hcs_$reboot writes: President Donald Trump said Monday that he has been taking anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine for over a week to prevent coronavirus infection even though it is not yet a proven treatment. Hydroxychloroquine, which is available as a generic drug and is also produced under the brand name Plaquenil by French drugmaker Sanofi, can have serious side effects, including muscle weakness and heart arrhythmia. A small study in Brazil was halted for safety reasons after coronavirus patients taking chloroquine, which hydroxychloroquine is derived from, developed arrhythmia, including some who died. Even Fox News agrees that this drug is harmful, adds hcs_$reboot. "I cannot stress this enough, this will kill you," Fox News host Neil Cavuto said.

Trump said Monday he asked his White House physician about the drug. "I asked him, 'What do you think?' He said, 'Well, if you'd like it.' I said, 'Yeah, I'd like it. I'd like to take it.'" Trump said Monday that if the drug wasn't good he'd "tell you." He said he's gotten "a lot of tremendously positive news on the hydroxy, and I say hey -- you know the expression I've used, John? What do you have to lose?"

"I'm not gonna get hurt by it. It's been around for 40 years," he said. "For malaria, for lupus, for other things. I take it. Front-line workers take it. A lot of doctors take it -- excuse me, a lot of doctors take it. I take it."

It may not be as hair-raising as Formula 1, nor as dramatic as Premier League football, but Sudoku solving is acquiring a niche following as a spectator sport. From a report: It's surprisingly thrilling, believe me. Just ask fans of the puzzle-solving YouTube channel Cracking the Cryptic, which has seen its viewing figures shoot up over the last two months. Its top Sudoku video has had more than 3 million views. In daily challenges, the channel's two British hosts, puzzle wizards Simon Anthony and Mark Goodliffe, narrate their strategies and processes of deduction as they attempt to solve fiendishly difficult Sudokus. What makes the videos so joyous is the constant stream of 'aha!' moments, as well as the ingenuity of the sudokus presented.

Russian President Vladimir Putin once called Xi Jinping, the Chinese leader, a "lone warrior." Putin was joking, but that description is starting to look more and more accurate. Russia has joined about 100 countries in backing a resolution at the upcoming World Health Assembly (WHA), calling for an independent inquiry into the coronavirus pandemic. From a report: The European Union-drafted resolution comes on the back of a push by Australia for an inquiry into China's initial handling of the crisis. That was met with an angry response from Beijing, which accused Canberra of a "highly irresponsible" move that could "disrupt international cooperation in fighting the pandemic and goes against people's shared aspiration." While the resolution to be presented at the annual meeting of World Health Organization (WHO) members, which begins on Monday in Geneva, does not single out China or any other country, it calls for an "impartial, independent and comprehensive evaluation" of "the (WHO)-coordinated international health response to Covid-19."

The wording of the resolution is weak compared to Australia's previous calls for a probe into China's role and responsibility in the origin of the pandemic. This may have been necessary to get a majority of WHO member states to sign on -- particularly those, such as Russia, with traditionally strong ties to Beijing. But that doesn't mean China's government should rest easy. The potential for an independent probe, even one not initially tasked with investigating an individual country's response, to turn up damning or embarrassing information is great. Australian government sources told the ABC, the country's public broadcaster, that the resolution's language was sufficiently strong to "ensure that a proper and thorough investigation took place."

An anonymous reader quotes CNBC: Apple released its blueprint Sunday night for how it will reopen its retail stores once it is safe to due so, per official coronavirus health guidelines. It will also open 25 stores in the U.S. this week.

When a store reopens, customers will be required to submit to a temperature check and wear a mask before entering the store, according to the guidelines, written by Apple's retail and human resources boss Deirdre O'Brien. If a customer doesn't have a mask, Apple will provide them with one.

Apple also announced on Sunday several stores in the U.S. that will be reopening this week. Some of the stores will allow customers in, while others will only offer curbside pick-up service. Apple stores will be reopening this week in a handful of states including Florida, California (curbside service), Washington (curbside service), Hawaii, Oklahoma and Colorado. O'Brien said stores would reopen per local official guidelines, and could even close again if lockdown orders in a certain area have to be renacted.
Reuters notes Apple's move is "continuing a gradual process that has unlocked doors at nearly a fifth of its worldwide retail outlets." Around the world nearly 100 Apple stores have already done some form of re-opening, the guidelines state, adding that "In every store, we're focused on limiting occupancy and giving everybody lots of room, and renewing our focus on one-on-one, personalized service... Throughout the day, we're conducting enhanced deep cleanings that place special emphasis on all surfaces, display products, and highly trafficked areas..."

"Down the road, when we reflect on COVID-19, we should always remember how so many people around the world put the well-being of others at the center of their daily lives. At Apple, we plan to carry those values forward, and we will always put the health and safety of our customers and teams above all else."

Long-time Slashdot reader tomtermite shares a report from The Guardian: Ministers and officials from every nation will meet via video link on Monday for the annual world health assembly, which is expected to be dominated by efforts to stop rich countries monopolising drugs and future vaccines against Covid-19... The leaders of Italy, France, Germany and Norway, together with the European commission and council, called earlier this month for any innovative tools, therapeutics or vaccines to be shared equally and fairly.

"If we can develop a vaccine that is produced by the world, for the whole world, this will be a unique global public good of the 21st century," they said in a statement.

The sole resolution before the assembly this year is an EU proposal for a voluntary patent pool. Drug and vaccine companies would then be under pressure to give up the monopoly that patents allow them on their inventions, which means they can charge high prices, so that all countries can make or buy affordable versions. In the weeks of negotiations leading up to the meeting, which is scheduled to last for less than a day, there has been a dispute over the language of the resolution. Countries with major pharmaceutical companies argue they need patents to guarantee sufficiently high prices in wealthy nations to recoup their research and development costs....

Oxfam's health policy manager, Anna Marriott, said: "This week's letter calling for a people's vaccine, which was signed by more than 140 world leaders and experts, sets the bar for the scale of ambition we need to meet the challenge before us...." [Research charity] Wellcome published a poll on Sunday of 2,000 people in the UK which found 96% supported the idea that national governments should work together to ensure that treatments and vaccines can be manufactured in as many countries as possible and distributed globally to everyone who needs them.

"We need vaccines and treatments that will work for the world, and any advances must be available to all countries equally, without exception," said Alex Harris, the head of global policy at Wellcome.

sciencehabit writes: Radioactive fallout is rarely a good thing. But new research suggests charged particles emitted from Cold War-era nuclear tests may have boosted rainfall thousands of kilometers away from the testing sites, by triggering electrical charges in the air that caused water droplets to coalesce.

The United States, Soviet Union, and other nations often tested nuclear weapons above ground in the 1950s and early 1960s. The fallout contained a devil's cocktail of radioactive elements that can have subtle effects in the atmosphere. Charged particles emitted during radioactive decay can smack into surrounding atoms and molecules, ripping them asunder and creating even more charged particles. Then, that flurry of charged particles can glom onto dust, soot, or water droplets in the atmosphere, sometimes making the droplets hefty enough to fall to the ground as rain.

To see whether above-ground nuclear testing actually increased rainfall, University of Reading atmospheric scientist Giles Harrison and colleagues looked at Cold War-era rainfall records from a weather station on a remote island north of Scotland... The team's analysis suggests a strong link between fallout and precipitation from 1962 through 1964, a period when fallout from above-ground testing of nuclear weapons was commonly present in the stratosphere. At the Scottish site, clouds were thicker, and precipitation was 24% higher on days when above-average levels of fallout were present (as inferred from measurements of the atmosphere's electric field), the researchers report in Physical Review Letters.
The researchers believe it could help us understand weather patterns on planets like Jupiter and Neptune with charged partciles in their atmosphere -- and might even make it possible for small-scale experiments in controlling the weather.

Long-time Slashdot reader chicksdaddy writes: One of the less-reported stories of this pandemic is the myriad of ways in which COVID has exposed changes to the medical device market and the increasingly draconian software licensing practices that have made servicing and repairing medical devices much more difficult, slow and expensive. In its latest episode, Security Ledger Podcast goes behind the scenes of Project BioMed, an effort headed up by repair site iFixit to democratize access to repair and servicing information for medical devices including (and especially) ventilators and respirators.

Kylie Wiens, CEO of iFixit, talks about the critical role played by biomedical technicians, who keep hospital equipment up and running, and about the growing efforts by medical device OEMs to deny hospitals and biomeds access to the information they need to service equipment. The podcast also interviews Jonathan Krones, an Assistant Professor at Boston College and one of an army of volunteers, including hundreds of librarians and archivists who sorted through and cataloged hundreds of thousands of pages of medical device servicing information donated by biomedical technicians as part of the project.

Digital Trends reports: Bill Gates has been warning government leaders about a global pandemic for years, but the coronavirus still caught nations off guard — and the philanthropist and Microsoft co-founder said that's one of his biggest regrets. "I wish I had done more to call attention to the danger," Gates told the Wall Street Journal. "I feel terrible. The whole point of talking about it was that we could take action and minimize the damage...."

[C]onvincing politicians to spend vast amounts of money on something that wasn't an immediate threat proved a difficult task, according to Gates.

He told the Wall Street Journal that he regrets not pushing harder.

"Is NASA really working on... a warp drive?" asks Popular Mechanics?

Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 shares their report: An internal feasibility report suggests the agency might be, or at least that the idea of traveling through folded space is part of the NASA interstellar spaceflight menu. In the report, advanced propulsion physicist Harold "Sonny" White explains the ideas of theoretical physicist (and peer) Miguel Alcubierre. He then describes a "paradox" in Alcubierre's work, and how that paradox might be resolved to make a working model...

The colloquial term "warp drive" has come from science fiction, and it refers to the idea of sub-luminal (less than the speed of light) travel that conforms to Einstein's theory of general relativity, but still pushes speed to absolute maximum that's theoretically possible... In real life, light speed is the barrier... Alcubierre's theory dates to 1994, and physicists have used it as a jumping-off point for further discussion ever since. By creating a kind of pocket world where a spaceship can operate seemingly outside of physics [and using a huge amount of energy], the laws of physics can be sidestepped — or so the theory goes...

The NASA paper suggests a rolling start in order to guarantee a travel direction... He suggests the proving ground for warp speed could be, well, closer to home. "[T]he idea of a warp drive may have some fruitful domestic applications 'subliminally,' allowing it to be matured before it is engaged as a true interstellar drive system," he explains.

If scientists can make the so-called "negative mass" required for an Alcubierre drive, even a tiny example could be deployed within Earth's atmosphere.

A Slashdot reader quotes MIT News: To closely observe an interstellar object (ISO) hurtling through space, time is of the essence. Richard Linares, an assistant professor in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT, developed a concept for a "dynamic orbital slingshot for rendezvous with interstellar objects." He outlined his idea in a research proposal that was recently selected as a Phase 1 study in the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) Program, which "funds innovative aerospace concepts that could enable and transform future missions...."

Linares envisions deploying a constellation of statites, or "static satellites" enabled by a solar sail constructed with just the right mass-to-area ratio to act as interstellar watchdogs along the edges of our solar system, lying in wait until roused by an ISO crossing our threshold. Once detected, the solar sail then enables the statite to switch gears quickly and spring into action. Since the statite has a velocity of zero, it is already in position for efficient trajectory. Once released, the stored energy in the solar sail would leverage the gravitational pull of the sun to slingshot the statite in a freefall trajectory towards the ISO, allowing it to catch up. If the timing is right, the statite could tag the ISO with a CubeSat armed with onboard sensors to orbit the ISO over an extended period of time, gathering important scientific data.

New submitter AleRunner writes: Considering Vietnam's proximity to China, where coronavirus was first reported, it might be expected that the Southeast Asian country would be affected by Covid-19 in a similar manner," reports inews.co.uk. "China has more than 84,000 cases of coronavirus and more than 4,600 deaths, according to the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center. Painting a strikingly different picture, Vietnam, which sits below its southern border, has just over 300 cases among its 97 million citizens and not a single death, according to reports."

The article points to a key willingness to "sacrifice short-term economic benefits for the health of the people" which is now paying back in that they plan to "partially resume international flights from June 1." The article then goes on to boost the value of Vietnam's "authoritarian leadership" and "socialist ethos," not mentioning the success of democratic and politically diverse countries like New Zealand, Slovenia, Taiwan and the Czech Republic. Still an interesting thought-provoking read. The report notes that Vietnam suspended flights to and from Wuhan after the first cases were detected. About a week later, the country closed its 870-mile border with China except for essential trade and travel.

"Vietnam quickly ramped up its testing and contact tracing capacity after the virus was initially detected in China, and has been expanding it since," the report adds. "Everyone entering from China was subject to testing and contact tracing." Interestingly, a nationwide lockdown was never implemented. Instead, it relied on testing labs, mass, centralized quarantine programs, and social distancing measures to contain the virus.

The Space Force, the newest military branch, now has an official flag. President Trump unveiled the flag at an Oval Office ceremony Friday where he also signed the 2020 Armed Forces Day Proclamation. NPR reports: The flag design comes from the seal of the Space Force, which was approved by the president in January. It sparked some Star Trek fan outrage for what some people have called its similarity to a logo in the science fiction franchise. According to the White House, the dark blue and white of the flag is meant to represent the "vast recesses of outer space" and includes a elliptical orbit with three large stars meant to symbolize the branch's purpose: "organizing, training and equipping" Space Force troopers, in the language of the Pentagon. The Space Force was created in part to protect strategic American space infrastructure, including communications, navigation and spy satellites, from adversaries such as Russia and China.

"As you know, China, Russia, perhaps others, started off a lot sooner than us," Trump said. "We should have started this a long time ago, but we've made up for it in spades. We have developed some of the most incredible weapons anyone's ever seen. And it's moving along very rapidly." Trump teased what he called a new weapon that could attack at such a high speed it would overwhelm an enemy's defenses. "We have, I call it the 'super-duper missile.' And I heard the other night [it's] 17 times faster than what they have right now," Trump said. It wasn't immediately clear what missile the president was describing, but the U.S. and other advanced powers are known to be developing new hypersonic weapons, designed to race at many times the speed of sound.

A reader shares a report from Live Science: There's no use sugar coating it: According to one scribe in medieval England, A.D. 1110 was a "disastrous year." Torrential rainfall damaged crops, famine stalked the land -- and, as if that wasn't bad enough, on one fateful night in May, the moon simply vanished from the sky. "On the fifth night in the month of May appeared the moon shining bright in the evening, and afterwards by little and little its light diminished," the unnamed scribe wrote in the Anglo-Saxon manuscript known as the Peterborough Chronicle. "As soon as night came, it was so completely extinguished withal, that neither light, nor orb, nor anything at all of it was seen. And so it continued nearly until day, and then appeared shining full and bright."

So, what made the moon disappear in an already dismal year? According to a study published April 21 in the journal Scientific Reports, the explanation for both the moon's mysterious vanishing act and the rain-ravaged summer that followed may be one and the same -- volcanoes. "The spectacular atmospheric optical phenomena associated with high-altitude volcanic aerosols have caught the attention of chroniclers since ancient times," the study authors wrote. "Careful evaluation of ice core records points to the occurrence of several closely spaced volcanic eruptions," which may have occurred in Europe or Asia between A.D. 1108 and A.D. 1110.

Those volcanic events, which the researchers call a "forgotten cluster" of eruptions because they were sparsely documented by historians at the time, may have released towering clouds of ash that traveled far around the world for years on end. Not only could a high-altitude veil of volcanic aerosols blot out the moon while leaving many stars unobscured, as the Peterborough writer described, but a series of large eruptions could have also disrupted the global climate, the researcher wrote, causing or exacerbated the cold, wet weather that made life so miserable in A.D. 1110. One such eruption, which occurred in Japan in A.D. 1108, could be to blame, the team said.

America's Food and Drug Administration "halted, at least temporarily, a Seattle-based at-home coronavirus testing program backed by Bill Gates," reports Digital Trends: "Please discontinue patient testing and return of diagnostic results to patients until proper authorization is obtained," the FDA told the Seattle Coronavirus Assessment Network (SCAN) in a memo, according to The New York Times.

"The FDA has not raised any concerns regarding the safety and accuracy of SCAN's test, but we have been asked to pause testing until we receive that additional authorization," according to an update on the SCAN website.
The delay "is the latest evidence of how a splintered national effort to develop, distribute and ramp up testing has left federal regulators struggling to keep up," reports the New York Times: Dr. Eric Topol, the director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, who is not involved in the Seattle group, said it was "bizarre" that the F.D.A. would halt such a project. The Seattle partnership that is conducting the testing, the Seattle Coronavirus Assessment Network, said in a statement that it had been in conversation with the Food and Drug Administration about its program for about 10 weeks and submitted data a month ago. "We are actively working to address their questions," the group said...

The issue in the Seattle case appears to be that the test results are being used not only by researchers for surveillance of the virus in the community but that the results are also being returned to patients to inform them. The two kinds of testing — surveillance and diagnostic — fall under different F.D.A. standards.... "We had previously understood that SCAN was being conducted as a surveillance study," the spokesperson said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Wall Street Journal: Bob Wachter, the chairman of the department of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, has had a front-row seat to the coronavirus pandemic. Dr. Wachter's job, at least in part, is to keep the department's 3,000 or so faculty, trainees and staff current on developments in research, education and clinical care. But most days he sets aside at least two hours to keep another group informed: his Twitter followers. Dr. Wachter, 62 years old, is part of a growing group of scientists and public-health officials who are increasingly active and drawing large audiences on social media. They say they feel a moral obligation to provide credible information online and steer the conversation away from dubious claims, such as those in "Plandemic," a video espousing Covid-19 conspiracy theories that drew millions of views last week. [...]

Dr. Wachter typically writes his tweets in threads, long strings of posts on a single topic or idea; on Wednesday, he posted about masks. [...] To compose his tweets, Dr. Wachter keeps a document open throughout the day, where he drops in material he believes could be relevant to his followers. He starts writing posts between 4 and 6 p.m.; his wife, a journalist, often proofreads them, he says. His tweets post between 7 and 8 p.m. The doctors feel like they "have an obligation to put out information that is as correct as it can be," says Dr. Wachter. This is important during amidst a pandemic, especially after a new paper in the journal Nature this week found that antivaccination views are drowning out the more mainstream voices online, "partly due to the ways antivaccination advocates interact with some users of social media platforms," reports the WSJ.

"As a result, researchers predict, antivaccination views 'will dominate in a decade.'"

An elderly woman with no travel history. An unexpected flare-up in a nightclub. A swelling cluster in towns near international borders with no discernible source. After containing their outbreaks through measures from strict lockdowns to rapid testing regimes, the Asian economies that have seen some of the most success quelling the coronavirus -- Hong Kong, South Korea and China -- are now facing resurgences that underscore how it may be nearly impossible to eradicate it. From a report: It's a painful reminder that as countries open up again and people resume normal life, untraceable flare-ups are likely -- even after an extended lull in cases. Scientists have warned that the disease may never go away, because it lurks in some people without causing any outward signs of sickness. "Given the asymptomatic population, these cases are going to emerge from unexpected sources," said Nicholas Thomas, an associate professor in public health at the City University of Hong Kong. "It is inevitable that the restarting of societies is going to lead to more cases emerging." In Hong Kong, a 66-year-old patient with no recent travel history ended the city's much-envied 23-day streak of zero local cases this week. Some of her family members have now been confirmed to be infected as well, and fears are growing that the woman may have seeded more infections as she moved around Hong Kong's dense city streets before being detected.

The Food and Drug Administration is cautioning the public about the reliability of a widely used rapid test for the coronavirus. The test, made by Abbott Laboratories, has been linked with inaccurate results that could falsely reassure patients that they are not infected with the virus. From a report: The Trump administration has promoted the test as a key factor in controlling the epidemic in the U.S., and it's used for daily testing at the White House. As first reported on NPR, as many as 15 to 20 out of every 100 tests may produce falsely negative results. A study released this week indicated that the test could be missing as many as 48% of infections. The FDA issued the alert on the Abbott test "in the spirit of transparency." In a press release, the agency said it's investigating whether the false-negative results could be connected to the type of swab used in the test or the material the samples are stored in for transport. It also cautions that "any negative test results that are not consistent with a patient's clinical signs and symptoms or necessary for patient management should be confirmed with another test."

Public health officials studying the Covid-19 outbreak among members of a Washington choir found numerous ways the virus could have spread, according to a report published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. From a report: Authorities interviewed all 122 members of the Skagit Valley Chorale, which met every Tuesday for 2.5 hours before the outbreak. They focused on two rehearsals held March 3 and March 10 in Mount Vernon, Washington. The report said 53 people were sickened and two died -- and all but one attended both rehearsals. The report said Thirty-three cases were confirmed, the report said, and 20 people had probable infections. There were 61 people at the March 10 rehearsal, including one member who reported having had cold-like symptoms. That person tested positive for Covid-19 and was the first case identified by health authorities, according to the report. That person attended both practices but didn't start showing symptoms until March 7.

Therapeutics company Sorrento has made what it believes could be a breakthrough in potential treatment of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that leads to COVID-19. From a report: The company released details of its preclinical research on Friday, announcing that it has found an antibody that provides "100% inhibition of SARS-CoV-2 virus infection of healthy cells after four days incubation." The results are from a preclinical study that still has to undergo peer review. It was an in vitro laboratory study (meaning not in an actual human being), but it's still a promising development as the company continues to work on production of an antibody "cocktail" that could provide protection against SARS-CoV-2 even in case of mutations in the virus. Sorrento says it believes this antibody, which is labelled STI-1499, stood out among billions of candidates it has been screening from its extensive human antibody library for its ability to completely block the interaction of the SARS-CoV-2's spike protein with a human cell target receptor. That means it prevents the virus from attaching to the host's healthy cell, which is what leads to incubation and infection. The nature of the antibody's efficacy means that Sorrento currently believes it will be the first antibody to be included in the cocktail it is developing, which will be made up of a large number of different antibodies that show efficacy in blocking the attachment of the spike protein, in order to provide multiple avenues of protection that are designed to remain effective even if the virus mutates in transmission from person to person, or within the same individual.

New submitter quantumghost writes: SpaceX has opened up a new online simulator that mimics the Crew Dragon capsule controls. The game was released in anticipation of SpaceX's upcoming launch of Crew Dragon to the International Space Station. On May 27th, it'll be the first American-built spacecraft to haul American astronauts to the ISS in 11 years.

The goal of the simulator is to see if you can dock your spacecraft to the ISS. "According to the new game's opening slide, this is the actual interface on which astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, Crew Dragon's inaugural test pilots, have been," reports Popular Mechanics. "The central interface is packed with a slew of numbers. The green numbers indicate whether corrections need to be made. When they're below 0.2, it means you've successfully docked and beat the simulation."