SpaceX is set to mark a huge milestone in its own company history, with a first-ever crewed spaceflight set to take off from Cape Canaveral in Florida later today. From a report: The mission is Commercial Crew Demo-2, the culmination of its Crew Dragon human spacecraft development program, which will carry NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken to the International Space Station. The launch is currently set to take off from Kennedy Space Center at 4:33 p.m. EDT (1:33 p.m. PDT), though that'll depend on weather conditions. Those haven't been looking too favorable over the past few days, but SpaceX and NASA have said they could make the call as late as around 45 minutes prior to the planned launch time about whether to delay. If today's attempt is scrubbed, there are backup opportunities on the schedule for May 30 and May 31.

UPDATE: The launch has been scrubbed due to weather conditions. NASA and SpaceX will reattempt on Saturday.

sciencehabit writes: Roughly half of the "normal" matter in the universe -- the stuff that makes up stars, planets, and even us -- exists as mere wisps of material floating in intergalactic space, according to cosmologists. But astronomers had no good way to confirm that, until now. A new study has used fast radio bursts (FRBs) -- powerful millisecondslong pulses of radio waves coming from distant galaxies -- to weigh intergalactic matter, and the results match up with predictions. "Using FRBs as a probe has been an exciting prospect for a while," says astronomer Paul Scholz of the University of Toronto, who was not involved with the work. "Now that we've built up a sample of local FRBs, we're starting to be able to do this. It's certainly exciting." Over the past few decades, cosmologists have compiled an inventory of the stuff that makes up the universe. Some 68% is dark energy, a mysterious force accelerating the universe's expansion. Another 27% is clumps of dark matter that hold galaxies together. Just 5% is so-called normal matter.

Cosmologists know how much normal matter there should be; they can calculate it from how much the big bang should have produced and from the microwave ripple of this cosmic event that still echoes through space. But they can only see about half of it glowing as galaxies and dense gas clouds. The rest, a rarified, intergalactic gas of just one or two atoms in the volume of a typical office room, has been almost impossible to detect. That was until the first FRB burst on the scene in 2007. Because these sporadic blasts are so bright and short, FRBs were originally thought to come from an instrumental glitch, or a source on Earth. (Some early "FRBs" were found to come from a microwave oven at an observatory.) But as detections of FRBs piled up, astronomers realized they were coming from distant corners of the universe. Pinpointing them was difficult because of their rarity: Observers had to be pointing in the exact right direction to catch one, and they wouldn't have time to focus other scopes on the source. These days, telescopes that view large portions of the sky continuously are bagging more FRBs.

Anthony Fauci told CNN Wednesday that the scientific data "is really quite evident now about the lack of efficacy" of hydroxychloroquine as a coronavirus treatment. From a report: The comments came in response to news that France on Wednesday banned the use of hydroxychloroquine to treat the virus, after a large retrospective study in The Lancet found an increased risk of heart problems and death among coronavirus patients who took the anti-malarial drug. The World Health Organization also announced on Monday it had temporarily stopped running tests on the drug to review safety concerns. Fauci stopped short of saying the U.S. should follow France's lead, but told CNN it has become "more clear" that using hydroxychloroquine could lead to "adverse" cardiovascular effects.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: In new guidance for mathematical modelers and public health officials, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is estimating that about a third of coronavirus infections are asymptomatic. The CDC also says its "best estimate" is that 0.4% of people who show symptoms and have Covid-19 will die, and the agency estimates that 40% of coronavirus transmission is occurring before people feel sick.

The numbers are part of five planning scenarios that "are being used by mathematical modelers throughout the federal government," according to the CDC. Four of those scenarios represent "the lower and upper bounds of disease severity and viral transmissibility." The fifth scenario is the CDC's "current best estimate about viral transmission and disease severity in the United States." In that scenario, the agency described its estimate that 0.4% of people who feel sick with Covid-19 will die. For people age 65 and older, the CDC puts that number at 1.3%. For people 49 and under, the agency estimated that 0.05% of symptomatic people will die. The CDC cautions that these numbers are based on real data collected by the agency before April 29 and are subject to change. Still, the "current best estimate" number of 0.4% is significantly lower than the 3.4% mortality rate the World Health Organization warned in early March.

"As I see it, the 'best estimate' is extremely optimistic, and the 'worst case' scenario is fairly optimistic even as a best estimate. One certainly wants to consider worse scenarios," biologist Carl Bergstrom of the University of Washington told CNN. "By introducing these as the official parameter sets for modeling efforts, CDC is influencing the models produced by federal agencies, but also the broader scientific discourse because there will be some pressure to use the CDC standard parameter sets in modeling papers going forward," he said. "Given that these parameter sets underestimate fatality by a substantial margin compared to current scientific consensus, this is deeply problematic."

UPDATE (5/28): An epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security also contradict the CDC's low numbers, saying that after reviewing new widespread testing, "The current best estimates for the infection fatality risk are between 0.5% and 1%," according to NPR.

"But even a virus with a fatality rate less than 1% presents a formidable threat, Rivers says."

Further reading: Many Scientists Warn CDC's New Death Rate Estimates Far Too Low.

New submitter Way Smarter Than You shares a report from The Seattle Times: Humans aren't the only ones hankering for the days they could dine out at their cities' restaurants: Some rats that miss feasting on the scraps are becoming increasingly brazen to find new food sources, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned Thursday. Amid stay-home restrictions set across the country to battle the spread of the novel coronavirus, many restaurants and cafes are closed or limited to takeout and delivery, and with the reduced sales, the restaurants' trash bins are no longer overflowing with scrumptious leftovers hoards of rodents subsisted on. Finding slimmer pickings than they used to, cities' critters are more aggressive, prompting CDC to issue guidance on how to deter them.

Since the start of the pandemic, there have been increased reports of rat cannibalism and infanticide in New York, as well as more rat complaints in residential areas -- including in Chicago -- as humans produce more food waste at home. Roving rat armies, including one caught on camera scavenging New Orleans' empty streets, are concerning to the CDC, which says rodents can carry disease. The CDC advises home and business owners to cover garbage cans, put bird and pet food out of reach and seal small holes rodents could access in buildings. If people follow established cleaning guidelines, they can avoid exposure to rodent-borne diseases, according to the agency.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Some 66 million years ago, an asteroid hit the Earth on the eastern coast of modern Mexico, resulting in up to three quarters of plant and animal species living on the planet going extinct -- including the dinosaurs. Now, a team of researchers equipped with a supercomputer have managed to simulate the entire event, shedding light on the reasons that the impact led to a mass extinction of life. The simulations were carried out by scientists at Imperial College in London, using high performance computing (HPC) facilities provided by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. The research focused on establishing as precise an impact angle and trajectory as possible, which in turn can help determine precisely how the asteroid's hit affected the surrounding environment.

Various impact angles and speeds were considered, and 3D simulations for each were fed into the supercomputer. These simulations were then compared with the geophysical features that have been observed in the 110-mile wide Chicxulub crater, located in Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula, where the impact happened. The simulations that turned out to be the most consistent with the structure of the Chicxulub crater showed an impact angle of about 60 degrees. Such a strike had the strength of about ten billion Hiroshima bombs, and this particular angle meant that rocks and sediments were ejected almost symmetrically. This, in turn, caused a greater amount of climate-changing gases to be released, including billions of tonnes of sulphur that blocked the sun. The rest is history: firestorms, hurricanes, tsunamis and earthquakes rocked the planet, and most species disappeared from the surface of the Earth. The 60-degree angle constituted "the worse-case scenario for the lethality of the impact" because it maximized the ejection of rock and therefore, the production of gases, the scientists wrote.

"The researchers carried out almost 300 3D simulations before they were able to reach their conclusions, which was processed by the HPE Apollo 6000 Gen10 supercomputer located at the University of Leicester," adds ZDNet. "The 14,000-cores system, powered by Intel's Skylake chips, is supported by a 6TB server to accommodate large, in-memory calculations."

The mystery of why glass frogs have see-through skin has been solved, scientists say: the unusual feature is a type of camouflage. The Guardian reports: Glass frogs are found in tropical Central and South America, and get their name from their skin. However, the frogs are not truly transparent but translucent, with the skin on their backs typically a vivid green and their intestines and heart visible through their underbelly. This has led to a question that has kept scientists on the hop. "If predators cannot see straight though the frogs, why do glass frogs have transparent skin at all, and not the opaque camouflaged patterns of other tree frog species?" said Dr James Barnett, a postdoctoral researcher at McMaster University, Canada, who co-authored the study.

Barnett and colleagues say they have cracked the conundrum. "The frog is always green to generally match leaves, but leaves will differ in their brightness," said Barnett. The team say that while the color of the frog's body changes little against dark or light foliage, the legs are more translucent and hence shift in brightness, helping the amphibians to blend in. "By having translucent legs and resting with the legs surrounding the body, the frog's edge is transformed into a softer, less contrasting gradient from the leaf to the legs, and again from the legs to the body," said Barnett, noting that this makes the frog's outline less recognizable to predators. Writing in the U.S. journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Barnett and colleagues report how they carried out three experiments.

Peter Piot, 71, one of the giants of Ebola and AIDS research, is still battling a coronavirus infection that hit him "like a bus" in March. From a report:"This is the revenge of the viruses," said Dr. Peter Piot, the director of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. "I've made their lives difficult. Now they're trying to get me." Dr. Piot, 71 years old, is a legend in the battles against Ebola and AIDS. But Covid-19 almost killed him. "A week ago, I couldn't have done this interview," he said, speaking recently by Skype from his London dining room, a painting of calla lilies behind him. "I was still short of breath after 10 minutes." Looking back, ruefully, on being brought down by a virus after a life as a virus-hunter, Dr. Piot said he had misjudged his prey and had become the hunted.

"I underestimated this one -- how fast it would spread. My mistake was to think it was like SARS, which was pretty limited in scope. Or that it was like influenza. But it's neither." In 1976, as a graduate student in virology at the Institute of Tropical Medicine in Antwerp, Belgium, Dr. Piot was part of the international team that investigated a mysterious viral hemorrhagic fever in Yambuku, Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo. To avoid stigmatizing the town, team members named the virus "Ebola" after a nearby river. Later, in the 1980s, he was one of the scientists who proved that the wasting disease known as "slim" in Africa was caused by the same virus that was killing young gay men elsewhere. From 1991 to 1994, he was president of the International AIDS Society, and then the first director of U.N.AIDS, the United Nations' anti-H.I.V. program.

An anonymous reader writes: There's an interesting analysis, which looks at several data points, to conclude that media may have flamed fears that drove the world to enforce lockdowns. From the story: "To put things in perspective, the virus is now known to have an infection fatality rate for most people under 65 that is no more dangerous than driving 13 to 101 miles per day. Even by conservative estimates, the odds of COVID-19 death are roughly in line with existing baseline odds of dying in any given year. Yet we put billions of young healthy people under house arrest, stopped cancer screenings, and sunk ourselves into the worst level of unemployment since the Great Depression. This from a virus that bears a survival rate of 99.99% if you are a healthy individual under 50 years old (1, 2).

"New York City reached over a 25% infection rate and yet 99.98% of all people in the city under 45 survived, making it comparable to death rates by normal accidents. But of course the whole linchpin of the lockdown argument is that it would have been even worse without such a step. Sweden never closed down borders, primary schools, restaurants, or businesses, and never mandated masks, yet 99.998% of all their people under 60 have survived and their hospitals were never overburdened. Why did we lock down the majority of the population who were never at significant risk? What will be the collateral damage? That is what this series will explore.

"In early February the World Health Organization said that travel bans were not necessary. On Feb. 17, just a month before the first U.S. lockdown, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases said that this new strain of coronavirus possessed "just minuscule" danger to the United States. In early March the U.S. surgeon general said that "masks are NOT effective in preventing [the] general public from catching coronavirus." As late as March 9, the day Italy started its lockdown, Dr. Fauci did not encourage cancellation of "large gatherings in a place [even if] you have community spread," calling it "a judgment call." NBA games were still being played. So how did we go from such a measured tone to locking up 97% of Americans in their homes seemingly overnight?" There's an argument to be made that lockdowns was perhaps the most responsible action a government could have enforced. Additionally, some Silicon Vally tech executives have argued that the media downplayed the significance of the coronavirus pandemic early on.

An anonymous reader shares a report: On Monday, Virgin Orbit attempted the first full flight of its orbital payload launch system, which includes a modified Boeing 747 called 'Cosmic Girl' that acts as a carrier aircraft for its air-launched rocket LauncherOne. While Virgin Orbit has flown Cosmic Girl and LauncherOne previously for different tests and demonstrations, this was the first end-to-end system test. Unfortunately, that test ended much earlier than planned -- just shortly after the LauncherOne rocket was released from Cosmic Girl. Cosmic Girl took off just before 12 PM PT (3 PM ET) from Mojave Air and Spaceport in California. The aircraft was piloted by Chief Test Pilot Kelly Latimer, along with her co-pilot Todd Ericson. The aircraft then flew to its target release point, where LauncherOne did manage a "clean release" from the carrier craft as planned at around 12:50 PM PT (3:50 PM ET), but Virgin noted just a few minutes later that the mission was subsequently "terminated."

An anonymous reader shares a report: The moon visits one of the spring constellations this week by traveling through the faint constellation of Virgo, the virgin. On 1 and 2 June, our natural satellite will pass close to Virgo's only bright star, Spica. Memorise its position and then return in the days to come to pick out the constellation's other, fainter stars. Spica is one of the 20 brightest stars in the night sky, located at a distance of about 250 light years. A blue giant star, containing around 10 times the Sun's mass, it is more than 20,000 times more luminous than our star.

NASA and SpaceX are closer than ever to a moment both have been preparing for since the beginning of the Commercial Crew program in 2010. SpaceX's Falcon 9 and Crew Dragon spacecraft are now set to fly with NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken onboard, making a trip to the International Space Station, and both the agency and SpaceX announced today that they have officially passed the final flight readiness review, meaning everything is now a 'go' for launch. From a report: According to NASA Commercial Crew Program manager Kathy Leuders during a press conference on Monday, everything went well with all pre-launch flight checks thus far, including a full-length static test fire of the Falcon 9's engines, and a dress rehearsal of all launch preparation including strapping Hurley and Behnken into the rocket. The only remaining major hurdle for SpaceX and NASA now is the weather, which is currently only looking around 40% favorable for a launch attempt on schedule for Wednesday, May 27 at 4:33 PM EDT, though during today's press conference officials noted it is actually trending upwards as of today. SpaceX and NASA will be paying close attention to the weather between now and Wednesday, and since this is a highly sensitive mission with actual astronauts on board the spacecraft, you can bet that they'll err on the side of caution for scrubbing the launch if weather isn't looking good. That said, they do have a backup opportunity of May 30 in case they need to make use of that.

Prime minister Shinzo Abe has declared victory for the "Japan model" of fighting coronavirus as he lifted a nationwide state of emergency after seven weeks [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source]. From a report: Speaking at a press conference on Monday evening in Tokyo, Mr Abe said that Japan had avoided an explosive increase in cases without the compulsory lockdowns used in Europe or the US. The ending of the state of emergency in the last five prefectures it covered -- Tokyo, Kanagawa, Saitama, Chiba and Hokkaido -- will mean that the world's fourth-largest economy can start to reopen for business. "In a characteristically Japanese way, we have all but brought this epidemic under control in the last month and a half," said Mr Abe. "Surely, it shows the power of the Japan model." Japan's constitution prohibits a compulsory lockdown but, under the state of emergency that began on April 7, the government requested voluntary social distancing and business closures. Under that regime, the number of new Covid-19 cases fell from 600-700 a day in mid-April to about 20-30 a day last week. The country has diagnosed 16,581 cases of coronavirus with 830 deaths -- many fewer than similar-sized populations in Europe or the US.

The World Health Organization is temporarily pausing tests of the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine as a coronavirus treatment in order to review safety concerns, the agency's director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesu said Monday. From a report: The decision comes after a retrospective review published in The Lancet found that coronavirus patients who took hydroxychloroquine or its related drug chloroquine were more likely to die or develop an irregular heart rhythm that can lead to sudden cardiac death, compared to those who did nothing. The medical journal's review consisted of 96,000 hospitalized patients diagnosed with the coronavirus in six continents, the largest analysis of medical records on the drug, between Dec. 20, 2019, and April 14, 2020. Tedros said that an independent executive panel "agreed to review a comprehensive analysis and critical appraisal of all evidence available globally" regarding hydroxychloroquine in order to determine whether it should continue to be used in WHO's Solidarity Trial, a global effort to test experimental coronavirus treatments.

An anonymous reader quotes Engadget: Texas Instruments' graphing calculators have a reputation as hobbyist devices given their program support, but they just lost some of their appeal. Cemetech has learned (via Linus Tech Tips) that Texas Instruments is pulling support for assembly- and C-based programs on the TI-84 Plus CE and its French counterpart, the TI-83 Premium CE. Install the latest firmware for both (OS 5.6 and OS 5.5 respectively) and you'll not only lose access to those apps, but won't have a way to roll back.

The company explained the move as an effort to "prioritize learning and minimize any security risks." It's to reduce cheating, to put it another way... While this could please teachers worried that students will use apps to cheat during exams, enthusiasts are unsurprisingly mad. This reduces the amount of control programmers have over their calculator apps.

schwit1 quotes UPI: City-dwellers are nearly 30 percent more likely to be diagnosed with multiple sclerosis than those living in more rural areas, a study presented Friday at the European Academy of Neurology Virtual Congress has found.

Based on the results, which will also be published in European Journal of Neurology, air pollution could be a risk factor for the development of the disease, according to the authors, who conducted their research in Italy.

"It is well recognized that immune diseases such as MS are associated with multiple factors, both genetic and environmental," co-author Dr. Roberto Bergamaschi, of the IRCCS Mondino Foundation in Pavia, Italy, said in a statement. "We believe that air pollution interacts through several mechanisms in the development of MS and the results of this study strengthen that hypothesis," he added.

"One of the longer chapters of the International Space Station has come to a close," writes Engadget.

"NASA has sent the last of its 11 ExPRESS (Expedite the Processing of Experiments to the Space Station) science racks to the orbiting facility, 19 years after sending the first two." They don't look like much, but they provide the power, storage, climate control and communications for up to 10 small payloads — they're key to many of the experiments that run aboard the ISS and will help the station live up to its potential research capabilities. This last rack was carried aboard a Japanese cargo ship and should be installed and functioning by fall 2020. While the EXPRESS racks should be useful for a while yet, this effectively marks the end of an era for NASA's ISS work...
Originally developed by engineers at Boeing and the Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama, "The first two completed racks were delivered to the space station on STS-100 in 2001 and have been in continuous operation ever since," notes a NASA press release, "as have all the subsequent added racks." And since then NASA has logged more than 85 total years of combined rack operational hours. "The sheer volume of science that's been conducted using the racks up til now is just overwhelming," says Shaun Glasgow, project manager for the EXPRESS Racks at Marshall.

"And as we prepare to return human explorers to the Moon and journey on to Mars, it's even more exciting to consider all the scientific investigations still to come."

Russia "is now challenging the United States' long-standing supremacy in space and working to exploit the U.S. military's dependence on space systems for communications, navigation, intelligence, and targeting."

That's the argument made in The Bulletin by a former U.S. Air Force intelligence officer who writes about technology and military strategy, Cold War history, and European security affairs (in an article shared by Lasrick). Moscow is developing counter-space weapons as a part of its overall information warfare strategy. For example, Russia just tested an anti-satellite missile system designed to destroy satellites in low earth orbit. Moreover, military leaders in Russia view U.S. satellites as the key enablers of America's ability to execute rapid, agile, and global military operations; they are intent on echoing this success and modernizing their own military satellites to more effectively support Russian forces.

Since the end of the Cold War, the number of countries with space programs has markedly increased. Many of them are actively developing space weapons. China, for example, has an operational ground-launched anti-satellite system, according to the U.S. intelligence community. India successfully tested its own space weapon in 2019. France announced that it will launch a series of armed satellites. Even Iran is believed to be able to develop a rudimentary anti-satellite weapon in the near term... Space systems are essential for warfighting on Earth and the large growth in the number of countries fielding space weapons means the likelihood that outer space will be transformed into a battlefield has increased... Russia is the only country, however, that is reportedly approaching U.S. satellites in an aggressive manner...

Moscow's destabilizing behavior could prompt the United States to take a more aggressive posture in space in the future... Russia has been taking advantage of the lack of international consensus on what constitutes acceptable behavior in space... It seems clear that Russia is likely testing how the United States and its allies might react to aggressive space behaviors and is gaining important insights into American national security space capabilities...

In 2019, former Secretary of the Air Force Heather Wilson said that at some point, the United States needs the ability to "hit back." Russia's destabilizing actions in space could, therefore, fuel a dangerous arms race in space.

America's Center for Disease Control "is conflating viral and antibody tests..." writes the Atlantic, "distorting several important metrics and providing the country with an inaccurate picture of the state of the pandemic."

Thelasko shared their report: We've learned that the CDC is making, at best, a debilitating mistake: combining test results that diagnose current coronavirus infections with test results that measure whether someone has ever had the virus. The upshot is that the government's disease-fighting agency is overstating the country's ability to test people who are sick with COVID-19... The widespread use of the practice means that it remains difficult to know exactly how much the country's ability to test people who are actively sick with COVID-19 has improved.

"You've got to be kidding me," Ashish Jha, the K. T. Li Professor of Global Health at Harvard and the director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, told us when we described what the CDC was doing. "How could the CDC make that mistake? This is a mess...." By combining the two types of results, the CDC has made them both "uninterpretable," he said...

[T]he portion of tests coming back positive has plummeted, from a seven-day average of 10 percent at the month's start to 6 percent on Wednesday. "The numbers have outstripped what I was expecting," Jha said. "My sense is people are really surprised that we've moved as much as we have in such a short time period. I think we all expected a move and we all expected improvement, but the pace and size of that improvement has been a big surprise."

The intermingling of viral and antibody tests suggests that some of those gains might be illusory.
"The CDC is not alone in its errors," notes a Reason article shared by schwit1. "Several states have been blending their test results as well, rendering it difficult to determine the local impact of the virus." But the CDC's role as the officially designated first line of defense makes the agency's failure far more significant. Without clear, reliable, and accurate reporting from the CDC, it becomes nearly impossible to take stock of the pandemic's damage.

The virus has upended American life in ways that make it unusually difficult to predict the future. But thanks to the CDC, we have a problem that is even worse: No only do we not know what is going to happen, but we don't know what is happening.

Sweden's death rate per million (376) "is far in advance of Norway's (44), Denmark's (96) and Finland's (55) — countries with similar welfare systems and demographics, but which imposed strict lockdowns..." reports the Guardian, "raising concerns that the country's light-touch approach to the coronavirus may not be helping it build up broad immunity."

"According to the scientific online publication Ourworldindata.com, Covid-19 deaths in Sweden were the highest in Europe per capita in a rolling seven-day average between 12 and 19 May. The country's 6.25 deaths per million inhabitants a day was just above the UK's 5.75."

Slashdot reader AleRunner writes: Immunity levels in Sweden, which were expected to reach 33% by the start of May have been measured at only 7.3%, suggesting that Sweden's lighter lockdown may continue indefinitely whilst other countries begin to revive their economies. Writing about new Swedish antibody results in the Guardian Jon Henley goes on to report that other European countries like Finland are already considering blocking travel from Sweden which may increase Sweden's long term isolation.

We have discussed before whether Sweden, which locked down earlier than most but with fewer restrictions could be a model for other countries.

As it is, now, the country is looking more like a warning to the rest of the world.
The Guardian concludes that the Swedish government's decision to avoid a strict lockdown "is thought unlikely to spare the Swedish economy. Although retail and entertainment spending has not collapsed quite as dramatically as elsewhere, analysts say the country will probably not reap any long-term economic benefit."