According to The Associated Press, the U.S. Postal Service said on Tuesday that it is "experiencing significant difficulties" in dispatching letters, parcels and express mail to China, including Hong Kong and Macau, "because most of its supplier airlines have suspended their flights" to those destinations. As a consequence and "starting immediately," USPS said it can no longer accept items destined for China, Hong Kong and Macao "until sufficient transport capacity becomes available." CBS News reports: Likewise, in another, separate note seen by the AP, Singapore Post told its global counterparts that it is no longer accepting letters, parcels and express mail items destined for China, "until sufficient transport capacity becomes available." The notes were shared with postal services around the world via the Universal Postal Union, a U.N. agency headquartered in Switzerland that is a main forum for postal cooperation between its 192 member countries.

In a statement to the AP, the UPU said that the suspension of flights because of the virus "is going to impact the delivery of mail for the foreseeable future." "But it is hopefully temporary. The Universal Postal Union is carefully monitoring the operational situation, and is in constant contact with postal operators to ensure any backlog is cleared in the shortest possible time," it said. The Chinese mail service, China Post, said it is disinfecting postal offices, processing centers, and vehicles to ensure the virus doesn't travel via the mail and to protect postal staff. The virus does "not survive for long on objects. It is therefore safe to receive postal items from China," said a China Post noted transmitted via the UPU. Letters, parcels and express mail that do still make it to China will be delivered "via non-face-to-face methods," the note said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Nearly 10 months after Vice President Mike Pence directed NASA to return astronauts to the Moon by 2024, the space agency has estimated how much its Artemis Program will cost. NASA says it will need an additional $35 billion over the next four years -- on top of its existing budget -- to develop a Human Landing System to get down to the Moon's surface from lunar orbit while also accelerating other programs to make the 2024 date. NASA's human spaceflight chief, Doug Loverro, shared this number Monday at Johnson Space Center, as the Trump White House released its fiscal year 2021 budget. It calls for a big increase in NASA's budget, 12 percent over last year's budget request, with a top-line number of $25.2 billion.

The biggest increase will go toward the Human Landing System, $3.37 billion in fiscal year 2021 alone. NASA says, if funded by Congress, this would mark the first time the United States has directly spent money on a lunar lander since the Apollo program in the 1960s. The human spaceflight budget also funds a small space station in orbit around the Moon, called the Lunar Gateway. This is a sizable budget request and, other NASA programs aside, represents the kind of funding the space agency needs if it is to make progress toward landing humans on the Moon in the mid-2020s. The president's budget also supports a lunar program that does meaningful things on the Moon, providing hundreds of millions of dollars to study the extraction of ice from the lunar poles and establishing a habitat on the surface. "In contrast to a recent authorization bill in the U.S. House of Representatives, the White House budget proposes using lunar landers developed via public-private partnerships, with contractors investing in their own landers," the report adds. "Those landers would also be launched on privately developed rockets, helping to contain costs of the Artemis Program."

Andrew Yang, tech entrepreneur and founder of Venture for America, will end his campaign for president after a disappointing showing in the New Hampshire primary. The Washington Post reports: "I am a numbers guy," Yang said in an interview before addressing supporters at Manchester's Puritan Backroom. "In most of these [upcoming] states, I'm not going to be at a threshold where I get delegates, which makes sticking around not necessarily helpful or productive in terms of furthering the goals of this campaign. If I become persuaded that there's a particular candidate that gives us a superior chance of beating Donald Trump, and I think it's important to make that opinion known, then I would consider it for sure," Yang said. He also said he would be open to becoming another candidate's running mate or joining a presidential Cabinet.

In his stump speech, Yang warned of the societal and economic changes automation would continue to bring to the United States. He proposed countering it by implementing universal basic income in the form of a $1,000-a-month "Freedom Dividend" for U.S. citizens. His sometimes bleak message on the campaign trail was contrasted with his upbeat, irreverent style of campaigning: Yang once crowd-surfed at a candidate forum and sometimes challenged other celebrities to pickup basketball games. He half-danced onto just about every stage to the '90s Mark Morrison R&B hit "Return of the Mack" and spawned a loyal following of supporters who dubbed themselves the "Yang Gang." They often showed up at his events wearing trademark "math" hats, a nod both to his self-described emphasis on facts and research and to the geek culture that surrounded his candidacy. "This is the nerdiest campaign in history," Yang told The Washington Post last year. Yang was also the first presidential candidate to use campaign funds for a pilot program meant to resemble his universal basic income proposal. "He told CNN on Monday that the concept of a freedom dividend was 'not going anywhere,' and emphasized on Tuesday that he had forced a new idea into Democratic politics," reports The Washington Post. "He made that point with math."

"Now, 66 percent of Democrats support a universal basic income," Yang said. "It's got 72 percent of young people, aged 18 to 34."

A viral myth from 2012 is recirculating on the web right now, claiming NASA said Monday was the only day you can make brooms stand up all by themselves, because of the earth's gravitational pull. Sadly, there's a reasonable explanation for the "standing broom" trick and it has everything to do with balance. CNN reports: [T]he truth is, you can make a broom stand upright today... and tomorrow and the day after... and the day after that. It has nothing to do with the earth's gravitational pull on a certain day. It also has nothing to do with the vernal equinox (another day of the year when this "magic" supposedly happens). Instead, it has everything to do with balance. The center of gravity is low on a broom, and rests directly over the bristles. Which means, if you can get the bristles positioned like a tripod, your broom will stand upright any day of the year.

Researchers have successfully bypassed the eyes with a brain implant that allows rudimentary vision. MIT Technology Review reports: "Alli," says Bernardeta Gomez in her native Spanish, pointing to a large black line running across a white sheet of cardboard propped at arm's length in front of her. "There." It isn't exactly an impressive feat for a 57-year-old woman -- except that Gomez is blind. And she's been that way for over a decade. When she was 42, toxic optic neuropathy destroyed the bundles of nerves that connect Gomez's eyes to her brain, rendering her totally without sight. She's unable even to detect light. But after 16 years of darkness, Gomez was given a six-month window during which she could see a very low-resolution semblance of the world represented by glowing white-yellow dots and shapes. This was possible thanks to a modified pair of glasses, blacked out and fitted with a tiny camera. The contraption is hooked up to a computer that processes a live video feed, turning it into electronic signals. A cable suspended from the ceiling links the system to a port embedded in the back of Gomez's skull that is wired to a 100-electrode implant in the visual cortex in the rear of her brain.

Using this, Gomez identified ceiling lights, letters, basic shapes printed on paper, and people. She even played a simple Pac-Man-like computer game piped directly into her brain. Four days a week for the duration of the experiment, Gomez was led to a lab by her sighted husband and hooked into the system. Gomez's first moment of sight, at the end of 2018, was the culmination of decades of research by Eduardo Fernandez, director of neuroengineering at the University of Miguel Hernandez, in Elche, Spain. His goal: to return sight to as many as possible of the 36 million blind people worldwide who wish to see again. Fernandez's approach is particularly exciting because it bypasses the eye and optical nerves.

Ars Technica's Eric Berger said on Twitter that the SpaceX Crew Dragon could take off on May 7th. "Though, due to 'a number of variables not hardware related' the launch could happen in late April or later in May," reports Engadget, adding: "We don't know yet how long the flight will be." From the report: It's been almost a year since the Crew Dragon achieved one major milestone: reaching the ISS. In January, SpaceX completed Crew Dragon's in-flight launch escape test, which proved that the capsule can break away from the Falcon 9 rocket and splash down in the Atlantic if necessary during launch. SpaceX has also successfully completed a round of engine tests without any explosions. At this point, it seems things are going well for SpaceX and Crew Dragon. It makes sense that, following these successful tests and Musk's previous estimate, Crew Dragon might be ready to launch on May 7th. When the flight does occur, it could look something like this simulated two-minute video clip that Musk tweeted late last year.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Atlas: Organic solar cells (OSCs) have a few advantages over other designs. They still collect energy from sunlight, but can be made more flexible, transparent (or at least semi-transparent) and can be tuned to only absorb certain wavelengths of light. That potentially makes them perfect for greenhouse roofing -- they can let most light through for the plants, while harvesting enough to offset a decent chunk of the facility's energy needs. "Plants only use some wavelengths of light for photosynthesis, and the idea is to create greenhouses that make energy from that unused light while allowing most of the photosynthetic band of light to pass through," says Brendan O'Connor, corresponding author of the study [from North Carolina State University]. "However, until now it wasn't clear how much energy a greenhouse could capture if it was using these semitransparent, wavelength selective, organic solar cells."

To begin to answer that question, the researchers modeled how much energy would be coming in from a greenhouse with OSCs in the roof, versus the amount of energy it would normally consume. The idea was to find the point where the greenhouse becomes energy neutral -- that is, it generates enough energy from the Sun to completely power itself. For this study, the theoretical greenhouses were modeled on the energy needed to grow tomatoes in three locations with different climates -- Arizona, North Carolina and Wisconsin. As a bonus, the OSCs are effective insulators too, helping maintain the right temperature. The team found that there would be a small hit to the amount of usable light the plants inside would receive, but the benefits would be worth it. In the famously sunny Arizona, for example, a greenhouse with OSCs installed could become energy neutral while blocking just 10 percent of the light the plants need. This shouldn't negatively affect the plants, the team says. In fact, the energy output could be doubled with just a little more light blocked. In North Carolina, sunlight is a little more sparse, so a greenhouse would need to block 20 percent of the photosynthetic light to become energy neutral. Chilly Wisconsin winters would be too much to ever achieve neutrality though, but these greenhouses could still generate almost half of their energy needs. The new study was published in the journal Joule.

It's another sea of red ink for federal research funding programs in President Donald Trump's latest budget proposal. The 2021 budget request to Congress released today calls for deep, often double-digit cuts to R&D spending at major science agencies. From a report: At the same time, the president wants to put more money into a handful of areas -- notably artificial intelligence (AI) and quantum information science (QIS) -- to create the new technology needed for what the budget request calls "industries of the future." Here is a rundown of some of the numbers from the budget request's R&D chapter. (The numbers reflect the portion of each agency's budget classified as research, which in most cases is less than its overall budget.)

1. National Institutes of Health: a cut of 7%, or $2.942 billion, to $36.965 billion.
2. National Science Foundation (NSF): a cut of 6%, or $424 million, to $6.328 billion.
3. Department of Energy's (DOE's) Office of Science: a cut of 17%, or $1.164 billion, to $5.760 billion.
4. NASA science: a cut of 11%, or $758 million, to $6.261 billion.
5. DOE's Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy: a cut of 173%, which would not only eliminate the $425 million agency, but also force it to return $311 million to the U.S. Department of the Treasury.
6. U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA's) Agricultural Research Service: a cut of 12%, or $190 million, to $1.435 billion.
7. National Institute of Standards and Technology: a cut of 19%, or $154 million, to $653 million.
8. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration: a cut of 31%, or $300 million, to $678 million.
9. Environmental Protection Agency science and technology: a cut of 37%, or $174 million, to $318 million.
10. Department of Homeland Security science and technology: a cut of 15%, or $65 million, to $357 million.
11. U.S. Geological Survey: a cut of 30%, or $200 million, to $460 million.

Last June NASA announced plans to host visitors on the International Space Station for just $35,000 a day.

"And now we know where they'll be sleeping," reports the Motley Fool: Earlier this week, NASA announced that it has selected Axiom Space to build "at least one habitable commercial module to be attached to the International Space Station...." In this particular demonstration project, Axiom will deliver to the ISS an "element" which "will attach to the space station's Node 2 forward port," giving access to the rest of the space station, and also a place for weary private astronauts to lay their heads at night...

"Developing commercial destinations in low-Earth orbit" is a priority for NASA, explains the agency -- whether those destinations are attached to the ISS or not... The "habitable commercial module" that Axiom is building will facilitate onboarding private businesses to do work on the ISS, creating potential new revenue streams to subsidize NASA's more adventurous endeavors farther out from Low Earth Orbit. With NASA's budget today stuck below where it was in 1972 -- the year of America's last crewed mission to the moon -- the agency's going to need significant new funding to perform planned missions to Mars and beyond in future years. If Congress won't pony up additional cash, therefore, the agency may hope to raise cash from private industry...

NASA says it "also plans to issue a final opportunity to partner with the agency in the development of a free-flying, independent commercial destination" at some point in the future. This latter opportunity should be of particular interest to both Axiom and Bigelow -- which, like Axiom, has expressed interest in building its own space stations independent of the ISS.
"If Axiom succeeds in building and operating a commercial space station," writes Axios, "it will mark a turning point for how space is used and who has access to it..."

They also report that Axiom expects to procure flights to the ISS from both SpaceX and Boeing. And when the International Space Station reaches its end-of-life, "Axiom plans to remove its modules and become a free-standing station that can be accessed by the company's customers."

"Scientists have discovered the first fast radio burst that beats at a steady rhythm, and the mysterious repeating signal is coming from the outskirts of another galaxy," reports Vice: A mysterious radio source located in a galaxy 500 million light years from Earth is pulsing on a 16-day cycle, like clockwork, according to a new study. This marks the first time that scientists have ever detected periodicity in these signals, which are known as fast radio bursts (FRBs), and is a major step toward unmasking their sources.

FRBs are one of the most tantalizing puzzles that the universe has thrown at scientists in recent years. First spotted in 2007, these powerful radio bursts are produced by energetic sources, though nobody is sure what those might be... Pulses from these repeat bursts have, so far, seemed somewhat random and discordant in their timing. But that changed last year, when the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment Fast Radio Burst Project (CHIME/FRB), a group dedicated to observing and studying FRBs, discovered that a repeater called FRB 180916.J0158+65 had a regular cadence...

While we still don't know what is blasting out these bizarre signals, the discovery of a clear tempo from one of these sources provides a significant lead for scientists to follow.

"Russia's intelligence services are apparently behind a well-coordinated social media campaign to blame the U.S. for creating and unleashing the Wuhan coronavirus on the world," reports the International Business Times.

That conclusion comes from the Atlantic Council think tank (founded in 1961), which established its Digital Forensic Research Lab in 2016. Eto Buziashvili, an analyst at the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab, published a report detailing how Russia's state propaganda units are disseminating different versions of conspiracies alleging the coronavirus is a U.S. creation. Western intelligence sources quoted by media said posts blaming the U.S. for attacking China with 2019-nCoV first began appearing on pro-Russia social media outlets such as VK (VKontakte) and Topcor.ru. The fake news has now spread to traditional Russian news media organizations such as Pravda and Izvestia and state propaganda platforms. State-controlled outlets are accusing the U.S. of using bioweapons against China...

A Russian website called Katushya.org says the People's Liberation Army (PLA), China's armed forces, is claiming the coronavirus was artificially produced in U.S. laboratories with the goal of destroying China from within.
"So far, their efforts have gained very little traction," Eto Buziashvili wrote on January 30, while adding that it still "serves as a reminder of Russia's long history of employing anti-U.S. influence operations during public health crises."

But the progressive political magazine Mother Jones argues that pro-Kremlin websites "are just one example of the kinds of outlets trying to capitalize on coronavirus fears. Some YouTube creators have been doing their best to get views and hawk money-making products and services on the backs of coronavirus fears; high-profile right-wing conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones are doing the same. Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have tried to step up their efforts to curb misinformation linked to the virus, but hoaxes and conspiracies continue to seep through."

A reader quotes Inverse: In an incredible feat of remote engineering, NASA has fixed one of the most intrepid explorers in human history. Voyager 2, currently some 11.5 billion miles from Earth, is back online and resuming its mission to collect scientific data on the solar system and the interstellar space beyond.

On Wednesday, February 5 at 10:00 p.m. Eastern, NASA's Voyager Twitter account gave out the good news: Voyager 2 is not only stable, but is back at its critical science mission.

"My twin is back to taking science data, and the team at @NASAJPL is evaluating the health of the instruments after their brief shutoff," the account tweeted... In a statement, NASA confirmed that Voyager 2 is back in business. "Mission operators report that Voyager 2 continues to be stable and that communications between the Earth and the spacecraft are good...."

The fix is no mean feat: It takes 17 hours one-way to communicate with Voyager 2 from Earth, which is the furthest away manmade object in space. That means a single information relay takes 34 hours.

This week Medium's tech blog OneZero published a 4,500-word look at Google's "methodical, iterative" and massive "living experiment" on its own employees to see if they can nudge them into making healthier choices when they eat: The campaign isn't changing just the food itself, but how it's presented. Google's tactics include limiting portion sizes for meat and desserts and redesigning its premises to lead its "users" to choose water and fruit over soda and M&M's. The goal, says Michiel Bakker, Google's director of global workplace programs, is to make the healthy choice the easy choice...

[T]he small changes make big differences. The plates on the buffet line are only eight to 10 inches wide, versus a standard 12 inches, which effectively limits serving sizes. Vegetables always come first on the line, so by the time you get to the meat or the snickerdoodles and chocolate tarts, there's not much space on your plate. "Spa water," bobbing with strawberries or cucumbers or lemons, is everywhere -- and deliberately more accessible than sugary drinks or even bottled water. A burrito at Google weighed in at about 10 ounces -- 60% smaller than the whopping one-pound nine-ounce log filled with similar ingredients that I picked up at a Chipotle near my home in Washington, D.C....

"Early choice architecture focused specifically on the process," said Ravi Dhar, a professor at Yale and the director of the school's Center for Customer Insights, which partners with Google on food research. "You didn't change the set of alternatives, but you rearranged them." So, if the goal was to get people to eat more vegetables, you would make the salad bar the first thing people see in a cafeteria -- hungry people usually grab the first food they see -- and leave it at that. But it turns out that's not enough. You also have to make the vegetables more abundant and more compelling -- and do the opposite for meat.
For example, moving the snacks table 10 feet further from the coffee machine reduced the likelihood of snacking by as much as 23% for men and 17% for women. But "Since then, Google has remade its 1,450 microkitchens. The unhealthy snacks -- now limited for the most part to M&M's and gummy bears -- are well away from the coffee machine, hidden in opaque canisters or in a drawer.

"At the same time, a big bowl of fresh fruit sits alluringly in the center of the counter nearest the coffee machine..."

"Chinese researchers reportedly have applied for a local patent on an experimental Gilead drug that they believe could help fight the novel coronavirus outbreak -- and also significantly bolster Gilead's bottom-line going forward..." reports The Street. "If granted, Gilead will need to get Chinese patent owners on board when it wants to sell the drug for treating the novel coronavirus infection outside China."

"The move is a sign that China views Gilead's therapy as one of the most promising candidates to fight the outbreak that has now claimed almost 500 lives..." Time reports. "While Gilead's experimental drug isn't licensed or approved anywhere in the world, it is being rushed into human trials in China on coronavirus patients after showing early signs of being highly effective."

But China's move concerns Bloomberg Opinion biotech/pharma columnist Max Nisen: If the patent is granted, it will confirm long-standing drugmaker fears about China's commitment to IP protection, raising concern about the industry's future in a crucial market. It also could further erode the already weak incentives for pharma to invest in drugs to combat emerging infectious diseases... [T]he company could see any potential return on the medication curtailed if China starts manufacturing it.

China's increasingly affluent population represents a huge opportunity for drugmakers. Many are investing heavily in the region despite previous data integrity and sales scandals. Leadership has recently demonstrated a greater commitment to IP rights in its initial trade deal with the U.S., but granting this patent could erode trust in the government and scare off foreign drugmakers.

The consequences wouldn't be limited to declining corporate confidence in China, even if this is a one-time emergency event. The world dramatically under-invests in drugs to combat infectious diseases, and a move like this by the Chinese government wouldn't help. Developing such medicines isn't very profitable, compared to drugs for rare diseases and cancer. That's especially true when it comes to emerging viruses, in spite of the obvious risk. Outbreaks are more common in developing countries, which limits pricing power. By the time a company has managed to get approval for any given drug, often a years-long process, there's a good chance that the outbreak will be over.

Seizing the rights to treatments dents drugmakers' already limited incentive to invest in infectious-disease drugs, let alone spend heavily to develop and maintain the ability to respond rapidly to outbreaks and scale up manufacturing. Without the promise of some kind of return, investment is going to dry up. I'm not a rah-rah pharma guy. The industry often abuses the patent system, especially in the U.S., in order to profit for years off of old drugs to the detriment of patients and the health-care system. Its pricing practices are frequently unconscionable. This isn't one of those situations. It's arguably one of the rare cases where the ability of drugmakers to profit needs to be boosted rather than crimped.

"Scientists have cultivated plants from date palm seeds that languished in ancient ruins and caves for 2,000 years," writes ScienceAlert. schwit1 shared their report: This remarkable feat confirms the long-term viability of the kernels once ensconced in succulent Judean dates, a fruit cultivar lost for centuries. The results make it an excellent candidate for studying the longevity of plant seeds. From those date palm saplings, the researchers have begun to unlock the secrets of the highly sophisticated cultivation practices that produced the dates praised by Herodotus, Galen, and Pliny the Elder.

First, they collected fragments of the seed shells still clinging to the roots of the plants. These were perfect for radiocarbon dating -- which confirmed the seeds date back to between 1,800 and 2,400 years ago. Then, the researchers could conduct genetic analyses of the plants themselves, comparing them to a genetic database of current data palms. This showed exchanges of genetic material from eastern date palms from the Middle East, and western date palms from North Africa.

Indeed, the researchers found that the ancient seeds were up to 30 percent larger than date seeds today, which probably meant the fruit was larger, too.

And, of course, there's the seemingly miraculous germination after so many centuries. As anyone who buys seeds for their garden knows, seeds deteriorate; the longer you have a packet of seeds sitting in storage, the fewer will germinate when you finally plant them. If scientists can discover how the date seeds retained their viability for so long, that could have important implications for agriculture.

"Scientists have announced a breakthrough that could be key to the creation of a powerful new kind of particle collider," reports the Fermilab/SLAC magazine Symmetry.

Long-time Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot shared their report: As reported in the journal Nature, the Muon Ionization Cooling Experiment, or MICE, has for the first time demonstrated the successful taming of a beam of particles called muons through a process called transverse ionization cooling, and the more potential you have to make discoveries as that energy converts into new particles...

Muons — which are heavy relatives of electrons — are interesting to accelerator scientists for a number of reasons. For one, they are more massive than the particles they have traditionally used in colliders. The more massive the particles you collide, the higher the energies you can reach with your collisions, and the more potential you have to make discoveries as that energy converts into new particles... Scientists have thus far stuck to colliding particles such as protons, antiprotons, electrons, positrons and ions. One reason for this is the difficulty of producing a sufficient amount of muons and funneling them into an organized beam for an accelerator to propel and collide...

MICE scientists passed a beam of muons through an absorber, slowing down their momentum perpendicular to the beam direction and focusing them into a tight beam. They then used radio-frequency cavities to speed up the momentum of the beam in the forward direction. They repeated this until they were left with a focused, well-behaved beam of muons traveling the right way.

The scientists undertook the difficult task of measuring each particle one-by-one to evaluate their efforts. They found that they had achieved what they set out to do, bringing scientists a step closer to potentially making a muon collider a reality.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from IEEE Spectrum: A team from the University of California, Los Angeles, has developed a system that transforms "waste CO2" into gray blocks of concrete. In March, the researchers will relocate to the Wyoming Integrated Test Center, part of the Dry Fork power plant near the town of Gillette. During a three-month demonstration, the UCLA team plans to siphon half a ton of CO2 per day from the plant's flue gas and produce 10 tons of concrete daily. Carbon Upcycling UCLA is one of 10 teams competing in the final round of the NRG COSIA Carbon XPrize. The global competition aims to develop breakthrough technologies for converting carbon emissions into valuable products.

The UCLA initiative began about six years ago, as researchers contemplated the chemistry of Hadrian's Wall -- the nearly 1,900-year-old Roman structure in northern England. Masons built the wall by mixing calcium oxide with water, then letting it absorb CO2 from the atmosphere. The resulting reactions produced calcium carbonate, or limestone. But that cementation process can take years or decades to complete, an unimaginably long wait by today's standards. "We wanted to know, 'How do you make these reactions go faster?'" Gaurav Sant, a civil engineering professor who leads the team, recalled. The answer was portlandite, or calcium hydroxide. The compound is combined with aggregates and other ingredients to create the initial building element. That element then goes into a reactor, where it comes in contact with the flue gas coming directly out of a power plant's smokestack. The resulting carbonation reaction forms a solid building component akin to concrete. The UCLA system is unique among green concrete technologies because it doesn't require the expensive step of capturing and purifying CO2 emissions from power plants. Sant said his team's approach is the only one so far that directly uses the flue gas stream. The group has formed a company, CO2Concrete, to commercialize their technology with construction companies and other industrial partners.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: Viruses are some of the most mysterious organisms on Earth. They're among the world's tiniest lifeforms, and because none can survive and reproduce without a host, some scientists have questioned whether they should even be considered living things. Now, scientists have discovered one that has no recognizable genes, making it among the strangest of all known viruses. But how many viruses do we really know? Another group has just discovered thousands of new viruses hiding out in the tissues of dozens of animals. The finds speak to 'how much we still need to understand' about viruses, says one of the researchers, Jonatas Abrahao, a virologist at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte.

Abrahao made his discovery while hunting down giant viruses. These microbes -- some the size of bacteria -- were first discovered in amoebae in 2003. In a local artificial lake, he and his colleagues found not only new giant viruses, but also a virus that -- because of its small size -- was unlike most that infect in amoebae. They named it Yaravirus. (Yara is the "mother of waters" according to Indigenous Tupi-Guarani mythology.) Yaravirus's size wasn't the only thing weird about it. When the team sequenced its genome, none of its genes matched any scientists had come across before, the group reports on the bioRxiv preprint server.

A second software problem during a CST-100 Starliner test flight is prompting a NASA safety panel to recommend a review of Boeing's software verification processes. Space News reports: That new software problem, not previously discussed by NASA or Boeing, was discussed during a Feb. 6 meeting of NASA's Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel that examined the December uncrewed test flight of Starliner that was cut short by a timer error. That anomaly was discovered during ground testing while the spacecraft was in orbit, panel member Paul Hill said. "While this anomaly was corrected in flight, if it had gone uncorrected, it would have led to erroneous thruster firings and uncontrolled motion during [service module] separation for deorbit, with the potential for a catastrophic spacecraft failure," he said.

The exact cause of the failure remains under investigation by Boeing and NASA, who are also still examining the timer failure previously reported. Those problems, Hill said, suggested broader issues with how Boeing develops and tests the software used by the spacecraft. "The panel has a larger concern with the rigor of Boeing's verification processes," he said. The panel called for reviews of Boeing's flight software integration and testing processes. "Further, with confidence at risk for a spacecraft that is intended to carry humans in space, the panel recommends an even broader Boeing assessment of, and corrective actions in, Boeing's [systems engineering and integration] processes and verification testing." The panel added that all those investigations and reviews be completed as "required input for a formal NASA review to determine flight readiness for either another uncrewed flight test or proceeding directly to a crewed test flight."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Today, scientists are releasing the results of a clinical trial designed to test the safety of gene editing as a way of fighting cancer. The results are promising, in that a version of the CRISPR gene-editing system that's already a few years out of date appears to be safe when used to direct immune cells to attack cancer. But the cancers that it was meant to treat simply evolved ways of slipping past immune surveillance. For the clinical trial, this gene-editing system has been combined with recently developed immune therapies that target cancer. There is a class of immune T cells that kill cells recognized as foreign, either because they come from a different person (such as after an organ transplant) or because they are infected with a bacteria or virus. These cells can also recognize and attack cancer but often don't, in part because cancer cells are so similar to healthy ones. People have engineered versions of the T cells' recognition system that specifically target cancer cells, and placed these back into patients, helping the immune system attack the cancer, sometimes with spectacular results. As part of the clinical trial, gene editing was used to improve the efficiency of the cancer-targeting T cells. This was done in two different ways.

The first was to target a gene that normally functions to tone down the immune system (called PDCD1). There has been evidence generated in mice that using antibodies that block the protein made from this gene will increase the immune system's attack on cancers. For this work, the researchers targeted the CRISPR system to delete part of the gene itself, inactivating it. This poses a potential risk, as a failure to tone down the immune response can lead to problematic conditions such as autoimmune diseases. The other way gene editing was used was to knock out the T cell's normal system for recognizing foreign cells, called the T cell receptor (TCR). The TCR is composed of two related proteins that form a binary receptor complex. Engineered versions of this protein are the ones used to get cells to recognize and kill cancer. Normally, these engineered versions of the TCR are simply inserted into an immune cell, where both they and the cell's normal TCR genes are also active. The result is four different TCR parts active at the same time, resulting in a variety of hybrid TCRs. At best, these are ineffective and will reduce the total amount of active TCR in a cell. At worst, they'll cause the T cell to attack healthy cells. For the trial, the researchers generated CRISPR constructs that targeted the cell's normal TCR genes. When successfully deleted, this would ensure that the only TCR on the cell's surface would recognize cancer cells. The researchers ended up working with a total of three patients that had cancers recognized by a known version of the TCR genes.

"While the rates of successful editing were high, the procedure is nowhere near 100 percent effective, and rates of editing varied from nearly half down to 15 percent, depending on the gene," the report says. It adds: "There were no serious adverse affects of the T cell infusions, no sign of a problematic immune response, and the cells persisted in the patients up to nine months after the transfusions, indicating they were tolerated well. [...] The response to the tumor, however, was limited. Two patients appeared to stabilize, while the third showed a response in some tissues but not in others. Ultimately, however, the disease began to progress again, and one of the patients has since died."