Amazing Science

Tufts University researchers suggest that their discovery offers a roadmap for exploration of therapeutic drugs that could help repair birth defects in humans.

Scientists led by biologists at Tufts University say they have discovered that the brains of developing frog embryos damaged by nicotine exposure can be repaired by treatment with “ionoceuticals” that drive the recovery of bioelectric patterns in the embryo, followed by repair of normal anatomy, gene expression and brain function in the growing tadpole.

Their study “HCN2 Channel-Induced Rescue of Brain Teratogenesis via Local and Long-Range Bioelectric Repair” published in Frontiers in Cellular Neuroscience, introduces intervention strategies based on restoring the bioelectric blueprint for embryonic development, which the researchers suggest could provide a roadmap for the exploration of therapeutic drugs to help repair birth defects.

Earlier studies had shown that nicotine disrupts the normal electrical patterns in the brain of the growing embryo, basically washing out, or reducing the contrast, of the bioelectric blueprint—a map of varying voltage levels around the cells that guides the pattern and growth of tissues and organs. Nicotine in humans has been linked to prenatal morbidity, sudden infant death, attention deficit hypersensitivity disorder (ADHD), and other deficits in cognitive function, learning, and memory, but many questions had remained about how this molecule induces structural defects in the brain.

The authors applied nicotine to developing frog embryos to create neural defects with the intention of identifying specific interventions that could reverse the chemical’s harmful effects. Their previous research identified one particular element in the natural electric signaling that controls brain development, hyperpolarization-activated cyclic nucleotide gated channel-2 (HCN2), which was able to restore the bioelectric patterns—much like dialing up the contrast with a photo edit tool–and protect against nicotine-induced defects.

“Embryonic exposure to the teratogen nicotine results in brain defects, by disrupting endogenous spatial pre patterns necessary for normal brain size and patterning. Extending prior work in Xenopus laevis that showed that misexpression of ion channels can rescue morphogenesis, we demonstrate and characterize a novel aspect of developmental bioelectricity: channel-dependent repair signals propagate long-range across the embryo. We show that distal HCN2 channel misexpression and distal transplants of HCN2-expressing tissue, non-cell-autonomously reverse profound defects, rescuing brain anatomy, gene expression, and learning,” write the investigators.

“Moreover, such rescue can be induced by small-molecule HCN2 channel activators, even with delayed treatment initiation. We present a simple, versatile computational model of bioelectrical signaling upstream of key patterning genes such as OTX2 and XBF1, which predicts long-range repair induced by ion channel activity, and experimentally validate the predictions of this model.

“Our results and quantitative model identify a powerful morphogenetic control mechanism that could be targeted by future regenerative medicine exploiting ion channel modulating drugs approved for human use.”

Modeling of complex adaptive systems has revealed a still poorly understood benefit of unsupervised learning: when neural networks are enabled to form an associative memory of a large set of their own attractor configurations, they begin to reorganize their connectivity in a direction that minimizes the coordination constraints posed by the initial network architecture. This self-optimization process has been replicated in various neural network formalisms, but it is still unclear whether it can be applied to biologically more realistic network topologies and scaled up to larger networks.

Scientists now have continued their efforts to respond to these challenges by demonstrating the process on the connectome of the widely studied nematode worm C. elegans. They extended their previous work by considering the contributions made by hierarchical partitions of the connectome that form functional clusters, and they explored possible beneficial effects of inter-cluster inhibitory connections. The results showed that the self-optimization process can be applied to neural network topologies characterized by greater biological realism, and that long-range inhibitory connections can facilitate the generalization capacity of the process.

Immune warriors known as T cells help us fight some viruses, but their importance for battling SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, has been unclear. Now, two studies reveal infected people harbor T cells that target the virus—and may help them recover. Both studies also found some people never infected with SARS-CoV-2 have these cellular defenses, most likely because they were previously infected with other coronaviruses.

“This is encouraging data,” says virologist Angela Rasmussen of Columbia University. Although the studies don’t clarify whether people who clear a SARS-CoV-2 infection can ward off the virus in the future, both identified strong T cell responses to it, which “bodes well for the development of long-term protective immunity,” Rasmussen says. The findings could also help researchers create better vaccines.

The more than 100 COVID-19 vaccines in development mainly focus on another immune response: antibodies. These proteins are made by B cells and ideally latch onto SARS-CoV-2 and prevent it from entering cells. T cells, in contrast, thwart infections in two different ways. Helper T cells spur B cells and other immune defenders into action, whereas killer T cells target and destroy infected cells. The severity of disease can depend on the strength of these T cell responses.

Using bioinformatics tools, a team led by Shane Crotty and Alessandro Sette, immunologists at the La Jolla Institute for Immunology, predicted which viral protein pieces would provoke the most powerful T cell responses. They then exposed immune cells from 10 patients who had recovered from mild cases of COVID-19 to these viral snippets.

All of the patients carried helper T cells that recognized the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, which enables the virus to infiltrate our cells. They also harbored helper T cells that react to other SARS-CoV-2 proteins. And the team detected virus-specific killer T cells in 70% of the subjects, they report today in Cell. “The immune system sees this virus and mounts an effective immune response,” Sette says.

The results jibe with those of a study posted as a preprint on medRxiv on 22 April by immunologist Andreas Thiel of the Charité University Hospital in Berlin and colleagues. They identified helper T cells targeting the spike protein in 15 out of 18 patients hospitalized with COVID-19.

Researchers are finding evidence that patients who test positive for the coronavirus after recovering aren’t capable of transmitting the infection, and could have the antibodies that prevent them from falling sick again.

Scientists from the Korean Centers for Disease Control and Prevention studied 285 Covid-19 survivors who had tested positive for the coronavirus after their illness had apparently resolved, as indicated by a previous negative test result. The so-called re-positive patients weren’t found to have spread any lingering infection, and virus samples collected from them couldn’t be grown in culture, indicating the patients were shedding non-infectious or dead virus particles.

The findings, reported late Monday, are a positive sign for regions looking to open up as more patients recover from the pandemic that has sickened at least 4.8 million people. The emerging evidence from South Korea suggests those who have recovered from Covid-19 present no risk of spreading the coronavirus when physical distancing measures are relaxed.

Malware doesn’t come out of thin air, nor does it spontaneously birth itself from the bowels of the net. Every single strain that’s ever existed was programmed by someone, either lovingly hand-crafted from scratch or quickly edited from existing code in an effort to sneak past antivirus sensors. But while there are (literally) countless cybercriminals on the web, only a few elites have earned the right to call themselves the most dangerous hackers in the world.

This review compiles a list of some of these individuals, groups, and organizations. The people who will always be trying to do you harm. The people who’ll ensure that cyber security professionals always have jobs; … that said, you’ll find this list lacking in one regard: the most successful cybercriminals are the ones who take great care to never get caught, or even leave a clue as to their presence. That means that most lists like these are composed of organizations who wanted the world to know they were there, or people who are currently being investigated for being careless. Which is all well and good — no one’s going to deny that Gary McKinnon hacking into the NSA and costing the US $700,000 is problematic. But in the wider world of hacking, he and others like him are more of an annoyance than a mastermind, at least compared to the still unknown author of the SoBig.F Worm, which did $37.1 billion in damages around the globe.

Naturally blond hair is rare in humans and found almost exclusively in Europe and Oceania. In 2012, scientists identified an arginine-to-cysteine (R->C) change at a highly conserved residue in tyrosinase-related protein 1 (TYRP1) as a major determinant of blond hair in Solomon Islanders. This missense mutation is predicted to affect the catalytic activity of TYRP1 and thus causes blond hair through a recessive mode of inheritance. The mutation occurs at a frequency of 26% in the Solomon Islands, and is absent outside of Oceania. It represents a strong common genetic effect on a complex human phenotype, and highlights the importance of examining genetic associations worldwide.

Researchers have finally succeeded in creating strong coupling between quantum systems over a great distance. They accomplished this with a novel method in which a laser loop connects the systems, enabling nearly lossless exchange of information and strong interaction between them. In the journal Science, physicists from the University of Basel and University of Hanover reported that the new method opens up new possibilities in quantum networks and quantum sensor technology.

Quantum technology is currently one of the most active fields of research worldwide. It takes advantage of the special properties of quantum mechanical states of atoms, light, or nanostructures to develop, for example, novel sensors for medicine and navigation, networks for information processing and powerful simulators for materials sciences. Generating these quantum states normally requires a strong interaction between the systems involved, such as between several atoms or nanostructures.

Until now, however, sufficiently strong interactions were limited to short distances. Typically, two systems had to be placed close to each other on the same chip at low temperatures or in the same vacuum chamber, where they interact via electrostatic or magnetostatic forces. Coupling them across larger distances, however, is required for many applications such as quantum networks or certain types of sensors.

A team of physicists, led by Professor Philipp Treutlein from the Department of Physics at the University of Basel and the Swiss Nanoscience Institute (SNI), has now succeeded for the first time in creating strong coupling between two systems over a greater distance across a room temperature environment. In their experiment, the researchers used laser light to couple the vibrations of a 100 nanometer thin membrane to the motion of the spin of atoms over a distance of one meter. As a result, each vibration of the membrane sets the spin of the atoms in motion and vice versa.

A loop of light acts as a mechanical spring

The experiment is based on a concept that the researchers developed together with the theoretical physicist Professor Klemens Hammerer from the University of Hanover. It involves sending a beam of laser light back and forth between the systems. "The light then behaves like a mechanical spring stretched between the atoms and the membrane, and transmits forces between the two," explains Dr. Thomas Karg, who carried out the experiments as part of his doctoral thesis at the University of Basel. In this laser loop, the properties of the light can be controlled such that no information about the motion of the two systems is lost to the environment, thus ensuring that the quantum mechanical interaction is not disturbed.

Forget light sabers. Researchers on Earth have invented something far flashier: a Star Wars–like 3D display that simultaneously projects video, sound, and even the sensation of touch. The new displays can’t create holograms as complex as Princess Leia’s famous distress call. But with further improvements, they could transform virtual reality, providing users a multi-sensory experience without headsets or other cumbersome gear.

“They did an amazing job with this,” says Asier Marzo, a computer scientist at the University of Navarra in Pamplona, Spain, who was not involved with the work. Future versions, he says, could give doctors 3D views of tumors inside the body or provide soldiers with an accurate depiction of what lies ahead. “It has the potential to revolutionize the display ecosystem,” Marzo says.

There are already many ways to create 3D movies, including headsets that project a sequence of slightly different images to our two eyes to fool us into experiencing the sensation of depth. A newer, less-cumbersome alternative projects laser light on a vibrating screen, giving viewers the impression of seeing a moving 3D image. But it can’t project sound. And if viewers try to touch the images, they could wind up with nasty burns from the laser light.

To add sound and touch, scientists put their own spin on a technique first reported this year by Marzo and his colleagues. It projects light onto a tiny plastic bead moving rapidly through a space the size of a coffee cup. Scientists move the bead using ultrasound waves; like sound waves we can hear, the ultrasound waves compress and decompress the air as they travel, creating regions of low and high pressure. Where several ultrasound waves converge on a single point, they can create a low-pressure spot that traps the bead, suspending it in midair. And by using an array of computer-controlled speakers surrounding the bead, researchers can move it continuously at nearly 9 meters per second.

Marzo’s team steers its bead repeatedly throughout the space and project red, green, and blue light onto it from nearby light-emitting diodes. The light becomes visible only when it bounces off of the bead. And because this occurs faster than the eye can see, it gives viewers the impression that they are seeing moving 3D pictures, Marzo and colleagues reported in August in Applied Physics Letters.

Total deaths in seven states that have been hard hit by the coronavirus pandemic are nearly 50 percent higher than normal for the five weeks from March 8 through April 11 2020, according to new death statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That is 9,000 more deaths than were reported as of April 11 in official counts of deaths from the coronavirus.

The new data is partial and most likely undercounts the recent death toll significantly. But it still illustrates how the coronavirus is causing a surge in deaths in the places it has struck, probably killing more people than the reported statistics capture. These increases belie arguments that the virus is only killing people who would have died anyway from other causes. Instead, the virus has brought a pattern of deaths unlike anything seen in recent years.

If you look at the provisional deaths from all causes, death counts in New York, New Jersey, Michigan, Massachusetts, Illinois, Maryland and Colorado have spiked far above their normal levels for the period. In New York City, the home of the biggest outbreak, the number of deaths over this period is more than three times the normal number. Recent data suggests it could have reached six times higher than normal.

Fundamental physics is an unknown world to most people. Equations, symbols, and incomprehensible terms abound, and unless you've studied post-grad mathematics and physics, this world is inaccessible to you. Although there are several great resources to map the way toward complete understanding. Most people will not undertake the journey to understand the source code to the world that we all inhabit.

The goal of the Graph, Wall, Tome project is to solve this problem by building a portal anyone can use to travel to the amazing world that we call fundamental physics.

The name of the project stems from the observation that there are three resources that themselves contain all that you need for an almost complete understanding of the world.

1. The Graph - A paragraph written by Edward Witten
2. The Wall - The iconic wall of Stony Brook University
3. The Tome - The book 'The Road to Reality' by Roger Penrose

Read more on theportal.wiki

COVID-19 Symptoms Swayed By Genetics

More info from WIRED Magazine

Some people experience Covid-19 as nothing more than a mild cold, and others exhibit no symptoms at all. Then there are the thousands who sicken and, often, die. Scientists are working hard to understand the underlying reasons for such huge discrepancies in symptoms and outcomes. No one knows the answer yet. One theory: It is locked deep in our genetic makeup.

More than 90 vaccines are being developed against SARS-CoV-2 by research teams in companies and universities across the world. Researchers are trialling different technologies, some of which haven’t been used in a licensed vaccine before. At least six groups have already begun injecting formulations into volunteers in safety trials; others have started testing in animals. Nature’s graphical guide explains each vaccine design.

Researchers at Switzerland-based Empa, ETH Zurich and Zurich University Hospital have developed a sensor that has the potential to identify SARS-CoV-2, the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19, in the air. The work is led by Jing Wang at Empa, who usually works on measuring and analyzing airborne pollutants.

The sensor has reliably shown the sensor can identify the first SARS-CoV virus that was responsible for the SARS pandemic in 2003. It has numerous similarities to SARS-CoV-2. “Tests showed that the sensor can clearly distinguish between the very similar RNA sequences of the two viruses,” Jing Wang said. And the results appear in minutes.

The system requires more development before it could be used in the real world, although the researchers believe it could be used in places like airports and train stations. “This still needs development work,” Wang said.

The biosensor is based on previous work Wang and his team conducted on using biosensors to detect bacteria and viruses in the air as possible diagnostics. They don’t believe the systems would replace traditional laboratory tests, but might be leveraged as alternative methods for clinical diagnosis and to measure viral concentrations in busy locations like hospitals or train stations.

The biosensor combines the effects of an optical and thermal sensor. It is built on gold nano-islands, which are minuscule gold structures which are then laid on out a glass substrate. SARS-CoV-2 is what is called an RNA virus, which is to say, its genetic materials are not double-stranded DNA, but single-stranded RNA. DNA receptors that match specific RNA sequences of the SARS-CoV-2 virus are grafted onto the nano-island. The sensor’s receptors are a complementary sequence to the virus’s DNA, which can reliably identify the virus.

The detection technology is called localized surface plasmon resonance, or LSPR. This refers to an optical phenomenon that happens in metallic nanostructures. When they are stimulated, or excited, they modulate the incident light in a specific wavelength range, which creates a plasmonic near-field around the nanostructure. The researchers state that, “When molecules bind to the surface, the local refractive index within the excited plasmonic near-field changes. An optical sensor located on the back of the sensor can be used to measure this change and thus determine whether the sample contains the RNA strands in question.”

In order to ensure that the RNA strands that exactly match the DNA receptor on the sensor are captured, they leverage what is called the plasmonic photothermal (PPT) effect. If the nanostructure layered on the sensor is excited with a laser of a specific wavelength, it heats up.

When the single strand of the virus RNA finds its complementary counterpart, they combine into a double strand in what is called hybridization. When a double strand splits into single strands, called melting or denaturation, it occurs at a specific temperature, called the melting temperature.

Everybody knows of the Hubble Space Telescope, but not everyone knows just how amazing it is. The Hubble launched in 1990, on the 24th of April, from the Space Shuttle Discovery, and while it was not the first telescope in space, it was larger and more capable than any that came before. It was the first of NASAs four Great Observatories, along with the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory, the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, and the Spitzer Space Telescope, launched in 1991, 1999, and 2003 respectively.

A research team including research scientist Atsuko Kobayashi from the Earth-Life Science Institute (ELSI) at Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan and research scientist Mizuho Koike from the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science at Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, have found nitrogen-bearing organic material in carbonate minerals in a Martian meteorite. This organic material has most likely been preserved for 4 billion years since Mars’ Noachian age. Because carbonate minerals typically precipitate from the groundwater, this finding suggests a wet and organic-rich early Mars, which could have been habitable and favorable for life to start.

For decades, scientists have tried to understand whether there are organic compounds on Mars and if so, what their source is. Although recent studies from rover-based Mars exploration have detected strong evidence for Martian organics, little is known about where they came from, how old they are, how widely distributed and preserved they may be, or what their possible relationship with biochemical activity could be.

Martian meteorites are pieces of Mars’ surface that were themselves blasted into space by meteor impacts, and which ultimately landed on Earth. They provide important insights into Martian history. One meteorite in particular, named Allan Hills (ALH) 84001, named for the region in Antarctica it was found in 1984, is especially important. It contains orange-colored carbonate minerals, which precipitated from salty liquid water on Mars’ near-surface 4 billion years ago. As these minerals record Mars’ early aqueous environment, many studies have tried to understand their unique chemistry and whether they might provide evidence for ancient life on Mars. However, previous analyses suffered from contamination with terrestrial material from Antarctic snow and ice, making it difficult to say how much of the organic material in the meteorite were truly Martian. In addition to carbon, nitrogen (N) is an essential element for terrestrial life and a useful tracer for planetary system evolution. However, due to previous technical limitations, nitrogen had not yet been measured in ALH84001.

This new research conducted by the joint ELSI-JAXA team used state-of-the-art analytical techniques to study the nitrogen content of the ALH84001 carbonates, and the team is now confident they have found the first solid evidence for 4-billion-year-old Martian organics containing nitrogen.

The missions capable of finding life by looking for Biosignatures (the chemical fingerprints of life) on planets and moons of our own solar system and in atmospheres of exoplanets are now on the drawing board. The upcoming Decadal Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics for the 2030s will have a great deal to say on that subject. At the moment we can only say that telescopes capable of imaging exoplanets and spectroscopically examining their atmospheres will be BIG between 2020 and 2030. A lot of research is going on within the Astrobiology Community to understand what might be the best candidate Biosignatures and how to interpret them and recognize false positives. There is a great deal yet to be known.

A mix of legacy drug makers and small startups have stepped forward with plans to develop vaccines or treatments that target the infection caused by the novel coronavirus. COVID-19, which was first detected in December in Wuhan, China, has since sickened nearly 4.6 million people worldwide and killed more than 300,000, as of mid-May 2020.

The Food and Drug Administration has issued two emergency-use authorizations for COVID-19 treatments, including one for hydroxychloroquine sulfate and chloroquine phosphate in March to treat COVID-19 patients and one for Gilead Sciences Inc.’s remdesivir on May 1. No drugs or vaccines have received FDA approval. Read more of MarketWatch’s coverage of COVID-19.

Scientists have discovered a handful of ultrarare mutations present in our cells from birth that likely shave years off a person’s life. Each of these DNA variants, most likely inherited from our parents, can reduce life span by as much as 6 months, the researchers estimate. And different combinations can dictate how long people live before developing age-related diseases such as cancer, diabetes, and dementia.

A person’s genes don’t set a specific natural life span—diet and many other factors play large roles, too—but studies have shown that DNA variants can influence the aging process. Biologists chalk up less than one-third of that influence to the genes we inherit. The source of other age-influencing DNA variation is environmental: Sun damage, chemical exposure, and other insults that create thousands of random mutations. Each cell’s collection of these environmental mutations differs, and most don’t greatly impact a person’s life span.

Hunting for these rare mutations, which are found in less than one in every 10,000 people, required a group effort. Harvard University geneticist Vadim Gladyshev, a senior co-author in the new study, partnered with academic colleagues and a biotech company called Gero LLC to scour the UK Biobank, a public database containing the genotypes of about 500,000 volunteers.

Using more than 40,000 of these genotypes, the team looked for correlations between small changes in DNA and health conditions, a so-called genome-wide association study. Specifically, the variants they were targeting knock out genes entirely, depriving all the cells in the body of certain proteins.

On average, each person is born with six ultrarare variants that can decrease life span and “health span,” the amount of time people live before developing serious diseases, the team reports this month in eLife. The more mutations, the more likely a person was to develop an age-related illness at a younger age or die. “The exact combination matters,” Gladyshev says, but in general, each mutation decreases life span by 6 months and health span by 2 months.

The results build on what is already known about aging: “Family genes” matter. But rather than studying the common mutations found in especially long-lived people, researchers can now target rarer variants present in everyone. Gladyshev hopes this information can be used in clinical trials to categorize participants by their mutations in addition to things like gender and actual age.

From space, Venus is bright white because it is covered with clouds that reflect and scatter sunlight. At the surface, the rocks are different shades of grey, like rocks on Earth, but the thick atmosphere filters the sunlight so that everything would look orange if you were standing on Venus.

Venus has mountains, valleys, and tens of thousands of volcanoes. The highest mountain on Venus, Maxwell Montes, is 20,000 feet high (8.8 kilometers), similar to the highest mountain on Earth, Mount Everest. The landscape is dusty, and surface temperatures reach a scalding 880 degrees Fahrenheit (471 degrees Celsius). A 3D model of the surface of Venus (Download Options).

Venus is covered in craters, but none are smaller than 0.9 to 1.2 miles (1.5 to 2 kilometers) across. Small meteoroids burn up in the dense atmosphere, so only large meteoroids reach the surface and create impact craters.

Almost all the surface features of Venus are named for noteworthy Earth women — both mythological and real. A volcanic crater is named for Sacajawea, the Native American woman who guided Lewis and Clark's exploration. A deep canyon is named for Diana, Roman goddess of the hunt.

Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) is a novel enveloped RNA beta-coronavirus that emerged in December 2019 in Wuhan, China, and is the cause of the current coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19).

The most frequent clinical presentation of severe COVID-19 is pneumonia with fever, cough and dyspnoea. The Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention reported that of 44,500 confirmed infections the majority of infected patients (80%) experienced mild disease, with either no or only mild pneumonia. However, 14% developed severe disease, with dyspnoea, hypoxia or greater than 50% lung involvement on imaging tests. Furthermore, around 5% developed a critical form of the disease, characterized by respiratory failure, systemic shock and/or multi-organ failures1. Approximately 20–30% of all patients who needed to be hospitalized with COVID-19-associated pneumonia have required intensive care for respiratory support2,3.

Acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) is a common complication of severe viral pneumonia, including pneumonia caused by highly pathogenic coronaviruses such as SARS-CoV-2 and Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV)4. In a group of 1,099 patients hospitalized for COVID-19, ARDS was reported to occur in 15.6% of patients with severe pneumonia5.

A recent study from New York, which has emerged as the epicenter for the pandemic in the United States, reported that out of 2,634 patients who were hospitalized with confirmed COVID-19 between 1 March and 4 April 2020, 14.2% of patients were treated in intensive care units (ICUs), 12.2% of patients required invasive mechanical ventilation and 21% of patients died. Mortality for those requiring mechanical ventilation was 88.1%6.

The factors that trigger severe illness in individuals infected with SARS-CoV-2 are not completely understood and the development of severe disease does not seem to be solely related to viral load and could involve a defective interferon response7. An excessive inflammatory response to SARS-CoV-2 is thought to be a major cause of disease severity and death in patients with COVID-19 (ref.8) and is associated with high levels of circulating cytokines, profound lymphopenia and substantial mononuclear cell infiltration in the lungs, heart9, spleen, lymph nodes and kidney10,11, as observed in post-mortem analysis.

Given that the morbidity and mortality seen in COVID-19 is associated with excessive inflammation, a better understanding of the immunological underpinnings of the differential responses seen in patients infected with SARS-CoV-2 is necessary to better identify therapeutic targets. Dozens of immunomodulatory agents are rapidly going into clinical trials as well as already being used routinely in the clinic in an off-label manner. Without a thorough understanding of which particular inflammatory pathways and cell types represent the best targets, some of these strategies could have detrimental effects in certain patients and/or at different stages of COVID-19 disease. Recently, scientists investigated the nature of the inflammatory responses that have been detected so far in patients with COVID-19; in particular, and highlighted the emerging roles of monocytes and macrophages in the pathology of COVID-19.

A team of astronomers from the European Southern Observatory (ESO) and other institutes has discovered a black hole lying just 1000 light-years from Earth. The black hole is closer to our Solar System than any other found to date and forms part of a triple system that can be seen with the naked eye. The team found evidence for the invisible object by tracking its two companion stars using the MPG/ESO 2.2-meter telescope at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile. They say this system could just be the tip of the iceberg, as many more similar black holes could be found in the future.

"We were totally surprised when we realiszd that this is the first stellar system with a black hole that can be seen with the unaided eye,” says Petr Hadrava, Emeritus Scientist at the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic in Prague and co-author of the research. Located in the constellation of Telescopium, the system is so close to us that its stars can be viewed from the southern hemisphere on a dark, clear night without binoculars or a telescope. “This system contains the nearest black hole to Earth that we know of,” says ESO scientist Thomas Rivinius, who led the study published today in Astronomy & Astrophysics.

The team originally observed the system, called HR 6819, as part of a study of double-star systems. However, as they analyzed their observations, they were stunned when they revealed a third, previously undiscovered body in HR 6819: a black hole. The observations with the FEROS spectrograph on the MPG/ESO 2.2-meter telescope at La Silla showed that one of the two visible stars orbits an unseen object every 40 days, while the second star is at a large distance from this inner pair.

Dietrich Baade, Emeritus Astronomer at ESO in Garching and co-author of the study, says: “The observations needed to determine the period of 40 days had to be spread over several months. This was only possible thanks to ESO’s pioneering service-observing scheme under which observations are made by ESO staff on behalf of the scientists needing them.”

The hidden black hole in HR 6819 is one of the very first stellar-mass black holes found that do not interact violently with their environment and, therefore, appear truly black. But the team could spot its presence and calculate its mass by studying the orbit of the star in the inner pair. “An invisible object with a mass at least 4 times that of the Sun can only be a black hole,” concludes Rivinius, who is based in Chile.

Astronomers have spotted only a couple of dozen black holes in our galaxy to date, nearly all of which strongly interact with their environment and make their presence known by releasing powerful X-rays in this interaction. But scientists estimate that, over the Milky Way’s lifetime, many more stars collapsed into black holes as they ended their lives. The discovery of a silent, invisible black hole in HR 6819 provides clues about where the many hidden black holes in the Milky Way might be. “There must be hundreds of millions of black holes out there, but we know about only very few. Knowing what to look for should put us in a better position to find them,” says Rivinius. Baade adds that finding a black hole in a triple system so close by indicates that we are seeing just “the tip of an exciting iceberg.”

Thermal imaging wearables used in China to detect COVID-19 symptoms could soon be deployed in the U.S.

Hangzhou based AI startup Rokid is in talks with several companies to sell its T1 glasses in America, according to Rokid’s  U.S. Director Liang Guan.

Rokid  is among a wave of Chinese companies creating technology to address the coronavirus pandemic, which has dealt a blow to the country’s economy.  Per info Guan provided, Rokid’s T1 thermal glasses use an infrared sensor to detect the temperatures of up to 200 people within two minutes from as far as three meters. The devices carry a Qualcomm  CPU, 12 megapixel camera and offer augmented reality features — for hands free voice controls — to record live photos and videos.

The Chinese startup (with a San Francisco office) plans B2B sales of its wearable devices in the U.S. to assist businesses, hospitals and law enforcement with COVID-19 detection, according to Guan.

Rokid is also offering IoT and software solutions for facial recognition and data management, as part of its T1 packages.

A Spanish-speaking version of Google Duplex, the AI chat algorithm that can call businesses on your behalf, is launching in Spain Thursday, Google tells CNET. Initially pitched as a way for the Google Assistant to call restaurants and book reservations on your behalf, the service will be used in Spain for inquiring about store hours during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

"We rolled out Duplex in Spain specifically for only confirming store hours only during the health situation," a Google spokesperson said. "At this time, this does not include making restaurant reservations or any other use cases for Duplex."

It's been a relatively quiet year for Duplex after the initial launch announcement left some rattled by the algorithm's eerie ability to mimic human speech patterns, pauses and mannerisms. Google has since worked to make the service a little less unsettling, including a promise that it'll always disclose the fact that it isn't an actual person to whoever it's speaking to. The company also unveiled Duplex for Web, which promises to help users zip through things like booking a car rental online.

Last month, Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai wrote a blog post detailing how Google was using Duplex to call businesses and inquire about their hours as part of an effort to keep Google's listings accurate during the pandemic.

The rollout in Spain follows a recent Duplex debut in the UK, Canada and Australia. Google didn't have anything to share on whether any other regions are up next.

The virus has mutated. But that doesn’t mean it’s getting deadlier.

At this point in the pandemic, coronavirus genomes with 10 or fewer mutations are common, and only a small number have over 20 mutations — which is still less than a tenth of a percent of the genome.

Over time, viruses can evolve into new strains — in other words, viral lineages that are significantly different from each other. Since January, researchers have sequenced many thousands of SARS-CoV-2 genomes and tracked all the mutations that have arisen. So far, they haven’t found compelling evidence that the mutations have had a significant change in how the virus affects us.