okonta, the president of Doctors Without Borders in West and Central Africa. As the pandemic lingers, the W.H.O. and other international public health groups are now urging countries to carefully resume vaccination while contending with the coronavirus.

Later this year, the International Space Station will receive a new and improved toilet system designed to bridge the gap between current lavatorial space tech and what humans will need to make extended visits to, say, Mars, in comfort. Space.com reports: It has a fancier name, of course; officially, the commode is NASA's Universal Waste Management System (UWMS). The launch is targeted for no earlier than the fall, a NASA spokesperson confirmed to Space.com, although the agency is still determining what spacecraft will carry the new plumbing up. The toilet currently on offer on the U.S. side of the space station was designed in the 1990s and based on its shuttle counterpart, according to a detailed review of space toiletry. But the apparatus has its flaws. It can be clunky to use, particularly for women, and it is "sensitive to crew alignment on the seat," sometimes resulting in messes, according to that review.

So NASA has tried to keep the aspects that have gotten positive reviews while trimming mass and volume and making some design changes, like adjusting the shape of the seat and replacing the apparatus that compresses the waste. Another change mimics a feature of the toilet on the Russian side of the space station, where astronauts simply hook their feet into toe bars, rather than the thigh bars used on the American equivalent to anchor the astronaut in the microgravity environment. The UWMS will remain on the space station for the rest of the orbiting laboratory's lifetime, and a second toilet of the same model will fly on the Orion capsule that astronauts use to fly around the moon on the first crewed Artemis mission in NASA's ambitious lunar return plan, according to the agency.