Warning that the number of coronavirus cases in the United States was expected to grow, the Trump administration on Monday evening said that testing for the virus would ramp up quickly in the coming weeks while declining to estimate how many Americans had already been tested for the virus. From a report: The evening news conference at the White House came as the stock market plunged and an increasing number of Americans wondered how the official count of virus cases in the country, still in the mid-three-figures, could remain so low despite the aggressive spread of coronavirus elsewhere. Trump addressed economic concerns, telling reporters his administration would ask Congress to pass payroll tax relief and other quick measures. He also said he was seeking help for hourly-wage workers to ensure they're "not going to miss a paycheck" and "don't get penalized for something that's not their fault."

Since Covid-19 began to spread, Google has aggressively intervened in some of its most popular online services to limit the spread of misinformation. This is a departure for a company that has relied heavily on software and automation to index and rank information throughout its 22-year existence. From a report: Google searches related to the virus now trigger an "SOS Alert," with news from mainstream publications including National Public Radio, followed by information from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization displayed prominently. In contrast, a recent search for "flu season" showed the website verywellhealth.com at the top, while another search for "flu" produced tweets, including one from U.S. President Donald Trump comparing coronavirus to the common flu. The coronavirus has killed more than 3,900 people out of 113,000 confirmed cases.

Online platforms have been inundated with rumors and misinformed concerns about the pathogen as it spread west from Asia, particularly in floods of messages on Twitter, according to Carl Bergstrom, a professor at the University of Washington. Google is swept up in this because it has a deal with Twitter to show tweets in search results, especially for queries about live and recent events. "It's really just a churning mess right now," Bergstrom said. On YouTube, Google's video service, the company is trying to quickly remove videos claiming to prevent the virus in place of seeking medical treatment. And some apps related to the virus have been banned from the Google Play app store, prompting complaints from developers who say they just want to help. The company is also giving up revenue.

As COVID-19 spreads rapidly around the world, people are eager to keep up with developments at its epicentre in Wuhan, China. But government censorship, partisan media and misinformation have led many to feel the public isn't seeing a full picture of life in a city on lockdown. So some have developed a creative solution to bypass the gatekeepers and go straight to the source: Tinder. From a report: Most Tinder users use the app to match with people nearby, for obvious reasons. But the world's most used dating app has a premium feature, Passport, that allows a user with Tinder Plus or Tinder Gold memberships to choose to swipe in any location -- like, say, Wuhan -- no matter where they are. And despite Tinder being banned in China, users say they're having luck setting their location to Wuhan, allowing them to match with and chat to residents to hear their perspective on the global story. US-based Twitter user @drethelin tweeted "Setting my tinder to Wuhan so I can get the real scoop on what's going on" on Jan. 28 -- just before the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 was a public health emergency.

"A study published in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine confirms the recommended 14-day quarantine period for those suspected of having been infected by the COVID-19 virus," writes Slashdot reader RNLockwood. "I'm going to stock up on essentials." From the abstract: Results: There were 181 confirmed cases with identifiable exposure and symptom onset windows to estimate the incubation period of COVID-19. The median incubation period was estimated to be 5.1 days (95% CI, 4.5 to 5.8 days), and 97.5% of those who develop symptoms will do so within 11.5 days (CI, 8.2 to 15.6 days) of infection. These estimates imply that, under conservative assumptions, 101 out of every 10,000 cases (99th percentile, 482) will develop symptoms after 14 days of active monitoring or quarantine.

Limitation: Publicly reported cases may overrepresent severe cases, the incubation period for which may differ from that of mild cases.

Conclusion: This work provides additional evidence for a median incubation period for COVID-19 of approximately 5 days, similar to SARS. Our results support current proposals for the length of quarantine or active monitoring of persons potentially exposed to SARS-CoV-2, although longer monitoring periods might be justified in extreme cases.

According to a new study published in Physical Review Letters, researchers have achieved a new record quantum key distribution (QKD) transmission distance of over 509 kilometers. Phys.Org reports: "Using the sending-or-not-sending twin-field (SNS-TF) protocol, we realized secure quantum key distribution (QKD) over 509 km, which is a new record secure distance in QKD over fiber," Qiang Zhang, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told Phys.org. "One of the important objectives of our study was to successfully break the absolute key-rate limit of repeater-less QKD, with any measurement device." The SNS-TF protocol was developed and introduced in a previous research effort by some of the researchers who wrote the recent paper. In previous studies, the protocol proved to be highly advantageous for QKD applications, particularly for achieving long distance transmission.

In their recent work, Zhang and his colleagues implemented the SNS-TF QKD protocol by eliciting a single-photon level, first-order interference between two independent lasers. These two independent lasers were combined with a remote frequency locking technique, ultimately enabling QKD transmission over unparalleled distances. In their experiments, the researchers also used superconducting single-photon detectors with high count rate and detection efficiencies. Using their SNS-TF approach, the researchers achieved a secure key rate at 509 km, over seven times higher than the relative repeaterless bound QKD, and with the same detection loss. Remarkably, the key rate they achieved is also higher than that achieved by more traditional QKD protocols running on a perfect repeaterless QKD device.

Amazon on Monday asked employees at its New York and New Jersey offices to work from home to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. This comes as the company told employees at its offices in the San Francisco Bay Area and the Seattle area to work from home, following reports that an Amazon employee in Seattle tested positive for the virus. CNBC reports: The Amazon-owned audiobook company, Audible, is headquartered in Newark, New Jersey. Amazon also employs thousands of people in New York City, including employees at Amazon Web Services and members of sales and marketing teams, among other units. An Amazon spokesperson told CNBC in statement: "We continue to work closely with public and private medical experts to ensure we are taking the right precautions as the situation continues to evolve. This includes recommending that employees who are able to work from home in Seattle/Bellevue, the Bay Area, New York, New Jersey and the Lombardy region/Asti province of Italy do so through the end of March."

Amazon last month restricted all nonessential travel in the U.S. in response to continued spread of the coronavirus. As of Monday afternoon, there are now more than 113,300 cases of the coronavirus worldwide, and at least 3,892 people have died from the virus. There are at least 600 confirmed cases of the virus in the U.S., and at least 22 deaths.

First known U.S. case offers lessons in how and how not to fight the outbreak. From a report: The man who would become Patient Zero for the new coronavirus outbreak in the U.S. appeared to do everything right. He arrived Jan. 19 at an urgent-care clinic in a suburb north of Seattle with a slightly elevated temperature and a cough he'd developed soon after returning four days earlier from a visit with family in Wuhan, China. The 35-year-old had seen a U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention alert about the virus and decided to get checked. He put on a mask in the waiting room. After learning about his travel, the clinic drew blood and called state and county health officials, who hustled the sample onto an overnight flight to the CDC lab in Atlanta. The patient was told to stay in isolation at home, and health officials checked on him the next morning.

The test came back positive that afternoon, Jan. 20, the first confirmed case in the U.S. By 11 p.m., the patient was in a plastic-enclosed isolation gurney on his way to a biocontainment ward at Providence Regional Medical Center in Everett, Washington, a two-bed unit developed for the Ebola virus. As his condition worsened, then improved over the next several days, staff wore protective garb that included helmets and face masks. Few even entered the room; a robot equipped with a stethoscope took vitals and had a video screen for doctors to talk to him from afar. County health officials located more than 60 people who'd come in contact with him, and none developed the virus in the following weeks. By Feb. 21, he was deemed fully recovered. Somehow, someone was missed. All the careful medical detective work, it's now clear, wasn't enough to slow a virus moving faster than the world's efforts to contain it.

Stanford University canceled in-person classes for the final two weeks of the quarter, switching to online instruction amid rising concern about the coronavirus outbreak. From a report: As the coronavirus first reported in China spreads in the United States, several schools have taken this step as a precaution, hoping to avoid further infections on campus. The University of Washington, which has more than 55,000 students on three campuses, announced Friday that it would switch to virtual classes, and some smaller schools in and near the hard-hit Seattle area, such as Pacific Lutheran University, announced similar plans.

On Sunday, Rice University in Houston canceled in-person classes for the week of March 9 and canceled gatherings of 100 or more people through the end of April. An employee tested positive for covid-19 last week after international travel, university officials said in issuing the alert. [...] In New York, where multiple cases have been identified, Columbia University announced Sunday that classes are canceled Monday and Tuesday and that the university strongly discourages nonessential gatherings of more than 25 people. There are no confirmed cases among Columbia students, faculty or staff, but the Ivy League school's president wrote that someone had been quarantined and that the suspension of classes will allow the school to prepare for a shift to remote classes for the remainder of the week.

Italy has placed up to 16 million people under quarantine as it battles to contain the spread of coronavirus. From a report: Anyone living in Lombardy and 14 other central and northern provinces will need special permission to travel. Milan and Venice are both affected. Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte also announced the closure of schools, gyms, museums, nightclubs and other venues across the whole country. The measures, the most radical taken outside China, will last until 3 April. Italy has seen the largest number of coronavirus infections in Europe, with the number of confirmed cases jumping by more than 1,200 to 5,883 on Saturday. Among the latest people to test positive is the army's chief of staff. Salvatore Farina said he felt well and was self-isolating.

"ADHD may also bring with it an advantage: the ability to think more creatively," argues a new article in Scientific American: Three aspects of creative cognition are divergent thinking, conceptual expansion and overcoming knowledge constraints... Previous research has established that individuals with ADHD are exceptionally good at divergent thinking tasks, such as inventing creative new uses for everyday objects, and brainstorming new features for an innovative cell phone device. In a new study, college students with ADHD scored higher than non-ADHD peers on two tasks that tapped conceptual expansion and the ability to overcome knowledge constraints. Together with previous research, these new findings link ADHD to all three elements of the creative cognition trio...

ADHD may create difficulties for individuals in many contexts that required focused, sustained attention — such as school, where students are expected to sit still and pay attention. On the other hand, the same distractibility and chaotic mind can give people with ADHD an edge when it comes to creative, original thinking. This new study suggests that ADHD may be especially beneficial when the goal is to create or invent something new without being locked into — and constrained by — old models or conventions.

The innovative, original thinking style of people with ADHD may be a great fit for innovative fields where it's an advantage to be on the cutting edge.

Medical researchers are trying to make history, reports CNBC -- including a 100-person R&D group within AWS: Amazon is working on a cure for the common cold in a years-long, top secret effort called "Project Gesundheit," according to three people familiar with the effort... The team is hoping to develop a vaccine, but is exploring a variety of approaches to the problem. Internally, the effort is sometimes referred to as the "vaccine project...."

Amazon isn't the only organization throwing resources into a cure for the cold. Researchers at Stanford and the University of California are working on a new approach that involves temporarily disabling a single protein inside our cells. Researchers at the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, which is funded by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, the physician Priscilla Chan, also chipped into the effort. The researchers behind that group said, in a statement, that they were close to a cure.

An anonymous reader quotes the Seattle Times: Testing for the novel coronavirus in the Seattle area will get a huge boost in the coming weeks as a project funded by Bill Gates and his foundation begins offering home-testing kits that will allow people who fear they may be infected to swab their noses and send the samples back for analysis. Results, which should be available in one to two days, will be shared with local health officials who will notify those who test positive.

Via online forms, infected people can answer questions about their movements and contacts, making it easier for health officials to locate others who may need to be tested or quarantined, as well as to track the virus' spread and identify possible hot spots.

Initially, the lab will be able to conduct about 400 tests a day, eventually expanding to thousands of tests a day, said Scott Dowell, leader of coronavirus response at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The project is ramping up as quickly as possible, but it's not clear exactly when it will launch, he added. Among other things, software needs to be upgraded to handle the expected crush of requests, and a detailed questionnaire finalized for people who request tests. "Although there's a lot to be worked out, this has enormous potential to turn the tide of the epidemic," Dowell said.
The article points out that the kits "will reduce the need for sick people to visit a doctor's office or clinic, lowering the chance of exposing others."

The foundation has already committed up to $100 million to the global response to COVID-19, including up to $20 million to accelerate international efforts to control the spread, up to $20 million to help partners in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia strengthen their response, and up to $60 million to kick-start the development of vaccines and treatments.

"Why did this particle mysteriously disintegrate?" asks Popular Mechanics. Slashdot reader aeropage shared their report: Scientists have proposed a new kind of subatomic particle to explain another particle's mysterious disintegration. The kaon, a special case of meson particle, is made of one quark and one antiquark. All are part of the overall family called hadrons. When kaon particles decay, a very rare few undergo a change that has baffled scientists. Can it be explained by existing physics at all...?

If this kaon decay (de-kaon?) is validated, it represents something new in physics. The style of decay could indicate a new kind of particle altogether, or a new physical force at work to make the novel decay... Kaons have several known common ways of decaying, but the one in this paper is so rare that scientists weren't sure it existed before now. Their model predicted they'd see less than a quarter of one instance of this decay in their sample -- not four, which is a veritable fortune by comparison. What does it mean to see so many more instances?

"If confirmed, this requires physics beyond the standard model to enhance the signal."

The five years between 2013 and 2017 saw a 200% increase in the number of commercially-insured Americans diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease or early-onset dementia between the ages of 30 to 64. "While the underlying cause is not clear, advances in technology are certainly allowing for earlier and more definitive diagnosis," says a Blue Cross executive.

The data was collected by the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association (and its licensee Independence Blue Cross) in a report titled Early-Onset Dementia and Alzheimer's Rates Grow for Younger Americans. schwit1 shared their announcement: Among that group, the average age of a person living with either form of dementia is 49... The number diagnosed with these conditions increased 373% among 30- to 44-year-olds, 311% among 45- to 54-year-olds and 143% among 55- to 64-year-olds from 2013 to 2017...

The study also took a deeper look into early-onset Alzheimer's disease and found that more than 37,000 commercially insured Americans between the ages of 30 and 64 were diagnosed with the condition in 2017 — a 131% jump in diagnoses since 2013.

"Well, those crazy chemistry cats have done it," writes Science Alert: Nearly 200 years after the molecule was discovered by Michael Faraday, researchers have finally revealed the complex electronic structure of benzene. This not only settles a debate that has been raging since the 1930s, this step has important implications for the future development of opto-electronic materials, many of which are built on benzenes.

The atomic structure of benzene is pretty well understood. It's a ring consisting of six carbon atoms, and six hydrogen atoms, one attached to each of the carbon atoms. Where it gets extremely tricky is when we consider the molecule's 42 electrons. "The mathematical function that describes benzene's electrons is 126-dimensional," chemist Timothy Schmidt of the ARC Centre of Excellence in Exciton Science and UNSW Sydney in Australia told ScienceAlert. "That means it is a function of 126 coordinates, three for each of the 42 electrons. The electrons are not independent, so we cannot break this down into 42 independent three-dimensional functions.The answer computed by a machine is not easy to interpret by a human, and we had to invent a way to get at the answer...."

"The electrons with what's known as up-spin double-bonded, where those with down-spin single-bonded, and vice versa," Schmidt said in statement. "That isn't how chemists think about benzene." The effect of this is that the electrons avoid each other when it is advantageous to do so, reducing the energy of the molecule, and making it more stable.

Ars Technica's senior space editor visited SpaceX's South Texas Launch Site for a long profile of Elon Musk (who was wearing an "Occupy Mars" t-shirt). Just two weeks ago Musk had called an all-hands meeting at 1 a.m. which led to a massive hiring spree of 252 people, doubling the site's workforce, within the next 48 hours. "Most of the new hires, even those who had inked contracts at midnight, were told to report for work the next morning..." SpaceX is designing its factory here to build a Starship every 72 hours... Musk has brought lessons learned from Tesla's assembly line so workers do not burn out. They will work three 12-hour days and then have a four-day weekend. Then they'll work four 12-hour shifts with a three-day weekend. Thus, with four shifts, the Boca Chica site can operate at full capacity 24 hours a day, seven days a week. SpaceX is throwing in hot meals every three to four hours, for free...

"A high production rate solves many ills," he said. "If you have a high production rate, you have a high iteration rate. For pretty much any technology whatsoever, the progress is a function of how many iterations do you have, and how much progress do you make between each iteration. If you have a high production rate then you have many iterations. You can make progress from one to the next...."

Other engineers have built an in-house, shielded machine to X-ray the welds... These machines existed only in the minds of engineers four weeks ago. The tent they've installed them in for testing was built less than three weeks ago. Musk has always had a knack for hiring brilliant young engineers, and those in the Boca Chica tents were mostly in their 20s, busting their tails for the boss. Willingly. Why? Because Musk empowers them to go fast, do cool things, and, very soon, to see their machines fly...

"I'll probably be long dead before Mars becomes self-sustaining, but I'd like to at least be around to see a bunch of ships land on Mars," Musk said.
It's a 4,000 word article, but the last paragraph really captures the mood. "The place feels the way a U.S. Navy shipyard must have felt in the weeks after Pearl Harbor -- insanely busy but also purposeful. These kids and swarms of recently hired technicians are fighting against impossible odds every day, and they're determined to win. Don't tell them it can't be done.

"They're not having any of that in Muskville."

Though SETI@Home has shut down, "users with a fondness for distributed computing might take a look at Folding@home, which is trying to figure out the structures of proteins on the surface of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus," writes Ars Technica. The coronavirus uses these proteins to latch on to proteins on the surface of human cells, a key step in its ability to infect them. Understanding the structure of this protein is a key to understanding the virus' vulnerabilities.

While it won't help in the production of a general vaccine, it can be extremely useful in developing therapies. Once we know where this protein interacts with its receptor on human cells, we can start searching for small molecules that could bind in this same location, potentially blocking this interaction. Alternatively, we can potentially generate antibodies that bind to this site on the virus' protein. Either of these options can help people who are already infected, as they can limit the virus' ability to spread to new cells.
Or, as their web site explains it, "The data you help us generate will be quickly and openly disseminated as part of an open science collaboration of multiple laboratories around the world, giving researchers new tools that may unlock new opportunities for developing lifesaving drugs."

Science Alert reports: The candidate culprit is a recently discovered subatomic particle called a d-star hexaquark. And in the primordial darkness following the Big Bang, it could have come together to create dark matter... explained nuclear physicist Daniel Watts of the University of York in the UK. "Our first calculations indicate that condensates of d-stars are a feasible new candidate for dark matter. This new result is particularly exciting since it doesn't require any concepts that are new to physics...."

When six quarks combine, this creates a type of particle called a dibaryon, or hexaquark. We haven't actually observed many of these at all. The d-star hexaquark, described in 2014, was the first non-trivial detection... If such a gas of d-star hexaquarks was floating around in the early Universe as it cooled in the wake of the Big Bang, according to the team's modelling, it could come together to form Bose-Einstein condensates. And those condensates could be what we now call dark matter.

Startup accelerator Y Combinator announced today that it has moved its demo day online, citing a "growing concern over COVID-19," or coronavirus. From a report: The demo day has historically drawn crowds of Silicon Valley elite, journalists and both national and international venture capitalists to watch more than 100 startups come out to the world. "While we won't be able to recreate every aspect of Demo Day, we'll try our best to create an amazing experience for our founders and investors," Y Combinator said in a blog post. Y Combinator's 30th annual demo day will be pre-recorded and released to investors on Monday March 23, per the post. Thanks to a mix of history and glamour, demo day is the culminating day of a YC startup's accelerator experience. It's a big audience full of check writers and fast typers, and at the least, they'll get a tweet or a couple of sign-ups. The move to remote, in some way, dims that excitement.

After pondering the totality of issues that arose during a December test flight of Boeing's Starliner spacecraft this week, NASA chief of human spaceflight Doug Loverro said Friday that he decided to escalate the incident. From a report: So he designated Starliner's uncrewed mission, during which the spacecraft flew a shortened profile and did not attempt to dock with the International Space Station, as a "high visibility close call." This relatively rare designation for NASA's human spaceflight program falls short of "loss of mission" but is nonetheless fairly rare. It was last used by NASA after a spacewalk in 2013 when water began to dangerously pool in the helmet of astronaut Luca Parmitano. Asked to explain during a conference call with reporters why he did this, Loverro said, "We could have lost a spacecraft twice during this mission."

In this, Loverro referred to two software errors that occurred during the two-day flight. The first problem occurred when Starliner captured the wrong "mission elapsed time" from its Atlas V launch vehicle -- it was supposed to pick up this time during the terminal phase of the countdown, but instead it grabbed data 11 hours off of the correct time. This led to a delayed push to reach orbit. The second error, caught and fixed just a few hours before the vehicle returned to Earth through the atmosphere, was due to a software mapping error that would have caused thrusters on Starliner's service module to fire in the wrong manner. NASA and Boeing officials held Friday's teleconference to announce the conclusion of a report from an Independent Review Team established after December's flight. These reviewers made 60 recommendations to NASA and Boeing for corrective actions that ranged from fixing these software issues to ferreting out others that may still exist in the spacecraft's flight code.