The deadly outbreak of a novel coronavirus has the world on edge, but it has not yet developed into a pandemic, according to the World Health Organization. From a report: Although WHO has declared the outbreak a "public health emergency of international concern," the outbreak has not met the criteria needed to be described as a pandemic when it comes to its geographical spread and impact, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said during a press briefing with reporters on Monday. "Our decision about whether to use the word 'pandemic' to describe an epidemic is based on an ongoing assessment of the geographical spread of the virus, the severity of disease it causes and the impact it has on the whole society," Ghebreyesus said during the briefing. "For the moment, we are not witnessing the uncontained global spread of this virus and we are not witnessing large-scale severe disease or deaths," he said. "Does this virus have pandemic potential? Absolutely it has. Are we there yet from our assessment? Not yet. So how should we describe the current situation? What we see are epidemics in different parts of the world, affecting countries in different ways and requiring a tailored response."

Six public health labs in the US plan to start monitoring the general population for the new coronavirus this week. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says that the risk of the virus still remains low for the general population. But activating the disease surveillance network will allow the CDC and other public health officials to find any undetected virus circulating through the country. From a report: "It's important because right now, all the efforts are focused on people who have a direct link to China, or a direct link to lab-confirmed cases. There's no system in place to detect low-level transmission that might be under the radar," says Edward Belongia, the director of the Center for Clinical Epidemiology and Population Health at the Marshfield Clinic Research Institute. The six labs -- in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Chicago, and New York City -- are already part of the nationwide influenza surveillance network, and they conduct regular monitoring of all types of viruses. At the labs, samples from sick people are tested for various pathogens, creating a big-picture look at how much various diseases are spreading through the community. Surveillance hasn't started yet, in part because of problems with the test for the novel coronavirus developed by the CDC. The test that will be used for surveillance that was designed to diagnose people who have symptoms of the illness caused by the virus called COVID-19. It was distributed to public health labs around the country last week, but the majority of the labs had trouble running it. The CDC says this often happens during the rollout of a new test, but it has not specified what the reasons for the errors are.
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The New York Times: They asked Katherine Johnson for the moon, and she gave it to them. Wielding little more than a pencil, a slide rule and one of the finest mathematical minds in the country, Mrs. Johnson, whose death at 101 was announced on Monday by NASA, calculated the precise trajectories that would let Apollo 11 land on the moon in 1969 and, after Neil Armstrong's history-making moonwalk, let it return to Earth. A single error, she well knew, could have dire consequences for craft and crew. Her impeccable calculations had already helped plot the successful flight of Alan B. Shepard Jr., who became the first American in space when his Mercury spacecraft went aloft in 1961. The next year, she likewise helped make it possible for John Glenn, in the Mercury vessel Friendship 7, to become the first American to orbit the Earth. Yet throughout Mrs. Johnson's 33 years in NASA's Flight Research Division -- the office from which the American space program sprang -- and for decades afterward, almost no one knew her name.

Mrs. Johnson was one of several hundred rigorously educated, supremely capable yet largely unheralded women who, well before the modern feminist movement, worked as NASA mathematicians. But it was not only her sex that kept her long marginalized and long unsung: Katherine Coleman Goble Johnson, a West Virginia native who began her scientific career in the age of Jim Crow, was also African-American. In old age, Mrs. Johnson became the most celebrated of the small cadre of black women -- perhaps three dozen -- who at midcentury served as mathematicians for the space agency and its predecessor, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. Their story was told in the 2016 Hollywood film "Hidden Figures," based on Margot Lee Shetterly's nonfiction book of the same title, published that year. The movie starred Taraji P. Henson as Mrs. Johnson, the film's central figure. It also starred Octavia Spencer and Janelle Monae as her real-life colleagues Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson.

schwit1 quotes Syfy Wire: There is, admittedly, some ambiguity about precisely how Trek's transporters work. The events of some episodes subtly contradict events in others. The closest thing to an official word we have is the Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual, which states that when a person enters a transporter, they are scanned by molecular imaging scanners that convert a person into a subatomically deconstructed matter stream. That's all a fancy-pants way of saying it takes you apart, atom by atom, and converts your matter into energy. That energy can then be beamed to its destination, where it's reconstructed. According to Trek lore, we're meant to believe this is a continuous process. Despite being deconstructed and rebuilt on the other end, you never stop being "you...."

[Alternately] the fact that you are scanned, deconstructed, and rebuilt almost immediately thereafter only creates the illusion of continuity. In reality, you are killed and then something exactly like you is born, elsewhere. If the person constructed on the other end is identical to you, down to the atomic level, is there any measurable difference from it being actually you? Those are questions we can't begin to answer. What seems clear — whatever the technical manual says — is you die when you enter a transporter, however briefly.
The article also cites estimates that it would take three gigajoules of energy (about one bolt of lightning) to disassemble somebody's atoms, and 10 to the 28th power kilobytes to then hold all that information -- and 2.6 tredecillion bits of data to transmit it.

"The estimated time to transmit, using the standard 30 GHz microwave band used by communications satellites, would take 350,000 times longer than the age of the universe."

McGruber quotes Atlanta TV station WSB: The city of Marietta, Georgia is suing drug manufacturer Mallinckrodt after Mallinckrodt increased the price of the drug Acthar by 97,500%.

The lawsuit, filed in federal court, claims one city employee needs the drug Acthar, which is used to treat seizures in small children.

"Acthar used to cost $40, but Mallinckrodt has raised the price of the drug to over $39,000 per vial," the city claims in the lawsuit. "This eye-popping 97,500% price increase is the result of unlawful and unfair conduct by Mallinckrondt. The city has expended over $2 million for just one patient covered by the city's self-funded health plan...."

Atlanta pharmacist Ira Katz said Acthar is what's called a "biologic" and they can be classified as specialty drugs. "They put them into the specialty class, and the prices are outrageous, just outrageous," Katz said.

Baldrson (Slashdot reader #78,598) writes: First announced on Slashdot in 2006, AI professor Marcus Hutter has gone big with his challenge to the artificial intelligence [and data compression] community. A 500,000€ purse now backs The Hutter Prize for Lossless Compression of Human Knowledge... Hutter's prize incrementally awards distillation of Wikipedia's storehouse of human knowledge to its essence.
That essence is a 1-billion-character excerpt of Wikipedia called "enwik9" -- approximately the amount that a human can read in a lifetime. And 14 years ago, Baldrson wrote a Slashdot article explaining how this long-running contest has its roots in a theory which could dramatically advance the capabilities of AI: The basic theory, for which Hutter provides a proof, is that after any set of observations the optimal move by an AI is find the smallest program that predicts those observations and then assume its environment is controlled by that program. Think of it as Ockham's Razor on steroids.
Writing today, Baldrson argues this could become a much more sophisticated Turing Test. Formally it is called Algorithmic Information Theory or AIT. AIT is, according to Hutter's "AIXI" theory, essential to Universal Intelligence.

Hutter's judging criterion is superior to Turing tests in 3 ways:

1) It is objective
2) It rewards incremental improvements
3) It is founded on a mathematical theory of natural science.

Detailed rules for the contest and answers to frequently asked questions are available.

Singaporean company Shiok Meats aims to grow artificial shrimp to combat the negative environmental effects associated with farmed shrimp. An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from The Economist: For a long time, beef has been a target of environmentalists because of cattle farming's contribution to global warming. But what about humble shrimp and prawns? They may seem, well, shrimpy when compared with cows, but it turns out the tasty decapods are just as big an environmental problem. The issue is not so much their life cycle: shrimp (as UN statisticians refer to all commonly eaten species collectively) do not belch planet-cooking methane the way cows do. But shrimp farms tend to occupy coastal land that used to be covered in mangroves. Draining mangrove swamps to make way for aquaculture is even more harmful to the atmosphere than felling rainforest to provide pasture for cattle. A study conducted in 2017 by CIFOR, a research institute, found that in both these instances, by far the biggest contribution to the carbon footprint of the resulting beef or shrimp came from the clearing of the land. As a result, CIFOR concluded, a kilo of farmed shrimp was responsible for almost four times the greenhouse-gas emissions of a kilo of beef. Eating a surf-and-turf dinner of prawn cocktail and steak, the study warned, can be more polluting than driving across America in a petrol-fuelled car.

All this has given one Singaporean company a brain wave. "Farmed shrimps are often bred in overcrowded conditions and literally swimming in sewage water. We want to disrupt that -- to empower farmers with technology that is cleaner and more efficient," says Sandhya Sriram, one of the founders of Shiok Meats. The firm aims to grow artificial shrimp, much as some Western firms are seeking to create beef without cows. The process involves propagating shrimp cells in a nutrient-rich solution. Ms Sriram likens it to a brewery, disdaining the phrase "lab-grown." Since prawn-meat has a simpler structure than beef, it should be easier to replicate in this way. Moreover, shrimp is eaten in lots of forms and textures: whole, minced, as a paste and so on. The firm is already making shrimp mince which it has tested in Chinese dumplings. It hopes the by-product of the meat-growing can be used as a flavoring for prawn crackers and instant noodles. Eventually it plans to grow curved "whole" shrimp -- without the head and shell, that is. While producing shrimp this way currently costs $5,000 a kilo, Shiok Meats thinks it can bring the price down dramatically by using less rarefied ingredients in its growing solution.

Astronomers have spotted molecular oxygen in a galaxy far far away, marking the first time that this important element has ever been detected outside of the Milky Way. Motherboard reports: This momentous "first detection of extragalactic molecular oxygen," as it is described in a recent study in The Astrophysical Journal, has big implications for understanding the crucial role of oxygen in the evolution of planets, stars, galaxies, and life. Oxygen is the third most abundant element in the universe, after hydrogen and helium, and is one of the key ingredients for life here on Earth. Molecular oxygen is the most common free form of the element and consists of two oxygen atoms with the designation O2. It is the version of the gas that we humans, among many other organisms, need to breathe in order to live.

Now, a team led by Junzhi Wang, an astronomer at the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory, reports the discovery of molecular oxygen in a dazzling galaxy called Markarian 231, located 581 million light years from the Milky Way. The researchers were able to make this detection with ground-based radio observatories. "Deep observations" from the IRAM 30-meter telescope in Spain and the NOEMA interferometer in France revealed molecular oxygen emission "in an external galaxy for the first time," Wang and his co-authors wrote. Motherboard notes that you couldn't just inhale the molecular oxygen found in Markarian 231 like you would the oxygen on Earth. "This is because the oxygen is not mixed with the right abundances of nitrogen, carbon dioxide, methane, and all the other molecules that make Earth's air breathable to humans and other organisms."

Still, the discovery "provides an ideal tool to study" molecular outflows from quasars and other AGNs, the team said in the study. [Markarian 231 has remained a curiosity to scientists for decades because it contains the closest known quasar, a type of hyper-energetic object. Quasars are active galactic nuclei (AGN), meaning that they inhabit the core regions of special galaxies, and they are among the most radiant and powerful objects in the universe.] "O2 may be a significant coolant for molecular gas in such regions affected by AGN-driven outflows," the researchers noted. "New astrochemical models are needed to explain the implied high molecular oxygen abundance in such regions several kiloparsecs away from the center of galaxies."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Human life "as we know it" could be threatened by climate change, economists at JP Morgan have warned. In a hard-hitting report to clients, the economists said that without action being taken there could be "catastrophic outcomes." The bank said the research came from a team that was "wholly independent from the company as a whole." Climate campaigners have previously criticized JP Morgan for its investments in fossil fuels. The firm's stark report was sent to clients and seen by BBC News. While JP Morgan economists have warned about unpredictability in climate change before, the language used in the new report was very forceful.

"We cannot rule out catastrophic outcomes where human life as we know it is threatened," JP Morgan economists David Mackie and Jessica Murray said. Carbon emissions in the coming decades "will continue to affect the climate for centuries to come in a way that is likely to be irreversible," they said, adding that climate change action should be motivated "by the likelihood of extreme events." Climate change could affect economic growth, shares, health, and how long people live, they said. It could put stresses on water, cause famine, and cause people to be displaced or migrate. Climate change could also cause political stress, conflict, and it could hit biodiversity and species survival, the report warned. To mitigate climate change net carbon emissions need to be cut to zero by 2050. To do this, there needed to be a global tax on carbon, the report authors said. But they said that "this is not going to happen anytime soon."

HB11 Energy, a spin-out company originating at the University of New South Wales, claims its hydrogen-boron fusion technology is already working a billion times better than expected. Along with this announcement, the company also announced a swag of patents through Japan, China and the USA protecting its unique approach to fusion energy generation. New Atlas reports: The results of decades of research by Emeritus Professor Heinrich Hora, HB11's approach to fusion does away with rare, radioactive and difficult fuels like tritium altogether -- as well as those incredibly high temperatures. Instead, it uses plentiful hydrogen and boron B-11, employing the precise application of some very special lasers to start the fusion reaction. Here's how HB11 describes its "deceptively simple" approach: the design is "a largely empty metal sphere, where a modestly sized HB11 fuel pellet is held in the center, with apertures on different sides for the two lasers. One laser establishes the magnetic containment field for the plasma and the second laser triggers the 'avalanche' fusion chain reaction. The alpha particles generated by the reaction would create an electrical flow that can be channeled almost directly into an existing power grid with no need for a heat exchanger or steam turbine generator."

HB11's Managing Director Dr. Warren McKenzie clarifies over the phone: "A lot of fusion experiments are using the lasers to heat things up to crazy temperatures -- we're not. We're using the laser to massively accelerate the hydrogen through the boron sample using non-linear forced. You could say we're using the hydrogen as a dart, and hoping to hit a boron , and if we hit one, we can start a fusion reaction. That's the essence of it. If you've got a scientific appreciation of temperature, it's essentially the speed of atoms moving around. Creating fusion using temperature is essentially randomly moving atoms around, and hoping they'll hit one another, our approach is much more precise." He continues: "The hydrogen/boron fusion creates a couple of helium atoms. They're naked heliums, they don't have electrons, so they have a positive charge. We just have to collect that charge. Essentially, the lack of electrons is a product of the reaction and it directly creates the current."

The lasers themselves rely upon cutting-edge "Chirped Pulse Amplification" technology, the development of which won its inventors the 2018 Nobel prize in Physics. Much smaller and simpler than any of the high-temperature fusion generators, HB11 says its generators would be compact, clean and safe enough to build in urban environments. There's no nuclear waste involved, no superheated steam, and no chance of a meltdown. "This is brand new," Professor Hora tells us. "10-petawatt power laser pulses. It's been shown that you can create fusion conditions without hundreds of millions of degrees. This is completely new knowledge. I've been working on how to accomplish this for more than 40 years. It's a unique result. Now we have to convince the fusion people -- it works better than the present day hundred million degree thermal equilibrium generators. We have something new at hand to make a drastic change in the whole situation. A substitute for carbon as our energy source. A radical new situation and a new hope for energy and the climate."

hackingbear writes: A group of 27 prominent public health scientists from outside China, who have studied SARS-CoV-2 and "overwhelmingly conclude that this coronavirus originated in wildlife" just like many other viruses that have recently emerged in humans, is pushing back against a steady stream of stories and even a scientific paper suggesting a laboratory in Wuhan, China, may be the origin of the outbreak of COVID-19. "The rapid, open, and transparent sharing of data on this outbreak is now being threatened by rumors and misinformation around its origins," the scientists, from nine countries, write in a statement published online by The Lancet .

Many posts on social media have singled out the Wuhan Institute of Virology for intense scrutiny because it has a laboratory at the highest security level -- biosafety level 4 -- and its researchers study coronaviruses from bats; speculations have included the possibility that the virus was bioengineered in the lab or that a lab worker was infected while handling a bat. Researchers from the institute have insisted there is no link between the outbreak and their laboratory. Peter Daszak, president of the EcoHealth Alliance and a cosignatory of the statement, has collaborated with researchers at the Wuhan institute who study bat coronaviruses. "We're in the midst of the social media misinformation age, and these rumors and conspiracy theories have real consequences, including threats of violence that have occurred to our colleagues in China."

An anonymous reader shares a months-old report, which is getting some attention this week: Many clones are born with defects and genetic disorders, and since those imperfections aren't what their buyer is spending tens of thousands of dollars on, they end up discarded. That's the price. Neonatal complications for cloned animals abound: Poor placenta and fetal development in the womb lead to high rates of early- and late-stage abortions. Once born, those first few weeks remain tenuous: Incidences of large offspring syndrome (which usually results in a cesarian section) are high as are pneumonia and respiratory distress syndrome in cloned lambs and cows, which indicates poor adrenal gland and lung function.

And if that cloned dog does make it through the gauntlet -- but is missing the spot over its eye that a deceased pet had, for instance -- it still faces a swift death via euthanasia, just another pile of genetic material to harvest. "There's too many mistakes, too many stillbirths, deformities, and mutations," warns Chris Cauble, a Glendale, California, veterinarian whose mobile service offers tissue collection for cloning pets. Despite being involved in the industry, Cauble wouldn't clone his own pets. "I'd hate to see one of my beloved dogs born with three eyes or without a leg. I'd feel like I created a monster. There are a lot of failures, and those are killed because they're not perfect. They keep trying until they get a good puppy. Consumers have to realize the procedure is not fully perfected."

A powerful antibiotic that kills some of the most dangerous drug-resistant bacteria in the world has been discovered using artificial intelligence. The Guardian reports: To find new antibiotics, the researchers first trained a "deep learning" algorithm to identify the sorts of molecules that kill bacteria. To do this, they fed the program information on the atomic and molecular features of nearly 2,500 drugs and natural compounds, and how well or not the substance blocked the growth of the bug E coli. Once the algorithm had learned what molecular features made for good antibiotics, the scientists set it working on a library of more than 6,000 compounds under investigation for treating various human diseases. Rather than looking for any potential antimicrobials, the algorithm focused on compounds that looked effective but unlike existing antibiotics. This boosted the chances that the drugs would work in radical new ways that bugs had yet to develop resistance to.

Jonathan Stokes, the first author of the study, said it took a matter of hours for the algorithm to assess the compounds and come up with some promising antibiotics. One, which the researchers named "halicin" after Hal, the astronaut-bothering AI in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, looked particularly potent. Writing in the journal Cell, the researchers describe how they treated numerous drug-resistant infections with halicin, a compound that was originally developed to treat diabetes, but which fell by the wayside before it reached the clinic. Tests on bacteria collected from patients showed that halicin killed Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the bug that causes TB, and strains of Enterobacteriaceae that are resistant to carbapenems, a group of antibiotics that are considered the last resort for such infections. Halicin also cleared C difficile and multidrug-resistant Acinetobacter baumannii infections in mice. Three days after being set loose on a database of about 1.5 billion compounds, the algorithm returned a shortlist of 23 potential antibiotics, of which two appear to be particularly potent.

"[The senior researcher] now wants to use the algorithm to find antibiotics that are more selective in the bacteria they kill," adds The Guardian. "This would mean that taking the antibiotic kills only the bugs causing an infection, and not all the healthy bacteria that live in the gut. More ambitiously, the scientists aim to use the algorithm to design potent new antibiotics from scratch."

penciling_in shares a report from CircleID: The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has announced that its ICANN67 Public Meeting, which was to be held in Cancun, Mexico, will now be held via remote participation-only. This decision was made as a result of the COVID-19 outbreak, considered a public health emergency of international concern by the World Health Organization. The meeting, scheduled for March 7-12, 2020, marks the first time in ICANN's history that it will hold a Public Meeting solely with remote participation. "This is a decision that the ICANN Board has been considering since the outbreak was first announced and it is one that we haven't taken lightly," said Maarten Botterman, ICANN Board Chair. "We know that changing this meeting to remote participation-only will have an impact on and cause disruption to our community; however, this decision is about people. Protecting the health and safety of the ICANN community is our top priority."

Fossil-fuel production may be responsible for much more atmospheric methane than scientists previously thought, according to new research published today in the journal Nature. The results, if they hold, suggest that methane needs to be managed even more tightly than was accounted for in multilateral initiatives such as the 2015 Paris Agreement -- not to mention many policies on the national and local level. Bloomberg reports: Scientists aren't challenging the top-line amount of fossil methane that enters the atmosphere every year -- that number stays at about 194 million metric tons, says Benjamin Hmiel, a post-doctoral fellow in Earth science at the University of Rochester and the study's lead author. Rather, they're challenging how much of the total comes from natural versus industrial sources, an important distinction for policy-makers. Conventional wisdom has held until now that fossil sources emit roughly 50 million tons of methane. The new paper's estimate is dramatically smaller: Just 5 million tons, at most, come from natural sources, or "seeps," the study says. "If it's not coming from seeps, then it's coming from fossil-fuel operations," says Rob Jackson, a Stanford professor of Earth system science who wasn't involved in the study. "There's really no other explanation for it. It's kind of a zero-sum game."

The Nature study takes advantage of a rare, radioactive form of the carbon atom that decays over several thousand years. Carbon-14 is present in trace amounts in the biosphere, embedded in naturally occurring molecules such as methane and carbon dioxide, but fossil fuels have no carbon-14 in them. Hmiel and his colleagues visited Greenland three times over two years to drill samples out of ice sheets dating back 300 years, then analyzed the gases trapped in it looking for carbon-14. This allowed scientists to establish a pre-industrial level for natural methane emissions.

schwit1 quotes a report from MSN: Cancer doctors fear superbugs which can't be treated with antibiotics will soon remove chemotherapy as a treatment option for their patients, a survey has revealed. Cancer patients are more vulnerable to infections because the disease and its treatments can stop the immune system from working correctly. Of the 100 oncologists in the U.K. surveyed between December 20, 2019 and February 3, 2020 by the Longitude Prize -- which was established to tackle antimicrobial resistance in cancer care -- 95 percent said they were worried about the effect superbugs could have on their patients.

An estimated one in five cancer patients need antibiotics during their treatment, according to existing research cited by the authors of the report, and cancers including multiple myeloma and acute leukemia can't be treated without them. The survey revealed that 46 percent of doctors believe drug-resistant bugs will make chemotherapy unviable. Some cancer treatments, which the report didn't name, will be obsolete in five years, 28 percent of the cancer doctors predicted. A further 39 percent forecast this would happen within the next decade, and 15 percent in two decades. Four in 10 (41 percent) said they had seen a rise in patients developing drug-resistant infections in the last year, with 23 percent of their cancer patients developing an infection during treatment on average.

As many as 65,000 cancer patients are at risk of catching a superbug infection after having surgery in the U.K. in this decade, the data suggested. Among the doctors surveyed, 5 percent of their patients who had surgery developed an infection which didn't respond to antibiotics. A total of 86 percent of the doctors said the bugs Staphylococcus, E. coli and pseudomona put cancer patients at the most risk of serious harm. The research also highlighted frustrations clinicians have with the way infections are diagnosed, with 60 percent saying laboratories take too long to identify them in their patients.

An anonymous reader shares a problem that Amazon asks in its interviews: A cable of 80 meters is hanging from the top of two poles that are both 50 meters off the ground. What is the distance between the two poles (to one decimal point) if the center cable is (a) 20 meters off the ground and (b) 10 meters off the ground?

A team of physicists at the University of Sussex has successfully developed the first nonlinear camera capable of capturing high-resolution images of the interior of solid objects using terahertz (THz) radiation. Phys.Org reports: Led by Professor Marco Peccianti of the Emergent Photonics (EPic) Lab, Luana Olivieri, Dr. Juan S. Totero Gongora and a team of research students built a new type of THz camera capable of detecting THz electromagnetic waves with unprecedented accuracy. Images produced using THz radiation are called 'hyperspectral' because the image consists of pixels, each one containing the electromagnetic signature of the object in that point.

The EPic Lab team used a single-pixel camera to image sample objects with patterns of THz light. The prototype they built can detect how the object alters different patterns of THz light. By combining this information with the shape of each original pattern, the camera reveals the image of an object as well as its chemical composition. Sources of THz radiation are very faint and hyperspectral imaging had, until now, limited fidelity. To overcome this, The Sussex team shone a standard laser onto a unique non-linear material capable of converting visible light to THz. The prototype camera creates THz electromagnetic waves very close to the sample, similar to how a microscope works. As THz waves can travel right through an object without affecting it, the resulting images reveal the shape and composition of objects in three dimensions.

Gizmodo's Ed Cara explains why HIV drugs are being used to treat the new coronavirus. An anonymous reader shares the report: On Tuesday, the Japanese government announced it will begin clinical trials to test treatments for the deadly new coronavirus that's engulfed China and spread to over two dozen countries. Rather than new drugs, they'll be studying existing medications already used to treat HIV and other viral diseases. But why exactly are researchers hopeful that these drugs can be repurposed for the new coronavirus, and how likely are they to work? The new coronavirus, recently named SARS-CoV-2 due to its close genetic ties to the SARS coronavirus, is made out of RNA. Other RNA viruses include the ones that cause Ebola, hepatitis C, and yes, HIV/AIDS.

RNA viruses come in all shapes and sizes, and those that infect humans can do so in different ways. But many of the drugs that go after HIV and the hepatitis C virus broadly target weaknesses found in all sorts of viruses. The approved hepatitis C drug ribavirin, for instance, interferes with something called the RNA-dependent RNA polymerase, an enzyme essential for many viruses -- including coronaviruses -- to produce more of themselves inside a cell. HIV drugs like lopinavir inhibit other enzymes that allow viruses to break down certain proteins, which cripples their ability to infect cells and replicate. Broad antiviral drugs like lopinavir should be able to work against SARS-CoV-2, scientists theorize. And there's already some circumstantial evidence they do. Some of these drugs have been successfully tested out for SARS and MERS, for instance, two other nasty coronaviruses that have emerged in recent years.

Slashdot readers fahrbot-bot and operator_error share a report from Phys.Org: Scientists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst have developed a device that uses a natural protein to create electricity from moisture in the air, a new technology they say could have significant implications for the future of renewable energy, climate change and in the future of medicine. As reported today in Nature, the laboratories of electrical engineer Jun Yao and microbiologist Derek Lovley at UMass Amherst have created a device they call an "Air-gen," or air-powered generator, with electrically conductive protein nanowires produced by the microbe Geobacter. The Air-gen connects electrodes to the protein nanowires in such a way that electrical current is generated from the water vapor naturally present in the atmosphere.

The new technology developed in Yao's lab is non-polluting, renewable and low-cost. It can generate power even in areas with extremely low humidity such as the Sahara Desert. It has significant advantages over other forms of renewable energy including solar and wind, Lovley says, because unlike these other renewable energy sources, the Air-gen does not require sunlight or wind, and "it even works indoors." The Air-gen device requires only a thin film of protein nanowires less than 10 microns thick, the researchers explain. The bottom of the film rests on an electrode, while a smaller electrode that covers only part of the nanowire film sits on top. The film adsorbs water vapor from the atmosphere. A combination of the electrical conductivity and surface chemistry of the protein nanowires, coupled with the fine pores between the nanowires within the film, establishes the conditions that generate an electrical current between the two electrodes. "We are literally making electricity out of thin air," says Yao. "The Air-gen generates clean energy 24/7." Lovely adds, "It's the most amazing and exciting application of protein nanowires yet."

The current generation of Air-gen devices can power small electronics, and they are expected to be brought to commercial scale soon.